Agape Agape

William Gaddis

No but you see I've got to explain all this because I don't, we don't know how much time there is left and I have to work on the, to finish this work of mine while I, why I've brought in this whole pile of books notes pages clippings and God knows what, get it all sorted and organized when I get this property divided up and the business and worries that go with it while they keep me here to be cut up and scraped and stapled and cut up again my damn leg look at it, layered with staples like that old suit of Japanese armour in the dining hall feel like I'm being dismantled piece by piece, houses, cottages, stables orchards and all the damn decisions and distractions I've got the papers land surveys deeds and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleared up and settled before everything collapses and it's all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes like everything else because that's what it's about, that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see?

And now even untrained person can do it! Back with Plato's chance persons pouring out Fur Elise without a flaw till the last perforation in the roll passes over the corresponding hole in the tracker bar and democracy comes lumbering into the room with the piano player hunched over the keyboard half as big as the piano itself.

The history of the piano as a soci-technological criticism of the West--written by a dead man. I've been reading a lot of difficult books lately--Agape Agape would count as one of these. There are no pauses, there is less punctuation, Gaddis' stream of consciousness style jumps tracks so often it takes continual focus to follow the story, but it is worth it. Don't be daunted.
You'll come away from Agape Agape wondering just how wonderful the Progress is that we have made. Especially when one considers Art and creativity, Gaddis is poking at the intelligence that has taken the meaning out of intelligence. If any better proof is needed, this blog surely is sufficient. A musician was once needed to provide music. Then just a piano. Now we only need an arrangement of electrical circuits. Good thoughts once went through much rigor. Now foolish little boys can think and their thoughts can flow out their fingers and through wires and into a box and out into the world of boxes where they are readily available and readable by the whole world, or at least all of it that counts (which definition proves Gaddis' point: no internet, no count--only people who are safe). I don't have to be intelligent, I don't have to think, I don't have to make sense or be in any way coherent in order to publish. This isn't as good as we thought it was. Shouldn't there be some level of filter, shouldn't there be something that keeps every yahoo like me from taking shits on paper and calling it art? If we don't keep our standards and the rigor of our art (something that technology and our wonderful democratic spirit is trying to destroy) we lose our right to have any art at all. Art isn't just what people want it to be. Art is the objective, objective beauty, objective skill, objective value. Art is not what I think it is. Nor what I say it is. Art is art.