Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one. We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to each other, can share an intimacy — an intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or for the duration of a song that is being listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.

« The obsessive fear of the Americans is that the lights might go out. […] In the tower blocks the empty offices remain lit. On the freeways, in broad daylight, the cars keep all their headlights on. In Palms Ave., Venice, California, a little grocery store […] leaves its orange and green neon sign flashing all night, into the void. And this is not to mention the television, with its 24-hour schedules, often to be seen functioning like an hallucination in the empty rooms of houses or vacant hotel rooms […].

“In his Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel noted that human beings— understood as collectively likeminded beings, what he called Geist—are always struggling to realize or actualize (verwirklichen) some normative conception of themselves, and in having attempted such an actualization, having “externalized” such a self- conception (created some social or political institution, collectively acted in some way, debated and passed some law, engaged in some marriage practice, educated their children in some way), they are then, and only then, able to understand much more fully and concretely what they took themselves to be committed to in such a merely provisional and tentative self- conception, and thereby what it was they actually did. This is Hegel’s famous notion of “retrospectivity” (Nachträglichkeit) in self-understanding. In his terms in the Lectures, human beings must “double themselves” (sich verdoppeln) not only to understand themselves, but to be themselves, given their distinct mode of being, as self-realizing beings. That is, the mode of self- knowledge distinctive for such beings is self- constituting as well as self- reflective, as human beings struggle to become who they take themselves to be. Art is understood as a distinct modality of such self- understanding, “externalization,” and self- realizing.”

“A joke’s punch line, like a poem’s meaning, is not in its words, but in what we make of them—and they of us. […] The performing arts—which include comedy, poetry, music, dance, and magic, as well as theater—ask of us not only the theater’s well-known suspension of disbelief, but also suspension of foreknowledge. All partake of something that lies at the core of ritual: the reenactment of and entrance into a mystery that can be touched and entered but not possessed.”