The Disintegration Loops, and: The Writing of the Disaster: After William Basinski

THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS after William Basinski

Across the East River he listenedthat morning to music looseningitself from the plastic backing. Thatis how sound worked once, a crustof finely-patterned ferrite appliedto tape. Turning spindles. Sometimeseven music is made to collapse. Cassetteby cassette he transferred the pastinto digital, its intricate iron flakes, fedpast the spindles, disintegratingfurther. Form, we have been told,is content. The condition, this means,for entering the future is destruction.I click the tiny sideways trianglethe tapes have become. I crankthe volume on my speakers & eventhis year it is possible to hear,still, a sound like an empiredying. The disintegration loopsagain through the news station’s samestock shots. The sky is blue. Twoplanes are pulling themselves again againstthe towers’—say it—spindles. Disaster,the ancients believed, repeateditself in cycles the stars—sentencesof light—could predict. When Cygnus,for instance, lifted its neckabove the seven hills, they knew thenthe whole spectacular pageantwas over. So, they said, it had risenthe month of Caesar’s slaying. Swansong—Goths, the Rubicon. History,Marx teaches, is patterned tragedy first, then farce. Or first, recall,the packed Ryder truck bucklingthe underground garage. Again. Yes,never forget. I listen, body sprawledon the mattress, to the slackeningambience. It is possible, yes, to hearhere that dejected fanfare humanityat its final annihilation will playagain for the bored stars. Spanof Orion. Rising Saturn. Those vastclouds of fire & dust combustingwith no one at all to watch them.

THE WRITING OF THE DISASTER

Let it begin, as in        the books of the ancients, raining            gall, the gods    by whom we have prospered tossingthe clouds, the towers        we climbed the sky with riven. It    isn’t hard to master. Fasten            myth to history. Fit,as by analogy, past        to present. Priam’stemples, it is said, held    carnival on Troy’s last day, the doomedchildren flinging    garlands to the wooden beast. Beautiful,            almost, the musicof ruin. The royal    scribes, while            the firstborns burned, turningtheir faces to the page.