limit to your love
a comment on james blake's cover of feist's 'limit to your love'
track can be heard on grooveshark here.
as an artist one becomes inextricable from cultural context, any statement necessarily bears relationships to all previous statements and enters in a dialogue that will in part modify the potential for future statements. already blake sets himself apart by combining the seemingly disparate elements of pre-r&b (though perhaps post-emancipation) louisiana blues and southern lutheran hymnal melodic and expressive sensibility with the spontaneous changes in tone, surreal sense of scale, densely syncopated 2/4 rhythms, and deeply extended sub-bass of what has become dubstep. in spite of its unlikelihood, this proves to be a divine synthesis and one that lends itself particularly well to blakes ability to affect a visceral 'tension and release' model of musicality by the superimposition of negative space and performative inflection. furthermore it is something of an elephant in the room after mentioning what i did about context, that i disclose that this track is a cover of a feist original that appeared on her 2007 full length 'the reminder'. but blake's interpretation does something novel. large parts of the track are conspicuously absent, and those that remain bring an entirely different narrative into focus.
as the track begins we are introduced into a void. the piano is very clearly real; as evidenced by the firm corporeality of the clicks and pops of the inner mechanical workings of the pedal system. and blake's voice is also very present. but even the limited reverb processing used on blake's voice is so deliberately center-channel and we are unable to intuit any characteristics of the space blake is inhabiting. it is as the solitary blade of light penetrates the stage rendering the boundaries of the theatre obscure. in the theatre we can perceive the size of the room sonically from the voices of the players but that is not the case here. we are in an anechoic chamber. blake demands our attention with such immediacy as to confine our sense of proprioception to his performance. the opening lyrics are:
there's a limit to your love
like a waterfall in slow motion
like a map with no ocean
there's a limit to your love
in the assessment of human potential it is so often contended that there is the capacity for good. indeed we often focus on decline narratives and are continuously repulsed by the "new lows' of humanity. institutional genocide. the self indulgence of drug users whose children starve. body horror in reality such as bugchasing/giftgiving fantasy. or perhaps as is more relevant to blake's narrative, the obdurate indifference toward suffering displayed by the advantaged. and yet few have remarked such on the highs of humanity. whether or not there is any upward limit to gestures of compassion. thus, 'there's a limit to your love' is the concise encapsulation of a realization that is as bleak as blake's sonic landscape. your concept of human failures or evils may have a floor, but there is also a ceiling, an upper limit of possible good.
the figure of the waterfall is so bountiful and abundant. it appears to be a source, never abating to the eyes of the human timescale without direct intervention. before we lived, while we sleep, and after we die these fonts give way to ever more flowing water, the lifeblood of our planet, one of the compounds that connects us to all life forms. but the volume of output is necessarily a function of time. the lyrics invoke the figure of the seemingly infinite and then identify its one constraint.
like a map with no ocean. now we're getting so much closer to the reasoning. as bleak as this idea is, it is not abject cynicism; far from it. with the suggestion of geographical coordinates the conversation has been reframed from the figurative to the empirical. dunbar's number (sometimes referred to by the neologism 'the monkeysphere') comes to mind almost immediately. this is the theorized limit to the number of social relationships that can be maintained by any one individual. it is a function of neocortical development. it comes from the observation that in primates as it is similar in humans there are limitations to the number of other people we can "care" about.
consider treasured modernist author katherine mansfield's short story "the garden party" in which a young girl's aristocratic family are planning a party in their garden when news of the death of a local laborer reaches the daughter.
"Jose!" she said, horrified, "however are we going to stop everything?"
"Stop everything, Laura!" cried Jose in astonishment. "What do you mean?"
"Stop the garden-party, of course." Why did Jose pretend?
But Jose was still more amazed. "Stop the garden-party? My dear Laura, don't be so absurd. Of course we can't do anything of the kind. Nobody expects us to. Don't be so extravagant."
"But we can't possibly have a garden-party with a man dead just outside the front gate."
...
"Mother, a man's been killed," began Laura.
"Not in the garden?" interrupted her mother.
"No, no!"
"Oh, what a fright you gave me!" Mrs. Sheridan sighed with relief, and took off the big hat and held it on her knees.
"But listen, mother," said Laura. Breathless, half-choking, she told the dreadful story. "Of course, we can't have our party, can we?" she pleaded. "The band and everybody arriving. They'd hear us, mother; they're nearly neighbours!"
To Laura's astonishment her mother behaved just like Jose; it was harder to bear because she seemed amused. She refused to take Laura seriously.
"But, my dear child, use your common sense. It's only by accident we've heard of it. If some one had died there normally - and I can't understand how they keep alive in those poky little holes - we should still be having our party, shouldn't we?"
Laura had to say "yes" to that, but she felt it was all wrong.
mortality is relentless and pervasive. suffering is relentless and pervasive, and yet time is insufficient for constant mourning. though we are aware on some superficial level of the death and suffering that fills the world at all times, we yet find opportunity even to celebrate. beyond even the ability to care about the death of a man that was "nearly [her] neighbour" the protagonists mother celebrates in her expression of relief that it was that specific person who died and not one she is bound to by any social obligation. she even goes so far as to use the dehumanizing "they" pronoun, otherizing the plebians so thoroughly as to revoke their claim to personhood. dunbar posits (and i'm scaling back the primacy of his assertion in paraphrasing) that language serves the purpose of expediting the process of social grooming so that ever larger societies can remain cohesive without the need to develop intimacy. this is an insight that also applies to social constructs resulting from education, wealth, and nationalism. the 'map with no ocean' here is the very figure of the limited landscape that is available to us to feel connected to and by extension, empathy for. perhaps this is part of the appeal of the christian mythos, that it is so very inhuman to seek to be infinitely generous, compassionate, or forgiving as the natural world is not so. mansfield speaks with irony through laura's mother when she labels such care 'extravagant'.
and so, having revolutionized our conception of the initial statement through the controlled use of existing trope, blake repeats, "there's a limit to your love". 'your love' echoes blankly seemingly along a depth axis backward, and after a pause of heightened anticipation, from the depths of this inscrutable space comes a pulsing and insistent sub-bassline. this bassline is in itself a meditation on the very nature of human limitation. at such low frequncies, the brain begins to have difficulty differentiating pitch and interval, and the notes feel very much beyond the reach of the human voice to recreate. it is here that we encounter the second set of lyrics:
there's a limit to your care
so carelessly there
is it truth or dare?
there's a limit to your care
so carelessly there
there's a limit to your care
having been stripped of their context, these feist lyrics from what was otherwise a somewhat disposable break up song have been reterritorialized into cold insightful realism surrounded by profound interpretive space and memento mori. 'love' and 'care' have been equivocated here. 'so carelessly there' regards it as something of an elephant in the room. and yet, 'careless' also addresses the very functioning of the inability in a social context. this carelessness exists carelessly. laura's mother's dismissal of the dead man's suffering and his family from the very conditions which gave rise to it all the way to it's consummation in death are effortless. it is then a comment on a natural contemporary state in the human sciences.
'is it truth or dare?' seems to invoke a skeletal address of the nature vs. nurture argument. is it 'truth'? the result of some empirical combination of chemical possibilities in the brain, or is it 'dare'? the result of unwritten social contracts and pressures that render us incapable of affecting empathy on a wider scale? thinking like dunbar would suggest neo-cortical development as being an emperical marker of the capacity for empathy. mansfield seems to take a more social conditioning oriented route, showing that socio-economic class divides, ethnico-cultural divides and nationalism, are to blame. reasonably it can be extrapolated that it is a combination of the two, or that the emperical gives rise to the social, but that both are undeniably barriers. there is a sense that the repitition of the dry factuality of the phrase 'there's a limit to your care' dismisses the question in favor of the recognition of the fact. the very act of asking the unanswerable question itself seeks the confirmation of the premise. it becomes an interesting theoretical indulgence or perhaps a statement of the variety of realms that already seem to so succinctly address the dilemma of the human limitation of love and care. but the lyrics take no direct stance, opting instead only to highlight the variety of realms in which the dilemma expresses itself. the lyrics 'there's a limit to your care' and 'is it truth or dare?' are then presented simultaneously to further obfuscate the degree to which we can and may need to find a distinction.
for more information on dunbar's number visit: Wikipedia - Dunbar's Number
for the complete text of mansfield's short story 'the garden party' visit: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/GardPart.shtml
track can be heard on grooveshark here.
as an artist one becomes inextricable from cultural context, any statement necessarily bears relationships to all previous statements and enters in a dialogue that will in part modify the potential for future statements. already blake sets himself apart by combining the seemingly disparate elements of pre-r&b (though perhaps post-emancipation) louisiana blues and southern lutheran hymnal melodic and expressive sensibility with the spontaneous changes in tone, surreal sense of scale, densely syncopated 2/4 rhythms, and deeply extended sub-bass of what has become dubstep. in spite of its unlikelihood, this proves to be a divine synthesis and one that lends itself particularly well to blakes ability to affect a visceral 'tension and release' model of musicality by the superimposition of negative space and performative inflection. furthermore it is something of an elephant in the room after mentioning what i did about context, that i disclose that this track is a cover of a feist original that appeared on her 2007 full length 'the reminder'. but blake's interpretation does something novel. large parts of the track are conspicuously absent, and those that remain bring an entirely different narrative into focus.
as the track begins we are introduced into a void. the piano is very clearly real; as evidenced by the firm corporeality of the clicks and pops of the inner mechanical workings of the pedal system. and blake's voice is also very present. but even the limited reverb processing used on blake's voice is so deliberately center-channel and we are unable to intuit any characteristics of the space blake is inhabiting. it is as the solitary blade of light penetrates the stage rendering the boundaries of the theatre obscure. in the theatre we can perceive the size of the room sonically from the voices of the players but that is not the case here. we are in an anechoic chamber. blake demands our attention with such immediacy as to confine our sense of proprioception to his performance. the opening lyrics are:
there's a limit to your love
like a waterfall in slow motion
like a map with no ocean
there's a limit to your love
in the assessment of human potential it is so often contended that there is the capacity for good. indeed we often focus on decline narratives and are continuously repulsed by the "new lows' of humanity. institutional genocide. the self indulgence of drug users whose children starve. body horror in reality such as bugchasing/giftgiving fantasy. or perhaps as is more relevant to blake's narrative, the obdurate indifference toward suffering displayed by the advantaged. and yet few have remarked such on the highs of humanity. whether or not there is any upward limit to gestures of compassion. thus, 'there's a limit to your love' is the concise encapsulation of a realization that is as bleak as blake's sonic landscape. your concept of human failures or evils may have a floor, but there is also a ceiling, an upper limit of possible good.
the figure of the waterfall is so bountiful and abundant. it appears to be a source, never abating to the eyes of the human timescale without direct intervention. before we lived, while we sleep, and after we die these fonts give way to ever more flowing water, the lifeblood of our planet, one of the compounds that connects us to all life forms. but the volume of output is necessarily a function of time. the lyrics invoke the figure of the seemingly infinite and then identify its one constraint.
like a map with no ocean. now we're getting so much closer to the reasoning. as bleak as this idea is, it is not abject cynicism; far from it. with the suggestion of geographical coordinates the conversation has been reframed from the figurative to the empirical. dunbar's number (sometimes referred to by the neologism 'the monkeysphere') comes to mind almost immediately. this is the theorized limit to the number of social relationships that can be maintained by any one individual. it is a function of neocortical development. it comes from the observation that in primates as it is similar in humans there are limitations to the number of other people we can "care" about.
consider treasured modernist author katherine mansfield's short story "the garden party" in which a young girl's aristocratic family are planning a party in their garden when news of the death of a local laborer reaches the daughter.
"Jose!" she said, horrified, "however are we going to stop everything?"
"Stop everything, Laura!" cried Jose in astonishment. "What do you mean?"
"Stop the garden-party, of course." Why did Jose pretend?
But Jose was still more amazed. "Stop the garden-party? My dear Laura, don't be so absurd. Of course we can't do anything of the kind. Nobody expects us to. Don't be so extravagant."
"But we can't possibly have a garden-party with a man dead just outside the front gate."
...
"Mother, a man's been killed," began Laura.
"Not in the garden?" interrupted her mother.
"No, no!"
"Oh, what a fright you gave me!" Mrs. Sheridan sighed with relief, and took off the big hat and held it on her knees.
"But listen, mother," said Laura. Breathless, half-choking, she told the dreadful story. "Of course, we can't have our party, can we?" she pleaded. "The band and everybody arriving. They'd hear us, mother; they're nearly neighbours!"
To Laura's astonishment her mother behaved just like Jose; it was harder to bear because she seemed amused. She refused to take Laura seriously.
"But, my dear child, use your common sense. It's only by accident we've heard of it. If some one had died there normally - and I can't understand how they keep alive in those poky little holes - we should still be having our party, shouldn't we?"
Laura had to say "yes" to that, but she felt it was all wrong.
mortality is relentless and pervasive. suffering is relentless and pervasive, and yet time is insufficient for constant mourning. though we are aware on some superficial level of the death and suffering that fills the world at all times, we yet find opportunity even to celebrate. beyond even the ability to care about the death of a man that was "nearly [her] neighbour" the protagonists mother celebrates in her expression of relief that it was that specific person who died and not one she is bound to by any social obligation. she even goes so far as to use the dehumanizing "they" pronoun, otherizing the plebians so thoroughly as to revoke their claim to personhood. dunbar posits (and i'm scaling back the primacy of his assertion in paraphrasing) that language serves the purpose of expediting the process of social grooming so that ever larger societies can remain cohesive without the need to develop intimacy. this is an insight that also applies to social constructs resulting from education, wealth, and nationalism. the 'map with no ocean' here is the very figure of the limited landscape that is available to us to feel connected to and by extension, empathy for. perhaps this is part of the appeal of the christian mythos, that it is so very inhuman to seek to be infinitely generous, compassionate, or forgiving as the natural world is not so. mansfield speaks with irony through laura's mother when she labels such care 'extravagant'.
and so, having revolutionized our conception of the initial statement through the controlled use of existing trope, blake repeats, "there's a limit to your love". 'your love' echoes blankly seemingly along a depth axis backward, and after a pause of heightened anticipation, from the depths of this inscrutable space comes a pulsing and insistent sub-bassline. this bassline is in itself a meditation on the very nature of human limitation. at such low frequncies, the brain begins to have difficulty differentiating pitch and interval, and the notes feel very much beyond the reach of the human voice to recreate. it is here that we encounter the second set of lyrics:
there's a limit to your care
so carelessly there
is it truth or dare?
there's a limit to your care
so carelessly there
there's a limit to your care
having been stripped of their context, these feist lyrics from what was otherwise a somewhat disposable break up song have been reterritorialized into cold insightful realism surrounded by profound interpretive space and memento mori. 'love' and 'care' have been equivocated here. 'so carelessly there' regards it as something of an elephant in the room. and yet, 'careless' also addresses the very functioning of the inability in a social context. this carelessness exists carelessly. laura's mother's dismissal of the dead man's suffering and his family from the very conditions which gave rise to it all the way to it's consummation in death are effortless. it is then a comment on a natural contemporary state in the human sciences.
'is it truth or dare?' seems to invoke a skeletal address of the nature vs. nurture argument. is it 'truth'? the result of some empirical combination of chemical possibilities in the brain, or is it 'dare'? the result of unwritten social contracts and pressures that render us incapable of affecting empathy on a wider scale? thinking like dunbar would suggest neo-cortical development as being an emperical marker of the capacity for empathy. mansfield seems to take a more social conditioning oriented route, showing that socio-economic class divides, ethnico-cultural divides and nationalism, are to blame. reasonably it can be extrapolated that it is a combination of the two, or that the emperical gives rise to the social, but that both are undeniably barriers. there is a sense that the repitition of the dry factuality of the phrase 'there's a limit to your care' dismisses the question in favor of the recognition of the fact. the very act of asking the unanswerable question itself seeks the confirmation of the premise. it becomes an interesting theoretical indulgence or perhaps a statement of the variety of realms that already seem to so succinctly address the dilemma of the human limitation of love and care. but the lyrics take no direct stance, opting instead only to highlight the variety of realms in which the dilemma expresses itself. the lyrics 'there's a limit to your care' and 'is it truth or dare?' are then presented simultaneously to further obfuscate the degree to which we can and may need to find a distinction.
for more information on dunbar's number visit: Wikipedia - Dunbar's Number
for the complete text of mansfield's short story 'the garden party' visit: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/GardPart.shtml