Becoming Wind, Becoming Water

A few months ago I heard Rosalía's Berghain for the first time, and I haven't been able to put it down since. Nothing about it resembled the usual 2026 slop, the statistically likely next sound. It didn't mirror my desires back at me. If anything, it felt like a uniquely human response to our artificial times. Uncontrollable, over the top, and grounded in something human that I couldn't quite name.

Berghain. Both the turmoil of the Berlin nightclub and, as Rosalía has pointed out herself, its older meaning: mountain grove, a place of peace and quiet.

The song is sung in three voices: Rosalía's, Björk's, and Yves Tumor's. It mixes genres and languages and seems to move across time, combining the celestial inspiration of Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic from the 12th century, with themes of toxic love and destructive masculinity.

The domestic and operatic is just one of many clashes in the song and video

The multiple meanings of bondage is also explored

I couldn't place it. It didn't fit the categories our own algorithmic desire has formed for us. So I stayed with the trouble. I tried to understand what it was a response to, and that's how I ended up writing about the death of the new in my last post, about how creativity killed it. But the song has more to say about our time and about the role of the genius in it. Because Berghain tells the story differently. It casts the whole history in a new light.

In the last post I told a story of loss. After the catastrophes of the twentieth century, we fled the figure of the genius: the exceptional man with the exceptional vision and the exceptional contempt for human life. And rightly so. We built something kinder in its place, human-centered design and creativity for all. But somewhere along the way the friction was engineered out of it. The participant became the user, the user became a bundle of needs, and creativity became the art of mirroring desire back to itself. We built a consensus machine, and then we built AI as its purest expression, the most statistically likely next word. We ended up neck-deep in our own averageness.

But if both the genius of old and the democratic consensus machine have failed us, then what?

The tempting answer is vision. Singularity, someone who sees what the committee can't. True, as far as it goes, but it smuggles the old genius back in through the side door, tyranny and moral immunity included. We excused the monstrous man because we needed his vision. What we need now is a kind of vision that doesn't require the exemption.

Ursula K. Le Guin offered a place to start. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction she pointed out that we tell human history as the history of the spear: the hero goes out, kills the mammoth, comes home triumphant. But before the spear there was the container. The net, the gourd, the bag. Gathering things, holding them, carrying them home.

So maybe the new genius is simply the bag instead of the spear: the one who gathers rather than pierces, who digs down rather than rising above.

Except the bag isn't enough. A bag that only gathers flattens whatever it holds. Everything ends up side by side at the same weight. That's a decent description of the consensus machine. It's an even better description of AI: all of human culture collected and smoothed into an average where nothing presses against anything.

Rosalía gathers, certainly. Flamenco, opera, the twelfth century, the Berlin night. But the gathering isn't what makes Berghain. The cuts make it. Violent, unprepared shifts between forms that have no business touching, held in contact without ever being reconciled. She's closer to Eisenstein here than to Le Guin: montage, two irreconcilable images slammed together until a third meaning appears that was in neither of them. Something gets released in those cuts that none of the gathered material contained on its own. A carrier bag torn open at the seams by its own edits.

There's a feminine gesture in this tearing, though not in the sense we usually give the word. The carrier bag has always been coded feminine: the gathering, the holding, the relational and situated parts of the human story, everything we overlooked because it wasn't a spear. What interests me is that the feminine position goes further than holding. It includes the willingness to tear the bag open, to fray your own form until something larger can step through. That movement runs opposite to the spear's, downward and inward, letting the world in instead of rising above it. I don't mean a gender here. It's about two ways of being in the world: being implicated in things rather than mastering them, and being willing, when it counts, to give up the very form doing the holding. A man can work from the bag, and a woman can throw spears all her life. Rosalía is the door-opener. Her collisions crack the categories apart, and through the gap comes something older than any cultural form, older than culture itself. Björk.

Björk's verse seems, at first, to argue against all of this. "The only way to save us is through divine intervention." A prayer for rescue from above, the oldest transcendence going. Except her first line already gives it away. "This is divine intervention" – present tense, pointing at the room. The video shows you what she means: the divine arrives as a small bird that lands on Rosalía's outstretched finger and sings to her.

Divine intervention, actual size

The forest is wallpaper. The animals are not

No hand reaching down from outside the world, then. Listen to where her divinity has always lived, from Biophilia to Utopia. Plate tectonics. The tide. She has sung the drifting continents outright (https://youtu.be/-WnzRqCK6Fs?si=S5OCJXRkLDj3ULTi). When Björk asks for divine intervention, she's asking the world itself to intervene in us.

The old genius transcended upward, cut himself loose from body and place, staged himself as eternal. Björk's depth runs the other way: beyond culture, not beyond the world. A goddess who isn't above creation but is creation, finding a voice.

You can hear it in the melody, which moves like the sea, and see it in the bodies on stage. When the song is performed without her, the dancers mass around Rosalía in a single undulating shape and oscillate slowly back and forth, miming the melody with their bodies, becoming water without necessarily knowing what they're enacting.

At the Brit Awards this spring she was actually there. The dancers parted, and the goddess appeared through the door Rosalía had opened. Then came an alternative ending, a brutal techno outro grown from a fan remix Rosalía had found on TikTok. Even the song's afterlife is a carrier bag. The beat hardens and the dancers break apart into anguish, jagged and frantic, clutching at themselves, biting their own hands and arms. A body longing for a transcendence it can't reach.

The dancers bite their hands because they're still trapped inside a single self. Björk has stopped being one. Not a self rising above the world, and not a soul escaping its body, but a self dissolving into wind and water and stone, into the weave of things we were never separate from to begin with. Haraway and Latour have insisted on this for decades: the subject was always already a hybrid, a knot in a net of relations, made with and of the world.

In the last post I ended on the image of Benjamin's angel of history: wings pinned open by the storm of progress, blown backwards into a future it can't see while the wreckage piles up at its feet. But maybe the tragedy of the image isn’t the storm. It's that it stays an angel, a single figure with its wings out, fighting the wind. The storm can only carry you off as long as you're something separate from it. Becoming wind, becoming water isn't defeat. It is the vision of an entirely different genius.

The old genius owned his vision; it proved his exceptional self. And you could object that Rosalía is exactly that: a global star, enormous machinery, her name above the work. But look at what she did with the remix. A stranger rebuilt her song, and instead of sending lawyers she made it the official ending. Try to imagine Beethoven doing that. The new genius owns nothing. The vision passes through her. She gathers what's already there, the voices, the bodies, the centuries, and cuts until something older than all of it comes through: wind, tide, ground. She doesn't possess what arrives. She just holds a form open long enough for the rest of us to see it too.

A spear is owned by whoever throws it. A bag, if it's any good, belongs to what it carries.