Musical Mathematics Part Two

I see the last song in this particular equation, "The Gash (Battle Hymn for a Wounded Mathematician)" by The Flaming Lips, as a kind of inspiration for the sound of the particularly jarring and clashing part of "The Shrine / An Argument" that I have been focusing on.




I see a similar motivation in each. The Fleet Foxes emphasize the violence and destruction that logically accompanies the cycle of  renewal. After all, without death there would be no need for renewal. But at the same time, being part of that cycle gives this violence a different form than if it were just on its own, it elevates it. That is why I particularly enjoy these two songs, because rather than just being loud and clashing for the sake of stirring shit up, they spiritualize the sense of strife that they capture.

"The Gash" puts a particularly "spiritual" spin on strife, indeed it makes the spiritual a matter of strife. Of course, this is only if you understand "spiritual" in the sense of the highest concerns and values of human life from within human life, and not stemming from some transcendent origin. Indeed, the "spiritual" is only won from out of struggling with the messy world of human affairs, not by some appeal to a pure, unsullied conception of truth as if everything in life could work out as clearly as a mathematical equation (hence the title character).

Among other things, this means that the truth needs forms of renewal and preservation and that it is susceptible to being lost. The gash that the song is named after reflects the contingency and the vulnerability of truth, as well as those who search for it. But what is interesting about the way that this song presents this issue is the fact that it is not the gash that is finally the problem, that it is not our "quasi-animality" (as I have been calling it) that is at issue, but this intra-spiritual concern:


Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
‘Cause I’ve noticed all the others
Though they’re gashed, they’re still going
‘Cause I feel like the real reason
That you’re quitting, that you’re admitting
That you’ve lost all the will to battle on


As I believe the lyrics make clear, the gash is not in itself what makes this mathematician give up the struggle, indeed, the gash may only be one more occasion for the struggle. Instead, the whole issue concerns the reasons we have for continuing to fight; whether the gash counts as a reason to stop or not is a matter of self-determination, of how we understand it and ourselves. This is why I speak of this as a spiritual issue solely from within life; it is this focus on self-determination that makes the struggle spiritual, and lends this song its credibility when it stages the whole issue as one of sanity:

Will the fight for our sanity
Be the fight of our lives?
Now that we’ve lost all the reasons
That we thought that we had


Still the battle that we’re in
Rages on till the end
With explosions, wounds are open
Sights and smells, eyes and noses
But the thought that went unspoken
Was understanding that you’re broken
Still the last volunteer battles on.

In the struggle of what can ultimately only be reason, all of the combatants are volunteers and they could only ever be so. Very eloquently put.