Rotate Stock for Freshness – Abandon Resolve!

Abandon Resolve!

The first post of 2011: Ten songs that, by proxy, act as New Year’s resolutions. But, rather than offer fixed resolutions (“lose twenty pounds by March”), let these resolutions resist resolve, and instead, serve—however recherché—as a creative sight glass to gauge our reservoir for seeking the unforeseen.

Put another way, our interaction with music specifically, and art generally, is often embodied in a doctrine of understanding (chart status, genre, era, mood, style, etc.); this list exists as a small counterweight against such indoctrinations, against such resolution, offering instead an attitude of experimentation.

Investigating the antecedents of our beliefs is a resolving to seek the unforeseen. Leaving oneself open to experimentation invites new possibilities. So, for every other day of the year let these songs be what they will always be (Psychedelic Masterpiece; Criminally Underrated Lo-Fi 7-inch; Toasting At It’s Best; Straight Funk Banger; Unreleased Soul Gem, Deaf Garage Rock Classic, etc.), but today, today let these songs mean something new (Art Will Never Take Orders—Whatever Happens; Revelations Are Murky; Blow A Kiss To The Sepulcher; Soon We’ll Be Beyond The Reach Of Dogs And Rifles; Redemption Springs From Audacity, etc.)

Find the crazy particularly audible. Or, as the song says, “They may, if they can, begin to wonder why.”

(All the songs in this list can be downloaded, here, in a .zip file.)

1. “Resist the forces that domesticate spirit.”

«« Begin to wonder why, and find out everything »»
Let the dreams you have forgotten —
equal the value of what you do not know
«« Go out on thin ice, experience is the best teacher. »»

It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment creative activity in the direction of ends foreign to itself and prescribe, in the guise of so-called reason, the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of exploitations — these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula complete freedom for art.
— Leon Trotsky, André Breton (Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, 1938)

2. “Be often abandoned. Never go home.”

D for desolation. E for empty. A for abandon. D for deserted…

You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven’t rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (August 12, 1904)

3. “Be finished with all learning.”

[LOOKOUT!]

«« Adulthood: the antechamber of death! »»

[LOOKOUT!]

Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things — and makes you old. Time-which-slips-away is what fills the void created by the absence of the self. The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of consumption. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily. Time has to be caught on the wing, in the present — but the present has yet to be constructed.
—Raoul Vaneigem (The Revolution of Everyday Life)

[LOOKOUT!]

There is the greatest misery in hope, in hopelessness is the height of bliss.
—Vairagyasatak Upanishad

[LOOKOUT!]

4. “Never Know.”

Level all things into one!
—Javier Ortega (Bricklayer, Local 2107)

Identify yourself with the infinite and wander in the unfathomable!
—Gen. Franklin Rosemont (45th Surrealist Battalion)

If you carry the circus within you, no cage or trainer can tame you!
—Ota Benga (Bronx Zoo)

Traverse Borders! — Resist Orders!
—Kali Bushman (currently homeless, looking for work)

Be most content in going too far!
—Unknown (Urinal grafitti, Cleveland Yacht Club)

Canonization is a cage to be escape from!
—St. Cyprian of Carthage (September 14, 258 AD)

If you liked school, you’ll love work!
—Brian Cooper (Food Service Worker)

5. “Stop betting on the prospect of a lucky day.”

«« The unattainable object of desire »»

«« The remnant left behind by the introduction of the Symbolic in the Real »»

Is there a God? I advise you think about how your behavior would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You already decided: You need a God.
—Bertolt Brecht (Stories of Mr. Keuner)

There are two main figures of Evil in pagan religions: the personification of primordial violence and destructive fury (like Kali in Hinduism), and temptation personified, that is to say, evil spirits who tempt people to abandon the right path and chose the way of egotism, lust, and earthly pride and power; what is unthinkable in this tradition is—as all intelligent Christians, from Kierkegaard to T.S. Eliot knew—Satan as a figure of evil whose ultimate temptation is the reference to Good itself—“the highest form of treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason,” as Eliot put it. Satan’s ultimate trump card is not “Give way to your lust for power, enjoy life, abandon the chimera of higher ethical values!”, but “Do all the noble deeds your heart tells you to do, live the highest ethical life, and be aware that there is no need for reference to God in all this, it is your own inner nature which is your guide here, you are following the law of your heart!”
—Slavoj Žižek (The Parallax View)

6. “Don’t be a scoundrel.”

A scoundrel’s worst fear is a society without money; for in such a society he would only get the respect he deserves.

Political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the pub; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that.
—Karl Marx (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

«« Don’t do it. Listen to the man. »»

A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within sound of the guns.
—George Orwell (Homage to Catolonia)