The Obvious Analogy

Most mornings I am woken by birdsong. If I know the name of the bird I will sleep. If I do not know the name of the bird I will not sleep. Or the other way around. Last year it was a scrub jay that woke me, this year a different bird with a simpler song, if it can be called a song because there is no melody, just one note at regular intervals. The scrub jay is not so musical either. Because there is no melody I cannot reproduce it. Or, I could, but it would sound too much like too many other sounds to offer any descriptive purchase. A song is not what is musical but what wakes me, or specifically, what wakes me continuously. A firework wakes me but does not repeat and so it is not a song, not that a song couldn’t be composed of fireworks. Many things sound like music but aren’t. More things are musical than are music. This is especially the case because not all that is music is musical. Not that I cared to adjudicate what was true music and what wasn’t.

“The obvious analogy is with music,” writes Lyn Hejinian. She’s right. Music is exemplarily analogical. Why is that? That music can serve as an analogy for much of what is called life. Less perhaps what is called death. The line is from My Life, Hejinian’s classic book-length Bildungs-poem. The line itself is like music too, in that it is repeated through various sections of the text, progressively appearing at different angles as the poem tracks memory’s advancement. Simplest to describe this line as a refrain, a term from music. The point though is perhaps less about music as such than about analogy. If something is “like music” that says very little about this particular thing because this likeness is common, or obvious. An analogy is a form of repetition. This and then this. Music too. Meaning music isn’t made such by its being sounded.

Three years before the original version of My Life is published, free jazz bandleader Ornette Coleman releases his album “Dancing in Your Head.” The record is noisy but the image invoked by its title is quiet. Or if not quiet, a loudness that is not held in common. Loudness usually is. The image of dancing in your head implies music that sounds out in this hollow as well, meaning music that can’t be heard outside of interiority’s bounds. As you read these words you call up a song to play in your head. Perfect fidelity. Though only inside your own head. The main issue with telepathy is not the communication itself—this is easy enough, an ambient condition—but the question of a message’s translation. Broadcast at such a subtle level I don’t recognize your voice. Both because it isn’t yours—or at least not yours in the same sense as your sounded voice is—and also because there is a song playing over it. The song you’re thinking of now. It’s too loud.

I text a few friends after arriving at the rave. It’s dark and it’s raining or it’s about to and I want to go through this together if it’s to be that sort of night. Speakers are pinioned to the redwoods that enclose us. I dance and kind of wonder why I came. No one in particular was counting on my attendance. Meaning that my presence was predicated less on an optimism about my relation to a community than my relation to a genre. To feel myself subject to its predictable turns. Trans girl goes to a rave in the woods. Of course in the moment I wanted to be seen, but more than this I wanted afterward to be seen as the kind of person, or rather the kind of girl, whose attendance at the rave is a given. “How was it,” someone could ask me, “did you make it out?” “Of course,” I’d wink. “It was beautiful.” A genre is appealing because it is obvious, even if its strictures or rules are not obvious. Not that one chooses to enter or exit a genre at will. But in being organized around a sense of obviousness a genre offers me an assurance of coherence, the sense that things will follow a familiar form. Music is obvious because it keeps going. The problem wasn’t that the night followed a familiar form but that I hoped it would. If I believe I will receive a message telepathically I won’t. If I attempt to predict the next card I can’t. If it helps, I did not have a good time. I wasn’t in love, I wasn’t all that high, I had no one holding me, I drove home before the sunrise, embarrassed by how much I burned for belonging. Lights pulse, the scene organizes and reorganizes itself.

Sylvia Wynter suggests that the groove of music opens up an “alternate way of thought, one where the mind and sense coexist, where the mind ‘feels’ and the senses become theoreticians” (McKittrick, 166). Or as the 1970 LP by Funkadelic has it, “free your mind and your ass will follow.” In high school I had that on a t-shirt. The political edge of the provocation was maybe lost on me, teenaged and stoned in rural Idaho, attuned less to the aesthetics of black liberation than to the set lists of the jam bands I followed and played in. Easy enough to mock the self-indulgence of this genre but that’s the same objection one might levy against masturbation. Playing in a jam band may not be cool but it feels cool; likewise masturbation. In other words, this was maybe as close as I ever came to embodying Wynter’s synesthetic suggestion. I also masturbated as a teenager more than I did at any other age. Easier to imagine the mind as an organ of feeling than the senses as an organ of thought. The obvious analogy is with music, not with thinking.

In a lot of cultural writing and theorizing by trans people over the last few years, dissociation is forwarded as something like a dominant affect and aesthetic of contemporary trans life. Often in this current of writing, dissociation is posed in contrasting relation to dysphoria: dysphoria is what we tell our doctors we have and dissociation is how we actually feel. The elevation of dissociation is doubly appealing: on the one hand it shifts the terms of trans embodiment outside of the clinic, and on the other it delinks trans life from the promise of happiness. Dissociation is what I don’t know I have, like a cryptic pregnancy. Or what I only know I had once I come out of it. Hence it is a ready object for theorization, which also comes after the fact, after the party. The rave is maybe the exemplary site for dissociation, which is what this winter’s rave returned to me, though not the beautiful kind. I was too in my head. Which is where dissociation would seem to be located—in my head—if it is what the word suggests: a turn away from the social. The fantasy of dissociation is that I could think without having to think, feel without having to feel. In a sense then dissociation is the inverse of Wynter’s image of the senses becoming theoreticians, of the mind becoming a sensory organ. If I only know I was dissociated after the fact, then a politics of dissociation can only be regressive. Burnt out nostalgia for the night before.

Not that presence promised a more progressive politics than memory. The next day or the next month it’s difficult to remember which track followed which. That’s the point in part: that the music would produce a sense of extension in which I could lose myself and then later remember that I’d been lost. Analogy is an intellectual act, meaning the opposite of what I imagine I ought to be doing on the dancefloor. But it is also an associative act: this thing linked to that thing. This moment to that moment. Likewise music. As Adorno writes, “Without listening ahead and thinking back, without expec­tation and memory, without the synthesis of the discrete and separate, great musi­cal forms would never have existed” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 89). This orientation toward time describes a kind of dissociation, or it is at least not a philosophy of pure immanence; but insofar as I’m taken out of the moment by my listening and my thinking, I’m drawn into a more sort of connective work, marking and feeling out the relation of this note to that note, this figure on the dancefloor to that one. I love dissociation and dissociatives as much as the next girl, but coolness has no horizon. If the dancefloor modeled a kind of utopia it wasn’t because I was spaced out. I wanted a method not of dissociation but association.

As a certain threshold of input is crossed, a microphone ceases to record external sounds and begins to record the workings of its own mechanism. What’s heard here is not the world, but noise, which is whatever the world isn’t. In other words, we hear something like the headspace of the microphone. The problem, again, as in all transmissions of thought outside of the head, is that I can’t dissociate whatever message might be telepathic from its ambient background. But it wasn’t wrong to listen for voices. Often I dream that I am playing an instrument I don’t recognize from the waking world or my memory, amazed at my facility that affords me a kind of detachment, watching my hand pass through a series of movements that I did not learn. The birds quiet or I do and I sleep again. Later, on a walk around the lake, wind at my ears: a sound that isn’t a sound.

Willa Smart was born in Idaho and is the author of numerous fantasies, insofar as one can claim to be the author of her own fantasies.