Sky before New Orleans, July 2013

Supersymmetry

In the order of Arcade Fire’s newest album, Reflektor, two songs come last: “Afterlife” and “Supersymmetry.” Given the lyrics and the three music videos that have emerged for the song since the album’s debut, it seems clear that “Afterlife” is about the emotional chaos that ensues after the initial realization that the external source of selfhood and meaning is either insufficient or subject to change-- literal death of the body or the strange, unclosed death of the end of a relationship. The voice of the singer in “Afterlife” demands to “want to know” if the great dualistic wounds of the battle waged by awakened desire can be “worked out.”

The music from one song fades into the other in a continuous euphony, and the opening lines of “Supersymmetry” conjure acceptance of loss and the feeling of difference:

“I know you’re living in my mind;

it’s not the same as being alive.”  

From there, the singer describes a year in which a man/woman lives in a bed and reads, apparently trying to fill up on new stories to recover from the cleaving of the self from the self.

In his article “The Awakening of Desire in the Classical Musical Work,” Robert McKay expands on Kierkegaard’s three phases of life by going beyond the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious to hint at a fourth stage-- a stage of desire that moves beyond desire itself, and that attempts to answer the questions of what happens to desire when its object in the world-- its love-- is lost.

What happens to a soul that is not as stubborn as Heathcliff’s, that needs time to heal, that has to consider that "awful word," afterlife?

In “Supersymmetry,” there is an echo of an echo of the transcendent possibility of stage four. After reading all the books, attempting to heal by filling up the sudden emptiness with new stories, and desire syncing with the passing of the seasons, there is a spring. A voice, unbidden, comes-- Win and Regine sing:

“It’s been a while since I’ve been to see you--

I don’t know where, but you’re not with me.

Heard a voice, like an echo,

but it came from me…”

This is the hinge around which the transcendent possibilities of the song revolve. The echo, no longer coming from the lover who is nowhere, is heard from within. The healing finally takes shape, form, and movement.

On one side of the mirror is before-life-- and the ghost of the other. As a conjuring of the past the lyric is still desperately sad-- the subject can only speak to the self, not the lover, and only the memory of the desire object.

But in this magical moment, there lies the possibility of discovering the deepest of mysteries, within and without. As listeners, we wait. The swirling bed of strings intensifies, and we realize that there may, for our subject, be the hope of reaching an afterlife. This hope, which comes from both the swelling music and the twisting of the prismatic imagery of the echo, is the ultimate desire. The voice that comes in that extreme solitude may be more than we ever challenged ourselves to dream-- the sound of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a connection to the numinous.

In showing the borderlands between desire conjoined to the external other and the shattered remnants of identity that remain after the violent ripping of desire from its object, we are faced with art that is, like the image of a warm hand touching a chilled ghost through a broken glass, in a time outside of time, and the nowhere land between life and death.

Sounds poetic, but, really, is there such a place? Is there such a state of consciousness? The song is the mirror of the love story rising like a balloon over the broken bridges of all the dualistic divides on earth: self and other; analog and digital; nature and society; desire machine and desire object; life and death. It is not so much the Romantic conception of the eternal value of the story and the eternal name of the writer that moves us out of time; it is the use of the mechanism of the word, logos, and the art, mytho-poetic, to fly us out of time and space-- art, as ritual, is spaceship to the beyond.

See Giorgio Agamben:

Just as all other mythic traditional systems celebrate rituals and festivals to interrupt the homogeneity of profane time and, re-actualizing the original mythic time, to allow man to become again the contemporary of the gods and to reattain the primordial dimension of creation, so in the work of art the continuum of linear time is broken, and man recovers, between past and future, his present space.