"Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shoveling them under by the cartload double quick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world," remarks Leopold Bloom to himself at Dingham's funeral in Ulysses. Later, of the priest, he thinks, "Said he was going to paradise or is in paradise. Says that over everybody. Tiresome kind of a job. But he has to say something." His meditations on death echo an anti-theme of the book: where at once the everyday is elevated, the banal recontextualized as (almost Darwinianly) a heroic struggle, here one of the most profound topics of existence, that of non-existence, is relegated to mundanity. As most people find it at one time or another, not only is death a natural part of life, the inexorable whirl of Charybdis, but it is commonplace to the point of humdrum cliche. Although the other side of this, as shown in "The Sisters" is that the eschatological aphorisms merely mask the unnamable, that is, we are unable to face it directly so must view it askance as if it were a solar eclipse. We find then that death, or talk of death, is situated thusly, in a tug-of-war between two ends of a an epistemological spectrum: one side being the most familiar and trite and the other the most profound and unknowable—death personified as oneself and dually as a thing-in-itself; it inhabits this quantum state, its wave form uncollapsed until that last breath allows an observation.
Hidden beneath the almost-benign keyboard pop of Spencer Owen's Malheur Ln. lies this very theme: the wave-particle duality of death. "Malheur", the French word for "unhappiness" or "misfortune", he tells us, was the name of a street in his grandmother's neighborhood, and the juxtaposition of suburbia with this doleful sentiment was a) not only full of dramatic irony as a comment on suburban life but more importantly for Owen, was b) a profound statement on just how death or violence are the yoke-mates of the everyday: here a street where people live out their lives relatively free of discord (overtly though, for we have all seen Blue Velvet), a modern Levitt Town, there also is that feeling, the one that only some clairvoyant charlatan can pretend to know: the paranoia of omnipresent death. "I am always in mortal danger/I am always living dangerously" he sings, not of those in high-risk occupations, but of the common man, for whom death, although unlikely, still lurks inscrutably. The music itself, experimental although with undeniable hooks, mirrors these sentiments, waves of passivity followed by violent eruptions by which Owen hopes to duplicate this vision: the binary unity of oblivion.
|
