A Circus: Krell, Cathedrals, Killers

Homelessness is what every work of art and archeticture bestows on us: neither roots nor domesticity nor the fireside chat but a sense of being never at home in the face of the uncanny. David Farrell Krell

Warily did I write the above quotation as it comes from an essay I have no business reading taken from a book I've never heard of and republished in an American Continental Philosophy collection I had no cause to buy except that it offered two things, equally pathetic: (1) the chance to read something written after Heidegger that was written in English (not that I can tell the difference between translations of German or French, but some soul-procrastination always conspires to make it an issue: "Oh I can't read that yet, what if it's a bad translation and I miss something. I'll just take a German class and I'll get to it then."); and (2) a quick look around at the American scene to see if I could buy some more books I won't read, which will look out at me as I, with hands clasped formally behind my back, perform a daily review and inspection of my bookcase -- and (the books) will whisper go to bed (like dark diving water).

Mission accomplished.

Anyway, I hadn't gotten (and by "gotten" I mean skimmed) through two pages of the essay -- some explanation of why he changed the spelling of architecture to archeticture ("a Greek class, too" - understanding beckons) -- before I came across the above sentence neatly placed at the end of both a paragraph and a page for maximum noticeability. Immediately something began to gnaw at me, at my memory: it sounded familiar -- what was it? -- something profound, some book, something, architecture, buildings, the El Tropico -- The Lost City!? No, close though, something else, damn it, oh yeah, cathedrals. Cathedrals. Cathedrals. The song. By Jump, Little Children (a band) - its beautiful, unlike-any-other chorus goes like this:

In the cathedrals of New York and Rome
There is a feeling that you should just go home
And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is.

That feels like reading Whittaker Chambers (don't get the impression I have, though - I skim him like everyone else). There are also other cathedrals I've come across lately/over the last year (starting, obviously, with James Wood - see top of page): Clay Shirky talking at Bloggingheads about his research on the early history of the printing press and its effect on the Church -

a lot of the social institutions that regard themselves as permanent features of the landscape turn out to have been built on technological accidents of media scarcity and as that scarcity goes away a lot of those institutions are being challenged in really quite profound ways (...)

Ironically, publishers - the people that destroyed the Catholic church as a pan-European political force and left it being merely a religion after the Protestant Reformation - those people are now arguing for the primacy of highly-managed voices that exist in the modern versions of cathedrals (...)

Mitt Romney's religion speech -

I'm not sure that we fully appreciate the profound implications of our tradition of religious liberty. I have visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe. They are so inspired … so grand … so empty. Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer. The establishment of state religions in Europe did no favor to Europe's churches. And though you will find many people of strong faith there, the churches themselves seem to be withering away.

George Will in the same vein -

I think he came to this country from Europe with its empty cathedrals to marvel at the miracle of the United States --the most modern and the most religious country in the world. The intellectuals have told us for two centuries that as modernity advances, religion will recede. In the most modern nation of all, religion is waxing

Rod Dreher, better, more like Shirky -

The great newspapers of our day are Gothic cathedrals that are emptying out in an era that is losing faith in them and their authority. Blogs are the storefront churches: raucous, plain, and more vital. We who are by nature and conviction more high church and traditionalist, and who respect the storefront churches while being deeply suspicious of their foundational convictions and long-term effect on popular religious belief and the shape and direction of our culture, should probably think more about how this applies to the news and information sphere.

And most recently, Caroline Gordon in How To Read a Novel, talking about the structure of The Idiot (I came across this the other day because my mother had asked me to buy her a copy of this book - she'd been reading it up at my sister's house and hadn't wanted to swipe her only copy, which was good because she never got her luggage back from that plane trip - but the day I got it in the mail she wasn't at the parents' house (you can see I'm desperately trying to point out that I don't live at home, which I don't, but I can see how you got the idea) so I looked through it and found this quote - oddly enough when I did give it to her later she was trying to make me read a feature article or something in The Catholic Sun about the importance of . . . cathedrals!):

And so the two young men, one the embodiment of good, the other of evil, sit down, in chairs facing each other, in a darkened room, their only companion the corpse of the young woman they were talking about when we first encountered them. The stage which the author sets at the beginning of his story serves the action throughout, like the pillars of a great cathedral which, rising from the earth, soar steadily upward to form the vaulted dome. Dostoevsky's adaptation of the principle of the unity of place gives his story a structure, an architecture, he could not have achieved in any other way.

Initially I meant to make some connection between all these separate cathedral mentionings, but I'm not up to it right now, so instead I'm going to try to interpret (incorrectly) a song by The Killers, Read My Mind. If you think that's illegitimate, I can cite precedent: grubby just did the same thing in a far more worthy context with a song by the same band! And, since I can't pull that off, this is my way of "starting up a game of Solitaire" and seeing if it might not lead to some accidental profundity. Permit me, now, to become serious. This song, like one or two more on the same album, is about a circus. About performance and a way out that isn't really a way out.

The song's refrain Can you read my mind? is not a simple question. This is shown in the structure of the song itself: the question plays a different role and changes its sense every time it is repeated; it constantly tempts the listener to "read too much into it" in a way that only a song can. And so I will give into that temptation, line by line. I'll try to stick to one interpretation only to keep it coherent, but it might bleed a little.

It could be said that each section of the song is part of a series, beginning with one conversation and continuing with subsequent re-imaginings of that conversation. Or it could just be what occurs in the back of someone's mind during one conversation. The beginning is the actual scene, the actual conversation:

On the corner of Main Street
Just tryin' to keep it in line
You say you wanna move on
And you say I'm falling behind
Can you read my mind?

The question can you read my mind? functions as a "threshold" phrase; it is both an interruption and an introduction in both the scene and in the structure of the song. That is, it is actually said in the conversation and it is also the refrain of the song. In the situation presented by the song can you read my mind? is, first, a challenge, and only secondarily a question. It is meant to cut through the cliché that governs the way a man and a woman begin to take leave of each other (which, if left bare would be the ugly, addictive sound of Dido's I want to be a hunter again, which makes my flesh crawl, but that's just me, and damn you for already knowing that). It is also an excuse. It is a way of saying, "I am not what I am yet, I am a procrastinator, you don't know what you're leaving behind." It is also meant to say, "Go to hell" in the sense of "go somewhere else, I like it here; weighty considerations are behind my staying here in what appears to you to be just a 'one-horse town.' It's because you don't know me and you don't know this place that you're so eager to leave - you think knowledge is out there, but it's here, too--maybe only here. You don't want to be here without having to come back first." In other words, "you don't want to know me by having to get to know me/this place; you want to know me by getting beyond me/this place and looking back knowingly." At any rate, in the first part, the blame for the leaving is on the girl and her poor reasons.

I never really gave up on
Breaking out of this two-star town.
I got the green light;
I got a little fight;
I'm gonna turn this thing around -
Can you read my mind?
Can you read my mind?

If you read my mind, that's what you'd be reading. At this point, the song embodies a certain kind of "falling behind," and, in doing so, possibly shifts the blame for the "moving on" to the man, to the one who's singing this song. It's something like the Postal Service duet, Nothing Better, when the girl sings, "don't you feed me lines about some idealistic future." It's because I'm prone to singing songs like this that you have to move one. It's because I end up relying on what I'm singing rather than what I'm doing to show who and what I am. "I never really gave up on" means "It's not that I gave up, it's that it was only one option among others. But look, the count's three balls and no strikes and the third base coach is giving me the green light, I'll swing away, really I will - I will resist my natural inclination to take the walk." And the girl would say, "No! that's the whole point - if it's only a possibility to you, then I've already left you behind."

But back to the embodying I mentioned before: the song gives up on its own plot. From now on it will consist of something else other than a plot. It will go into the back of the mind. It will become like a daydream (I have noticed this in other songs, too - maybe it's just the way people write these days, always daydreaming) and then the awakening from the daydream. And this is the daydream:

The good old days, the honest man,
A restless heart, the Promised Land,
A subtle kiss that no one sees;
A broken wrist and a big trapeze

It's at this point, again, that the song embodies a certain kind of "falling behind" as it begins to take on the personality of the one who is being left behind. That embodiment even reveals why he is being left behind. The ultimate reason is this: the question can you read my mind? is all the fight he puts up. It is the only evidence of that "little fight" that he has left in him. As soon as he mentions the "little fight" he loses hold of its sarcasm (that is, of the fight in it) and plunges back into his own mind, thinking about what could be known of him. He seems to say: "We could have these moments -- the subtle kiss that no one sees. I see them now and they, though they have not happened, make me happy. Why not?" More importantly, he is also saying that they could have had these moments: "It's not so much that we could have these moments, it's more that we could have had them. That's what I really want . . . to have had them. To be with you in such a way as to have been with you; to whisper clichés with all the force of their being true and having happened." It's future perfect (not really, but my grammar's never been that good). Flowers' tense is the present as the to-be-about-to-have-happened.

The lines that come next (the awakening from the dream), some have the lyrics as:

Oh well, I don't mind, you don't mind
'Cause I don't shine if you don't shine
Before you go, could you read my mind?

I have them as:

So what! I don't mind if you don't mind
Cause I don't shine if you don't shine.
Before you go,
Can you read my mind?

I think everything is in this so what! - and I'll get to that tomorrow.

Update: Grubby reads better than I write.