PRELUDE

Troy Schafer

Transcribed from a spoken conversation with Felipe Rodríguez

ES

For me, the challenge was in that big, overarching word: darkness. I needed to think broadly on the theme and also on a personal level, to rein myself in, thinking about light as a backdrop to darkness and how we wouldn’t be aware of one without the other.

I considered archetypes of light and darkness. Jung is hip in the art world now, I know, but he does provide a good framework to begin to structure one’s thoughts. 

I considered darkness and light in union, first in a personal way, then in a psychic sense and then, on a spiritual level, rather than in scientific terms. It can be difficult for me to find inspiration there, though the rigor of science can be motivating. There are some great audiobook-style recordings of lectures given by Rudolf Steiner on spiritual science, in which he encourages students to approach religion or life from that angle. 

Looking inward, I searched for darkness and light as polarities in my life. I found recurring memories that weren’t my own. Memories that were not from my own experiences. I believe they were types of ancestral possession, genetic memories, and unresolved shadows. Common themes wove in and out. Alcohol/Algol is one, liquor and alcohol played a heavy hand, and also Fire, the two overlap.

When I was a little boy, I would have these visits from another boy… I should start… before I get into that…I grew up under the same roof, in a fairly strict Catholic household. When I was a little boy I was often visited by the spirit of another child about my age. My bedroom was haunted and I experienced all kinds of poltergeist activity. I’d wake up to marbles rolling across the hardwood floor, marbles I’d never seen before. Though at the time I was an only child, I slept in a bunk bed, always on the bottom bunk. I recall hearing rustling above me and when I turned on the lights, there were visible signs that someone had been lying in the top bunk, an outline of a little body. I remember being able to see imprints of fingers and feet, though nobody ever slept there. 

My parents remodeled that entire house, just gutted the whole thing in its original form. When they took the siding off, I remember finding all these old newspapers in place of proper insulation. The papers were local and I found articles about how the house had previously caught fire. A little boy had suffocated to death. I assumed he died in the closet of my bedroom because in the attic above my room they rebuilt the roof and there were still scorched beams and ash all over, like there had been a bad fire. Strange occurrences happened in that closet. Things would fall off the shelves all the time and I’d often hear movement. 

I think I told you about the violin I play. It was involved in the suspicious death of my great-great grandfather and my great-great uncle, and now I have that violin.

During prohibition, my great-great uncle ran a whiskey still in Pickerel, Wisconsin. Supposedly, the liquor was quite good. John Dillinger frequented the family farm to purchase my family’s booze. My grandmother told stories about seeing his car pull up the long driveway as a young girl, and she’d jump in a ditch and hide because she thought he’d shoot her with a machine gun [laughing]. My great-great uncle played fiddle at the bar, to entertain guests. He was supposed to be tending to the still but one night he got drunk and fell asleep. The still blew up and the bar burned down. He died in the fire, but the fiddle was saved from the wreckage. On occasion, I taste whiskey and feel the liquid in my mouth as I play the instrument. 

It was my great-great grandfather, who immigrated from Germany, who originally purchased the instrument while working as the captain of a fishing boat on Lake Michigan. At night when his crew slept in their quarters, he’d sit on the deck, drinking whisky and playing lullabies on the violin. One night the music stopped abruptly and when they went to check on him, he’d vanished. The death certificate states that he drowned, but they never found his body. They did find the violin, placed very neatly at the edge of the boat. 

That violin is a physical manifestation of light that has come through my lineage, and now, it’s in my possession. The score that I sent you was written on rubbings from the floor of my old closet, where the boy died. They are uneven, as you can see, but generally the staves are the angles of the floorboards and the notation is made up of scribbles from my son, who was playing there. The piano performance is an interpretation of that score. 

I’m thinking about the piano as a compositional tool; it has that archetypal quality to it. The pianist as a composer and that dusty old piano as a way to drop into these memories. That was how I chose the instrumentation. The voice, the narrator that I chose, was a friend of mine who’s vocal quality most closely resembled the sound in my mind. 

There’s a tape loop in there. My intention was to represent a clock, you can hear the time in it. I made a loop from a small segment of a reel I found in the garbage of our town’s historical society. Unaware of the contents of the reel, I randomly cut a piece of tape to make the loop. It has a little pop that indicates fire…

I could just point to cultural things, but that is something that I’m resisting. The last time I spoke with you we kind of talked about how I’m trying to shut out a lot of culture, because I think it’s a form of conditioning. Most popular culture is inevitable. Well, I would say all of it at this point. I think of the idea –you mentioned it, with the dark web folks that are going to be doing something for the magazine– of a Luddite, or someone who is against technology, but also the culture at large. I get a sense of that, which can be thought of as shutting out of a certain type of light, but it’s interesting.

I can see your concern regarding this project, and especially our past conversations. For me personally, I think you have to go inward. The only way out is to go in. The soul has to land, and it has not landed. The moment we die is the moment our bodies come closest to this. Maybe the attempt to be embodied is the only way to individuate and transcend. I’m always outside of myself; it’s very easy to be floating out there, but it doesn’t really seem... I don’t know... 

The devil is a dragon who devours the stars out of the sky. There’s a lake in his gullet where those stars are fireflies. Pursue them to light the way out of this world. They say that if our eyes were made slightly different than they are, we’d see flames of fire pour out of our mouths.