James Kelman - A Disaffection

What a temptation!

There were these amazing paintings done by Goya when he was quite old, late middle age or thereabouts — no, much older than that, he was really elderly at the time. Could that be true! They were actually astonishing. Incredible pieces of art. And gruesome. And yet! Plus that hollowness of tone. Was that it? A hollowness of tone? Or was he just thinking of the pipes.

He had not been thinking of the pipes at all. But neither had they gone from his head; rather the opposite, a kind of luxuriation, they were so much a part of him. But maybe they had gone right enough. The imagination works in its own way. It was easy to assume the whole backdrop of his perception had altered whereas it might not have; there was no reason to think it had, rather the opposite, if reason had anything to do with it. But there was little to trust in reason. Fuck that for a racket. A method of approaching the thing, perhaps, was to say he had been subconsciously avoiding all thought on the subject because of a growing awareness that it could prove momentous, all too fucking momentous.

He bought tins of enamel paint on his road home from school next afternoon; one each of the colours silver, red and black. He wondered whether a better depth of sound might be obtained by blocking the ends. When using them before he held the top section with his right hand while his left was covering the bottom in such a way that only a tiny fraction of air escaped. It worked fine but with something affixed permanently and made adjustable, a variety of notes would become available. That is, if a variety of notes was what was required. Even the term itself, ‘variety’, could scarcely be deemed satisfying. In an odd sense it almost cheapened the pipes as instruments, as though there must be an ‘object of the exercise’ and this object was to play a fucking tune. And it was not that. It was not that at all. Was it something better than that? Something better than playing a tune? Or was it just something different? Something different, not better? What could it be? This great feat he was setting out to do. This amazing thing that was not connected with playing a tune, a plain ordinary tune. This astonishing accomplishment he would achieve on a pair of discarded pipes, found dumped behind the rear fire-escape of the local arts centre.

And yet it probably connected to notes and to intervals, those spaces between them. If he got the right tone or pitch then that would be it and the distinctions between them, and the gaps in time, all such elements would be part of what was important. There was nothing mystical about it, although, fair enough, it did occur to him that reading more deeply into the Pythagoreans and how they used sound and number or rather, what they thought about sound and number, their uses, and their universal reference; and yet.

and yet, this conceptualising. Creating a distance already. Only a couple of days since the first sounds and now here he was attempting to get away from it, from the actual physicality of them. That was hopeless. That was the kind of thing he always seemed to be doing nowadays. The totality of it: the totality of it; the way the sounds had been the other night, or was it last night, the way the actual sounds had been, that was it — that was that! How come he had even felt the necessity of painting them in these bright enamels? What was wrong with their own colour? Their selfcolour? What was wrong with that, their self colour, the colour of their selves? Had that also been done to create a distance? And even the time it took for the paint to fucking dry! Was that also an excuse, a way out, an escape route, so he wouldni be obliged to actually blow them? But no, it wasnt that either, there was no self-deceit going on there, he knew himself well enough for that. If there was cheating going on he would know about it. Probably it was just a straightforward thing, that he wanted it to be right. He wanted the pipes to be ‘as finished’ as possible. He wanted them to appear as instruments, to actually look like musical instruments to the ordinary wo/man-in-the-street. He wasnt in any rush either. It was not as if he had to get it all over and done with in a certified period of time. Everything was to be proper, that was all; regulated, thought to the fore.

There was that temptation

It could even relate to field-theory, the whole thing, the sound and the number, insofar as such a theory ever managed to appear in relation to the lives of ordinary individuals, the manner in which each person, each organism, related to things as a totality, that old business of harmony, linked in the universal chain. And how in the name of fuck did the two guys with cudgels relate to that! Stuck fast in the mud, the miring quicksand — like the wee dog. Belabouring each other with those stout sticks. That magnetic force — an enactment? between the men just? or did Goya himself have a physical part in it? And what the hell did it matter anyway. This was him off with the concepts once again. Theoretical webs, dirty webs, fusty webs; old and shrivelling away into nothingness, a fine dust. Who needs that kind of stuff. Far far better getting out into the open air and doing it, actually doing it, something solid and concrete and unconceptualisable.

And now there existed a great temptation: to stop being a teacher. To stop being a teacher. To concentrate solely upon things of genuine value, things of a genuine authenticity, of a genuine physicality. Teaching by performance instead of pointing the finger.

But could all that be achieved on the pipes? What was it about them?

The actual idea of finding a pair of discarded pipes and turning them into musical instruments!

And yet the idea only appeared daft because they were ordinary pipes like the sort used by plumbers and electricians. If they had been called something else perhaps. And maybe this is why he had bought the enamels and painted them. If for instance he was performing on them in public and the audience saw them as ordinary pipes the reaction would be predictable, if not a silly kind of laughter then a degree of skepticism that would be better avoided if possible. Laughter would be okay if it came towards the end, but not at the beginning, before he could even be said to have started. The problem was fairly old hat, functionalism and nominalism, the naming process and imperialism, transforming commercially produced products into aesthetic weapons. The whole affair had been kicking about for years, probably several centuries! Even Goethe but, had he not been involved in something akin? To hell with it anyway. It was not something he found especially worrying. What he sought was the doing, the act.

And absolutely no attempts to conceal the artefact. Any person could recognise the pipes for what they were and good luck to them. That they had been painted would simply be seen as a sort of public affirmation, that the pipes could now be regarded in such and such a way, and without irony. Unless that irony was seen to be wholly enmeshed in the essence of the actual performance. The best way of looking at it might be in terms of jazz, particularly those great old bluesmen who used to manufacture washboard waistcoats. In fact that was precisely it; that was the analogy. Everything about it. And then that incredible moment of nostalgia or whatever, that amazing beauty, a crazy kind of incredible beauty which appeared to sum up all those failed ideals, the plans and the principles right from boyhood all the way up and now dead, deadened, rubbed out by the low-lying roof, that weight pressing down on you, like that medieval torture where they lay enormous stones on top of you, crushing out your breath, that kind of weight, society, that you hated and detested more than anything else in the world, that was forcing you on and on and on and on and fucking bloody on and on and on, and all the time grafting away on its own behalf, on account of its own propagation.