You made a promise
Negatives mirror the light’s absence. Footnotes refer to an unseen text which lies behind the written word. The two offer, in different ways, a portal to a place of reflection. The footnotes are invented, fictions of place and intention. The author never existed. Nor the book. But they might have. The negatives, on the other hand, are snapshots of work in progress, of the process which underlies much of the music.
‘In times entanglement are the folds of inertia which is its way of showing a desire to experience absence. Time is jealous of humanity. This jealousy is occasionally visible as a kind of melancholia. Without it we would not experience longing and we would not know what love is.’
From Time in the Age of Melancholia by Margrit Bøhme ©1879
‘Do not console me, nor kiss the unbecome of i. Nor think of me as motion other than something where absence is that love I do not hold. In appearance we are each other, negatives against the pane of glass as if the eye alone could see the other you. Tame me not. Make me wild. I will then bless you with emotion.’
From Keepers of Future Dreams by Hannes Salomon ©1883
‘You said, these are just phonemes, made of a certain resistance. The atmosphere makes it so and without it I would be nothing but a pair of lips making shapes in silence. You said, even this certainty is clothed in uncertainty as it depends on a source of light to be more or less visible. And even then, even with some indicator of luminance, if there is nothing to reflect or mirror it, or soak up the excess, how would you know whether there was sound to my shapes? I pause against the skin of this idea’.
From Essays on Melancholia by Arvo Han © 1923
‘Music is written because of circumstance. Circumstance is where lovers meet. Music is a short-hand for this place in time. Time is jealous of humanity because unlike us, it has nowhere to go. We need to reinvent melancholia otherwise music will fade into transparency.’
From Actualities of the Other through Poem and Music by Billie Fathom ©1885
‘You made a promise. I am not familiar with it. Is this the negative of your love?’
From Negative Love by Amanda Pollack ©1879
