The Disintegration Loops, and: The Writing of the DisasterAfter William Basinski Christopher Kempf (bio) THE DISINTEGRATION LOOPS after William Basinski Across the East River he listenedthat morning to music looseningitself from the plastic backing. Thatis how sound worked once, a crustof finely-patterned ferrite appliedto tape. Turning spindles. Sometimeseven music is made to collapse. Cassetteby cassette he transferred the pastinto digital, its intricate iron flakes, fedpast the spindles, disintegratingfurther. Form, we have been told,is content. The condition, this means,for entering the future is destruction.I click the tiny sideways trianglethe tapes have become. I crankthe volume on my speakers & eventhis year it is possible to hear,still, a sound like an empiredying. The disintegration loopsagain through the news station’s samestock shots. The sky is blue. Twoplanes are pulling themselves again againstthe towers’—say it—spindles. Disaster,the ancients believed, repeateditself in cycles the stars—sentencesof light—could predict. When Cygnus,for instance, lifted its neckabove the seven hills, they knew thenthe whole spectacular pageantwas over. So, they said, it had risenthe month of Caesar’s slaying. Swansong—Goths, the Rubicon. History,Marx teaches, is patterned tragedy [End Page 161] first, then farce. Or first, recall,the packed Ryder truck bucklingthe underground garage. Again. Yes,never forget. I listen, body sprawledon the mattress, to the slackeningambience. It is possible, yes, to hearhere that dejected fanfare humanityat its final annihilation will playagain for the bored stars. Spanof Orion. Rising Saturn. Those vastclouds of fire & dust combustingwith no one at all to watch them. [End Page 162] THE WRITING OF THE DISASTER Let it begin, as in the books of the ancients, raining gall, the gods by whom we have prospered tossingthe clouds, the towers we climbed the sky with riven. It isn’t hard to master. Fasten myth to history. Fit,as by analogy, past to present. Priam’stemples, it is said, held carnival on Troy’s last day, the doomedchildren flinging garlands to the wooden beast. Beautiful, almost, the musicof ruin. The royal scribes, while the firstborns burned, turningtheir faces to the page. [End Page 163] Christopher Kempf Christopher Kempf received his mfa from Cornell University and is now a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University and a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online, and the New Republic, among other places. Copyright © 2015 Center for Literary Publishing
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