“Zwieschlächtig” is a German word designating a field of phenomena related to all phenomena in the field. It means communication goes in and comes out all at one and the same time, but also that semi-quantifiable information is spilling in and out at all times and from all angles (and maybe more than all). Master American essayist Fenton Johnson consciously, I think, acknowledges the brute mores of our moment when he confesses to his readers that it is perfectly feasible to call the great Impressionist Paul Cézanne “crazy” the way the local kids who once hurled rocks and abuses at him did, but that if we should be actually and actively seeking meaningful counsel it might make sense to pause and consider like the great solitary painter strolling “the psychology of the earth” with its “living, feeling, expressive self, made manifest in rivers and seas and mountains and tornadoes and earthquakes.” Maybe the Earth Creature becomes more and more like a thick sinewy heart pumping deep within the earth, perhaps even at its core, like in some ditzy old 1950s Technicolor sci-fi picture. We are collectively the Earth as a creature when the echolocation starts to go haywire. The Earth gets up on top of you like Robert Frost dreamed it would, but only after the Globe shuts down and drops with a loud, wet splat in the pig slop. After the Globe shuts down a weighted blanket awaits you, folded and laid out on the Phantom of the Opera’s side of the bed. You’re going to be okay. You are loved. There are always string instruments around and they’ve always been around more for the nerves and for ‘art therapy’ than they have been for anybody’s underlying sense of self, Wagner notwithstanding. In modifying my string instrument tunings ever so slightly I found hillbilly ragas waiting there for me like a natural spring. After I got COVID I spent some time with a physician friend at his retreat in the Rockies and we asked ourselves what it is to underly. Beneath us is simply the rot that makes it all possible...as the forest makes abundantly clear. We hacked this out spitballing and picking our respective axes next to a usually very-still lake. Some young friends came out and we made tapes. It all looks a bit like this: a canalization, directing flows across a physical topography that’s all blocked-up and/or used/abused but whose underside or flipside is the All Time 'Papa Don't Preach' Smooth Ride. Upon returning to Calgary, the ‘jimsonweed ragas’ I began making in earnest with my friends sought to canalize in, around, and through a city we almost completely could not outwardly navigate—the “surface streets” of Inherent Vice. All as it was and as it had to be, what should have been always having actually been during these highly vertiginous early 2020s, year of lockdown succeeded by whiplash like hellfire, but then of course also all the way back to the dawn of time it’s either love your fate or suffer it; all that slack rope is just your own squid-like intestines. You are responsible for cleaning up after yourself. As it was to be in the year of lockdown: we were to pass a raga shelter to shelter, helter skelter, in a manner that tech-wise could not have been done even five years earlier and I would joke with another good Doc entirely that we were the group of us building ourselves a particle accelerator in the city’s sewers.
Robyn, "Robotboy"
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