by Brian Dillon
My father’s contribution to my parents’ small record collection comprised a few old 78s of light classical music: waltzes, light opera. For all I knew, he might well have shown more enthusiasm as a young man, when these recordings were current, but my memory of him suggests that my father was actually afraid of music. It was as though he suspected that if he allowed too extreme (too beautiful, too austere, too languid or frenetic) a sound to touch him, his sense of self-possession might unravel. He had, if pushed, his favourites; but these choices were so lacking in pretension, so unadventurous even for a middle-aged man of steady temperament and distracting cares, that he might as well not have bothered. I discovered in my teens that his lack of interest in music had made him usefully impervious to the trashiest sounds to which I could expose him. He greeted everything with the same weary scorn. I sometimes tried to penetrate his shell of sarcasm and indifference, but could never hit on the right frequency to startle or soften his disregard. It was not even a matter of genre: there were times, I’m sure, when I tried to trick him with an uncharacteristic classical piece, yet provoked not the slightest response.
I think I know now what I was trying to achieve. After my mother died, in 1985, the enthusiasm my brothers and I already shared (though we had few tastes in common) turned swiftly to obsession. Of course, I can only test my own preoccupation against those of my contemporaries, but eventually even friends with whom I had discussed certain key discoveries (my own canon was constructed of extremes of pure, disposable pop and wilful, noisy obscurity) began to tire of my inability to think or talk about anything else. But it wasn’t a community I was after. I had never had a sense to start with that music was something to be shared: my passion was monomaniacal and, when it came to talking about it, monologic too. I still cannot quite grasp what people mean when they say that the music of their adolescence reminds them of a specific moment: a season, a milieu, a romance. I recall only the time spent actively listening. Music was never a backdrop to anything else; it was the central (for a long time the only) drama, the sole nexus of interest and energy in my life, so much so that I now wonder what it was I was trying to hear, or not to hear. I remember the first record I bought after my mother died, and how, at the end of a month during which I had hardly left the house, I had been seized by this extraordinary song, fleetingly heard on television: a sort of hymn to preternatural weather, a giddy, soaring three minutes of strangeness and fragility. (Or so it still sounds to me; were I to name it, it might mean nothing, or far too much.) Scared that my sudden access of interest in the outside world was as yet inadmissible, I had to smuggle into the house the 7-inch single I bought a few days later and hide it, hoping I could listen to it later without disturbing the silence that had persisted there since my mother’s death. In the end, it proved impossible: I had to play it, that evening, with my father and brothers in the room. I remember that I crouched, blushing, in the corner by the record player as a parade of synthesized strings and military drums gave way to a woman’s voice so eloquently grief-stricken to my ears that I almost had to tear the record from the turntable, such was my discomposure. With my back to the rest of the room, I was unsure whether the song was going unnoticed or had actually, as I feared, opened and healed, in its brief span, a sort of wound in the air between us. The song seemed too unbearably tender a thing to have introduced into the room; I resolved to listen to it only when I was alone.
Over the next few years, and on into the time after my father died, music became a way of perpetuating and obscuring the silence, of not having to choose between silence and speech, of avoiding the subject and letting it vibrate in the atmosphere, translated into sound, a thousand times. We dreamed, I think, of a sound, of a song, that would say what we could not and that would at the same time excuse us from ever having to say anything. I can find no other way of explaining what happened in those final years in the house, when music was a way for my brothers and me to avoid speaking to one another: sometimes comically so, as when we would try to drown out one another’s voices by simply turning up the volume. Our competing record collections became weapons in an undeclared war of musical sensibilities which were really something else: our incompatible responses to our predicament. And yet music was also what we shared, sometimes the only thing we might admit to sharing, the only arena in which any emotional currency other than rage was exchanged.
I have sometimes wondered whether that combination of silence and noise is what has caused me to forget completely what my parents’ voices sounded like. I can remember songs, not listened to since, better than I can recall the voices of my parents as I last heard them. I certainly look like my father; but do I sound like him? To my ear, numerous tiny cues in my own voice sound as if they have come from my father’s; but I have only to listen to the recorded sound of my voice – thin, inauthentic, immature – for the impression to disappear.
Although I cannot hear my parents’ voices, I hear myself talking to them all the time, and only ever in anger. I am forced to imagine what it is like to be an adult whose parents are living, and so I have little notion what emotional accommodations are called for on either side in order to arrive (if indeed this is what happens) at a kind of equilibrium. In my daydreams, my parents stay silent while I carry on talking: admonishing, complaining, settling countless tiny scores. Or I simply rehearse arguments I did actually have (especially with my father); this time, I win. These are not traumatic flashbacks, but rather, I think, pretences on which to return to the house (we are always in the sitting room, from which I imagine the rest of the house hovering out of sight above me) and to hear, faintly at first, then rising to compete with my own voice, and finally drowning it out altogether, an imagined song. The song seems to come from nowhere specific within the house, but to drift up out of the foundations, to set the whole house vibrating, to fill the empty rooms around me, to be at once every song that was played to keep those rooms from pressing too hard upon us and the sound of escape, of air rushing through a house that has been allowed to breathe at last. It is the song we were searching for and it says, for the first time, because nobody has had the strength to say it before, that something is missing.
Readings
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London, Verso, 1994).
Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999).
St Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1993).
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, Beacon Press, 1994).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London, Fontana, 1990).
Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).
Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London, Penguin, 1993).
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2002).
John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man (New York, Pantheon, 1976).
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1911).
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, trans. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (London, Penguin, 1970).
Joe Brainard, I Remember (New York, Penguin, 1995).
Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977).
John Cage, Silence (Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (New York, Arcade Publishing, 1998).
Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London, Reaktion, 2004).
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (London, Macdonald, 1956).
Tacita Dean, Seven Books (Göttingen, Steidl, 2003).
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (London, Penguin, 1996).
Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot
and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2003).
John Donne, The Major Works (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990).
George Eliot, Middlemarch (London, Penguin, 2003).
Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (New York, Viking, 1999).
Gabriel Josipovici, Touch (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996).
Jacques Henri Lartigue, Lartigue: Album of a Century, ed. Martine d’Astier et al. (London, Hayward Gallery, 2004).
Chris Marker, La Jetée: ciné-roman (New York, Zone Books, 1992).
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982).
Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (London, Bloomsbury, 1999).
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock (London, Penguin, 1998).
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London, Penguin, 1989).
August Sander, People of the Twentieth Century (New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2002).
W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted, trans. Michael Hamburger (London, Hamish Hamilton, 2004).
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (London, Verso, 2001).
Rachel Whiteread, House (London, Phaidon, 1995).
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London, Grafton, 1977).
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London, Pimlico, 1994).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, and Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, frieze and Artforum. He is UK editor of Cabinet magazine, and teaches at the Royal College of Art, London. Originally published in 2005, In the Dark Room is his first book and won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction.
Frances Wilson is a biographer, whose books include The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey. She teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
COPYRIGHT
Fitzcarraldo Editions
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Copyright © Brian Dillon, 2005
Foreword © Frances Wilson, 2017
This edition first published in Great Britain
by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2018
The right of Brian Dillon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
eISBN 978–1–910695–73–9
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