I asked my students if they recognized the photograph. Yes, they had seen it in Barthes’s book, but not one of them could tell me why the two were photographed together. Then, I tell them that in 1976, the two of them, Glass and Wilson, collaborated on a piece of musical theater called Einstein on the Beach. I myself had not heard of Einstein on the Beach until I was a graduate student, when I listened to it in my husband’s—who was not yet my husband—dorm-style campus apartment, a setting that is, perhaps, in total opposition to the dreamy and enchanting musicscape that is Einstein on the Beach. Although I had been, previously that semester, introduced to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, it had not prepared me for the snowflakes, the ephemeral sea, the lulling waves crashing that are Einstein on the Beach.
I could watch over and over again the PBS documentary Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera, a film that I showed my students. The film documents the staging of Einstein on the Beach in 1984 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.
And to think, public television used to broadcast such beautiful things, I tell them, a statement that makes me realize that I have grown older. I am ever-so-much older than I was in 1976, when Einstein on the Beach debuted (and when I was born), and in 1984, when Glass and Wilson put the show on again for the Next Wave Festival, and in 2002, when I heard for the first time, on a CD player, the one-two-three-four-fives.
Einstein on the Beach is an existential electronic pulsing, the pure and perfect postmodernist dream, and like Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Wilson and Glass, an arrangement of subtle yet stark incongruity. It riffs from classical dance and opera yet subverts those very traditions at the same time it celebrates them. There is repetition, change through repetition, collaging, splicing of the overheard, fragments of conversations/advertisements/instructions/trifles, historical inquiry and plundering, the inclusion of the seemingly insignificant and the mundane, a meditative surmounting of the opera’s heroic subject.
The background of Einstein on the Beach is composed of electronic hums, blips, and beeps; one senses that at its very core is a strange mechanism, an enormous supercomputer with no connection to the empirical world nevertheless striving to connect to that world. But I grew up in the ‘80s. The very soundtrack of my life was electronic. The world pulsed through the sound of electronic machinery. The term postmodernism and what it represented was occluded from me; I could not see the forest for the trees. I could fast-forward and rewind, fast-forward and rewind, and hear again and again a phrase or song. I could record my very voice and play it back and speed it up and slow it down again.
I have been thinking about this impulse in my writing; that is, there exists an impulse to false start, to say exact words over again, to abruptly insert a pronouncement, to skip over pertinent parts, to return to a scene over and over again.
I am officially old-fashioned now, now that I can see the forest for the trees.
I do not know how to end this except to say that in video games, which were the playthings of the ‘80s, when new life was given, it was given with electronic beeping; and when the struggle or flight or fight commenced, there was electronic beeping; and when a death occurred, there was electronic beeping. And I have been hearing these sounds less and less.
On the Voyager Golden Records
When I was a child, seeing future dates always made death and old age seem impossible—the future was a thing that was so far away it could never arrive.
With their plutonium stores diminishing, the Voyager probes, according to NASA, will be unable to send back information beyond 2025, at best 2030. Perhaps in 1977, when the probes were launched, the year 2025 seemed far off, an unachievable dream; however, now that 2025 is ever-so-near, I still cannot see the present for what it is: even this very year seems unreal, futuristic, beyond what is possible.
That our tether to the Voyager probes will sever in 2025 means letting go, forgetting, acknowledging an inability to get in touch ever again. It is more than empirical absence; it is an existential termination.
The Voyager’s mission was to chart and analyze our solar system’s territory, but its mission was also to go where no probes had gone before. The probes were programed to leave the heliosphere; they would journey on into interspace and forever remain there, orbiting within our galaxy for billions of years.
In addition to instruments that would analyze and send back data, each probe carried a precious piece of cargo, an identical Golden Record, but other than a stylus, NASA did not send any other technology with which to listen to the audio or reveal the analog images embedded within them.
NASA did, however, equip the records with illustrations of how to decode them, illustrations that would themselves need a fair amount of deciphering. If an alien being were to, in that far-off off-chance, discover the records, it would be faced, first, with the task of interpreting the instructions of how to properly place and time the stylus; from there, it would have to be tech savvy enough to create the
