PJ Harvey's Music - The Soundscape of a New Flânerie.

“Flânerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness even though it is actually a final resignation to it…” (Keither Tester)

PJ Harvey's Sound posits an insatiable tension somewhere between musical flânerie and dialectical playfulness; a sound that is addictive to my generation’s ear. She pulls me from the infinite, finite, organic, city-bound, the body, mind, distilling them all. She ruptures the eternal from the transitory reaching up to those independent, intense and impartial spirits, conjuring that psycho-semantic world that runs down into my bones. Perhaps a bit much? Let me explain with a few fragmented lyrics.

Is This Desire?

“Catherine liked high places,

The hills

Chapel

Washing herself

Wind

Listen

Children’s voices

Women of the hills

A view of the city,

Now she sits and moans” (The Wind)

“Beauty of her

Under electric light

Tears my heart out

Every time…

waiting” (Electric Light)

Stories from the city, Stories from the sea

“Teach me mummy,

How to catch someone’s fancy

Under the twisted oak grove” (Grow Grow)

“The ceiling is moving…

Like a conveyor belt above my eyes

When under ether,

The mind comes alive…

Something’s inside me

Unborn and unblessed

Into this world and to the next” (When Under Ether)

Lyrically, the idea of the city seems to represent heartache, chaos, and the uncontrollable. Nature some place of refuge, where we only gain moments of culminate feeling when her odes to love climax, always being taken forward by her melodic narratives. The city is present more as a motif than a subject in the background, foregrounding all her undulating sound-concepts and nature-based imagery. This is one of the places where her music gains its dynamism and power from a movement and interaction of extremes, between desirous chaos, and romantic reprieve; city and nature; authenticity and deception; a sort of musical Flânerie, always imagistically tied to, yet anterior to the city. Her music is always bound by some sense of modern idealism and the abyss, yet some paradigmatic opposite is constantly bubbling up from an expression of her subjectivity.

Her music is in a perpetual state of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence crossing path ways and the nostalgic wilderness of feeling, from one great rhythmic throb to the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms. Overall, I feel like her music's taken me on “a turn from the seething bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of solid materials of buildings, laws regulations and historical traditions,” (Robert Musil, 1954), and out into some ethereal other and for this I can't but feel that she has some quality as a quasi-heroic, journeying flâneuse, placing herself always in a liminality of being.

The Politic of Conversation

Bombs set off out of my open eyes,

Shapes revolving in a vein structure;

This ethereal rhizome romping,

Tied to beings of ground,

Lost out in air.

Dipolar voices

Make each divide,

Branch after branch,

Ruddy liquid truth never still, astride

Until it spreads and crosses

Blocking beneath,

Another vein shooting beyond

the now and the then explosion of eyes.

Speck

I’m a speck,

on humble knees bare,

bleeding out away under

the house,

tears escape. smashed picket fence,

words precipitate

crowds stare perfections

Minute revolutions

enlightening,

framing image

away from sense

into specks

On crumpled papers

Circling in heads

My translation of Rimbaud's newly discovered poem

Bismarck’s Dream
(Fantasy)

It’s night time. Under his tent, full of silence and dream, Bismarck, a finger on the future of France reflected on his pipe emitting a blue thread… he meditates, his little bent index finger advanced from Rhin to Moselle, to the paper, Moselle to The Seine; from his finger nail, he scratched the paper imperceptibly around Strasbourg; he goes beyond. At Sarrebruke, in Wissem Bourge, in Woerth, in Sedan, it flinched away his little bent finger; he caresses Nancy, scratching Bitche and Phalsbourg, Metz line, tracing on the border of little broken lines– and he stops himself…

Triumphant, Bismarck covered from his index finger Alsace and Lorraine! Oh, under his yellow skull, such a delirium of misery! What delicious waves of smoke come from his pipe, blessed and happy!

Bismarck reflects, wait! A large black dot seems to stop his index finger, wriggling. Paris. So, his bad finger nail, scuffing, scuffing the paper, here there, with rage, finally stopping himself… his finger resting, half bent, still..
Paris! Paris! Then, the chap dreamed much, then opening, slowly drowsiness impairs him.. his forehead inclines itself towards the paper; mechanically, the embers of his pipe, escape from his lips, removing the ugly black dot…
Hi! Povero! By abandoning his poor head, his nose, Mr. Otto de Bismarck’s nose, plunged itself into the ardent embers Hi! Povero! Go povero! In the incandescent embers of his pipe, Hi! Povero! His index finger was on Paris! Finished, the glorious dream…

It was so kind, so spiritual, so happy, this nose of the first old diplomat. Hide, hide this nose! And so! My dear, when sharing the royal sauerkraut, you will enter the palace… with crimes of… the lady… in history; you will eternally bring your burnt, sooty nose between your senseless eyes.
Look here… don’t daydream away…

Away from the pages

“Fluid minds carve their own path in humble, crafted words”

Tonight on the ferry, after looking up over the blurred characters of my philosophy reader I felt this strange merging with the blackness of the water, wanting to get away into some murky depth; liquid slickness that sheaths itself over light, some organic, primordial notion of the world.

‘Authenticity’ I remarked, until it had to recontain itself in some black medium, some opaque limit. Here my body spread outside the corporeal outlines of warmth and out into the cold light where my hands ached, my mind excited itself and landed me here, to spill out, gurgling like the water retaining itself around the vessel; the moving entity, out into utterance. I came to juggle these words, like a joker, who cuts up his mind into moments with their simple truth… until the sensual authentique kissed the lips of perception and reminded me again that I’m moving. Up-ho-ho…skidding, sliding with the water.

Response to Galway Kinnels Poem "The Middle of the Way"

The sonic universe is moving but the heart doesn’t beat. It is atemporal, corporeal, a pump of presence that captures poetry in its stillness. It is the between of the intertwined and the chiasm. It is the ontogenesis; the opening and closing of the flesh that never reaches space, but comes as a flow of silence in which vein like fingers touch at meaning. It is empty and full in an eternal paradox of extremes but its blood-effect will forever spread, in this subtle interconnectedness of our senses and our sense of the world. It is the moment where space envelopes and time is broken open. It is where the wild dark of sense and the heliotrope of language hesitate to touch.

Signs are subjectification and objectification. They come as heavy sound, the drawing back of arteries, ricocheting off the heart’s still beat, pulling it from metaphor to sign and back into the temporal, the epistemological dimension. Words control the beatlessness of the heart – to make it jump away over some invisibility of the mind-body system, to try to abandon the heart’s stillness, to make it move outside its paradoxical and concrete inertia. Words saturate into the flesh of the heart its ontological signification; the self. It is here where metaphor drops out of the storm and ceases to be rain becoming a droplet that forms a puddle that finds its way into a larger body of water or evaporates back into the clouds up and away from perception.