Look No Further

I’ve been writing notes to myself along the lines of appearance and reality, and saying that when I do a Plato, I miss the joy and fun of the surface of things. Maybe there’s something to say for superficial beauty sometimes? Life doesn’t have to be heavy and ethical all the time. A philosopher wants to know the moral truth of everything; to grasp its inner essence: to know and understand it by analyzing it. But dissecting life tends to kill it. Think of dissecting a frog in high school: you learn how it works but you leave it a dead body… I’m not sure how I got onto this topic, though it started when I was reading Eiseley. I took away one idea and now it’s kind of dominating all of my thoughts. Once you’ve learned to be a philosopher, is it possible to will to forget it? I want to be able to enjoy life like I used to in my childhood; to appreciate the aesthetics of everything around me. This is like the approach that Poe takes to write a poem. It’s for the music and not a moral. This and the image are sufficient, and don’t look for allegorical meaning. That’s why Mallarme suggests that music is the greatest art form, and Walter Pater repeats his claims later.

I think it may be desirable for me to unlearn how to analyze and critique everything I see and try to adore things as they appear, not as they are to a philosopher’s mind. To apprehend reality without lectures and sermons; without ethics or anything heavy: with the sugar coating and no pill to swallow. Because, you miss something if you look beyond what is manifestly there. You miss the beauty and the joy of living.

Advertisement

Ineffable

Ten ten at night.

I woke up an hour ago from my evening nap, having dreamt of the bass guitar trio with Stanley Clarke et al, but I wondered why music was still important to me, and what was the significance of the bass clef. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all in a verbal way. It’s kind of like trying to make verbal sense of folklore and mythology, the purely imagistic: perhaps it does violence to interpret these things as language. They ought to be left simply aesthetic rather than meaningful. I know that someone has said this already. It might have been the commentary by Henry Weinfield on the poetry of Mallarme. But more likely it was an old critical biography of Edgar Allan Poe that stated his distaste for allegory and his preference for pure music, especially in a poem like “The Bells.” The point was not to say anything moral or significant. The point was precisely pointlessness, and the experience of sheer feeling instead of an ideology. Not sense, but only sound. I wish I could find that biography again and hang it on my wall. 

The Misunderstood Artist

Wee hours.

I heard the rain start again tonight from my bedroom. If I was sleeping, I don’t remember my dreams, though there was a semiconscious thought process. My dog is not sleeping well either. So I got up and came in here to make a few notes. The streetlight is on outside my window and a couple of cars have passed by. The same wooden light post has been there since these houses were built in the early Sixties. There’s an undercurrent of the same old spirit when my family first moved into this house in 1971. This community can be an interesting place if I open my heart to it. Certain pockets of it have resisted change over the years. I need to go easier on the church pastor, I suppose. It’s probably true that my parents were hedonists, contributing very little to the neighborhood, especially my mother. While my dad was simple, Mom willfully sucked pleasure out of life. She did it without consequences for most of her life, until a heart attack cut it short. 

I wonder if there’s an ethic to being an aesthete like she was? She got the idea from Hollywood. I remember watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with her on television. Marilyn Monroe was the original, pretty much, with a lot of imitators. I don’t know that much about it. I think my mother admired her a great deal. It’s hard to know where she would have fit in; perhaps as a bohemian artist among other artists. Someone needed to guide her on the right track, but there just wasn’t anybody to do this. Mom was far smarter than the moral majority of churchgoers and gossips and other shallow people. 

She was the next Michelangelo. 

Praise

Quarter of five. I feel pretty good right now. It’s cloudy and yet still bright outside. The thought occasionally rises to me that I love music, for music is the experience of feeling. I can hear a scene from Spartacus in my mind, a piece by Khachaturian, so sensuous and lush, quite voluptuous. And the origin of this word is Voluptas, meaning Pleasure, the daughter of Cupid and Psyche as related in The Golden Ass, and again in Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater. I doubt if my mother was familiar with Pater, but she might’ve gotten a similar notion from reading The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone when she was in her thirties. I probably don’t even need to read it to know its philosophy. My mother absorbed it and lived it— embodied the book… I could be wrong about that. I only remember how I felt when my siblings and I unearthed the book in a trunk of Mom’s things after she passed away. The fact is that she was not very philosophical, even in an aesthetic way. She had trouble with abstractions and understood everything literally. So, it doesn’t make much sense to discuss her “belief system,” or to puzzle it out behind her back. Most likely there was no ideology to my mother at all. In this regard, she and music had something in common. Her life was a bit like reading “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe: all sound without sense. To say that she was “aesthetic” would miss the point. She was the sound of music itself… 

Particulars

Quarter after ten. It feels very cold outside. I put on my jacket and chattered my way to the market for food and, for a change, a Coke. I told Vicki about the burrito pricing mixup, so she entered the new prices in the register. In addition I asked her when there would be more dog food on the shelf. She answered something vague, but at least I put a bug in her ear. Aesop doesn’t like the Costco brand of canned food anymore, and I said so. 

As I plodded there and back, I began to consider the introduction to the Montaigne book. The striking thing for me is how he lets the contradictions within himself remain. He doesn’t impose unifying principles on his own experience, makes no attempt to systematize. And this is called diversity. It impresses me as the very opposite of Joseph Campbell, and even of modern natural science. It seems rather lawless, like chaos to me. And yet it is a valid way of perceiving the phenomena of life. According to biology, without organization a life form breaks down and dies. Without it, perhaps the sciences could not exist as they do today. But still Montaigne reminds me that some people leave the particulars as they are, and they don’t operate on what they perceive. This kind of variety means a minimizing of conflict which in the extreme would otherwise result in bloodshed… 

The Coke is a little gross, bubbly and acidic and ultimately unhealthy, though it’s a treat just the same. Tomorrow I have physical therapy again, this time taking a taxi both ways. I plan on not doing the homework. Erin can then decide if I should continue the sessions.

Sometimes I see myself as an aesthetic person, and this applies even to the experience of sitting down to read a book. The volume in my hands is like a succulent meal, like the best prime rib or shrimp scampi. There’s something obsessive about it for me, perhaps even manic. Moreover, taste makes waste. On the other hand, life needs the seasoning of beauty to render it palatable. The weather, speaking of beauty, is cloudless and perfect, the sky a blue pearl. Now the maple leaves begin to change from green to gold. On the fringe of my mind lurks the figure of Neil Peart, whose inconsistencies make me wonder if he ever read Montaigne. 

Unions

Quarter after one. Some people like to believe that 2 + 2 = 5, but for me it’s very difficult to make that leap. I left a voice message for Polly. I imagine she’s out shopping or something. Abruptly the sun comes out. We really need some rain to help with the wildfires. The church will be ringing the bell again this week. I realize that the antipsychotic throttles my imagination and clarifies my thinking.

Four o’clock. I’ve been on the phone with Polly: it went okay. I can actually appreciate her viewpoint now. She is very stoic about morality, very upright. She believes in hard work. I can’t argue with that, because she’s probably right. But as far as how I live, I’m the laziest person I know. Nor do I condemn myself for this. One way or another, I do the best I can. I received a megadose of bad parenting in my youth, plus I have the challenge of mental illness to contend with. Well, whatever. I don’t have to defend myself against my sister’s stone heart. Mom was entirely different. She had passion and sensitivity. Is it really fair to call such things “selfish?” By its nature, art is egoistic and expressive, individual and eccentric. While my sister is religious, Mom was aesthetic in the purest form. That’s why they didn’t understand each other, and why I’m still stuck in between… This Thursday, I think I’ll go observe the bell ringing at the church just for the romance of it. There has to be a locus where religious and aesthetic meet. “Let there be commerce between us.” 

Solfege

Six twenty.

At the crack of dawn I will probably go to the store for a soda and things to eat. And yet the ritual has gone so smooth. The groove has become a rut. What could break the monotony? Just about anything. I could go to Grocery Outlet and buy some banana peppers and some artichoke hearts. But this is for people whose taste buds are all in their mouth. My mother used to say that. I see the first light of day out my front window. The only hope now resides with instrumental music, music with no words. The sounds of music are feeling. Feeling describes; it cannot prescribe. It can’t moralize— and really, it is the moral that we need to get rid of, with everything we face today. The only poetry we need, a most blasphemous thing, is that of Edgar Allan Poe. To recite “The Bells” again over our gravesite is to be sublime. Poe made poetry for the music of it, for the sound, not the sense. His verse slips under the net of language and meaning. Music is the one art form to which the other art forms aspire to be. Walter Pater said this. Poe anticipated the Aesthetic Movement by a few decades, inspiring especially the French… People need something to make them feel good. To my mind, the greatest help to us right now is instrumental music. And the best that words can do is to strive to be music.

Mandalay Moon

Eight ten.

I feel a little wiped out, but my mood is fairly cheerful. Early this morning the moon shone through my bedroom window, bright and full. Under its spell I thought of my mother in her last two years, after Dad had passed away. We drank a lot! And she made breakfast for dinner often, or else I would get takeout from Tio Pepe, the Mexican restaurant on River Road. I lived in sort of a dream then. My friends in music must have thought I was strange to be living with my mother. But I was comfortable. I had no worries financially. I bought a lot of books and read every day. And I learned more about my mother’s aesthetic mentality, although it was beginning to decay. She told me about a song her parents used to sing for their parties, “The Road to Mandalay,” with words by Rudyard Kipling. On one of my trips to the bookstore I bought a big book of Kipling’s verse that contained “Mandalay.” I brought it home and read it to Mom. I also purchased two novels by Harold Robbins in an effort to make sense of the thinking of my parents. I was very aware that it was different from most people I knew. Quite amoral, in fact, like the poetry of Edgar Poe. Maybe what I sought was the root of schizophrenia. There was such a schism between Mom’s beliefs and those of everyone else that madness could result. But that’s only a theory. Perhaps Mom was simply more intelligent than the average people I knew…

Irving Stone

Quarter after three. My Coke is almost gone. The sun comes and goes. The tinnitus is back again. I wonder if the springtime is affecting me adversely? But my poor brain is simply hypersensitive, and nothing I can do about that. I used to anesthetize myself with beer, and it felt wonderful at first. Now it’s just not an option…

I understand why my mother had problems. My dad by contrast was bovine, obtuse; a blockhead. Not very smart. But she was smart enough to realize how the world can be a menacing place. She only needed to be stronger and more defiant of her critics. To just say screw you and do what she wanted. Follow her instincts and be a painter or sculptor, like her hero Michelangelo. No one else understood why her personal bible was The Agony and the Ecstasy. We found it sealed up in an old green trunk after she passed. I confess I had mixed feelings about it. But her mentality was dear to her. She couldn’t choose otherwise. I wonder what she would’ve thought of Marius the Epicurean? She was too inhibited to go that deeply into it. Still, aestheticism was her faith and fascination, and the world contradicted her. The world was too narrow for my mom. I daresay the world was wrong.

An Old Song by Paul

Toward noon. I might play my white bass in a few minutes. I love most instruments that have four strings. Something archetypal about the number four…

Quarter after one. The white bass sustains almost too much. It’s because of the Omega bridge I installed about five years ago. Now the instrument really sings. I can hardly hit a wrong note. Probably I could drop the bass on the floor and it would sound coherent. I purchased it from Rondo online nine years ago. At the time I couldn’t play very well because I was always drunk. I almost never practiced. I’m glad that I can play today. What was the advantage in being drunk? Nothing ever got done that way. And I never had any money to work with… It’s tempting to believe that God, if he exists, favors people who don’t drink. Alcoholism nearly ruined my life, and now I see my brother’s life being ruined. He’s making big mistakes and losing friends, according to what Polly told me. I don’t know. You don’t have to call it God, but simply the way of nature. We are not intended to self destruct, but rather to live fully and happily. The world of the alcohol buzz is false. It pulls you into depression and then despair. Finally it destroys you.

Two thirty. I suppose I drank in order to escape from something. Hopefully I’ve addressed the problem and put it in its place. I knew I was going to have to give up my family. They will always say that I’m worthless, lazy and selfish. That I’m some kind of hedonist. Fuck it, I can’t be any other way. I’m just a rock and roll type of person, an entertainer. My relatives can call me the devil himself, but it wouldn’t be the truth. But I admit to being more esthetic than ethical or religious. What’s wrong with that? “Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs…”