Dear diary,
I’m always afraid that I’m using words wrongly, especially when the topic is something cool. And by cool I mean hip and by hip I mean passably fashionable.
So jazz seems cool to me, and I wanna use the word “riff”, which I know is not exclusively a jazz term but I associate it with a specific scene:
Imagine a jazz band. You have a bunch of guys strumming plucking or pounding upon their instruments, thus creating the background rhythm, and one single soloist pays attention to this supporting music and riffs on it, or riffs over the top of it (riffs off it?), thus inventing his cadenza. I only mention this vision to define the word so that I can make an observation about my own addiction: writing.
Writing is like riffing on nothing. Or the whole world is the band; and you try to blab on over or off of it, in a way that appeals to one soul or at most a happy few.
I called the world nothing at first, for the same reason that one would call the combination of all colors in the visible spectrum light. (I assume that my addressee is human; if you are other-than-alive and can see beyond the spectrum that men call visible, then please continue hurtling toward the flame.) Also the world, as a whole, contains so many differing waves of rhythm that they cancel each other out—if you want to hear a particular one, you have to zoom in on it; tune it in; which is to say: ignore others.
Then there’s this notion of marching to one’s own drummer. How is that different from solipsism? It’s not. But we use the same word “mad” to denote behaviors that span from obnoxious to charming. Don Quixote seems more the latter than the former, still I wouldn’t want him to mistake me for a windmill.
Actually it would be fine if I were mistaken for a windmill. That’s a gentle structure whose blades pose no threat to anyone, not even to birds. (“The cut worm forgives the plow,” as it is written in William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven & Hell.) What I meant is that I’d rather not be mistaken for a harmless item that is in turn mistaken for a violent enemy combatant.
So the world provides the groove for your improvisation. There’s always this crucial decision to make: Which aspect of the cacophony should I magnify by taking it as subject? Now current events are always a big deal; and precisely because they’re so squeaky, everyone greases them; but it’s almost a sign of being attention-starved if you try to make TOO urgent of a connection with the majority of the creatures of the forest. You wanna prove that your mind has inventive powers equal to or greater than the world into which you have been thrown.
I now recall that the French writer Raymond Roussel was so rich, so wealthy, so well-off that he ordered a fancy-long car like a limousine to be custom-built so that he could travel in it all around the globe; and he would go to countries that struck him as exotic, like Africa, yet purposely he’d stay inside his vehicle to compose his poetic tales: he’d never get out to look at the scenery or people, just to prove that, although he had the resources to draw his creations from reality, he purposely chose to invent everything from whole cloth, as it were, straight out of his divinely powerful mind. If he had been less affluent and remained in France but written the same type of stuff, one might assume that he opted to dream up Africa, instead of engaging in actual “field research”, on account of his limited means—that’s why it was important to write about Africa while in Africa yet ignoring Africa.
Whatever was wrong with Roussel is wrong with ME: I have that same reluctance about taking inspiration from anyplace other than my own damned inwardness.
The Ein Sof of the Kabbalists, the Everlasting, the Ineffable shares an identity with the profoundest, time-proof, centermost aspect of my being. Although much of me is clearly dross, there is an indestructible core to this sensation. And I know that it is one with the Abyss.
The angel said: “You must not ask for my name; it is unknowable.” [Judges 13:18]
Anyway, that’s why I hate writing about current events and politics. Tho on any given day I own a thrillion opinions that I’d love to broadcast, covering everything from the latest bloodbath school-shootings to the latest bloodbath U.S. Wars of Aggression; also the perpetual sex scandals, and various corporate abuses of power; I refrain from making a peep, because I am proud.
Also, to be honest, there’s a bit of shyness mixed in: I’m half proud, half shy. Maybe even more shy than proud, but I’ve learned how to market my timidity as conceit, because I’m convinced that it makes me look macho.
P.S.
This was a short post because I deleted a lot of psychobabble from the end of it. Now here is another track from that demo rap album that my friend produced for me on his supercomputer. It is a shrugging effort; brace yourself.
8 comments:
Suuuup. Dave here again. I guess I should really get a Google+ account, hey?
(and definitely no need to mitigate your responses or reign-in your expressiveness, I enjoy steeping in linguistic whirlpools)
I've been thinking of the divine nature of writing for a few weeks now, and those thoughts combined with your blog here has made me feel enriched! Totally did not mean to make a Biblical pun there regarding a David (biblical king as you well know, horntoot horntoot) becoming 'enriched', but, you know what, I wish I was trying to make that pun. So there you go!
I was trying to hew close to the specific subjects brought about in this post but now I'm met with an unaccounted-for demand on my time, so I must decamp for now, but I'll return to this well of solace again soon! (don't take 'solace' the wrong way though--hey, look where we are, back to the subject of your post!--I don't mean to imply "childishly soothing" like a teddy bear [though child-'like' would not be as pejorative {how many brackets deep can we go!?}], I mean to get across something more like a 'a sense of a renewal of vigor.)
Hi hi hi, Dave! Oh my goodness, re: “I should really get a Google+ account…”—hahaha! NO, please avoid getting anything at Google: that’s my sincere advice… I am ashamed that so much of my online activity runs thru that monster. The only reason that my comments section here favors G+ is that Google controls Blogger; and the only reason I use Blogger for this diary is that it was the easiest way that I could get a plain blank screen to write on (without advertising or extra visuals etc.)—that’s all I cared about when I started this public-private journal; and not a day passes without me contemplating moving somewhere else, like Wordpress or Fill-in-the-blank, because I know that THIS current place has a cumbersome format that renders the act of commenting nearly impossible (that’s not my intention, I swear!)… Everyone tells me that I should simply devise my very own website so that I can control everything myself. I like that idea. I keep leaning more & more toward that solution, but I’m burnt-out on backstage computer choreography, so I procrastinate…
Anyway, I stress: I’d rather chop off my own head than provoke another being to join G+!!!!!! (…so don’t join G+ unless you are ANTI-HEAD)
I’m glad to know that we’re on the same page, regarding the importance of writing. Tho it’s been a topic familiar to philosophy for many generations, I still find it thrilling to contemplate the two options of spreading one’s influence in the world: physical, in the form of begetting fleshly offspring; and intellectual, in the form of creating new attractive ways to THINK. (ha! I typo’d that last word as “THING” and had to fix it—but the mistake kinda works too! as most errors do) …Just to be clear, I hold that anyone who brings forth and brings up actual offspring made of atoms is worthy of the highest honor among humankind; but I myself am a little more enthralled with the notion of providing a DREAM for which the MIND of each of these living forms might aim to REALIZE via creativity, imagination, genius. And text is the medium. That’s my bias.
& as to your admission “I was trying to hew close to the specific subjects brought about in this post but...”—I say: no worries!—I myself always veer FAR from my intended subjects (let us celebrate doing so)! And, as for your statement “but now I'm met with an unaccounted-for demand on my time”—again, zero worries: I, too, am always running short on time, which is PART of the reason that I end up writing so recklessly. (The masses attempt to magnetize money selfward; but, in the present age, the ultimate wealth is TIME.)
And I thank you for referring to my mirage as a “well of solace”—I love that phrase.
Lastly, re: “how many brackets deep can we go!?” you have (perhaps knowingly) centered on the above post’s subject YET AGAIN—for one of the major works of the writer aforementioned, Raymond Roussel, is dispatched by th’encyclopedia in the following manner:
New Impressions of Africa is a 1,274-line poem, consisting of four long cantos in rhymed alexandrines, each a single sentence with parenthetical asides that run up to five levels deep. From time to time, a footnote refers to a further poem containing its own depths of brackets. This impressive nest of brackets carries an assertion—or perhaps a recommendation—buried by Roussel within the text.
In closing, therefore, all is right with the world.
Ah fuck! I discovered a typo that actually matters:
In my 3rd paragraph above, the phrase "DREAM for which" should read just "Dream which" or "Dream that" (no "for") – the point is to provide a dream to be realized.
Very well said. I rarely remark on current events for much the same reasons. Politics is tomorrow and yesterday, whereas poetry, or the best of what you and I aim to offer, is timeless, i.e., 'transparent to the transcendent,' to quote Joseph Campbell. Another reason is am mostly mute is because it's just so hard to keep up with the newsreel, it rolls so fast, especially nowadays. The moment you write about something, it's old news and no one cares anymore. There's also the question of what can I say that Bill Maher or Stephen Colbert and their teams of writers, not to mention the 500,000,000 Twitterpaters and Facebookers out there haven't already said?
Ah thanks man! Yeah we’re in total agreement re: favoring the timelessness of poetry over time-sensitive politics. And I hold Campbell in the highest esteem, I LOVE that quote that you give from him: it’s new to me, so this is a good reminder that I need to read even more of his stuff. Right now coincidentally I’m working thru the Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, which he co-authored; but I’ve enjoyed (& remain enthralled by) many of his other books, like that Masks of God tetralogy—especially the first and last of those titles, Primitive Mythology and Creative Mythology – those were a turning-point in my life, along with the “Power of Myth” series of video interviews that he did with Bill Moyers: THAT was actually the last marvel with which I fortified myself before walking into my old church and telling them “I quit!” It was Joseph Campbell’s wise advice to follow your bliss that woke my soul the fuck up. It might sound cheesy but that’s the truth. Yet I should add that it was an accumulation of many things that brought me to my moment of rebirth; Campbell was the straw that broke the camel’s back… no that sounds too negative: say, rather, he was the Nietzschean impetus that moved me to play out the “Rube-Goldberg machine” of Christian Salvation WHOLLY INWARDLY and forgive myself to dispatch my own damned burden.
Pardon the raving mad fit: I really love Joseph Campbell.
And re: “…it's just so hard to keep up with the newsreel, it rolls so fast, especially nowadays. The moment you write about something, it's old news and no one cares anymore…” etc. – I second this fully: we are 100% in agreement. It’s so right-on that I feel an embarrassed need to excuse the sporadic times, past present and forthcoming, that I actually do (or will) write politically themed stuff: IF I fall into this habit, IF the lure of politics manages to beguile me, I always hope that I’m touching on some aspect that can be expected to “live on” or have an impact on eternity, that what I say will transcend the quotidian nature of its subject, that it will possess a HUMANE essence and prove truly multicultural (I mean in the way that Shakespeare is multicultural and multinational by transcending any particular nation or culture; also, despite their sources, his “histories” achieve immortality by way of focusing on the human condition): this is why I allow myself to give an occasional two-cent thought against war (I’ll be overjoyed if World Peace renders my condemnation antiquated!); and although the power struggles that manifest themselves often as, say, military coups, or state “intelligence agency” shenanigans, although I hope these things go extinct, I assume that they’ll be universally recognizable and thus potentially lasting. (But, having said all this, I still would always rather read a love story. So I’m glad that my superego keeps me on the ropes!)
I remember when I first discovered Joseph Campbell. It was 2004 and I was sitting on my sofa in my house in Florida and flipping through the channels, which was a rarity for me. I never watched TV. But then for some reason I stopped at PBS and started watching The Power of Myth. Moyers was interviewing Campbell, and it only took about a minute for me to realize I was watching something special. Then Campbell name-dropped Schopenhauer who I happened to be reading and lionizing at the time and that hooked completely. I knew I was watching someone who would soon change my life in a big way. I even said that to myself. After that I got A Hero w/ 1000 Faces, etc., etc, plus I started reading all of Campbell's favorite and most mentioned writers - Goethe, Joyce, Jung, Shakespeare, and so forth, and their favorite writers... and the next thing I knew I was living in Germany. I doubt I'd be here if it weren't for Herr Campbell and his follow your bliss advice. Tho sometimes I wonder if I should admit it. haha. BTW, when I read Finnegans Wake, I was reading Campbell's Skeleton's Key at the same time. But this site is probably even more helpful if you take the time to figure out how to use it. http://www.fweet.org/
Beautiful!! So we both have Campbell “salvation testimonies”! (In case that phrase is exclusively Reformed-Protestant jargon and therefore unfamiliar to anyone clear-minded, I should explain: that’s how my parents’ church used to refer to a believer’s story of their personal experience of getting saved by Jesus.) Yeah and what you say about his mentioning of Schopenhauer – I had the same excitement and ALL EARS reaction when he casually riffed on a passage from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Also the way that Campbell is able to weave aspects of (for one instance, among glorious others) Picasso’s drawings and paintings into and thru archetypes of ancient mythology, and compare them, show the echoing of themes, etc.—I melt for that wisdom.
I’ve devoured a lot of Campbell’s books with delight, but, oddly enough, I’m ignorant of Hero w/1000 Faces – tho I own a copy of it, and it waits in the stack of books that I plan to tackle after Madame Bovary (which, by the way, more than lives up to its sky-high reputation—I say this with about a quarter of Flaubert’s novel left to go)… it’s crazy that, during my long-table feast on Campbell, I somehow missed his Hero book, because it strikes me as one of his most popular titles, if not THE most popular. So, as I’ve repeated more than ninety zillion times now: I gotta remedy my ignorance!
[To be continued...]
[2 of 2]
Yeah, and ALL those writers that you name in this regard – yes, yes! I recall Campbell making some of the most intriguing remarks about them; often he’s more valuable than the “official” literary critics; and he’s guided me to a great many treasures. Ah, and so you’re familiar with his Skeleton Key – I wish I had availed myself of it when I was first bemusing thru Joyce’s Wake. I employed other help-books and essays. Perhaps it’s because I’m quite a bit more familiar now with both sages—Joyce and Campbell—that I’m finding Campbell’s key the usefullest yet.
& as long as I’m on the topic, I’ll mention this, too: One other essay that I found more enlightening than usual is by the critic Northrop Frye: it’s called “Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake” (it’s the last piece in Frye’s collection Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology) – he asserts that F.W.’s genre is essentially the same as Blake’s brief epics, like Jerusalem and Milton, or The Four Zoas. That little observation alone was worth a full book, to me. To give an idea of the stance, I can’t stop myself from copying the first paragraph in full—I love the way Frye describes the qualities and aim of Blake’s work, and Joyce’s assent, in the middle of this:
Finnegans Wake belongs to the epic tradition, and epic writers have always been unusually conscious of tradition. Joyce’s immediate predecessors in his type of epic were the mythological poets of the Romantic period. And among these Blake is clearly the most important for the study of Joyce. Blake’s work is middle-class, nineteenth-century, moral, romantic, sentimental and fervently rhetorical, and these were the cultural qualities that Joyce, to the dismay of many of his critics, most deeply loved and appreciated. I propose first to set out the major parallels between Blake’s myth of Albion and Joyce’s myth of Finnegan.
Joy and I are re-reading Blake’s epics, partly because of this revelation – and not a day passes without me reflecting how insightful this Albion-Finnegan comparison is. My experience is that Blake illuminates Joyce while Joyce illuminates Blake. This is bliss central.
...& holy info! your link to the “Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury” is a goldmine: I can’t believe such a place exists!! I never knew of it – I never thought to look online for this type of thing… it will indeed come in handy: this is the type of thing that the Internet excels at, and I love to see it serving Joyce so amply. The only time, till now, that I’ve thought to seek out such a site, is for Thomas Pynchon’s behemoth Against the Day, because it’s so thick and involved, and because I keep getting torn away from it and losing my footing. (As if I ever had any footing to begin with, hahahahaha!!) …Anyway, thanks again for the helpful heads-up!
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