Bergson's Night Train

by Scott Wollschleger

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I really enjoyed reading your posting yesterday on the "Mistake of the Attempt to Derive Relations of Extensity from Those of Succession. The Conception of 'Pure Duration'" Bergson is so sensitive to the most subtle nuances of movement and the reflective process upon that movement. I can tell I have so much more to learn.

You mentioned, “If we are concerned with the conscious states that are passing away, then our consciousness will move into the past.” Really, nothing to me could be more sad. I often wonder about my first memories as a child, one of them was the sound of a great opening, which sounded like a tear. I don’t necessarily think this was my real birth, but something about the sound always bears a painful sensation of moving into the past and then coming to the most infinite memory who’s ending point and starting point are both the same. In a sound’s disappearance all that remains for me is this infinite memory.

Reading your entry reminded me of the relationship between life and duration. I am interested in my friend Damien Languell’s idea of nurturing sound. In some way to nurture a sound is to keep if from dying or to keep it from being captured by memory completely.

Here is Damien with his musician friends, nurturing a sound.



It is the idea of a sound as being something living in itself. To create a sound is to give it life and duration. I differ with him in methodology, but essentially, to keep it alive it requires a sort of non-formal economy, perhaps one that is “organized” only by intensities before they are explicated. A sound, now seen as living, would have a relationship to the dynamic link between a past and a future which the life endures. This would be a sort of musical life or what I would call musical time-space.

I want to ask if you see a relationship between displacement and the order which comes from succession? Can this displacement itself take on a higher order which is not related to succession? (Richard Pinhaus addressed this notion somewhat in that conversation with Delueze.)

As an artist I often wonder about how a process of pure duration is able to created or harnessed and what is involved in doing this process. According to Bergson, to place moments in succession is already to spatialize them. What about a modification to this and ask the reverse: is to displace moments in succession to despatialize them?

There is a process of displacement which disrupts an ordering from occurring, a kind of dance or displacement of movement, but a dance is not a negative movement. Disruption is often taken in its negative form. There is a positive movement around disruption, if anything I don't want to be stuck doing the same thing over and over again.

I have often wondered about the concept of musical time-space. Which would be a pure a pure mixture of time and space. Take the basic form of a "call and response" movement. Here the space in between the call and the response is not a void, or empty space. It is "full", in a sense, of expectation. When the expectation is fulfilled, the memory of what we left from is not what is important, but rather that the "call" now returns in the response, and vise versa. The return, taken positively, is joy. This is not a joy exclusively understood as what the future bears in relationship the feeling of expectation, but also to agitation which seems to result from expectation itself. Both, call and response, rather than maintain a constant uniform distance, they instead will tend to harness a disuniform or dynamic distance. This dynamic distance or space between the call and the response is positive. But it is really still in relation to the body. The listeners body, the instrument’s body, the players body and the composer’s body. I think a good rhythmatician has a keen feeling for the positive space which is found in the distance between sonic events related to a body. a great rhythmatician is a master of displacement and she understands distance in terms of what is already inherent in the event itself and not as something which is outside or between it. Or as Bergson might approve, the distance in between the notes of a sweet melody appear as fluid. I find in music the potential for a pure mixture of time and space, but one that is not contrary to a pure duration.

….Dance….

I would like to improvise on what you said and say to displace movements in succession is to also intensify them.

This is a video my friend Vince passed along to me which I think demonstrates this idea. (I hope you don’t mind the strange flange on the whole thing.)



The form of this is:

A – call: “Night!”
B – response: an incoherent word maybe of both “Night” and “Train” sung by the audience in a simultaneous way.
C – breakdown
A
B
C
…
A and B could also be take as just one section, but I think it is better to break it into 2 distinct sections. So the form is ABCABCABC… But the power of this music does not come from its formal or successive(spacial) reality that is happening, but rather what is dynamically at play in the duration of each movement. The movements of the breakdown section have the greatest intensity because there is the greatest amount of displacement of successions in time which are also occupying that given duration. The moments themselves are movements of a kind of pure duration or life.