Well Well Well

Mildred Pierce reporting...

In the autopsy of Aristotle, I cut away the surrounding flesh to reach the organs in which were contained the biles of tragedy... in the adjacent ward a similar operation was performed on the still living body of Plato. His screams disturbed the sleep of Reason and bought forth monsters named Fundamentalism and Common Sense (the latter roared in a Scottish accent). 

Tattoos on the scraps of skin cast away described music in cursive script. Dr Benway, reanimated solely to overlook our procedures proceeded to pick up the bloody tatters and intoned over the rhythmic ripping of our scalpels. 

"All the skills gone out of theory, these days. Why, I remember the time I performed a deconstruction without footnote one... but that was in a different narrative and besides, post-modernism's dead."

Benway determined that our investigation gambles on the wrong horse. Neither Aristotle nor Plato cared for tragedy in itself, even if the pair of them wandered and wondered in the Pure Land and nobly rejected the practical use of philosophy. The aesthetic genealogy that we hope to describe deliberately denies their intentions, grinding up techne and ousia into a mush that can be feed to the toothless.

"You want to understand an idea, you gotta chew it, swallow it whole then regurgitate it like a cow on the cud.Cut and paste works for a computer, but you need to cut up to expose the hegemonic thought."

At this point we reconsidered our employment of the good doctor Frank and his lightning machines.  

McCoy gently gathered the disparate and broken flesh, spreading it out across the gurney and categorised each piece. The Phoenix applied fifty shades to the assemblage, offering it a monstrous parody of reincarnation. 

"Music... music... that's what they understood. It isn't the (redacted) (expletive deleted). If poetry is closer to philosophy and therefore better than history, then music when it dispenses with the word is closer again to Universals because more abstract and (at this point the text is broken or lost)."

In the office next door a single tone for six hours - that's all it took to recognise a twinned truth. The body responds to sound, or women respond to bass, and experimental soundscapes are really fucking irritating. Especially if the frequencies are not pure and have been downloads in less than 320. 

Weaponising music is an adaptation of Plato's belief that sound can be used to train the spirit. The music of the age of enlightenment addressed the potential spiritual benefits of order and scale. It follows on from the Renaissance's rediscovery of classical texts via the Islamic diaspora (diaspora or empire or da'ar al-islam). If music be the food of love, will be please turn it down. We don't need cross-infection in the operating theatre...

Footnotes:

Well, Well, Well: a composition by Matthew Whiteside, which resolves into a minimalist motif of Irish music, two forms Whiteside has denied, previously, as influences. The title refers to the artist's surprise at their emergence.