Thoughts on Dave Malloy's THREE HOUSES
These thoughts are very very very unverified, since I haven't even listened to the entire piece twice through yet, but I'm going to end this essay by telling you that I'm getting out of the systemic internet, so that'll be something to look forward to.
As I often write when I don't know how else to begin: here we go.
THREE HOUSES and OCTET can be read as connected works, in the sense that both pieces deal with not only our current era but also a specific type of person who is a deliberate product (deliberate practice) of this era.
I want to pause at this point and look up the word era, which is etymologically related to the Latin aera, which translates into counters but specifically delineates the counting of money, and of course so much of what and whom we produce in this particular time derives from this particular mathematics.
So we have OCTET, in which people explain how and why they became addicted to the internet, and THREE HOUSES, in which people explain how and why they became disconnected from the world.
This is where I should pause and tell you that this is an extremely simplistic gloss on two very complex pieces, and it reminds me a bit of Doris Lessing's introduction to The Golden Notebook, in which she writes that people see in these kinds of complex texts what they most want to see, which is often the problem that they are currently dealing with, and then I turned the page and started The Golden Notebook and found it both clichéd and tedious and then I stopped reading because Lessing's introduction also instructed the reader to stop any book they found dull.
What I love about THREE HOUSES, among all of the other things I love about THREE HOUSES, is how many of the numbers I can sing back after just one-and-a-half listens. How many lyrics I can recall word for word. This piece is indelibly memorable, as I like to say, if you are willing to pay attention. It's a tighter work than GREAT COMET (even though I also love GREAT COMET) and a more informationally dense piece, and if it loses relevance as we forget the specific technology it references (there is already one reviewer who mistakes the game we played during the pandemic, forgetting about Animal Crossing and guessing that Sadie is obsessed with ummmmm Minecraft????) it may gain something else instead.
An understanding of how people become who they are, perhaps, and how they can become someone new.
This, at least, is a straightforward translation of the coda:
as we looked back at the houses we had come from
and we looked back at the people we had been
and then we looked forward
toward whoever we were each
about to become
THREE HOUSES and GREAT COMET share an ending, in the sense that Pierre, Susan, Sadie, and Beckett all come to the same kind of understanding.
It seems to me
That this comet
Feels me
Feels my softened and uplifted soul
And my newly melted heart
Now blossoming
Into a new life
OCTET's ending is adjacent but not dissimilar; PRELUDES also deals with the work of becoming. Each of these pieces in their own way also deal with characters who are pressurized by systemic forces, and I use the word systemic specifically because I suppose I mean, in this case, that it is not a system they created for themselves.
It is not their own philosophy of how to live, chosen with thought and honed with action.
It is aera.
This is why the characters in OCTET and THREE HOUSES are so familiar. They are the avatars that populate the systems. The reflections we see in the screens – and it is worth remembering that every single screen ever created was specifically designed to separate us from something else.
At this point I will pause and look up avatar, and note that in addition to the definition associated with Hinduism the word has been expanded to include the "concrete embodiment of something abstract."
This is precisely what Malloy is doing.
This is perhaps what all art should do.
This particular piece of art has also changed what I am going to do next.
I've been thinking about it for months and months, by which I mean literally two months, and I haven't had the courage to put the plan into action, but, once again: here we go.
It's time for a complete separation from the algorithmic parasocial internet. I deleted my accounts three years ago, but I've still been lurking, clicking, scrolling, letting the system shape my thoughts.
So.
No more Substacks.
No more X/Twitter.
No more Reddit.
No more Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, and none of those Buzzfeed articles where they round up the best social media posts on your behalf. Nothing that was created to feed the monster, as Malloy described it.
I'll still read independent blogs, so if you've got something that you are writing that is not connected to the system, let me know.
And now, as I often write when I don't know how else to stop: it's time to get back to work.