Perfect Music

Almost the entire canon of popular contemporary Western music involves amputation of the human performer, or in other words, it concerns itself with the extraction of those rare sublime moments in musical expression which are then to be repeated over and over again in an easily digestible, mass produced form, that is, the modern single, locking both performer and audience in an endless charade of mythological musical movements and their celebration.

Now this is very difficult to articulate, but let's see.

Well, first consider what a popular musician does to produce a creative work, and the careful editing that goes towards the eventual public offering. All of the learning, all of the errors, all of the frustrations, really the entire process of creating the actual music is hidden away, along with any human frailties and flaws.

The most sublime moments of musical creation are captured and repeated again and again, until they can be reproduced at any time anywhere, where they are recorded in a process which itself strives for perfection.There is some improvisation, but most of the material is heavily rehearsed and constructed. There is this incredible shielding and insulation around the ego. The performer is transformed into this mythological figure in the public's eyes, which results in a profound alienation between audience and performer.

The audience itself becomes accustomed to these easily digestible bits of perfection. It delights the senses and shortens the attention span. Nothing less is expected. The audience jumps from artist to artist, from the hottest expressions and the most vibrant moments to the next as the older artists age and lose their vitality. Many of these artists melt down or go mad or just burn out on drugs in compensation to this fall. After this legendary, mythical ideal is formed, it is almost impossible to remove it from the mind. If an artist's performance lags under this ideal, it is almost certain destruction subjectively. The artist is transformed into mythological object both in the public's eye, and his or her own eyes.

And again, the public is conditioned to it. Influenced followers seek to repeat those sublime artifacts that so resonated in their minds, rearranging them into new configurations and sonic combinations, crafting shields around themselves in turn, within which they produce their own artifacts of perfection.

The creation of mythology is self-perpetuating. One must exceed the high watermark placed by one's predecessors or one is nothing. Witness the sheer scarcity of successful performers. One either soars as a near deity, a musical god, or one barely scrapes by, if at all.

Colorado In Pictures (With Brief Observations on the Nature of Things)

My visit to Colorado (to see a friend) had an interesting set of circumstances. Most of the time I felt docile and passive and was content with taking in experiences, while embedded within these periods of complacency were intense episodes of feverish thought which were triggered by correspondingly intense external pressures, of which I'll briefly comment on.  So! Pictures. 

High above, coils of jetsmoke unravel silently:

The first hike consisted of a trail that rose up to Horsetooth, a large rock outside of Fort Collins. The trail provided nice variety with snowy, icy paths in the forests, which then warmed up as the paths opened up out on the ridge with exposed views of the landscape, which was bifurcated into desert and temperate climates on either side of the mountain. Here is a view from the summit of Horsetooth: 

The fading light painted the rocks and trees, or well, the entire landscape; it was lovely:

A curious combination of flash and backlit horizon: 

We went on a second hike the day before I left. Here is an icy river underneath the initial bridge to the Greyrock trail: 

Water and ice: 

The handsome face of Greyrock which rose high above the trail and caught the sun: 

A flock passing over Greyrock:

Rock and ice at the edge of a frozen pond high up at the top of the trail. 

Grass peeking up through the ice: 

At the summit of Greyrock: 

During the course of the two hikes, several things occurred to me. First, the nature and composition of my person binds me to civilized society by virtue of two major constraints: the possession of information for survival and the ability to act on that information. All of the information and abilities I currently have are only useful for survival in a civilized environment. I am bound to civilized society by the necessity to sustain myself, and that the nature of my person currently reflects the nature of civilized society itself. Also I need to be in proximity to others with access to their complementary survival skills that I haven't developed. This means I can only exist comfortably outside of a civilized environment for a brief period of time, that is before I run out of navigable light, preparable and digestible food and water, sources of warmth, and etc. So, basically a day. If I wished to live in this wilderness for an indefinite amount of time, I would have to radically alter the nature and function of my person, taking up a completely new set of skills and absorbing a completely different set of information, which would change the way I think and act. One's person is very much a part of one's environment. 

Altering one's person takes work above and beyond merely sustaining oneself, so there is a resistance to radical change and a tendency towards subsisting in a familiar environment with sympathetic others, unless there is a great enough pressure which supersedes the tendencies of convention, such as if one's environment is no longer conducive to one's own subsistence.

Secondly, the struggle to navigate a landscape, reach a summit, and return to one's point of departure helped to elucidate more clearly some very crude concepts of masculinity and femininity. The masculine impulse seems to present itself in unfamiliar environments in which potential hostilities could manifest, and so one seeks to understand the environment as an object to master in order to sustain one's own ego within it. Sometimes it becomes difficult to separate the masculine and feminine concepts, as both impulses are necessary for the reality that we currently experience, and both impulses come naturally to us in various situations in our daily lives. What we call the masculine often consists of the formation of ego, or a differentiated and circumscribed entity which navigates the world and attempts to subsist as a distinct body which experiences. If the totality of our universe tends towards heat death, or the entropic evening out of energy, then any distinct lifeforms must do constant work to extract energy from their environment and concentrate it within the boundaries of their body, thus maintaining their separation from the cosmos, and their perceptive and self-relfective experience of the cosmos.

However this principle of separation has its limits. With a concentration of egos there arises competition for energy between those egos, and upon reaching a point of homeostasis when the ego is in mastery of its environment and secure, the competition becomes separated from the necessities of survival and becomes an end in itself, resulting in the disintegration of the cooperative social body, which brings us to the feminine impulse. 

In contrast, the feminine impulse comes from a familiarity with an environment and one's fellow egos (as well as a love for them) in which one seeks to identify one's ends with the ends of those things in order to further oneself. Instead of external objects to be dominated, one sees fellow travelers to empower and to rely on. One seeks to join the surrounding cosmos, instead of separate oneself from it. 

Like I said, crude. Hopefully I can get a better handle on these concepts later. Finally, I had an experience in the mountains that made me feel things I hadn't felt before, specifically having to do with death and survival. 

Death in the mountains (when the light wanes): 

It is not that I was in serious danger of dying - well, it was possible, but the circumstances were not as severe as they could have been -  but that the possibility of dying was a psychological potential that carried subjective weight. A friend and I took a hike out in the mountains. We were running out of time, and thinking we could do the hike quickly, went late in the day with little supplies. 

We became lost several times; the second time we lost the trail and it was getting dark fast. We were getting very hungry and very weak and had very little water. This set of circumstances produced a bad feeling, a rising panic that was suffocating, but which could be fought back with reassuring thoughts and positive actions. With fatigue and fear, the mind becomes confused. Thoughts race and one starts weighing out the best options given the energy expenditure: retrace one's steps back to the original trail? Follow the mountain down the grooves and look for running water? Continue in one's preferred direction and try to pick up the trail again?

In such a large area, any of these options could lead to disaster. There is no telling which way is the right way when you are disoriented and the light is dying. How far should you search out before you retrace your steps? What expenditure of energy is going to generate the best yield? Where would the rescue parties be more likely to search first?We tried calling 911 as a precaution and none of our phones could get reception. We ended up retracing our steps to the trail where we got lost to look for a better path. Turns out that was the right choice, as it usually is.

What surprised me about the affair was the experience of being lost. Instead of an expanding feeling of dread, of being lost in a wide, cold expanse to have one's ego devoured, there was an overwhelming claustrophobia, of the waning light leading to an enclosure of action, like within a sarcophagus.

Panic morphed into serene acceptance which morphed back into hope and then fear again and back. Death itself as a psychological possibility was not absolute, but an ideal, a potential hanging there which numerous lines of thought angled towards but then shot away from at the last moment. There was a competition of inner opinion which was at first flighty, which raced from possibility to possibility, only to settle into a homeostasis when external indicators overwhelmingly confirmed an opinion. If this inner consensus reaches agreement on death, the system shuts down and prepares itself; an inner tranquility passes over as one contemplates one's life and loved ones. Otherwise the mind switches from state to state as alliances of connections compete for universal representation within the mind.

Achievable ends generate vitality. As soon as we found our way back to the trail and discovered a way out, there was this surge of energy and the mind cleared, preparing the body for the 2 mile hike back in the dark.

Bare survival brings people together towards a common, clear goal, and though strategies for survival can diverge and lead to rifts between egos, the tasks required for survival are often highly motivating and unifying, while prosperity can have the paradoxical effect of social disintegration, as those competitive survival instincts continue to be discharged without proper outlet. The neoconservatives vaguely grasped this after World War 2 and attempted to administer the unifying effects of bare survival by creating existential threats to rally around: first the communists and then the fundamentalist Muslims. This can't be done in a sustainable manner artificially however; vitality can only come from the bottom up through authentic communion with one's reality and one's self.

I'm not one to fetishize primitive modes of survival however. Prosperity is one of the fruits of progress and should always be pursued. There is no reason to artificially induce the survival instinct in a social body; nature will always provide us with the impetus to evolve or die. No reason to increase the difficulty of living internally. Anyways, more vague ideas to digest and possibly expand upon later. Oh and happy holidays.

Break

Sometimes it is good to take a break from incessantly writing I suppose. Like trying to yell continuously, one's bellow peters out into a gasping whimper unless one pauses to catch another breath.

I've been in Colorado, complacent with an inner silence, but gladly taking in the outer experience. I have a bundle of pictures to post when I get back. A good extended break with pictures, yes, that'll do just fine.

Plenty of material to belt out besides. Planned pieces on power and creation, love and fear, and a final end to the extended scribblings on pathology, seeing as how I'm set to finish this book on neurotic styles.

Yep, 'till then.

Hannah Arendt

The movie Hannah Arendt presented a complex historical state of affairs for not only Hannah to cut through, but the viewer to cut through as well.

Critiquing the movie is a tricky affair, since the movie itself deals with an incredibly complex historical subject matter which has since generated countless works of scholarship with opinions in constant flux, and a complex personality stuck right into the middle of it all, the personality of Hannah Arendt herself.

The movie has to do with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, who was a major actor in the administration of the Final Solution, with much of the film focused on Hannah's reporting on the trial and her arguments about the nature of the evil she was witnessing, arguments which were informed by her body of work on the subject of Nazism and totalitarianism in general, along with the subsequent effect her position had on her relationships and the general public.

In the linked review, there is a discussion of Primo Levi's - a major historian of the Holocaust - famous admission that there is a great tension between the historian's desire to account for all of the facts and events, and at the same time to pull it all together and render a coherent and effective judgment on the historical matter. This difficulty echoes one of humankind's most serious (and defining) intellectual conflicts: the ultimate impossibility of encapsulating the endless complexity of the universe into a symbolic schema, or an ideology, as well as the never-ending struggle to achieve close approximation in spite of the fact.

This is precisely what Hannah was trying to do with her Eichmann in Jerusalem, which upon being cast into the tumult of the era, was met with violent controversy. In balancing the multiplicity of historical fact and the impact of coherent judgment, Hannah Arendt was attemping a tightrope walk that eventually blew up in her face, costing her reputation and many friends.

The public seized on two distinct points in particular, ripped out of context when it came to the larger argument of course. In her report on the Eichmann trial, Hannah characterized Eichmann as a fool and a clown, as well as a particularly dry and boring species of bureaucrat. His was a banal evil, the banality of a bureaucratic system, which people took as a diminished condemnation of Nazis in general, which it wasn't. The other problem people had with her piece was that she wrote that the story of the Jewish collaborators who worked with Nazi authorities was one of the darkest aspects of the whole affair. Her judgments were based on a greater philosophical argument that she had been developing all her life, in order to understand the nature of evil. Of course, emotions were still hot; the events of the Holocaust were still fresh in the public's mind. The public (and many friends) were having none of this philosophical speculation.

A constant recurring accusation of Hannah was her arrogant coldness in transforming a sensational trial that captured the hearts of millions into a cold and detached philosophical lesson, and a cerebral lesson at that. One is tempted to indict that mass of detractors as fools that simply failed to understand Hannah's ideas, but of course, it is more complicated than that.

Those who wanted an emotional account of the Holocaust and a neat drama which depicted the Nazis as the prototypical monster and the Jews as the prototypical powerless victims were not necessarily wrong in their judgment; it is simply how they saw the world, and it couldn't have been otherwise. After all, there is a very clear conceptual difference between the Nazis and the Jews. The Nazis are the evil genocidal maniacs, the Jews unfortunate scapegoats caught in one of history's perfect storms.

Who was this awful woman who wished to depict Eichmann as a boorish clown, as opposed to the monster they all saw him as, and the Jewish collaborators as one of the darkest aspects of the entire nightmare? On an emotional level it seemed a slap in the face: ostensibly, here was this author trying to downplay the evil of a Nazi and emphasize the darker aspects of the Jewish collaborators.  But it is always so much more than that.

Although it turned out later that Eichmann actually was a monstrous and diabolical figure who used bureaucratic language and a feigned air of boorishness to camouflage his true nature (which many other Nazis also relied on) it doesn't necessarily nullify Hannah's argument; it only serves to complicate it. Hannah was trying to understand the nature of this evil, both in its radical and banal nature, as a historical formation that could happen to any population receptive to it.

Hannah mentioned the Jewish collaborators in her piece as a simple acknowledgement of facts: they gave testimony that showed they worked with Nazi authorities in carrying out many of the functions that would eventually send their people to their doom. To condemn these collaborators is a bit more difficult to do however, and I really don't think that's what Hannah was trying to do when she described their historical role as dark. She was trying to understand them as human beings caught within this great historical storm. How did it happen? Why?

Hannah's cold detached view and her determination to find truth is a rare trait tempered by both character and life experience. The general public could not understand what truths she had to express because they were intellectually, psychologically, and even physiologically incapable. This is the great tragedy of humankind as a general organism: through spatial, temporal, and constitutional differences, there arise individuals and groups that, because of their composition, can only see and feel the world a certain way, and thus think in a certain way.

This tragedy, I think, forms the kernel of Hannah's understanding of the nature of evil and the nature of the Nazi regime, its rise, and the total moral collapse that radiated out and infected those caught in the pull of its malevolence.

Hannah's thought, which signaled the coming of a collective consciousness, was not necessarily new, but was novel for its opposition to mainstream political science which sought to isolate individuals and events as discrete historical occurrences, putting them in discrete boxes and affixing discrete characters to them. Hannah's concepts of totalitarianism and the "banality of evil" sought to imagine social states, or conditions for human beings as a group, as opposed to the analysis of the cause and effect of events and individuals, in order to explain the nature of the evil in her time.

For Hannah, totalitarian movements like Nazism have their roots in vast causal chains which extend far back into history: anti-Semitism as an ideology was born out of a marriage of the unique and unfortuante historical position of the Jews as a group, and the birth of racial ideology which was formed in part for the justification of imperialism, a phenomenon which itself was and is responsible for the crushing of whole peoples, within nations and without, which leads to a social pulverization and fragmentation that leaves whole populations vulnerable to totalitarian upswells.

What is the nature of evil? From whence does it come? How do these evil empires form? Why do they form? How did these Jewish collaborators turn against their own people? The same question can be asked today in the face of this global capitalist empire and its ability to turn politically sympathetic minorities in client states against their own people. What is power and why does it concentrate so dependably, and why do even the powerless cling so desperately to what power they can get to, even if it means subjugating their own peers in cooperation with greater evil? This is the same force which perpetuates racist institutions: some powerless whites are happy to dominate powerless blacks if it means being a little higher in the food chain. Why?

The answers to these questions lie in the understanding of human nature on a systemic level, which is an ongoing project, which although is elusive and difficult, is well worth undergoing should we wish to avoid repeating the past.