Deep Trouble/Deep Treble: Nathaniel Mackey's Gnostic Rasp

But what haunts the Gnostics above all else, when confronted by matter--by its opacity, its density, its compactness, its weight (and they felt this weight, this materiality, in those states that seem most subtle: the trembling of water, the wind of the desert, the shimmering of stars)--what haunts them is the intolerable awareness that this inhibiting matter is the result of an error, a deviation in cosmic order; that it is nothing but a poor imitation or a caricature of the original matter of the hyperworld.

--Jacques Lacarrière, The Gnostics

Were all in harmony to our ears, we would dwell in the dreadful smugness in which our mere human rationality relegates what it cannot cope with to the "irrational" as if the totality of creation were without ratios. Praise then the interruption of our composure, the image that comes to fit we cannot account for, the juncture in the music that appears discordant.

--Robert Duncan, "Introduction," Bending the Bow

Low Breathy Growl & Raspy Word

In "Song of the Andoumboulou: 18," we hear Nathaniel Mackey elicit "flamenco's gnostic moan" (WS 14). We also hear Mackey drawing out of this moan its two constituent parts: its "raspy word given / back by the newly / dead" (WS 7), which is its tendency toward a "burred" sound; and its expression of duende, which is longing without an object and the very heart of flamenco. In Mackey's writing, duende is a motile force he connects with his most powerful--and obsessive--themes: the song of the Andoumboulou itself, the tale of Gassire's lute, zar, the School of Udhra, his evocations of experimental jazz and other improvised musics, and the "monophysite lament" ¹ (WS 14) that pervades his writings, telling of the self-consciously futile hope of uniting all these themes in some conceivable way.

In his essay "Cante Moro," Mackey in discussing Lorca says of duende that it "is something troubling. It has to do with trouble, deep trouble" (CM 73). Lorca himself calls duende "all that has black sounds." He calls it "a power, not a work" and " a struggle, not a thought." Further, duende is "the spirit of the earth." It also "wounds" (García Lorca 49, 58). The same can be said about many of Mackey's other topics, especially when considered in the light of the complex of his work; for instance: zar--spirits--are deep trouble, the Andoumboulou--something like mythic phantoms--are a kind of deep trouble, "Gassire's Lute" is a deeply troubling story, the relationship between duende and Mackey's gnostic rasp is the voice of a deep trouble. Mackey says: "Anyway, the word duende means spirit, a kind of gremlin, a gremlinlike, troubling spirit" (CM 73). Much the same can be said of a zar, which is a djinn that temporarily occupies a human being. Zar is an Arabic word that comes from an Ahmaric root. In the Encyclopedia of Islam, we learn:

Zar is very probably derived from the name of the supreme divinity of the pagan Kushites, the God-Heaven called in Agau (Bilen): djar; and in Sidama languages (Kaffa): yaro; (Buoro) daro. The ancient pagan god became in christianized Abyssinia a malevolent genius; and in this way the animistic practices, which in the paganism of the Kushites were directed only to the minor superhuman beings, passed into Abyssinian Christianity (and then into Islam) with the proper name of the God-Heaven who had been reduced to a minor work. (1217)

Perhaps it is the diminution of the God into a demon or a gremlin that makes for the trouble. Perhaps it is the implicit malevolent genius of the rasp, of the fact that "duende loves the rim of the wound" (CM 74). But then Zar is also a city--according to the second epigraph for the "Zar" section of School of Udhra. It is perhaps an invisible city, perhaps not unlike the city Wagadu destroyed by Gassire's...