At a table, a few evenings ago, the question returned, why so much labour for this project, and why me of all people, who was never even a fan. Whoever poses it asks not so much for a motive as for a justification, as though attention, when its object is called Michael Jackson, had first to clear itself, and presumes that the only legitimate door remains the prior love of those who already worshipped. I possess no cause to produce. I possess an event.

The event lasts a few seconds, a fragment of a concert from the HIStory tour, Parken Stadium, Copenhagen, one of the two August nights of 1997.¹ In the opening medley passes "In the Closet," a song about keeping closed, about the pact of not being seen. On the record the decisive words belong to a female voice, credited as Mystery Girl, who invites him to open the door because there are no secrets, and asks to be set free, while he, in counterpoint, vows to keep everything in the closet.² On stage those words are spoken by Jackson, and he speaks them in a grave register far beneath the voice the world believed it knew, as though inside a song about keeping closed a room of the body had opened that had remained locked until then.³ I was not a fan. Nothing had prepared me, and only later would I read, in Bachelard, that the image works precisely so, that nothing prepares it, neither culture nor perception.⁴ Those seconds never left, and of one thing only I was certain, that I did not know why, but it was indispensable to go and see.

To those who asked me why, I long answered with a figure that had formed by itself, a tree pointed to in place of a reason. Only afterwards did I discover that the figure possessed a text and an age. A monk asks Zhaozhou the meaning of the coming from the west, which in the Chan tradition amounts to asking the meaning of everything, and Zhaozhou answers by pointing to the cypress in the courtyard.⁵ He hands over not a reason but a presence, to the question about meaning, the thing. My cypress stood on that stage.

The European tradition knows the scene as well, and has given it its exemplary text. In 1908 Rilke opens the second part of the New Poems with a sonnet before an archaic torso of Apollo, a statue missing its head, and with the head the face, the eyes.⁶ The poem performs an exact movement, for the gaze that ought to be missing has withdrawn into the stone and presses from every surface, until the verse arrives that carries everything, "there is no place that does not see you," and at once, without transition, without a therefore, "you must change your life." For a century readers have sought the logical passage between the gaze and the imperative, and there is none, because the leap is the content. Whoever had gone to look discovers being looked at, and comes out commanded. Of the torso, what is missing counts for more than what remains, since in an intact statue the gaze would dwell in the eyes, while the mutilation has dispersed it across the whole surface, and what is missing completes itself in the one who looks. This is why a fragment can call. No one, after all, ever asked Rilke whether he was a fan of archaic sculpture.

Before an image that seizes, the ready answers are two, devotion, which converts it into cult, and dismissal, which files it away as caprice. A third exists, going to see, and my trade had taught it to me without declaring it, since for years I have watched people enter a house and know they must stay before any reason, and trust that knowledge. I went to see, and the first thing the fragment took from me bears the name of an unearned certainty. I believed I knew, as everyone does, what voice that man had, and the voice was another. I advance here a hypothesis, and declare it as such. If received knowledge was wrong about a datum so elementary, so audible, all of that knowledge asked to be reopened, and the rule that governs these pages, to distinguish what is documented from what is merely repeated, was born in those seconds, before any theory.

When a friend asked me what I mean to do with it, whether a publisher, whether a publication, I gave the only true answer, that there is no purpose, that I want to see, and that more than wanting, I must. The word vocation preserves, to the letter, a voice, and the grammar of its scenes crosses the millennia unchanged, the voice precedes the reasons, and the one who receives it answers with a single word, here I am. Rilke never explained the torso, he answered it with a sonnet. I cannot explain those seconds of Copenhagen. The book I am writing answers for me, and lays them out at length.

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1. HIStory World Tour, Parken Stadium, Copenhagen, 14 and 29 August 1997, with "In the Closet" in the opening medley. Which of the two nights the fragment belongs to remains to be established. ↩︎

2. Michael Jackson and Teddy Riley, "In the Closet," Dangerous, Epic, 1991; released as a single in 1992. The spoken parts are credited to "Mystery Girl," Stéphanie of Monaco. ↩︎

3. Tour documentation of the period reports these performances as the first public display of that register; the claim awaits confirmation in stronger sources and is flagged here as a declared limit. ↩︎

4. Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l'espace, PUF, Paris, 1957, introduction. ↩︎

5. Wumen Huikai, Wumenguan (Mumonkan), case 37. Translations of Zhaozhou's tree oscillate between the cypress and the oak. ↩︎

6. Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaïscher Torso Apollos," Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil, Insel, Leipzig, 1908, the volume dedicated to Rodin. The identification with a specific torso in the Louvre remains a traditional, debated attribution. Peter Sloterdijk took the final verse as the title of Du mußt dein Leben ändern, Suhrkamp, 2009. ↩︎

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