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the gateway drug really is the short story at the end of dubliners, "the dead."
this question of feeling stupid because something works in a framework that's different from what folk are used to is an ongoing concern of mine, really.
i went at it through joyce here because his work is something of a lightening rod for that response.
i'm not in any way comparing myself to joyce here, but in the sound work i do, i run into this response as well. folk seem to assume that work should be accessible immediately to them. if it isn't, they initially feel there's something wrong with them, then they transfer it onto the piece and by extension onto the person who made the piece.
what i know is, for example, 12 tone music is not intuitively available to folk who are steeped in ways of organizing sound which are typical for european classical music (straight music). you have to train yourself into hearing it. but that training usually happens because you find something beautiful in a piece that's organized that way and so it begins with being attracted to a piece and happens through that attraction and so isn't seen as training. for me, it was anton webern's op. 30 for piano, and it was the ways in which the spaces between notes operated. i'd never heard anything like it before. with joyce, it was the proteus chapter from ulysses, the one in which stephen is walking along the beach. it was a little thing, the description of a dog running across the sand, the way it shape shifted.
what these things eventually opened onto was the possibility that one could make things--sound pieces, writing, whatever--as conceptual actions. so you could take on and manipulate the conventions that inform regular experience of the world and within that experience of made objects.
if you're going to work that way, it doesn't make sense to treat those same conventions as if they were transparent--given in advance along with the world itself. what's given are sets of rules that enable certain types of experience. these are culturally conditioned. they're arbitrary outside that conditioning process. they could be otherwise. but you, making stuff, are yourself inside those same conventions and rely on them to communicate--so the obvious move is to feed these conventions back onto themselves and, in the process, try to open up and explore alternate spaces. which may be effects of feedback. phantom places. or they could be experiments with switching registers--moving from the usual modes of explicit experience to one that envokes underlying modes of perception, of being in the world.
what this means for a listener or a reader is that they have to open themselves up to the experience, even if its alien. more importantly, what it means is that it puts listeners or readers into the position of actively making their experience of a piece or environment. which we all do, all the time.
the gambit is that something happens within the piece that hooks you as listener or reader into coming along for the ride, into making the ride for yourself that you see yourself as being along for. because there's no single experience to be had: there's no right way to know this kind of work. there are only ways of knowing. it's a world of partial viewpoints we inhabit. the idea that there's a single order to things and that, as a consequence, a right and wrong way of knowing or experiencing something, is an illusion--a deep illusion---but an illusion nonetheless. there are partial views and the environments that condition or constrain them.
anyway, this is perhaps a digression.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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