Work
Collage for Forst
Collage for Forst was an attempt to derive the Self-World from pulp.
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Programme note
Collage for Forst was an attempt to derive the Self-World from pulp.
In the mid-1990s I could not yet have named this process in that way. I knew only that I was trying to understand not music alone, but myself. I was studying Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology intensely, while at the same time building my own way of thinking about the double bass. The instrument was ceasing to be merely an instrument. It was becoming a map of the human being.
I tried to translate Jung’s psychic functions into double-bass playing. The right hand became thought and intuition; the left hand, feeling and perception. I did not build this map for others. I needed it in order to understand myself.
This process led me toward individuation. I did not experience it as an abstract philosophical concept, but as daily work on myself and as an encounter with my own shadow.
The text came first.
The music had to grow toward it.
The opening words, “Arrayed in body,” do not describe any concrete person. They try to name the experience of existence itself. Here, “Arrayed” means not only dressed but placed in a body, embodied, called into being. From the beginning the text exceeded autobiography. It could be spoken by a human being, an animal, a machine or a god. What interested me was not private experience, but shared experience.
For that reason my own voice also could not remain the recognisable voice of the author. I searched for a way of transforming it so that it would not speak about me, but carry the purest possible content. From today’s perspective I would call this a search for Pure Content, just as Witkacy searched for Pure Form. It was not a matter of hiding the author. It was a matter of removing everything that could distract from the process of inner transformation itself.
The electronic layer was not an effect. In the mid-1990s, tape gave me the best assurance that the subtleties shaped in the studio would reach listeners unchanged, whatever the technical conditions of the concert hall. For me, tape was the guarantee of the work’s integrity.
Today I also understand the title differently. Collage did not mean the arrangement of ready-made elements. It meant something deeper: an experience in which images, sounds, one’s own body, psyche, memory and identity are broken down almost to the level of their inner structure, so that they may be assembled anew. The word that now comes closest to naming this condition is pulp. It was not the goal. It was the point of departure. Collage for Forst was an attempt to derive the Self-World from pulp.
Only after many years did I see that, intuitively, I had come close to what the alchemical tradition calls Nigredo. In 1995 I did not yet know this term. I knew only the necessity of passing through that process.
The immediate impulse was an invitation linked to the Forster-Brücke festival in Forst, Germany, preceded by earlier encounters at Buckower Begegnungen and by performances of Siedem Uroków Chorego Anioła in Brandenburg. Forst became for me more than the place of the first performance. I saw in it a symbol of encounter and reconciliation between Poland and Germany. Collage for Forst was an attempt to give that place everything I was living then: my own text, the double bass, electronics, my psychological search and faith in art as a space of shared experience.
After more than thirty years, I would no longer change this work.
I would change only the person who would write it today.
That is why I leave it as it is.
Poem
Below I publish the complete poem of Collage for Forst in its English Authorial Literary Edition, based on the Polish Canonical Authorial Source Text established from the author’s typescript of 1995 and the authorial performance preserved on tape.
Arrayed in body, boneless and early, I bind the ribbons of hours The canvas of fleeting frames entwines the feet A little butterfly swims with god’s breath Twelve pupils look out from its wings Behold, you go with a face painted in jest on the back of a shaven head Grow seven thousand days and nights From the clay of these thoughts I shall gather a mass of sound In the dreambound overlanguage It presses through the mouth: “Release” I arrange my atoms into “not-I” At the end of birth, a-round the rapture I loop circles, ribbons, links-of-hours Here I breathe pulse into the aortas of a new world Memory of memory — the garden of my play In god’s womb, blind, I free long fingers from a tangle of light-seconds And with my hand I trace the circle of earth-heaven The time of my twin world’s agony has bent Breathless, on the pass of the divine cycle Driven through space — I listen for the pulse Congealed at the turning point, on the spiral slide With one eye I see the ending, and with the other the beginning
Editorial Note
The Polish original constitutes the Canonical Authorial Source Text, established from the author’s typescript of 1995 and the authorial performance preserved on tape. It remains the source text for this and all future Authorial Literary Editions published within the Living Archive.