Question Four

Plainsong

Much has been made of the “atmospheric” nature of The Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration. Looking only at recent write-ups and re-evaluations of the record, one immediately comes across countless deployments of the variations on the term. Even bandleader Robert Smith, in interviews around the time of the album’s release, refers to it as being “dark, atmospheric, quite slow” and “big and atmospheric,” with “quite long, strong, atmospheric pieces.” But what exactly does atmosphere mean here?

Taken alongside their previous output, and especially their 1987 record Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me — a chaotic album that Smith conceived of as a “retrospective,” which is reflected by its wild generic and tonal shifts, as well as its track-list of 18 songs — Disintegration is much more consistent. Though basically the same length as Kiss Me, the original release of Disintegration has only 10 tracks (12 on its CD reissue), and its variations occur within much narrower sonic and stylistic boundaries. Partly due to this, it is easy to agree with BBC Radio 6 host Steve Lamacq when he calls Disintegration “a response to the previous album Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me.”

The opening track “Plainsong,” which one recent reviewer calls “romantically atmospheric,” sets the tone for the rest of the album. Wind is present from the very beginning, if only implicitly: it opens with the sound of wind-chimes, which give way to a crystalline shattering sound that recurs throughout the track. This opening bestows a concern for atmosphere on the song itself, but also, in principle, on the entire album, where wind, water, and rain feature heavily as titular and lyrical focal points.

From the beginning, the song moves at a very slow pace, with Boris Williams’ trademark sixteenth note hi-hat pattern that evokes the falling of the rain, and the soft shattering noise that repeats regularly at the end of each cycle of the chord progression. While it is commonplace to assign the record as a whole the designation of being “gloomy,” the inception of “Plainsong” feels nothing if not monumental — in fact, it feels almost triumphant. Halfway through the song, the lyrics come in, and they are difficult to decipher because they are treated with a heavy echo that makes them seem like they are spoken into a heavy wind.

Appropriately, because of its lyrical focus on one single moment in time, “Plainsong” lacks a chorus. In lieu of this, before the vocals come in, its guitar refrain calls back to “A Thousand Hours,” a song from late in the track-list of Kiss Me, which is even more lyrically sparse. The speaker there not only asks: “For how much longer can I howl into this wind?” but also corroborates by stating that this is all “Just to feel my heart for a second.” The melody recalled in “Plainsong” is a refined version of the melody attached to this latter phrase. This call-back concerns not only atmosphere, but also its effects on the speaker.

The first grouping of lyrics in “Plainsong” reads as follows:

“I think it’s dark and it looks like rain,” you said

“And the wind is blowing

Like it’s the end of the world,” you said

“And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead”

Then you smiled for a second

Taking into consideration the intertextual relation between “Plainsong” and “A Thousand Hours,” as well as the references to weather, it becomes clear that affect is privileged in its immediacy (“for a second”) by way of the wind, the cold, and the threat (or promise) of rain. Of course, the atmosphere alone cannot be said to “cause” this feeling, but, as it is present in both songs, it would seem that something about this particular configuration of the weather, as a component of the atmosphere, contributes to the fleeting nature of the speaker’s intense feelings.

There is also the matter of the doubled quotations required to cite these lyrics. For the most part, the lyrics quote a “you” who never receives a response, at least not within the song itself. However, the final group of lines reads:  

Sometimes you make me feel

Like I’m living at the edge of the world

Like I’m living at the edge of the world

“It’s just the way I smile,” you said

The “you” figure seems here to become aware of the song’s actual lyrical content, responding in turn to Smith’s repeated description of the smile. This is notable sonically for the reason that the words are quite difficult to make out without the aid of a lyrics sheet, since they are not only subject to heavy effects but are also, unlike the deliberate melodicity of the instruments, far more ambient in their actual tone, indeed almost conversational. Is the speaker quoting these lines back to the “you” figure? Is “It’s just the way I smile” a response to the lines that come before, or is it one more line cited from a previous moment? How do the speaker’s quotations square with his comparatively direct statements, temporally? Of course, these questions cannot be answered, as any temporal concerns are transformed into impressionistic gestures by the prevailing atmosphere, which is emphasized mimetically by the obscured nature of Smith’s voice (as it would be for the “you”).

With the rain, the wind, the cold — as well as the feeling of “living at the edge of the world” — we again have a confluence of affect and atmosphere. The difference, however, is that whereas “A Thousand Hours” feels sentimental, with even its title verging on the hyperbolic, “Plainsong” is somewhat less direct, more enigmatic, and perhaps “romantically atmospheric.” Instead of the straightforward questioning of “A Thousand Hours,” we have here a text that sustains paradox, without implying the value judgments that we might expect. For many, darkness, rain, cold (especially “like the cold if you were dead”) are nothing to smile about. But this momentary smile, as well as the overall melodic dimension of the instrumental, lend it an air that is wistful and atmospheric, to be sure, but certainly not gloomy.

— Bryan Counter, SUNY Buffalo

Wind and Atmosphere in Bloodborne

In FromSoftware’s action-horror video game Bloodborne (2015), the high point of atmospheric design occurs at the gameworld’s highest point: the Orphanage building nestled among the spires of the Gothic city of Yharnam. Entering this area at night via a bridge from a nearby tower, the player is immediately met with a pair of aural anomalies. Not only is this the sole location in Yharnam with non-diegetic music—dissonant strings and a repeating sequence of two high, sustained vocal notes—but here the wind also howls like nowhere else, blasting the narrow bridge as if it were the summit of a mountain.  

This wind bears multiple meanings. On the most basic level, it serves to express both the area’s dizzying height—situated hundreds of feet above the winding streets below—and vast spatial extension as such. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner writes of “the windy sunlight of space,” a synesthetic experience of raw three-dimensionality that he contrasts with the uncanny two-dimensionality of his fictional world’s “ultimate edge”:

Beside [the road] a weathered church lifted its crazy steeple like a painted church, and the whole scene was as flat and without perspective as a painted cardboard set upon the ultimate edge of the flat earth, against the windy sunlight of space and April and a midmorning filled with bells. (292)

One may note that this perceptual distortion perfectly describes the outer limits of many a 3D gameworld, where even the most lavishly rendered environments often terminate in flat, fake-looking surfaces. But Faulkner’s sentence also relates to Bloodborne in its simple joining of wind and light—two effects that exemplify 3D spatiality in different but related ways. If light, as Paul de Man writes, “implies space” and thereby implies the “spatial differentiation… that organizes perception” (see “Anthropomorphism and the Trope in Lyric,” 258, and T. J. Clark’s reading of this passage in Farewell to an Idea, 219-220), then wind implies a spatial immensity that defies differentiation and perception alike: it expresses spatial totality as a force. Accordingly, what is important for both Faulkner and Bloodborne is that we now feel vastness itself, whether that mean the majestic scale of the game’s continuous 3D city (of which we’re now afforded a sweeping view) or the infinitude of a Yoknapatawpha landscape that here suffers a jarring, surreal negation.

At the same time, Bloodborne’s wind also bears a ludic message. For purely by virtue of its aural intensity, this wind—along with the anomalous music that likewise activates our hearing—announces the area’s defining motif, which is precisely the intensification of aural awareness and the corresponding negation of sight (that is to say, light) as a means of navigating space. Upon entering the Orphanage’s main hall, a werewolf brings the central chandelier crashing down, plunging the whole building into darkness and forcing the player to rely primarily on their ears to detect the presence of nearby foes. Hearing—so far almost exclusively an “aesthetic” sense in Bloodborne—thus becomes newly pertinent to gameplay, while sight loses some of its usual primacy. This sensory reversal, moreover, nicely recapitulates one of Bloodborne’s main themes. Within the game’s Lovecraftian world, both story and game mechanics suggest that vision is deceptive, serving merely to mask the eldritch reality that lies beneath the surface of things. Indeed, members of Yharnam’s Healing Church—the governing body whose highest-ranking officers are housed in this very building—renounce sight itself by covering their eyes with cloth. This building’s unique gameplay challenge thus reflects the doctrine of its owners.  

This very thematic felicity, however, also leads to a mimetic paradox. For if by chance your avatar—who, like many action-game protagonists, may equip whatever clothing they find on their journey—has been donning one of the game’s several pieces of headgear that cover their own eyes (such as a repurposed Healing Church hat, or a Cainhurst helmet that covers the face with a solid sheet of metal), then the fact that cutting out the lights invariably transforms the player’s experience of this space is puzzling. After all, equipping such headpieces never has any effect on how your avatar controls or what you’re able to see: within the diegetic reality established by gameplay, your avatar would seem to have already transcended the use of physical eyesight. That they’re now likely reduced to a bumbling, panicked mess thus jars with this apparent superpower. Strictly speaking, the very fear that the player now feels through immersion in their avatar’s situation is a disruption of true characterological identification.

Still, when did strict mimetic coherence ever matter to the production of atmosphere? The darkness of the Orphanage creates a powerful mood regardless of whether it makes total sense. And the same is true for the howling wind outside. A meteorological aberration, this wind ceases abruptly when one reaches the terrace at the bridge’s end, exactly like the artificial sound effect that it is. As with Faulkner’s “windy sunlight of space,” here an enveloping sensory reality thus stops short against an arbitrary border, producing an apparent violation not only of realistic wind but of the all-pervading nature of atmosphere itself. (Writing of a suggestive passage about the weather in Proust, Bryan Counter notes how atmosphere de-differentiates space, producing “a confusion of the boundary between inside and outside” (26).) And yet, as in Faulkner, our immersion in the virtual world readily assimilates this spatial paradox: what is “atmospheric” about Faulkner’s sentence, one might say, is not this windy sunlight alone, and surely not the “painted cardboard set” that resists it, but rather their uncanny conjunction. Similarly, in Bloodborne this meteorological violation has its own atmospheric power. For cutting out the wind here serves precisely to foreground the ambient music that has so far largely been obscured by the bridge’s deafening gusts. In a certain sense, this so-called “Soothing Hymn” now sublates the wind, at once negating the latter and assimilating it into the track’s monotonous and indeed somewhat windlike drone. If this change happened “realistically,” say, upon crossing the threshold of the Orphanage itself, such melding would fail to occur, since instead of becoming the wind the music would simply replace it. This is why it’s crucial that the sonic transfer—and transformation—happens outdoors. Assaulting our ear at first under the guise of physical nature, the wind must finally die (rather than die down) to be reborn as spirit, as an essence that pervades this area whether you are inside or out. Just as atmosphere homogenizes a space amid that space’s manifest differentiations, here the very aural effects that produce atmosphere—wind and music—are themselves unified through an unnatural spatial boundary. With the death of the wind, the “Soothing Hymn” itself becomes a windy darkness.

— Nathan Wainstein, University of Utah

Bibliography

Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

Counter, Bryan. “‘Pour cet état si particulier’: Disinterest and the Impersonal Resonance of Aesthetic Experience.” SubStance 49, no. 3 (2020): 19-36.

De Man, Paul. “Anthropomorphism and the Trope in Lyric.” In The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 239-262 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage International, 1990).

Breathe

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

~ Who Has Seen the Wind? Christina Rossetti (1872)

And when the wind is passing by, I shiver gladly, then shudder, then shed tears. Why does the wind blow much my way—one moment to the next a different air? Whence come its songs, stories, and sensations? As the wind ever changes its directions, how could we seize and heed its variations?

*

The wind is shapeless. The wind is boundless power. Its amorphism allows it to take on every form, and to form everything. The wind ducks and rises; falls and climbs; whispers and screams. The wind carries songs; without it tunes would leave neither the privacy of skulls nor the grip of strings. The wind delivers messages. Voices travel through its routes: secrets, pleas, confessions.

The wind is invisible, elusive: an “unseen force,” as Karen Emslie wrote, seen only through the motions and sensations of the affected; a force that enables life.

The wind is life.

Wind and life have been related for countless ages. Four winds blow through Aztec mythology—Mictlanpachecatl (north), Cihuatecayotl (west), Tlalocayotl (east), and Vitztlampaehecatl (south)—and affect characters and fortunes. The Mesopotamic demon Lilith brings storms, disease, illness and death. The Norse Njörðr rules wind, seas and wealth, and the Hindu god Vayu embodies prana—breath. In Latin, spiritus can mean breath, wind, sigh, air, and spirit. In Italian, breath is respiro—another wind. From spiro we get spiral, for the wind’s whirling tricks. What do we do when the mind falls into anxious tides? With the wind, we spiral.

The Sanskrit for spirit and soul—atman—also means essence, or breath. That’s rather similar to alma in Spanish, anima in Italian, âme in French, and many other words that denote that animating force which turns objects into organisms. Air—the wind, the Spirit of spirits, breathes life into matter. Is the main difference between the dead and the living not a difference of breath? Dogs pant, trees breathe, and fish make air from water. Mountains are still, breathless, lifeless. Or are they? Wind passes through them too, for they’re porous, and wind passes through all pores. The illusion between dead and alive may then be just that: an airy fancy. If all lives, if all is breath, is not all sacred? Without argument or intention, the wind changes our perceptions and the affections that follow. Despite its elusive motions, it pervades. Every pervasion makes a statement. Every statement is a story, and every story an emotion.

* 

A soft breeze picks up. I notice movement before me. A flower swings, gently, as though dancing to a song. It shows strength, and tranquility, and draws me in. My body tingles and relaxes. Muscles stretch and loosen up. I shiver gladly before this lovely sight…

The breeze reminds me of a story I long to live again: it was spring, and buds had begun to bloom. I was at a park with my mother, who stood tall beside the sun; her imposing shape towered over my small body. I admired her, as I still do, and often stared into her eyes. She saw my gaze and returned it with a smile that extended from ear to ear. Her head swung, gently, side to side, as did her torso as she reached her arms towards me, as though moving with the wind, as though dancing to a song.

Vento, Beatrice Ruggeri, 2022.

*

Without notice, the wind strikes anew. It’s harsh, fast. It breaks my skin, makes it bleed. I shudder. Frosty clouds cover every speck of blue and yellow. High currents shove everything in their path up and down and up and down in a maddened fit. Dante’s cold inferno engulfs me.

My mother is before me once again. She’s crying, crouched, on her knees. They’re anxious tears. Her chest contracts in spasms. She gasps for air. Before her is a body: soft hands and puffy cheeks. It’s the body of a child, breathless. It’s my body.

Dread ensues. I try to pull away from this ghastly sight, but the more I resist, the more the wind rages on, and the more my dread deepens. It’s as if the currents shackled and compelled me to stare at this frozen form that resembles me.

Tears trickle down my pallid face.

*

Blizzard, tempest, storm—all words for that wind that makes us fear and exude cold sweat. The wind that toys with us, teases us like a malevolent being intent on causing pain. And as we twist and turn in the cold currents of thought, we plead for shelter, safety, warmth. But the wind rarely grants our wish. That is, until we yield to its command and accept its story.

So there I am, like the plastic bag in American Beauty: dead, but not lifeless. Just beautifully impotent. The wind first sweeps me gently across the ground, then lifts and twirls me vigorously, then shackles me unforgivingly. I choose neither speed nor direction: my path is paved by air.

For the wind takes, and lets go at its pace. The wind steals, and returns at will. Any attempt to tame its shifting moods results in hurting hurdles. Perhaps, there is a way to heed these variations: surrender—complete submission to the airs that blow our way; total abdication of control in favor of powerlessness and stochasticity.

*

As the wind soothes, stillness ensues. The plastic bag’s dance ends. Flowers pause; smiles shrink; tears dry. Stillness smothers, and the stories the wind has written through me fade, as the breath expires when touched by icy water.

Frigid.

Currents wane and with them I, into quiet and oblivion, and immobility; into the unstoried void of a lifeless slumber. Nothing is left but silence’s aseptic drabness. And as stillness engulfs me, the wind blows one, last, breath

— Leonardo Salvatore, Writer & Independent Scholar

“the curious belief”: Wind Watching in The Third Policeman

Responding to Venti “Question Two,” Bryan Counter recognized that air is “a carrier of both temperature and sound.” Counter discusses atmosphere in relation to aesthetic philosophy, but in a premodern Celtic conception, air conveys colour as well. In The Third Policeman for instance, Flann O’Brien aestheticizes variations in wind colour, probing the affective metaphorical capacities of wind. This complicates idioms like “scattered to the four winds.” (O’Brien claims there are four winds and eight sub-winds, each with its own colour.) By suggesting directional winds have colours, O’Brien draws heavily on ancient Celtic aesthetic theories; but before we examine these, a brief overview of the novel will prove useful.

A concise summary is impossible: an unnamed narrator has withdrawn from life and exists only to write about the savant and philosopher de Selby (who he cites throughout the novel). He murders a man named Phillip Mathers with a co-conspirator named John Divney. (The narrator reluctantly agrees to steal Mathers’ money so he can afford to publish his academic index on de Selby.) Divney refuses to give the narrator his share of the cash until they are free from suspicion. They remain at odds for three years until Divney (literally) blows up the narrator who then forgets his identity in the afterlife. His mythical journey in Hell begins. The narrator finds himself in the parish of three policemen who torment him by questioning his namelessness, and therefore his existence, and who confound him with impossible scientific theories. He flees, forgetting his tormentors, only to unknowingly return without memory of his previous suffering. And this punishment goes on forever because he is in Hell.

In the first chapter set in the parish, Mathers (who resides there already having died first) claims it is possible to ascertain the length of one’s life by watching the wind. Keith Hopper has noted that even before the narrator meets the policemen, Mathers tells him they “have the gift of ‘wind watching’, i.e. reading the colours of the winds” (111). Mathers asks the narrator, “What is your colour?” (33). He then explains his theory:

‘No doubt you are aware that the winds have colours,’ he said. […]

‘I never noticed it.’

‘A record of this belief will be found in the literature of all ancient peoples. There are four winds and eight sub-winds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a fine shining silver. The north wind is a hard black and the west is amber. People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend a day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, the magic of neighbouring winds when they are inter-weaved like ribbons at a wedding. […]

‘You were asking me what my colour was. How do people get their colours?’

‘A person’s colour […] is the colour of the wind prevailing at his birth […] you can tell the length of your life from it. Yellow means a long life and the lighter the better.’ (33-34)

One wonders where this strange theory originated. Brendan McWilliams first noted a connection between this sequence in the novel and the medieval Irish poem, Saltair na Rann, “Psalter of the Quatrains,” in an article entitled “Winds of a Different Hue” published in The Irish Times on 11 December 1992. Building on this idea, Hopper has argued that in evoking Saltair na Rann, O’Nolan ascribes “folkloric beliefs of the ancient Celtic druids” to the policemen, who “are the resultant interface of several intertextual worlds” (111-112). In his “Irishman’s Diary about wind colour” published in The Irish Times on 5 February 2014, Frank McNally noted that the “real-life version of Flann O’Brien probably studied [Saltair na Rann] at university, before wildly embellishing the idea in his writings.”

There are several modern sources about wind colour. P. W. Joyce, in A Social History of Ancient Ireland (1906), discusses Saltair na Rann in the first volume (1: 464); “The Wind” in volume two forms the basis for Mathers’s explanation. Joyce notes that descriptions of wind in Saltair na Rann “deserve to be noticed on account of the curious belief they record of the ancient Irish people that the wind blowing from each quarter has a special colour” (2: 521). Joyce created the following diagram (now in the public domain,) based on the descriptions given in Saltair na Rann:

Whether or not O’Brien read P. W. Joyce’s essay on “The Wind” (2: 521-523)—a copy of the book was not in his personal library at the time of his death—it is very likely, as McNally observes, that O’Brien encountered the poem as he completed his degree in Irish at University College Dublin.* He may have read it in Irish. Eleanor Hull’s anthology, The Poem-Book of the Gael, contains a translation of the poem with a “Creation of the winds with their colours” section that notes the affective potential of each wind:

the East, the smiling purple,  

from the South, the pure white, wondrous,

from the North, the black blustering moaning wind,

 from the West, the babbling dun breeze. (Hull 5-6)

P. W. Joyce’s diagram matches Mathers’ description of sub-winds, “sub-winds had colours of indescribable delicacy, a reddish-yellow half-way between silver and purple, a greyish-green which was related equally to black and brown. What could be more exquisite than a countryside swept lightly by cool rain reddened by the south-west breeze!’” (TTP 34).

O’Brien’s novel thus conveys an informed understanding of Celtic aesthetics. Mathers’s theory that the colour of the winds can be used to predict the length of one’s life could also be a reworking of the superstition noted by Joyce that “the fate of the year depends on the wind that happens to blow on the 1st of January” (2: 522). The wind motif in The Third Policeman informs the novel’s startling central irony: that after the second chapter, readers are in the presence of a dead narrator, and dark winds blow.

— Joseph LaBine, University of Ottawa

* Cathal Ó Hainle has done extensive work reconstructing the author’s reading lists for university courses by examining University College, Dublin Calendars for the following years: “1929-30, pp.171-172; 1930-31, pp. 187-190; pp. 1931-32, pp. 191-194” (Conjuring Complexities 169, n. 8). Ó Hainle does not mention Saltair na Rann specifically.  Eleanor Hull’s Poem-Book of the Gaels is a likely source. It includes an English version of Saltair na Rann and also contains several translations by Douglas Hyde (the first President of Ireland and O’Brien’s Irish professor while he was a student at UCD,) as well as two poems by Thomas MacDonagh (1878-1916), Donagh MacDonagh’s late father and one of the leaders executed by the British for his participation in the Easter Rising. Flann O’Brien could have known about the book, as well as the poems, “Is truagh gan mise I Sasana” and “The Yellow Bittern” (Hull 270-272), through his friendship with MacDonagh. Donagh leant him books, notably an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Works Cited

Counter, Bryan. “Some Notes About Air, by way of ‘But Not Tonight’ and Proust’s Recherche.” Up in the Air, Question Two, Venti, 2021, https://www.venti-journal.com/question-two. Accessed 1 December 2022. 

Hopper, Keith. Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist. 2nd ed., Cork University Press, 2011.

Hull, Eleanor, editor. The Poem-Book of The Gael: Translations from Irish Gaelic poetry into English Prose and Verse. Chatto and Windus, 1913.

Joyce, P. W. A Social History of Ancient Ireland. 2nd ed., Longmans, 1913. 2 vols.

Long, Maebh. “Plagiarism and the Politics of Friendship: Brian O’Nolan, Niall Sheridan and Niall Montgomery.” Flann O’Brien: Acting Out, edited by Paul Fagan and Dieter Fuchs, Cork University Press, 2022, pp. 18-35.

McNally, Frank. “Orange at first, green spreading from the west later: An Irishman’s Diary about wind colour.” The Irish Times, 5 Feb. 2022, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/orange-at-first-green-spreading-from-the-west-later-1.1679275.

McWilliams, Brendan. “Winds of a Different Hue.” The Irish Times, 11 Dec. 1992.

O’Brien, Flann. The Third Policeman. Harper Perennial, 2007.

Ó Hainle, Cathal. “Fionn and Suibhne in At Swim-Two-Birds.” Conjuring Complexities, edited by Anne Clune and Tess Hurson, Institute of Irish Studies, 1997, 17-36.