"There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." -Oscar Wilde
I have a particular affinity for plot lines that involve the culmination of things a long time in the making, particularly when we, the audience, start in medias re and learn about the beginnings piecemeal as the story progresses: it's a narrative device that I think is particularly engaging. The writers for Breaking Bad use this quite frequently on the small level (episode; though in this case we are typically flashed-forward to some striking act or visual...anyway), but with the Gustavo Fring story, they employed it in a much larger arc that I found particularly satisfying (and which, for me, made up for how annoying Walter White became in that season/act).
Where was I going with this?...hmmm...
Anyway, I've made a decision that was a long time coming. I had been planning to go to grad school at Oxford Brookes University over in merry olde England. That plan is no more, and I will not be getting a masters in music composition any time soon. It was a lovely dream; the reality was not. Even considering the financial benefits studying in England would have afforded (1 year v. 2 years, cheaper tuition) and that I had some money to go, it still would have deepened my debt to a more painful degree, and--this is important--I realized it wasn't worth it. Part of the realization was solid advice and information concerning the future state of music and music education, particularly for a composer, but it was mostly that I didn't truly want it that much. The cost-benefit analysis weighted too much towards cost, and I heard myself saying things like "it would be nice to go," not "I would do anything to achieve this dream." Perhaps most telling, I felt I was more drifting along than rowing forward, compelled towards an expectation of my future I had fed people instead of impelled towards a future I could claim solidly. Not to say I blame others, but I have a tendency to rely too much on the thoughts of other people. So, for the foreseeable future, I won't getting a masters to teach music in college.
The compromise, though, is something I think will work better for me in the long run. For a while I had been toying with teaching English abroad, mostly as a means to make a good buck for a short while. Now, I am going to make a career out of it. It combines teaching, which I've wanted to do since 2nd grade (according to my mother, but I can only recall to 4th grade), with travel, which I've wanted to do since 2nd grade, and with my love of English, which...I've had in some capacity since 2nd grade. What I'm saying is this plan is the seventeen year culmination of a grade schooler's various interests...I guess; my, oh my, what a winding road. As soon as I can I would like to attain a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) Certificate (and I have a program in mind that I'm still looking into), go perhaps to East Asia where the big bucks currently are, help work down my debt, and move on from there. Of course, nowhere in this plan is a cessation of musical activities: I will still play piano, sing, and most importantly, compose. Several famous composers held other full-time jobs: Alexander Borodin was a chemist, Charles Ives was an insurance salesman, Phillip Glass has done all sorts of things. Of course, it remains to be seen how famous I will become (see what I did there with the word manipulation?).
Some dream places to teach:
Chile
Brazil
...End of list? There are of course many European countries I would love to visit, but EU regulations make it difficult for non-EU citizens to attain such work, so I'm told; such jobs frequently go to Britishers. And I would like to visit parts of the Middle East and South East Asia, but considering my sexuality and the local views of such in many places in these regions, that may not be wise. We'll see.
There, he mounts a high tower in his mind, and looks out far and wide. Many solitary figures he perceives, creeping through the streets; many solitary figures out on heaths, and roads, and lying under haystacks. But the figure that he seeks, is not among them. Other solitaries he perceives, in nooks of bridges, looking over; and in shadowed places down by the river's level; and a dark, dark, shapeless object drifting with the tide, more solitary than all, clings with a drowning hold on his attention.
Where is she? Living or dead, where is she? If, as he folds the handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able, with an enchanted power, to bring before him the place where she found it, and the night landscape near the cottage where ti covered the little child, would he descry her there? On the waste, where the brick-kilns are burning with a pale blue flare; where the straw-roofs of the wretched huts in which the bricks are made, are being scattered by the wind; where the clay and water are hard frozen, and the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day, looks like an instrument of human torture; — traversing this deserted blighted spot, there is a lonely figure with the sad world to itself, pelted by the snow and driven by the wind, and cast out, it would seem, from all companionship. It is the figure of a woman, too; but it is miserably dressed, and no such clothes ever came through the hall, and out at the great door, of the Dedlock mansion.
(Charles Dickens, Bleak House, end of Ch. 56.)
("Eleanor Rigby")
("Another Hundred People")
o o o o
I admit to visions; oh, not of the kind where burning wheels-within-wheels accompanied by freaks of nature tow in a God with the dramatic sensibilities of Andrew Lloyd Webber: They are, rather, image-dramatic responses to my thoughts, my ponderings; I am nothing if not metaphorical. Two common visions I have are concerned with connections, one of a dispersed web, the other of a central focus. The first, the older, is of some nondescript transportation network (why yes, I am fascination by such systems). Frequently, though, I will give this network a more definite form as I imagine the layout of the St. Louis area, seeing from aloft like a satellite image. The other vision, even more abstract, was born out of both my thinkings-through of certain current projects, and an interest in astrophysics: it is of some kind of astral matter, circling, writhing, and throbbing around some unknown center. They are imaginings of two kinds of connections, one of links between more-or-less separate points, the other of links from several points to one center; the former of independent identities, the latter of interdependent ones.
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We're the other nation anthem, folks,
the ones that can't get in to the ballpark
Spread the word!...
There's another national anthem, folks,
for those who never win:
for the suckers, for the pikers,
for the ones who might have been.
(Stephen Sondheim, "Another National Anthem," Assassins)
Bifil that in that seson, on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay,
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury, with ful devout corage,
At nyght were come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
(Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue 19-27)
("La Vie Boheme")
o o o o
To this day I remember a little line from a hilarious TV show that was on, I think, when I was in middle school: Titus, a vehicle for the comedian Christopher Titus (if you don't know him or the show, check them out). He would interpolate commentary between the scripted action, and in one of them he said "normal people scare me." To be a bit frank, all people scare me, to varying extents, though confidence in its different forms, such as "liquid courage," have helped. What is "normalcy?" We can speak of normative behaviors, for example, and mean objectively behaviors that can be observed and defined across a broad spectrum, but when we say "normal," it is a subjective stance, usually with the implication of what should be observed and defined; even more so, when used in the negative, as in "that's not normal." Too many people, even today, run around like Old Testament gods, interchanging "abnormal" and "unnatural," condemning any and all behavior that is seeming condemnable. This cuts off sectors of people from each other, obviously, but this is more than missed connections: unsuccessful people, seen to be at fault for their state, are cut off, disenfranchised; they can't get into the ballpark, if for no other reason than they can't afford the tickets. Then there are the "freaks," "weirdos," "monster," those who are what they are, and they are cut off from those who are not what they wish they were. It is this separation, this quartering, that is "abnormal," "unnatural," for the scatterings of the universe, to have made the universe as it is, interacted in bump-'n'-go fashion, another billions and billions of particles colliding endlessly.
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From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—
(Edgar Allen Poe, "Alone")
Let's let the world go its own way. If you, my dear love, want things as I do, let's not allow anything to drag us away from the path on which we know we must go. I mean the direction of my art. Let's leave the competition to the others. But let's grasp our art with a tremendous grip.(Jean Sibelius, letter to Aino Sibelius, November 10, 1911)
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Halfway through our journey through life
I found my own self in darkened woods,
The path straight-forward having been lost.
(Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno 1:1-3)
o o o o
If The Shining taught us anything, it's that Stephen King should not be trusted with movie adaptations of his books—Kubrick's version is much better than the King-approved TV one. More to the point here, it shows what nutters isolation(ism) can make of us ("All work and no play make Jack a dull boy."). For example, a person long enough on their own will likely reach the confirmation of their own infallibility, and that dammit, they're the only ones who can fix, say, healthcare, of the "Jewish problem" [note: there is no "Jewish problem"]. Prolonged solitude is a flood plain of egotism, solipsism, and delusions of grandeur—but this is hardly news. Technology has given uf the wonderful predicament of public displays of loneliness, allowing us to waste time on listicles of cats making listicles about the meat-workings of internet denizens, and then share this with our adoring crowds of barely remembered Facebook friends, who are too busy themselves with blog posting about the possibilities of casting Breaking Bad with cats. I wax a touch cynical, and think we will find a balance once we learn to handle this technological onslaught. But I bring up my own sarcastic ramblings as an example of the fogeyism du jour, tirades against technology, though this is an incredibly long jour, as I'm sure the first tool-using cavemen were denounced as heretics. Why should social media receive especial scorn and scrutiny? Because we use it too much? Well, okay, but too much of anything is bad for you. Maybe because that's not how it was done in the old days? Certainly, we are bound by things originating in time immemorial, like a need to eat and mothers guilting us for not calling them, but successive generations add and remove as necessity sees fit, and I'm afraid, folks, that social media are here to stay (for a while). Yet, so should old media: books, letters, this thing called a date in which people speak to each other using the circuitry in their heads and not in their overly-priced iPhones. The human body seems to love more tactile interactions, and unless you have an incredible sensitivity to light waves, the digital realm comes up lacking. But I'm going on a long tangent to get where I really want to be, so I'm just going to jump there. Art and literature and music. So much is said in our diversion-hungry culture about losing ourselves in, say, a book or a song (if we lose ourselves in even these things anymore); I'm more interested in finding oneself, but even more intrigued by doing both. All journeys are truly taken alone, and wind up with a return home, but a home retrieved with a certain alienated majesty; that's a glorious way to say "experience casts the things we use to take for granted in a different light and we therefore appreciate it anew, should it be worth appreciating at all." Which brings me back to Poe. Youthful angst tends to hitch our tastes to works whose earnestness masks their shoddy and dreadful quality; nostalgia in later years will then either take the form of defiant embarrassment, an avant-garde triple-dog dare of shield against anyone presuming to point out that we were once young, because we fear, and indeed know, they are right; or such fond remembrance will prove that "absence makes the heart grow fonder." Wait—you still like Pokémon? Never mind, then... Whatever the case, character is a constant episodic agon, stepping from one monument to the next; here, a monument may be an event, a thing, a work, any hinge upon which new doors are opened. Any embarrassments we have suffered are permanent marks, and add to our definition: we can no more expunge an offense from our record and claim our record was then never affected than we can remove an arm and claim our body was never altered, that we always had one arm. Poe was an awful writer, but I once admired his works because they met the needs of my childish emotions. Then my heart grew, my mind grew, and like stepping stone to stone as one tests a stream, I moved on with strength to better works. (By the way, if that makes me seem like a pompous, pretentious ass, fine: I think any English-speaker past puberty can find any number of works more appropriate than Poe, who never met an obscure and deadening synonym he didn't like.) In trying to cross this current, one may take advie, one may follow another's path (indeed, may need to on some parts of the way), but the stones are not such that more than one person can use them simultaneously. I may be open to my friends' suggestions on books, music, etc. (well, more open), may try some or them out, may even like some of the works, but close to all of the things I hold most dear I found on my own, or refound alone after an initial flirtation with one of these suggestions; perhaps more correctly, the works found me. I don't believe in fate, that I was meant to happen upon, oh, The Divine Comedy, because of preordained expectation. Rather, memory and crisis are co-conspirators, the latter creating an opening that needs to be filled, and the former insinuating what might achieve that. That is why one should accept advice but rarely follow it: there will come a time, maybe, when the situation will arise when you will need it, and there it will be, filed under its appropriate catalog. Like Joshu' fittin' the battle of Jericho, these things that people tell us, to try x solution or try y band, need to circle around a bit before our defensive wall will fall. And they need to fall by ourselves. Character is journey, and since journeys are essentially alone, character must be forged out of solitude.
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("Means the right to expect that you'll have an effect, that you're gonna
connect! Connect! Connect! Connect!")
Spent the evening with the symphony. The disposition of the themes: with all its mystery and fascination, this is the important thing. It is as if God the Father had thrown down mosaic pieces from heaven's floor and asked me to put them back as they were.
(Jean Sibelius, diary entry in April, 1915)
"All roads lead to Rome."
o o o o
To get to Rome, I must go to Rome. Should I be in Venice, I cannot say I am in Rome because there lies open a direct connection between the the cities; that would like saying that since today leads into tomorrow, that it is already the next day now. I must travel, and in traveling I make the connection
Romance can be only with incomplete information; it blossoms out of an engagement with discovery. Knowledge/wisdom is like romance in the latter sense, but needs ever more and clearer data to thrive better. Love and thought are—must be—linked, and so with art and science. Philos and sophia are united only by active engagement, not by passive acceptance, and certainly not through prideful divorce.
It is not as important how connections are made, but that we are either open to them at all, or should we be forced open to them, that we meet them matched and directly. The relationships I have—with friends, family, art, and food—are more or less accidents: life jostled us together, and like a solar furnace crafting elements, a bond was made. Yet, I myself—so reticent, shy, rather inept at conversation—so understandingly internalize this unopenness to connection that these connections I have I feel the strongest when they are at their most tenuous, and I feel them the most tenuous when they are the strongest. In the former case, romance trumps reality as we desperately wish for a relationship with intriguing strangers; in the latter, the honeymoon ends in Rome, and we long again for the fantasy of travel—but there remains, one, plenty in Rome, and two, the return home.
What are connections? Are some forms better than others? Does tangibility outdo the indirect? Is it the end? the means? both? What balance is good between solitude and company? What is it to connect? Truly, you: what is it to connect?
A line, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses," that has taken me a bit to come to understand, partly out of awe, mostly of laziness, goes "yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margins fade for ever and for ever when I move." I don't claim to grasp it fully even now, but a more blunt, prosaic wording might be: "All my experience is behind me, in the past, and is like a doorway to the limitless realm of wisdom and knowledge which lies beyond its frame; but the more I absorb of that knowledge and wisdom into my experience, the pathway to that realm shrinks, or seems to, since that realm, in being absorbed, becomes less expansive; but in moving through life, I don't just devour knowledge, I also consume life, or have it consumed anyway [Ulysses immediately goes on to rage against stopping and how the little life our human mortality grants us is hardly enough; he basically agrees with the ancient rabbis while also railing against our modern retirement], so the opportunity to experience and learn diminishes against the clock." (This, folks, is what separates poetry from prose.) Ulysses is a troubling figure to empathize with; his cunning brought about the successful sack of Troy in the Iliad; Dante casts him into the 8th pit of the 8th circle of the Inferno, for generally being a "false counsellor" or "fraudulent rhetorician," depending on your interpretation; and while Tennyson wrote this great dramatic monologue out of a need to go on after the death of his great friend and mentor, he molds his Ulysses after Dante's man. Ulysses' obsession is with knowledge, and having soaked up what the ancient world had to offer, the only place left is "beyond the baths of the Western stars," "beyond the utmost bound of human thought"; that way lies death, and his quest is a suicide mission--it is well-nigh homicidal. He mentions his son Telemachus; I have only now had any inkling of explaining this rather jarring stanza, which seems shoved in like nuts in a fruitcake. The stanza itself tosses Telemachus aside, making him little more than a domestic; to what extent this is true of Telemachus, we don't know, and likely neither does Ulysses, who isn't that interested anyway. So why mention him at all? Self-service: in bringing him up, perhaps he is protesting that his son is important to him so Ulysses isn't such a cold person after all, even if he does frame his son as a servant carrying out necessary duties that don't interest Ulysses. Worse yet, though, is his attitude towards his men, his "mariners." He never says he loves anyone; it's either "those that loved me" or "alone," and his interest in his men extends only to how far they participated in his quests, and how they helped him in achieving experience and knowledge. Yet, what wisdom! "Though much is taken, much abides" is the take-away of the poem.
As I said, though, he is dangerous to understand empathetically, and I so frequently fear that I do. I have lost friends, loves, seen much and done some, but have I reacted? In tears, sad, angry tears? No, not much so. I was thankful to have experienced, like attaining a specimen to add to my collection: so academic, so studious--"Thanks for the memories." It is (was) a cool detachment; Ulysses claims "I am a part of all that I have met," but behind that I think is a vain casting of oneself into parts of importance, not of one deeply involved with and attached to something, who feels empathy with people and places and events and things. The irony, to empathize with a man who lacks practically any empathy. Ulysses is a bus, all bump and go: he is more interested in moving, in going to destinations, rather than the destinations themselves: in experiencing over experiences. I let a man go easily, a man leaving me, partly because I knew uncontrollable circumstances could not be overcome, but mostly because I was hungry to add to my empirical charts, another datum gained. I was also buffering against loss, as I have come to learn. But to have been in the moment, riding along the point of convergence where emotion, thought, and the polar aspects of time meet? To have liked, maybe loved; in short, to stop and smell the rose? And to have subsumed the anguish and bitterness under logic and observational study? This is to become a person who intones with Ulysses "those that loved me, and alone."
We are all fools, made weak by time and fate--"you've been a fool, and so have I." In the end, Ulysses will have been the biggest of fools, for he is blind to the greatest, most edifying aspect of wisdom and knowledge: people learn best how to move through life by the trans-causal relationship between the deep, personal, involved experiences of one's own, and those of others. The only requirement in critical analysis of art, for example, is to bring one's whole self before the work and then hold dialogue with it. He could have found untravelled worlds locally if he had bothered to see them in family and comrades, but most importantly in himself. There lies the problem; he is "always roaming with a hungry heart" because his heart is empty; Ulysses is a void; he must always travel, always explore, because there is nothing within, no flowers in his garden or birdhouse in his soul. Do you, Reader, have nothing but nothing inside? Our pains may make us wish so, but joy reprimands that. Terrible sorrow awaits practically everyone, and we will experience it no matter how we choose to do so. Do not welcome pain--"I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged"--but when it comes, do not stand by and observe how the frost kills the roses, and you taking notes and marking charts. Be upset, then accept, and finally move in to cultivate your roses again, now into a hardier beauty. Detachment, like all defense mechanisms, helps us survive, not thrive. To make your garden grow, you must learn and truly be a part of all you have known, which happens only when all you have known becomes a part of you. Who knows: when you stop to smell the roses, do the roses smell you?
Sir John Gielgud reciting the end of "Ulysses," with the middle section of Holst's "Jupiter" in accompaniment.
And the song I referenced in the latter half of this post:
The idea of connecting, or connections, has concerned me for a long time, on all planes of subjective and objective questioning and theorizing. And now I would like to know what others think. Let your responses be as free-wheeling as you please, or answer some questions I will list here and go from there.
1.) What does "connecting" mean? What does it mean to you?
2.) What forms do connections take?
3.) What helps connecting? What inhibits it? Something personal, technological, social, political, geographical, temporal?
4.) What is the good of connecting? What is the evil?
5.) What are examples that come to mind, whether from the news (politics, crime, weather, etc.), art, etc.?
And so on. I will keep things anonymous, unless you specifically want credit (and if you reference or allude to a newspaper, or speaker, or of the like). After a week or so (pretty much whenever I feel like it), I will synthesize all of it together, including my own thoughts, into something portentous. I hope.
You may post your replies as a comment on this post, on my Facebook page (Christian Hendricks), my Twitter (XtianHendricks), or email (composingpenguin@gmail.com).
Caravaggio...Gesualdo...Wagner... These are a few names that come immediately to mind, artists of striking, severe originality, whose creations invoke supreme emotion and depict stunning vistas of humanity. They were also capable of awful things: Caravaggio was an excessive brawler who killed a man, perhaps intentionally; Gesualdo murdered his wife while his henchmen killed her lover, and later killed his baby, finally dying in an extremely tortured state of mind; Wagner had no problem living off others gifts, sleeping with his friends wives, and practically codifying and intensifying European anti-Semitism in such essays as Das Judentum in der Musik. I would not want to know these men personally. Their works, however, know me intimately, and I rate Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as one of my favorite operas.
"As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular." - Oscar Wilde
"Never trust the teller, trust the tale." - D.H. Lawrence
I am, usually, much less interested in the personal lives of artists than in their creative lives. Naturally, the two arenas have overlap, but it is easy for me to, say, ignore Wagner's ideas on Jewry in music and focus on the real and deep human achievement in his one (great) comic opera. That is part of the essence of the above quote by Lawrence, and of the handful of admonitions I take to heart, mind, and soul; whatever a person says, postulates, theorizes, it little matters compared to what he does, or to be more exact, what he achieves. Gesualdo was, to be scientific, looney, at one point taking a cue from Macbeth and having the forest surrounding his castle mown down; even today, strangeness attends his name (see Werner Herzog's excellent movie on him, Gesualdo). Yet, there stand his six books of madrigals, which take the madrigal to its disturbing limits and conclusion (the madrigals of Monteverdi serve as an epilogue, bridging from the madrigal to the new-old art form of opera). More particular to my case, and returning to Wagner, the German master wrote much on music and art, postulating this theory and that ideal. To me, none of it matters until the works matter (which naturally the operas of Wagner do); theory should follow, not lead.
In enlightening upon the relevance of the quote by Wilde, I come to the recent controversy surrounding the novelist Orson Scott Card, known for Ender's Game and related books. I have not read his works, and am only slightly interested in doing so; something, though, tells me he is hardly of the caliber of the geniuses I listed above. He has only gained recent notoriety, however, now that a major movie has been made of his blockbuster book, bringing to light some truly horrendous opinions of his, particularly those on marriage equality; simply put, he is vehemently against it, even calling for secession should the gays get the marriage. Meanwhile, I did not care about his opinions before, I do not care about them now, and the future contains too much possibility to waste on dithering over them then. Nor do I particularly care to see the movie. But, my disinterest has nothing to do with his opinions. To put it differently, I will not boycott the movie because he is anti-gay; if it can be said that I am boycotting at all, it is because I am anti-spending-good-money-on-things-I'm-not-all-that-intrigued-by. If the movie, or the book were anti-gay, then I would certainly boycott, just as I refuse to endorse Das Judentum in der Musik. Such views are vulgar, and art should have nothing in it that is itself vulgar (this is different from depictions of vulgarity, which is a necessity). Wickedness is fascinating: usually what we attribute as wicked is something that our more disturbing parts wish to pursue. Boycotting the movie, as this group wishes to do, is to affix wickedness to it (by proxy of it's writer), and will make it all the more interesting for people to see; in other words, any publicity is good publicity. But, should we treat him, or his ideas at least, as vulgar, we lose interest as quickly as we lose interest in stinky trash. I hold it would have been better to ignore Card's personal opinions altogether, only addressing as the need should arise.
Personally, Card and the whole cadre of anti-gay activists and opinionators do not hurt me; their way is down and out, and they will be--already are--irrelevant. Card has already made money from his books, Ender's Game having been first published in 1985, and he will continue to do so, especially now from the movie. May he make money from his art. May all artists make money from their art. May he earn nothing from his vulgar opinions. May all people earn nothing from their vulgar opinions.
N.B. Orson Scott Card was recently hired by D.C. Comics to write for the digital Adventures of Superman. The artist who was to draw the issue, Chris Sprouse, withdrew from the project, saying the controversy crowded out the work at hand.
Also, the New York Times called out Geeks OUT for their boycott.
(Thanks to the blog Joe.My.God. for the compiling of the articles concerning the matter.)
