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Notes on Refrain..

writte by Poppy Amberg

There is a strange concurrence to the etymology of the word refrain, it being both verb and noun of inverse meaning. Its two uses borne from different Latin roots. Its two contradicting meanings now harmonious in my mind, reflective of each other, manifestations of the same middle nub of suspension: refrain, a holding back, refrain, a reoccurring phrase.

A refrain, refrain. I search online in what song does leonard cohen say the word refrain. I search again does leonard cohen ever say refrain. Google does not seem to understand. I am sure Leonard Cohen at some point says the word refrain in a chorus somewhere, but perhaps it is the low tone and strange upwards lift of his as-if-talking singing voice that would suit the word so well. As I say it in my head I become him.

When I read a word or phrase repeated I am sure I have met some divinity. To go again, to go again, to reiterate. To bear repeating. To speak all things twice I want to write all things twice. To place again the sense of the word or phrase, not its meaning but the feeling in its shape the object it becomes. To replicate but treat them all as new. The way Derrida conceives of mimesis as being repetition with difference. The way the genealogy of an object can in fact be the object too.

Part of Konstantin Zhukov’s show at Outhouse gallery was a film on a loop. Text, dialogue, oral accounts of queer Latvian club culture at the fall of the Soviet Union. A refrain, there on the screen, in the dark, with the older lady in the floor length wool coat and the knitted hat, almost cropped there to her small forehead, clutching a bag or a scarf or some other brown black lump, standing there to my left: What’s it like–to touch another person? Kā tas ir – pieskarties otram cilvēkam?

I did lose breath reading Nisha Ramayya’s States Of The Body Produced By Love it did sort of fall out of me an elegant slosh. She writes of Hindu mantras, their meaning that lies in form and repetition, quoting André Padoux, who explains that unlike language, [mantras] are not bound by ‘conventions’ nor associated with objects, but on the contrary are oriented toward the very origin of the Word and of the energy. Mantra as ritual as periodic wave.

I read online of such thing as a sine wave, a kind of periodic curve in an s shape, and I read that the word sine comes from a mistranslation of an Arabic word that was once a Sanskrit word by a 12th century European translator, that it was a bowstring, that it was misconstrued as the word for bosom or pocket and it’s all come full circle. I read that the word sine can be mixed up with the Scottish phrase syne meaning since, or ago, or a time in the past from which a thing has continued until now.

The Latin root of the noun refrain is refringere meaning to break off. What is that speck, that fragment. Broken thing in triangles in the palm. Scatter. Arc. Eva Hesse’s Hang Up, the wire thrown out the frame, wrapped in grey scale scrap. The broken record refrain.

There is too a refrain in Autobiography Of A Performance, Blue Pieta and Bhanu Kapil’s sweet heavy work and of course it thumped up grey–––Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?–––

–––Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

Here is what I wrote:

Kapil and Pieta writing on water, on being surrounded by water, of surrounding oneself with water, with the channel, with the body by which other bodies are brought forth and buried in a furrowing, a mother. My mother. Sharpe’s wake, the wake of slavery, of the ever present and lateral.

The refrain without time effervescent. A refrain with time to go fizz and go grey. A repetition outside order and so an immediately abject form. Yes, it does something to a romantic ideal, to reiterate and echo, it grates and we misunderstand and it is not linear but somehow vertical, an upward build, non-progressive and immanent. I think of this in the works of Sue Tompkins, the voice and lyricist of the band Life Without Buildings and their one and only album Any Other City from 2000. Sue is now a poet, a performer, a fine artist. Word performance, though, a jangly shuffling spoken word performance. At 20 seconds into a 30 second video on YouTube, Sue waves her hand in a circular motion as if wiping a window, holding a microphone, her bangs and ready legs, repeating the word grey grey grey grey grey

Of course at the gallery I am never missed by its once toilet history and this is a thrilling thing. To want for an abject holding space, to want for one's art, one's refrain, to have to reverberate through walls that once hugged sewage pipes and cisterns. The older lady who watched the film on a loop with me in the gallery said it made her think of being a prisoner. I wasn’t sure if she meant the room we were in, blacked out windows for the cinematic feel, or the oppression and silencing of queer life and love. To want to remain in greyness, of course, for the grey of Konstantin’s photographs and newspaper pages oscillating there on the TV, the triptych the older lady asked about, What does it mean? What does it mean?

Either way some truth and some not, some stuckness, fractal enveloping. You and I spoke of how we like songs with a continuous refrain that builds but remains the same all the way through, that accumulates without culminating, Nick Cave’s The Mercy Seat, Jeff Buckley’s Kangaroo outtake.

Here is what I wrote:

The process of the refrain being the embodiment of repetitive action and performance as research. Of guttural noise without sound. Of guttural coercion in the intestines and specifically the diaphragm.

I read that the word wake comes from the Old Norse word to keep watch. And the state of being or remaining awake. Being or remaining. What of both, being in refrain. What might they say of the desire to be (outside temporal structure, state of existence) always at some place on a mound, wave, cycle, syne. Film on a loop there in the out house, within a structure, the house of outside the romantic ideal, club music’s cyclical thump.