A subscriber post on Substack on a solo guitar (and saxophone) set by Dirar Kalash, with diversions on Paul Klee, Christa Wolf, mathematics, awkwardness, blues, and cheerfulness as ways to utopia.
Before he plays, Kalash speaks about the idea that politics, revolution, resistance is not ideology, or not just ideology, but something that is forced from one when one can no longer breathe, as Fanon says of anti-colonial revolt. Air through the lungs, rising up. The piece at once literalizes all that and turns it into representation: the deaths of racialized people in custody, in jail or on the street; DK speaks the words “I can’t breathe” into the saxophone before squalls of notes translate it or transcend or move through it, breath becomes sound becomes something else—not, he says, as a process of abstraction, or of abstraction as the removal of context, content, but abstraction as politics; or abstraction as the constant oscillation of the literal and the metaphorical, the capacity for translation in sound and speech of what it’s possible at a given moment to say amidst all the choking air.
Sound becomes something else, and that something else is not easy, it’s not nice, it’s messy or unpleasant, it’s what we’d rather gloss over, its sticky entanglements. Breath and the breathing apparatus, a trail of saliva from the saxophone, a trial, the phlegmy mucus matter of the lungs one coughs up, a habitual gargling or strangling vocabulary of vocalities, a matter of course. “Base materialism” and so on. Is how the spirit chokes to get out, is labour, bodily production, without which any notion of spirit and its entanglement with matter is just an empty mystical shell.
But the kernel is not necessarily rational.
“But a vision had to have been there.”*
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