"HERE IS NO WHY"
My first experience with the phrase "here is no why" was on October 23rd, 1995, at about 10 PM. I was seventeen.1
"The song you just heard: Here Is No Why," said the interviewer, Bill Weinman. "What does that title mean?"
"Don't know," answered Billy Corgan.
Bill: "Okay."
Billy: "It used to be 'No Is Here Why.'"
Bill: "It just got mixed up in the transcriptions?"
Billy: "Correct."
At first, I took Billy at face value. But inconsistencies have drawn me back to the phrase, over and over. I've learned that value is often not in the mere recognition of true and false, but in the suspension of contradictory observations.2
"Heir ist kein Warum" or "Here is no why?"3
1
The Smashing Pumpkins were my favorite band, and this was the eve of the release of their epic double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
The debut concert at the Chicago Riviera broadcast via Simulcast, and I listened from my parents' Saturn, parked in our garage in Flushing, Michigan. I huddled in the cold with a tape recorder perched on my lap and watched the carbon light streak through slats in the wooden walls.
Before the concert, the station broadcast a live interview by the Chicago Reader.
2
That is, our ability to identify and interpret paradox. To acknowledge paradox, yet move beyond it.
3
To me, 'Here Is No Why' represents the mystery of paradox. The phrase assumes the presence of place in the absence of cause or justification. Since we believe that we "cause," through the agency of action and thought, causality must be either intact (as enabling an event or procluding it), or action a passive irrelevance. Hence, these four words create an economy of contradiction. Our efforts to interpret this paradox enrich it with productive and thought-provoking tension. Since I'm committed to transforming, challenging, and contradictory art, the phrase is a fitting title for this site.
