MUSIC & PHILOSOPHY November 20, 2009

John Frusciantes Cosmogony on God * by Jos Preciado

www.josepreciado.net

John Frusciantes mystifying musical power has been often marked out, unlike the role that poetic language plays within that mystication. The temporality of poetry is very similar to that of music. As we know, the latter evokes a type of experience that only comes associated to a specic time and place determined by the moment in which we execute it or listen to it. Likewise, poetry appears held out of time as if it would inhabit some kind of eternal present. The way Frusciante introduces us into his music as to a uke of founding poetry whose function is almost sacramental, is mythological. Frusciante constantly employs myth as a resource to interpose a universe of retention between our nitude thrown in the middle of a hostile nature blind to our hopes where the unexplainable ends up making sense in one way or another. In God (The Empyrean, 2009), Frusciante uses myth to impound us from the horror inspired by the world that we unsuitably inhabit. God, incarnated in the voice of the musician, presents an alternative reality that stands out clearly from the ordinary world, the profane reality to which we only have access through our nite condition: So each day would be new, I build you to sleep / thats the idea of dying but youll just have to see. After this lapidating opening phrase, God presents an assorted rattle of unfolding events. These are derived from the pronominal game that Frusciante proposes insofar that its signs refer constantly to themselves, and nd their determination in new relations that they establish with other signs which are present in the song and allow us to make multiple lectures. A common attribute among Tibetan Buddhist monks, Aztec gods, some Christian saints and plenty of psychedelic substances consumers, is their unfolding capacity. Lets say that its unfolded that the one whose soul leaves or projects out of the body even remaining connected to it always in the same spatialtemporal context. When, for example, Frusciantes God says: Im each one of you, he is unfolding into his audience. From that moment, as if in the face of a mirror, each one of his listeners will be able to be and recognise itself before itself, and for so before God, as human being and as deity: Be for me, before me John sings to the crowd and to himself, as a God and as a man. It is in that piousness that we can represent his

poetic language to ourselves as a free ow of words that swivel upon themselves, like signs in rotation, since each one who listens to them gets involved in a game of unsettled purpose. As in the case of the English pronoun you, which can be read as allusive to a group of entities in plural form, or to a single entity in singular form, depending on the context of its use. What Frusciantes God proposes is to play with words in order to nd alternative anothers who can be him or any of us: as deities and as human beings. For so, another possibility is that you can turn into the abstraction of the lover, and, God, into any of us unfolding into her or him: You blaspheme my name / but still I love you / still I love you / I love you just the same. Within this sacramental and amorous uncertainty, the only unquestionable thing for Frusciantes God seems to be the immediacy of the mind between our existence and any aim to understand it: You can do what you want or so you think / but till you stop all your thoughts / you are ties to your surroundings. Nevertheless, this reliance can be solved in a magic way if we tread into another form of unfolding suggested by God, whose mystifying power allows to reach, like in a dream, all that is unapproachable by means of reason: When the fog spreads out in the rainy season / it comes from my insides / When the thunderous lightning strikes down / youre seeing your real I sings God-Frusciante to nd himself and another that like ourselves and him itself, as deity and human, as lover and now as thunder, befalls where and when the transguration of signs occurs; that is, at the moment when poetry comes to happen. God operates as myth because it contemporises an implausible drama in a narrative present that is eternal and contains the experience of satisfaction itself. Within his cosmogony, Frusciante denes himself as an articial creator of the world, and of music, by reafrming his artistic vocation: Creations not something I did / its something that I do exclaims God as he remarks his exhaustive condition within this unnished world of his own authorship, speaking like a humble craftsman who perceives himself as an imperfect being and wails upon those who listen to him: You know that I try to repair and repay; for he is, after all, a very human God.

* This is a translation of the original Spanish version of this article. Thanks to Andrew Jackman for his advice and help with the corrections to the English translation.