In her essay Seeing, Annie Dillard speaks of sacrificing details for a greater picture, or sense of truth. In this assignment, I attempted to make minor abstractions form a whole.
The
piece I chose is called Subterraneans,
and was composed by David Bowie in 1977. It is part of an album called Low. The name is a nod to Bowie’s mental
state, however it is a rather lighthearted description of the truth. Rather
than a mundane sort of sadness or ennui, he was caught in existential torment.
After spending the greater part of a decade addicted to cocaine, courting a
damagingly obsessive relationship to celebrity, and devolving into paranoid
isolation while living in California, the man sought a change of pace. Low is dramatically different than his
previous music, and reflects astounding emotional depths.
One
of its songs, Warszawa, was written
specifically to reflect the desolation of its Polish namesake. Subterraneans feels similar to that song.
There is a sense of profound damage in both, though this sense is more
immediate in Warszawa. It strikes the
listener as memory in Subterraneans. It
does not sound like the death of a culture, but like a memory or half-forgotten
story of something long dead. The pain felt in this song is cold, not visceral,
and even attains a level of ethereal beauty. The synthesizer portions were
densely layered in production, in such a way that the melody sounds indirect.
It is reminiscent of hearing a song being played from a distant room in a large
house. Some of the instruments were recorded backward, furthering the song’s
sense of weightlessness. Low deals
explicitly in the theme of societal collapse, and Subterraneans seems to be growing backwards where most songs press
forward.
With
these thoughts in mind, I chose to include some sort of visual abstraction in
each photograph I used. Some images are seen through water or reflected off of
it. Some are deliberately freed of context. The final picture is simply a light
effect I created in my room. I took some of these pictures at the Bonneville
Salt Flats. The Salt Flats are beautiful and barren. There was once life there,
and now the earth is literally salted. The flats act as a natural monument to a
prehistoric lake. They became linked to Subterraneans
in my mind. Both speak beautifully of something that came before, and now
is lost. As Bowie’s song seems to slip backward, my images slip to increasing
darkness and confusion. It is my hope that together these abstractions are
reborn as something understandable.
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