yeah, but what does it all mean?

This essay assumes you have a basic familiarity with the film “The Shining”. If you don’t, go watch it or something. 

I – Lilith Maybe Speaks

One of the, like, three readers of this blog and I got into a bit of a discussion about the last entry. Curiously, not about what I thought about the focus of the entry, but rather the brief mention of Nurse With Wound’s “Soliloquy for Lilith”. I’ll dance about architecture for a bit here. “Soliloquy for Lilith” is a long set of compositions which are the result of chance; the creator (and really sole member of Nurse With Wound) Stephen Stapleton, found that a set of linked effects created a noise, which was altered by his proximity to the effects, like a malfunctioning theremin. It’s a record that has had a lengthy afterlife, and is apparently Nurse With Wound’s best selling record, somewhat odd for a triple (or quadruple, depending on which version you get) album. 

It’s a record I enjoy greatly; weird pulses and loops and buzzing. It is, more than anything, a collection of sounds. There’s development and movement, but the direction of it is slow and not particularly predictable, in any real context. The person I was talking to, however, was curious about the title. “What would it mean to produce a soliloquy for Lilith”? I replied that I had no idea what the connection to Lilith was; that I only knew the name vaguely as figure from mythology— sometimes depicted as Adam’s first wife, banished for disobedience, sometimes a she demon, and sometimes other things. According to one article I read, it was named after Stapleton’s daughter. In other words, I don’t tend to ascribe meaning to it, and there’s a part of me that suspects that it’s just a neat sounding phrase. 

I have to admit, my interpretation of texts, especially musical ones, is heavily influenced by John Cage, who would famously say that his music was just sounds that required no explanation and then would set out explaining them at some length, offering cryptic insights into his process, and delivering pithy quotes like: “Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?”

In other words, things stand as they are, and adding to the text is beside the point. 

II- Good Evening, Mr. Torrance

I have written a little bit before about that perspective. The text is what it is, and we put ourselves into it as we see fit. But I’ll contradict myself on that point as well. It is possible to misread a text to the point where your understanding of it is useless. 

If you want to see a wild example of misreadings of a text, the film “Room 237” is excellent. It consists of voice overs of people with varying interpretations of the film “The Shining”, among them that the film is “really about” the treatment of Native Americans, or “really about” Kubrick’s role in faking the moon landings, or “really about” Theseus and the Minotaur. It’s wild, in that respect, though I find the movie a bit of a slog. But it illustrates a point. It’s entirely possible to wildly misread a text: If the film is “about” the treatment of Native Americans, it’s a failure, because it is in no way about the treatment of Native Americans. It’s like saying Moby Dick is “about” the World Series. I’m entirely certain you can somehow stretch out the text to make it look that way, if you want but 1) No, and 2) The book was published before the World Series even began. 

Kubrick’s obsessive nature and his general refusal to elaborate on his themes help convince this person he’s right about the Native American thesis. There’s a scene which takes place in a pantry that has cans of Calumet baking powder in it, which is cited as evidence. I’d argue that a pantry in a hotel would likely have baking powder in it, and that Kubrick likely used what he could get his hands on. I read an exhaustive book on the making of The Shining, and while it remains silent on this issue, I believe it would have mentioned this if Kubrick had thought it a huge deal. 

That having been said, The Shining feels like it’s about more than just a man going insane over a long winter and trying to kill his family. There’s a lot of subtext flying around; the way Wendy acts, the backstory involving Jack dislocating his son’s arm, the scenes of Jack interacting with the bartender all strongly hint at a family falling apart due to alcoholism. The story of the previous caretaker, the “crazy woman” in room 237, the final shots of the film all strongly hint at the supernatural. And so on, There’s a lot of “there” there, and it’s grist for the interpretive mill. But I’m not always sure that fleshing these things out enhances the text. 

III-What We Talk About when We Talk About What We Talk About

I think we engage in discussions about “what things are about” because we don’t have the correct linguistic tools to engage in them in some other fashion. “I liked it” or “I didn’t” are simple enough things, but there is some part of us that needs to engage with artistic texts on a deeper level. (That having been said, not every text needs or even asks to be— “It has a good beat and you can dance to it” is fine, even preferable with some things— I’ll touch on that a bit later.). It’s this desire for engagement that leads us down that road; we fall in love with a piece of art, and we want to share that. I think taking apart a text in some senses is an outpouring of that affection; it can equally be done out of dislike, but I’m not writing a fuckin’ graduate thesis here, so I am going to lean heavily toward the former. 

This lack of tools is the source of a lot of tension in the philosophical world. Wittgenstein’s famous quote “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is the most extreme example of this: it’s not that the thing we are trying to get at does not exist, it’s that language is limited to describing things and cannot adequately describe concepts like say justice. Justice ‘shows’ itself to us in a process that Wittgenstein doesn’t tell us about because… we can’t talk about it. 

Lest we fall too far down the rabbit hole here, I think this is partially correct, and I think it applies to our analysis of texts: We want people to understand texts as we understand them but we can’t because we don’t have the language to do so. I find Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” to be a profound, beautiful, and moving experience. You (the fictional you) find it a confusing disorienting mess. I want to convince you that it is not, so I create another text: a text about the text which I hope offers a way in to my point of view. The further removed a text is from a language we understand or are capable of repeating, the more complex my critical text becomes— it’s why someone listening to Soliloquy for Lilith might seize on the title in an attempt to analyze it: there’s nothing else to cling to.

IV-What Would it Mean to Produce a Soliloquy for Lilith

I write this blog for fun, which means I don’t want to spend a lot of time researching things: it appears to me, for example, that we’re moving dangerously close to some of Derrida’s theories: but the fun part is I haven’t read any Derrida, I’ve only read about him. Curiously, for someone who self-identified as a philosopher, most of his influence seems to have ended up in the world of literary criticism, where deconstructionism runs a little more rampant that it does in philosophy (though it has a place in philosophy as well). And yeah, I have a couple of his books on order, and they will be added to the list, which I will maybe get through before the heat death of the universe, but… as someone who lives a little closer to the world of literary criticism than I put it “I think we ride a möbius strip of meaning.” What we bring to the table when we talk about a text varies as well. When I talked with them about the topics of this little essay, they mentioned “Weiland”, an early Gothic novel (from 1798):

“…Whatever it meant 100 years later didn’t fit the zeitgeist. It showed back up in masters classes in the 1990s when I read it. I loved it but didn’t read it the way I do now. And now, as prophetic as it is, as much as I would like to hand it out on street corners, very few people would get it because the language is not what we speak anymore. And most people don’t have time for that shit.”

In other words, what it would mean to produce a Soliloquy for Lilith is what it would mean to do that now; a text is, in part, what we bring to it. But not all of it. But what that fixed part is will have to be a subject for another time, I’ve gone on for long enough.