A Note On J.H. Prynne 2019-2021 And His Covidian Abounding

Prynne’s Covidian abounding feels like gold that you can no longer trade on or a bird singing cryptically long after it knew what it knew just to show you what that furtherance can mean on its own terms. As this song comes into 2020-21, regarding the necessary intensification, it is as if it really has done something else. Imagine what it knew, and then imagine what it still knows and what costs in its deepened, lost reticence. Angelic reticence, even. The infinitely tamped down secret of a distance. Proliferation at (a) close of day.

The assumption that we are listening to Prynne sing a song long after he knew something (which if you don’t yet know then . . . ) is based on trust, even infinite trust, like crypto. It outruns the banks, and allows one to contemplate a long time in which a stretch of music had gotten over ransacking its own wake for signs of old distress and heavy mourning clefts, but or and there’s some kind of but there, an unrest, if one cannot rest with the idea that what was known in the first place was a single, moving, or even emptily moveable but still unupdatable thing, which perhaps it was. By 2021 the music has become what? . . . . gently frenetic and insistent, pre-cuneiform, a controlled blast of silent and invisible reminders that have to go farther and farther away from the point d’appui that is now only imaginable, as one has a migration in the air with no location, mid-air songing. What we are talking about, if it can be put like this again in any case again, is the singularly brittle gold of a song that stretches to infinity a last most beautiful return, a give-over, or what Malabou calls ‘the strange tendency metaphysics has of reinvesting, at its close, its own traces, of somehow coming back upon itself’.