Dark was the Night and Indeterminate the Sign

I have been talking to my class about the golden record flying through space aboard the Voyager satellite. It contains, as is well known, the greatest musical hits of humanity. This was the project undertaken by the hard bitten man of science Carl Sagan in what actually amounts to an astounding act of blind faith. What the disc contains is signs, visual and aural signs, and the act of faith involves the conviction, perhaps an utterly groundless conviction, that the alien receivers can construct a context in which these signs can signify. Let’s take the song ‘Dark was the Night Cold was the Ground’ recorded in the 1920’s by the American gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson. This consists of sonic information. Notes on the guitar and slow, melodic moaning. Minimally our putative aliens would have to sense sounds rather than, say, chemical information or, like a shark, minute changes in the pressure of a medium. Music is addressed to one particular human sense though sound DOES make vibrations that make it possible for the deaf to sense musical patterns. This would mean that music, though an art that uses sound as its medium, can be realized analogously in the sense of touch. It can also be realized visually, though abstractly, in the form of notation. At best then, our aliens will need three of our 5 senses to allow ‘Dark was the Night’ to act as a sign. In fact, though, they will need two for the golden disc does not include any scores or notation. For the sake of argument, though, let’s give our alien listeners ears: what will they hear? Well,they will hear notes in sequence both artificially produced by strings and produced by the vibrating vocal chords of a human being (would they know the difference?). This human WE know is expressing and perhaps alleviating a mood of sadness, perhaps even desolation in a voice that is low and harsh yet conveys a tone of ineffable compassion even love. Some of this,I suspect, is related to human physiology particularly breathing, heartbeat and the internal, embodied component of feelings such as elation, tenderness or sadness (which aliens might not even have alas). Music evokes and indeed imitates certain internal sensations in its rise and fall and we would need the capacity to have these sensations to respond appropriately. Now, for humans, elation and sadness are elation and sadness about and tenderness is tenderness towards. Our aliens, alas, only have the materiality of the signs with none of the intentionality.  

Of course, any human at all can intuit something about ‘Dark was the Night’ even without the intentionality of the signs for we do this with many pieces of music. I can certainly enjoy a raga though I do not have access to much of the nuance available to a person from India conversant with classical literary and musical traditions. In the same way our putative alien may sense something sad or consoling or both from the materiality of the music without exactly knowing what experiences or thoughts are evoking this mood. Or to put it more exactly, they COULD do this if they shared enough of our basic physiology. Cats and dogs seem to respond to music and our aliens may do so in the same sense. In the same way we can tell the Venus of Willendorf has SOMETHING to do with fertility or sexuality even though we have no context for understanding what or who this figure represented to the people who made it. There might, for all we know, be a STORY about this figure as with Ishtar or Demeter. What I wish to note about this, though, is that just on the level of materiality we do not have the grounds for a rich discourse about this song. There is not enough friction for us to fly to adopt an image from Kant. The signs do not rub up against enough other signs! 

Alas for our aliens they do not have access to the bit of text we have with this song: the title. Worse, even if they did they would not be able to place its meaning. This is an object lesson in how, with just a bit of background knowledge, a text can shift from being inert to being saturated, indeed oversaturated, with meaning. Dark was THE night and cold was THE ground. The title puts us someplace specific in space and time, THIS night and THIS ground. Here we would be at sea if we did not have access to the canon of African American gospel music. Since we do, we know that the song ‘Dark was the Night’ refers to Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemene. In this prayer he shrinks from the horror of death yet submits to the will of the father. It is HIS voice with which Blind Willie Johnson sings the sadness of the world. Indeed, the singer is here the voice of God and the voice of man at once for in Christ the two are one. He invokes both human grief and divine compassion. The God in whose voice he sings is a God who is present in and present with suffering humans. Christ’s prayer is the singer’s prayer and vice versa and, in fact, this unity is pre-verbal for the singer does not employ the words. It is a prayer of resignation to the inevitability of death and suffering. If all we had was this section of the Gospel text the matter would end there but the Gospel story, when we get it in full, is a story of hope and resurrection in the midst of suffering. The gesture of divine compassion is also a gesture towards the hope of redemption. This makes the emotional tonality of the song complex for now we have to set its tragedy in the context of a deeper triumph: its acceptance of death is an openness to new life.   

Without this bit of text and the ur-text to which it refers we would have no access to any of this and the song would be as inert a symbol as an obese stone goddess from the stone age. It is in an intertextual relation that the text comes to life: from the Gospels to a hymn text to a wordless chant. If its meaning is saturated it is because it is saturated with other text. There is more, however, for another text we can read is social text. We can read ‘Dark was the Night’ as part of the story of American music or part of the story of American Christianity or part of the experience of African Americans. My students had little difficulty situating Blind Willie Johnson as poor and, with a little prompting, black. This gives a social meaning to his performance that follows on the religious one. The Christian God is a god of the poor and oppressed. He did not enter the world as a refined southern aristocrat, say, but as a person rather like Johnson himself. He described himself as a slave just as Johnson’s near ancestors had been. God is with us specifically in the form of a ‘suffering servant’ and, in his human mode, he is with the poor and the downtrodden above all. His face is the face of the other. With this context we can read ‘Dark was the Night’ as a quiet but firm assertion of dignity. It is the poor, abused and homeless of America, the despised sons of slaves who speak, indeed who speak uniquely, with the divine voice, who, indeed, assume the very voice and identity of Christ in his hour of despair. The gesture, placed in this context of race and class oppression, is significant and powerful. Indeed, we might take it as subversive. Understood this way it is a moment in the birth of the consciousness of freedom among African Americans. Blind Willie Johnson’s oppressors seem to have understood this well for he was, according to one story, arrested for singing a song about Samson tearing down the temple of the Phillistines! 

All of this is to say, alas, that ‘Dark was the Night’ is in all likelihood lost on anyone who happens to find it. Unless, of course, our aliens start telling their OWN story about this mysterious object the golden disc and the mysterious, baffling sounds it utters (assuming they frame things in terms of narratives). ‘Dark was the Night’ might end up spliced into a different narrative and put in a different context. It might rub against NEW signs and generate new kinds of significance. It might even become an object of cultic reverence! This would be a possible consequence of something we know about signs: that they signify only in relation to other signs. ‘Dark was the Night’ signifies what it does to us because we can put it in relation to literary and social signs such that it can generate meaning. As an object it means nothing in itself. It is not, as we now say, a transcendental signified. It is a moment in the explication of a system of signs. As such it can be grafted into another set of signs. It can be redeployed in a new context and take on a new meaning as it does not mean as a unit or atom of information. Even on a material level it means in relation to human physiology exactly as a chair signifies the structure of the human body that sits on it. In a sense, there is no such thing as ‘Dark was the Night’ as there is no such thing as JUST a chair (without a body it is designed for). The indeterminacy of signs raises our hopes that this and other pieces on the golden record may, after all, mean something though we can never, in all likelihood, know what this something is.