SOUNDTRACK: CÓDIGA DE GUERRA-“Wittgenstein Song” (2013).
Códiga de Guerra is from Hidalgo in Mexico. They have one album out (called Peyote). I am having a devil of a time finding anything out about them. You can stream the album on YouTube and you can even buy it from iTunes, but I can’t get any kind of band home page.
It should be apparent that I’d never heard of them before I saw they had a song called “Wittgenstein” and so here they are.
They sing entirely in Spanish, so I don’t really know what this song is about, but i really like it. Indeed I like the whole album. They have an indie rock feel–buzzy guitars and good melodies. Some of the early songs on the album are even kind of mellow which made me think of R.E.M. for some reason.
“Wittgenstein” is the heaviest song on the album. It opens with some echoed guitars (not unlike Kiss’ “Black Diamond”) but when the other guitars kick in, it is much louder (not heavy heavy, but louder). The chorus gets kind of heavy again, but the song fades out entirely at around two minutes. Then a buzzy bass comes back in and the echoed guitar plays the intro and the song starts again. I heard the word logico in there so it may indeed be all about Wittgenstein.
Check out the song
or the whole album
[READ: October 16, 2013] Wittgenstein’s Mistress p. 1-60
Typically for a group read like this (especially the longer, harder books) I like to be a kind of touchstone–noting significant things that happen and trying to wrap my head around the book by summarizing it, without really speculating wildly about what will happen. Well, Wittgenstein’s Mistress seems to studiously resist that sort of approach. I am not typically a “solve it” kind of reader. I don’t usually try to figure things out ahead of time. If the book is well written, I just like to let it flow over me so I can think about it afterwards.
But this book more or less demands you to try to figure out what is going on right from the get go.
The cover image above shows the opening sentence:
“In the beginning sometimes I left messages in the streets. Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery.”
followed soon by
“Nobody came , of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.”
Weird, right? And then comes:
“I have no idea how long ago it was when I was doing that. If I was forced to guess, I believe I would guess ten years.”
Whoa. And then the kicker:
“And of course, I was quite out of my mind for a certain period too, back then.”
That’s quite a lot to pack into the first page.
And yes, the “paragraphs” are largely one sentence each.
The narrator explains that she (we learn it is a she a few pages in [“Conversely I am still menstruating”]) has been all over the world:
“As when I drove that time to the obscure corner of Turkey, for instance, to visit at the site of ancient Troy.”
She has also seen the Parthenon and the Dardanelles, which seems somewhat surprising. But, here’s where my first big flag went up:
“It was that winter during which I lived in the Louvre, I believe. Burning artifacts and picture frames for warmth, in a poorly ventilated room.”
Okay, what?
She has also lived in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where she later placed her own paintings) and in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She also let thousands of tennis balls bounce down the Spanish Steps in Rome.
When she begins talking about her family, she cannot remember if her husband was named Adam (she is pretty sure) but she does know that her son, who died when he was 7, was named Simon. And that must have been some twenty -five years ago. Which would make her, maybe 50.
She is currently living in a house (of which there is a painting that she is studying) and typing what we are reading. She is not editing it nor is she going back to see if she is repeating anything (she constantly wonders if she has already said something and is revising what she has written).
One thing is clear–she is well read in both the classics and (some) philosophy and she knows her art and classical music. She claims to have recently read all of the ancient Greek plays (before burning them) and references Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. She also talks about Rembrandt, and Da Vinci (talking about how his students painted oins on the floor that looked so real he tried to pick them up).
In addition to the classics that she mentions (Wuthering Heights, Pensees), she also talks about Baseball When the Grass Was Real a book from 1975 by Donald Honing (but she hates baseball so she would never read it, even though she finds the title interesting).
We begin to believe that there are no other living creatures anywhere. She thinks she may have seen a cat in Rome and a seagull near her now, but she never saw them again (she even put food out for the cat). She thought she saw another person, but it was only her reflection. She is able to take any vehicle that she wants, provided they have gas and a working battery (cars are littered everywhere). And when one is done, she just takes another one.
She also makes sure to correct her writing a lot–calling into question the vagaries of language:
“When I say not speaking one word [of Greek] I mean not reading one either, obviously.”
or
“There is a painting of Penelope weaving in the National Gallery, by someone named Pintoricchio. I have said that quite badly, I suspect. One scarcely meaning that where Penelope is doing her weaving is in the National Gallery. Where she is doing that is on the island of Ithaca, naturally.”
She also is hesitant about everything. The word “perhaps” appears on just about every page and “possible” on every two.
There are some feminist ideas in the story–the Rape of Helen is brought up and the island of Lesbos is mentioned a few times, and of course, she divorced her husband right after their son died and has done quiet well without him. So I’ll be looking for more themes like that in the future.
For ease of searching, i include: Codiga de Guerra
By the end of the first 60 pages she has started repeating herself a little–mentioning Helen of Troy twice for instance, so we’ll see if certain themes get repeated a lot.
Despite the strangeness of the story and the repetitiveness of some of the parts and the clear fact that there is no plot to speak of, I find it fascinating. And I wonder, is she crazy or is she really the last person alive in the world?
I’ve only read the first 30 pages (it’s deceptively easy to read, though suddenly I look up and I realize I have no idea what’s “happened” – that may be partly the book and partly my faulty reading) but I’m tripping over practical matters. Like, how did she drive from Europe to Mexico? And to Alaska – where is all this gas coming from?
The idea of living in art museums is marvelous – if I were caught in a people-less Portland, I might live in the library. But I’d miss the internet. 😉
I’ve crowd-sourced the video in my philosophy MOOC to see if someone can help with a translation (there’s a broad international crowd there).
Glad you’ve “joined” us. It is a very quick read (You may even finish before me as I am pacing myself very slowly) and yes I’m not sure what has happened either really (and from all of the people who talk about spoilers, it sounds like you may never actually know). I was very concerned about practical matters too. Although she does sort of explain things. The internet would certainly be a loss. I’m planning on writing a bit about that for my next week post.
I feel like I may have missed something about your video/translation question. Can you point me in the right direction?
re the video translation: I’m taking a series of online courses (MOOCs) through Coursera, one of which is Intro to Philosophy (not the same philosophy class that got me stuck on Wittgenstein in the first place, but that’s ok). Since students come from all over the world, I put out a call for a Spanish-language speaker to clue me in on the lyrics.
A Brazilian student found the Facebook page for the band ( https://www.facebook.com/pages/C%C3%B3digo-de-Guerra/173682642747418 ) and sent an email asking for the lyrics (he speaks Portuguese and some Spanish but not enough to understand the lyrics or translate them).
Just now he told me he got a reply. I love the internet.
In Spanish:
Wittgenstein
El Tractatus
Wittgenstein
Ya no eres tú
Wittgenstein
La lógica ya no es igual
Wittgenstein,
No hay significado esencial
No hay esencia ya
En los signos que hay
Todo reside en
El juego en que tú estás
Wittgenstein
No hay problemas filosóficos
Wittgenstein
Son enredos psicológicos
Wittgenstein
La lógica ya no es igual
Wittgenstein
No hay significado esencial
No hay esencia ya
En los signos que hay
Todo reside en
El juego en que tú estás
I ran it through Google Translate:
Wittgenstein
The Tractatus
Wittgenstein
It’s not you
Wittgenstein
The logic is not the same
Wittgenstein,
There is no essential meaning
Essentially no longer
In the signs that there
It’s all in
The game in which you are
Wittgenstein
No philosophical problems
Wittgenstein
They are psychological entanglements
Wittgenstein
The logic is not the same
Wittgenstein
There is no essential meaning
Essentially no longer
In the signs that there
It’s all in
The game in which you are
It appears to be a summary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – all about language games. And he did state that “There are no philosophical problems, there are only language problems.” He went into great length about language games, and saw language as functioning differently in different games.