Strata Lucida

Peaks and peneplains

My thinking on whether originality is possible, or even desirable, is expanding way beyond the bounds of a simple conversation about Liz Penn's spam screed. In his comment, Scot points out that I've unfairly characterized him as a neofetishist, and says "A guitar solo doesn't have to be novel to rock." I couldn't agree more here. But the "passionate but unoriginal" guitar solo is separated from the "banal and derivative" one by the thinnest of aesthetic threads.

I don't think you can even pin it down in discursive terms -- there's no theoretical underpinning or principle that will allow you to distinguish the sublime from the hack. You have to rely on some variant of "I knows it when I sees it". If you could specify in abstract and general terms what makes a great performance, someone would turn that specification into a paint-by-numbers plan, and the necessary spontaneity would be extinguished forever.

This all reminds me of what Cary Tennis had to say about peak experiences -- that by their very nature, their sharp and jagged edges will become rounded and dull with time. The mindblowing breakthroughs in art, given the passage of time and their inevitable domestication, will seem tame, unthreatening, safe. All you can do is cherish the memory of the peak; you can't bottle it, you can't reproduce it, you can't represent it. The time I was completely merged with the music and lights at a Stereolab concert is gone -- time has carried away those jagged peaks and worn it down into a sandy peneplain.

What's left is to appreciate the subtle beauty of that flat, slightly rolling surface for what it is, and not succumb to the temptation for endless, empty intake of new peak stimuli. The culture wants you to think that flat is boring. The plains are so simple and so featureless that with a single glance everyone thinks they've experienced the whole story. On the flats, nothing can be marketed, because nothing stands out.

Harvey Keitel's character in Smoke takes the same photograph from outside his shop at the same time every day for ten years. He knows about the value of repetition, and close observation, and the subtle differences that make each individual photograph different from the next. An act that looks like a crude mechanical reproduction of the same image, the very essence of empty capitalist production, turns out to be an intensely anti-industrial act: he has to be in front of his shop at the same time every day, interacting with people, an inviolable and irreducibly personal ritual. It doesn't produce a peak experience, but it can't be bottled and sold. It's his, and his alone, even if it appears banal to the flyover observer.