The Flowers of Keiwha
Page 30
much to the detriment of TUSK’s outcome. Like the tide coming in and out, there would be ebbs and flows; there would be cheap slaps of water across concrete or arsenic-wood pilings, there would be great currents that would move dozens to wherever they went. But TUSK was still back in university-student days; SEATTLE would still be there, everywhere, floating through the corridors at night.
It’s possible to record everything and yet miss it all. Of course things at Yale had not divided down the faculties, this was exactly a matter of trying to record everything and missing the central story, an analysis ironically enough driven by a mathematician’s obsessive take, yet at Yale during unfolding times, also inspired by the English-Math overlap, the relationship that was unexpected and therefore interesting.
Present day: “Mathematics is indeed the only true subject because it was the first subject ever studied and because only it breaks new ground in a purely abstract way.”
"Oh we literaturists have a thing or two to say about that.”
"English literature which only became an actual university major in the 1920s.”
"But I took a third of the Classics curriculum as well, so eat that.”
Years past: “Hey do you want to hear my concert?”
The story has been a lie. The story has been a lie. Yale was not about concentricities or overlaps, nor Chicken Leg dealing trouble to even Death’s Head, but the story of individuals, humanities, personalities, charismatics, life being an art and not a science. It was not even the third month when shoe-gazer mathematician rock-star decided to produce music rather than pure research.
"M.C. Escher is the best artist ever; I can’t look at anything else.”
[Sound of gagging.]
"Wha—why? Who are you to determine what is Art?”
There were those who tried to be cool. There were those who almost could become cool. Yet the coolest was the one who made a spectacle of his uncoolness, it was Converse-wearing, dreadlocked half-Jamaican Shoegazer who from some New England prep school invented the idea of staring completely at one’s shoes during a rock concert.
"Oh my god, is he ever going to look up?”
"Shuddup! Just listen to the music!”
It had escaped characterizers before. The process of creativity was itself impossible to fully elaborate upon, but while long stretches of Shoegazer’s music were recondite and incomprehensible, at times a sparkling and ethereal beauty would erupt, leaving the dancers stock still, the crowd almost seemingly drugged up and effervescently stoned. He created all his music by mathematical function.
"Okay, so this is a zeta-function.”
Bleeeee-bleeeee—bleeee. At the studio, the sound wave, a sine wave, arced up and trilled mercilessly. It was unmusical.
"And this is a Riemann function.”
Bleee-blip-blee-blip-bleeep.
And such like this, Rockstar and his band would sit and listen for hour upon hour as homework was not done and Sunday’s afternoon faded away into a cram session late at night to get assignments completed.
"This is it? This is freakin’ it? You guys just sit here and listen to non-sense non-sound?”
"Welcome to Mathematica.”
Shoegazer’s reign was in a sense long-lasting, complex, unity-forming. It helped he was awfully handsome; he attracted the girlies; they, sticking around, attracted a further crowd of male friends-of-the-band, and so, beyond the Faculty of Literature, beyond the Faculty of Mathematica, there was a charismatic subcult around the musician-mathematicisn who produced sounds that were sampled, ultimately, by hip-hop producers and new-rock in the East Village. Shoegazer was a pioneer.
"Hey, are you his friend? Can I be his manager?”
"Is it true they might get a deal? Is this what he’s going to do after college?”
"Is it true they’re going to Russia to live in a cave? That there’s musician mathematicians there too?”
There was one brilliant meeting between SEATTLE and the Shoegazer coalition. Beauty stared at beauty; one almost wanted the two to become platonic friends, but then SEATTLE sniffed and walked away with a sense of snobbery. “Not real creativity,” was her comment, making hearts flutter yet others question sanity. “I think I’m going to break out to video-art,” she tossed aside. “My father was friends with Nam June Park.”
If there was a peak, a top of the function, top of the bell-curve, maybe it was that year and the next, the peak of Shoegazer, the overlap with SEATTLE. Coffee, new restaurants opening, gentrification of collegial neighborhoods resulting first in a three-star French bistro, then upscale Japanese, Colombian, another French, upscale American (two) places taking the funky beat to something too well-off, high-rent, maybe it was that middle section, unusually. One normally slumped sophomore year, clouds skudded across the sky, but even in city environments the change of seasons elicited memory, timelessness, certain countryside and seaside memoryscapes. Skyscarps could be climbed; lobster could be eaten, there was just the flutter and Ziemann-functions left, psychological changed elicited by pursuit of creativity dissolving into a sea of complex numbers, imaginary numbers, real numbers, cardinals, ordinals.
"Oh god, you are not bringing anything to this group with your numerical code functions. You have to actually just create from within.”
Year three: first year’s success had not been replicated, and the band was on the down-swing. The bassist starts to yell at Shoegazer.
"Dude, there’s one lead in this band. It ain’t you.”
"This is just non-sense. I wrote half last year’s tracks.”
"The only reason why I don’t sing is because I don’t have a good voice. You’re what you are.”
"Then I quit. See you later! You’ll see what I can do by myself.”
Shoegazer’s group had lasted eighteen months, but now bassist went off to start K.C., his own group, which would in time eclipse Shoegazer’s meta-functions. But Shoegazer and TUSK remained friends.
"See the problem is that there’s no room for ego in music. If you want to produce art, you just have to channel, do the exercises no matter how pointless they seem. The man lacks backbone.”
"Still, I’m in the mood for hard rock this evening. Hope you don’t mind…”
"There you go.”
Perhaps in total a group of thirty inner-circlists had crowded around Shoegazer, including perhaps five girls who wanted Shoegazer and perhaps two or three who actually got him. Outside the thirty there were another hundred or so at least mildly associated, including a Thai princess, some historian girls, some blue-stockings, a book club or two, conceptual artists. It was farcical, perhaps, maybe even inaccurate, but TUSK could only remember that totality as being about the Shoegazer inner-core; the weekly if not three times weekly jam sessions taking place in a Math lab (and a Math lab being only terminals and blackboards in a sound-proof room).
"Here’s a joke for you. The university president calls an all department head meeting and says, ‘how much money do you need?’ The Physics department needs $100 million for a cyclotron. The Chemistry department needs $80 million for a new materials lab. Biology wants $60 million for a supercomputer to study protein folding. Then the president says to mathematics, ‘how much do you need?’ Math answers ‘Just $100 sir.’ President says, ‘Just $100? Why so little?’ ‘Well sir, mathematics is a totally pure subject. All we need is a desk, paper, pencils, and a wastebasket.’ The president is extremely pleased and hands over the $100. He then says, ‘look everybody, what a model subject. Perhaps the pride of our university.’ Suddenly Philosophy jumps up. ‘Sir, we don’t even need $100. All we need is $50.’ And the president is amazed. He says, ‘what? How come you only need $50?’ Philosophy answers, ‘Like math, we need a desk, paper, and pencils. But we don’t need a wastebasket!’”
SEATTLE calls from Seattle, the telephone conversation ends on a refusal to return to New Haven, live with TUSK in his airshaft room that he has drawn through housing division machinations, a continually high-on-marijuana basketball schol
ar from Los Angeles who takes more than his share of the place, but is too drugged up and high to comprehend SEATTLE’s excited cries that TUSK is being disingenuous, that he shouldn’t be openly accepted for how he presents himself. TUSK and girlfriend are going through one of their seasonal breakups again; sometimes they last a few hours, sometimes as long as a few months. SEATTLE is in turn still at home, unsure of her next move, possibly willing to write greetings cards for pizza and gas.
"Don’t you think you are SHOEGAZER? No way, you couldn’t be that cool. I think you’re the bassist.”
"I think these stories are just face-value, SEATTLE. Why is everything allegory or representation?”
"As I superintend to doze, thoughts of incipient hypomania, neuralgia, dementia praecox inspire me towards a developing post-high modernity, post-victorian steampunk-sliding new…”
She was going to do cutting edge steampunk. She loved Victoriana at this point, although shy of being a subculturist who wore gothic Lolita fashions. She would not be returning to New Haven.
"But be honest about what I said, because it wasn’t quite that, was it TUSK? It wasn’t TUSK.”
Down the green fields of New Haven, some girls would make a show of showing their horses; nerd boys would play football at one point, eliciting an odd respect from the actual football players. Opera singer sang through the streets, and Shoegazer’s new band would not go anywhere, his new genre no