Jürgen Bürgmann's notes on a train

By i, Jürgen Bürgmann

Are there thoughts, or series of thoughts, which are only possible on trains? A train of thoughts, perhaps, which moves in a single direction in an unbreakable chain, a logical deduction moving stepwise towards its destination? The body, moving at great speed, has nothing to do. Its locomotion being taken care of by the locomotive, it simply sits in place like a corpse, the mind freed to think. Here, everything physical is taken care of, and one can, once again, be a thinking thing.

There are thoughts that are certainly impossible on a train. Some cannot be thought truly: ‘I am in a plane’, e.g., or ‘I am not now on a train’. But are there uniquely train-thoughts, or sets of thoughts, which couldn’t arise at all were one not on a train? It seems absurd to me that I could think these thoughts I am currently thinking were I walking or standing. Even more absurd to think that dreamlike aquatic thoughts could be had here, going forward at speed.

I have been told that the new linguistic rule is that I is the language of privilege and oppression, and that i is the correct way of referring to oneself. Our linguistic rulers favour only those who are quick on the uptake. And why am I so slow? Is it that I am not humble enough to be i and use i? We must, I have been told, bow down and abase ourselves before the new linguistic rules, lower ourselves and cultivate a provincial self, an i. While my I wants to travel first-class, my i wants to travel second-class. (‘Universalise the first-class!’ a marxist once said in defence of travelling first-class.) I myself think we must resist the new rules, for the real deceptions and self-deceptions all begin in the lower-case – i, on the other hand, of course disagree.

We first learn words for things, only later do we learn the words for self. We are taught our name in the third-person before we learn to refer to ourselves in the first-person. I was called Jürgen Bürgmann before I was called I. If I move to the third-person, as is my whim, is this a conversion to depersonalised self-reference – or a reversion to my real name? Consider the following: if I say ‘I’ and someone asks who I am I say ‘Jürgen Bürgmann’; if I say ‘Jürgen Bürgmann’ and someone asks who I am I do not say ‘I’. Jürgen Bürgmann is my true and most basic name.

Trees, houses, trees, lines, houses, warehouses, green fields, window, rain etc. You cannot keep track of things at speed, at best you can label them and as soon as they are labelled, they have passed. There can be no serious investigation of things at this speed, you can only reflect on the stream of images as a whole, and the stream runs so fast you cannot keep up even the labelling of it – ‘trees’, ‘houses’, ‘trees’, ‘lines’… – and this is how you forget yourself in the window and its silence.

Silence itself plays a great role in quartet music. You notice it in the room as a presence more than in any other musical form (for instance, you cannot hear it in Cage’s piece). If the auditorium is small, and if the audience is quiet and they know of this quality of music and respect it, it may emerge. And you wonder if this old and tired audience comes here only for music that, at its best, produces this audible silence.

I (Jürgen Bürgmann) remember that in the new perfectly designed concert hall with world-class acoustics which they had spent years and millions on building, the doors in the auditorium clicked as they closed, and the chairs squeaked as anyone moved on them, and so all you could hear throughout the concert was clicking and squeaking, and silence was impossible. You go to a concert hall for the silence and all you find is sounds of various kinds.

I remember two adult men sat in the auditorium – I called them, mentally, water boys – and as they listened to the quartet, these water boys couldn’t help drinking water from their glasses every minute or two, involving us all in their water or sipping addiction, and we end up looking at them and thinking of their constant need for water, and thinking that it is only a felt need for water not a real need, and we think of how their sipping water obsession is a replacement for their phone checking obsession, displacing their need for their phones into this maniacal water sipping, unable to sit and listen for an hour, having to do something absurd like sipping water, and so as they consume their water and gulp, first one, then the other, the first noticed by the second and then imitated by him, we are consumed with their water consumption need, unable to attend to the quartet music and silence of the quartet music. These were the water boys.

I remember the pianist, and as he played we looked constantly at his face and his gestures, each gesture adding to the music, adding to our understanding of what he was trying to convey by the music: he looked blissful, he shook physically in anger etc., never once expressing anything of himself, it was the music which was angry, it was the music which was blissful. There was never anything personal in his expression. For instance, he was never happy with his playing, or bitter at his mistakes. He had seemed to disappear, having become a vessel and interpreter at once.

You see a pianist in front of you playing for an hour without music and you think how much a pianist knows – something unfathomable to us – not merely the notes but the music, his interpretation, and whatever else he must know in order to be able to interpret, and whatever else he must know to know how to be able to interpret, and then how to express himself, which means he must understand the relation between, on the one hand, his stokes on the piano and his gestures, and on the other hand, our eyes and ears which take all this in the way he intends. And you think also of what he cannot know to do all of this, what parts of life he must preserve himself from and remain innocent of in order to conserve these powers and grace and mind for his great purpose.

We look to music for energy. Can it give this to us? Perhaps, but its effects are transient and we need more and more to sustain a normal level of energy, and so the music must deliver more and more energy, and become more and more extreme, and we must consume ever more of it just to feel on an even keel. Perhaps music can give no more than it takes. This might be why it is better not to think of music as something we can use for ourselves, but as the expression of someone or something. Putting things like this is strategic: trying to block the utilitarian move in which music is treated as a resource to use for some purpose.

Just as music is used as a means, so is art. Why must all art now deal with issues? Is the issue imposed on the artist as the only way to sell what they make? Or are all artists now issue artists, who use their art to ‘stage an intervention’ on some topic, or to ‘raise awareness’ of some topic? We, who are outside art, cannot tell and we have no interest in this issue art, for the artists are the last ones we would go to for thinking, let alone thinking about issues. We wanted something much more from art and from artists, beyond opinion.

Example: In the Pitt Rivers collection they have made a museum into promotional material for the resistance to….well, I wasn’t sure. Beside a case holding an Egyptian mummy, a woman asked her husband whether that mummy oughtn’t rather be in Egypt, “What’s it doing here?” she asked, rhetorically. It seems the resistance to the Pitt Rivers collection from within the Pitt Rivers collection is succeeding. The Pitt Rivers collection is so guilty of itself that it is returning itself – or ‘endeavouring to’ – back to where the objects in the collection ‘originated’. One day, even the physical structure of the museum will return itself to the pits and mines of England. So get to the Pitt Rivers collection while you can – it won’t be around for long! What is promised, what we can dream of, is perhaps a world of autarkic states, with high walls, of nothing moving between them, of no appropriations of culture, of nothing escaping and being taken. This is surely better than the exploitation of cultures to be found in the Pitt Rivers collection, and the national shame of possessing these objects. Being a recipient of this message of resistance, I reasserted my commitment to resistance, leaving the museum floor, disgusted, and ventured upstairs to the museum cafe (‘Eat the Future’) and, as their excellent carrot cake was digested, I looked out and down on the oppressive Pitt Rivers collection below, and contemplated a future without it, a better future, an emboldened future, but one I hoped would retain this excellent cafe serving excellent carrot cake.

We want to let politics deal with issues, not issue artists or issue museums. But how can we do so? How will chaotic rule affect our behaviour? If we cannot plan, because we wait for him with baited breath, what happens? Fear, misunderstanding, mutual mistrust, tragedy, farce, comedies of errors on a global scale?

We hate the bureaucracy and yet it binds us together. What would we be without it? It may be absurd, but, in Europe, it is perhaps its very absurdity which ties us so tightly together that we do not fight one another. We attribute the lack of war to our being good people, but it is only the labyrinthine institutions which make it impossible to fight and so allow us to think of ourselves as the good people who do not fight. We mistake an institutional reality for a moral one, and in a sense, this is the success of the institutions. But, the consequence of this success is that by our not giving them credit, we think we can remove the institutions and things will continue in the same way, because we are good people. New parties will once again advertise European war as the only way to cleanse us of the bind of the bureaucracy whose original goal was to prevent war.

The BBC is a bureaucracy that binds us together. It doesn't merely provide content. It holds us together in ourselves and amongst each other. But we are perhaps the last generation to think so and to be held in this way. We cannot accept institutions that don’t fully represent each of our current beliefs; we have no patience for them and for trying to alter them. We no longer want to be bound together but to think of ourselves as individuals who can freely choose their story of themselves, of what they are, and of what the world is like. And we are promised this through our devices.

We have prioritised distal mediated electronic information – from we know not where, nor whom, nor whether there is a whom behind it – over proximal information about what is immediately around us – nature, the visual field, the auditory field etc. We are environmentalists who, by and large, do not to exist in the environments in which we find ourselves. Looking around us now bores us, and so we enter into electronic stimulation. Here we are no longer bored, though we are now more liable to become bored, and need ever more stimulation to remain on the level; we no longer want to exist in the outside world in which nothing happens; we exist in the outside world only in order to excite ourselves with electronic stimulation. Finally, the outside world has become useless and we see no reason for it, in fact it becomes an impediment and delay to the stimulation directly entering our brains. Before, we thought of the electronic stimulations as mediated reality, and the real world experience as unmediated. Now, we think of electronic stimulations as immediate reality, and the outside world as that which mediates and produces an impediment to electronic stimulation. (The cumbersomeness of eyes and screen, of ears and earbuds etc.) The senses have got in the way of themselves, delaying what we need – the sooner the electronic can stimulate the brain directly, the better.

But we cannot simply say ‘why do we look at screens and not our surrounding reality?’ We have, by funnelling our life into the machines, emptied our surrounding reality of meaning, and the screens provide surrogates. (We take things such as smiles, gestures etc., out of public space, and instead send someone we met online an emoji.) They appear magical only because they contain the traces of meaning; they appear to re-enchant the world only because they have robbed the world and now contain part of that which they have taken. (Have they robbed or been given? Once the rules change, it no longer makes a difference.) While we shy away from real people, our devices are for being with people – or being-with-in-the-image – being flies on the wall is the form of all our entertainment, always being on the side, feeling left out of the images of drama we are watching. The screen screens us from our loss at the same time as representing what is lost. (Like those new place names, which refer to what has been replaced by houses, ‘Pinewood’, ‘The copse’ etc.)

He said I was wasting time not being on my phone, not taking in content. He said I was anti-culture, he said I was anti-human – why else would I sit here like a lump of flesh, dull eyes, staring at the passing scene? ‘trees’, ‘houses’, ‘trees’, ‘lines’… He said I was lying to myself about not wanting that beautiful content, that I was simply aggregating a kind of moral authority (to myself, in my mind) over others who, in their shameless phone use and addiction, appeared to give me permission to feel contempt (easy prey) and so, he said, I was using them only to enjoy my contempt – and that, because of my position in life, this was the only basis on which I could feel contempt, and so feel superiority, and that it was me who was shamelessly using their phone addiction for this purpose, and that this was my own contempt-addiction in action. This was his view.

The experience is not of being stimulated, but of disappearing into the stimulus. We lose time and self – this is why we do it.

The market, defined as where you go to satisfy your desires. Strange how it could be elevated to an ideal, given what it is. Easier to see how it could be denigrated, insofar as we do not accept our desires – we do not accept them but want them satisfied nonetheless. Satisfaction being the fastest way to be rid of them, perhaps. We think of the pursuit of satisfaction as the endorsement of the desire but it can just as much be a condemnation of it, or else, wouldn’t we want to sustain the desire by not satisfying it? Could this be the basis of a perverse market morality?

Is it right to think that the whole world market system rests on something so whimsical as our desires? If so, is this a frightening thought? Or are our desires, in the main, constant, enduring, ‘inelastic’?

I can imagine someone who saw that the story in which he lived was itself made up by him. So he saw his life ironically. He had woken up, then, not into the absence of a story, but into another one, whose subject was that he had awoken from a story of himself. Having awoken, there was no silence. It was as if there was more music, but in a different key.

I read Wittgenstein as it gave me a sense of the mystical, a feeling, as I read it, of being awake, outside of time, of not being in the world but of hovering over it, free, able to breathe etc. I read for such experience. (Or surrogate experience? or escape? And if there are escape routes, why not escape? But was it a real escape or only an appearance of one?) This was partly why I was not interested in those dry plodding philosophers going through their proofs for this or that which gave me only the feeling of incomprehension, dullness and boredom. Though admittedly, that was a philosophical experience too, and the predominant one.

Thinking is feeling your mind from the inside, which means thinking is not something opposed to feeling, as it is often thought of as being.

I always keep feeling that there is something just outside of my thoughts which I touch on (or touches on me) and which always escapes me, except perhaps in dreams. It presses on my thoughts from the outside, I can know it through this pressure. I search for the thought that includes it – I want to represent this outside thing which is pressing on my thoughts as a thought which I can grasp – and if I think I have it, I forget it immediately and cannot set it down.

By saying ‘we’, I (Jürgen Bürgmann) make a request for others to think in the same way as I do, or I assume that they do, or I call on them that they must. It is an imposition. It is, or can be, a rhetorical device to increase the authority of a weak claim, just as saying ‘many people think…’ is a (poor) attempt to aggregate authority to a purely personal judgement.

I keep saying to myself: it is ok, it is ok, it will be ok. Like a parent to its child. Never: we have arrived, only, we will arrive, or, we are about to arrive. I define the fact that I must define a destination before I travel, but I find myself already travelling, and without having a destination defined. It is a paradox: I must know where I’m going and know where I left from in order to define a destination, and yet I find myself already travelling – without either! I never wanted to be in this situation. How could I ever have boarded without a destination, and how could they have let this happen?