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| Isn't this where we came in? |
Beginnings matter. Not just because a beginning poses itself as the beginning (understood as "start") of something, but because the Beginning is also what determines the End of something. The temporal tense of the Beginning is in an important sense in the future. That something has Begun is thus marked differently from something which Began, insofar as it is the former which determines the future, rather than being just another past occurrence, indeed not really a beginning at all as much as plainly an event.
Where then does The Wall begin? The one by Pink Floyd, that is. The beginning of The Wall is in the first sense of a beginning, insofar as any analysis or attempt to understand thus also marks out the area to be understood. If The Wall begins with the 1977 Pink Floyd tour "In The Flesh", what does that say about the End of The Wall? I should think it must lie somewhere yet in the future, as Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason continue (more or less) to perform the songs (which surely are part of The Wall, right?) live, or in the case of Roger Waters, well who knows - he's already reworked the Dark Side of the Moon in his 2024 Redux.
The question really being asked, of course, is not so much as where The Wall begins as much as the question of where its analysis does; the analysis aiming for completeness, the two Beginnings become one and the same - by stipulation. A wrong beginning might give too narrow or too broad an idea of the present substance. And so it is not merely "by stipulation" that the two beginnings must coincide, for if they didn't the analysis wouldn't be one of The Wall, but one of Roger Waters, David Gilmour, British society at large perhaps, or something smaller or greater in scope yet. The beginnings have to coincide, for otherwise the analysis is void.
So where does The Wall begin? Not the story of The Wall; we're not looking for some other etiology, which inevitably end up as a reprise of the myth of the fall. We might want to consider what The Wall is. But even this poses issues; insofar as the Beginning marks an End, it also marks the substance at hand in its entirety, with nothing outside it. There is nothing before the beginning and nothing after the end.
Leaving Nothing unconsidered, the obvious issue arises that knowing the Beginning and the End are knowledge of the substance at hand; knowledge which, for an interpretation to take place, are necessary, but which also require a familiarity with the substance at hand itself. The necessity of prejudice is one which can be more or less informed, of course - whether informed by Wikipedia, Facebook groups or previous own listens. In the end, it seems, determining the Beginning and the End are just that, a determining of something - a decision. Yet can a decision not be better or worse, our chosen Beginning (and thus End) more or less apt?
The Wall begins with itself, not as abstracted entity, but as a Thing. The Wall is an album, released originally only on Vinyl records. This materiality of The Wall can all too easily be forgotten in our digital age, yet would not one do wrong to assume that it didn't matter, rather than at least to be open towards the possibility that it does? What might we reasonably expect from this thing, then? This is the question of apt prejudice. I should like to answer this twofold. On the one hand, surely, we can expect some Wall. In an important sense, this, truly, is the beginning of The Wall - its being named. In any confrontation with The Wall in its entirety, the title of the album takes a place of temporal primacy. In its beginning The Wall, exactly by this determination - by naming The Wall "The Wall", its beginning and end are set. What does said title contain? Well, lest we forget - The Wall being a name is only one part of the primary confrontation, which, in the Thingness of The Wall, is the recreation of a wall itself. And jolly, it seems that this entity, The Wall, actually defines its own contents too - in a tracklist, which one is greeted by in opening up the Vinyl record itself. The Wall begins with a sleeve, wherefrom a record is extracted, played, and returned - the return marking its end. The Wall, it should seem, is, at least in some sense, a kind of event, but a prophetic one at that, insofar as it tells us beforehand what is to happen during this event. It spells out its structure - four sides, four acts. Provides the names of the tracks which we are to hear, including their lyrics - notably, of course, The Wall has multiple tracks which flow more or less entirely into one another, and which might very well be taken as a single track (or rock ballad) if it weren't for the fact that The Wall itself instructs us to do otherwise. The Wall begins and ends with itself, a structure of its own creation, autopoesis. And so an analysis must too. The first step in analysis, then, becomes not the first song, but what goes before it - a story told of the story yet to be told, a tracklist.