“Art depends from a vision… but the obstacle of matter forces this vague vision to form itself, to condense into a sign that is recognizable, or at least, fascinating”

— Jean Aujame

Translated excerpt from Jean Rudel’s introduction to the Technique of Painting:

Knowing craft has never guaranteed the value of a work, no more than its subject, reference to theory — or justifying it after the fact with discussion!

Without a choice of materials and a technique putting them to use, there is no work. The form it dons, like its significance, depends in large part from this materiality, whether it is a question of “pure” plastic creation or forming an “image”.

But the pictorial “fact” can be the result of both a “historical practices” and contemporary discoveries, the two often combining, under the condition that one doesn’t forget that the personal way of organizing a surface largely influences the selection and arrangement of the means to be used. There exists, on one hand, the recipes of a profession and on the other the way in which they bring forms and material to life. “It is necessary”, wrote Aujame in our first edition, to discover a “profession” that aptly serves a particular language, an original poetic. One must certainly make beautiful images, but also give through these images the idea of a special order of the world, that is not necessarily distant from the one offered by nature, but sufficiently different all the same to act sharply on the spectator, through the special effect of a “comforting disturbance”, while insisting all the same that it can happen for paintings to be executed in spite of the prescribed rules to be conserved admirably, while others, finished with extreme care, are in ruins within fifty years.

Reading Le Temps Des Gares (Exposition Catalogue, 1978), These pictures juxtaposed to show Euston Station before and after its demolition and renovation, spoke to me. The old Penn Station in New York City shared the same fate within a year. The upper image is of the interior from 1849, with neoclassical architecture (columns, a grand staircase, cast iron banisters, a statue, decorated doorway) and curved Art Nouveau lamps (the armchairs present when the picture was taken, however, were decidedly Bauhaus). The lower image shows the plans for its replacement; one sees that simple vertical and horizontal lines without ornament (columns, lighting, signs, glass windows) will replace the complex diagonals and curves of the mid-late 19th century. People seem to fit easily with the rich detail of neoclassical decor, at least in this black and white picture, as opposed to the colder, straight-edged “functionalist” counterpart that came a century later.

In this documentary from 1970, “Railways For Ever”, on the end of steam trains in Britain, Sir John Betjeman briefly mentions the station (4:00–4:30)

Here is the exterior of another English station, that had a functionalist facade attached to the old one in Victorian Neo-Gothic:

“Your were a revealer, a timelessly tragic poet, you had to transform this capillary action all at once into the most convincing gestures, into the most available forms. So you began that unprecedented act of violence in your work, which, more and more impatiently, desperately, sought equivalents in the visible world for what you had seen inside […] overwhelmed with what is tangible, for the sake of what cannot be grasped”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ibsen”, From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

In a passage of Culture and Value (69e), Ludwig Wittgenstein considers how one comes to understand music, and how he would go about explaining it:

“There is a certain expression proper to the appreciation of music, in listening, playing, and at other times too. Sometimes gestures form part of this expression, but sometimes it will just be a matter of how a man plays, or hums, the piece, now and again of the comparisons he draws and the images with which he as it were illustrates the music. Someone who understands music will listen differently (e.g. with a different expression on his face), he will talk differently, from someone who does not. But he will show that he understands a particular theme not just in manifestations that accompany his hearing or playing that theme but in his understanding for music in general”

Like math, instrumental music is an abstract symbolic system that does not use the day to day word, but unlike math, it does not seek to understand and transcribe the empirical world. Philosophers have termed music as the expression of indescribable human feeling. It played a large role in Wittgenstein’s life as he grew up in the high society of fin de siècle Vienna; Mahler, Strauss, and Schoenberg were household names, and one had to acquire an almost instinctive musical sensibility since birth. His notes are littered with remarks on music, trying to come to terms with, from what their reader is able to interpret, what it means to be “deeply moved” by it; to possess the inner understanding that enables one to have an aesthetic experience caused by a sequence of notes. This passage is useful for the aim of this paper because it relates an understanding of music to the other arts:

“Appreciating music is a manifestation of the life of mankind. How should we describe it to someone? Well, I suppose we should first have to describe music. Then we could describe how human beings react to it. But is that all we need do, or must we also teach him to understand it for himself? Well, getting him to understand and giving him an explanation that does not achieve this will be “teaching him what understanding is” in different senses of that phrase. And again, teaching him to understand poetry or painting may contribute to teaching him what is involved in understanding music”

This lengthy passage grapples with musical understanding; Wittgenstein does not even begin to think of what it means to create a musical theme, how its expression is generated in a human being. Yet G.L Hagberg, in Art as Language, interprets the philosophy of Wittgenstein from the Investigations to examine the question of artistic creation, or expression, and his survey will be useful in returning to this quote and what it says about “artistic meaning” (1).

Hagberg’s first three chapters survey three “pre-Wittgensteinian theorists” that shaped “many of the questions we now face throughout the larger field of analytical aesthetics” (ibid). The first chapter is on Susanne Langer, and it is of interest because a large part of Langer’s aesthetic theory (in Philosophy in a New Key, Feeling and Form, Problems of Art) is centered on musical expression, and Hagberg argues “Wittgenstein’s early atomistic philosophy of language” from the Tractatus influenced her thought. Langer believes a work of art is made of a series of symbols that express the interior feelings of the artist. She differs the symbols of logic and language, which she views as “discursive”, from the inexplicable “felt life” (Langer borrows the term from Henry James) the artist projects into their work (“Expressiveness”, Problems of Art, 25). The artist does not resort to “discourse”, because what they wish to express is “not discursively communicable or, in the strictest sense, logically thinkable. It is unspeakable, ineffable; according to practically all serious philosophical theories today, it is unknowable […] that is what we call the subjective aspect of experience, the direct feeling of it […] what it feels like to pursue an elusive thought or to have a big idea […] the ways we are moved are as various lights in a forest; and they may intersect, sometimes without cancelling each other, take shape and dissolve, conflict, explode into passion, or be transfigured” (ibid, 22). Langer concludes that “artistic forms are more complex than any symbolic forms we know. They are, indeed, not abstractable from the works that exhibit them” (ibid, 25). Her structural conceptions are a very interesting way of theorizing artistic expression, yet its complete meaning eludes us in resorting to “symbolic forms” as the term for the “parts” that make up a work of art.

Throwing around the word symbol and differentiating discursive thought from felt life gives the impression that eventually, when humans better understand their nature, they will be able to directly, discursively decipher a symbol in a work of art, linking it with a mixture of “such and such” emotions and impressions. Indeed, Langer writes “an extension of language will gradually follow the wordless insight, and discursive expression will supersede the non-discursive pristine symbol. This is, I think, the normal advance of human thought and language in that whole realm of knowledge where discourse is possible at all” (ibid, 24). If that were true, at this point one would no longer be overcome with emotion when staring at the Venus of Willendorf or the frescoes of Villa Livia, as their direct symbolic meaning and formal structures are quite intelligible for us at this point. No, something is not quite right with Langer’s use of symbolic logic for explaining the parts of a work. Hagberg says as much, and equates this “synthesis of formalism and linguistic atomism, insofar as that synthesis led us to expect the meaning of a work of art to be that meaning another, generates the need for an escape from those very categories. Wittgenstein discovered that the picture-theory of meaning in the Tractatus — the view that a meaningful proposition bears a logical resemblance to a state of affairs in the world — could not be intelligibly stated even if it were true, and Langer’s Tractarian aesthetics were found to lead to the same discovery” (185). There seems to be nothing beyond these “complex” intersections of “the forms embodied in works of art were thought to bear a logical resemblance to the forms of human feeling”, the “logical resemblance” being the inexplicable fallacy here.

Yet Langer is right that art expresses the “ineffable” feelings of an artist, causing, in turn, the viewer to be moved “beyond words”. Yet if what really caused the artist to create cannot be described, and transfers, in conjunction, an ineffable feeling to the viewer (perhaps “conjures” would be the correct term here), the nature of which remains a mystery, it becomes a conundrum resembling Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Hagberg terms this the “paradox of expression” in his sixth chapter, titled “The Silence of Aesthetic Solipsism”. He states the three concepts that collide as the “paradox of expression” (120) this way:

Emotions are private, phenomenologically internal objects that are logically beyond the reach of others; they are not a part of the public, observable physical world to which others have access. They are, in a sense, secrets inviolably kept by ontology

Artworks are physical objects (albeit of a curious sort), objects located in the public, observable, external world. Their existence, we might say, is physical rather than phenomenological, and their existence does not depend — unlike emotions — on the mind that perceives them.

Artistic expression is nothing short of the impossible process of merging (1) and (2). Expressive artworks cannot, as ontological impossibilities, exist — and yet they most assuredly, as the empirical fact of the case, do exist.

Hagberg refers to many artists and aesthetic theoreticians (Santayana, Tolstoy, Beardsley…) that have summed this paradox in a phrase, among whom Louis Arnauld Reid: “‘How does a body, a nonmental object, come to ‘embody’ or ‘express,’ for our aesthetic imagination, values which it does not literally contain? Why should colors and shapes and patterns, sounds and harmonies and rhythms, come to mean so very much more than they are?’”. This is equated with Wittgenstein’s question of a private language, or the “S Diary Argument” in the next subsection, in that emotions causing a work of art are only interpretable by whomever created it, as if their emotions were a private language. However an artist that creates a work does not have an “emotional syntax” they can readily interpret, with its own private laws, that allows them to explain what a particular part of a work was expressed from. Nor can they ever feel that they can perfectly express their interior sense as they wish in a work. Take the continuation of the Rilke quote given at the heading of this paper: “desperately, sought equivalents in the visible world for what you had seen inside […] Then you could do no more. The two ends, which you had bent together until they touched, sprang apart”. Wittgenstein seemingly rephrases the paradox, from the point of view of the receiver of a work of art, in Culture and Value: “If I now ask “‘So what do I actually experience when I hear this theme and understand what I hear?”’ — nothing occurs to me by way of reply except trivialities. Images, sensations of movement, recollections and such like. Perhaps I say, “‘ I respond to it”’ — but what does that mean?” (69e-70e).

In his concluding chapters, Hagberg summons the help of post-Wittgensteinian theorists in an “attempt in the direction of” […] “leaving those false views in aesthetics and the linguistic misconceptions that engendered them behind”, but I think they still remain inconclusive in the face of the paradox. The answer, I believe, is present in the reasoning of all these theories. But they still tried to equate their puzzlement in reference to a logical hermeneutic system. I think the answer, though it may be perceived as cheap generalization, lies in the complex of metaphor. Quite simply, all metaphors are symbols, but not all symbols are metaphors. The etymology of metaphor, originating in the Greek “metapherein” means to transfer. An explanation of this meaning is that there is a “metaphoric act” contained in the figure of speech, wherein one thing or object transfers its value upon another. In this, metaphoric action is relating one thing to another, it creates, or expresses, a “relation”. One could contest that mathematics, as a symbolic system, also creates metaphoric relations between things and their abstract representations. Fundamentally, however, the hermeneutics of mathematical systems require that they be rigorously exact and explainable. With metaphor, the relation created or expressed between two things does not have to be exact, nor does it have to be direct. Since it can express the relation between one or multiple aspects of two things or more, the idea of multiplicity, not singularity, is inherent to metaphor. What remains constant is the expression of relation.

It is astounding that Langer, who makes reference to metaphor and its properties, does not use it as the umbrella term for her aesthetic theory, as she uses logic: “Even in the use of language, if we want to name something that is too new to have a name […] or want to express a relationship for which there is no verb or other connective word, we resort to metaphor; we mention it or describe it as something else, something analogous […] A metaphor is not language, it is an idea expressed by language, an idea that in its turn functions as a symbol to express something. It is not discursive and therefore does not really make a statement of the idea it conveys; but it formulates a new conception for our direct imaginative grasp” (Problems of Art, 23).

Every work of art is a metaphorical matrix. It consists of a set of relations between its constituent parts, and it is the expression of that set of relations taken as a whole. Each part or section or quality of a work of art is also a metaphor, that is at the very least, they are expressive of their relation to other parts of the work and the act of expression that the artist undertook in transposing their interior sense into and in relation with an exterior entity. A perfect example can be drawn from the Art of Chinese Calligraphy: when a calligrapher transcribes the most simple sign, the symbol for one — (yī), which is just a horizontal line — it takes a length of time to draw it out, with the vibrations of their hand, which imbue the work as it is brushed into paper. This relation of the vibration, the amount of time it took to transcribe the line, and its relation to surrounding space where it was brushed (as well as the quality and type of the brush that painted it), is the set of relations that remains and is felt by the aesthetic receiver seeing the finished piece. This can also be illustrated by what Hans Hoffman stated “On Relation” in Search for the Real and Other Essays: “Since each thing carries both a meaning of its own and an associated meaning in relation to something else — its essential value is relative. We speak of the mood we experience when looking at a landscape. This mood results from the relation of certain things rather than from their separate actualities. This is because objects do not in themselves possess the total effect they give when interrelated” (Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook For Critics, 540). Hoffmann calls a “finished” work of art a “spiritual synthesis” (ibid, 541) akin to our matrix. A musical note is also a part, a metaphor transposed by the composer in relation to the other notes which combine in a musical phrase, melody, and harmony. Douglas Hofstadher, in his article on “Pattern, Poetry, and Power in the Music of Frederic Chopin”, describes what we are terming as the metaphorical matrix as the “pattern” that emerges from a set of notes: “The magic of music emerges from complex, nonmagical — or should I say metamagical? — patterns of notes” (Metamagical Themas, 174). Hofstadher identifies a number of patterns that interlock in a musical piece, the structural “pattern of the mind”, and the expressive “pattern of the heart”. A structure that arises out of a series of parts — each of which are metaphors — becomes its own supervening metaphor. One need only think of Monet’s five renderings of the Rouen Cathedral Façade when seen individually or taken side by side. Each individual painting can be seen as a metaphorical matrix, a complex structure. When the five paintings are placed in relation with one another — in a sequence on a wall — a whole new relational matrix supervenes upon that of the individual painting.

In his lecture on Swann’s Way, Vladimir Nabokov said that Marcel Proust’s virtuosity in prose came from an uncanny ability for the extended metaphor. Endless streams of metaphorical relations run in a single phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a section, or a volume of his work. Indeed, one might say that In Search of Lost Time — human creation at its most complex — is the capital definition of relation. Each part of the novel can only be truly understood as a function of the whole — a sea of relations must be set out for the reader before they can grasp its themes, before its metaphorical matrix has dawned in upon them. The receiver of a work of art does not require the exact same “felt life” as its creator in order to have an aesthetic epiphany. One does not need to know exactly what it is to be a child in the 19th century Parisian bourgeoisie to understand the sense of the images, dialogue etc. presented throughout a novel. The artist has related the quality of their feelings to external objects or signs — words, colors, lines, notes, gestures — which are common points of reference to all human beings. What moves the reader is the particular pattern of metaphorical relations mediated to them through these common external points of reference, through which they re-construct the metaphorical matrix based upon their own “felt life” — the impressions and experiences acquired over the course of their existence that they possess in the moment of contact with the artwork. The greater the amount of common and relevant points of reference between the “felt life” of the creator and receiver of a work of art, the greater the potential effect of the former’s sets of relations upon the latter. If, for example, a passage of In Search of Lost Time makes reference to the prelude of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the effect of this metaphor will depend on the prelude having been experienced in the reader’s own felt life or not. Henri Meschonnic’s Anthropologie historique du langage (Anthropological History of Language) quotes a passage from Henri Bergson’s Energie Spirituelle (Spiritual Energy) which describes this phenomenon well:

“The writer’s art consists above all in making us forget the words he employs. The harmony he seeks is a certain correspondence between the comings and goings of his mind and speech, a correspondence so perfect that, carried by the sentence, the undulations of his thought are communicated to ours, so that each word, taken individually, no longer counts: there is nothing but the moving meaning that runs through the words, nothing but two minds that seem to vibrate directly, without intermediary, in unison with each other. The rhythm of speech has no other purpose than to reproduce the rhythm of thought; and what can the rhythm of thought be if not the nascent, barely conscious movements that accompany it?” (Trans. Filippo Vanni)

And indeed Proust, who thought there would be no need for art if one could truly interpret the “felt life” of another in reality, wrote the closing argument on the subject, in a “Letter to a Friend” from 1911:

“In all the arts it seems that talent is a relation of the artist towards the object that is expressed. Whenever a gap remains present, the work is not finished. The violinist plays his violin phrase very well, but you see its effects, you applaud, he is a virtuoso […] In Flaubert, for example, intelligence, which may not have been of the greatest, seeks to create the tremor of a steamboat, moss’s color, an island in a bay. Then comes the moment where one does not find intelligence (even the mediocre intelligence of Flaubert), one is in front of a a boat that flees “‘meeting the train of wood that began to undulate upon the swirl of the waves”’. This undulation is intelligence transformed, incorporated in matter. It is able to also penetrate the heathers, the hours, the silence of the light in the underbrush. Is it not that this transformation of energy, where the thinker has disappeared, which drags things before us, is it not that it is the best effort of a writer towards style?” (Trans. Filippo Vanni)

Isn’t it the case, as well, with music? It is, perhaps, the form of metaphorical expression that is the least material, that gets the closest to the interior, almost private, language of the “felt life” of an artist, but it is still transcribed into notes of different pitches, vibrations, and structures of association. The aim of the composer is to make one forget that we are listening to music at all (as Proust says the virtuoso violinist does not do in the above quote), it is to provoke within us the association of these very relations of notes, the undulations and arabesques of feeling that represent the oasis of the artist’s felt life, and what they reproduce within us, what they reveal to us within our own, that without this structure brought before us we could not have realized. Moreover, the implicit relations evoked within us from a complex work of art are limitless, ever changing. That is why we return to them again and again. The material quality of a work remains the same, but we, as human beings, are constantly adding and forgetting impressions and experiences in our own felt life, reconsidering them. The passing of time becomes an inherent quality in a work of art; hence the endless fascination with pieces such as the Venus of Willendorf that have become mysterious with its passing, where it added layer upon layer of symbols and interpretations of meaning.

Returning to the initial quote from Wittgenstein, is it not that the association of “trivialities” occurring to him when explaining the meaning of a musical piece, the “Images, sensations of movement, recollections and such like”, are the very explanation of this phenomenon? The metaphorical complex of relational movements conjures an aesthetic experience for him out of his own felt life, due to his own set of experiences (which include the knowledge of other musical pieces), impressions, and sensations.

Post-Scriptum:

If one were to extend the argument of this essay further, would it not be that all original critics, thinkers, and scientists, discover or “reveal” complex “relations” that were “there”, before us, yet we could not know? John H. Holland, known as the “father of genetic algorithms”, seems to argue something like in his 1998 book, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, in the pre-concluding chapter on “Metaphor and Innovation”… but it is a question to pursue further in another essay.

Bibliography:

Langer, Susanne. Problems of Art. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957.

Hagberg, Garry L. Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory. Cornell University Press, 1998.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Patern. an Interlocked Collection of Literary, Scientific, and Artistic Studies. Basic Books Inc, 1985.

Holland, John H. Emergence from Chaos to Order. Oxford University Press, 1998.

McGuinness, Brian. Wittgenstein, a Life: Young Ludwig 1889–1921. Penguin Books, 1990.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980.

Proust, Marcel, and Jérôme Picon. Ecrits Sur l’art. Flammarion, 1999.
Ravasio, Matteo. “History of Western Philosophy of Music: Since 1800.”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 13 July 2021, plato.stanford.edu/entries/hist-westphilmusic-since-1800/.

Selz, Peter, et al. Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Univ. of California Press, 1968.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Edited by G. H. von (Georg Henrik) Wright and Heikki Nyman, Translated by Peter Winch, University of Chicago Press, 1980.

The color of street lighting has changed over the past twenty years, as we have gone from the yellow-orange tones of HPS & LPS (High Pressure Sodium, Low Pressure Sodium) to the cold blue of LED’s. This is an exciting environmental step, as the latter are energy efficient, controllable, and less toxic (releasing no phosphate or mercury into the air). Yet there is a reason sodium lighting is qualified as “soft” and “warm”, as opposed to the “crispness” of an LED. That is because phosphate lighting runs at 2200 Kelvin (the warmth of light emitted), as opposed to the 5000–6000K an LED can reach, and this is the typical warmth of the ones installed as streetlights. Under the Reddit post “I Buy All My Lights in 5000K. Is There a Reason to go With Colder or Warmer?” From 2022, @crucible wrote “I think 2700K is popular with people who want a modern light that reminds them of an older incandescent one”, and @Pentosin confirmed this, responding that “Going for walks during the night, its just so much more cosey”.

This is not a nostalgic post decrying the loss of phosphate lighting, as street lamps have shifted from warm to cold and back again since they heralded modernity at the turn of the 19th century. Paris, of course, documented and introduced many of these changes, moving from oil lanterns to gas-lit lamps and arc-lights (which apparently emitted an inhospitable, bright white glare only fitting for train tracks), incandescent and then electric lighting. It became known as the “city of light” as it introduced iron posts to line the grands boulevards under the urban planning of the baron Haussmann. But many of the new LED’s are placed in old frames (the same metal fixtures that used to house gas and LPS), especially in Europe. They blind you when when passing by, and are inhospitable to a nightly walk, as mentioned by @Pentosin. That is because the lights are installed in the roof of the lighting cage, and the glass panes that used to frame it have been removed.

The solution is simple. Installing opaque glass in the lamp cage will already dampen the glare emitted, and produce a softer bluish aura than a harsh, piercing brightness that streams in all directions. I know someone that has already pushed for this measure in the city council of her town, and it has worked nicely. Secondly, LED’s colder than 4000 Kelvin could be banned for street lighting, as has already been done in France (except for certain uses; highways and train stations…), so that perceiving urban landscapes at night will once again be warm and welcoming. It remains a mystery to me, however, that after this regulation, many streetlights in Paris that have turned to LED’s continue to emit an asceptic dentist-office light…

P.S : I include here a link to a clip that was cut from the final version of Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), called the “Maestro di Cinema” … It speaks of colored traffic lights, and may give an indication to the essential question of the film… which I will treat in a future article.

Almost two years ago, Jean-Jacques Sempé passed away. I have always loved the gentle, melancholy tone of his comic strips. Though he lived through a difficult childhood, his poetic gaze remained fixed on the pleasures of life. In these trying times, I think his spiritual outlook is a lesson for us all. This pretty little calendar, shown above, with 365 of his illustrations brightens my days. There was also a wonderful animation, released a few months before his passing (and nominated for a César that year), made on the friendship he had with René Goscinny (who wrote and edited Asterix, Lucky Luke, and Iznogoud, among others) and their co-creation of Le Petit Nicolas. In it, we see Sempé working at his desk, facing large atelier windows, with the Parisian landscape laid out below. Whenever I walk or sit in Paris on a nice day, I imagine his kind eyes looking over my shoulder, from the rooftops and through the trees. Spring is here and summer is coming along with his memorial, so I thought I might share a poem written in one of these moments as a dedication:

Midday in the Parc de Choisy (Homage à Sempé)

A curl of steam
slips up from
my waxed cup.
As the fountain
catches light
with its
playful spray.

I lean back, into the
red “Algida” chair
picked out for
its shaded place.
Leaves, mirth
strollers, singing birds
surround me.

My elbows sit on
the table’s dark
wooden grain
as I write.
Taking fresh
sips of coffee,
I glance up to
a glinting light

Across the way
a window open
in the sun
gently sways.
Maybe a wink
a nice trick
in the spirit
of Sempé.

P.S. For those of you who read French and wish to know more on Sempé, the Atelier du Roman, a literary journal he collaborated with for decades, released a “Sempé pour toujours” issue that can be found here.

Last semester I took a course entitled The Literature of Waiting. We were prompted to write a song recommendation to a friend having something to do with this topic. I chose Windmills of Your Mind, sung by Noel Harrison, and written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. It was inspired/translated, interestingly enough, by the song Les moulins de mon coeur (The Windmills of my Heart), sung by Michel Legrand, and written by Eddy Marnay. Are heart and mind one in true intelligence? I now address it to you, reader:

Dear . . . ,

This song documents my mental progression from the beginning of the pandemic, the last time we saw each other. I was in a dark place. My lifelong convictions were debased (my ambitions and beliefs in helping society, for example). Reading À la Recherche du Temps Perdu and seeing La Grande Bellezza obsessively did not help. I thought love and friendship impossible, life without meaning, save for some illusory moments of splendor. These past years, I have read quite a bit, and thought, quite a bit. I waited for the pandemic to end, from my room, surrounded by my bedded grandmother next door, my father’s Bach and frame cutting, the yelling of animals through the walls. I fell into beauty, but it churned me. Here the “windmills” began to turn. Flirting with decadence and dreams brought me to wait in a dingy Paris apartment, in the kitchen, because the wifi router in the bedroom emitted a disturbing noise — a faint but present “beep” — like the trembling window panes on Broadway. They turned for over a year, this melody droning throughout.

Then I met her. She gave me reality. Now that I have love, the windmills turn again, and I am in the days where our friendship was deep — where I would wait weeks to speak of everything, windmills turning simultaneously as we walked and walked to the point of forgetting our way — together. Now they are separate. I do not know if they will meet again. This song speaks memory and what its movement creates. I have repeated it endlessly. Perhaps you will, too.

Best.