Antony & The Johnsons @ Abbey Road

To my shame, even though he won the Mercury Prize all the way back in 2005, I’ve only just got round to listening to Antony & The Johnsons. Even that happened purely by chance when he and his current band turned up on the Channel 4 show Live at Abbey Road last Friday. Within a few days of being blown away while watching that, however, I had familiarised myself with most of his back catalogue, and decided that he was a musical genius – a modern day Bach.

Now, I’m pretty fussy about my music. There are a lot acts I like, but only about four or five that I truly love. The members of this prestigious latter category are distinguishable by the fact that, in spite of hours and hours of listening, I have never grown bored or indifferent to their music (or lyrics) and, even after the hundredth or so listen to a particular track, in it still hear something new and fresh and interesting. I have a sneaking suspicion that Antony & The Johnsons may eventually sneak into this category, as his music has a transcendental quality and a melodic and harmonic richness that seems unlikely to get old. This is only a hunch, though, as I could hate him in a few weeks.

Here’s one of the tracks from Abbey Road:

Sartre: Phenomenology as Re-enchantment

To know is to burst toward…

To be is to fly out into the world, to spring from the nothingness of the world and of consciousness in order suddenly to burst out as consciousness-in-the-world. When consciousness tries to recoup itself… it destroys itself. This necessity from consciousness to exist as consciousness of something other than itself Husserl calls “intentionality”.

Knowledge, or pure representation, is only one of the possible forms of my consciousness “of” this tree; I can also love it, fear it, hate it, and this surpassing of consciousness by itself that is called “intentionality” finds itself again in fear, hatred, and love. Hating another is just a way of bursting forth toward him; it is finding oneself suddenly confronted by a stranger in whom one lives, in whom one suffers from the very first, the objective quality “hateful”.

So it is that all at once hatred, love, sympathy – all these famous “subjective” reactions which were floating in the maladrous brine of the mind – are pulled out. They are merely ways of discovering the world. It is things which unveil themselves to us as hateful, sympathetic, horrible, loveable. Being dreadful is a property of this Japanese mask, an inexhaustible and irreducible property which constitutes its very nature – and not the sum of our subjective reactions to a piece of sculptured wood.

Husserl has restored to things their horror and their charm. He has restored to us the world of artists and prophets: frightening, hostile, dangerous, with its havens of mercy and love. He has cleared the way for a new treatise on the passions which would be inspired by this simple truth, so utterly ignored by the refined among us: if we love a woman, it is because she is loveable […] We are… delivered from the “internal life”: in vain we would seek the caress and fondlings of our intimate selves… like a child who kisses his own shoulder, since everything is finally outside, everything, even ourselves. Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves: it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a man among men.

_{“Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea Of Husserl’s Phenomenology”
In: The Phenomenology Reader, pp.382-384}