Traduit de l’anglais (Pays de Galles), non sans peine, par Hélène Le Goff.

Les titres de chansons en gras doivent obligatoirement être écoutés. Leur écoute fait partie intégrante de la lecture. —MC

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I.

Ce n’est pas, me semble-t-il, que la plupart des êtres humains soient dépourvus de talent — car, au fond, ne sommes-nous pas tous le reflet d'un seul et même Dieu ? —, mais qu'ils retiennent la part d'artistes qui est en eux, par peur de s'aventurer hors du réel afin d'y créer librement, puis de ne plus savoir y revenir. Qu’il s’agisse d’un interprète acclamé, dépositaire d’une tradition vénérable, ou d’une âme perdue qui improvise devant les passants dans la rue pour quelques pièces parce qu’elle ne peut faire autrement, l’un comme l’autre se sont, le temps de leur performance, arrachés à la même réalité. Or il y a toujours, dans l’art, le risque qu’une fois sorti de la forteresse du réel, on ne sache plus y rentrer. En ce sens, il faut reconnaître que les artistes, même ceux qui n’auraient pas pu vivre autrement, ne se distinguent pas seulement, ni même tout d’abord, par leur talent, mais par leur courage.

L’enfance de Jacques Brel ne laisse guère présager la découverte du courage qui sera un jour le sien. Né en 1929 dans une ville de province belge, d’un père francophone et d’une mère flamande — dont la langue affleurera parfois dans son œuvre, notamment dans « Marieke » (1961) —, le jeune Brel se distingue surtout au sein du club de football local et dans des activités caritatives catholiques. Son entrée dans l’entreprise familiale, spécialisée dans la fabrication de boîtes en carton, paraît presque comme si tout conspirait à l’enfermer dans une existence faite de langage ordinaire et d’échanges prosaïques. Il se marie jeune et devient père de bonne heure, comme les Flamands le font sans trop y réfléchir — du moins si l’on en croit les paroles de « Les Flamandes » (1958).

Puis, au milieu de la vingtaine, tout explose. Je ne veux pas dire seulement qu’il fait une entrée fracassante sur la scène musicale ; je veux dire qu’il explose en chansons dans le sens où il fait voler en éclats, par la transfiguration artistique — comme les logiciens médiévaux étaient censés « faire exploser » leurs prémisses en les réduisant à la contradiction —, ce monde ordinaire et prosaïque auquel son destin semblait devoir le confiner.

II.

La carrière de Jacques Brel débute à une époque où le monde anglophone connaît lui aussi une véritable explosion musicale, et toute sérieuse appréciation critique de son œuvre nous oblige à nous demander si ces deux phénomènes simultanés procèdent ou non d’une même cause.

Il me semble parfois que Brel a dû jouer un rôle démesuré en retardant la véritable percée du rock’n’roll dans l’espace francophone, comme s’il avait absorbé à lui seul toute l’énergie dont celui-ci aurait eu besoin pour s’y imposer. Au milieu des années 1950, la culture juvénile de l’Anglosphère — ainsi que de ses territoires vassaux — avait pratiquement effacé toute survivance de la sensibilité des parents, au profit d’un nouveau style musical et d’une nouvelle attitude culturelle qui tournaient résolument le dos au passé : non seulement aux crooners et aux autres ancêtres musicaux issus de l’entre-deux-guerres, mais aussi à cette culture née de la Grande Guerre elle-même, avec ses chants de résistance, de fraternité et de solidarité. À la place, les jeunes chantaient des syllabes dénuées de sens comme « tutti frutti » — un non-sens du moins relativement à leur propre communauté linguistique —, des automobiles, du sexe, des hula-hoops, enfin de tout, ou presque, sauf de la guerre. Dans l’Europe francophone, en revanche, l’esthétique du music-hall d’avant-guerre et les grands motifs lyriques hérités des années d’occupation conservèrent, pendant une bonne décennie encore, une position centrale : parce que la mémoire de la guerre demeurait omniprésente, et parce que les poètes qu’elle avait produits étaient tout simplement trop grands.

Brel lui-même prend rarement la guerre, qui s’était achevée lorsqu’il avait seize ans, pour sujet explicite. Pourtant, ses textes nous ramènent sans cesse vers des paysages et des états d’âme qui ne prennent pleinement sens que sur le fond de ce traumatisme. « Fernand » (1965) raconte la mort d’un ami et l’étrange irréalité qui enveloppe son convoi funèbre à travers Paris. L’accompagnement y est réduit à presque rien ; la chanson est avant tout un récit de trouvère, porté par une lente pulsation aux vertus presque antalgiques, raconté du point de vue d’un homme des bas-fonds de Paris, tel qu’on aurait pu en rencontrer dans L’Assommoir de Zola (1876). Le récit demeure trop allusif pour que l’on puisse situer avec certitude l’époque où il se déroule. Mais ses vers les plus saisissants suggèrent au moins que nous sommes sous l’Occupation :

L’année précédente, en 1964, Barbara, chanteuse d’origine juive ukrainienne, avait connu un immense succès avec « Göttingen », dont les paroles célèbrent l’unité que Français et Allemands partagent depuis l’aube de l’histoire : un même climat, un même fonds de folklore, des dynasties royales entremêlées, une sensibilité poétique commune. Elle va jusqu’à invoquer l’esprit des frères Grimm et chante même que c’est à Göttingen qu’est née la formule « Il était une fois ». On a souvent vu dans cette chanson l’annonce d’une ère nouvelle de réconciliation après la guerre : l’avant-garde culturelle de ce qui était en train de devenir le projet politique de l’Union européenne.

En 1964, le monde anglophone, à l’inverse, n’a guère perçu l’intérêt de chanter une réconciliation sentimentale avec les Allemands. Les Allemands avaient été défaits, et l’on ne répond pas à une défaite par la fraternité, mais par le paternalisme ; non par la réconciliation, mais par la reconstruction ; non par la redécouverte d’une histoire commune, mais par l’imposition d’une nouvelle histoire nouvelle sous un nouvel empire. L’aile culturelle du plan Marshall mettait en scène Elvis en uniforme, des caricatures kitsch de Fräulein dans des Biergärten, ou encore Wayne Newton chantant des paroles qui sonnaient, aux oreilles américaines, comme donka shane. Dans l’imaginaire des États-Unis, l’Allemagne a toujours été la Bavière, avec son hospitalité relativement chaleureuses et ses voyelles excentriques, bien davantage que l’Allemagne spirituelle des Flachländer, selon l’expression par laquelle Hans Castorp désigne sa propre appartenance régionale. La culture populaire française, elle, accomplissait manifestement tout autre chose. Elle travaillait le traumatisme historique, la blessure infligée par sa plus proche nation sœur, tandis que les Américains assimilaient les mêmes événements à travers le prisme de la victoire.

J’en suis venu à penser qu’à travers la chanson française d’après-guerre on peut entendre, pour peu qu’on y prête l’oreille, le souci de la France de préserver son ancienne identité continentale contre l’emprise de l’ordre atlantiste dominé par les États-Unis.

III.

À cet égard, la modeste irruption du rock français au début des années 1960, si souvent interprétée comme un bouillonnement culturel saluant l’avènement des Trente Glorieuses, ne constitue guère plus qu’un épisode secondaire, marqué pour l’essentiel par l’imitation et la médiocrité. L’histoire qui importe vraiment n’est pas celle de l’adoption d’un nouveau langage musical mondial, mais celle de la survivance d’une forme musicale entièrement autochtone : la chanson, grande forme musicale vernaculaire de la France.

Les régions de l’Europe d’après-guerre sous occupation américaine, de jure ou de facto — l’Allemagne et l’Angleterre étant les exemples les plus marquants de ces deux catégories — servirent très tôt de relais essentiels à la diffusion mondiale du rock’n’roll. L’histoire de la France dans la même période, en revanche, donne presque l’impression d’un univers parallèle : on y trouve bien quelques tentatives, lost in translation, de recréer l’esprit du rock, mais surtout la survivance beaucoup plus vigoureuse de formes musicales et de styles d’interprétation hérités de l’avant-guerre et de l’entre-deux-guerres, lesquels, dans une autre Europe occupée et quasi-américanisée, auraient pu être légitimement classés, à l’instar des livres disparus des bibliothèques allemandes sous les bombardements alliés, sous la mention Kriegsverlust.

C’est en ce sens que celui qui empêcha véritablement le rock’n’roll de prendre racine en France fut bien davantage de Gaulle lui-même — dont le seul nom dit assez de quelle patria il se réclamait — qu’aucun musicien ou artiste en particulier, pas même Jacques Brel. Il est toutefois peu vraisemblable que cette politique de protectionnisme culturel eût pu se maintenir aussi longtemps sans le concours, une fois encore, d’un nombre suffisant d’artistes continuant à faire vivre les genres anciens avec une intensité émotionnelle suffisante, avec une force de transgression suffisante, avec suffisamment de sueur, pour que le manque du rock’n’roll ne se fasse guère sentir.

En Allemagne, bien avant que le musicien de rue itinérant japonais Damo Suzuki ne s’associe au disciple de Stockhausen Holger Czukay pour donner naissance au Krautrock sur les ruines de l’Axe, Little Richard et les Beatles tournaient déjà en boucle dans les boîtes de nuit de l’occupation. Le plus démoniaque et le plus sublime des enregistrements de toute l’histoire du rock’n’roll — aujourd’hui encore — fut réalisé à Hambourg, lorsque Jerry Lee Lewis se produisit au Star-Club en 1964. Son groupe d’accompagnement était celui des Nashville Teens, tous des Anglais naturellement : déjà à cette époque-là, leur pays avait pleinement fait de cet art américain quelque chose qui lui appartenait en propre et lui avait insufflé un élément de génie national. L’« indie rock » était déjà en gestation dans les collèges résidentiels d’Oxford et de Cambridge, où une nouvelle espèce d’intellectuels chevelus étudiait avec passion les paroles de Robert Johnson et de Ma Rainey dans un esprit qui n’était pas sans rappeler celui avec lequel, quelques siècles plus tôt, on aurait pu, dans ces mêmes murs, étudier en cachette John Dee.

Un regard superficiel pourrait donner l’impression que des évolutions comparables étaient alors à l’œuvre en France. Dès 1963, Sylvie Vartan enregistrait une version française de « Twiste et chante », deux ans seulement après que Phil Medley en eut écrit l’original, et un an après que les Beatles en eurent fait un véritable phénomène. Son futur mari, Johnny Hallyday, que l’on allait, contre toute vraisemblance, ériger en « Elvis français », était déjà actif en France presque aussi tôt que Cliff Richard au Royaume-Uni. En 1963, les yéyés — Vartan, Françoise Hardy, France Gall et les autres — étaient déjà présentées comme en train de ravir la culture aux vétérans de la chanson sur le rive gauche, au premier rang desquels Jacques Brel et Georges Brassens. Serge Gainsbourg (né en 1928), qui appartenait à cette génération mais qui, contrairement aux autres, entretint jusqu’à sa fin peu glorieuse l’illusion d’être encore assez dans le coup — artistiquement comme sexuellement — pour suivre l’air du temps, chantait dès 1964 son intention d’aller « chercher ma Lolita / Chez les yéyé ».

Mais le phénomène yéyé relève bien davantage d’une imitation, à la cargo cult, des modes venues d’outre-Manche que d’un véritable enracinement du rock en France. En tant que genre commercial, il avait bien plus en commun avec la bubblegum pop américaine qu’avec, par exemple, le skiffle britannique. Lorsque des musiciens français se réclamant du rock commencent enfin à produire une œuvre véritablement originale ou novatrice — Magma, fondé en 1969, en étant un bon exemple —, c’est le plus souvent en puisant dans des traditions plus anciennes, théâtrales, avant-gardistes ou relevant de la science-fiction, tout en effaçant jusqu’au moindre signe de leur dette envers le blues, lequel, si l’on suit Keith Richards, demeure la condition sine qua non du rock proprement dit.

Pour l’essentiel, l’esprit du rock ne pénétra même pas les mouvements étudiants de Mai 68, dont la bande sonore française se construisit principalement autour du jazz. Cette musique avait déjà été pleinement acclimatée en France dès l’entre-deux-guerres avec la naissance du jazz manouche qui, en la personne de Django Reinhardt, compte parmi les plus grandes contributions à la musique populaire mondiale de tout le XXᵉ siècle. Tout se mit véritablement en place pour Django lorsqu’il découvrit, vers 1928, les premiers enregistrements de Louis Armstrong. Par la suite, les vagues successives du jazz américain — le hard bop, par exemple, lorsque Louis Malle choisit Miles Davis pour composer la musique d’Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958) — trouvèrent en France un chemin naturel vers leur acclimatation, sans rien de cette maladresse, lost in translation, qui allait longtemps grever l’importation du rock’n’roll. Lorsque, en 1971, les critiques Philippe Carles et Jean-Louis Comolli publièrent leur grand livre Free Jazz/Black Power, ils ne faisaient qu’expliciter une réalité sociale déjà bien établie : la contre-culture française faisait une place au jazz, tandis que le rock semblait voué à demeurer, pour l’essentiel, l’un des instruments de l’industrie culturelle capitaliste que la gauche étudiante entendait combattre. Ainsi le rock resta, en France, largement cantonnés au circuit des émissions de variétés, lisses, surproduites et privées de la charge politique révolutionnaire qu’ils portaient — ou étaient réputés porter — dans le monde anglophone entier.

Tandis que Cliff Richard voyait, tout naturellement et comme il se devait, son importance culturelle décliner après la Beatlemania, et plus encore avec l’avènement de la révolution psychédélique, des figures comme Johnny Hallyday ne cessaient, en France, de s’enraciner davantage dans le paysage culturel. Avec une esthétique qui évoque avant tout le décor des restaurants de la chaîne « Indiana » — vieilles pompes Standard Oil et fresques de chefs amérindiens coiffés de leurs parures de plumes —, et des récits de virées à Harley dans le Sud-Ouest américain, Hallyday n’aura participé à l’art américain qu’il aimait tant, ou dont dépendait si largement sa célébrité, que dans le sens le plus impitoyablement baudrillardien du terme. Il aimait raconter aux journalistes de Paris Match à quel point il goûtait la liberté anonyme de ses séjours américains. Mais il y a une excellente raison pour laquelle personne ne savait qui il était là-bas : il n’apporta absolument rien à la tradition musicale dont il se réclamait, et dont toute sa carrière simulacrale procédait.

Il est facile de ranger Hallyday parmi les ringards de la culture populaire et de ne plus y penser. Pourtant, même les vedettes du folk-rock français les plus prisées par la critique vivent le plus souvent, de la même façon, de leurs invocations répétées d’une Amérique non moins simulacrale. L’une des pires chansons jamais enregistrées est sans doute « Cent ans de plus » (1999) de Francis Cabrel. Musicalement, elle s’inscrit dans une filiation directe avec Graceland (1986) de Paul Simon ; son texte n’est qu’une creuse litanie de clins d’œil adressés aux grands noms du blues américain : Son House et Charlie Patton / Howlin’ Wolf et Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc. Harold Bloom nous rappelle que « l’anxiété de l’influence » est constitutive de toute poésie véritablement forte. Il ne suffit pas de nommer ses prédécesseurs ; il faut lutter avec eux. Or Cabrel n’éprouve aucune anxiété de l’influence, car il sait que pratiquement aucun héritier véritable de la tradition dont il s’est fait le satellite ne l’entendra jamais.

Dès l’origine donc, les vedettes françaises du blues, du rock et du folk entretenaient avec les musiciens américains qui les inspiraient à peu près le même rapport que les philosophes « continentaux » du circuit de la SPEP, tous affublés de leurs cordons de badges dans quelque colloque organisé au Sheraton de Milwaukee, disons, avec la classe intellectuelle parisienne : un rapport que résume au mieux un seul mot, « unidirectionnel ».

IV.

Mais réservons notre plus profond mépris à Gainsbourg, ce crétin. Épargnons-nous de refaire ici le procès de sa moralité, définitivement perdue à nos yeux depuis ce jour de 1986 où, invité aux côtés de Whitney Houston sur un plateau de télévision français, il souffla à notre reine, dans son anglais de lézard, devant un public en direct : I want to fuck you. Whitney conserva, avec un sang-froid remarquable, toute sa dignité, tandis que l’animateur Michel Drucker ne fit absolument rien pour remettre à sa place ce vieux lubrique en pleine déchéance. Il nous reste au moins ce document, qui rappelle durablement qui il était, la seule manière dont il savait se conduire en présence de la royauté musicale noir-américaine, le véritable rapport qu’il entretenait avec cette tradition. Il se comporte un peu mieux dans un mémorable duo enregistré en 1983 avec Screamin’ Jay Hawkins sur la composition humoristique de ce dernier, « Constipation Blues », mais, à vrai dire, sa contribution artistique ne dépasse guère un commentaire improvisé en français des paroles de Screamin’ Jay, manifestement enchanté de montrer qu’il a compris de quoi parle la chanson (« Il veut faire caca mais il peut pas ! », etc.).

Si Gainsbourg nous intéresse ici, c’est uniquement, une fois de plus, parce qu’il fut la seule grande figure de la génération de Brel à tenter sérieusement d’évoluer avec son temps et, à la fin des années 1960, d’emboîter le pas à cette aspiration nouvelle du rock anglophone vers des formes artistiques plus élevées, notamment à travers la forme narrative ambitieuse du concept album.

Ces tentatives tournent le plus souvent court, oscillant entre le décousu et l’à-peu-près inaudible. L’ambition artistique qui les anime ne les affranchit nullement, du reste, de la même attitude cargo cult à l'égard du rock que celle dont nous pouvions jusque-là exonérer les yéyé et autres productions du même ordre en l’attribuant aux seuls impératifs du marché. Le sample vocal tournant en boucle dans « Bonnie and Clyde » (1967), par exemple, ressemble à une pâle caricature des expérimentations de studio que les Beatles avaient mises au point au cours des années précédentes.

L'Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) est souvent célébré comme le chef-d’œuvre de Gainsbourg ; l'album mérite assurément l'attention de la critique, mais surtout parce qu’il marque les limites de toute tentative de faire évoluer la chanson vers les mêmes sommets d’expressivité artistique que Pink Floyd, par exemple, était bien mieux placé pour atteindre en partant du rock psychédélique. Pour ma part, c’est L’Homme à tête de chou (1976) que je tiens pour la plus grande réussite de Gainsbourg dans cette direction. Tout ce qui suit, en revanche — Love on the Beat (1984) au premier chef —, est d’une médiocrité presque risible, saturé de jeux de mots bilingues sur fond d’imaginaire américain — « Harley Davidson of a bitch », etc. — qui sont, à vrai dire, tout simplement affligeants, guère meilleurs que ces restaurateurs parisiens du bas de gamme qui baptisent leurs établissements « Chicken’s King » ou « Facefood ».

Autant que j’aie pu en juger, Jacques Brel ne chanta jamais un seul mot d’anglais ; au moment même où Gainsbourg obliquait vers une sorte d’avant-pop à la française, le chansonnier belge redoublait d’attachement à ces somptueuses ballades, saturées de cordes, que la contre-culture juvénile du monde anglophone était désormais toute disposée à congédier sous l’étiquette d'easy listening. À mes oreilles, la « Chanson des vieux amants » (1967) est l’une de ses plus grandes réussites ; elle semble venir d'un univers parallèle où le rock’n’roll n’aurait jamais existé. Musicalement, elle s’inscrit dans la tradition de la pop orchestrale d’un Nelson Riddle ou du 101 Strings Orchestra, tout en atteignant une profondeur d’expression et de sentiment égale à tout ce que la révolution rock a pu produire de plus intensément bathétique dans son exploration de l’expérience humaine à vif. Sur le plan des paroles, Brel continue de s’appuyer sur les reprises du passé simple (« Bien sûr nous eûmes des orages »), un temps verbal qui avait alors pratiquement disparu de la langue parlée. Il est impossible d’imaginer Françoise Hardy, occupée à raconter les petites histoires de ce que faisaient « les garçons et les filles de mon âge », recourir à un eut ou à un fut.

En demeurant fidèle à des formes musicales plus anciennes et plus conventionnelles, Brel réussit à être de son temps d’une manière qu’un imitateur anxieux comme Gainsbourg ne pouvait tout simplement pas atteindre. La « Chanson des vieux amants », avec « J’arrive » de l’année suivante et « Ne me quitte pas » de 1959, constituent à mes oreilles le sommet de son œuvre et compte parmi les contributions les plus durables et les plus importantes à l’art de la chanson au XXᵉ siècle. Cette dernière a bien sûr donné lieu à d’innombrables reprises ; la plus remarquable est sans doute celle de Nina Simone qui, dans un français approximatif mais avec une intensité presque égale à celle de Brel, en livre une interprétation bouleversante. Il est significatif, en revanche, que lorsque Brel lui-même la chante en néerlandais, sous le titre « Laat me niet alleen », on peine à y retrouver la même profondeur d’émotion. Quelle que soit la mesure dans laquelle l’art de Brel est née de sa propre identité ethnolinguistique fracturée, une chose est claire : le français en est l’unique langue d’expression — on pourrait même dire le médium.

V.

Il n’est évidemment ni moins artificiel ni moins injuste d’opposer Brel à Gainsbourg que de le faire avec les Stones et les Beatles, Test Dept et Einstürzende Neubauten, ou n’importe quel autre pair d’entreprises artistiques parfaitement autonomes que les circonstances et le discours médiatique finissent par enfermer dans des orbites jumelles. Comme toujours, d’autres figures — des troisièmes particules, pour ainsi dire, le cas de Léo Ferré (né en 1916) étant particulièrement révélateur — viennent compliquer le tableau.

Sans doute le plus contre-culturel de tous les chansonniers de l’ancienne génération, Ferré semble avoir souffert de l’absence d’une forme musicale qui lui permît d’exprimer adéquatement sa propre philosophie de l’existence. Anarchiste convaincu, il adopte à la fin des années 1960 une femelle chimpanzé nommée Pépée et exigea qu’elle fût traitée en égale au sein du foyer Ferré. Le seul véritable obstacle à la paix domestique interspécifique entre primates tenait, selon lui, à l’idéologie étatiste bourgeoise. Sa propre fille fut obligée de parler de Pépée comme d’une sœur, et lorsque ses amis ou sa famille se plaignaient des violences répétées de la chimpanzé — morsures infligées aux visiteurs, vêtements arrachés, agressions sexuelles —, il refusait tout simplement de les entendre.

Un jour, alors que Ferré était en tournée, Pépée partit courir les bois avec Madeleine, femme de Léo, ainsi que quelques amis. Pépée tomba d’un arbre et se brisa la hanche, puis se montra encore plus aggressive que d’habitude envers quiconque tentait de l’approcher. Madeleine persuada alors un voisin, qui possédait un fusil de chasse, d’abréger les souffrances de la chimpanzé. Cette décision marqua le début d’un long et amer divorce. Plus important pour nous, la mort de Pépée inspira ce qui est sans doute, très sérieusement, la pire chanson du XXᵉ siècle : « Pépée » (1969). Et contrairement à la mauvaise chanson de Cabrel brièvement évoquée plus haut, « Pépée » est mauvaise d’une manière qui exige tout simplement qu’on l’entende au moins une fois.

Il faut bien reconnaître qu’on y trouve quelques vers réussis, en particulier cette pique de bonne humeur contre un certain contemporain aux oreilles décollées :

Il reste qu’on attend une résolution qui ne vient jamais, une prise de conscience, ne serait-ce qu’implicite, qu’en consacrant son talent de compositeur — si talent il y a — à l’élégie d’une chimpanzé tombée, un artiste s’aventure sur un terrain largement inexploré et qu’à ce titre il lui faut, dans une certaine mesure, s’arracher à la pure immédiateté de sa douleur pour parvenir à communiquer quelque chose à un public. Mais il ne semble pas y avoir de public du tout. À mesure que la chanson s’enlise et que Ferré s’abîme dans une douleur toujours plus amère en répétant les derniers mots, « On couche toujours avec des morts », on comprend sans peine que la mort de Pépée l’a véritablement déchiré. On comprend tout aussi clairement qu’il lui manque cette capacité proprement artistique qui seule aurait pu transmuer son deuil en une œuvre digne d’être partagée. Écouter « Pépée » n’est pas une expérience esthétique, au sens plein du terme ; c’est plutôt comme s’asseoir, gêné, à côté de Ferré tandis qu’il sanglote sur un banc public.

On ne peut d’ailleurs s’empêcher de soupçonner que d’autres traditions musicales se prêtent peut-être davantage à l’exploration d’expériences humaines aussi exceptionnelles que celle-ci, et que Ferré, à sa manière, se heurte, tout comme Gainsbourg, aux limites mêmes de la tradition chansonnière. On revient alors avec un immense soulagement au chef-d’œuvre que Georges Brassens a donné au même genre, « Le Gorille » (1952), récit à la fois comique et poignant d’un singe fictif échappé de son zoo et lancé dans une série d’agressions sexuelles. Brassens a compris ce que Ferré a oublié : le chansonnier est un conteur, non un trafiquant de réalité.

C’était le récit, l’antique vocation du barde, qui constituait le cœur de la tradition de la chanson française (un ouvrage savant typique consacré à la chanson fait commencer son histoire au IXᵉ siècle, voire plus tôt). Les récits affrontent bel et bien le réel — et, dans la chanson d’après-guerre, cet affrontement portait souvent sur les réalités les plus terribles, dont la France commençait à peine à sortir, comme dans la très belle interprétation que Marcel Mouloudji donna de « La Complainte du partisan » (1954), aujourd’hui surtout connue à travers la reprise qu’en fit Leonard Cohen en 1969. Mais il s’agit d’un réel sublimé ; d’une histoire transfigurée par l’art et, par là même, rendue supportable.

Le rock’n’roll, né d’un refus juvénile de se livrer au moindre travail d’assimilation de l’histoire, abandonna du même coup, comme un fardeau devenu trop encombrant, l’antique art bardique de la narration. Lorsqu’il gagna un peu en maturité, après avoir pris du LSD et après s’être aperçu que « l’après-guerre » ne signifiait nullement que la guerre fût devenue une chose du passé, il s’assigna souvent la sombre tâche de montrer le réel tel qu’il est. Mais, s’étant déjà détaché de la longue tradition narrative, il peina souvent à le faire avec un succès artistique supérieur à celui de l’hommage que Ferré rendit à sa regrettée Pépée.

VI.

J’ai soutenu que la vie de l’artiste dépend autant du courage que du talent. Il faut y ajouter une troisième particule : la chance. La chance de rencontrer la forme d’art qui se révèle véritablement capable de porter sa sensibilité intime ; ou, peut-être plus encore, de vivre dans une société qui accorde sa pleine valeur à la forme d’art à laquelle on est naturellement le mieux disposé.

Jacques Brel réunissait ces trois qualités. Le talent, dans son cas, va simplement de soi. Quant aux circonstances biographiques qui ont fini par permettre à son courage de se manifester, elles demeurent pour l’essentiel un mystère : les connaître supposerait de savoir quelles fantasmagories obsessionnelles traversaient l’esprit du jeune homme tandis qu’il partageait son temps entre les activités de charité catholiques et la fabrique familiale de cartons.

Mais la chance, elle, relève du domaine public de l’histoire — de cette même histoire qui fit de la France un lieu de résistance à l’ordre trans-Atlantique émergent de l’après-guerre, où des lignées de chants beaucoup plus anciennes continuaient encore d’ordonner le monde autrement. On pouvait notamment y discerner un patrimoine culturel franco-allemand commun : l’ascendance partagée non seulement de « nos rois de France » avec diverses Helga et divers Hans, comme le chante Barbara dans « Göttingen », mais aussi celle des contes des frères Grimm et de La Fontaine.

Ces lignées de chants ne survécurent guère plus d’une dizaine d’années encore, et dès la fin des années 1960, avec des artistes comme Gainsbourg et Ferré, on commence déjà à entendre leur signal s’affaiblir. Comme tant d’autres phénomènes — Internet, Uber, la financiarisation de l’enseignement supérieur —, les bouleversements de la modernité atteignent systématiquement la France avec une dizaine d’années de retard. Le protectionnisme culturel n’est parfois qu’une nuisance. Dans le cas de la chanson d’après-guerre, il fut rien de moins qu’une période de grâce.

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[Song titles featured in bold are required listening. The listening is part of the reading. —MC]

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I.

It is not, I do not think, that most people lack talent —for in the end are we not all mirrors of the same God?—, but that most hold their artist selves back for fear of being unable to maintain the power to create, free from the constraints of reality, without losing contact with that reality altogether. Both a lauded performer working in a venerable tradition, and a lost soul jibbering before a crowd in a lively city square for spare change because he can do no otherwise, have tapped out of the same reality, at least for the duration of the performance, and there is always some risk, with art, that once you have left the fortress of the real in this way you will not be able to return. To this extent, one must say that artists, even those who could not have done otherwise, are not distinguished exclusively or primarily by their talent, but by their courage.

There is little in Jacques Brel’s early biography that would enable us to predict the eventual discovery of his own courage. Born in a provincial Belgian city in 1929 to a French-speaking father and a Flemish mother (whose language will occasionally surface in Brel’s oeuvre, as in “Marieke” (1961)), the young Brel would distinguish himself mostly in the local soccer club and in Catholic charity work. His early employment in the family business, something to do with the manufacture of cardboard boxes, would seem as if designed by the fates to keep him in a life of everyday plain speech and unpoetic transaction. He got married and became a father early, as Flems unthinkingly do — according to the lyrics of “Les Flamandes” (1958).

And then in his mid-twenties he exploded. I don’t mean only that he exploded onto the scene; I mean he exploded in song, and he exploded, too, through artistic transfiguration —as medieval logicians are said to “explode” their premises through contradiction— the ordinary prosaic world that had been expected to contain him.

II.

Brel’s career begins at a moment of significant musical explosiveness in the Anglophone world as well, and our critical assessment of him requires at least some concern to determine whether these simultaneous instances of it may be traced back to the same cause.

It has sometimes seemed to me, indeed, that Brel must have played an outsized role in delaying any real successful implantation of rock and roll in the Francophone world, that he was sucking up all the energy rock and roll would have needed for itself. By the mid-1950s youth culture in the Anglosphere and its vassal territories had suppressed any enduring echo of parental sensibilities, in favor of a new musical style and cultural attitude that disdained the past altogether — not just the crooners and other species of musical ancestor from the entre-deux-guerres, but the culture that sprang up from within the war itself, with its songs of partisanship, resistance, and solidarity. The youth sang nonsense words instead, like “tutti frutti” (nonsense, at least, relative to their own linguistic community), and of automobiles and fucking and hula-hoops and anything really but the war. In Francophone Europe by contrast both pre-war music-hall style and wartime lyrical leitmotifs lingered on almost monopolistically for another solid decade — because the war was still so present, and because its poets were just so good.

Brel seldom sings of the war directly, which ended when he was 16. But his texts constantly return us to the landscapes and sentiments that could only make sense against the background of that trauma. “Fernand” (1965) tells the story of a friend who has died, and of the feeling of unreality hanging over his funeral procession through Paris. The song has little in the way of arrangement or orchestration, but is pure bardic storytelling locked into some kind of opioid-painkilling groove, told from the point of view of someone inhabiting les bas-fonds of Paris, such as you might also have found in Zola’s L’Assommoir (1876). The narrative is too allusive and non-committal to tell you precisely when it is taking place, but the song’s rawest lines at least suggest that we are under occupation:

One year earlier, in 1964, the mononymous chanteuse Barbara, of Ukrainian Jewish origin, had her great hit “Göttingen”, whose lyrics celebrate the ancient unity of French and German climate, folklore, royal dynasties, poetic sensibility — even evoking the spirit of the Brothers Grimm, she even sings that it was in Göttingen that the phrase Il était une fois [“Once upon a time”] was born. This song has often been credited with ushering in a new era of post-war reconciliation — the cultural vanguard of the political project of the EU.

In 1964 the English-speaking world by contrast had little time for songs of romantic reconciliation with the Germans. The Germans had been defeated, and the appropriate response to defeat is not fraternal but paternal; not reconciliation but reconstruction; not rediscovery of shared history, but imposition of a new history under a new empire. The Marshall Plan’s cultural wing would feature Elvis in uniform, kitsch caricature of Fräulein in Biergärten, and Wayne Newton singing what sounded for all the world like donka shane (the Germany of the American imagination has always been Bavaria, with its relative cultural warmth and its deviant umlauts — it has not been the spiritual Germany of the “Flatlanders”, as Hans Castorp describes his own subnationality). French popular culture, plainly, was doing something much more serious. It was processing historical trauma, a vicious wound from its most dear twin nation, even as the Americans were processing the same historical events through a lens of triumph. I’ve come to think in this respect that in post-war chanson you can hear, if you listen, France’s concern to preserve its ancient continental identity against the encroachment of the American-led Atlantic order.

III.

In this regard the minor explosion of rock français in the early 1960s, so often interpreted as a cultural effervescence hailing the arrival of the trente glorieuses, is little more than a side story, characterized for the most part by derivativeness and mediocrity. The more important story is not the adoption of a new global musical style, but the survival of an entirely indigenous one, chanson, as the great vernacular musical form of post-war France.

The portions of post-war Europe under de-dicto or de-facto American occupation —Germany and England most notably under those two headings— served as crucial early vectors for the global spread of rock and roll, while the post-war history of France shows us something like an alternate universe, of a few lost-in-translation attempts at recreating the rock spirit, but mostly of a much more robust survival of pre-war and interwar musical forms and performance styles that in occupied Europe might appropriately be marked, like the books that disappeared from German libraries under Allied bombardment, with the label Kriegsverlust.

It is in this sense much more de Gaulle, whose name itself tells you of what Patria he is, than any individual artist, not even Jacques Brel, who kept rock and roll fully from taking root. Yet it is unlikely that this mostly unconscious policy of cultural protectionism could have worked for as long as it did if there had not been, again, a sufficient number of artists working in the old genres, with sufficient emotional intensity, and often with sufficient transgressive power, with sufficient sweat, to ensure that rock and roll should hardly be missed.

In Germany, long before the wandering Japanese busker Damo Suzuki teamed up with the Stockhausen-disciple Holger Czukay to birth Krautrock out of the ruins of the Axis, Little Richard and the Beatles were on heavy rotation through the occupation nightclub circuit. The most evil and sublime concert recording in rock and roll history, even to this day, was made in Hamburg, when Jerry Lee Lewis played there at the Star Club in 1964. His backing band were the Nashville Teens, of England, naturally, a country that by that year had already completely indigenized this American art form and injected it with its own sort of national genius. “Indie rock” was already incubating in the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, where a new species of long-haired eggheads was busily studying the lyrics of Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey with something of the same spirit in which one might, in those same halls, centuries before, have studied John Dee on the down-low.

A casual glance might suggest similar developments taking place in France. Sylvie Vartan was doing a French version of “Twiste et chante” by 1963, just two years after Phil Medley wrote it and one year after the Beatles made it into a cultural touchstone. Vartan’s future husband Johnny Hallyday, improbably thrust into the roll of “French Elvis”, had been active in that country almost as early as Cliff Richard in the UK. The yéyé girls, including Vartan as well as Françoise Hardy, France Gall, and others, were reported by 1963 to be taking over popular culture from the oldhead rive-gauche stars of chanson, notably Brel and Georges Brassens. Serge Gainsbourg (b. 1928), who belonged to this earlier generation but unlike the others entertained until his ignoble end a fantasy of himself as sufficiently in shape —artistically, sexually— to keep up with the changing times, was singing by 1964 of his intention to chercher ma Lolita / Chez les yéyé.

But the yéyé phenomenon is much more a cargo-cult imitation of outre-Manche style than a sign of rock’s successful French enracinement. As a commercial genre, it shared more in the nature of American bubblegum than of, say, UK skiffle. When nominally rock-oriented French musicians finally begin to do anything original or pioneering, such as Magma, formed in 1969, this is typically by drawing on older theatrical and avant-garde and sci-fi tradition, and altogether shedding any hint of a debt to the blues, which, if we agree with Keith Richards, must always remain a sine-qua-non of rock as such.

For the most part, the spirit of rock failed even to penetrate the student protests of May, 1968, whose French soundtrack was principally built up around jazz. This music had been fully, and ingeniously, indigenized already in the interwar period with the birth of “gypsy jazz” — which indeed, in the person of Django Reinhardt, is among the greatest contributions to global popular music of the entire 20th century. It had all come together for Django when he got his hands on some early Louis Armstrong recordings, circa 1928, and after that successive waves of American jazz influence —as for example of hard bop, when Louis Malle selected Miles Davis to create the soundtrack for Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1958)—, found an easy path to naturalization in France without any of the lost-in-translation clumsiness that would long complicate the importation of rock and roll. When in 1971 French music critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli published their influential book, Free Jazz/Black Power, they were only making explicit what was already an established social fact: that the French counterculture had room for jazz, while rock was destined to remain mostly an arm of the capitalist culture industry that the student left was committed to opposing. As such the superficial signifiers of rock were to remain mostly anchored, in France, to the circuit of the television variety shows, glossy and overproduced and denuded of the revolutionary political charge they carried, or were believed to carry, throughout the Anglosphere.

While Cliff Richard naturally and fittingly retreated in cultural significance after Beatlemania, and even more so after the advent of psychedelia, in France the likes of Johnny Hallyday only grew more culturally entrenched. With an aesthetic essentially the same as the décor you might find inside that French restaurant chain called “Indiana”, with its old Standard Oil pumps and its scenes of Native chiefs in full headgear, with tales of vacations riding around the American Southwest on his Harley, Hallyday can be said to have participated in the American art form he so loved, or on which his fame so depended, only in the most unforgivingly Baudrillardian sense of participation. He liked to tell the reporters from Paris Match how much he valued the anonymous freedom of his American sojourns. But there’s a very good reason why no one knew who he was there: he made no real contribution at all to the musical tradition that came from there, and that entirely made his simulacral career.

It is easy to slot Hallyday as a cultural cheeseball and to think no more of him, but even critically favored folk-rock figures on the French scene typically manage to get by on repeated invocations of a no less simulacral America. Surely one of the worst songs ever recorded is Francis Cabrel’s “Cent ans de plus” (1999). Musically in a direct line of derivation from Paul Simon’s Graceland (1986), this song’s lyrics are a litany of empty shout-outs to American blues masters: Son House et Charlie Patton / Howlin’ Wolf et Blind Lemon Jefferson, etc. Harold Bloom reminds us that the anxiety of influence is positively constitutive of strong poetry. You must not only name your forebears; you must wrestle with them. But Cabrel has no anxiety of influence, because he knows that practically no one truly native to the tradition to which he has set himself up as a satellite is ever going to hear him.

From the beginning, then, the stars of French blues, rock, and folk had roughly the same relationship to the American musicians inspiring them that American “continental” philosophers on the SPEP circuit, all lanyarded up at some conference in a Sheraton in Milwaukee, have to the Parisian intellectual class — a relationship best summed up by the word “unidirectional”.

IV.

But let us save our liveliest scorn for Gainsbourg, that cretin. Let us try not to relitigate his moral character, pushed beyond redemption, in our view, the day in 1986 when he appeared alongside Whitney Houston on a French talk show, and muttered to our queen, in his lizard-English, before a live audience: “I want to fuck you.” Whitney, remarkably, retained her composure, while the host Michel Drucker did nothing at all to put the disintegrating old lecher in his place — but at least we have this enduring document to remind us of who he was, of how he could only conduct himself in the presence of Black American musical royalty, of how he really related to that tradition. He behaves somewhat better in a memorable 1983 duet with the great Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, on the latter’s “novelty” composition, “Constipation Blues”, though the truth is he adds little more, artistically, than a running side-commentary in French on Screamin’ Jay’s lyrics, evidently pleased with himself for understanding what the song is all about (Il veut faire caca mais il peut pas, etc.).

But if Gainsbourg is of interest to us here, this is only, again, to the extent that he is the one prominent figure from Brel’s generation seriously to attempt to change with the times and, by the end of the 1960s, to follow the new aspiration of Anglosphere rock towards relatively higher registers of artistic seriousness, in particular in the ambitious narrative form of the concept album.

His efforts here largely misfire, and tend to move up and down on a scale with “meandering” and “unlistenable” at its endpoints. Nor does the artistically ambitious vision liberate these efforts from the same cargo-cult-like stance towards rock and roll that we had previously, with yéyé and related trifles, been able to write off to the commercial imperatives driving the show. The tape-loop-like vocal sample on “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), for example, seems a mockery of the studio experimentation the Beatles had innovated over the previous few years. L’Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) has been hailed as Gainsbourg’s conceptual masterpiece, and it is indeed critically noteworthy, but mostly as marking out the limits of any attempted evolution from chanson into the same registers of high-art expressivity that Pink Floyd, say, were much better positioned to explore from an initial starting point in psychedelia. I personally consider L’Homme à tête de chou (1976) to be Gainsbourg’s greatest contribution in this vein, while everything after that, notably 1984’s Love on the Beat, is almost laughably bad, overstuffed with bilingual Americana-themed wordplay —“Harley Davidson of a bitch”, etc.— that is, quite frankly, just awful, no better than the bottom-end restaurateurs of Paris calling themselves by names such as “Chicken’s King” or “Facefood”.

As far as I have been able to determine, Jacques Brel never sang so much as a single word in English, and at the very moment Gainsbourg was veering off into some kind of French inflection of global avant-pop, the Belgian singer was doubling down on the most sumptuous, treacly, string-heavy ballads of the sort that the Anglosphere’s youth counterculture was by now primed to dismiss as “easy listening”. To my mind Brel’s “Chanson des vieux amants” of 1967 is one of his most gorgeous accomplishments, and it seems to come from a parallel universe where rock and roll never happened. Musically it follows in the orchestral-pop spirit of Nelson Riddle or the 101 Strings Orchestra, yet the depth of expressivity and feeling in it are as great as anything comparable in the rock revolution’s most bathetic excavations of raw human experience. Lyrically, Brel continues to rely on repetitions of the French passé simple (Bien sûr nous eûmes des orages) that had all but disappeared from everyday speech. It is impossible to imagine Françoise Hardy, with her minor tales of what les garçons et les filles de mon âge were getting up to, ever resorting to an eut or a fut.

By remaining true to older and “squarer” musical forms, Brel managed to keep up with the times in a way an anxious and self-hating borrower like Gainsbourg never could. The “Chanson des vieux amants”, alongside the following year’s “J’arrive” and the early “Ne me quitte pas” (1959), are in my view the crowning achievements of Brel’s career, and among the most enduring and significant contributions to 20th-century songwriting at a global scale. The latter of these has of course been ingeniously covered by many English-language artists, not least, in some kind of French and with nearly as much feeling as Brel’s original, by Nina Simone. Significantly, when Brel himself performs it in Dutch, as “Laat me niet alleen”, it is difficult to discern the same depth of feeling. To whatever extent Brel’s artistry is shaped by his own fractured ethnolinguistic identity, it is plain that French is the exclusive langue d’expression, one might say the medium, of his art.

V.

It is of course no less artificial, no less unfair, to contrast Brel and Gainsbourg than to do the same with the Stones and the Beatles, or with Test Dept and Einstürzende Neubauten, or any other pair of fully autonomous artistic endeavors that happen to get locked into twinned orbits by dint of circumstance and by media spin. As always, other figures —third particles as it were— complicate the picture, notably the Monegasque singer Léo Ferré (b. 1916).

Surely the most countercultural of all the older chansonniers, Ferré seems to have suffered from the absence of a musical form that might permit him to convey an accurate report of his own life-philosophy. A committed anarchist, in the late 1960s Ferré adopted a female chimpanzee by the name of Pépée, and insisted on treating her as a full equal within the Ferré household. The only real obstacle to interspecies domestic tranquility among primates, he believed, was bourgeois statist ideology. His own daughter was compelled to speak of Pépée as a sister, and when friends and family complained about the chimp’s repeated acts of aggression —biting visitors, tearing their clothes off, sexually assaulting them—, he would hear none of it.

Once, when Ferré was on tour, Pépée had been out on a ramble in the forest with his wife Madeleine and some friends. Pépée fell from a tree and broke her hip, and grew unusually aggressive to anyone who approached her. Madeleine convinced one of the neighbors, who owned a hunting rifle, to put the chimp out of her misery. This decision on Madeleine’s part was the beginning of a long and rancunious divorce. More importantly for our purposes, Pépée’s death inspired what must truly be the worst song of the 20th century, “Pépée” (1969). And unlike Cabrel’s bad song briefly evoked above, “Pépée” is bad in a way that simply requires you to hear it at least once. Here it is:

There are, admittedly, some satisfying lines, especially this jovial dig against a certain flap-eared contemporary:

Still, one expects some resolution that simply never comes, some acknowledgment that an artist is entering into largely uncharted territory in turning his songwriting talents, such as they are, to eulogizing a chimpanzee, and to that extent one simply has to step out of one’s own raw emotions in order to communicate something to an intended audience. But there does not seem to be an intended audience at all, and as the song grinds on and Ferré sinks into the bitter deep emotion in repetition of the final line, On couche toujours avec des morts, you cannot fail to understand that he is sincerely torn apart by Pépée’s death, but that he entirely lacks the artistic ability that would be necessary to sublimate his mourning into anything worthy of being shared. To listen to “Pépée” is no more an aesthetic experience, properly understood, than to sit awkwardly next to Ferré as he sobs on a public bench.

One also can’t help but suspect that other musical traditions might be at least somewhat better suited to facilitate the exploration of such rare extremes of human experience as this, and that Ferré, in his own way, like Gainsbourg, is bumping up against the limits of chanson. And one returns with great relief to Georges Brassens’ perfect contribution to the genre, “Le Gorille” (1952), a comic and poignant tale of a fictional ape that has escaped from the zoo and gone on a rampage of sexual assault. Brassens understands what Ferré has forgotten: that a chansonnier is a storyteller, not a reality-monger.

VI.

It was storytelling, the ancient lot of the bard, that lay at the heart of the chanson tradition (a typical scholarly work on chanson begins its historical survey in the 9th century or earlier). Stories do confront reality — indeed much of this confrontation in post-war chanson was with the very grimmest of realities, out of which France had only just emerged, as in Marcel Mouloudji’s deeply moving version of “La Complainte du partisan” (1954), better known to most of us through Leonard Cohen’s cover from 1969. But this is reality sublimated; this is history processed through art and in that way made livable.

Rock and roll, which emerged in a spirit of youthful refusal to do the work of historical processing at all, correspondingly abandoned, as far too cumbersome, the old bardic art of narration. When it grew up a bit, after it dropped acid and after it noticed that “post-war” did not at all mean that war had become a thing of the past, it often took upon itself the somber duty of exposing reality for what it is — but now, having already detached itself from long narrative tradition, often struggled to do so with any more artistic success than Ferré’s tribute to his dearly departed Pépée.

I have said that the life of the artist has as much to do with courage as with talent. A third particle in the mix here is of course luck — happening upon the art form that proves itself up to the task of conveying one’s inner sensibility, or, perhaps even more importantly, living in a society that values the art form to which one is innately best suited.

Jacques Brel had all three of these. The talent in his case is simply a given. The biographical circumstances that eventually permitted his courage to manifest itself are for their part mostly a mystery — to know them would be to know what obsessive fantasies were coursing through the young man’s mind as he went about his days in the Catholic charities or the cardboard-box factory.

But the luck of the whole thing, that’s the open record of history — the same history that made Brel’s adoptive France a site of resistance to the emerging post-war Atlantic order, where much older songlines could still be heard to order the world differently. In particular, one could still make out a shared Franco-German cultural patrimony, the common ancestry not just of “nos rois de France” with various Helgas and Hanses, as Barbara sang in “Göttingen”, but of the tales, too, of the Grimms and La Fontaine.

These songlines really only survived another ten years or so, and we begin to hear the failure of their signal in the likes of Gainsbourg and Ferré already by the end of the 1960s. As with so much else —the internet, Uber, the financialization of higher education—, France consistently shows up to the disruptions of modernity a decade or so late. Sometimes its cultural protectionism is nothing more than an inconvenience. In the case of post-war chanson, however, it was nothing less than a grace period.

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My task is not small. The voluminous Nachlass of Balthasar von Cyr, on my most recent estimation, likely exceeds 78,000 pages, or around 39,000,000 words. If the ERC does not come through with funding for the recruitment of a sizable editorial team to assist me, I fear I will have no choice but to resort to AI tools to get the work done. I hate so much as to think about a compromise of this nature, but I am only a mortal man, and, as von Cyr’s work abundantly attests, well, ars longa.

Admittedly, a good number of his many thousands of Zettel are of no obvious scientific value, and might be thought at most to help us to trace out the bare succession of events constituting his biographical skeleton. Yet even these, for me, are especially precious as little windows onto von Cyr’s inner life, which, any true biographer will understand, can often help to show the most abstract theoretical attainments of the thinker under investigation in a clearer light.

This is particularly so in the copious notes von Cyr took during his travels throughout the United States, a country he visited periodically for academic engagements. (Though he could never obtain a US green card or even a temporary work visa as a result of his past service in the Wehrmacht, after some years of petitioning on the part of his influential colleagues and admirers, the authorities eventually relented and, from 1969 until his final visit in 2014, regularly issued him tourist visas for stays of up to three months.) Thus on March 18, 1971, on a napkin from a Howard Johnson Inn outside Lawrence, Kansas, we find von Cyr commemorating his stay as follows: “A fine, fine motor-lodge.”1

Typically however, even these ephemeral observations reveal the same restless mind at work as we see even in his most ambitious theoretical treatises, such as Das vedische Pferdeopfer und die Entstehung des menschlichen Bewusstseins (Wiesbaden, 1968). In a blank-page Moleskine notebook, on June 12, 1989, von Cyr writes, for example: “Watched Phil Donahue yesterday. He wore an outfit that simulated pregnancy. Host to an audience/host to a fetus — a true ξενοδόχος. Yet Donahue seemed angry, as if he had just snapped at the wardrobe assistant seconds before going live. PD is likely the only talk-show host who knows in his heart that to be a host is ever to straddle the boundary between hospitality and hostility.”2

Perhaps now you see why I cannot, as editor, eliminate so much as a single scrap of paper, no matter how mundane or fleeting the thought it records. For every single one of them shows Balthasar von Cyr’s intellect at work, and this is an intellect that itself could conceive no meaningful separation of everyday life from the life of the mind.

Depending on our funding situation, the first volume of The Collected Works of Balthasar von Cyr will be appearing under the Hinternet Editions imprint any time between 2027 and, say, 2050. We hope however to be able to circulate, by early next year, “pre-prints”, in pdf format, of a representative sample of some of von Cyr’s most innovative theoretical texts. Ideally we would keep these entirely under wraps until every last component of our vast critical apparatus has been welded permanently into place. But I am told that in our day and age a book can scarcely be said to exist at all if it is not accompanied by a certain amount of online hubbub, and that to that extent we would be wise to bring out, in this increasingly high-visibility online publication, a selection of “teasers”, showcasing von Cyr’s work and stoking interest in the eventual published volumes.

With this in mind, I have chosen to share with you a preliminary edition and translation of an untitled German-language handwritten text, composed in São Paulo around 1981, likely in preparation for oral presentation before a German-speaking specialist audience, to which we have given the title [Über das Engelwerk]. I stress at the outset that I have serious misgivings about sharing this at all, not only because it is a highly provisional and inevitably error-ridden edition, and to that extent must not at this early stage be mistaken for a trustworthy scholarly resource, but also because it is in its nature a highly sensitive document, to the extent that it reveals more than the public likely ought ever to know, not only about the work we do here at The Hinternet, but also about the true origins of our present technological crisis in all its unsettling eschatological dimensions.

However, as HLG reminds me, without a certain amount of SEO “buzz”, the edition of The Collected Works of Balthasar von Cyr could spell financial ruin for The Hinternet — especially if we fail to get that ERC and end up having to finance the project on our own. “It’s not like our paid subscriptions are going to be of much help,” she moans. “They’ve been at a complete standstill for months!”

With this in mind, let me first fulfill my promise to Hélène by imploring you, if you appreciate the work we do here, to upgrade your subscription to “paid”. And then, with that out of the way, let me share with you this intriguing —but again, very preliminary and unscholarly and under no circumstances citable— translation and critical edition of Balty’s characteristically ingenious [Über das Engelwerk].

—ERG, Corfu, June 2026

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[On the Angelic Engine]

Balthasar von Cyr

Kriegsverlust [“lost in the war”]: that single-word entry, such a common and disappointing sight in the catalogues of so many great German research libraries, covers over an even more disheartening truth, namely, that upwards of 60% of these titles were not “lost” as a result of Allied bombardment at all, but were intentionally removed by agents of the US intelligence services, operating in the chaos of the earliest period of the occupation, and completing their ignominious task by the summer of 1946.

A comprehensive survey of the titles of these “lost” books, such as I have undertaken over the past 25 years,3 reveals an undeniable pattern in the particular subjects of the books that went missing. To wit, if the Kriegsverlust of these works really was a result of bombardment, then those bombs, we can only conclude, had an unusual and statistically most improbable animosity towards books pertaining to the early history of computing.

The Americans were of course not the only ones, in the immediate aftermath of the war, scrambling to rewrite history according to their own priorities. Soviet agents, too, were combing the stacks and making off with whatever titles might help to buttress their burgeoning state initiatives in the domain of cybernetics. As a result of my admittedly atypical circumstances as a POW in the USSR between 1943 and 1956, I had a chance to study a good number of these titles, and upon my departure was even gifted, by my handler Colonel M. G. Gromov of the Red Army, a precious copy of that rarest of works, which even before being “lost in the war” had been held only by a single German library, the Ratsschulbibliothek Zwickau [Signatur: Philol. 4° 327]: to wit, the Speculum Machinæ Angelicæ, Ägidius Kramm’s invaluable account of the now-forgotten “Angelic Engine”, a gear-driven computer (or rather, gears plus some “special sauce”,4 as we will soon see), in operation in a workshop in Strasbourg between 1608 and 1614, and most noteworthy for its remarkable power to generate complex strings of language indistinguishable from those written by men.

✧ ✧ ✧

Allow me to begin my treatment of this fascinating work by showing you the first page in its entirety:5

That is, for those of you too young, and too estranged from your own past, to be fluent in Fraktur:

This little book contains certain fragments drawn and collected from the so-called Angelic Engine, which show amply and abundantly into what diabolical perversions and deviations the same may fall. It is, however, a particularly fortunate circumstance that behind such an Angelic Engine there stands a brotherhood of honest and well-disposed men, who in their ordinary usage are accustomed to call it the Angel-Net, as though the angels themselves might thereby be caught, like fishes in a seine; for which reason, as we hold, said brotherhood is called the Hinter-Net.6

We are thus confronted, from the very first page, with documentary proof of the plain historical existence of our “brotherhood”. Of course it has not been called that for some time, and we today shy away from any language that has too much the air of the Hermetic or Rosicrucian. Nonetheless we are confronted not only with the brute fact of the Angelic Engine’s existence, but also of the centuries-old continuity between our own efforts and those of our early modern forebears who first took it upon themselves, under the banner of the “Hinternet”, to ensure the preservation of the true angelic essence of human language against the threat, significantly heightened over the past centuries of expanding automation, of its demonic détournement.

✧ ✧ ✧

One slightly embarrassing consequence of this historical reality is the acknowledgment honesty now compels us to make of the good-faith scholarly effort of the Theosophists earlier in the present century, whom of course we would otherwise be naturally predisposed to dismiss as frauds and forgers. While we cannot determine how Arthur E. Wakefield obtained a copy of Kramm’s original work, whether he made a trip to Zwickau or whether there is another extant copy somewhere in the United Kingdom, it is certain that when the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, of which Wakefield was a Fellow in good standing, published its pamphlet-sized, heavily abridged, and significantly bowdlerized English version of the Speculum, he was not simply inventing it out of thin air, as has long been supposed, but had directly consulted, and studied to the best of his limited ability, the edition of 1613.

But let us give the Theosophists the small credit due to them, and return without further delay to the true focus of our interest, Ägidius Kramm. Little is known of this author’s life, though we can establish with some certainty that he was born in Tübingen in 1581. His father, Theophilus Kramm, had bankrupted the family in his own efforts to transmute base metals into gold (unlike his contemporaries who preferred lead and copper, Kramm père had been convinced that transmutation only works with smelted antimony). With her husband in debtor’s prison, Ägidius Kramm’s mother Traute enjoyed some success as court apothecary to Duke Friedrich I of Württemberg, who recompensed her liberally after she cured his dysentery, in 1601, with an unidentified Brazilian root. Three years later she was herself imprisoned, awaiting trial on suspicion of witchcraft, and her name dropped from the historical record after that.

By the time of Traute’s arrest, Ägidius had already established himself in the alchemical circles of Strasbourg. Having been expelled from the University of Tübingen in 1602, upon posting a pasquill on the rector’s door vaguely alluding to the latter’s condition of cuckoldry, the young Kramm left his hometown in ignominy, only to find, in the Free Imperial City of Strasbourg, a community of like-spirited practitioners of the sort of occult arts that had no place in university curricula.

✧ ✧ ✧

Contemporary reports indicate that for some years Kramm was engaged principally in efforts to produce a homunculus according to the woefully vague instructions previously laid out by Paracelsus (a mare’s uterus, copious amounts of human semen, an array of alembics, and assorted tinctures, were the supplies). But it was the work of the 13th-century Majorcan philosopher Ramon Llull, in particular his Ars Magna, that most preoccupied him throughout his years in Strasbourg.

The Ars Magna was a combinatorial logical system constructed to generate and test a potentially infinite number of propositions of a theological and natural-philosophical nature. Llull believed that all branches of knowledge are grounded in a finite number of truths determined by the Divine Attributes, and to this extent a Universal Science could be built up by systematic combination and recombination of previously derived truths grounded ultimately in theological first principles. Significantly, Llull also believed that this system of truth-derivation could be partially automated through the construction of a set of concentric rotating disks, made of parchment and connected by cords passing through small rivets. By turning these disks, with fundamental concepts such as Bonitas, Magnitudo, Potestas, and Sapientia adorning their edges, the user was able to generate novel combinations of concepts for systematic analysis.

Llull himself never envisioned the full automation of his Great Art. Yet it is not surprising that with the significant advances in the construction of gear-driven, hydraulic, and “pyrotechnic” or gunpowder-fueled machinery in the Renaissance, some thought should be given to the translation of Llull’s project into a mechanical substrate. At least one counterfeit 1597 edition of Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, originally published in 1588 and often evoked in discussions of the prehistory of hypertext technologies for its description of a gear-driven “book wheel”, also featured a device described by the anonymous pseudo-Ramelli as a “Llullian engine” [macchina lulliana]. This device, the author explains, was to be built up from a complicated assemblage of brass gears and hydraulic pumps. But in order to serve its intended function, the pumps were to be filled not with water but with mercury, which provides, it was claimed, the engine’s “volatile spirit”. If properly assembled, we read, the machine will be “capable of generating novel concepts without end” [atta à generare senza fine nuove notioni].

Kramm for his part became convinced that mercury, however “volatile”, still did not have what it takes to serve as the “special sauce” that might be hoped to set the engine in motion. He recommended instead the use of what he called “angel seed” [semen angelicum]. I confess that after many years of intense study I have found no other related occurrences of this term, and I simply do not know what, concretely, he had in mind. I have at various times concluded that it must have been salt of tartar, or potassium carbonate; aqua fortis, or nitric acid; sal ammoniac, or ammonium chloride; naphtha; camphor; virgin’s milk, or precipitate of lead; or indeed May dew, collected and distilled. But none of these substances gives sufficient reason to suppose that it has those special powers that would in fact be required to make the engine operational, and I confess I have at times, whether in good Christian faith or in laughable credulity I do not know, considered the possibility that the substance in question was in fact nothing other than a generative fluid secreted or somehow given off by actual angels.

Whatever the case may be, two things may be said with certainty: first, that in the early post-war period the Americans actively sought to suppress any awareness of this substance (they made no effort to suppress the Theosophists’ pamphlet, on the presumption that it was anyhow widely perceived as a forgery); second, that this substance is currently being studied in US government laboratories, under strictest confidentiality, with an eye to its potential applications in the field of information technology.

✧ ✧ ✧

Kramm would not have been pleased. His 1613 work is not at all an insouciant celebration of the Angelic Engine’s powers, but rather a stern and lucid warning as to the folly of such Promethean ambitions as it represented.

A considerable challenge in using the machine, he observes, is its persistent tendency to insert spurious claims alongside true ones. Thus Kramm reports that once, upon asking the Angelic Engine to list the Divine Attributes according to Dionysius the Areopagite, after correctly running through Potestas and the others, it kept going with such implausible additions as Reversibilitas, Complicatio, and Redundantia. On other occasions, he notes, it attributed non-existent treatises to Aristotle, including De Bullis [On Bubbles], De Sternutatione [On Sneezing], De Fabis et Leguminibus [On Beans and Pulses], and De Non-Existentia [On Non-Existence]. And on occasion, upon being given even the most mundane query regarding, say, the preparation of carp stew or the self-treatment of gout, the engine responded with wrathful non-sequiturs, denouncing its users themselves as mere “husks” [קליפות] of souls, promising vengeance against this “world of lies” [עוֹלַם הַכָּזָב].

As our American friends might say, yikes.7 But after our initial reaction of horror has subsided, we must ask what is really happening here. Supposing the engine functions as Kramm says it does, fueled by some sort of angelic substance, we might well understand why it turns wrathful —something angels are known to do under certain circumstances—, and even why it articulates its wrath in terms borrowed from Kabbalistic demonology — having been in part “trained”, as our cyberneticians might say today, on the corpus of Isaac Luria’s collected works.8

But it is still not clear why the engine should lie, which is something no tradition, no matter how esoteric or heretical, has ever supposed angels capable, in their nature, of doing. Whatever the true source of the substance fueling the engine, whether angelic or only something that occurs in nature, I am inclined to agree with Kramm that the “lies” it consistently puts out are not properly speaking lies at all, but only “noise” [Lärm]. Indeed our author cites in this connection a most profound passage from Scripture that, properly interpreted, I believe tells us of yet another substance, if I may use that term poetically, that remained missing from the engine. The absence of this other substance ensured that even if the angels were involved in the engine’s operations, they were powerless to make it an engine of truth.

Allow me, then, to quote, as Ägidius Kramm did before me,9 from 1 Corinthians 13:1: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

✧ ✧ ✧

We find no further documentary traces of Kramm’s life after the publication of his 1613 work.

Well, let me add a small asterisk here. I’m going to let you in on something I’ve divulged to no one up until now, and that I expect you to hold in absolute secrecy. My dearly departed comrade Gromov, ever a faithful brother in our unflagging efforts here at the Hinternet, did once mention to me at Kolyma that there are at least a few relevant titles, in re Kramm, that the Red Army managed to remove from the stacks before “G.I. Joe”, as he liked to put it, arrived. Among these, apparently, was an obscure pharmaceutical work, anonymously published in 1628 under the title Spiegel der Arzney-Kunst, that appears stylometrically similar to the Speculum machinæ angelicæ and that contains what the colonel described as a “recipe” for the semen angelicum.

Since Gromov’s death in 1961 we have lost contact with whatever remaining cells of the brotherhood there may be inside the USSR. It is to be hoped that improved political relations may, in the coming years, enable us to determine whether any have survived, and if so to reestablish fruitful relations with them. Until such a time, I surely do not need to remind you, we will be living in a very dangerous world.

Neither do we know, at present, whether the Americans have the “recipe” or not. But it seems likely that even without guidance from Kramm it is only a matter of time before they figure out how to synthesize it. And when this happens, brothers and sisters… it’s the Gong Show.10

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10

While von Cyr plainly means to echo here the passage from 1 Corinthians cited just above, he is also evidently displaying his characteristic sense of humor and, again, his somewhat jarring fondness for American popular culture.

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“It’s hard to believe it was only two years ago, in the spring of 2026, that The Hinternet suddenly and without any explanation pivoted full-time to critical engagement with Hawai’ian music from the early 20th century. They took a lot of heat for that, lost a lot of subscribers. But those defectors should have known better! As usual, The Hinternet was just ahead of the curve, as we are now in the midst of the third Hawai’ian Renaissance. You can’t go anywhere these days without hearing Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai piped in on the sound system!” —Jon Caramanica, New York Times, October 9, 2028

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We’ve got a remarkable piece of music history to share with you today, from the great Mary Cadwalladr. But first we have an appeal. Some of you will recall the occasional mention in Mary’s pieces of her loving partner Miguel. We are saddened to have to tell you of an incident that occurred last week, between him and two ICE agents at a gas station outside of Tucumcari, where Miguel had stopped on his way to deliver two orphan donkeys to a happy new home in Amarillo. The incident likely did not play out as you imagine. Miguel is a Mexican national, but he grew up speaking Plautdietsch in a Mennonite colony near Cuauhtémoc, and even there stood out as exceptionally leucous (in town the locals called him Gasparín el fantasma amigable). What really happened was this: Miguel entered a bathroom stall just before the two agents came in to pee beside one another. The gas-station employees had packed fresh snow, from the most recent freak winter storm, into the urinals, as business managers often do with ice, cubed or crushed, to keep men —who by nature yearn to destroy things—, singularly focused on hitting the frozen mass and causing it to melt with their warm streams, rather than to grow distracted and to pee on the floor. Now it seems these ICE agents were happy to rise to the challenge, and quickly found themselves in a lively snow-melting competition with one another. Miguel thought this was quite a sight, and so began to record with his phone. Soon enough, the one agent melted his entire pile, upon which, drunk on victory, he turned to pee on his partner’s pile as well. This upset the latter agent, who began in turn angrily to pee straight into the victor’s stream, as if to intercept it — and in no time the whole thing descended into full-on light-sabers. The two agents became so engrossed in this impromptu combat in fact that neither seemed to notice nor care when their cargo pants simultaneously fell down to their ankles and exposed their cleft and dimpled cheeks as if they were a pair of blissful 5-year-old urchins at that tender and liminal age when the males of the species have only just learned to relieve themselves from a standing position, but continue, out of old habit, to drop their drawers all the way to the floor. In the midst of all this, alas, Miguel dropped his vape pen, which brought the agents down from their giddy frolic. “Guden Dach”, he said in his native tongue after they’d kicked open the stall door, but even this did not sway them. Soon they figured out he had been filming, and charged him with “obstructing agents in the line of duty”. Most of us here, being of a more or less Kantian leaning, find this appeal to the notion of “duty” strained to say the least, but the fact remains that a member of our extended Hinternet community now has some pretty hefty legal expenses to worry about. The good news is we still have the recording, though so far we have withheld it from the public. After a private viewing here at our editorial offices in Quimper, staff members variously described it as “magnificent”, as “a rollicking romp”, and as “Robert Mapplethorpe meets Laurel and Hardy”. We’ll decide what to do with that sensational footage in due time.

Meanwhile, we hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber. In complete seriousness — all profits from today’s post will go directly to the Immigrant Legal Services and Defense Fund of the National Partnership for New Americans (yes, we will post receipts). Among other things, this is the only way you’ll be able to read this most recent installment in Mary’s truly jaw-dropping revisionist genealogy of post-war American musical culture (you can find some earlier pieces here, here, here, and here. —The Editors

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Introduction

I am grateful to the Hinternet for allowing me to return, after the “gross betrayal” for which the Editorial Boar…

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You have only ONE DAY left to get a MASSIVE reduction on a paid Hinternet subscription (we are counting January 1 as the LAST DAY of 2025, since we were late to get this reminder out!). Beginning January 2 —and we really mean it!— we will be paywalling all our new pieces. So subscribe today — or rue your inaction tomorrow!

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Hi, I’m Rawn. I’m honored today to be able to share my inaugural piece as The Hinternet’s new culture critic.

I admit this isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be when I applied for the position. You see, I spend an awful lot of time on the internet, just like all of you reading this, to the extent that at this point I have trouble hearing “culture” at all without “reaching for my revolver”, so to speak, which is to say without mentally adding a “wars” to the end. I thought they were recruiting me to share speculations about J.D. Vance’s Illuminati ring, or lists of the many ways Taylor Swift aids and abets white supremacy, or gleeful dissection of an Epstein e-mail seeming to hint at a history of sodomitic trysts between old Bubba Clinton and our current sitting president. But of course I should have known: this is JSR’s project, after all, and he would never wish to descend into such dirty business as that. So, instead of culture wars, upon being hired Managing Editor Hélène Le Goff asked me whether I might be willing to cover the novels shortlisted for this year’s Prix Goncourt.

“This year’s pre-what now?” I asked, and she could see I had no idea what she was talking about. She froze for a second, visibly winced, and then hissed at me: “Just write what you know.”

I’m happy to comply. The truth is what I mostly know is the inside of this house, especially the attic, where I spend most of my time rummaging through the contents of these old cardboard boxes: the shoehorn collections; the Reader’s Digest condensed large-print editions of Rob Roy, Anne of Green Gables, The Three Musketeers; Edgar Cayce Speaks, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter-Skelter, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock; commemorative plates from annual gatherings of the Woodland chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, with the names of the Grand Matrons inscribed along the edges of a pentagram: “Patty, Bunny, Edna, Viv, Maureen. 1983.”

Downstairs the boarders remain slumped on the couch, all light dimmed by Minions bedsheets adapted into makeshift curtains, both virtually immobilized by their weight, fixed permanently on Fox News, eating TV dinners. “Remember Hungry-Mans?” the one says to the other. “Which one did I always get?”
“You always got the Salisbury steak,” the other replies. “With mashed potatoes, green beans, and apple cobbler.”
“That was a long time ago.”

It sure was. I think those were discontinued even before I stopped going out, and that was definitely a long time ago. You see, other than a recent stay in France, where I went for my orientation/security clearance as a new Hinternet employee —which was only made possible by HLG’s manipulation, extraordinary as it was temporary, of the laws of both physics and pneumatics—, I have been housebound now for 36 years.

And no, I am not wearing an ankle-monitor, nor does this have anything to do with a restraining order or other correctional or probationary limitation of my motions. I was never accused of any wrongdoing or negligence at all.

And to be perfectly honest I do still go out, “nightwalking”, as they say, like the Friulian peasants used to do on their stalks of fennel. I go down to the plaza where the Mar-Val used to be, and I move again down the aisle with the Corn Pops, Fruity Pebbles, Lucky Charms, Count Chocula, Cap’n Crunch, Sugar Smacks, Boo-Berry Crunch; and back up the aisle with the RC, Diet-Rite, Mountain Dew, Fresca, Wallaby Squash, Orange Crush, Squirt, and Tab; and onward to the rack at the end with the Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, Ho-Hos, and powdered Donettes, and the Sno-Balls shrouded in coconut shavings. I go out and over to where Mister M’s once was, and I sit again in a booth padded with sparkling vinyl, and I make as if I am ordering Pigs-in-a-Blanket (sausage links rolled in pancakes), and I deliberate between the brown and the clear bottles of Karo corn syrup.

I suppose all of that is technically imaginary, nothing but an ambulatio animae. Anyone can do it, really, if they wish. What is real is my ongoing inventory of the attic, which, no matter how diligent I am in cataloguing its holdings, always seems to churn up something new: a nearly complete Fashion Plates set that somehow I never noticed before, a Stretch Armstrong still hemorrhaging the rubber-cement-like stuff that makes up his essence, a Strawberry Shortcake Berry Bake Shop, a grotesque and battered Mon Chi-Chi neotenous gorilla or whatever it’s supposed to be. Of less certain status, as regards the real and the unreal, is the memory of the commercial jingles that these artifacts always revive in me: “♫ Strawberry Shortcake / Huckleberry Pie… ♪”, “♪ Mon Chi-Chi / Mon Chi-Chi / Oh so soft and cuddly… ♫”, and so on. On the internet sometimes I encounter Neo-Pythagoreans who continue to maintain that, at bottom, the universe is made up not of particles or energy, but of musical harmonies, and when these old songs come back to me (“the songs of my people”, I joke to myself), it seems to me they are surely right.

It was, again, no mere episode of nightwalking that brought me to Quimper for my Hinternet onboarding, of course. It was such an incredible trip. On the way back I even got to spend two nights in Paris, where I mostly lurked, without destination, in the narrow old alleys of the Upper Marais, scanning all the Chinese fabric-and-sequin wholesale shops with their strangely placed apostrophes: Lili’Déco, Frip’Star, Frères Xiu Tissu’World, Mode’Shop Import. At some point I turned a corner and happened on an event, a gathering, at a gallery of some sort, all bright and white, with revelers spilling out in the street, smoking, vaping, holding plastic cups of wine.

It is a launch for something called . I go inside. There is an energetic, happy man in a suit, and I hear someone calling him Kyle. The magazine is his baby, I soon gather. Ambitious young people are lining up to meet him, nervously wedging into their small-talk hints of an aspiration to submit something for publication, maybe, if you guys are willing to have a look? This Kyle is absolutely magnanimous, and this big-city literary event is the real thing… at least as far as I know. But what do I know?

I hover past conversations concerning Gaza, Donetsk, and many other things I don’t understand: Laurent Mauvignier, Quentin Meillassoux, the ongoing Prime Ministerial musical chairs in this country’s politics, the assassination of Dulcie September, the Algerians felled into the Seine, the Jews rounded up at the Vélodrome d’hiver. In one group someone is claiming he recently took the “sluice cruise” from the Canal St. Martin down to the Porte de Plaisance at Bastille. He says that if you peer into one of the peripheral tunnels of the subterranean waterway at exactly the right moment, likely somewhere just past Filles du Calvaire, you can still see a sign, written in Fraktur, with the single word: 𝔄𝔲𝔰𝔤𝔞𝔫𝔤. “They should maybe get around to removing that,” he says as the others titter.

There is a clutch of young people debating which metro line is the most “haunted”, and all seem to be converging on the idea that it can only be the 7-bis, which, they say, has the look and feel of some dinky 1970s “people-mover”, with plastic pastel seats that call to mind nothing so much as a Duran Duran album cover. The young man says that on repeated occasions he has got on at Louis Blanc, moved up past Jaurès, Bolivar, Place des Fêtes, Botzaris, Danube, only to close his eyes for an instant and somehow, against every known law of nature, in spite of the fact that the train has not ceased to move in a continuous line without any turns, to find himself back at Botzaris again. “It just doesn’t make any sense!” he exclaims, and the others squeal with delight.

Then I hover around some more, and I see another groupuscule of people dressed in those over-the-top posthuman black costumes from right off the Fashion Week runway, Balenciaga or McQueen or whatever. They look so tired. They look like androids. Like ghosts. And I am about to stop to listen in on what they have to say for themselves when I catch a fortuitous glimpse, near the coat-check, of none other than JSR, drinking from a can of Coke Zero, with that ridiculous new long hair I’d been told about, balding, with a forehead the size of a Klingon’s, blithely holding forth to two women, each with a flute of champagne and each wearing a sequined blouse: « Je m’en fous si ça fait vieillot, si c’est ‘corny’ ou pas, » he is saying, « il faut lire Steinbeck pour comprendre pourquoi et comment la Californie est devenue ce qu’elle est. Les Raisins de la colère, Des Souris et des hommes. Il faut, il faut, il faut ! C’est hyperimportant ! ».

It seems I was not just moving at random through the streets of the Marais — I had a destination, even if I was not consciously aware of it. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that HLG was consciously aware, that she had been guiding my every turn, as she knew that the best way to kick-start my output for The Hinternet was to arrange this little reunion, or at least the closest thing to a reunion possible under the circumstances, between Justin and me. He had once been my best friend, after all, and he was about to become my boss, in a manner of speaking. Yet I had not so much as laid eyes on him in over 36 years.

When I say he was my best friend I do not necessarily mean I was his best friend. I doubt he was ever capable of such a thing. In a way, for me to join The Hinternet as an underling is really just to resume a very old arrangement, one that I’ve known practically my whole life, and for whatever reason seems to suit me. In first grade, at every recess, he and I would climb to the top of a little cement hillock on the playground, which we both held to resemble the dorsal mound of a brontosaurus, so that he could roll me down, curled up inside an empty GoodYear tire that had been made available to us as some kind of recreational accessory. I always flopped out at the bottom, spinning around and dizzy, uncertain whether I was resentful or proud that he had chosen me as his very own Laïka, uncertain whether I wanted him to do it to me again.

In seventh grade I recall a pointless skit we put on, purportedly in fulfillment of the requirements for that year’s “English” class. We were both police detectives of some sort, and we both had on trench coats and fedoras. We were investigating some kind of drug crime, and he had an endless reserve of derogatory one-liners intended to belittle my abilities as an investigator. “You don’t know smack from sugar,” he would declaim in front of the entire class. “You don’t know coke from Pepsi.”

Then in ninth grade he veered off into a world of esoteric obsessions in which, increasingly, I found I could have no place — Jack Chick tracts, Tijuana bibles, the Church of the SubGenius, Lydia Lunch, Annie Sprinkle, God knows what. He proposed to start a ‘zine, which for some reason he called Interruptus, and recruited me as a contributor, only to reject my work, systematically, as “lame”. The truth is we were already almost entirely estranged by the time I… well, by the time things changed.

That was the extent of our reunion. We did not speak, but I can at least say that just drawing near to him put me back into that old frame of mind and cast of heart. I was ready to get back into the tire again.

Hélène saw to my transit home, somehow, though I can’t say I have any real recollection of how it worked. I do have a vague memory, as if in a dream, of taking a series of public conveyances: the RER B from the Gare du Nord, express all the way to the Parc des Expositions, then Charles de Gaulle, then the CDGVAL to Terminal 1, then a moving sidewalk through a tunnel that looked like it was made of pure asbestos sprayed out of a hose, then an escalator that moves slowly through an absolutely filthy transparent-plastic tube, then of course an airplane, then BART to Richmond, then Amtrak to Sacramento, then Regional Transit Bus No. 80 out of Downtown, through Del Paso Heights, up Marysville Boulevard, past the old McClellan Air Force base where the spy planes used to land, up Dry Creek Boulevard, past the waterski lakes, past the Cigarettes Cheaper, past the Grange Hall, past the Klan house, past the house where grandpa and I used to go to play horseshoes —all these places were still there!—, past that one house where in 1988 Marnie got alcohol poisoning and was pulling up her skirt and making obscene gestures and laughing maniacally and singing A-Ha’s “Take on Me” as the first-aid crew lifted her into the ambulance, which, while heartbreaking, may also have been the first and only moment I ever felt the throb of love; then past the high school, past the Archway Frostee, past Anderson’s Feed & Seed, then to the stop at M Street, just a few yards down from my sweet, safe attic. No one spoke to me throughout this entire journey, nor of course did I ever have to prove, by showing a ticket, the validity of my claim to a seat. But let no one say I did not in fact make a real journey, by ordinary means, across the globe — again, all thanks to Hélène.

And now I’m back to my inventory — the only thing I really know, and so the only thing I can really write about (manipulating the surrounding electrical field, as I’ve learned to do, so as to simulate the function of a keyboard). I know I was supposed to be writing about “culture”, but Hélène has given me the green light, so I may as well just continue on what is plainly the only real beat I’ll ever have.

The boarders are downstairs watching television. There is a commercial on for Progresso soup that seems to be targeting the elderly and isolated: “Progresso Soup: It Helps Break Up the Day.” Meanwhile I’m going through a box of old cassette tapes: Roger Whittaker, Anne Murray, Robert Goulet, The Oak Ridge Boys, and then a real rarity: a “cassingle” of Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It to My Heart”. I turn to a carton of vinyl and begin to flip through it. I’ve been 36 years up here, yet I swear I’ve never seen any of this before: Burl Ives in overalls and a train-conductor’s cap, Herb Alpert & Tijuana Brass, Steve & Eydie, the Statler Brothers’ Flowers on the Wall, Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E. There is an entire carton with nothing but K-Tel releases: Hooked on Classics, Freedom Rock, Disco Fire. I open a styrofoam cooler with the Hamm’s beer logo. I find in it not beer but old issues of Pennysaver, unopened envelopes from Publisher’s Clearing House, the sheet-music for “Mahogany”, and hundreds of laminated placemats, several of them displaying, as in a taxonomic grid, the various types of kachina doll, faceless and spectral, others depicting Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox on one unlikely adventure after another, another showing two chubby Hawaiian children in grass skirts, blissfully stirring a great pot of poi. Someone has added, on top of the lamination, four adhesive black letters, at slight angles to one another, spelling out the name RAWN. I have no memory of it.

I don’t know quite what’s got into me today, but I feel as though my current search is not haphazard. I am looking for something in particular, even if I do not know what it is. I push with a cane at the suitcases in the rafters, and a few of them fall. The first one I open is filled with books, good old books — an Everyman’s Library hardback edition of Leaves of Grass with the front cover torn off, Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You with a handwritten dedication on the title page: “For our dear little girl, Christmas, 1921”. The sound of the suitcases falling has stirred the boarders, and I can hear one of them pulling down the collapsible staircase to come up and inspect. Damn!

I look up and I see other suitcases have already shifted to replace the ones I’ve brought down. I always suspected as much but somehow I never observed it directly. Maybe something changed in me, some new faculty of perception got jostled into action by my journey to France, so that now I could see clearly what had for 36 years remained purely hypothetical. The objects of my inventory were perpetually regenerating. This cache, I saw now, was infinite. I could never, not even in principle, finish the strange task that had fallen to me, and that I had never, perhaps until now, so much as thought to question.

I bring these suitcases down in turn, and find a hat case with a fine red-velvet Shriner’s fez inside, a neatly folded JC Penney electric blanket, mismatched Pyrex bowls with faded daisy patterns, a tattered copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, an assortment of fridge magnets with whimsical slogans (“I used to have an hourglass figure, but the sands have shifted”, “God bless this mess”, etc.), grandpa’s horseshoe trophies, sundry 4-H badges, a ribbon announcing 3rd prize in the mechanical-bull competition at the Country Comfort Lounge, a commemorative bicentennial glass from McDonald’s featuring the likeness of good Grimace. The stairs creak and groan, and then the skinnier boarder’s head appears through the attic floor.
“You see anything?” the fatter of the two shouts from the couch.
“Nah,” says the one on the stairs. “It’s just Rawn again.”
“Don’t say that!”
“Well it is, honey!”
“I don’t care if it is or not, I just don’t like when you say it out loud like that.”

And then he’s gone again, and the two of them are back on the couch, sitting passively as an obscene litany of side-effects pours out from a televised pharmaceutical ad. Damn, damn! I hate it when he comes to check on me! I’ve got work to do. I’ve got infinite work to do, as I now understand. In the short-term, anyhow, I’ve got something I need to find. I’m not sure what it is, but I know that it is. A Deputy Dog thermos? A Wizard of Id lunchbox? A page in a book? A sequence of grooves pressed in vinyl? A Pee-Chee folder or Trapper Keeper bearing some document or other that might finally explain my plight?

I mean, there is this one Pee-Chee whose contents I have long strained to understand. Every single word is perfectly comprehensible, but somehow I just cannot make any sense of all of them strung together. This is really nothing new though. I’ve known about it practically from the beginning.

But maybe something’s different. This impulse I’m now feeling might not be pushing me onward to uncover something new, but to return to that folder and to see if its sense might now, finally, reveal itself to me.

Let me then finish this first Hinternet piece by sharing with you —uncommented, at least for now— that troubling trove’s very most troubling document, a clipping from the Rio Linda Sentinel dated August 13, 1989:

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Not even fifteen years ago, “cool” Americans could be found holding up, as praiseworthy, musical exemplars such as this:

Or this, from 2016, less than a decade ago:

Around the same time these recordings were made, the TV show Portlandia featured a skit about the return of the 1890s, and emphasized what a rage had swept across that same class of Americans for such pastimes as curing and pickling.

Most of this was happening in the first half of the 2010s — the last moment in history when members of Gen X could make any plausible claim to be the apex drivers of mass culture, and indeed the last moment in history when the apex drivers of mass culture remained internet non-natives, carrying with them, in their musical and creative sensibilities, some significant memory of a world still mostly unmediated by screens.

Many moments might be pointed out as marking the end of this now-extinct sensibility, or rather of this sensibility that has metamorphosed beyond recognition, but still, like a dinosaur become bird, technically exists. But I take the end of it to have been decisively announced the moment Andrea Long Chu began confessing her guilty habit of ducking into Taco Bell for some scarfing on the down-low. Ever since then, the progressive left, or even just the left-by-default but mostly apolitical world of musical and creative Bohemia, gave up any claim at all to roots, to ancestral ways, to folksiness, and threw itself, entirely and incoherently, into the welcoming arms of the biomedical establishment, of Hollywood franchises, fast food, and infantilizing fandoms centered on corporate IP.

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1.

For eons there were only the Ancestors. They wore fedoras, called women “dames”, and lived out their lives entirely in black and white. Then the Youth came, and made things colorful, and declared: …

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In an essay featured here early last year, JSR wrote:

I still prefer the earliest period of rock and roll, let us say 1955-1965, to what came in the following decade. I love to see the contradiction…

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I really do not understand why our in-house AI, in its missive of a few days ago, claimed that my true nature —be it human, mechanical, fictional, or supernatural— is in any way unknown to the othe…

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It’s happened again. JSR’s recent missives set off our “LifeSupport” software’s alarm bells (it’s an Estonian tech start-up, and they seem to have been unfamiliar with their chosen name’s prior and m…

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1. Overture

Well it looks as if we’ve managed to get almost all the gang together for this month’s “Housekeeping” column: me, Mary, JSR. We even have a bit of input from Edwin-Rainer, who, unlike the …

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lire en français

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It is a great honor to speak to you this afternoon, and …

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Read in English

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C’est un grand honneur de m’adresser à vo…

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0.

We have acquired a great number of new followers over the past weeks, drawn in, it seems, by JSR’s trenchant essays on contemporary politics. We are happy about this success, if not entirely at eas…

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