The Faster Transcription
In late-August of 2003, I was hired to help move the Plastic Skull recording studio from the basement of a 1920s bungalow in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood to the site of a former auto repair shop in the Lakeview neighborhood. While carpenters and electricians worked at the new site, building out a control room and laying cable for monitors and microphones, I worked at the old studio, boxing up odds and ends: stray vacuum tubes, guitar strings, old copies of music magazines, reels of half-inch tape. I came across a small cardboard box behind an upright piano. The box contained an assortment of objects: a small vial of green pills; one half of a torn ticket stub with the words "hover, angel, lantern of my slowing" added in ballpoint pen; a cheap, gold plated pocket watch; a sleeping blindfold; an unopened pack of index cards and a caseless cassette tape marked "Interview, Minneapolis, 19 August, 2002."
I played the tape as I worked. There was something in the garbled mess of the first five minutes which, although completely unintelligible, persuaded me to let the tape play. Perhaps it was the rhythmic regularity of the audio, a pattern of what sounded like slow, deep breathing. Because the tape was identified as an interview, I took the noise to be the sound of two people talking. Without that clue I doubt I would have ascribed voices to the noise. In retrospect, the sound seems too consistent to be voices – a repetitious pattern of three seconds of sound, two seconds of hissy silence. The pitch of the sound modulates, shifting slightly higher or lower from utterance to utterance. But the rhythmic pattern remains mechanically consistent.
After five minutes, the recurring sound flutters like a pair of struggling wings and morphs into a human voice in mid-sentence, sputtering to life from within the miasmic repetitions:
"…mainly delusional. Everyone thought so. But it was nearly instantaneous."
This voice (designated in the following transcript as "Voice 1") belongs to my brother, who died in Minneapolis on the 19th of August, 2002. The other voice ("Number 2") remains unidentified.
Voice 2: You say that as if you were surprised when it began.
Voice 1: I was. Everyone was.
Voice 2: But you started it. It was totally within your power to…
Voice 1: No, that’s what everyone thinks – or thought. But it wasn’t like that. Put yourself in my shoes. I had gotten in over my head. It’s the same with love or ambition. Addiction, compulsion – whatever you want to call it – spreads itself pretty evenly. We’re all susceptible.
Voice 2: You’re saying that this kind of behavior shouldn’t be distinguished as something special, something out of the ordinary?
Voice 1: You’re putting me in an impossible position: either I say it’s special and I’m a self-important asshole or I say it isn’t and I relegate it to inconsequence. It is the best thing I’ve ever done. Maybe – probably – the best thing I will ever do. I think it is important. But I don’t demand that you think so too.
Voice 2: But you also seem to say that it wasn’t all your idea. It chose you as much as you chose it.
Voice 1: No more so or less so than anything else. At first, you feel like you can run faster than you’ve ever run, think faster and deeper than you’ve ever thought. You don’t need to sleep. You don’t need to eat.
Voice 2: But these sensations only came after you chose to start.
Voice 1: I just thought I could go months without eating, so long as I kept certain thoughts in my head. It wasn’t about politics in the systemic sense. I’ve always thought that politics, as we know it, is a symptom of the problem. Domination, ever since men settled down, and later in the commodity society has become objectified as law and organization and must therefore restrict itself. It can’t be the remedy. It can’t even be the caretaker. If we fix the problem, politics as we think of it, will disappear.
Voice 2: So what’s the problem?
There is some intrusive noise in the background, followed by a loud bang, like a hand slapping a desk. The voices become indistinguishable again, morphing back into the same breath-like rhythm that starts the tape. Soon the rhythm breaks down and the sound becomes a single, wheezing, monolithic tone. The sound flutters again, like wings. An unintelligible voice seems to address the two conversants. Then silence. A few seconds later the conversation resumes as if nothing has happened.
Voice 1: …that’s part of it. But, more importantly, it’s the tendency to create categories and to fit our impressions inside these categories. I sometimes think of a zoo where the cages are shaped like the animals they contain. The tiger cage is exactly the size and shape of the current tiger. When that tiger dies, the zoo keepers try to find another tiger, but every time they think they’ve found one, they try to squeeze him into the cage and either he’s a little too big or a little too small. So the zoo keepers conclude that there are no more tigers because none of the tigers they’ve found match their category of a tiger. On the other hand, an evolutionary biologist, an animal behaviorist and a 3-year-old child might all look at one of the rejected tigers and agree that, yes, this is indeed a tiger. Their categories agree. But the biologist, for instance, might divide Bengal Tigers from African Tigers in a way that the behaviorist wouldn’t. Who is right?
Voice 2: Nobody.
Voice 1: Everybody.
Voice 2: Same thing.
Voice 1: Opposite thing. If someone were going to punch you in the stomach, would you rather it be everybody or nobody? It’s not the same thing. Let’s be practical. I want what Adorno wanted. That is, an emancipation from domination towards forms of social, economic and political organization that would be more free, more equitable, more just, etc.
Listening to the tape now, I relive my experience at Plastic Skull. The effect is just as dramatic, just as disorienting. But listening now, I feel at a safe distance from the drama and the disorientation. Memory is a kind of padding. Unlike dreams, memories allow us to preface events with an implicit disclaimer: "It can’t touch you now." But, back in that basement – in the oppressive heat of the Chicago summer, all by myself, cramped in a corner, coiling up a few remaining instrument cables – it seemed as if it could touch me; as if it could and would. What’s strange, thinking back on it, is that there was no "it" really. It was as if the reality of the tape – that incessant repetition at the start, the interruptions, the fluttering wings – it was as if these events which upset the natural flow of the conversation also upset the natural flow of time. Listening to the tape, I felt as if time paused when the conversation paused. And I found myself pausing too. I stopped what I was doing as the tape reverted to its unintelligible rhythms. The rhythms seemed to conduct the beating of my heart and the tempo of my breathing. The only "it" was time; time as dictated by the tape and time as lived time. Even as I listen now, I feel my body synching up with the rhythm. But I’ve learned my lesson: I don’t fight it I ride its currents passively, accepting my loss of power. The tape truly takes hold when my brother says:
"…music is the combination to the lock. Dial in music and the door swings open."
The word music distends like an image on an overly-washed t-shirt. It slows down. The word combination tries to speed back up again, but sinks beneath the weight of its own consonants and by the time he says music the second time, it has slowed to half its natural speed, extended to twice its natural length. What’s more, the voice is no longer my brother’s. It is lower and more grotesque. If one knows anything about audio, this is entirely explicable. As I have since discovered, the tape has been stretched; each sound, trapped by magnetic particles like flies on a fly strip, has been pulled apart from adjacent sounds. Infinitesimal bits of silence have been introduced and interspersed within the sounds. These silences are the aural equivalent of elastic, they allow the fabric of sound, the fabric of time to stretch beyond its original inclinations. But as with elastic, there is a limit. As the tape is stretched farther and farther, introducing demagnetized silence, the sound eventually refuses to stretch any more. The sounds pull apart; sound and time surrender to static.
Just before the tape surrenders there is a final fluttering of wings. My brother’s voice reemerges from the brooding malevolence of his slowed-down self:
"Man is the measure of all things, but his standards are dependent on the world to which they are applied. I am a product of my genes. I am a product of my environment, sculpted from my DNA by the rains and the winds; by the flutter of angel’s wings passing through my darkness as I sleep."
My brother’s voice swoops and is swallowed by the wheezing monolithic tone. The tape goes grey with static (static in both senses of the word: a shower of pixelated hiss and an absolute stillness). Ever since I first heard them, these words delivered from my brother’s lips, have engineered a hostile – if gentle – occupation of my being. He and I share roughly half our genes. I am half of what he was and he was half of me. His final transformation, shedding body weight like a leaky pipe, delivered him through a series of manifestations on his way to death. The speed, acting progressively on less and less body, wreaked its own form of havoc – stirring his mind like a pot of soup. In this, his final conversation, he speaks the words of other men as if they were his own. I believe he had lost the ability to distinguish between himself and others. He lost track of which thoughts were his and which were not. As his voice on the tape slows down, his metabolism, tuned to a much larger man, is speeding up, his heart beating with increasing vigor, the blood whipping through his veins like a slot car. I can still remember a day when we were boys, laying on our backs on the bright green grass of our front yard, gazing up through the branches of a birch tree at the slow clouds; slow, and almost, but not quite still.
Note:
I have made an effort to identify the sources of some of my brother’s remarks, but have succeeded in just three instances. I suspect this transcription contains other "borrowed" remarks which remain unidentified. I apologize for these omissions. The sources I have identified are as follows: