I believe I discovered the word “ananke” in a novel by Philip K. Dick. I scrawled it on a piece of junk mail with the definition “blind necessity/blind chance,” and carried it around in my checkbook for years, planning to eventually use it as a document title. Having acquiesced to Steve’s choice of “April/October 1991″ for the last album, I hoped to use “ananke” as at least a partial title for the album at hand. However, faced with Steve’s proposals this time around, I had no choice but to succumb to his pithy and wholly appropriate suggestions. As I was tired of carrying “ananke” around in more ways than one, Steve proposed that I incorporate it into liner notes for this LP.
Interpreting “blind” as humanity’s inability and an individual’s struggle to even partially grasp so-called reality, “ananke” somehow conveys a primary motivational component of my life and work. Additional clues can be found in the following quote from “Old Masters” by Thomas Bernhard – “Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt — an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect — to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hypocrisy and self-deception…” The struggle, the process to move, however slightly, from these overwhelmingly pervasive attributes of humanity, greatly interests me.
[2009: A decade and a half after writing these notes, and during which time I came to find out that "ananke" is actually the goddess of necessity, her name has finally graced a document.]
- milo fine (liner notes to ANOTHER OUTBREAK OF ICONOCLASM [TWO EGGS, SLIGHTLY BEATEN])