Abjectivity

OK, I made that word up. (BN)

The origin of the concept is the very basic equipment with which CA began, the Bontempi organ, the Stylophone, the recorders, ocarinas, a prepared piano, the soundboard populated with kitchen utensils, school mathematical instruments - we recall a protractor - and various other objects found to hand at Vine Cottage, inserted under the wires so as to produce percussive noises when the affected keys were depressed. These we collectively christened “abject noise-makers”. The Beniphone was no doubt also a part of our abject arsenal, but nobody can remember what it was. More broadly, the noun refers to that in life and art which is, or treats of that which is, low, wretched, detestable, abased. Spanner is a related concept:

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Spanner    

Page image: The image at the head of this page is a shoebox tape player/recorder of the sort used by CA when we first began. The image comes from a 1977 BBC production (broadcast in April of that year) of Samuel Beckett's Ghost Trio. The short play was first published in the Journal of Beckett Studies, winter 1976.

As it happens, the “ghost trio” of Cultural Amnesia have a Beckett connection. On the last two evenings of May 1982, Ben and Gerard performed in a staging of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as, respectively, Estragon and Vladimir. John was involved with the lighting of the production, though I personally feel he would have made an excellent Pozzo. Indeed, CA have acted as a unit in a number of other respects than as a band and as friends. In the early '80s we were also a debating team, and the most widely circulated picture of us, and that which heads up the CA Wikipedia page, is not us as CA, but as a winning debating team (on the one occasion we won). The caption in the publication in which the photo first appeared was “Youth speaks”. And for a number of years beginning in the early 1990s the three of us also collaborated closely on the design and typesetting side of the establishment of a new academic journal. This involvement was still ongoing when, following 15 years of silence, CA resumed activities in 1998. GG, 21/09/26