So, continuing this broadly functional description of what’s happening right now, by which I mean this 13.8 billion year-long expanse (give or take a few tens of millions), this epoch in which disappearance has disappeared: at a metaphysical level, right now is remarkably calm. Not calm like serenity, rather the comparative stillness of persistence, of congealing existing at all. Even right after the supposed Big Bang, when energy density and temperature were unimaginably high, the situation was infinitely more stable and persistent than what transpired in the past of time itself. The opposite of right now would be more hellish than even the darkest imaginable potency, a total cosmic deluge of vanishing at infinite speed, the torrent of nothing consuming nothing in every direction; “direction” already naming a stabilization on this side of this cosmic epoch of becoming.
The possibility of sound
Against that unimaginable deluge-chaos potency, our present is actually cosmically quite chill. Over the last 13.8 billion years or so, sound has been able to take enduring shape, somewhere between a lower and upper bound. Within the deluge, there would be no sound whatsoever, neither hiss nor hum nor any other sound, just pure annihilation at infinite speed. Sound is, as Hegel has it, “the lamentation of the ideal in the midst of the compulsion of matter,” and this description obtains for beautiful, sonorous singing as well as shrieking and grinding noise. It’s crucial to understand that to be able to cry out a lament is infinitely preferable to simply being suffocated by a total violence which eliminates the very conditions of possibility of voice and of hearing and of sounding and resounding; here we draw relatively close to the ethical and political stuff of the historical present of the last 5000-300,000 years. But let’s stay zoomed out sub specie cosmici aevi for now. As we said, appearance is the suspension of absolute dissolution, the strange interval in which desecration can even be perceived as desecration, in which violence and the ideal can stand in any kind of relation. In the pure deluge, there is no shape against which vibration could yield a sound, no minimally stable medium in which sound could resound. Sound is only possible right now.
So, this playlist (if you use a different platform): it’s some ruinous blackened metal and droning doom set against moments of calm and also a really important Death in June song.
-Tom
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