We may also recognise the presence of The Basement by its sounds: the level of amplitude, the shrill tone of voices, the out-of-tuneness, the placement of actions at the wrong time, the lack of silence. The noise.
We are equipped with all the sensory instruments necessary to ‘read’ other human animals (fight or flight?) providing that we have these instruments functioning, online, and powered up. These arrive ‘bundled’ with the human child. A proper, fitting education – booting up? – enables the child to fully use these instruments as they were intended. This is rare. We are also bundled with some optional programmes, which require special-needs (‘preternatural’) training. This is, respectively, more common than we might believe, and very rare: we have to discover the schools or teachers for ourselves. Failing that, instructors. Failing that, someone who has greater experience. Failing that, someone who knows more than we do.
Around 09.35, myself reading and reflecting, the serving-person began to rearrange chairs beneath the tables near us. They did this by pushing the chairs along the floor. The sound was comparable to the sound of chalk on a blackboard: unpleasant, disruptive to the sonic environment – noisy. The last chair was the loudest: it shouted at anyone with open ears.
The music of the worlds:
The Music of Silence.
The Silence in Music.
The Sound of Music (to borrow a phrase).
Muzak (dead music) Noise.
So, what was the serving-person doing? Perhaps:
The scraping sound was ‘music to their ears’: in the deeper Basement, noise is ‘music’.
They didn’t hear the sound: in The Basement we are ‘deaf’.
They were intentionally-unintentionally ‘expressing themselves’ by presenting the ‘artwork’ of their life to the world:
‘I am pissed, I have the right to be pissed, I’m not doing anything wrong – take that, Oh screaming-chairleg-on-the-floor – and if I am I don’t care. Now the world knows how I feel, and can share my pain, because I have the right to dump my negativity onto the world by small acts of disruption and unpleasantness, particularly on customers reading because they keep me in this shitty job’.
My take on it was, the serving-person didn’t hear the sound, and was behaving unintentionally-unintentionally: asleep on their feet.
The presence of absence is tangible. Whatever the external act, it reflects the quality and presence of the person acting; that is, the ‘world’ they live in. Alternatively, the world which we allow/welcome/wish/accept to live in us.
So, the same act by one person is ‘right’, the same act by another person is ‘wrong’, the same act by another person is arbitrary, the same act by another person is destructive.
My own experiencing of acts, actions, and activities is of the intention which gives rise to them. So, determining rules for specific behaviours at KC performances, for example, is rather more complex than putting up posters that threaten:
Anyone found talking while Adrian is playing a guitar solo will be pelted with overripe fruit.
The person talking, for example, may be a doctor in an emergency situation explaining how a person should take their medication. Or:
There is a highly poisonous snake wrapping itself around your left leg. Or:
A crazed psycho whose picture is in all the papers is standing behind you, smiling, holding a small axe. But the axe is small so maybe I shouldn’t be talking. Or:
The man on the balcony directly above your head has placed his knapsack on the ledge and it looks like it will fall. Or:
Have I told you about the time that I saw Crimson in Berkeley in 1973 when they were supporting the Eagles no of course I haven’t but since Bill isn’t here today I’ll tell you how much better everything was back then when sentience was not so much a miracle as part of the normal process of living but they’re really not as good today and even if I were listening to them they wouldn’t be as good as twenty-seven years ago and since you’re fascinated by my reminiscences…
When a particular course of response to malfeasance is mandated, it must take place. Otherwise, the credibility of the response is undermined. If undermined, it becomes ineffective. So, under this particular rule of law even an innocent speaker would be taken to the place of punitive fruit-pelting (whether private or public) and suffer their fate, unmitigated by a more flexible justice.
The principle is this: respond in the right way at the right moment.
The rule is this: necessary and/or useful talking only.
The law is this: do not talk.
The Basement imperative: shut up!
There are forms of policing appropriate to each world. That’s another story, and no doubt more later.
The ‘worlds of performance’ provide a complex matrix of interconnected and connecting situations, relationships, and negotiations, all of which need to be taken into account when determining and declaring ‘principles, rules, and laws of the house’. One member of the audience will be attending an utterly different performance to the person sitting or standing next to them. One member of the performance team will be playing at an utterly different performance to their band buddy sitting or standing next to them.
Robert Fripp
Thursday 24th. August, 2000
Edinburgh, Scotland