“Unlimited simulacreage”: Nietzsche, Newsom, and Philosophy in Waltz of the 101st Lightborne
Peeling Back the Layers in Joanna Newsom’s Divers, Part 4
Let’s pick up where we left off, with the “land lone and leveled” after nuclear attack. After visiting the landscape of New York with its history layered one on top of the other, I want to visit another form of layered landscape in Divers.
If you’ve come across this without reading Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, you’re welcome to start with those, or just dive in here. I would, however, recommend you read my earlier piece on “Waltz”, as I’ll be building on several ideas discussed there.
Infinite territory, infinite maps
Many years ago, when I initially shared some thoughts about “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”, I referenced the image of Borges’ “tattered ruins” of a grand map the size of the Empire. The concept — first introduced by Lewis Carroll, reimagined by Borges, and inspiring many, including Solnit and Baudrillard — might feel more at home in “Sapokanikan”, with its “map [that] is sanded and beveled”.
Rebecca Solnit’s introductory words in Infinite City echo some of the sentiments we hear in Newsom’s song:
The Borges map may have been coextensive with its territory, but it could not have been an adequate description of that territory, could not have even approached charting its flora, its fauna, its topography, and its history. A static map cannot describe change, and every place is in constant change.
Such an extensive map can’t really do the richness of experience justice, can’t tell all the stories of the people who lived in that space. While the connection with “Sapokanikan” certainly rings true, I also see it as a welcome entry into the layering of “Waltz”. In particular, the hauntingly striking word Newsom coins in that song : “simulacreage”.
The word evokes the greedy drive of the song’s “we” to colonize the territory, or acreage, of some kind of phantom realm — multiverse or simulation or simulacrum… I don’t intend to go deep into the quantum mechanics or time travel theory here, but I do want to dwell for a moment on simulacra.
If you want a quick summary of Jean Baudrillard’s thesis in his book Simulacra and Simulation, then look no further than his exploration of Borges’s map:
If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) […].
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.
Baudrillard argues that modernity has progressed to a point where we are not simply copying or representing some “real”, but that simulations are formed without referring to any “real” that came before them.
- the territory = the original, the origin, the real
- the map = the copy, the double, the icon, the concept
- the simulation = the map that pre-exists the territory, the hyperreal, the simulacrum (like the image at the top of JN trying to avoid dysentery while lugging her Lyon & Healy to her next gig across the mountains in the mid 1800s)
The map metaphor feels particularly relevant in a song where the narrator is struggling with their relation to Time, and therefore looks to Space to situate themselves:
[…] You and I ceased to mean Now,
and began to mean only Right Here
(to mean Inches and Miles, but not Years);
Even the “Right Here” is reminiscent of the “You Are Here” pin on a map. And the “Inches and Miles” recall a map’s legend and scale.
Infinite differences, infinite simularities
Other philosophers have wrestled with the notion of simulacra, too. Plato and Nietzsche, in particular, wrote about the subject of originals, copies, and simulacra. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote a fair amount about this, and in dialogue with earlier philosophers. I like the simplicity of his definition: “The copy is an image endowed with resemblance” — that is, made to look like the original], while “the simulacrum is an image without resemblance.” In his work on “Plato and the Simulacrum”, Deleuze further compares the copy (what he calls “icon” here) and the simulacrum:
Let us take the two formulations: “only that which is alike differs,” and “only differences are alike.” Here are two readings of the world in that one bids us to think of difference in terms of similarity, or a previous identity, while on the contrary, the other invites us to think of similarity or even identity as the product of a basic disparity. The first one is an exact definition of the world as icon. The second, against the first, defines the world of simulacra. It posits the world itself as phantasm.
The phantasm calls to mind the line in Newsom’s song — “the war between us and our ghosts”. In “Waltz”, we start by seeing an attraction to the simulacreage, a covetous desire for it, but ultimately that turns to horror and dread.
In that same article, Deleuze goes on to describe the role of simulacra in and difference/divergence in modern literature. In his description, I immediately think of the divers series of anecdotes we hear in Newsom’s album, and yet the unity that pulls them together (something I discussed with Sam Morgan and Nikki Fortier a little bit ago). Just as Newsom’s polysemic words like “scrambling” and “undarked” contain within themselves several stories, several paths at the same time.
We know, for example, that certain literary procedures (other arts have equivalents) allow one to tell several stories at the same time. This is certainly the essential character of the modern work of art. It is in no way a question of different points of view on a single story understood as the same, for these points remain subject to a rule of convergence. It is, on the contrary, a matter of different and divergent narratives, as though to each point of view there corresponded an absolutely distinct landscape. There is of course a unity of the divergent series, as divergent, but it is a continually decentered chaos, itself at one with the Great Work. This unformed chaos, the great letter of Finnegan’s Wake [sic], is not just any chaos, it is the power of affirmation, the power of affirming all heterogeneous series, it “complicates” within itself all series. (Whence Joyce’s interest in Bruno as the theoretician of complication.) Within these basic series a sort of internal reverberation is produced, a resonance that induces a forced movement that overflows the series themselves. The characteristics are all those of the simulacrum when it breaks its chains and rises to the surface. It then asserts its phantasmatic power, its repressed power.
Wait… Finnegans Wake and simulacra? Ok, maybe it’s not too surprising to encounter Joyce here, especially as a modern author whose works demonstrate the principle Deleuze is describing. Though it is surprising to encounter the “Great Work”, also called the “Magnum Opus”. Deleuze might be referencing an author’s magnum opus, or masterpiece, such as scholars may consider Joyce’s sprawling novel. But when capitalized like that, it references more directly the alchemical and Hermetic concept of the Great Work — that is, creating the philosopher’s stone. (The original French uses the term “Grand Œuvre”, which has the same meaning).
One of the Renaissance scholars of Hermeticism was the “Bruno” referred to here. Giordano Bruno, who had an outsized influence on Finnegans Wake, and about whom Joyce wrote an early essay. Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 — for believing that stars were other suns, and had their own planets.
I don’t want to stray from our initial exploration of “simulacreage”, so I’ll resist going into too much detail. When Deleuze talks of the tension in the “unity of the divergent series”, it calls to mind how Bruno expanded on the work of Copernicus by exploring the concept of infinity:
Copernicus had made the sun the center of the universe and assigned the earth and the planets their orbits accordingly, but he did not expressly deny the Aristotelian theory that the world is finite in extension. Bruno went a step further and inferred from the equivalence of all planets and the infinite power of God that the universe must be infinite. God, causation, principles, elements, active and passive potencies, matter, substance, form, etc. are all parts of the One and distinguished only by logical conceptualization, as it is inevitable in human discourse
Deleuze talks of a “decenter”-ing, which fits squarely in the realm of Copernicus and Bruno — the earth went from being the center of the solar system (I’m sure they didn’t call it that!) to being just a cog around the sun. Then our solar system went from being “the universe” to being just one of many star-centered clusters in the wider universe. Talk about decentering!
These concepts are familiar territory for us here in “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”, a world of the infinite and its implications. I went into more detail on my prior piece about the song, but simply put, the logical extension of true infinity is the multiverse — a Borgesian jungle of forking paths where nearly-unique but ever-so-slightly different versions of all history coexist with dramatically divergent variations. In her interview with the New York Times, Newsom discussed the photographs of Kim Keever, with a nod to multiverse theory:
I like the fact that it’s not clear whether they represent a period of time before humans, or a period of time after humans, the post-apocalyptic thing, or whether they represent just a part of the world where there are no humans, or whether they represent an iteration of Earth within the multiverse where humans never evolved to exist.
Vast landscapes built in miniature, submerged, and injected with colorful clouds of pigment, Keever’s worlds have an air of simulacreage to them.
Infinite wars
So what do we make of this “war”? We hear that it is fought “between us and our ghosts”. We hear, in echoes of WWI (and also in echoes of the Great Work), that they were “Great Wars”. World War One was initially called “The Great War” — no one hoped for or expected a sequel. People also referred to it as “the war to end all wars”…though it did not.
In fact, the narrator says there were
three we had narrowly won.
(But the fourth,
it was carelessly done.)
The story seems to refer to this fourth “Great War” as “the last of the Great Wars”, as well. The finality (“the last”-ness) of the war gets thrown into question, in some sense, when we later hear:
When I woke, […] the War had begun, in eternal return and repeat.
Perhaps if this fourth Great War never ends, but instead repeats eternally, perhaps then it will be the last war? The war to end all wars — or at least to engulf all wars?
The idea of Eternal Return, or eternal recurrence, is different from multiverses. Where the multiverse posits infinite possibilities in infinite universes, eternal return suggests that existence repeats — exactly the same — over and over again. So the warriors here are caught in a trap, in an infinite loop. They know how this goes, they’ve seen it before, but they can’t get out.
Make it stop, my love!
Infinite recurrence
While the origins of Eternal Return go back to early Greek philosophy, the most famous proponent of the theory comes later, in the late 1800s. That philosopher was the animated and sometimes problematic Friedrich Nietzsche.
You’ve probably heard of Nietzsche, and maybe even read some of his work, or at least heard of his book Thus Spake Zarathustra. I won’t try to summarize the whole thing, but suffice it to say Zarathustra does a lot of spake-ing, thusly. Toward the end of the book, Zarathustra (another name for the Persian prophet Zoroaster, but recast here by Nietzsche in a different light) is out partying with the people he was speaking to, and as it’s getting close to midnight, then one of the party-goers says: “one day, one festival with Zarathustra” has made my life worth living — just to live this moment, I’d go through the whole drudgery of life all over again.
In reaction, Zarathustra stands “there like one drunken”, but then launches into a speech, and eventually repeats a song he sang earlier in the book. For a close listener of Joanna Newsom, I think reading the passage will spark some interesting connections.
Joy, however, doth not want heirs, it doth not want children, — joy wanteth itself, it wanteth eternity, it wanteth recurrence, it wanteth everything eternally-like-itself.
Woe saith: “Break, bleed, thou heart! Wander, thou leg! Thou wing, fly! Onward! upward! thou pain!” Well! Cheer up! O mine old heart: WOE SAITH: “HENCE! GO!”
Ye higher men, what think ye? Am I a soothsayer? Or a dreamer? Or a drunkard? Or a dream-reader? Or a midnight-bell?
Or a drop of dew? Or a fume and fragrance of eternity? Hear ye it not? Smell ye it not? Just now hath my world become perfect, midnight is also midday, —
Pain is also a joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun, — go away! or ye will learn that a sage is also a fool.
Said ye ever Yea to one joy? O my friends, then said ye Yea also unto ALL woe. All things are enlinked, enlaced and enamoured, —
— Wanted ye ever once to come twice; said ye ever: “Thou pleasest me, happiness! Instant! Moment!” then wanted ye ALL to come back again!
— All anew, all eternal, all enlinked, enlaced and enamoured, Oh, then did ye LOVE the world, —
— Ye eternal ones, ye love it eternally and for all time: and also unto woe do ye say: Hence! Go! but come back! FOR JOYS ALL WANT — ETERNITY!
All joy wanteth the eternity of all things, it wanteth honey, it wanteth lees, it wanteth drunken midnight, it wanteth graves, it wanteth grave-tears’ consolation, it wanteth gilded evening-red —
— WHAT doth not joy want! it is thirstier, heartier, hungrier, more frightful, more mysterious, than all woe: it wanteth ITSELF, it biteth into ITSELF, the ring’s will writheth in it, —
— It wanteth love, it wanteth hate, it is over-rich, it bestoweth, it throweth away, it beggeth for some one to take from it, it thanketh the taker, it would fain be hated, —
— So rich is joy that it thirsteth for woe, for hell, for hate, for shame, for the lame, for the WORLD, — for this world, Oh, ye know it indeed!
Ye higher men, for you doth it long, this joy, this irrepressible, blessed joy — for your woe, ye failures! For failures, longeth all eternal joy.
For joys all want themselves, therefore do they also want grief! O happiness, O pain! Oh break, thou heart! Ye higher men, do learn it, that joys want eternity.
— Joys want the eternity of ALL things, they WANT DEEP, PROFOUND ETERNITY!
Have ye now learned my song? Have ye divined what it would say? Well! Cheer up! Ye higher men, sing now my roundelay!
Sing now yourselves the song, the name of which is “Once more,” the signification of which is “Unto all eternity!” — sing, ye higher men, Zarathustra’s roundelay!
O man! Take heed!
What saith deep midnight’s voice indeed?
“I slept my sleep — ,
“From deepest dream I’ve woke, and plead: —
“The world is deep,
“And deeper than the day could read.
“Deep is its woe — ,
“Joy — deeper still than grief can be:
“Woe saith: Hence! Go!
“But joys all want eternity — ,
“ — Want deep, profound eternity!”
Thanks for indulging the long citation. For me, the speech resonates with “Time, as a Symptom” and its reflections on joy and pain.
the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating
joy of life.The moment of your greatest joy sustains:
not axe nor hammer,
tumor, tremor,
can take it away, and it remains.
It remains.
and
Joy! Again, around — a pause, a sound — a song
Like the Roundelay of Zarathustra. To say “yes” to the joy of life is to say “yes” to its pain, too. To have one moment of joy in your life is to want an endless repetition of all your life’s ups and down… just to live that one moment again.
A pause, a sound
Nietzsche writes: “WOE SAITH: ‘HENCE! GO!’”
The speaker of “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne” cries out, when faced with the “eternal return and repeat” of the last war: “Make it stop, my love!”
We’re not in a joyful place. No — we’re in the place of the phantasms, the simulacra.
Gilles Deleuze, in that same book I quoted above— The Logic of Sense (I love how he plays on the polysemy of the French word sens, both ‘meaning’/’sense’ and ‘direction’/’way’, but that’s for another time)—Deleuze points out how the simulacrum and eternal return have a “connection so profound”:
Simulation designates the power to produce an effect […] in the sense of “sign,” resulting from the process of signals. And it is in the sense of “costume,” or even better, of masks, expressing a process of disguise where, behind each mask there is still another. . . . Simulation constructed in this way is not separable from the Eternal Return […]
The secret of the Eternal Return is that it in no way expresses an order that it opposes to chaos, and masters it. On the contrary, it is nothing but chaos, the power of affirming chaos. There is a point at which Joyce is Nietzschian — when he shows that the vicus of recirculation cannot affect or spin a “chaosmos.” For the coherence of representation, the Eternal Return substitutes something entirely different, its own c[ha]o-errance. For between the Eternal Return and the simulacrum there is a connection so profound that one is only comprehended by the other. What returns are the divergent series, as divergent: that is, each one insofar as it displaces its difference from all the others; and all, insofar as they complicate their difference in the chaos without beginning or end. The circle of the Eternal Return is a continually eccentric circle with a constantly decentered center.
The reference to Finnegans Wake here (not the one about chaos+cosmos, that’s elsewhere in the Wake… the one about ‘vicus’) points to the bridging sentence that circles from the last page to the first:
A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
You can look into the many layers of meaning in the phrase “vicus of recirculation”, one of which was Renaissance philosopher Giambattista Vico. I’m not the first to point out the connection to Newsom’s Divers by way of his influence on Joyce’s Wake. But I’d be remiss not to give a nod to him here, while we’re discussing the layered philosophy of “Waltz”.
Vico’s theory on the recurrence of history outlines the way he saw cyclical patterns in the rise and fall of nations. In his magnum opus, New Science, Vico discusses the progressive ages of history. Prof. Robert Miner, one of the translators for that book, described it this way:
He also emphasizes that at the end of the cycle, there will be a return to the beginning. But it’s not a simple return. Any return that actually happens […] will still occur on a new foundation. So sometimes people will say that Vico’s image of history is not so much that of a circle, but that of a spiral. So you have the recurrences, but he combines that with a kind of movement that isn’t simple repetition. Whether that amounts to any kind of progress or not, is a much more difficult question.
Making the distinction between circle and spiral highlights an important nuance. The circle implies a closed loop that repeats exactly in the same way. Whereas the spiral implies a repetition in many ways, but also a difference in that the repetition happens on a new foundation. Picture a spiral staircase or ramp, each layer stacked directly on top of the other. Viewed from the top, they may look like a circle, but viewed from the side, we see that each ring moves in 3 dimensions. Yes, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day (or Cristin Milioti’s and Andy Samberg’s in Palm Springs, for that matter) lives the same day over and over — but they remember the day before. So it’s more of a spiral than a circle, if that makes sense.
Let’s return to Vico for a minute. In the introduction to his book New Science, the writer describes an engraving and the symbols shown in it. He commissioned the art himself for that purpose. Have a look:
You can read about the various figures and symbols in the image if you like. I want to zoom in, though, on the description of the zodiac constellations shown as a kind of belt around the globe (the round thing teetering on the corner of the altar). Vico writes,
In the belt of the zodiac which girds the celestial globe the two signs of Leo and Virgo, more than the others, appear in majesty, or, as is said, in perspective. The former signifies that our Science in its beginnings contemplates first the Hercules that every ancient gentile nation boasts as its founder, and that it contemplates him in his greatest labor. This was the slaying of the lion which, vomiting flame, set fire to the Nemean forest, and adorned with whose skin Hercules was raised to the stars. The lion is here found to have been the great ancient forest of the earth, burned down and brought under cultivation by Hercules, whom we find to have been the type of the political heroes who had to precede the military heroes. This sign also represents the beginning of time[-reckoning]s, which among the Greeks (to whom we owe all our knowledge of gentile antiquity) began with the Olympiads, based on the games of which we are told that Hercules was the founder. They must have begun among the Nemeans to celebrate his victory over the lion he slew. Thus the time[-reckoning]s of the Greeks began when cultivation of the fields began among them. The second sign, that of the Virgin, whom the astronomers found described by the poets as crowned with ears of grain, signifies that Greek history began with the golden age. The poets expressly relate that this was the first age of their world, when through the long course of centuries the years were counted by the grain harvests, which we find to have been the first gold of the world. This golden age of the Greeks has its Latin counterpart in the age of Saturn, who gets his name from sati, “sown” [fields]. In this age of gold, the poets assure us faithfully, the gods consorted on earth with the heroes. For we shall show later that the first men among the gentiles, simple and crude, and under the powerful spell of most vigorous imaginations encumbered with frightful superstitions, actually believed that they saw the gods on earth. […] Thus from Saturn (whose Greek name Chronos means “time”) new principles are derived for chronology or the theory of time.
I want to draw particular attention to these statements in the description:
- “Thus the time-reckonings of the Greeks began when cultivation of the fields began among them.”
- “The [ancient Greek] poets expressly relate that [the golden age] was the first age of their world, when through the long course of centuries the years were counted by the grain harvests, which we find to have been the first gold of the world.”
Of course this interpretation of the phrase “golden age” calls to mind the lines from “Waltz”:
I saw the Bering Strait and the Golden Gate,
in silent suspension of their golden age!
But they also shed light on the grain- and harvest-based mysteries of Eleusis and Demeter that we see again in “Time, as a Symptom”, which I’ve written about elsewhere. And I would be willing to guess that Joanna Newsom was aware of the connection.
In many Greek mystery-religions (Orphic, Dionysian, Eleusinian…), the concept of the “Golden Age” refers to the reign of the Titan, Kronos. I found this article on the subject nicely summarized and researched. In a few places now, I’ve pointed out the allusion to the Titans in this song’s lines: “making Time just another poor tenant:/ bearing weight, taking fire, trading smokes”. So I would suggest that Newsom is alluding to the Greek concept of a “golden age” when Time (Kronos) was ruler, before Time was made “just another poor tenant”, subservient to the light-traveling warriors we see here. But I leave it up to you to draw your own conclusions.
Thank you for coming on this bit of a ramble with me. I don’t want to go on eternally, so I’ll stop here for now.
I’ll leave you with one more thought to consider. With Newsom’s pronunciation, and with our historical context on colonization of land, of places, up to now I’ve tended to read the term “simulacreage” as the combination of “simulacra” and “acreage” — Space.
But could we add to that? Could we also interpret it as “simulacra” and “age” — the colonization of Space and of Time?
The exploration continues in Part 5, if you’re curious.
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