Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [46]
Don’t Turn Away
As we give our attention to The Eraser, we sense that Yorke is pitching his vocational tent in the thick of this hi-tech dysfunction as he attempts a distinctly human word across a space in which death alone, it would seem, has complete dominion. As Yorke sees it, the deathliness doesn’t honor the supposed boundaries (the marketing categories) of “politics,” “entertainment,” and “religion,” and neither should we. Keeping the one safely sequestered from the other within our fields of perception is, in fact, the strategy whereby the forces of darkness suck young blood, literally and metaphorically, from a witless populace, and an artful resistance demands a constant refusal of all such compartmentalizations conveniently arranged by what we might name, to write it out largely in a variation of Eisenhower’s famous phrase, a military industrial entertainment complex.
By Yorke’s lights, the evil that would take David Kelly out one way or another, that erases little women and little men without bothering with body counts, is a palpable social reality beyond any one person’s control, a Faustian economy that isn’t overly ruffled by protest recordings that sell well. The difficulties of staging a resistance to such evil, of staring into the abyss without becoming what one beholds, appears to be the subject matter of “Atoms for Peace” in which the line, “So many the lies,” becomes a playful, sing-songy chant, as if an overwhelming consciousness of ubiquitous evil has to be cast aside at least a few hours of each day to look after children and to wash a few dishes. “Quite a personal song, really,” Yorke once remarked. “Trying to correlate my life with choosing to do this, and choosing to get over the fear which is a constant thing I have. Being a rock star, you’re supposed to have super-über-confidence all the time. And I don’t . . . It was my missus telling me to get it together basically.”31
Getting it together, like thinking things through, like trying to make sense by collating what information we have might best be undertaken in a spirit of earnest nonchalance that means to keep its own witness, conscientiously under erasure; worth doing certainly, but not so self-seriously that it takes its toll on all other relationships. There is the fearful alertness of the poet that is a necessity for anyone having a go at lyrical sense-making or crazy prevention, but it requires a light hand. It isn’t to be held on too tightly as work, this farming of a verse. Is it writing? Is it analysis? Does such self-consciousness undermine the possibility of right witness?
Here again, Derrida’s word on his own words, in the deliberately marginalized piece “Circonfession,” is especially helpful:
Commotion of writing, give in only to it, do not make oneself interesting by promised avowal or refused secret, so no literature if literature, the institution of ‘saying everything’, breathes to the hope of seeing the other confess and thereby you, yourself, confess yourself, admit yourself, you my fall, in an effusion of recognition. . . .32
This word on a self-denying, self-referential “commotion of writing” that hopes to work its way out of its own solipsism by way of non-mastery (the scribbling that might occasion confessions by confessing itself first and foremost) is reminiscent of the endlessly reminiscent work that is “Cymbal Rush.” One can try to save oneself (“your little voice”) to the exclusion of everything and