ADVENT 12/19: Jenny Boully: Einstein on the Beach/Postmodernism/Essays/Electronic Beeps

On the last day of class this semester, I wanted to give my students the gifts of wonder, awe, and inspiration. I wanted them to marvel at things that could be done. For many years now I have taught and reread Roland Barthes Camera Lucida and not once during these years (a decade now?) have I stopped to ask my students why Philip Glass and Robert Wilson were photographed by Mapplethorpe. (For Barthes, the young Bobby Wilson is all punctum.) On the last day of class, I projected this onto the screen:

I asked if they recognized the photograph. Yes, they had seen it in Barthes’ book. But not one of them could tell me why the two are photographed together. Then, I tell them that in 1976, the two of them, Glass and Wilson, collaborated on a piece of musical theatre called Einstein on the Beach. I myself had not heard of Einstein on the Beach until I was a graduate student and would listen to it in my husband’s—who was not yet then my husband—dorm-style campus apartment, a setting perhaps that is in total opposition to the dreamy and enchanting music-scape that is Einstein on the Beach. And although I had been, previously that semester, introduced to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, it had not prepared me for the utter snowflakes, the ephemeral sea, the lulling wave crashing that is Einstein on the Beach.

I could watch over and over again this documentary, which I showed my students.

And to think, public television used to broadcast such beautiful things, I tell them, a statement that makes me realize that I have grown older. And I am ever so much older than I was in 1976 when Einstein on the Beach debuted (and when I was born) or in 1984 when Glass and Wilson put the show on again for the New Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or in 2002 when I heard for the first time, on a CD player, the one two three four fives.

Einstein on the Beach is the electronic pulsing of the essay that has been turned inside out, that has been ripped at the seams. It is the pure and perfect postmodernist dream, riffing from classical dance and opera yet subverting those very traditions at the same time they celebrate them. There is repetition, change through repetition, collaging, splicing of the overheard, fragments of conversation/advertisements/instructions/trifles, historical inquiry and plundering, the inclusion of the seemingly insignificant and the horrifically mundane, a meditative surmounting of the opera’s heroic subject.

And what essayists have done things such as these? One doesn’t have to look too far to see these elements at work in classical essays. (Please leave your answers in the comments field.)

The background of Einstein on the Beach is composed electronic hums, blips, and beeps; one senses that at its very core is a strange mechanism, an enormous supercomputer with no connection to the empirical world yet nevertheless striving to connect to that world. But I had grown up in the 80s. The very soundtrack of my life was electronic. The world pulsed through the sound of machinery. The term postmodernism and what it represented was occluded from me; I could not see the forest for the trees. I could fast-forward and rewind, fast-forward and rewind and hear again and again a phrase or song. I could record my very voice and play it back and speed it up and slow it down again.

And I have been thinking about this impulse in my writing and in the writing of postmodern essays in general; that is, there exists an impulse to false-begin, to say exact words over again, to abruptly insert a pronouncement, to skip over pertinent parts, to return to a scene over and over again.

I am officially old-fashioned now, now that I can see the forest for the trees.

I do not know how to end this except to say: that when, in video games, which were the playthings of the 80s, when new life was given, it was given with an electronic beeping; and when the struggle or flight or fight commenced, there was electronic beeping; and when a death occurred, there was an electronic beeping. And I have been hearing these sounds less and less.

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Jenny Boully is the author of five books, including The Body: An Essay and The Book of Beginnings and Endings. Recent on-line work can be found at Brevity, Passages North, and Solstice.