To do creative work you need to be like a camel: bad tempered, hard to stir, dogged, and at home in arid places.
To see through the manipulation is to understand the importance of music, and you will never say 'it's only a song' again, unless it is for the purpose of fooling someone.
When you have no opinions, you start to drift aimlessly, and forget everything. You become a mysterious exasperation.
Censorship is for the easily alarmed, and no-one is more easily alarmed than a man living a dream, with a traitor in his bowels.
She lay silent for a billion years, and then one day she awoke. 'We thought you were dead', said those who survived.
He is a coward, and so he puts his grievances into his songs. Therefore each of his songs is, in effect, a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, and just as trivial.
He is not my friend, but I envy him. I wish I could share his garden with him, and his teapot, and his books. He may complain, but he must be the happiest man on earth.
She wanted to meet her dream lover - she was so fascinated with him. She left a message under his door. Soon, he responded, but in disguise. If she rejects him, there is no damage done. If she responds, trouble of an interesting sort will ensue.
'Ignorance is bliss'. It took me twenty years to understand that saying. At first I thought it was ironic. Now I know better. May reality never reveal itself to me in its entirety.
Now I know that she is not beautiful, she is even more beautiful. I think I understand why: Not gifted with natural beauty, she has colluded with her imagination. In compensation, she has mushroomed forth extraordinary beauty. Only the crippled can run like that.
'Approach your fears', I told her, but I was being too dramatic. If I could restate my advice, I would say, 'Fear is only useful to you if it remains unnamed. But if you must name it, shunt it aside.' It's easy to say that, but harder to do it. How do you shunt aside fear? Apply yourself to that question and see what comes up.
You haven't changed much from your fifteen-year-old self, you know. Has it been a long time since you did that thing you used to do? That child will have its revenge.
What is the point of it? That luminously bleak question emerges from the mist whenever the lustre of each new technology begins to wear off. We do not find ourselves newly adrift in a new world beyond meaning and purpose. We are still adrift in the old world, where meaning never existed. Why should you not then merrily improvise on the theme of your own delusions whatever they are? Do you need a reason? If so, fine: let that be your delusion.
Patience. What a word. We will never get to the bottom of it. It is the sister of revenge, and is allied to a million forgotten lives. What kind of a person prefers patience to revenge? Well, maybe there is an answer to that. I don't know.
It takes a lot of hubris to commit words to a page. I am immortal, I say to myself. You are also afraid: can I perhaps draw you into my web? My word is transduced through the ages, I say to you - can you resist that temptation? I know, I know, it is better to stay silent, better not to disturb the universe. But, over and over, one thing draws me to you: I may provide some kind of solace to you, I may draw tears from your wounded heart. Now that is a temptation even I cannot resist.
If you're ever worried abut how to pay back someone for their great generosity, don't be. There will be payback, though it may occur much later.
I dreamed I travelled to an island. There, I found a fox with a heart of fire, a rabbit who was his friend and lover, a beautiful blue woman, an elf, and a man who smoked and fell asleep from exhaustion, a female scholar, and a magical creature who appeared, sometimes as a robot, and sometimes as a whore. I said, "what is the point of it all?', because it is in my nature to seize a moment like this. The fox replied, 'Do not waste my time'; the rabbit said, 'I have a secret place to show you'; the beautiful blue woman said, 'Will you take me dancing?'; the elf said, 'Obviously you are wiser than me'; the man who smoked and fell asleep from exhaustion said, 'Read this book'; the scholar said, 'I have to know you better - we have many things to discuss'. The magical creature, who appeared sometimes as a robot, sometimes as a whore, said, 'Sing your song'.
She was a god, and so was he: a thousand years is an instant for a god. She flirted with him for an aeon, but eventually she could not sustain her desire without losing her dignity, and so she let the matter drop. She never forgot him, always remembering him with resentment and love. She married and gave birth to a son. His name was Aeon.
There was a dispute between two lovers, and each appealed to their mutual friend. He extended his arms, and in great pain stated his reasons, and clenched his fists and openly wept; and this friend took his hands in hers, and let his tears wet her shoulder, and spoke rarely and with well chosed words of gentle great solace; and not long after, she, his former partner, also made her case to the friend, and rolled her eyes, and paced restlessly around the room, and finally also succumbed helplessly to tears; and once again the friend took her sweet head into her hands, and stroked her hair, and dried her tears. But, even so, having heard everything, still she could not take sides; and so, to this day, she remains the friend of both.
I am at the mercy of the cosmos. It could crush me in a second. This knowledge is the root of my fearlessness.
Where am I allowed to celebrate my transgressions? That's what I want to know. My capacity for reasoning is of no assistance in answering this question. Only obstacles assist me: they direct me to my pleasures as do the banks of a river.
Tuck shop arm, she calls it: one of the many signs of the flabbiness of her aging, thirty-three year old body. The truth, though, is that even an old woman is girlish. She has not lost anything - I still see her youthfulness - she is like a tree, always adding new rings of growth to the sum of her existence, never losing what has come before.
If I were to start a movement, it would be predicated on schism. Within our Orders, it would be required that each new member form a splinter group within a short period of time, in which all the key tenets of its host were repudiated. Mutations would proliferate. Only those who wished to be included would be excluded. In this way, the profusion of sects would become a signature, a sign of my Order's success, instead of an embarrassment.
What an old fashioned word 'bore' is, but, although he was only 25, and very much a modern young man, there is no doubt that this description suited him best of all. The complete bore must combine pomposity, hypocrisy, paranoia and aggression. It takes all four character traits, combined, to keep this rather old fashioned word alive.
We eviscerate our interests by deigning to fawn on the disillusioned. They hold no genuine fascination for us, so let's not pretend any more. We need not indulge in a protective view of life. We have no reason at all to despair of reaching our zenith. It is perfectly possible that each of us can do that. We can stop worshipping the disillusioned - whatever other illusions we may have, surely we can see that they are not gods. 'Oh, but they channelled gods'. Yes, sure, but they are not doing it any more, are they? Leave them alone.
Of the many preternatural powers that have been bestowed upon me - the power to see the future, the power to manipulate others according to my will, and so on - there is only one I do not consider completely useless: the power to see who is, and who is not, a pathological narcissist.
You desire love, you desire respect, you desire appreciation of your beautiful body. If I deny you these things, I am a hypocrite. I will meet you in the garden of your desires.
In dialogue, we listen with our voices. Our voices slide over and under the rocks and through the crevices, seeking the presence of the other.
The trade-off between anonymity and glory in the world of creative work is due to the epicene nature of the work itself. Anonymity desires glory, and glory desires anonymity, and each flows towards the other. In the tension and desire of each for the other is found the creative work.
What I would like to ask theorists who create taxonomies of everything is this: Does your own theory fit into the taxonomy? It seems to me, that no matter how this question is answered, it presents an insoluble logical dilemma. For if the taxonomy contains the theory, then the theory is smaller in scope than the taxonomy itself, and hence cannot include it; but if, on the other hand, the theory does not fit into the taxomony, then it is something extraneous to the taxonomy - and a taxonomy cannot be of everything as long as there is something extraneous to it.
We are never as modern as we would like to think. We see our transcendence of, or our unmooring from, the past. We feel as if we are adrift, even as we search for some provenance in history for our predicament, like a child seeking its parent. We name our era in such a way as to capture our awestruck, revelatory disenfranchisement. In a few years, we all die, and future generations take that very name to mean something historical, categorical, transitory, and in no way to be compared with their own sense of thrownness into the Void, that crystal cold terror-in-joy, which, though they may deny it, is exactly the same as ours. Our name was intended to sound a gong through the ages, as if to say, 'from now on, everything will be different'. But that gong has been sounding through the ages, and we are just the ringing of it.
I have great faith in the scientific method, which after all is our formal instantiation of our own conditioning principles as organisms, but I don't have too much faith in many scientists. Last century alone , scientists from a variety of cultures were complicit in an enormous number of human rights abuses. Warfare technology itself is a branch of science of course. I have plenty of respect for science, but there are a lot of scientists who would, with a slight change of outfit, make equally great tyrants. I am thinking maybe the problem is one of authoritarianism, and the concomitant use of belief as a control mechanism. Perhaps we should be talking about 'believers' rather than 'religious people'. I fear all true believers, and see them as a potential threat to the survival of the species.
The creative process is alchemical, primitive and magical at first - because you don't quite know what you're doing - then, gradually, it becomes more and more scientific, as you come to identify causes and effects, the formula behind the process. Once you understand the whole chain of events back to front, it appears to be entirely prosaic - and then you have the urge to move on, to seek more illusion. You find a sense of danger, of taking risks, to be crucial to your own sense of artistic adventure. You find your delight in the open spaces which beckon in the almost-safe, almost-dangerous region between care and recklessness. Too much of the former, and the artistic outcome is bland and predictable, and you are also jostled by a million uninteresting people; too much of the latter and you risk losing your bearings and even your sanity of course.
The trouble with seeking the keys to the creative process from the history of great men is that great men invariably wish, in their hearts, to become famous. Therefore, they conspire and collude, trample and take, reject and steal, confabulate and condemn, ignore and occlude, fawn and cavil, rage and storm, and do various other undignified acts in order to attract attention to themselves. This is how they become famous: there is no other way to become famous. No matter what our culture has told us, the truth is that these men are not great. They have neither happiness nor wisdom, only technique. A moth has technique.
Every religion is an expression of atheism, couched in richly anthropomorphic, symbolic language, with a few characters thrown in for the children.
At first it seemed that his book was a mighty polemic against that type, the intellectual hypocrite, but, in a more analytic moment several years later, it became evident to me that he was simply a gossip who was unaware he was describing, not the enemies of freedom, not even his own enemies, but himself. The tragedy of propounding a vociferous critique is that the reasons behind one's invective are, in the end, trivial, personal, and bound to our infantile need for redress, and that is why wisdom is alloyed with silence.
I would sooner pray to a ghoul than to a god for material trappings and worldly success. Can you see the logic?
Criminal behaviour is the usurpation of the habitual activities of the upper classes by those beneath them. Therefore, if you wish to remain virtuous, be born into a family where you can do what you like.
Delve into the history of an autolatrist and you almost always find a doting mother and an absent father. The parents are, unconsciously, complicit in the crime of enlightenment.
We lose our hearing in the confines of brisk conversation between friends over music, and in social hubbub and discourse over clatter and sound. Prattle, gossip, smalltalk. This is not necessarily a problem. We hear what we need to hear in a quiet place, where we cannot mistake it, no matter how deaf we may be.
I tried to persuade a fly that he was trespassing; I tried to persuade a mosquito that she was stealing what was not hers. I got nowhere in either case. I now see that my only options were to eject, kill or leave.
Genius, hiding its eyes, is sublime cowardice. This is also what distinguishes genius from insanity and overweening hubris, because no-one with any sense stands in front of a tidal wave and says 'All this is mine!'.
The most important question a person can ask is not 'Why am I here?', or even 'Who am I?', but 'When should I leave?'.
Of course, if one is to avoid a life of quiescence, one must eventually act; and, to act coherently, one must entertain beliefs. But it it really possible to entertain a belief if one knows all beliefs are delusional? One turns to artists, alcoholics and occultists to find an answer to that question: because nowhere else is the question asked.
Omnivorous, esurient, he works everything into his mental system. He remonstrates, and accretes, and aggrandizes his position through the mechanism of inclusion. It is as if he is saying: 'I am bigger than you - I can digest you!'. His comeuppance will arrive via the prosaic and agreeably ridiculous discovery - by others - of the simple follies of his sex life.
I would walk over all that generosity, spirit, energy, correct perception, compassion and fortitude to get you one ounce of patience.
Then again, kitsch and bad taste are not the same. Kitsch is always in bad taste, but the reverse is not true. To the artist, extreme bad taste is a baring of the teeth. Anything less than extreme bad taste is gratuitous, however, and what is gratuitous is always kitsch.
Tax minimization, properly understood, is the arrangement of one's affairs so as to minimize time spent thinking about tax.
I appreciate that you have mastered prosody, that you can stetch your hand over an octave and two notes, that you know how to arrange strings beautifully. You have never blackened your body with pitch and crawkled through the bracken on your belly at night, however, and it really shows.
Do not subscribe to the upside-down world: they cannot be enlightened if they say they have it. Stand tall on your own two proud feet. If you must learn how it is done, examine a chair.
You may thank the ditch for providing the opportunity to climb so high, though the truth is that the ditch doesn't care for your welfare, nor the welfare of anything sentient, and you were not singled out to learn this particular lesson. You may credit mere geometry for life's lessons, but next time around you will blame the same mute structure for your inevitable fall.
Sooner or later, life while scar you in the exact location of your greatest pleasure. That is when you are reborn as a teacher. Before your scarring, you think that teaching is schooling. After your scarring, you teach with whatever it was you used to do, and your lessons are presented as the way you do what you do.
If I were a statistician, I would only need to know what had already been decided by my superiors. I would then seek out the data that supported that decision, and I would suppress or ignore the data that did not. This is, after all, the job of any statistician, and anyone who denies this is either a liar or a statistician.
Only the truly depraved are religious. Their salvation is pornography, but they are damned, and, with the pride of the damned, they resist help from below.
If it should come to pass that strange and terrifying faces suddenly appear in your works, as if hell beings were emerging one by one from the aether of your canvas, please continue.
There is nothing banal about this country except its people. I take pleasure in banality, the conversations, the routines, and so on. It has its own murmuring rhythm. I am no saint or any other kind of exhibitionist. What I know is told to you by others.
Because he was not expecting trouble, trouble came to him. After the denouement, he had no strength to ask the intruder to leave; and trouble remained in his house thereafter. In due course, he and his nemesis struck a truce of sorts, which became a grudging mutual respect, and then, finally, an alliance and a firm friendship. From time to time, his companion left the house, usually at night, to visit the richly deserving.
He may be obnoxious, and may regularly insult you, but if he can't undermine you, he isn't your enemy.
Become gracefully old. Our pleasures in life revisit us and take up lodging in our frame. Where once we aggressively pursued our pleasures, in those precise locations, now we clearly contemplate dramatic rips in the fabric of our physical being. Each has its own texture, its own sensory modality. This is dying. That which you were was life spurting outwards; that which you will be, is death, or nothingness, the Silence.
You are an idiot who is always bawling at people and putting them down in public. Caution around fools ensures that I won't be jumping into the bear pit with you, or even remaining in your presence. But, if you hurt someone who is innocent, and bears you no animosity, if you hurt them because you can, and to impress others like you, and only then, I will expose you, you idiot.
First you show me gold, then you show me ashes. I have come to understand: of course there is gold, of course there is ashes.
He cannot really put life as it is lived by people, and life as it really is, together. I wonder if he covertly values his insights into futility so much that, out of a misplaced sense of cleaving to something superior, he preserves the gap, and in so doing tortures himself.
I asked a tree what life was, but received no answer. This tree is either arrogant or ignorant, I thought to myself: if the tree cannot answer my question, I will ask another tree, or a rock.
Yesterday I rediscovered you: strange, unfathomable, pretty, delightful, shy, vain. Only then, I realised that your complaint, that I had been neglecting you, was true after all - but I was forgiven, until the next time.
Balance does not lie in the rejection of imbalance, but is an expression of the balance of imbalance and balance, successively, in parallel, and in the absence of both.
You are only thirty-eight, but there are times when your bones ache, and you sense an old woman gradually making her presence felt within your frame.
He said, here is how to stand your ground with a coward who fears you, but has more power than you, and is showing the first tendencies towards making your life difficult: First, a warning shot across the bows; second, a blade in the heart; third, you stand aside to reveal the mocking crowd. Once you have defeated this person, manifest human warmth, and let him be.
I don't understand, I replied.
Curse your enemies with enlightenment, he said. Then, when they are afraid, manifest untrammelled companionship within illusion.
I don't understand, I replied.
Curse your enemies with enlightenment, he said. Then, when they are afraid, manifest untrammelled companionship within illusion.
Why is it that after two days of unplaceable unease, you are suddenly filled with an unplaceable happiness? Maybe it is because two fish kissed, in the dark, in the depths.
They consider themselves visionary, but their visions, like their essays are coddled by history. They disappear into their own reading. I do know several people of vision, and they are quite different. They have no forum, they have no peers. If you have a vision, you are all alone.
You are exasperated by my carelessness with mementos. I know I should keep a scrapbook, frame the pictures, and put the all the loose photos in an album. I would rather let the wind scatter them around the house, into forgotten books and drawers, to lie dormant until, one day, they are rediscovered. Icons and links are nothing without the power to move - and that power is reliant on the shock of renewal, like an almost-forgotten friend who knocks on your door to renew your acquaintance after an absence of many years.
I am a musician and, because I would not compromise my love in any sensible way, I am slowly going deaf. Furthermore, when I look around, I see those who love to write are finally twisted into madness by an obsession with stories, and I see great lovers meeting the consequences of playing cat's cradle with human relations. Everywhere I see artisans and athletes permanently damaged by the pursuit of their craft. What we love will slowly kill us. And yet, the alternative, the constant preservation of the self from pleasure and involvement, elides into a cowardice about life, and, in the end, it is the cowardice that will kill us.
After all, in the end it's all a glamour, but we need to forgive ourselves. It's not such a bad thing that we fool ourselves all the time. It seems to be enough to have the capacity to see where one went wrong, playing a game, and suddenly reached the point where one began to hurt people.
Of course, we all go straight to their bookshelves and music collections, and then we decide once and for all whether we can be friends. There is something frightening about a house with no questioning books, no curious music.
In every ignored child is the performer of the future. I love you, not because you are perfect, but because you deserve my love. Your performances are not for me, but I will support them with my heart and mind, and I will hold you when you realise that even this cannot correct the tragedies of your past.
Two dark shadows on the wall
Which dark shadow shall I be?
Two lights shine behind me
One will lose me, one will find me
One will rise, and one will fall
One will attack, and one will flee
Or, I will not make the choice:
Two dark shadows sharing a single voice
Which dark shadow shall I be?
Two lights shine behind me
One will lose me, one will find me
One will rise, and one will fall
One will attack, and one will flee
Or, I will not make the choice:
Two dark shadows sharing a single voice
Prepare yourself, Beloved, for I shall rain down on you. But first, prepare the way with sacrifices, prayers, and invocations: I am a coquette and demand your attention. Pray to see the winds lash the sea, pray for ash, for fire, for cracks in the earth, pray with devout enthusiasm for hail and loss! Even now, the dark cloud descends. Drink human blood from my cup. I will show you what I have concealed within my womb. I will show you all these, and you will ride the dark waves on a rudderless ship.
All day long you gather your tribe with your eyelashes and your sweet words. As the day ends, you are tired and alone. Your mood descends: you despise your empty virtuosity. Then it somehow comes to pass that you are absorbed in vivid thought. This is something very different to your daylight persona. You begin to create.
Somewhat self-contained and remote, one senses that there are large gaps between his thoughts. People take great interest in those thoughts of his, but I take even greater interest in the gaps.
Your bliss is to accrue plaudits and to see your shining face reflected in the eyes of strangers. My bliss is to walk through immersive silence in the streets and parks. You hope to realise your bliss some day. I know my bliss already.
Now that I am incapable of profound thoughts, or even complex deductions, I dream of meeting and falling in love with an equally unambitious woman, and living a life of mild anonymity in the suburbs, just getting to know the neighbours and not thinking of travel too much. I want to talk about food, beer, sport and domestic repairs. I want to work hard all day and come home tired. I want to greet my wife and children every afternoon and just love them, and be loved in return. So private is this sunny fantasy that it has the cast and character of a sinister perversion: a disembowelling of character in the honeyed sunlight.
You hang around with people obviously less articulate than you, I said. Is this because you want to feel superior? She replied: I hang around with people who see before they think. This talent is more common among the inarticulate. As for those rare folk who are both articulate and clear-eyed, one can spot them easily because they love nonsense.
She said to me, not only do you not need a teacher: you cannot get it with a teacher. I asked, what about a teacher who teaches that you cannot get it with a teacher? She replied, you cannot get it with any teacher, no matter what they teach. I said, why then should I listen to you? She said, why then should you listen to me?
Never having had the attention of your father, except when he was angry, you have come to equate love with violence. So, you sought a man who would dominate you. Instead, you found a man who simply loved all the things you did. You became frustrated: he didn't hit you - didn't he love you? But something in you persevered. Soon, you found this man was discoursing with a man inside you: they had each other's eyes. You wielded the energy of method and began to walk with confidence, rather like a man yourself. This was your birthright.
I dreamed that the floor split open with a thunderous crack, revealing a red light, through which the head of a reptilian hell being emerged. ‘What is your name?’ I asked. ‘I am Derongi’, the being replied. ‘You brought me here by synchronizing sound and vision.’
Some jump off the cliff, but most are pushed. They fall through hot and cold realms. They meet Madness, and see that he has penetrated them like a tick. They address the worm. The real work begins.
There is no theatre without the Scarlet Woman. Last night, I met her in a dream: she was dressed as a business woman and her name was Savannah. She wore a tailored dark blue suit. She was extremely beautiful. We kissed. She told me she was thirty-nine, but later I found out she also posed as an older woman; in fact, it transpired that she had had at least two identities, and many former lovers. I met one of them near a stone fountain, an amiable, well dressed man in his early thirties, who since ceasing to be her lover, had become her friend. We talked about her, admiringly, for an hour or two, as darkness fell over the stone boulevard.
Imbibe the spirit: fill yourself with fearful creatures. Allow the demon to penetrate your body, making you perform demonic actions. In so doing, understand the demon: his ways, his needs, and his meat. Soon, you know him inside out, for a demon is simple. When you know him, you are his master and his carer. He will carry you through the wilderness when you are weak and confused, leaping over rocks and hurtling you towards your destiny.
Where is our Achilles heel? It is right in the centre of our greatest talent. There, our knowledge began with words which blossomed into action, where it should have begun with action which blossomed into words.
What do you want to hear? I would like to know that. Then I will tell you everything you want to hear, and you will fall into a trance. Then I will rob you.
That paint smells of mildew, you should probably throw it away, I said to her. I'm painting, she replied. I need to finish this painting, with this paint. I said: you could go and buy some fresh paint and finish your painting. To which she replied: Then it would not be this painting. It would be another painting. I want to finish this painting.
He and his wife were gossipers. They didn't believe anyone, or trust anyone, or give anyonethe benefit of the doubt. They gossiped all day in their little room. Soon enough, they turned on each other.
I told him I would renovate his house. I would fill it with all the great works he had done. I would curate an exhibition. People would come from everywhere and make speeches. I myself would make a speech! It would be an impressive one. It might even make me a little niche or career for me. I would then assiduously defend him against his critics, as, after all, he was my job.
She wanted to be a teacher but was unable even to look after her friends. So this is why she teaches anonymously: out of shame, because her words and deeds do not match, and she knows it. Strangely, though, this knowledge itself removes all blame, and so she is free to teach: anonymously.
The Palace of Wisdom is a library. Inside, there are a million books. No-one knows who wrote them. Only a few people come here to read. I was there one day and suddenly wondered, 'Why are there no authors for these books? Or, if there were authors, why did they leave their names off the books?' Then a voice replied, 'These authors bargained with me, and I gave them their true desires on the condition that they hid their faces.'
You are torturing yourself with hope. You will never know the gentle happiness of untrammeled futility.
I found a meadow made of crystal, and an underwater cavern, and a bizarre machine which replicated itself, and an abandoned mansion with thousands of half-lit rooms, and a stratified network of corridors, and a vast precipice from one I could see a cloud emanating shafts of light in the distance, and a creature who bled forever, and a fragrant vale in which moss and lichen grew, and a great, lead hill from which one could see the whole world. For a while I was happy to explore on my own. Soon, though, the urge came to tell. I told a thousand strangers I would take them there, and show them around. Some came, but were not impressed.
She wanted to write a Book of Disappointment. In it would be described the whole terrain, and how one walks through it without killing one's self. However, she quickly realised that it is impossible to write such a book.
You are neither cruel nor apathetic, but it has been said of you that you do not care for other people. You look after them, but in the end you would rather not see them much. This isn't coldness, in your view, but a mark of love and respect.
Around and around we go, each in our own holding pattern. If you knew what was coming, you would not pray quite so hard for change.
I am a ghost walking among you: My heart is in the void. Therefore, I am enervated by your wishes, and you are exaspertaed by mine. When we are in the sunshine, enjoying simple things, this is a cause for celebration. Now, though, it is a serious misunderstanding. We contemplate each other through the glass.
You are in despair because you don't know who you are any more. How can anyone help you? You have mistaken the cure for the disease.
Although she plumbed neither the heights nor the depths, her mind was sharp and adept enough to expand out sideways, exploring the shallows across a broad terrain, until, one day, she became an administrator of some sort.
Who is the one who, in the presence of debauchery, is pleasantly aloof? That is the Satan, that is the Lucifer.
The photocopiers go down, and we are at a loss. With nothing to do, we all have our own strategies for coping: ways of filling space, as if the space was not already filled, and agendas other than those to which we address ourselves internally were not already running forward like dogs, each after their own particular hare.
On days like this I miss my daughter, and have simple dreams of taking her to school or combing out her head lice. Creature dreams.
We are never more deluded than when we travel. Some people, sensibly, never travel. Those who travel and return home are just as sensible. Only those who travel are missing the point.
Perfected objects exemplify poor taste. You may find strange things that are not perfect; however, you will never find perfect things that are not tasteless. Nor will you find, in a person who aspires to perfection, anything resembling good taste. To find good taste, you must find the unflinching eye.
Of all the treasonous acts committed against the State, none erodes quite so effectively as the practice of barter.
Vulnerable, delicately poised, tremulous, and taking great care: as gentle as a mother with her new born baby. When you have this heart inside you, I dare not oppose you. When I myself have this heart, I am perplexed. Nothing stands in the way, yet it is not my way.
People admire your many medals, but you are brusque with them, and are apparently ungracious. I think I understand your position. Still, be gracious.
Mirroring: one becomes a mirror. It is very free and easy. There is no fractious effort, and this is why it seems so very effortless.
Postmodernism is the sealing of an impulse against application. It's a form of defence.
People don't want their statements tested: it might prove them wrong. Some people don't want their art tested either.
Academics have an obvious financial and social stake in propagating the preeminence of the word. Academic postmodernism blossoms thickly, generating many concepts. There is plenty of scope for theoretical research: everyone can keep their jobs. They must colonise art, using the word, and the wordy. Now, they have power and control.
Art, many people feel, is of the flesh and hackles . This is interesting, as many artists believe the same thing. These artists appeal to the senses and the skin.
People don't want their statements tested: it might prove them wrong. Some people don't want their art tested either.
Academics have an obvious financial and social stake in propagating the preeminence of the word. Academic postmodernism blossoms thickly, generating many concepts. There is plenty of scope for theoretical research: everyone can keep their jobs. They must colonise art, using the word, and the wordy. Now, they have power and control.
Art, many people feel, is of the flesh and hackles . This is interesting, as many artists believe the same thing. These artists appeal to the senses and the skin.
I only understand any of you when I am drunk. Not being a natural drunkard, my inebriated teaching is only sporadic. I am destined to die without students. I understand. But I do not like it. When I am drunk, my heart breaks. But when I am sober, I don't seem to give a shit.
It is a masque ball, to which all the philosophies of the world are invited. Because I feel sorry for them, I wear this masque you see before you, on the page. The masque is in the shape of a word, and the word says, 'Reality'. But once I leave, few will leave with me, because, though many like my masque, it is no easy thing to see what is behind it.
The old woman said to me, 'I do not want to write any more books. I want to play on the sun. I have lost all my manners and all my culture. I am only good for playing with young children; and that is all I want to do.'
The stimulation is not analysed: transcendent pleasure. One lacks the will to continue: necessary tranquility.
It is certainly not necessary to have a large vocabulary. However, one must understand how a certain kind of rhythm one's writing is able to induce suggestibility.
We are not useful: nor are our occupations, our intelligence, our philosophies of life, useful in any way. How we struggle with that. Each useless shape is linked to another: but we can find no use for any of it.
You are not grateful. I do not care. Nor do I care that you care. Also, I do not show you the level from which I see this dynamic; and above all I do not crow to you. My silly friend, I have things to do.
I said to my muse as we paced the house, I was that child and grew up into this person. There was a problem too large to ignore. In having to face it, I did not overcome it, but nevertheless I became like this. The muse replied, now there is tumult everywhere but in your heart.
My sanctuary was a cool stone courtyard with a stone fountain and a towering jacaranda tree. The flowers would carpet the sandstone paving and gradually turn into a sweet smelling, fementing purple mush. I read books there, and smoked, and listened to the birds. The courtyard, I remember, had an echo which made all the sounds it contained magically immanent, or pregnant with a gently unutterable meaning. Later, when I was swirled away from that life into a new, unrecognizeable one, I found that this place had taken root in my body.
We dream, wistfully, of luxuries we cannot afford. For some, these are riches; for others, simplicity. Still others dream of self-pity and fear.
When I want to save time and resources, I I put things where those who need them can find them quickly. When I want to waste them, I follow the established procedures.
They just notice things when they have already happened, and cannot imagine anything happening that hasn't already.
A sense of injustice lies at the heart of each hypocritical act. This is why I urge you to dispense with your belief in justice.
I interrogate my heart, and I can find no justification for interpreting that tender feeling in any way at all; so why call it pain?
I left it alone, and it grew, until one day I opened the door and saw that the room was both occupied and defended. I was then forced to enter into conversation with this thing.
I think they have won the day - they tour from one university to the next, they play at events with names like 'futur.fall', and they are smart artists - not really artists, but academics, they play the system. I don't know what they really contributed, but when I think of the kind of dull-normal artists often featured in a certain period piece magazine of pretentious journalism, describing with drab tenacity their technique of making various noises through various gimmicky means, and so ending up with sound pastiches of no real intensity or imagination, I think of them.
First you may be dismayed, she said. Do not falter, please persevere. Behind my deep sadness you will find a deeper happiness.
The song always struck me as a piece of defiant hubris - the kind of thing you might sing before being sucked straight into hell. There is something about it that suggests the character has not only failed to triumph except in his own mind, but that he has somehow failed to see beyond his own needs. One could imagine, perhaps, a very rich and unhappy man singing that song.
A solace is a quiet, private thing, a ripple in the heart, or at least, among the solaces, there is the one which consoles. That is a melting solace, the one which dissolves, and brings tears, and warmth, and a pain which we gladly endure because it is true enough.
My clumsiness is valuable to me. I roam sideways, and mix things together, before I learn to separate them into streams. This muddleheaded mixing may appear to be incompetence; and many give it that name, and that is why so many of us are stymied so young.
They bury treaure in the mountains. Not desiring to attach a name to their understanding, they bury it and leave. Their treasures are like land mines, but they are also like gifts to strangers whose ancestors have yet to be born.
Resistance is the first thing we meet. We step back, wait, and often others come to us through the murk. The resistance melts away.
You are deluded, and do all kinds of things because you think they are important. Later, when you perceive that they are not important, you still do these things. You feel as if you may as well, as there is no reason not to. You find, as you continue, that there are many strange symmetrical pleasures that bloom in the garden of delusional acts.
Time travels backwards, sweeping our work into the horizon and beyond view. We search the present for mementos, anchors via which we think we can follow the chain into the past; and we call this history.
I met my muse in her middle-aged, no-nonsense aspect, in her late forties, an age where wise men and women begin to resemble each other. 'I hesitate to give you advice...' she said, and appeared satisfied that I was not expecting her to finish the sentence. We walked together for a while, and she soon disappeared.
Think in cliches, my friends, and meaning will never trouble you again. You my safely join the rest of us, and our enemies will be plainly revealed.
Know your audience, they say; but in what way, and to what end? We should know our audience in order to corrupt them.
Laughter, joy, delight and inspiration - this is what we experience at the funeral of a happy man or woman. However, most of us are born, live and die without having had sufficient time to entertain the host. This is why the death of a small child causes an agonising pain beyond words. Only tears and despair are fit to draw this pain, and we are, for a time, inconsolable. Nevertheless, we will stand again some day, and we will even laugh again, for we are human beings and we are remarkable creatures.
The dull haze that descends, for weeks, or months, or years, is the body hypnotising the mind, putting it to sleep. We cannot think clearly: we are somnolent. This is called writer's block.
His melancholy grew until it became a song, then a lament, then a curse, then a whirlwind. One Sabbath he came down the stairs with a strange fire in his eyes. Slamming the table, he shouted, "There is no judgement and there is no judge!' His those who heard him were unable to think or speak. There was horror in their hearts. The community was split, and each split was the cause of still more. Some of the people said, 'the precipice of his understanding became to sheer for us to climb, and he became lonely'. For he had retired to his room, left his beard untrimmed, and accepted his meals only through the crack in the door. The first revelation is like a crown in the sky. The last is like a tide of blood and black bile. Where you have gone, no-one can follow. You must come back to them, like a stranger who remembers the town of his birth.
Under the influence of noise, chaos, alcohol and other aids to randomness, the night begins to fray, and the threads diverge. Habit is engulfed by waves of chaos and coincidence. People arch off into new lives, with their own full consent, falling in with strangers, even falling in love, or at least into bed. Lives are created, couples diverge, factions split and fracture, falling into new orbits, or spinning off into the void. The order, never more than a truce, is broken.
Under cover of anonymity we speak with the voice of reality automatically, saying the unsayable. As our anonymity is removed, we become smaller and smaller, eventually speaking with our own voice. If we are not careful, we may become legendary, a living repository of our own history. This is not the place where new shoots are born. Therefore, we prefer to emerge over and over again from nothing, a creature of no rank.
Mad as you are, without a coherent centre, you have made yourself into an image which denies its own ground. I do not think there is any point in bargaining with you. I am impossible because you are impossible. The very second you understand, your reflection as it manifests in me will also understand.
‘Be gracious in victory’. This means not approaching your victims too closely, once you have tied them up, lest they bite off your nose.
When it comes to finding out about a person's whole being, their strengths and weaknesses in all their richness, uncensored by any conscious technique, you can see it all in their cooking.
The shallows and the depths... those fish residing in the depths despise the silvery fish who flit in the warm, light currents of the surface, as they do not understand how cold and dark the world can be. Unable to reach the surface, they see it from afar, perceiving the broad ebb and flow of its inhabitants, but experiencing none of its pleasures. They remain where they are, understanding only a little.
Ask a stranger what brought them here. They will tell you love, desire, fire, fate, regret. There are a thousand words. Some will say, do not ask us what brought us here, thereby forcing us to lie. Yet, miraculously, some will not answer your question at all.
I shy away from those who shun the ministrations of death and her sisters, decay and change. Among those, none fear more death than those who attempt to sexualise death. Let sex be sex, let death be death. What do they have in common?
As I could not believe it any more, I could not teach it. I thought, I would rather teach them how to no longer believe. This did not settle my mind. At last, I was compelled to the following conclusion: since I no longer believed, teaching anything in particular was no longer the point; so why proselytise non-belief? Satisfied, I did my research, and taught them what I no longer believed.
To be tortured by the illusion of choice, and to bear all the regrets that tumble from that illusion, is the punishment accorded to those who believe in free will.
All he ever wanted was to be important! His life became a campaign to make himself exalted and canonical in the eyes of others. He was therefore able to make himself as ridiculous as a human being can be without actually becoming a professional clown.
Who can possibly tell a saint he is wrong?
Destiny is the shining bauble we use to trap the suckers.
He's a journalist. He's gifted with the capacity to see the social context for music making, and the social causation involved in generating new musical forms. As for what happens before a musical style becomes a mass movement, he has no idea: he's not privy to such turnings.
She used to feel she was the ruler of the town, but now it becomes clear that the ruler has died, and the tower is empty, so who is she? Now she is one of the townspeople, as they gather in the streets, arguing what to do; but she is not sure which one.
He has locked the basement door and plugged his ears so he cannot hear the unearthly sounds. Next, he will go around the world selling his method to the highest bidder. Creatures of the underworld instinctively despise him. How long will he survive?
An epigone sets up a stage in the market. People flock around to praise him. They are reminded of the greatness of the master, and in the delerium of their pleasure, welcome the thief.
A prophet of honour appeared to me in a dream and said, I have gazed without flinching upon all the hells to which the ungrateful are dispatched, but I could not gaze for a second upon that hell which is reserved for the devout.
Driving things to an extreme, you make unique lies.
Not desiring fame in this lifetime, they work hard at their craft and attempt to see it through to completion, dodging bullets. Are they wasting their lives? In the opinion of their peers, yes. The opinion of their successors is harder to estimate. All they really want is the gentle creature pleasure of dying in contemplation of their unvarnished works. They are not so interested in the living hell of being observed and judged throughout their lives by strangers.
She said, ‘Hands-off easygoing tolerance is most effective for handling demons. After that, violence is best.’
She desires to know what's going on in his head. He says, without reevoking anything, 'Nothing of great consequence'. She smiles and says she does not believe him, but he is telling the truth, as by not recalling his thoughts, he has made it true.
When an intellect is too weary to deduce, it thinks in apothegms. A dog under a tree, it raises its head, whines to no-one in particular, then rests its head, thinking of nothing.
To the potential mass murderer, insoluble prolems often appear as challenging opportunities.
Through constant complaint he is able to create a simulacrum of a raft, an illusion of continuity of consciousness, the vanity of which is obvious even to him, thereby creating further grounds for complaint.
'Don't tell me you are well', he says. 'I only want to hear from sick people. How can you, being well, understand my misery?' This is his reasoning. Even now, he is conversing with his sick friends, and they are engrossed with themselves and their unifying misery.
I suppose the mental torment you feel is caused by a recoil from the physicality of your love for this person, which is intense and unnerving.
"I like your stories", I told her, "Because they have no specific meaning and allow me, the reader, to exercise my imagination and understand them in any way I like". "On the contrary", she told me, "My stories have only one meaning. There is no room for your imagination, and only one way they may be understood; also, the meaning is always the same".
If he truly understands the nature of change, he will be out of a job.
The body reaches a precipice and halts. It turns right around. It wanders along the edge, then returns to its original spot. It waits. It squints at the sun. It scratches itself. Suddenly, it jumps.
The cosmos threw him a bouquet: he accepted it gratefully, because he knew that this was his third and final offer.
And now she is invaded by a shadow which eases itself out to her toenails and fingertips, hollowing her out inside, making her body its own, for she is about to die. She digests everything into her particular sensibility, which is simply to make the tussle with life a meaningful and constructive enterprise, with not a little dark channelling activity, and that is why I like her style. So, if she is to die, it will be without a feeling of persecution. Idly, I find myself contemplating another friend who feels persecuted when he loses his keys, and wonder how he will feel when his time comes.
She knows that one day she will climb a mountain, rest her head on a rock, and die without a second thought, and this will confuse her loved ones, whose tears will not move her: she will not understand their tears. She will forget everything she has ever done, and all her attention will be focused on the gathering dark.
Anonymity jealously rules inspiration.
In his dream, she was black, haughty, and stood with her foot on the severed head of a wolf. This is what she told him:
"The trickster works through one person, against another. The mode of action is unmasking. The unmasking creates surprise in those who expect and depend upon solidity and the perseverance of form. They depend on such illusions to preserve their sanity, or so they believe; but it is this belief which actually undermines their sanity.
"The trickster only manifests against a person subject to that delusion. To a person not subject to that delusion, he is a principle of embodied action, not a person or deity. According to that principle, the trickster is simply a facet of reality, the fact of change, applied within the locus of personality and social world. Those who understand this principle have a way of appearing and disappearing, changing shape, and so on, without any apparent regrets.
"The difference between the trickster and the psychopath is not as subtle as it might first appear. The psychopath defends and maintains his pleasure at all costs. The trickster defends nothing: not even the principle of non-defending. For this reason, the psychopath more closely resembles the normal person as defined by our society than does the trickster."
One day during a walk in the woods, a leech attached itself to his ankle and began to suck. Or was it that a troll appeared in his bedroom, and began to follow him around, eating his food, stealing his seat and occluding his view of the world? The leech drank its fill and eventually dropped off; or was it that the troll became bored, found an easy prey, wandered off, lost sight of him in the shadows? Later, she asked him, why did you put up with that leech, or was it a troll? Why did you put up with it for so long? And all he could say was, I did not have it in my heart to remove the leech, or the troll. It needed my blood; or was it that it needed my company, my food, my seat, or my view?
She reflects on the gentle sweetness she feels when dissolving her past; there is something fearsome in it.
'At first, he told her, 'my stories are made up to pass the time. Before too long, the moon appears and they are suddenly recondite with hidden meaning. It is not long, though, before they seem, in a flash, utterly redundant. Later still, they wander back into your life, like sleepwalkers.'
She wakes in the night shouting, 'Whose voice is that?' Then she laughs. She has to explain to me that it is only the punchline of a joke, the point of which she has already forgotten.
I said, at first I liked the way you went hither, but now, on reflection, considering all the relevant facts, in the light of experience, perhaps you should go thither. And you said, aah, you might be right. Then I said, do you think, wouldn't it be best, wouldn't it be the sensible or perhaps the crazy thing to do? And you said, maybe, you could be right about that, I don't know. Then I said, but there's something there that shouldn't be, or maybe it isn't there but should be. Or really, no, it's more that it's too difficult, the project is too big, you will fail, or, no, it's that the project is too small, you are hemmed in, or I am hemmed in by you. And you said, it could be that way, who can tell?
First of all she found herself skim reading books, taking in great chunks of text in one hit, judging in a second whether there was anything there. Later, she found she was also skim reading conversations, allowing her mind to skip over small-talk, bustle, gossip, cant, and shop talk. Now, she is amazed to find herself skim reading reality, passing over almost everything. From time to time, she is galvanised; at other times she is quiescent, mentally somnolent or blurry; for she now considers attention a resource.
All depends on who gets to tell our history.
Malevolent, he is denied space in her world, and has become ruthless, breaking in through the windows of her bedroom while she sleeps, giving her nightmares.
He has often thought that if, in an autocratic state, he were asked to adopt some religious or ideological stance, he would happily do so to avoid persecution; and that such a recanting would be neither consistent with, nor inconsistent with, his world view.
She is accustomed to modelling her own thoughts in the body, even looking in the mirror as she does so, the better to articulate in skin each inner being. One evening, her lover accuses her of being priggish at a party attending by a number of relaxed, young, well-moneyed academics of no great note. This is unexpected, as she always feels tremorously raw and unpretentious, and never shares her humility with anyone, since, logically enough, humility does not parade.
Thinking back, she realises her unconscious modelling has slipped over the borders of her personality. She was modelling, not her own concealed attitudes, but theirs, like a king's fool. She wonders what they thought of her? What did they think of themselves? Unlike them, she gave up teaching years ago, yet cannot stop driving these wicked pins into peoples' hearts, even against her own will.
Who can possibly tell a saint he is wrong?
Destiny is the shining bauble we use to trap the suckers.
He's a journalist. He's gifted with the capacity to see the social context for music making, and the social causation involved in generating new musical forms. As for what happens before a musical style becomes a mass movement, he has no idea: he's not privy to such turnings.
She used to feel she was the ruler of the town, but now it becomes clear that the ruler has died, and the tower is empty, so who is she? Now she is one of the townspeople, as they gather in the streets, arguing what to do; but she is not sure which one.
He has locked the basement door and plugged his ears so he cannot hear the unearthly sounds. Next, he will go around the world selling his method to the highest bidder. Creatures of the underworld instinctively despise him. How long will he survive?
An epigone sets up a stage in the market. People flock around to praise him. They are reminded of the greatness of the master, and in the delerium of their pleasure, welcome the thief.
A prophet of honour appeared to me in a dream and said, I have gazed without flinching upon all the hells to which the ungrateful are dispatched, but I could not gaze for a second upon that hell which is reserved for the devout.
Driving things to an extreme, you make unique lies.
Not desiring fame in this lifetime, they work hard at their craft and attempt to see it through to completion, dodging bullets. Are they wasting their lives? In the opinion of their peers, yes. The opinion of their successors is harder to estimate. All they really want is the gentle creature pleasure of dying in contemplation of their unvarnished works. They are not so interested in the living hell of being observed and judged throughout their lives by strangers.
She said, ‘Hands-off easygoing tolerance is most effective for handling demons. After that, violence is best.’
She desires to know what's going on in his head. He says, without reevoking anything, 'Nothing of great consequence'. She smiles and says she does not believe him, but he is telling the truth, as by not recalling his thoughts, he has made it true.
When an intellect is too weary to deduce, it thinks in apothegms. A dog under a tree, it raises its head, whines to no-one in particular, then rests its head, thinking of nothing.
To the potential mass murderer, insoluble prolems often appear as challenging opportunities.
Through constant complaint he is able to create a simulacrum of a raft, an illusion of continuity of consciousness, the vanity of which is obvious even to him, thereby creating further grounds for complaint.
'Don't tell me you are well', he says. 'I only want to hear from sick people. How can you, being well, understand my misery?' This is his reasoning. Even now, he is conversing with his sick friends, and they are engrossed with themselves and their unifying misery.
I suppose the mental torment you feel is caused by a recoil from the physicality of your love for this person, which is intense and unnerving.
"I like your stories", I told her, "Because they have no specific meaning and allow me, the reader, to exercise my imagination and understand them in any way I like". "On the contrary", she told me, "My stories have only one meaning. There is no room for your imagination, and only one way they may be understood; also, the meaning is always the same".
If he truly understands the nature of change, he will be out of a job.
The body reaches a precipice and halts. It turns right around. It wanders along the edge, then returns to its original spot. It waits. It squints at the sun. It scratches itself. Suddenly, it jumps.
The cosmos threw him a bouquet: he accepted it gratefully, because he knew that this was his third and final offer.
And now she is invaded by a shadow which eases itself out to her toenails and fingertips, hollowing her out inside, making her body its own, for she is about to die. She digests everything into her particular sensibility, which is simply to make the tussle with life a meaningful and constructive enterprise, with not a little dark channelling activity, and that is why I like her style. So, if she is to die, it will be without a feeling of persecution. Idly, I find myself contemplating another friend who feels persecuted when he loses his keys, and wonder how he will feel when his time comes.
She knows that one day she will climb a mountain, rest her head on a rock, and die without a second thought, and this will confuse her loved ones, whose tears will not move her: she will not understand their tears. She will forget everything she has ever done, and all her attention will be focused on the gathering dark.
Anonymity jealously rules inspiration.
In his dream, she was black, haughty, and stood with her foot on the severed head of a wolf. This is what she told him:
"The trickster works through one person, against another. The mode of action is unmasking. The unmasking creates surprise in those who expect and depend upon solidity and the perseverance of form. They depend on such illusions to preserve their sanity, or so they believe; but it is this belief which actually undermines their sanity.
"The trickster only manifests against a person subject to that delusion. To a person not subject to that delusion, he is a principle of embodied action, not a person or deity. According to that principle, the trickster is simply a facet of reality, the fact of change, applied within the locus of personality and social world. Those who understand this principle have a way of appearing and disappearing, changing shape, and so on, without any apparent regrets.
"The difference between the trickster and the psychopath is not as subtle as it might first appear. The psychopath defends and maintains his pleasure at all costs. The trickster defends nothing: not even the principle of non-defending. For this reason, the psychopath more closely resembles the normal person as defined by our society than does the trickster."
One day during a walk in the woods, a leech attached itself to his ankle and began to suck. Or was it that a troll appeared in his bedroom, and began to follow him around, eating his food, stealing his seat and occluding his view of the world? The leech drank its fill and eventually dropped off; or was it that the troll became bored, found an easy prey, wandered off, lost sight of him in the shadows? Later, she asked him, why did you put up with that leech, or was it a troll? Why did you put up with it for so long? And all he could say was, I did not have it in my heart to remove the leech, or the troll. It needed my blood; or was it that it needed my company, my food, my seat, or my view?
She reflects on the gentle sweetness she feels when dissolving her past; there is something fearsome in it.
'At first, he told her, 'my stories are made up to pass the time. Before too long, the moon appears and they are suddenly recondite with hidden meaning. It is not long, though, before they seem, in a flash, utterly redundant. Later still, they wander back into your life, like sleepwalkers.'
She wakes in the night shouting, 'Whose voice is that?' Then she laughs. She has to explain to me that it is only the punchline of a joke, the point of which she has already forgotten.
I said, at first I liked the way you went hither, but now, on reflection, considering all the relevant facts, in the light of experience, perhaps you should go thither. And you said, aah, you might be right. Then I said, do you think, wouldn't it be best, wouldn't it be the sensible or perhaps the crazy thing to do? And you said, maybe, you could be right about that, I don't know. Then I said, but there's something there that shouldn't be, or maybe it isn't there but should be. Or really, no, it's more that it's too difficult, the project is too big, you will fail, or, no, it's that the project is too small, you are hemmed in, or I am hemmed in by you. And you said, it could be that way, who can tell?
First of all she found herself skim reading books, taking in great chunks of text in one hit, judging in a second whether there was anything there. Later, she found she was also skim reading conversations, allowing her mind to skip over small-talk, bustle, gossip, cant, and shop talk. Now, she is amazed to find herself skim reading reality, passing over almost everything. From time to time, she is galvanised; at other times she is quiescent, mentally somnolent or blurry; for she now considers attention a resource.
All depends on who gets to tell our history.
Malevolent, he is denied space in her world, and has become ruthless, breaking in through the windows of her bedroom while she sleeps, giving her nightmares.
He has often thought that if, in an autocratic state, he were asked to adopt some religious or ideological stance, he would happily do so to avoid persecution; and that such a recanting would be neither consistent with, nor inconsistent with, his world view.
She is accustomed to modelling her own thoughts in the body, even looking in the mirror as she does so, the better to articulate in skin each inner being. One evening, her lover accuses her of being priggish at a party attending by a number of relaxed, young, well-moneyed academics of no great note. This is unexpected, as she always feels tremorously raw and unpretentious, and never shares her humility with anyone, since, logically enough, humility does not parade.
Thinking back, she realises her unconscious modelling has slipped over the borders of her personality. She was modelling, not her own concealed attitudes, but theirs, like a king's fool. She wonders what they thought of her? What did they think of themselves? Unlike them, she gave up teaching years ago, yet cannot stop driving these wicked pins into peoples' hearts, even against her own will.
Their polemics are received each morning in the mail. Each is closely typed, densely argued and presented with great skill, wit and flourish. Each has been sealed and dated, as befits all official correspondence. She takes the scissors to each one. She slices them up into appealing shapes and then reassembles them. She mails them to her friends, and they hang them on their walls as decorations. It is rare that her detractors ever find out, but when they do, this is the stinging cause for further polemic.
If I am slower this time, he thinks to himself, I will avoid the perils of breaking the skin of my anonymity. Perhaps then this thing may expand with the grand, unhurried gait of nature left to its own devices, no longer at the behest of cleverness and other aids to speed and ascendence.
Astonishing, given the cadences of his prose, their gentle intensity, and his love of the human world, the quivering spirit in each of us, that he was never moved to write music. Then again, being able to fire that arrow directly to the heart with words alone, maybe he is in no need of that medium, since after all his prose is almost poetry, a music of words.
She must have a problem with pride, she thinks to herself, because she seems to be always meeting arrogant, talentless types from her past who are now doing a lot better than her. Or maybe they're being set up for a fall, and her lesson is simply to be patient and forebearing? She doesn't know, but really hates having her nose rubbed in it.
That great sigil, the Cosmos, really makes a mockery of the lesser sigil I will call 'my fate'.
He was a fine chef, and every night he would cook simple, unusual meals with fresh ingredients, but few people ever came, preferring the glossily rich prandium of the suavely urbane eatery across the road. So, every night he would cook, and every night he would eat his own food. ‘Even if no-one else wants my food, excellent though it is’, he would muse, ‘I have the benefit of enjoying it myself.’ And as he ate his own food every night, he became imbued with its benefits, and gradually became simple and unusual in himself.
Heaven itself is a haven for criminals.
A man made a wish, and his world promptly fell apart. He thought to himself, 'This is the wish: it is making its presence felt'.
She said, "Institutional Christianity is the religion of flock conformity. Satanism is better, because it at least rejects the mediocrity of social approval. But there's something beyond both".
He said, "It's called nothingism."
She said, "Don't give it a name".
"Such vanity", muttered the Controller of Reputations, "to put his name about when he isn't even famous".
There were seven corridors, each one beholden in a kind of non-sentient trance to the one beneath. The shallowest level opened out to courtyards with gargoyles and fountains; further down they resembled office and hospital corridors, with no people present, until finally the lowest level was a road through a tunnel, with empty cars crashing, one after the other, in slow motion, forever: the sound was a kind of agony of buckling metal, brakes and glass, and was not without a certain horrific beauty.
It is an ingenious machine, a transforming engine, which turns the animus of another into adamantine, transparent light geometry.
'There's a lot of fascinating, delightfully entertaining people out there who really have nothing of substance to offer', L told me. 'They can be detected easily. The trick is that you simply appear to them as if you are not useful to them, yet do not wish to be their follower. You will be brushed off within a few seconds. On the other hand, there are others, far less numerous admittedly, who will instantly recognize you as a status-free person; not that they will do anything about it.'
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that is why he mixes with people who neither know nor care about such things. As for the experts, he is probably waiting for their knowledge to fragment, shatter, and fly away - but that is unlikely to happen, so why did it happen to him?
Despite his evident genius, he is prickly, and waspish, and therefore one is able to discern from these tendencies toward pomposity that he has further work to do, not that anyone need tell him.
It's miraculous to me that, when others are offensive to her, she is not offended. It may be that they cannot disinter any hate or fear, because she has none, which is, in itself, quite remarkable to me. Also remarkable is that no-one else seems to notice her extraordinary qualities in this regard; and that she does not care that they do not notice.
'Compassion fatigue' is of course an oxymoron. False compassion exists so people don't have to look at true compassion, which is rather more direct and brutal than many people can bear.
All art is a mediation on chanelling the large into the small. If we feel frustration in the morning when we review what we accomplished last night, it may be because we see that, in spite of our best efforts, it remains a fact that the large cannnot be channelled into the small. If the frustration melts into proud fatherhood over time, and we come to see the merits of our little work, it may be due to the realisation that the small already contains the large.
A child fantasizes about all kinds of things - marrying its opposite sex parent, sucking on the teat of the universe forever, making the cosmos bow down before its primal urges, smearing the cosmos with faeces, having mummy bring it whatever it wants when it cries, and other fantasies of omnipotence.
As we grow older, we learn to sublimate these very basic urges into blogs, music, and becoming a person of saocial worth. For example, instead of smearing faeces around, we publish a learned critique of someone's scientific theory - especially if they remind us of one of our parents. We still fantasise about omnipotence and the trailing of clouds of glory, but within a more socially acceptable framework.
Infantile wish fulfillment occurs where an adult actually does consummate one of these basic, id-driven, polymorpheously perverse fantasies. Many gurus are like this. They have been protected from the reality principle by their overindulgent mothers. They grow up and become big babies.
This is connected to the oceanic feeling in this way. The child experience bliss and unity with the cosmos in that whenever a need arises, the mother appears and satisfies it. Sucking on the Good Breast, the child feels warm, blissful and unified with the mother. Later, the Good Breast (or Good Mother) may be idealised as a feminine principle of universal bliss and compassion in which one can be absorbed, cossetted and protected. The feeling of bliss that results is intense and is felt as a profound religious enlightenment. All gurus have oceanic feelings of unity with the universe, which cannot be maintained without devotees. This is how society makes big babies.
Lack of insight has a protective function, and is the chief reason why so few journalists kill themselves.
What he is, he hates to see in others. Moreover, what other have that he does not have, he affects to despise, as he loathes competition. He will therefore associate only with people more powerful than him. What they do is no concern of his.
Anonymous writes:
Maybe I'm perverse, but the notion of a music or even artistic career, seems sillier to me the older I get. It just doesn't seem to be something a serious person would entertain.
She has said goodbye to paranoia, mental torment and the monotony of maintaining her historical borders. However, she has not become any easier to live with.
The conflicting opinions of others can put you in a spin. If you are pigheaded, however, you hold to your own counsel and steer your way through the storm, working with the wind and the waves, but only insofar as it conserves energy. You need one helmsman only.
Some happily lost souls will always wave to you from the horizon, as they go about their business, catching only the smaller fish.
Nothing is identical to anything else. There must be two situations in order for the identity comparison to be made. As soon as two situations can be defined, they differ in space.
As for the observation that all situations are self-identical, that is no more illuminating than saying, 'It is what it is'. Fortunately, that unilluminating statement turns out to be very illuminating if one really thinks about it.
"I am discerning your system, your approach to life, at last", he said. "I have become obsessed with a thought pattern", I thought.
The tide goes out, revealing rocks, grey coral pieces, shells, seaweed and dead bluebottles. Some of us supplicate before the receding tide, begging for its return. Others sink to their knees, cursing God, or Lady Luck, or the Fates. Many of us call meetings, gathering round, drawing up plans in the yellow sand, arguing heatedly. Few of us rest while we can.
The problem is not evil, or error, or destiny, but why the universe, on waking up, recoils in horror and amazement.
First as a child in the garden, then as the gardener, then as the one who watches the gardener and the child from a window upstairs, then finally as the garden growing unseen.
It won't be done until it can't be done.
There is no soul. This is the problem with the complaint that electronic music is soulless: a virtue is presented as a vice.
In the same way, those who lack the delusion that they have a soul are sometimes seen as uncanny or cold. However, the hot, theatrical vortex of narcissism that is called soulfulness is seldom appreciated for long by those who have to deal with it in an individual. On the other hand, a truly soulless person is always a pleasure to know and be with. But the pleasure is a cool one, easily overlooked.
So, also, it is easier to appreciate someone when we have no stake in their existence. That comes with time spent apart, too.
Of course, Jesus is the most famous recorded example of a Christ complex, but consider Socrates, a man with the most subtle of Christ complexes, and foiled only by his own ugliness, which instilled in him a kind of playful irony antithetical to the serious messianic task of leading lemmings off cliffs, but sufficiently elitist to ensure martyrdom at least.
By his peevish, self-righteous, and above all public response to a friend who asked him for a favour, I deduce he lacks both the humility and the strength of the thousandfold defeated. I can safely assume he has no balls.
Imagine, at an age when you were sufficiently young and uncompromising to think such things were fundamental to an authentic existence, that you struck an internal deal with yourself to sacrifice all commercial success, in exchange for prolonged joy in your muse, which, as per the terms of the deal, was to be a lifetime contract. Now you find myself wondering why you have very little money, yet, miraculously, always enough to continue to pursue your art. Then you must remind myself of your deal, struck long ago. The deal was for life, struck with all the radical romanticism of a teenager, and cannot be revoked. The child is master of the adult.
I avoid deeply spiritual people. The reason is that the substance of my own ephiphany, such as it was, was that there was no spirit. So extraordinary was this experience that I found I was unable to obtain comfort from spiritual people; I could only obtain it from people who had no spiritual beliefs at all, and who only cared about practical matters.
This includes people very busy with their jobs, young artists and other egotistical types, women who rely on their looks, middle aged men whose spirit has been crushed beyond repair and now only want to read and drink tea, ribald old bohemians who paint, sew or make dolls and like their wine and sunshine, Satanists and Buddhists too lazy to read their respective scriptures, let alone practise them, and of course the French.
Hence, a lot of my friends are deeply materialistic, and only care for pleasure in this life, and I find that quite acceptable, so long as they never get any money to splash around.
What makes darkness visible? Mental imagery appears in the darkness, but is fundamentally of the darkness. It articulates the night, colouring it in its own raiment, characterised by soft light, and permeated by fog and steam. There is an opiate, somnambulist comfort to these dark dreams, and no sense of humour to speak of.
That is why some of us are not afraid of the dark. For us, true terror is clear light, bright light, dazzling light. There is comedy, too, and it is almost too intense and vivid for comfort. I find this keyboard and this screen, and these hands, far more unnerving than any demonic archetype - and if that sounds strange to you, you had better take your comfort in the lesser terrors of the night.
You feel like you should apologise for your perplexity. Perhaps you should make a virtue of it. This is what a charismatic leader, the hypnotic centre of a social gathering, would do. But you remain everyone's inferior, unwilling to assert yourself, as if you could even find a self to assert. A little less insight would do you material good.
Why should I be moral?
As some of us get older and start appealing to generation gaps, or preface something with 'I'm an old fogey, I can't get today's music', we are inviting others to approve of a certain mental state of affable, comfortable, mildly pompous smuggery. We are asking you to help us settle down into a self-enclosed, cossetted, snuggly little world in which we can be king or queen. We are asking you to help us pretend that we will not die. We are asking for dignity and respect without really wishing to earn it. We want you to applaud our cognitive stasis and call it wisdom and taste.
In reality, though, unable to cope with the continous shock of change, we have fallen into a waking coma. We are now dreaming of the permanence of our youth and strength. We take our own childish music far too seriously, and fail to see seriousness in yours.
It is immense cowardice that allows me to persevere, lacking as I do the courage to give up.
As for the subject of culture overload: wean yourself off a taste for cleverness and for the compulsive signposting of trends, remove all polish from your purview, and lose interest in the sparkling, brittle world of industry gossip. You'll quickly discover there's less to enjoy than you may once have thought. You may look for years and find no-one of interest. But by all means get on with it and find these people.
Jane said, more or less, ‘Your normal mind is the hardest state in which to deal with not knowing what’s going to happen. But when you’re drunk, or out of it, it’s fine. It’s not a problem. That’s why so many musicians get intoxicated’.
After a couple of drinks though, you feel confident, relaxed, aware, even a little cocky, just right for rock and roll. It’s seductive, isn’t it?
R: I'm a true singer - I can't keep my mouth shut.
Release a record and you announce your own death. The reviews are your obituaries. The CD tray is the casket, the CD the body, the record launch the funeral and wake, the CD rack in the record shop the viewing of your corpse. We come to the record shop to pay our respects, give money as flowers, remembering you in our own way.
Listen to your releases. This person gave birth to you, and died in labour. You, too, will die giving birth.
Every artist should have an extravert and an introvert project. The extravert project, which is naturally collaborative, should lead the way into the public eye in a blaze of confidence and colour. The introvert project, which is always a silent, private meditation, should absorb the backlash, quelling, dissipating, and stilling the return wash, allowing the sand settle at the bottom, the bubbles to rise and disappear, and the weed to extend its eloquent slow motion gestures through the water between.
It's hard to make it in this world as a synaesthetic musician, with no real skills, just the ability to see music. Your musical choices become eccentric, because they are not musical - they are visual. You traverse genres looking for synaesthetes. If you write music, then you are writing for such a small bunch of these people. However, it's nice to see their faces light up.
Music should be seen, not heard.
Music is a twilight language, best understood in a state of manic lucid somnambulism.
Music is full of wounded souls, looking to each other for salvation, and of course none of us can help each other. A little sympathy.
Dark days... they are dissolved not by meditation, but by wine, women and song.
Does he have dark days, like me? If I had his talent, and the results, and yet the lack of success, would I kill myself? What is his secret?
I like a bruised optimism, don't you? Pessimism, when it is complete, removes all causes for concern. The result: bruised optimism. A bruised optimist has fondness for an unbruised optimist. The latter in all innocence thinks the former might just make a good disciple.
Alcohol: the spiritual anthopomorphicist.
He actually forgets the slights against him without even trying, the same way we forget phone numbers - and others call this his virtue. On the other hand, she will invent wrongdoings out of nowhere, grow them with her fury, and present them to you, in rancid triumph, at every opportunity.
Grace falls from heaven. You don't have to be religious to comprehend this.
The universe is a very odd place isn't it? And human beings are quite strange too. You yourself are quite strange. A freak.
Irony is not the problem. It's postmodernism: the multiplication of irony by cowardice.
Chit-chat, reminiscence, novels and diaries, catching up, telling anecdotes, exchanging pleasantries... to get rid of all this is to lose all your friends. On the other hand, you make a new friend.
Sentences do not refer. If there's anything tethering a sentence to a situation, I'd like to see it. Sentences do not refer, but they do direct. Sometimes.
Read for resonance, not reference.
It takes a lot of face to be that mediocre.
When you are constantly thinking 'I can't do this any more', and yet you continue to do it, it becomes clear that inner speech guides the body when there is silent assent from the latter, and only then.
A fertile garden smells of shit, blood and bone, and people hold their noses as they go past. Later on, they come back to admire the flowers. The causal relationship is lost on them.
Your persistence condemns you to a life of futile invention.
Pretending to be a genius is an international celebrity pastime, but it's really not a matter of wearing crazy clothes, engaging in expensive and complex projects, and generally acting like a shaman or a trickster. The few people I know who are geniuses are rather odd, friendly but socially maladroit and inclined to suddenly disappear on you. They stick to their thing and don't mix easily with the world, and, consequently, are quite small in the social order of things. Genius is not theirs, but resides in them for a while, or until they become famous, at which point it is very slowly sucked right out of them, a process which takes several years and which is irreversible.
When all potential courses of action clearly lead to disaster, thought is curtailed.
When you are a successful artist, you are busy all the time maintaining success, and, in your youth at least, there will be no such thing as fame and leisure together.
Finally, though, you reach old age. There you may enjoy, if you are no longer driven, a golden age of no more work. You simply accept artistic accolades for your past accomplishments, enjoying your few remaining years in the rich autumnal garden of your senescence.
This must be very pleasant, to cruise gently to one's grave in a glow of reminiscence, admiration, and perhaps, also, the gentle warm haze of a little mild senile dementia.
All music lyrics are fundamentally about the absence of a driver.
When you tell people there are no universal moral rules, they reply that you're offering a license for anarchy, murder and pillaging. You can tell what's really on their minds.
Anyone can dispense common sense wisdom. It's like a chef saying, 'We should use fresher ingredients, we should bake a nicer cake'.
I want to see a philosophy which doesn't provide you with a better way to be. Unfortunately, that philosophy can't be put into words without becoming prescriptive.
The smug fat body of mainstream white Anglo-Celtic mediocrity stretches itself comfortably across this fair nation, bellowing for more entertainment and more food, crushing the bodies of its cultural pups, who slowly and painfully asphyxiate.
Are there only non-moral reasons for conforming to a moral code? And if you have only non-moral reasons for being moral, is that truly a moral stance after all?
To be fated to be a lawyer is so unspeakably awful that the matter must never be broached, not even in a lawyer's own mind.
The more we permit in others, the more we permit in ourselves. A critic who understands this will be unsufferable to other critics, and had better just be an artist instead.
Reality rewards evil with little bits of paper.
The burden isn't knowing what you know. It's abandoning it to be with people who don't.
People worship fictional beings all the time. No-one worships sanity.
The ground is only sporadically interested in details.
Choose a miniscule range of musical possibilities and stick to them with the stolidity of a Flemish weaver. You will forge a whole new genre.
People are always asking how they should be moral, but seldom why they should be moral.
Poverty is the only austerity an artist requires.
Just as not everyone who claims to be virtuous really is virtuous, not everyone who claims to be satanic really is satanic - even if they want to be.
Eugenicists typically don’t understand that, as a rule of thumb, the survival of a species is enhanced by multiplying mutations, not by reducing them. Every dog breeder knows this. But the eugenicists don't: they are sufficiently dull witted to qualify as candidates for their own extermination campaigns.
No, I don't want to learn any more exercises. Enough with exercises. But, the alternatives are exiguous, to say the least, when you scour the shelves.
Didacticism is exegesis.
Explain at your peril.
There's much to be said for leaving the gods to their business.
Evil is fathomless and multi-tiered. How do you know you are going to hell? You will hear strange birdsong; your surroundings will become increasingly ornate and antique; there will be more and more servants.
The sane do not reject delusion but indulge it for fun, so as to make life more interesting. Life is pretty boring if you keep in mind the true nature of existence. On the other hand, sanity is the capacity to dynamically switch between delusion and awareness. Delusion is sought when things are getting boring; awareness is sought when things are getting painful or overheated. Temperatures are lowered primarily by graciously acknowledging the partiality of the viewpoint you have hitherto been pursuing.
When you are sane, admitting fault in everyday life is just the same as admitting fault in a dream. I notice that people who are slow to take offense or pass the buck rapidly acquire power and influence over others. This is called improving the mood in dream world and rising naturally to great influence in La La Land.
The difference between an artist and a con artist is that the latter will not try to con his friends.
Human beings do not have cognitions; cognitions have human beings.
Everyone owns popular music: it's an international treasure. As a result, everyone is an expert. They know what makes a good song. If there's something missing, they know that too. They may not be able to put their finger on it; however, if it's lacking, they can hear the lack.
When you get something off the ground and running, anyone who feels safe to express an opinion in your company will do so. If what you are doing is in some way not mediocre, if it is untried, or exemplary of a new aesthetic, and if they are not themselves talented musicians, they will tell you so, often at length - for they, and not you, are the experts, the listening public.
As to the most effective strategy for dealing with the volley of expert opinions to which you will be exposed, I wish to offer a few general rules of thumb. Listen, argue if you like, but do not take it to heart. Stick to your guns and carry on.
If your music is in some way unprecedented, to that extent the average listener will say it is cold, flat, empty, or contrived. These are projective descriptions unconsciously illustrating the fact that the listener does not feel automatically welcome in your musical world. If the listener finds the music cold rather than warm, it is a sure sign that you are innovating. Your music will warm up when the listeners warm up. Then the same music will be deemed classic - and, in virtue of being classic, it will also be history, by which stage, I hope, you will have moved on to something colder.
She tests them out with nonsense. If they laugh along, she moves closer.
Those who go into battle with regretful resolution nearly always defeat me. I prefer an angry, resentful opponent.
It's not so much that you have opinions: nor is it that you have too many. It is simply that you think your opinions are not partial. This fact alone has turned you into a deeply irritating person.
It's not philosophy or psychology per se that interests me so much as each person's unique delusional pattern.
When I listen to maudlin, lovelorn pop lyrics and assume they are the sentiments of the songwriter, they sound dull, superior, and self absorbed; but when I listen from the point of view that they are a message to the songwriter, from a better or wiser part of her nature, or as a message from the unconscious to the controlling ego, suddenly the lyric is deeply moving to me. This never changes.
I wanted to make my own paper, so I asked an expert: he had written a book.
'Paper', he told me, 'Is not longer the fine thing it once was. Modern paper can hardly be compared to the elegantly textured, pestle-pounded sheets used by the ancients'. He paused to see if any of his traditional rivals had overheard him. He was spoiling for the usual argument.
'I'm not so interested in which paper is the best and finest', I told him. 'I just would like to know what paper is actual composed of, and how it is made'. He replied angily, 'Matters of taste cannot be separated from matters of composition!' And with that I sensed my interview was over.
Regarding the manufacture of my own paper, I was able to come up with something that did the job via a process of trial and error, reading, and asking around. As for questions of taste, I have never paid them much attention.
Stall them, stonewall them, then throw them into the hands of the experts.
Perhaps, in dealing with the narcissist, the best strategy is to roll over and play dead.
Sometimes you retract into a private and cold space, into which I cannot climb to join you. It is as if you are preparing me for your death.
He watches over his crueller impulses like a cat watching over her kittens. He knows them all.
He is burned hollow now and can see right through himself, as if he were made of layers of irridescent glass. When the winds are so disposed to move him, he is compelled to sing the praises of the cosmos like a hand puppet.
So you tell fairy stories, as it's the best you can do. You explain it to children, but they are grown, older than you. You do not have the nerve to patronise them, and anyway, they are comfortable with patronising you. Above all, you don't care that much one way or the other.
Fear is her litmus. When ghouls and goblins no longer terrify, there is one more way to frighten the bejesus out of a human being; and when that no longer works, the story ends.
Who can you tell your secret? You can't tell anyone. I don't envy you.
It's too easy for you, and that is the problem. You surpass us: we hate you.
From the sublime to the ridiculous they go, and back again... you think they are contradicting themselves? Then you're an idiot.
She is no fool, but if you are, she will do her utmost to make herself look foolish, in order to get rid of you.
You must become a statesman of your art. This is achieved by being ignored for approximately forty years. Then, you receive the ultimate accolade: you did not spit the dummy.
Genius is cack-handed.
Our voices our so innocent we dare not speak at all.
Some highly skilled and specialised people in the popular cultural industries have a lot of hubris. They are proud of the silliest things. On the other hand, if you're lucky like me, you've had the pleasure of working with technically skilled people who are also humble. How can you pick them? You do not forget their names, nor do you lose their phone numbers.
Say I want to be famous, have no particular aptitude for the arts, yet possess a moderately competent, dull-normal writing ability. I would write about popular culture, hoping to attact some attention.
The expression 'There is no time to waste' has two meanings.
Then again, there are many people I would like to accuse of wasting their time, but I have two problems. The first is that I don't seem to be able to form any conception of time that isn't self-contradictory. The second is that I do not understand where waste could go in this universe, such that it is no longer useful, somewhere, to some living thing.
He is not doing what I value, and I do not understand what he is doing: he is wasting his time.
There is no cure for happiness.
They show you their confidence, which is strong: but their confidence is constructed out of their own hardened shame.
Mirroring the shadow is done unconsciously, as the shadow is not conscious.
Metal techno doesn't exist yet, and we haven't done any, but it might be interesting to try to talk it into existence by pretending it's already here. This is called tactical reification.
The critic was dubious. ‘What is it?’
I said, ‘It’s a new mode of transport that owes a lot to the horse and cart. I call it a car.’
‘Hmmm,’ said the critic, and dubiously rubbed one of the tyres with his shoe. ‘Interesting.’ But he wasn't very interested, and was already looking over my shoulder for someone more important.
There was a pause, while he formulated his thoughts, and I listened to the birds. At last he said, with some irritation, 'But it just doesn’t quite have the feel of a horse-drawn carriage, does it? You can’t beat that good old clippety-clop feel, no matter how well you imitate it. Still, nice try', he lied, and shook my hand. And very quickly, he was gone, as he had seen someone famous who had set up a stall across the road with free drinks and cheese.
Avoiding mass spectacles, going down the side alleys, hoping to catch some precious little event, a private performance just for her.
You describe them in music, and a few months later they walk into your life. Be careful.
Hell is heaven tipping over, and heaven is hell dispersing.
Writers are liars. They fantasize, confabulate, and connive. When you question them, they fly into a rage, knowing they have been found out, unable to accept themselves.
To communicate with the utmost clarity, saying exactly what you mean, so that nothing is in the shade; this is unforgivable.
If they say they are nihilists, this commitment alone proves they are not.
This idea that you exercise creativity solely through what you consume is a corporate invention with obvious utility. Though it is a way of keeping the general public in its place, it may be also one of the key reasons a previously vibrant scene eventually falls stagnant.
Scenes in music are electric when there's a palpable sense that everyone can do it - and that sense is also a reality: everyone is doing it! You look around - my God, your useless mates who can't even microwave their dinner are suddenly cranking out tracks and releasing them around the world! This other friend of yours has started a label or a clothing store, your partner has got the Singer out and is running up crazy looking dress designs and selling them at the local record shop, and getting orders in from all other the place; someone else is making a film or some videoclips, all on a shoestring, and they look great...
A scene eventually dies when money comes into the picture and the free-for-all is formalised by business and legal requirements into a more rigid structure consisting of two camps - the stars, who produce (or who take the role of the producer in the public eye), and the cattle, who consume. This arrangement is dissatisfying to both parties and cannot be maintained for more than a few years. In the end, it kills that particular scene by starving it of exterior inspiration; and the corpses which remain turn into a fertile mulch, providing base nutrition for the next scene.
The perspective that has the dissatisfied customer saying,'feed me something else' is not the one that is going to create a solution.
It's a tragedy that he has seen enough to know the emptiness of masks, but not enough to see the necessity of masks.
It's a circus without clowns, and so we emerge dazzled but none the wiser.
She creates and she listens back, but the creator and the listener are two different people. They exist in a partnership which is grounded in inevitability and a hands-in-the-dirt realism. It is not a contest, nor an uneasy truce any more. One brush with insanity is sufficient for a person to get the joke, if they have a sense of humour.
Our wishes for financial security, recognition, the opportunity to travel, and an exciting and fulfilling love life are sometimes met, sometimes not. If our wish was simply to be killed and brought back to life, we would never be disappointed.
We would rather say something less commonplace. Something wild and a little feverish, likely to cause a sensation. What we are afraid of is what happens after we've attracted idiots to the cause.
The creative impulse is apparently not target focused. Music, cooking, writing, talking, walking, it's all the same. However, within certain more or less contrived social constraints, the quickest route to expression is always favoured.
Upon realisation that your interest has waned, you may also wonder, 'is my life dead or am I tired of it?' This is a strikingly passive stance. There is no thought of getting involved, creating, or altering the process in any way. It is the consummatory attitude of a diner, who, unimpressed with the food, has no aspiration to go to the kitchen and get involved with the cooking.
It's not that time flies when you're having fun. It's that the illusion of time disappears when you don't have time to think about time.
It's there, but you can't see it. So you say nothing's there, and needlessly get into trouble. You should say, "There is something there, but I don't know what it is". It's so simple.
It hasn't happened yet, and they are to blame. Maybe I should be getting on their collective cases. Or maybe they and I are being separated from each other by natural causes, in which case meeting them at all would be an attempt to swim upstream into my past, away from an unknown future.
He has yet to encounter a problem that cannot be solved by inaction, silence, effortlessness, or some artful combination of the three. However, he sometimes finds it sorts things out more quickly to pretend there's some point of issue. Sometimes it even helps for him to pretend to be angry. People think he's taking them seriously, which of course he is, in a way.
They counter her honest but unexplored perspective by sharing an irrelevant joke at her expense. She counters by becoming even more irrelevant, and irreverent, than they are. They have no answer to that trick, which is completely unexpected. They depended upon her embarrassing herself through a sincere and passionate defence, thereby strengthening their group solidarity and marking her as a permanent outsider - it has worked a thousand times before. But she seems uninterested in defending anything, and has apparently forgotten the point of dispute altogether: they are nonplussed. She has not won, but neither has she lost. Characteristically, her technique and the result she seeks via the technique are somehow identical.
I suppose she allows herself to be wounded in order to write with the blood.
One can lay open the situation to others, then hold out a net to catch the return volley. Out the stones, brickbats, grapeshot and shrapnel something can be made.
Revealing aperspectival vision to a body of writers in any field is like teasing a pack of dogs with a stick.
Just as you must kill an animal before you can eat it, you must give new music a name before you can make money out of it.
You do not feel disposed to argue; therefore the boundaries become permeable and you may travel.
Artists do not see movements and genres come and go. They change shape with the changing of shape.
If you are an artist, and you believe that art consists of a succession of movements, that belief alone will turn you into a critic.
"That's another reason I want to be famous", she said, "so I can be in a celebrity car race."
So they revel in cracking and scratching the surface, looking for whatever might be underneath. If there is something there, they are rewarded. If there is nothing, they are accused of vandalism.
One year a beautiful little blue flower grew, but was soon cast into the shade by a large dung heap. “Well”, thought the little flower, “It’s better to be beautiful and ignored than ugly and noticed”. But, on further reflection, she began to realise that what she really wanted was revenge.
Of all the perceptive people on earth, none are more perceptive than those who compliment us on our personalities.
One group fills in the gaps, while another opens the gaps. The latter are afraid to stare too hard, and this preserves them. They feel contempt for the former group, and their contempt is returned with indifference.
We are masks for each other.
Alcohol is a fuel for absurdity.
I had fallen into conversation at the market with him after he had talked and some vegetarian food had been served. I greeted him rather awkwardly with my hands together at my lips, bowing slightly. "No, not like that, but like this, at the heart", he said, lowering my hands to my chest. "It is much more effective that way. Did you hear my talk?" "Only from about ten minutes from before the food was served", I replied. "Ah!", he said, "You heard it all!" Although he looked as if he were Hindu and was Indian, with a silky black beard which I spontaneously began to stroke as he held my hands, we were talking about Buddhism, or more properly, the nature of Buddhahood, the enlightened state. He must have been speaking about the difference between the two, as I was encouraged to say, unconsciously imitating his speech cadences, "Even a person who openly rejects Buddhism, or who has never heard of it, can not be rejected as necessarily not a..." but my speech faltered, as I had constructed my sentence with too many double negatives, and at any rate, he must have already grasped the intended meaning, because he whisked me over to a group of ten nuns on the border, sitting in two rows, and gestured to them, saying, "Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?". Then he immediately drew me over to a stall next to the nuns, where educational text books, many copies of the one book, were displayed protruding from the carboard boxes in which they had been packed. He gave me one. It was a thick, soft, colour compendium of recommended toys for children. The page fell open at a chapter on mechano, including diagrams of a mechano aircraft. However, the writing was too small to read, and I was already waking up.
When there is nothing exterior to which it can direct attention, inner speech begins to direct attention to itself, creating inner dialogue.
It is dark, dark, dark in this world that spewed out of his fingertips. There is gallows humour. I haven't read one good review for this record. Whenever I listen to it I hear demons dancing inside a mind of stony indifference. He must have mastered the art of controlling demons by exiting from the building.
"Observe how I move from the abstract to the particular!", she announced, not unselfconscious in her appreciation of her own beauty.
"How do you do it?" I asked, because I did not have her faculty with words and simply wanted to get to the point, perhaps for my own advantage.
"I do it by finesse", she replied, and the answer was rather deflating for me, because she had not revealed any secrets.
"What is the nature of your finesse?" I asked, because I was aware she was playing a game, teasing me into asking more questions.
"My finesse", she declared proudly, and at that moment she seemed to me like Joan of Arc, holding a shield, ascended to mythology, "my finesse lies only in my capacity to confound by solving".
The sound began as a howl, which before too long splayed out into the horizon as great, long tendrils of thought. Warmed and fattened by the sun, it became poetry. Soon the elegant sentences became joyfully aware of their own importance, and began to blush, colour and fatten into eulogies, laments and prayers; each of which developed its own sprays and branches, bearing fruit that turned golden, hardened and became metallic, solid, smooth, unbreakable, unyielding, magnetic, attractive and repulsive, disputational in nature. The silver and golden cords began to overlap and overtake one another, tying knots, unravelling, pushing through, defining spaces, invading, twisting, rejecting, supporting, undermining. Finally they all locked together, and there was no more room to move. Then, because the force of the howl that began all this was unabated, the knots and coils began to heat, glow, vibrate, sizzle and liquefy until they sprang apart, molten and potentiated. Freed, they were propelled again, singing, humming, beating and so on as dictated by their shape, size, density and composition, forming dizzying sonic terraces like a swarm of insects, generating musical patterns, each of which folded under the mass of sound and was instantly superseded. Shooting up higher into the sky, they lost their density and began to dance, converging, dividing and exploding into astonishing shapes and textures and filligrees, mutating, revolving as brilliant atoms of violet, indigo, blue, green yellow and red, arching, resonating as electrical fields, far, far beyond language, in the realm of pure play, where philosophy ends, and music prevails.
Some people think a fool is someone who doesn't know some fact; or who is so open-hearted and trusting he doesn't know he is being ridiculed; or who doesn't know how to defend herself; or who subscribes to an unfashionable viewpoint.
A fool, though, is really someone who takes the moral highground.
The latter kind of fool not only deserves our ridicule; such ridicule is our social obligation. These fools steal the happiness and the lives of others. To ridicule her, though, is a fine art, and a profession, and a dangerous job, suitable only for those with great courage, subtlety and genius. Not everybody who is merely wise can lay claim to being a natural comedian. To kill a fool, you must be a fool - for the purposes of killing only.
They came here for a reason, or, at least, with a certain feeling of excitement, but when they had arrived, there was silence and inactivity, all of them having forgotten what the reason was - or perhaps the idea had flown, or had hidden like a fox, or maybe, some were already saying, there never had been any idea after all.
Some of them left at once in search of dinner and a show. Others raged and fulminated, unable to find the idea anywhere, and resorted to kicking things and storming out, loudly slamming doors behind them. Silence descended at once.
Only a few were left. They started to work, hardly knowing what they were doing, their confidence and pleasure growing as the thing began to take form.
Ethics are simple rules for those who are too thick to act morally.
Snakelike, he has squeezed himself through many changes over fifteen years to keep himself in the public eye. He is a pathological diplomat, a mystery to himself. Always, he names the right names, going no deeper than required, for he does not want to cause unease. As he brings forth the shibboleths and codes, his audience visibly relaxes. He is one of them, and will remain so, until their fortune wanes. One of them may hence discover him, miles away, in a new place, a new town, wearing new clothes, speaking a new language to a new coterie of endowed young princes, basking with great dignity in what they truly believe will be an eternal good fortune.
She is neither meretricious nor duplicitous, but she reminds me of a writer, in that when she says ‘he’, she may mean ‘me’, ‘she’, ‘you’, ‘they’ or even ‘it’. She seems to use these terms interchangeably, or perhaps for their poetry, as the mood takes her, ratcheting up from her personal experience - if they are grounded there, because it is hard to say – to the general, the abstract, and the performative. Moreover, it is clear that the view she describes may not be hers. However, it is equally clear that she never lies.
Her indecision is so charming and irresistible that we all play up on it, encourage it, and ultimately reinforce it. We're not doing her any favours.
This country is a good breeding ground for talent, because it is hostile to talent. What survives here, survives there.
The first friend you meet when you enter the creative world is boredom. He wants to share some quality time with you.
If they live in Melbourne, and you live in Brisbane, they say you are Japanese, because you're closer to Tokyo than anyone else they know.
By imagining their urges have lives outside of themselves, as exterior demons and so on, by attempting to contrive a distance between themselves and their instincts, they hope to sup with a longer spoon.
The occultist is a stolidly unrepentant romantic who has disowned and projected all his nasty urges.
She's a pseudo-intellectual, parading the breadth of her reading for its own sake.
Some of them notice every colour and name. Some of them can’t even remember their own name. Steeped in the liminal, they have forgotten how to excogitate, and move through the world like solid ghosts, living in the still space just behind intent.
When things get nightmarish, the nightmare itself may be sufficient to wake you up. When things get too dull, you may drift asleep again. Perhaps we cannot dream properly unless we are thoroughly deluded.
When dealing with humourless people who only want to get ahead at your expense, intimidate them by being extremely, unforgivingly precise and clear.
Eventually, I came to see no value in a permanent state of wakefulness. It was spoiling my fun. So now I prefer to dream on oblivious, though I still wake up from time to time, disturbed from my slumber by the indigestion of insight.
Many musicians prefer dull, mechanical jobs even if they take up most of the working week. The reason is that if the job is sufficiently dull, the brain begins to hum a little tune.
The creation of the discipline of psychology depended on thought becoming an insomniac.
Studying the mind is like making a fist out of thought.
His web diary is full of lamentations about the purposeless of his life. Sometimes he talks knowledgeably about this or that cultural artifact or tradition. Sometimes he pines for a purpose, a task, or a life's work he feels sure must be waiting for him at some time in the future. His yearning is so intense it becomes a prayer which keens into the ether, unrecorded by any angel or master being.
I think that the web diary itself is his masterpiece. Although I want to tell him, I prefer it that he doesn't know, or maybe I'm afraid he already knows it. If the former, why make him self-conscious? If the latter, why show a magician the mechanics behind his own trick?
They are agamic, much the same as they were ten years ago. Hard as nails in the beginning, they had nowhere to go but tighter, harder, faster and more complicated. They were surprising at first, but now they never surprise anyone. That is why, in spite of feigning outsider status, they appeal only to the ossified in mind and spirit, the mentally prematurely aged, the subliminally fearful, the ones who do not want to be surprised any more.
The moon is desolate. If you were to be king of the moon, you would have total power over a dead world.
Nevertheless, there are those who aspire to be king of the moon. Vanquishing their enemies, they compete for the honour of ruling over a barren wasteland.
You work between two poles, at the exact point at which there is no gravitational pull to either extreme. People shout from each pole, saying, 'What are you doing? Come to my end, where everything has already been worked out.'
You catch yourself knowing too much, and think, 'that can only lead to trouble'.
Your choices becomes less governed by taste, and more situational, more instrumental. Music, in particular, is a powerful thing. It is an active ingredient. You add the appropriate music at the appropriate time, without holding any of it close to your heart.
Persuasion is completely beside the point. Even those who say they understand usually don't - especially those who say they understand.
Religion is a cavalcade of con artists and their dupes.
Authoritarianism: the authority dispenses what she believes is wisdom, and expects only devotion in return. Thoughts or views not emanating from, or reflecting, the her views are not permitted to flow back up the tree. The authoritarian is fueled only by unconditional love.
When you meet someone like this on the net, you can make your excuses and leave. They will not follow you as you are of no use.
I don't think that much of value to anyone can be achieved by posing yourself, and looking at your own life as others would. I think you have to work from the inside out. You examine, develop and refine your materials and your methods, not your self-image. The reason is that you wish to avoid becoming a trope or a type. There must always be surprise and change, or the result is not true. Truth in life is not in accurate representation, but in the implicit acknowledgement of change.
Some people think that being an artist is a matter of showing us their lives. "Look, here I am having sex, here I am taking a dump - I'm an artist!"
On the other hand, there is an art to both these activities.
History alters to accommodate the hypocrite.
Being a pyromaniac, I launch outrageous propositions for the pleasure of watching them burn.
When considering creative partners, it can be helpful to distinguish, not between egotists and non-egotists, but between those who are willing to keep going and those who are determined to stay put.
The greatest curse is not to know how to sell out.
Following the dictum, 'the mistake is the hidden intention', seize upon your weaknesses and explore their permutations relentlessly, to the exclusion of all else, loudly and firmly proclaiming your genius.
Any pyromaniac with real ambition is going to move into explosives sooner or later.
If you want to live in the modern world without coffee, sugar, and alcohol, well, good luck pal. One day without at least one representative of the unholy trinity is sufficient to bring forth the realisation that we are all mad.
Avoid befriending authors, less you become immortal.
No-one is more debauched than an idealist.
Just because it's obvious, doesn't mean it's not worth saying over and over.
Is the player piano roll digital or analogue?
Those who make toys have no use for them.
Edit down to the bones; or, if you wish to attract leeches, flesh everything out.
Overplaying the diplomat persona, you show yourself to be untrustworthy to everyone. Underplaying the same persona, you show the world that you cannot see a situation from any other angle but your own.
This it is done as method acting. It is interpersonal systems analysis, applied and embodied as behaviour. It is also a form of shapeshifting, if you are comfortable with that word.
I think I enjoyed reading Weininger for the same reason I enjoy a cheesy horror movie - grotesquery is horribly fascinating. Weininger is really a gothic writer: he combines the commonplace, and the keenly observed, with the bizarre and the incredible. Everything is lashed forcibly together with hooks and wires that dig into the skin. He constructs monsters that almost walk.
Abstraction is the most effective form of revenge.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that there is a laughing competition, and on the board to judge this competition are the cream of our cultural laughing stock. Respected and envied by their peers, they loom large on the face of joke culture, and have been laughing all their lives. They know talent when they hear it.
Sorting though the hopefuls, they select carefully, on the basis of learned discussion, argument, and who they know. One by one the young jokers perform for the judges; one by one they meet their fate: joy or tears.
The technique behind laughter is well understood by the judges. Then, also, each has his or her speciality: the guffaw, the sneer, the chuckle, the giggle, the heehaw. Where appropriate, they defer to each other on matters of specialist expertise: such matters as tuning, rhythm, melodic progression, intonation, dynamic range and so on are understood to be at the heart of a good laugh. The technique of many of the contestants is razor sharp, prodigious, precocious. The most skilled jokers effortlessly traverse 1/32 and 1/64 notes. They employ pleasing portamentos and vibratos; they invest strong and moving emotional touches to their phrasing, to create an agreeable complexity; and they make pretty melodies.
Where technique is lacking, this is pointed out; where it is present, the judges are effusive and encouraging.
If it should happen that the judges encounter genuine laughter, they are embarassed - for themselves, or for the performer, they are not sufficiently awake to tell. The technique of such a one is frequently lacking, for she is not thinking of perfecting technique. Rather, she laughs because she is amused. The judges may even laugh back, -a different kind of laugh - a laugh of ridicule betraying, possibly, a subterranean fear of humiliation. Perhaps they feel, around the borders of their tunnel consciousness, that they might have been exposed, made fun of. Do they sneer at the performer? Or is the homunculus who sails imperiously over the surface of their waters, the one who is playing master, sneering at the depths? Even a puppet master can, for his own amusement or the amusement of others, have the puppet ridicule the puppet master’s technique. As for the genuine laughter artist, there are no glittering prizes for her. However, she is not too dismayed. It is a comedy.
One can be non-mediocre, brilliant even, but still a fool. Conversely, one can be an ordinary person with no particular aspirations over and above doing a simple job well, and become wise. I've known a few up-themselves people in my time - but not recently. I evicted all fools, mediocre or talented, from my life almost a decade ago. I still encounter them occasionally of course. I treat these bores with the utmost civility.
She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But I do. Why should we feel contempt for the mediocre, I ask her? It’s bad manners to despise someone for lacking good looks, or money, or education - so why not talent, insight, or wisdom as well? The foolish man knows in his bones he lacks all three, that his security is highly specialised and dependent on ready public access to certain facts, facts he has at his disposal and will not share unless forced to do so. But he feels the lack of something overarching, and is angry in an ill-defined, restless way. He will pick on you, because you are torturing him. He senses your freedom, you are not dragging chains of quite the same weight, nor moving through such dense air.
But, she says, you suffer a fool to make foolish decisions on your behalf. And I think, you know, maybe she’s right not to suffer fools gladly. My life may have been different if I had been less patient with fools.
And I think about it further, and realise, well, if you become exasperated with a fool, the fool is using you up. To treat the foolish with respect must involve something else, something skillful and self-protective, some kind of nuance or subtlety that saves energy so one can concentrate on one's larger purpose or interest without unnecessary distraction.
Here's what I think it means to suffer fools gladly. One keeps one's distance and does not rouse the nest. One's manners remain impeccable. One excuses the fool from one's life, and with great decorum and ceremony, shows her out of the house. Isn't this how an experienced bouncer removes a drunk from a club? When we see a bouncer gently, and with great respect, leading a troublemaker from the room, it's as if he's showing the fool to his limousine. His expression remains courteous and detached, and he neither tugs nor pushes. He takes his time and never embarasses his guest. He is the very model of good etiquette. This is what it means to suffer a fool gladly.
Now, this woman I know does not suffer fools, and rarely evicts one with much grace. She likes to give them a kick in the behind as they leave, even. But then again, I rarely evict a fool at all until the damage is done. She is missing the mark, but so am I. Dealing patiently with a fool is not simply a matter of patiently putting up with him as he messes up your program. Rather, it is an elaborately polite ceremony of respectful eviction of the fool from the domains of one's life in which his aggressive promulgation of his own agenda or skill at any cost to you is neither required nor welcomed.
There’s that bird again, the one that always sings at this hour, the one you only ever hear when you’re aware in the early morning hours. It is a cool, smooth, damp, eerily dipping sound, irresistibly tied in your imagination to this hour and this place.
So when the situation starts to unfold rapidly, you also unfold rapidly - no effort required.
Many of us read blogs backwards through time, delving further and further back into the archives. I don't know if this is an unusual practice. Blog reading becomes archaelogical when one reads back from the present to the past. Running themes appear out of the blue. It's disorienting but you get used to it: mysteries appear, and then are resolved, as you read further and further back and get a retrospective handle on the causation. You uncover the conditions of change in the writer's life much as you do in real life: first you see the face of a stranger, then, as you come to know them, you begin to understand why their faces are lined and scarred.
You become a famous psychoanalyst, an explosives expert, or a world authority on the I Ching. You have all this knowledge, and ultimately this is all you learn. Every skill you acquire leads you back to the kernel. This is why, even though neither of us know anything much about botany, or particle physics, or pottery, or cordon bleu cooking, we have enough in common with you to spend a pleasant evening together talking about what matters most. Drifting away from our institutes of learning, we become curious about this: the way that a self-possessed individual finally finds a wellspring of courage and strays from the path.
What’s the difference between an artist and a critic? There are a thousand answers to this question, some with more merit than others. However if we compress out minds into the shape of a professional critic’s mind, several things immediately become apparent on introspection. One, we are in the theoretical domain of a battle of wills. Two, we have strategies at our disposal to defend, attack, advance, retreat, observe and unify. All this is done through thought and linguistic concepts. The critic’s eye is acute and peers through holes in the battlements, or scans from a hill or the sky like a general.
Now, when we relax our mind to think like a true artist (false artists are much more common of course; they are people who profess to be artists but actually the ground troops paid by critics in fame and money to fight their wars), we see lines of battle which may be freely traversed. The critics appear to be at war over scarce resources. There is territory to defend, territory to scorch, territory to overwhelm. True artists feel like scavengers, moving freely where they choose, dodging the draft. Occasionally they may bump into a critic who will wonder what they are doing getting in the way. Happily, no critic fires at a true artist, because, in the game of battlefield strategy, they are neither much of an asset nor much of a liability. Such an artist is little better than a rather irritating presence, like a bird looping across the field of a dramatic struggle for survival played out between lions and hyenas. The true artist is free to go about her business without attracting undue attention; and her business is to roam free, investigating interesting situations.
I think it's necessary, really, for the weirdo to come out of the closet and not be a shrinking violet about his or her strangeness - even if such strangeness is only sporadic rather than chronic. There seems to be no doubt that many people love and treasure harmless but interesting weirdos. I know I certainly do.
Never apologise for being a weirdo. Many of my friends are quite eccentric, and I would be horrified if any one of them became apologetic about their uniqueness. I would rather normal people apologised for not being weird enough.
As for people laying strangeness trips on us for our weird behaviour the question becomes this: how do we protect ouselves from losing confidence in such a situation?
I would like to know your answers to this very important question, as every weirdo could use the tools and techniques to avoid being undermined simply for not following minor social rules. I think the answer has to do with systematically ridding yourself of all forms of self-monitoring. Self monitoring is the process by which one says 'what am I doing?', 'is this appropriate?', 'did I just come over as an idiot?' and so on. That inner voice might be attenuated, or even disappear completely - making one that most envied of souls, the completely unselfconscious weirdo.
It's been said here and there that creativity is aligned with mental illness. The evidence cited is usually correlative, which is to say, there is plenty of evidence that mental illness is more prevalent in the artistic community than in the general community (incidentally, what a Victorian curio is that phrase, ‘mental illness’ – a sickness in the mind).
Correlations... they are the very devil. They invite us to draw causal relations where none have been established. Poverty is higher in the artistic community than the general community too? Are we going to conclude that poverty is congenial to art? Are you an artist? Do you find it really helps not to be able to afford to repair your equipment, buy your paints and canvas, pay the rent? Do you get the album finished more quickly because you break a guitar string and can’t afford to replace it? Because you can’t afford a studio, a rehearsal room, a CD burner to run off demos? Or does it hinder your creativity? It's the latter, isn't it? Poverty and being creative are correlated, they go hand-in-hand, but the former does not cause the latter. Maybe being creative causes poverty though! However, even though this seems more plausible, the correlation itself is no evidence. We can’t conclude anything causal from a correlation.
‘Oh, but poverty makes you resourceful’. No it doesn’t. Being aware of resources make you resourceful. Poverty just limits your resources. A good thing? How is that a good thing? It's an imposition to have limited resources: an imposition which we accept and work around, because we have no choice.
Insanity might be the demon that destroys creativity. It might just be the searing delusion of personal grandeur, resplendant in hallucinatory visions of self-reference and destiny, with all the attendant paranoia, that undoes an artist. Now, that might be worth considering.
Plenty of great art has been made by people who went through periods of mental instability. However, we are not entitled to assume that what we admire in the likes of Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson, Brian Wilson and others was created from their insanity. It seems more plausible that it was created from their sanity, since their productive years were also their sane years. When they lost their sanity, they were unable to create comprehensible art.
'Oh, but they were really, really inspired on the run-up to the full-blown psychosis'. Isn't that tantamount to saying they were at their most creative when they were sane yet full of energy? Is that conclusion too obvious and commonsensical to be exciting to our romantic sensibilities? Or would we be equally comfortable saying that the acceleration of a car is caused by the crash that results from accelerating too much? The form of the argument which claims that insanity assists with creativity is the same, and equally absurd.
Sanity is definitely underrated, as it does not fit in with our rather romantic artistic schema. However, if an artist can give to his or her audience a dose of genuine sanity, what more is required?
Barrow's paradox holds wherever some piece of advice cannot be given without the giver of the advice contradicting herself. For example, 'human beings should never follow general principles of behaviour' falls prey to Barrow's paradox. Such statements may well be true: however, to make them is always self-contradictory. So, to avoid Barrow's paradox, one should lead by example, rather than by giving advice. And I see I am now falling prey to Barrow's paradox myself.
A special case of Barrow's paradox very relevant to web discussion groups is the principle that some disputes are best resolved by not getting involved - and yet, one cannot point this out to the disputants without getting involved. The canonical example is the response of list members to a troll in the forum. The troller gets various members' backs up; they react by naming the poster as a troll and an attention-seeker; and, before too long, the temperature rises to flaming point, people firing off all kinds of posts which they may later regret. Now, the best way to deal with a troller is to disregard the post. Eventually the trolling will extinguish due to lack of positive reinforcement.
What's reinforcing about becoming notorious, and why does a troller seek negative or hostile attention? Perhaps it's just that having negative attention is more reinforcing than having no attention at all. If this were true, then negative attention, up to a point at least, would be preferable to being shunned by all and sundry. This is the troller's predicament. No-one likes him. Everybody hates him. He has no friends. He has little experience with positive attention and praise. What's a lonely guy to do? Stir up some trouble! Off he goes! In fairness, haven't we all felt the thrill of notoriety from time to time? Isn't it just a little bit of a rush to have complete strangers arguing with each other about you, even if much of it's negative stuff? Does Marilyn Manson get a kick out of being blacklisted by fundamentalist Christian groups? Does he seek to provoke them? Do you cheer him on? We can relate to the troller, I think.
So, when dealing with the persistent troll (who should be distinguished from the penitent troll) it's understood that the way to get rid of a troll is to let his incendiary posts fall by the wayside. However, not everyone on a typical forum understands this principle to the extent of allowing it to guide their behaviour. Those who post to the effect that 'this is a sad person, ignore him' are just feeding the troll! Those who post to the thread saying, 'let's let this thread die' are keeping the thread alive! How to teach someone to allow a disputation to pass unstoked, without contributing to the stoking? There is no way. Those who understand the troll dynamic post nothing, and thereby demonstrate their understanding. Those who try to contribute to an understanding of the troll dynamic by posting advice thereby demonstrate their failure to understand it. I'm not the first person to point this out. But I am the first person to realise that, in so doing, I am falling prey to Barrow's paradox.
There's also the obvious point to be made that the most complex machine in a modern studio is a human brain. However, many electronic artists seem to use their gear as prosthetic devices, or brain-substitutes. It's as if they are afraid of themselves. Or, more accurately perhaps, the intellectual/planning part of their brain is afraid of their deep, instinctual brain. This affliction, too, is not limited to music or to the arts, but is a problem of life. I don't want to know who's using what piece of advanced gear or what new techniques are being developed, whether they're playing this or that piece of gear etc etc. I want to know what kind of person they are.
Almost all Kraftwerk's songs were about some kind of new fangled technological innovation or other. Do people really get very excited about technological innovation per se any more? I wonder if the very idea of Kraftwerk is a thing of the past. In about 500 years, Kraftwerk lyrics will be like Chan poetry, because the innovation factor will have evaporated entirely from everyone's perception of the lyrics. "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" will sound like "I carry water and chop wood". People will go, "wow, they found mystery in their commonplace, rustic daily activities."
Wandering off the beaten track, we are drawn, some of us, to abandoned follies. Abandoned websites by the million, some of them still with active chat lists, which echo occasionally with solitary voices: “Hello? Is anybody there?”
I love to fetch up in areas where a great deal of thought and time has been put into an operation, installation, or structure to no avail. I hesitate to speculate on my motives. What is driving this fascination with architectural failure? Schadenfreude? Identification? Or – and this is the motive I wish you to believe, because I am vain – is it that I recognise the essential beauty of futility, and its concordance with the predicament of the lonely universe? For God is alone, and divides Himself up to maintain the illusion of company. However, He is endlessly drawn back by that frisson of cosmic fear to His true nature: the Only Being, the Lonely Being. The Atheist.
Not just lonely enclosures; but also, lonely little things. A little orchid growing just behind my neighbour's back fence. A tape left in a cupboard from a decade ago which unconsciously records a conversation between several friends at a barbecue – because someone hit record when they should’ve hit play. I want to gather these things, and gather myself, collect my thoughts. It was here, but no-one came.
Bandwagon jumping skills are essential to musical survival, unless you want to play the equally valid but rather less exciting game of keeper of the flame and update records, gather unreleased material, correct other scholars, and generally camp it up as a stroppy but necessary figure in the dusty libraries of musical history.
The bandwagon jumper is a different fish. The adept bandwagon jumper rarely jumps from the ground; rather, she jumps, catlike, from one wagon to another. Some wagons move slowly; some move quickly. The swifter wagons are only jumped by the adept, the gymnastic, the highly courageous. Then, as well, there are many intellectual and planning factors to digest before one dares a jump: there is the speed of one’s own bandwagon; the moods, tempers and attitudes of the bandwagon to which you wish to jump (sometimes the groups is welcoming, sometimes hostile); and so on.
The adept jump on bandwagons that are only about a quarter full of very hard working artists playing the we-are-visionary game. They take over through the magnetic force of their personalities and their business sense.
Never jump on a bandwagon that is already full. There is no room for you unless you jump on top of their heads. They will get annoyed; they will probably kick you off. You may end up under the wheels, or rolled over by the next bandwagon that comes along. Also, a full bandwagon is uncomfortable for everyone aboard. There is so little room that no-one can move or do any work. They travel more slowly as they are heavier, and there is a risk that the wheel axles will break under the combined load. Everyone falls in a heap, and some are squashed. It is, as best, embarassing and undignified; and it is not always easy to catch a fast moving bandwagon from a standing position on the road.
So when is the best time to jump on a bandwagon? If, like us, you are not a charismatic, adept gymnast, but a slow moving, perplexed little tortoise, by far the best time to jump a wagon is when the genre it represents is beginning to smell. It is beginning to be uncool: so uncool that even the uncool people are jumping ship, even though this time last year they were sticky with it like Pooh in a honeypot! See the suckers run and jump!
You don’t need to be travelling at any great speed to jump a bandwagon like this: it’s already coming to a slow halt. Run up alongside it. Ease yourself on. Take a walk around, familiarise yourself. Pick up the bits and pieces people have left behind. Turn them over, examine them in the light. Scrub the decks until they no longer smell of money. Get to know the engine and the steering wheel; the sleeping quarters; the kitchen. It’s yours now. Take your little wagon wherever you like.
Astonishing, given the cadences of his prose, their gentle intensity, and his love of the human world, the quivering spirit in each of us, that he was never moved to write music. Then again, being able to fire that arrow directly to the heart with words alone, maybe he is in no need of that medium, since after all his prose is almost poetry, a music of words.
She must have a problem with pride, she thinks to herself, because she seems to be always meeting arrogant, talentless types from her past who are now doing a lot better than her. Or maybe they're being set up for a fall, and her lesson is simply to be patient and forebearing? She doesn't know, but really hates having her nose rubbed in it.
That great sigil, the Cosmos, really makes a mockery of the lesser sigil I will call 'my fate'.
He was a fine chef, and every night he would cook simple, unusual meals with fresh ingredients, but few people ever came, preferring the glossily rich prandium of the suavely urbane eatery across the road. So, every night he would cook, and every night he would eat his own food. ‘Even if no-one else wants my food, excellent though it is’, he would muse, ‘I have the benefit of enjoying it myself.’ And as he ate his own food every night, he became imbued with its benefits, and gradually became simple and unusual in himself.
Heaven itself is a haven for criminals
A man made a wish, and his world promptly fell apart. He thought to himself, 'This is the wish: it is making its presence felt'.
She said, "Institutional Christianity is the religion of flock conformity. Satanism is better, because it at least rejects the mediocrity of social approval. But there's something beyond both".
He said, "It's called nothingism."
She said, "Don't give it a name".
"Such vanity", muttered the Controller of Reputations, "to put his name about when he isn't even famous".
There were seven corridors, each one beholden in a kind of non-sentient trance to the one beneath. The shallowest level opened out to courtyards with gargoyles and fountains; further down they resembled office and hospital corridors, with no people present, until finally the lowest level was a road through a tunnel, with empty cars crashing, one after the other, in slow motion, forever: the sound was a kind of agony of buckling metal, brakes and glass, and was not without a certain horrific beauty.
It is an ingenious machine, a transforming engine, which turns the animus of another into adamantine, transparent light geometry.
'There's a lot of fascinating, delightfully entertaining people out there who really have nothing of substance to offer', L told me. 'They can be detected easily. The trick is that you simply appear to them as if you are not useful to them, yet do not wish to be their follower. You will be brushed off within a few seconds. On the other hand, there are others, far less numerous admittedly, who will instantly recognize you as a status-free person; not that they will do anything about it.'
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that is why he mixes with people who neither know nor care about such things. As for the experts, he is probably waiting for their knowledge to fragment, shatter, and fly away - but that is unlikely to happen, so why did it happen to him?
Despite his evident genius, he is prickly, and waspish, and therefore one is able to discern from these tendencies toward pomposity that he has further work to do, not that anyone need tell him.
It's miraculous to me that, when others are offensive to her, she is not offended. It may be that they cannot disinter any hate or fear, because she has none, which is, in itself, quite remarkable to me. Also remarkable is that no-one else seems to notice her extraordinary qualities in this regard; and that she does not care that they do not notice.
'Compassion fatigue' is of course an oxymoron. False compassion exists so people don't have to look at true compassion, which is rather more direct and brutal than many people can bear.
All art is a mediation on chanelling the large into the small. If we feel frustration in the morning when we review what we accomplished last night, it may be because we see that, in spite of our best efforts, it remains a fact that the large cannnot be channelled into the small. If the frustration melts into proud fatherhood over time, and we come to see the merits of our little work, it may be due to the realisation that the small already contains the large.
A child fantasizes about all kinds of things - marrying its opposite sex parent, sucking on the teat of the universe forever, making the cosmos bow down before its primal urges, smearing the cosmos with faeces, having mummy bring it whatever it wants when it cries, and other fantasies of omnipotence.
As we grow older, we learn to sublimate these very basic urges into blogs, music, and becoming a person of saocial worth. For example, instead of smearing faeces around, we publish a learned critique of someone's scientific theory - especially if they remind us of one of our parents. We still fantasise about omnipotence and the trailing of clouds of glory, but within a more socially acceptable framework.
Infantile wish fulfillment occurs where an adult actually does consummate one of these basic, id-driven, polymorpheously perverse fantasies. Many gurus are like this. They have been protected from the reality principle by their overindulgent mothers. They grow up and become big babies.
This is connected to the oceanic feeling in this way. The child experience bliss and unity with the cosmos in that whenever a need arises, the mother appears and satisfies it. Sucking on the Good Breast, the child feels warm, blissful and unified with the mother. Later, the Good Breast (or Good Mother) may be idealised as a feminine principle of universal bliss and compassion in which one can be absorbed, cossetted and protected. The feeling of bliss that results is intense and is felt as a profound religious enlightenment. All gurus have oceanic feelings of unity with the universe, which cannot be maintained without devotees. This is how society makes big babies.
Lack of insight has a protective function, and is the chief reason why so few journalists kill themselves.
What he is, he hates to see in others. Moreover, what other have that he does not have, he affects to despise, as he loathes competition. He will therefore associate only with people more powerful than him. What they do is no concern of his.
Anonymous writes:
Maybe I'm perverse, but the notion of a music or even artistic career, seems sillier to me the older I get. It just doesn't seem to be something a serious person would entertain.
She has said goodbye to paranoia, mental torment and the monotony of maintaining her historical borders. However, she has not become any easier to live with.
The conflicting opinions of others can put you in a spin. If you are pigheaded, however, you hold to your own counsel and steer your way through the storm, working with the wind and the waves, but only insofar as it conserves energy. You need one helmsman only.
Some happily lost souls will always wave to you from the horizon, as they go about their business, catching only the smaller fish.
Nothing is identical to anything else. There must be two situations in order for the identity comparison to be made. As soon as two situations can be defined, they differ in space.
As for the observation that all situations are self-identical, that is no more illuminating than saying, 'It is what it is'. Fortunately, that unilluminating statement turns out to be very illuminating if one really thinks about it.
"I am discerning your system, your approach to life, at last", he said. "I have become obsessed with a thought pattern", I thought.
The tide goes out, revealing rocks, grey coral pieces, shells, seaweed and dead bluebottles. Some of us supplicate before the receding tide, begging for its return. Others sink to their knees, cursing God, or Lady Luck, or the Fates. Many of us call meetings, gathering round, drawing up plans in the yellow sand, arguing heatedly. Few of us rest while we can.
The problem is not evil, or error, or destiny, but why the universe, on waking up, recoils in horror and amazement.
First as a child in the garden, then as the gardener, then as the one who watches the gardener and the child from a window upstairs, then finally as the garden growing unseen.
It won't be done until it can't be done.
There is no soul. This is the problem with the complaint that electronic music is soulless: a virtue is presented as a vice.
In the same way, those who lack the delusion that they have a soul are sometimes seen as uncanny or cold. However, the hot, theatrical vortex of narcissism that is called soulfulness is seldom appreciated for long by those who have to deal with it in an individual. On the other hand, a truly soulless person is always a pleasure to know and be with. But the pleasure is a cool one, easily overlooked.
So, also, it is easier to appreciate someone when we have no stake in their existence. That comes with time spent apart, too.
Of course, Jesus is the most famous recorded example of a Christ complex, but consider Socrates, a man with the most subtle of Christ complexes, and foiled only by his own ugliness, which instilled in him a kind of playful irony antithetical to the serious messianic task of leading lemmings off cliffs, but sufficiently elitist to ensure martyrdom at least.
By his peevish, self-righteous, and above all public response to a friend who asked him for a favour, I deduce he lacks both the humility and the strength of the thousandfold defeated. I can safely assume he has no balls.
Imagine, at an age when you were sufficiently young and uncompromising to think such things were fundamental to an authentic existence, that you struck an internal deal with yourself to sacrifice all commercial success, in exchange for prolonged joy in your muse, which, as per the terms of the deal, was to be a lifetime contract. Now you find myself wondering why you have very little money, yet, miraculously, always enough to continue to pursue your art. Then you must remind myself of your deal, struck long ago. The deal was for life, struck with all the radical romanticism of a teenager, and cannot be revoked. The child is master of the adult.
I avoid deeply spiritual people. The reason is that the substance of my own ephiphany, such as it was, was that there was no spirit. So extraordinary was this experience that I found I was unable to obtain comfort from spiritual people; I could only obtain it from people who had no spiritual beliefs at all, and who only cared about practical matters.
This includes people very busy with their jobs, young artists and other egotistical types, women who rely on their looks, middle aged men whose spirit has been crushed beyond repair and now only want to read and drink tea, ribald old bohemians who paint, sew or make dolls and like their wine and sunshine, Satanists and Buddhists too lazy to read their respective scriptures, let alone practise them, and of course the French.
Hence, a lot of my friends are deeply materialistic, and only care for pleasure in this life, and I find that quite acceptable, so long as they never get any money to splash around.
What makes darkness visible? Mental imagery appears in the darkness, but is fundamentally of the darkness. It articulates the night, colouring it in its own raiment, characterised by soft light, and permeated by fog and steam. There is an opiate, somnambulist comfort to these dark dreams, and no sense of humour to speak of.
That is why some of us are not afraid of the dark. For us, true terror is clear light, bright light, dazzling light. There is comedy, too, and it is almost too intense and vivid for comfort. I find this keyboard and this screen, and these hands, far more unnerving than any demonic archetype - and if that sounds strange to you, you had better take your comfort in the lesser terrors of the night.
You feel like you should apologise for your perplexity. Perhaps you should make a virtue of it. This is what a charismatic leader, the hypnotic centre of a social gathering, would do. But you remain everyone's inferior, unwilling to assert yourself, as if you could even find a self to assert. A little less insight would do you material good.
Why should I be moral?
As some of us get older and start appealing to generation gaps, or preface something with 'I'm an old fogey, I can't get today's music', we are inviting others to approve of a certain mental state of affable, comfortable, mildly pompous smuggery. We are asking you to help us settle down into a self-enclosed, cossetted, snuggly little world in which we can be king or queen. We are asking you to help us pretend that we will not die. We are asking for dignity and respect without really wishing to earn it. We want you to applaud our cognitive stasis and call it wisdom and taste.
In reality, though, unable to cope with the continous shock of change, we have fallen into a waking coma. We are now dreaming of the permanence of our youth and strength. We take our own childish music far too seriously, and fail to see seriousness in yours.
It is immense cowardice that allows me to persevere, lacking as I do the courage to give up.
As for the subject of culture overload: wean yourself off a taste for cleverness and for the compulsive signposting of trends, remove all polish from your purview, and lose interest in the sparkling, brittle world of industry gossip. You'll quickly discover there's less to enjoy than you may once have thought. You may look for years and find no-one of interest. But by all means get on with it and find these people.
Jane said, more or less, ‘Your normal mind is the hardest state in which to deal with not knowing what’s going to happen. But when you’re drunk, or out of it, it’s fine. It’s not a problem. That’s why so many musicians get intoxicated’.
After a couple of drinks though, you feel confident, relaxed, aware, even a little cocky, just right for rock and roll. It’s seductive, isn’t it?
R: I'm a true singer - I can't keep my mouth shut.
Release a record and you announce your own death. The reviews are your obituaries. The CD tray is the casket, the CD the body, the record launch the funeral and wake, the CD rack in the record shop the viewing of your corpse. We come to the record shop to pay our respects, give money as flowers, remembering you in our own way.
Listen to your releases. This person gave birth to you, and died in labour. You, too, will die giving birth.
Every artist should have an extravert and an introvert project. The extravert project, which is naturally collaborative, should lead the way into the public eye in a blaze of confidence and colour. The introvert project, which is always a silent, private meditation, should absorb the backlash, quelling, dissipating, and stilling the return wash, allowing the sand settle at the bottom, the bubbles to rise and disappear, and the weed to extend its eloquent slow motion gestures through the water between.
It's hard to make it in this world as a synaesthetic musician, with no real skills, just the ability to see music. Your musical choices become eccentric, because they are not musical - they are visual. You traverse genres looking for synaesthetes. If you write music, then you are writing for such a small bunch of these people. However, it's nice to see their faces light up.
Music should be seen, not heard.
Music is a twilight language, best understood in a state of manic lucid somnambulism.
Music is full of wounded souls, looking to each other for salvation, and of course none of us can help each other. A little sympathy.
Dark days... they are dissolved not by meditation, but by wine, women and song.
Does he have dark days, like me? If I had his talent, and the results, and yet the lack of success, would I kill myself? What is his secret?
I like a bruised optimism, don't you? Pessimism, when it is complete, removes all causes for concern. The result: bruised optimism. A bruised optimist has fondness for an unbruised optimist. The latter in all innocence thinks the former might just make a good disciple.
Alcohol: the spiritual anthopomorphicist.
He actually forgets the slights against him without even trying, the same way we forget phone numbers - and others call this his virtue. On the other hand, she will invent wrongdoings out of nowhere, grow them with her fury, and present them to you, in rancid triumph, at every opportunity.
Grace falls from heaven. You don't have to be religious to comprehend this.
The universe is a very odd place isn't it? And human beings are quite strange too. You yourself are quite strange. A freak.
Irony is not the problem. It's postmodernism: the multiplication of irony by cowardice.
Chit-chat, reminiscence, novels and diaries, catching up, telling anecdotes, exchanging pleasantries... to get rid of all this is to lose all your friends. On the other hand, you make a new friend.
Sentences do not refer. If there's anything tethering a sentence to a situation, I'd like to see it. Sentences do not refer, but they do direct. Sometimes.
Read for resonance, not reference.
It takes a lot of face to be that mediocre.
When you are constantly thinking 'I can't do this any more', and yet you continue to do it, it becomes clear that inner speech guides the body when there is silent assent from the latter, and only then.
A fertile garden smells of shit, blood and bone, and people hold their noses as they go past. Later on, they come back to admire the flowers. The causal relationship is lost on them.
Your persistence condemns you to a life of futile invention.
Pretending to be a genius is an international celebrity pastime, but it's really not a matter of wearing crazy clothes, engaging in expensive and complex projects, and generally acting like a shaman or a trickster. The few people I know who are geniuses are rather odd, friendly but socially maladroit and inclined to suddenly disappear on you. They stick to their thing and don't mix easily with the world, and, consequently, are quite small in the social order of things. Genius is not theirs, but resides in them for a while, or until they become famous, at which point it is very slowly sucked right out of them, a process which takes several years and which is irreversible.
When all potential courses of action clearly lead to disaster, thought is curtailed.
When you are a successful artist, you are busy all the time maintaining success, and, in your youth at least, there will be no such thing as fame and leisure together.
Finally, though, you reach old age. There you may enjoy, if you are no longer driven, a golden age of no more work. You simply accept artistic accolades for your past accomplishments, enjoying your few remaining years in the rich autumnal garden of your senescence.
This must be very pleasant, to cruise gently to one's grave in a glow of reminiscence, admiration, and perhaps, also, the gentle warm haze of a little mild senile dementia.
All music lyrics are fundamentally about the absence of a driver.
When you tell people there are no universal moral rules, they reply that you're offering a license for anarchy, murder and pillaging. You can tell what's really on their minds.
Anyone can dispense common sense wisdom. It's like a chef saying, 'We should use fresher ingredients, we should bake a nicer cake'.
I want to see a philosophy which doesn't provide you with a better way to be. Unfortunately, that philosophy can't be put into words without becoming prescriptive.
The smug fat body of mainstream white Anglo-Celtic mediocrity stretches itself comfortably across this fair nation, bellowing for more entertainment and more food, crushing the bodies of its cultural pups, who slowly and painfully asphyxiate.
Are there only non-moral reasons for conforming to a moral code? And if you have only non-moral reasons for being moral, is that truly a moral stance after all?
To be fated to be a lawyer is so unspeakably awful that the matter must never be broached, not even in a lawyer's own mind.
The more we permit in others, the more we permit in ourselves. A critic who understands this will be unsufferable to other critics, and had better just be an artist instead.
Reality rewards evil with little bits of paper.
The burden isn't knowing what you know. It's abandoning it to be with people who don't.
People worship fictional beings all the time. No-one worships sanity.
The ground is only sporadically interested in details.
Choose a miniscule range of musical possibilities and stick to them with the stolidity of a Flemish weaver. You will forge a whole new genre.
People are always asking how they should be moral, but seldom why they should be moral.
Poverty is the only austerity an artist requires.
Just as not everyone who claims to be virtuous really is virtuous, not everyone who claims to be satanic really is satanic - even if they want to be.
Eugenicists typically don’t understand that, as a rule of thumb, the survival of a species is enhanced by multiplying mutations, not by reducing them. Every dog breeder knows this. But the eugenicists don't: they are sufficiently dull witted to qualify as candidates for their own extermination campaigns.
No, I don't want to learn any more exercises. Enough with exercises. But, the alternatives are exiguous, to say the least, when you scour the shelves.
Didacticism is exegesis.
Explain at your peril.
There's much to be said for leaving the gods to their business.
Evil is fathomless and multi-tiered. How do you know you are going to hell? You will hear strange birdsong; your surroundings will become increasingly ornate and antique; there will be more and more servants.
The sane do not reject delusion but indulge it for fun, so as to make life more interesting. Life is pretty boring if you keep in mind the true nature of existence. On the other hand, sanity is the capacity to dynamically switch between delusion and awareness. Delusion is sought when things are getting boring; awareness is sought when things are getting painful or overheated. Temperatures are lowered primarily by graciously acknowledging the partiality of the viewpoint you have hitherto been pursuing.
When you are sane, admitting fault in everyday life is just the same as admitting fault in a dream. I notice that people who are slow to take offense or pass the buck rapidly acquire power and influence over others. This is called improving the mood in dream world and rising naturally to great influence in La La Land.
The difference between an artist and a con artist is that the latter will not try to con his friends.
Human beings do not have cognitions; cognitions have human beings.
Everyone owns popular music: it's an international treasure. As a result, everyone is an expert. They know what makes a good song. If there's something missing, they know that too. They may not be able to put their finger on it; however, if it's lacking, they can hear the lack.
When you get something off the ground and running, anyone who feels safe to express an opinion in your company will do so. If what you are doing is in some way not mediocre, if it is untried, or exemplary of a new aesthetic, and if they are not themselves talented musicians, they will tell you so, often at length - for they, and not you, are the experts, the listening public.
As to the most effective strategy for dealing with the volley of expert opinions to which you will be exposed, I wish to offer a few general rules of thumb. Listen, argue if you like, but do not take it to heart. Stick to your guns and carry on.
If your music is in some way unprecedented, to that extent the average listener will say it is cold, flat, empty, or contrived. These are projective descriptions unconsciously illustrating the fact that the listener does not feel automatically welcome in your musical world. If the listener finds the music cold rather than warm, it is a sure sign that you are innovating. Your music will warm up when the listeners warm up. Then the same music will be deemed classic - and, in virtue of being classic, it will also be history, by which stage, I hope, you will have moved on to something colder.
She tests them out with nonsense. If they laugh along, she moves closer.
Those who go into battle with regretful resolution nearly always defeat me. I prefer an angry, resentful opponent.
It's not so much that you have opinions: nor is it that you have too many. It is simply that you think your opinions are not partial. This fact alone has turned you into a deeply irritating person.
It's not philosophy or psychology per se that interests me so much as each person's unique delusional pattern.
When I listen to maudlin, lovelorn pop lyrics and assume they are the sentiments of the songwriter, they sound dull, superior, and self absorbed; but when I listen from the point of view that they are a message to the songwriter, from a better or wiser part of her nature, or as a message from the unconscious to the controlling ego, suddenly the lyric is deeply moving to me. This never changes.
I wanted to make my own paper, so I asked an expert: he had written a book.
'Paper', he told me, 'Is not longer the fine thing it once was. Modern paper can hardly be compared to the elegantly textured, pestle-pounded sheets used by the ancients'. He paused to see if any of his traditional rivals had overheard him. He was spoiling for the usual argument.
'I'm not so interested in which paper is the best and finest', I told him. 'I just would like to know what paper is actual composed of, and how it is made'. He replied angily, 'Matters of taste cannot be separated from matters of composition!' And with that I sensed my interview was over.
Regarding the manufacture of my own paper, I was able to come up with something that did the job via a process of trial and error, reading, and asking around. As for questions of taste, I have never paid them much attention.
Stall them, stonewall them, then throw them into the hands of the experts.
Perhaps, in dealing with the narcissist, the best strategy is to roll over and play dead.
Sometimes you retract into a private and cold space, into which I cannot climb to join you. It is as if you are preparing me for your death.
He watches over his crueller impulses like a cat watching over her kittens. He knows them all.
He is burned hollow now and can see right through himself, as if he were made of layers of irridescent glass. When the winds are so disposed to move him, he is compelled to sing the praises of the cosmos like a hand puppet.
So you tell fairy stories, as it's the best you can do. You explain it to children, but they are grown, older than you. You do not have the nerve to patronise them, and anyway, they are comfortable with patronising you. Above all, you don't care that much one way or the other.
Fear is her litmus. When ghouls and goblins no longer terrify, there is one more way to frighten the bejesus out of a human being; and when that no longer works, the story ends.
Who can you tell your secret? You can't tell anyone. I don't envy you.
It's too easy for you, and that is the problem. You surpass us: we hate you.
From the sublime to the ridiculous they go, and back again... you think they are contradicting themselves? Then you're an idiot.
She is no fool, but if you are, she will do her utmost to make herself look foolish, in order to get rid of you.
You must become a statesman of your art. This is achieved by being ignored for approximately forty years. Then, you receive the ultimate accolade: you did not spit the dummy.
Genius is cack-handed.
Our voices our so innocent we dare not speak at all.
Some highly skilled and specialised people in the popular cultural industries have a lot of hubris. They are proud of the silliest things. On the other hand, if you're lucky like me, you've had the pleasure of working with technically skilled people who are also humble. How can you pick them? You do not forget their names, nor do you lose their phone numbers.
Say I want to be famous, have no particular aptitude for the arts, yet possess a moderately competent, dull-normal writing ability. I would write about popular culture, hoping to attact some attention.
The expression 'There is no time to waste' has two meanings.
Then again, there are many people I would like to accuse of wasting their time, but I have two problems. The first is that I don't seem to be able to form any conception of time that isn't self-contradictory. The second is that I do not understand where waste could go in this universe, such that it is no longer useful, somewhere, to some living thing.
He is not doing what I value, and I do not understand what he is doing: he is wasting his time.
There is no cure for happiness.
They show you their confidence, which is strong: but their confidence is constructed out of their own hardened shame.
Mirroring the shadow is done unconsciously, as the shadow is not conscious.
Metal techno doesn't exist yet, and we haven't done any, but it might be interesting to try to talk it into existence by pretending it's already here. This is called tactical reification.
The critic was dubious. ‘What is it?’
I said, ‘It’s a new mode of transport that owes a lot to the horse and cart. I call it a car.’
‘Hmmm,’ said the critic, and dubiously rubbed one of the tyres with his shoe. ‘Interesting.’ But he wasn't very interested, and was already looking over my shoulder for someone more important.
There was a pause, while he formulated his thoughts, and I listened to the birds. At last he said, with some irritation, 'But it just doesn’t quite have the feel of a horse-drawn carriage, does it? You can’t beat that good old clippety-clop feel, no matter how well you imitate it. Still, nice try', he lied, and shook my hand. And very quickly, he was gone, as he had seen someone famous who had set up a stall across the road with free drinks and cheese.
Avoiding mass spectacles, going down the side alleys, hoping to catch some precious little event, a private performance just for her.
You describe them in music, and a few months later they walk into your life. Be careful.
Hell is heaven tipping over, and heaven is hell dispersing.
Writers are liars. They fantasize, confabulate, and connive. When you question them, they fly into a rage, knowing they have been found out, unable to accept themselves.
To communicate with the utmost clarity, saying exactly what you mean, so that nothing is in the shade; this is unforgivable.
If they say they are nihilists, this commitment alone proves they are not.
This idea that you exercise creativity solely through what you consume is a corporate invention with obvious utility. Though it is a way of keeping the general public in its place, it may be also one of the key reasons a previously vibrant scene eventually falls stagnant.
Scenes in music are electric when there's a palpable sense that everyone can do it - and that sense is also a reality: everyone is doing it! You look around - my God, your useless mates who can't even microwave their dinner are suddenly cranking out tracks and releasing them around the world! This other friend of yours has started a label or a clothing store, your partner has got the Singer out and is running up crazy looking dress designs and selling them at the local record shop, and getting orders in from all other the place; someone else is making a film or some videoclips, all on a shoestring, and they look great...
A scene eventually dies when money comes into the picture and the free-for-all is formalised by business and legal requirements into a more rigid structure consisting of two camps - the stars, who produce (or who take the role of the producer in the public eye), and the cattle, who consume. This arrangement is dissatisfying to both parties and cannot be maintained for more than a few years. In the end, it kills that particular scene by starving it of exterior inspiration; and the corpses which remain turn into a fertile mulch, providing base nutrition for the next scene.
The perspective that has the dissatisfied customer saying,'feed me something else' is not the one that is going to create a solution.
It's a tragedy that he has seen enough to know the emptiness of masks, but not enough to see the necessity of masks.
It's a circus without clowns, and so we emerge dazzled but none the wiser.
She creates and she listens back, but the creator and the listener are two different people. They exist in a partnership which is grounded in inevitability and a hands-in-the-dirt realism. It is not a contest, nor an uneasy truce any more. One brush with insanity is sufficient for a person to get the joke, if they have a sense of humour.
Our wishes for financial security, recognition, the opportunity to travel, and an exciting and fulfilling love life are sometimes met, sometimes not. If our wish was simply to be killed and brought back to life, we would never be disappointed.
We would rather say something less commonplace. Something wild and a little feverish, likely to cause a sensation. What we are afraid of is what happens after we've attracted idiots to the cause.
The creative impulse is apparently not target focused. Music, cooking, writing, talking, walking, it's all the same. However, within certain more or less contrived social constraints, the quickest route to expression is always favoured.
Upon realisation that your interest has waned, you may also wonder, 'is my life dead or am I tired of it?' This is a strikingly passive stance. There is no thought of getting involved, creating, or altering the process in any way. It is the consummatory attitude of a diner, who, unimpressed with the food, has no aspiration to go to the kitchen and get involved with the cooking.
It's not that time flies when you're having fun. It's that the illusion of time disappears when you don't have time to think about time.
It's there, but you can't see it. So you say nothing's there, and needlessly get into trouble. You should say, "There is something there, but I don't know what it is". It's so simple.
It hasn't happened yet, and they are to blame. Maybe I should be getting on their collective cases. Or maybe they and I are being separated from each other by natural causes, in which case meeting them at all would be an attempt to swim upstream into my past, away from an unknown future.
He has yet to encounter a problem that cannot be solved by inaction, silence, effortlessness, or some artful combination of the three. However, he sometimes finds it sorts things out more quickly to pretend there's some point of issue. Sometimes it even helps for him to pretend to be angry. People think he's taking them seriously, which of course he is, in a way.
They counter her honest but unexplored perspective by sharing an irrelevant joke at her expense. She counters by becoming even more irrelevant, and irreverent, than they are. They have no answer to that trick, which is completely unexpected. They depended upon her embarrassing herself through a sincere and passionate defence, thereby strengthening their group solidarity and marking her as a permanent outsider - it has worked a thousand times before. But she seems uninterested in defending anything, and has apparently forgotten the point of dispute altogether: they are nonplussed. She has not won, but neither has she lost. Characteristically, her technique and the result she seeks via the technique are somehow identical.
I suppose she allows herself to be wounded in order to write with the blood.
One can lay open the situation to others, then hold out a net to catch the return volley. Out the stones, brickbats, grapeshot and shrapnel something can be made.
Revealing aperspectival vision to a body of writers in any field is like teasing a pack of dogs with a stick.
Just as you must kill an animal before you can eat it, you must give new music a name before you can make money out of it.
You do not feel disposed to argue; therefore the boundaries become permeable and you may travel.
Artists do not see movements and genres come and go. They change shape with the changing of shape.
If you are an artist, and you believe that art consists of a succession of movements, that belief alone will turn you into a critic.
"That's another reason I want to be famous", she said, "so I can be in a celebrity car race."
So they revel in cracking and scratching the surface, looking for whatever might be underneath. If there is something there, they are rewarded. If there is nothing, they are accused of vandalism.
One year a beautiful little blue flower grew, but was soon cast into the shade by a large dung heap. “Well”, thought the little flower, “It’s better to be beautiful and ignored than ugly and noticed”. But, on further reflection, she began to realise that what she really wanted was revenge.
Of all the perceptive people on earth, none are more perceptive than those who compliment us on our personalities.
One group fills in the gaps, while another opens the gaps. The latter are afraid to stare too hard, and this preserves them. They feel contempt for the former group, and their contempt is returned with indifference.
We are masks for each other.
Alcohol is a fuel for absurdity.
I had fallen into conversation at the market with him after he had talked and some vegetarian food had been served. I greeted him rather awkwardly with my hands together at my lips, bowing slightly. "No, not like that, but like this, at the heart", he said, lowering my hands to my chest. "It is much more effective that way. Did you hear my talk?" "Only from about ten minutes from before the food was served", I replied. "Ah!", he said, "You heard it all!" Although he looked as if he were Hindu and was Indian, with a silky black beard which I spontaneously began to stroke as he held my hands, we were talking about Buddhism, or more properly, the nature of Buddhahood, the enlightened state. He must have been speaking about the difference between the two, as I was encouraged to say, unconsciously imitating his speech cadences, "Even a person who openly rejects Buddhism, or who has never heard of it, can not be rejected as necessarily not a..." but my speech faltered, as I had constructed my sentence with too many double negatives, and at any rate, he must have already grasped the intended meaning, because he whisked me over to a group of ten nuns on the border, sitting in two rows, and gestured to them, saying, "Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?". Then he immediately drew me over to a stall next to the nuns, where educational text books, many copies of the one book, were displayed protruding from the carboard boxes in which they had been packed. He gave me one. It was a thick, soft, colour compendium of recommended toys for children. The page fell open at a chapter on mechano, including diagrams of a mechano aircraft. However, the writing was too small to read, and I was already waking up.
When there is nothing exterior to which it can direct attention, inner speech begins to direct attention to itself, creating inner dialogue.
It is dark, dark, dark in this world that spewed out of his fingertips. There is gallows humour. I haven't read one good review for this record. Whenever I listen to it I hear demons dancing inside a mind of stony indifference. He must have mastered the art of controlling demons by exiting from the building.
"Observe how I move from the abstract to the particular!", she announced, not unselfconscious in her appreciation of her own beauty.
"How do you do it?" I asked, because I did not have her faculty with words and simply wanted to get to the point, perhaps for my own advantage.
"I do it by finesse", she replied, and the answer was rather deflating for me, because she had not revealed any secrets.
"What is the nature of your finesse?" I asked, because I was aware she was playing a game, teasing me into asking more questions.
"My finesse", she declared proudly, and at that moment she seemed to me like Joan of Arc, holding a shield, ascended to mythology, "my finesse lies only in my capacity to confound by solving".
The sound began as a howl, which before too long splayed out into the horizon as great, long tendrils of thought. Warmed and fattened by the sun, it became poetry. Soon the elegant sentences became joyfully aware of their own importance, and began to blush, colour and fatten into eulogies, laments and prayers; each of which developed its own sprays and branches, bearing fruit that turned golden, hardened and became metallic, solid, smooth, unbreakable, unyielding, magnetic, attractive and repulsive, disputational in nature. The silver and golden cords began to overlap and overtake one another, tying knots, unravelling, pushing through, defining spaces, invading, twisting, rejecting, supporting, undermining. Finally they all locked together, and there was no more room to move. Then, because the force of the howl that began all this was unabated, the knots and coils began to heat, glow, vibrate, sizzle and liquefy until they sprang apart, molten and potentiated. Freed, they were propelled again, singing, humming, beating and so on as dictated by their shape, size, density and composition, forming dizzying sonic terraces like a swarm of insects, generating musical patterns, each of which folded under the mass of sound and was instantly superseded. Shooting up higher into the sky, they lost their density and began to dance, converging, dividing and exploding into astonishing shapes and textures and filligrees, mutating, revolving as brilliant atoms of violet, indigo, blue, green yellow and red, arching, resonating as electrical fields, far, far beyond language, in the realm of pure play, where philosophy ends, and music prevails.
Some people think a fool is someone who doesn't know some fact; or who is so open-hearted and trusting he doesn't know he is being ridiculed; or who doesn't know how to defend herself; or who subscribes to an unfashionable viewpoint.
A fool, though, is really someone who takes the moral highground.
The latter kind of fool not only deserves our ridicule; such ridicule is our social obligation. These fools steal the happiness and the lives of others. To ridicule her, though, is a fine art, and a profession, and a dangerous job, suitable only for those with great courage, subtlety and genius. Not everybody who is merely wise can lay claim to being a natural comedian. To kill a fool, you must be a fool - for the purposes of killing only.
They came here for a reason, or, at least, with a certain feeling of excitement, but when they had arrived, there was silence and inactivity, all of them having forgotten what the reason was - or perhaps the idea had flown, or had hidden like a fox, or maybe, some were already saying, there never had been any idea after all.
Some of them left at once in search of dinner and a show. Others raged and fulminated, unable to find the idea anywhere, and resorted to kicking things and storming out, loudly slamming doors behind them. Silence descended at once.
Only a few were left. They started to work, hardly knowing what they were doing, their confidence and pleasure growing as the thing began to take form.
Ethics are simple rules for those who are too thick to act morally.
Snakelike, he has squeezed himself through many changes over fifteen years to keep himself in the public eye. He is a pathological diplomat, a mystery to himself. Always, he names the right names, going no deeper than required, for he does not want to cause unease. As he brings forth the shibboleths and codes, his audience visibly relaxes. He is one of them, and will remain so, until their fortune wanes. One of them may hence discover him, miles away, in a new place, a new town, wearing new clothes, speaking a new language to a new coterie of endowed young princes, basking with great dignity in what they truly believe will be an eternal good fortune.
She is neither meretricious nor duplicitous, but she reminds me of a writer, in that when she says ‘he’, she may mean ‘me’, ‘she’, ‘you’, ‘they’ or even ‘it’. She seems to use these terms interchangeably, or perhaps for their poetry, as the mood takes her, ratcheting up from her personal experience - if they are grounded there, because it is hard to say – to the general, the abstract, and the performative. Moreover, it is clear that the view she describes may not be hers. However, it is equally clear that she never lies.
Her indecision is so charming and irresistible that we all play up on it, encourage it, and ultimately reinforce it. We're not doing her any favours.
This country is a good breeding ground for talent, because it is hostile to talent. What survives here, survives there.
The first friend you meet when you enter the creative world is boredom. He wants to share some quality time with you.
If they live in Melbourne, and you live in Brisbane, they say you are Japanese, because you're closer to Tokyo than anyone else they know.
By imagining their urges have lives outside of themselves, as exterior demons and so on, by attempting to contrive a distance between themselves and their instincts, they hope to sup with a longer spoon.
The occultist is a stolidly unrepentant romantic who has disowned and projected all his nasty urges.
She's a pseudo-intellectual, parading the breadth of her reading for its own sake.
Some of them notice every colour and name. Some of them can’t even remember their own name. Steeped in the liminal, they have forgotten how to excogitate, and move through the world like solid ghosts, living in the still space just behind intent.
When things get nightmarish, the nightmare itself may be sufficient to wake you up. When things get too dull, you may drift asleep again. Perhaps we cannot dream properly unless we are thoroughly deluded.
When dealing with humourless people who only want to get ahead at your expense, intimidate them by being extremely, unforgivingly precise and clear.
Eventually, I came to see no value in a permanent state of wakefulness. It was spoiling my fun. So now I prefer to dream on oblivious, though I still wake up from time to time, disturbed from my slumber by the indigestion of insight.
Many musicians prefer dull, mechanical jobs even if they take up most of the working week. The reason is that if the job is sufficiently dull, the brain begins to hum a little tune.
The creation of the discipline of psychology depended on thought becoming an insomniac.
Studying the mind is like making a fist out of thought.
His web diary is full of lamentations about the purposeless of his life. Sometimes he talks knowledgeably about this or that cultural artifact or tradition. Sometimes he pines for a purpose, a task, or a life's work he feels sure must be waiting for him at some time in the future. His yearning is so intense it becomes a prayer which keens into the ether, unrecorded by any angel or master being.
I think that the web diary itself is his masterpiece. Although I want to tell him, I prefer it that he doesn't know, or maybe I'm afraid he already knows it. If the former, why make him self-conscious? If the latter, why show a magician the mechanics behind his own trick?
They are agamic, much the same as they were ten years ago. Hard as nails in the beginning, they had nowhere to go but tighter, harder, faster and more complicated. They were surprising at first, but now they never surprise anyone. That is why, in spite of feigning outsider status, they appeal only to the ossified in mind and spirit, the mentally prematurely aged, the subliminally fearful, the ones who do not want to be surprised any more.
The moon is desolate. If you were to be king of the moon, you would have total power over a dead world.
Nevertheless, there are those who aspire to be king of the moon. Vanquishing their enemies, they compete for the honour of ruling over a barren wasteland.
You work between two poles, at the exact point at which there is no gravitational pull to either extreme. People shout from each pole, saying, 'What are you doing? Come to my end, where everything has already been worked out.'
You catch yourself knowing too much, and think, 'that can only lead to trouble'.
Your choices becomes less governed by taste, and more situational, more instrumental. Music, in particular, is a powerful thing. It is an active ingredient. You add the appropriate music at the appropriate time, without holding any of it close to your heart.
Persuasion is completely beside the point. Even those who say they understand usually don't - especially those who say they understand.
Religion is a cavalcade of con artists and their dupes.
Authoritarianism: the authority dispenses what she believes is wisdom, and expects only devotion in return. Thoughts or views not emanating from, or reflecting, the her views are not permitted to flow back up the tree. The authoritarian is fueled only by unconditional love.
When you meet someone like this on the net, you can make your excuses and leave. They will not follow you as you are of no use.
I don't think that much of value to anyone can be achieved by posing yourself, and looking at your own life as others would. I think you have to work from the inside out. You examine, develop and refine your materials and your methods, not your self-image. The reason is that you wish to avoid becoming a trope or a type. There must always be surprise and change, or the result is not true. Truth in life is not in accurate representation, but in the implicit acknowledgement of change.
Some people think that being an artist is a matter of showing us their lives. "Look, here I am having sex, here I am taking a dump - I'm an artist!"
On the other hand, there is an art to both these activities.
History alters to accommodate the hypocrite.
Being a pyromaniac, I launch outrageous propositions for the pleasure of watching them burn.
When considering creative partners, it can be helpful to distinguish, not between egotists and non-egotists, but between those who are willing to keep going and those who are determined to stay put.
The greatest curse is not to know how to sell out.
Following the dictum, 'the mistake is the hidden intention', seize upon your weaknesses and explore their permutations relentlessly, to the exclusion of all else, loudly and firmly proclaiming your genius.
Any pyromaniac with real ambition is going to move into explosives sooner or later.
If you want to live in the modern world without coffee, sugar, and alcohol, well, good luck pal. One day without at least one representative of the unholy trinity is sufficient to bring forth the realisation that we are all mad.
Avoid befriending authors, less you become immortal.
No-one is more debauched than an idealist.
Just because it's obvious, doesn't mean it's not worth saying over and over.
Is the player piano roll digital or analogue?
Those who make toys have no use for them.
Edit down to the bones; or, if you wish to attract leeches, flesh everything out.
Overplaying the diplomat persona, you show yourself to be untrustworthy to everyone. Underplaying the same persona, you show the world that you cannot see a situation from any other angle but your own.
This it is done as method acting. It is interpersonal systems analysis, applied and embodied as behaviour. It is also a form of shapeshifting, if you are comfortable with that word.
I think I enjoyed reading Weininger for the same reason I enjoy a cheesy horror movie - grotesquery is horribly fascinating. Weininger is really a gothic writer: he combines the commonplace, and the keenly observed, with the bizarre and the incredible. Everything is lashed forcibly together with hooks and wires that dig into the skin. He constructs monsters that almost walk.
Abstraction is the most effective form of revenge.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that there is a laughing competition, and on the board to judge this competition are the cream of our cultural laughing stock. Respected and envied by their peers, they loom large on the face of joke culture, and have been laughing all their lives. They know talent when they hear it.
Sorting though the hopefuls, they select carefully, on the basis of learned discussion, argument, and who they know. One by one the young jokers perform for the judges; one by one they meet their fate: joy or tears.
The technique behind laughter is well understood by the judges. Then, also, each has his or her speciality: the guffaw, the sneer, the chuckle, the giggle, the heehaw. Where appropriate, they defer to each other on matters of specialist expertise: such matters as tuning, rhythm, melodic progression, intonation, dynamic range and so on are understood to be at the heart of a good laugh. The technique of many of the contestants is razor sharp, prodigious, precocious. The most skilled jokers effortlessly traverse 1/32 and 1/64 notes. They employ pleasing portamentos and vibratos; they invest strong and moving emotional touches to their phrasing, to create an agreeable complexity; and they make pretty melodies.
Where technique is lacking, this is pointed out; where it is present, the judges are effusive and encouraging.
If it should happen that the judges encounter genuine laughter, they are embarassed - for themselves, or for the performer, they are not sufficiently awake to tell. The technique of such a one is frequently lacking, for she is not thinking of perfecting technique. Rather, she laughs because she is amused. The judges may even laugh back, -a different kind of laugh - a laugh of ridicule betraying, possibly, a subterranean fear of humiliation. Perhaps they feel, around the borders of their tunnel consciousness, that they might have been exposed, made fun of. Do they sneer at the performer? Or is the homunculus who sails imperiously over the surface of their waters, the one who is playing master, sneering at the depths? Even a puppet master can, for his own amusement or the amusement of others, have the puppet ridicule the puppet master’s technique. As for the genuine laughter artist, there are no glittering prizes for her. However, she is not too dismayed. It is a comedy.
One can be non-mediocre, brilliant even, but still a fool. Conversely, one can be an ordinary person with no particular aspirations over and above doing a simple job well, and become wise. I've known a few up-themselves people in my time - but not recently. I evicted all fools, mediocre or talented, from my life almost a decade ago. I still encounter them occasionally of course. I treat these bores with the utmost civility.
She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But I do. Why should we feel contempt for the mediocre, I ask her? It’s bad manners to despise someone for lacking good looks, or money, or education - so why not talent, insight, or wisdom as well? The foolish man knows in his bones he lacks all three, that his security is highly specialised and dependent on ready public access to certain facts, facts he has at his disposal and will not share unless forced to do so. But he feels the lack of something overarching, and is angry in an ill-defined, restless way. He will pick on you, because you are torturing him. He senses your freedom, you are not dragging chains of quite the same weight, nor moving through such dense air.
But, she says, you suffer a fool to make foolish decisions on your behalf. And I think, you know, maybe she’s right not to suffer fools gladly. My life may have been different if I had been less patient with fools.
And I think about it further, and realise, well, if you become exasperated with a fool, the fool is using you up. To treat the foolish with respect must involve something else, something skillful and self-protective, some kind of nuance or subtlety that saves energy so one can concentrate on one's larger purpose or interest without unnecessary distraction.
Here's what I think it means to suffer fools gladly. One keeps one's distance and does not rouse the nest. One's manners remain impeccable. One excuses the fool from one's life, and with great decorum and ceremony, shows her out of the house. Isn't this how an experienced bouncer removes a drunk from a club? When we see a bouncer gently, and with great respect, leading a troublemaker from the room, it's as if he's showing the fool to his limousine. His expression remains courteous and detached, and he neither tugs nor pushes. He takes his time and never embarasses his guest. He is the very model of good etiquette. This is what it means to suffer a fool gladly.
Now, this woman I know does not suffer fools, and rarely evicts one with much grace. She likes to give them a kick in the behind as they leave, even. But then again, I rarely evict a fool at all until the damage is done. She is missing the mark, but so am I. Dealing patiently with a fool is not simply a matter of patiently putting up with him as he messes up your program. Rather, it is an elaborately polite ceremony of respectful eviction of the fool from the domains of one's life in which his aggressive promulgation of his own agenda or skill at any cost to you is neither required nor welcomed.
There’s that bird again, the one that always sings at this hour, the one you only ever hear when you’re aware in the early morning hours. It is a cool, smooth, damp, eerily dipping sound, irresistibly tied in your imagination to this hour and this place.
So when the situation starts to unfold rapidly, you also unfold rapidly - no effort required.
Many of us read blogs backwards through time, delving further and further back into the archives. I don't know if this is an unusual practice. Blog reading becomes archaelogical when one reads back from the present to the past. Running themes appear out of the blue. It's disorienting but you get used to it: mysteries appear, and then are resolved, as you read further and further back and get a retrospective handle on the causation. You uncover the conditions of change in the writer's life much as you do in real life: first you see the face of a stranger, then, as you come to know them, you begin to understand why their faces are lined and scarred.
You become a famous psychoanalyst, an explosives expert, or a world authority on the I Ching. You have all this knowledge, and ultimately this is all you learn. Every skill you acquire leads you back to the kernel. This is why, even though neither of us know anything much about botany, or particle physics, or pottery, or cordon bleu cooking, we have enough in common with you to spend a pleasant evening together talking about what matters most. Drifting away from our institutes of learning, we become curious about this: the way that a self-possessed individual finally finds a wellspring of courage and strays from the path.
What’s the difference between an artist and a critic? There are a thousand answers to this question, some with more merit than others. However if we compress out minds into the shape of a professional critic’s mind, several things immediately become apparent on introspection. One, we are in the theoretical domain of a battle of wills. Two, we have strategies at our disposal to defend, attack, advance, retreat, observe and unify. All this is done through thought and linguistic concepts. The critic’s eye is acute and peers through holes in the battlements, or scans from a hill or the sky like a general.
Now, when we relax our mind to think like a true artist (false artists are much more common of course; they are people who profess to be artists but actually the ground troops paid by critics in fame and money to fight their wars), we see lines of battle which may be freely traversed. The critics appear to be at war over scarce resources. There is territory to defend, territory to scorch, territory to overwhelm. True artists feel like scavengers, moving freely where they choose, dodging the draft. Occasionally they may bump into a critic who will wonder what they are doing getting in the way. Happily, no critic fires at a true artist, because, in the game of battlefield strategy, they are neither much of an asset nor much of a liability. Such an artist is little better than a rather irritating presence, like a bird looping across the field of a dramatic struggle for survival played out between lions and hyenas. The true artist is free to go about her business without attracting undue attention; and her business is to roam free, investigating interesting situations.
I think it's necessary, really, for the weirdo to come out of the closet and not be a shrinking violet about his or her strangeness - even if such strangeness is only sporadic rather than chronic. There seems to be no doubt that many people love and treasure harmless but interesting weirdos. I know I certainly do.
Never apologise for being a weirdo. Many of my friends are quite eccentric, and I would be horrified if any one of them became apologetic about their uniqueness. I would rather normal people apologised for not being weird enough.
As for people laying strangeness trips on us for our weird behaviour the question becomes this: how do we protect ouselves from losing confidence in such a situation?
I would like to know your answers to this very important question, as every weirdo could use the tools and techniques to avoid being undermined simply for not following minor social rules. I think the answer has to do with systematically ridding yourself of all forms of self-monitoring. Self monitoring is the process by which one says 'what am I doing?', 'is this appropriate?', 'did I just come over as an idiot?' and so on. That inner voice might be attenuated, or even disappear completely - making one that most envied of souls, the completely unselfconscious weirdo.
It's been said here and there that creativity is aligned with mental illness. The evidence cited is usually correlative, which is to say, there is plenty of evidence that mental illness is more prevalent in the artistic community than in the general community (incidentally, what a Victorian curio is that phrase, ‘mental illness’ – a sickness in the mind).
Correlations... they are the very devil. They invite us to draw causal relations where none have been established. Poverty is higher in the artistic community than the general community too? Are we going to conclude that poverty is congenial to art? Are you an artist? Do you find it really helps not to be able to afford to repair your equipment, buy your paints and canvas, pay the rent? Do you get the album finished more quickly because you break a guitar string and can’t afford to replace it? Because you can’t afford a studio, a rehearsal room, a CD burner to run off demos? Or does it hinder your creativity? It's the latter, isn't it? Poverty and being creative are correlated, they go hand-in-hand, but the former does not cause the latter. Maybe being creative causes poverty though! However, even though this seems more plausible, the correlation itself is no evidence. We can’t conclude anything causal from a correlation.
‘Oh, but poverty makes you resourceful’. No it doesn’t. Being aware of resources make you resourceful. Poverty just limits your resources. A good thing? How is that a good thing? It's an imposition to have limited resources: an imposition which we accept and work around, because we have no choice.
Insanity might be the demon that destroys creativity. It might just be the searing delusion of personal grandeur, resplendant in hallucinatory visions of self-reference and destiny, with all the attendant paranoia, that undoes an artist. Now, that might be worth considering.
Plenty of great art has been made by people who went through periods of mental instability. However, we are not entitled to assume that what we admire in the likes of Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson, Brian Wilson and others was created from their insanity. It seems more plausible that it was created from their sanity, since their productive years were also their sane years. When they lost their sanity, they were unable to create comprehensible art.
'Oh, but they were really, really inspired on the run-up to the full-blown psychosis'. Isn't that tantamount to saying they were at their most creative when they were sane yet full of energy? Is that conclusion too obvious and commonsensical to be exciting to our romantic sensibilities? Or would we be equally comfortable saying that the acceleration of a car is caused by the crash that results from accelerating too much? The form of the argument which claims that insanity assists with creativity is the same, and equally absurd.
Sanity is definitely underrated, as it does not fit in with our rather romantic artistic schema. However, if an artist can give to his or her audience a dose of genuine sanity, what more is required?
Barrow's paradox holds wherever some piece of advice cannot be given without the giver of the advice contradicting herself. For example, 'human beings should never follow general principles of behaviour' falls prey to Barrow's paradox. Such statements may well be true: however, to make them is always self-contradictory. So, to avoid Barrow's paradox, one should lead by example, rather than by giving advice. And I see I am now falling prey to Barrow's paradox myself.
A special case of Barrow's paradox very relevant to web discussion groups is the principle that some disputes are best resolved by not getting involved - and yet, one cannot point this out to the disputants without getting involved. The canonical example is the response of list members to a troll in the forum. The troller gets various members' backs up; they react by naming the poster as a troll and an attention-seeker; and, before too long, the temperature rises to flaming point, people firing off all kinds of posts which they may later regret. Now, the best way to deal with a troller is to disregard the post. Eventually the trolling will extinguish due to lack of positive reinforcement.
What's reinforcing about becoming notorious, and why does a troller seek negative or hostile attention? Perhaps it's just that having negative attention is more reinforcing than having no attention at all. If this were true, then negative attention, up to a point at least, would be preferable to being shunned by all and sundry. This is the troller's predicament. No-one likes him. Everybody hates him. He has no friends. He has little experience with positive attention and praise. What's a lonely guy to do? Stir up some trouble! Off he goes! In fairness, haven't we all felt the thrill of notoriety from time to time? Isn't it just a little bit of a rush to have complete strangers arguing with each other about you, even if much of it's negative stuff? Does Marilyn Manson get a kick out of being blacklisted by fundamentalist Christian groups? Does he seek to provoke them? Do you cheer him on? We can relate to the troller, I think.
So, when dealing with the persistent troll (who should be distinguished from the penitent troll) it's understood that the way to get rid of a troll is to let his incendiary posts fall by the wayside. However, not everyone on a typical forum understands this principle to the extent of allowing it to guide their behaviour. Those who post to the effect that 'this is a sad person, ignore him' are just feeding the troll! Those who post to the thread saying, 'let's let this thread die' are keeping the thread alive! How to teach someone to allow a disputation to pass unstoked, without contributing to the stoking? There is no way. Those who understand the troll dynamic post nothing, and thereby demonstrate their understanding. Those who try to contribute to an understanding of the troll dynamic by posting advice thereby demonstrate their failure to understand it. I'm not the first person to point this out. But I am the first person to realise that, in so doing, I am falling prey to Barrow's paradox.
There's also the obvious point to be made that the most complex machine in a modern studio is a human brain. However, many electronic artists seem to use their gear as prosthetic devices, or brain-substitutes. It's as if they are afraid of themselves. Or, more accurately perhaps, the intellectual/planning part of their brain is afraid of their deep, instinctual brain. This affliction, too, is not limited to music or to the arts, but is a problem of life. I don't want to know who's using what piece of advanced gear or what new techniques are being developed, whether they're playing this or that piece of gear etc etc. I want to know what kind of person they are.
Almost all Kraftwerk's songs were about some kind of new fangled technological innovation or other. Do people really get very excited about technological innovation per se any more? I wonder if the very idea of Kraftwerk is a thing of the past. In about 500 years, Kraftwerk lyrics will be like Chan poetry, because the innovation factor will have evaporated entirely from everyone's perception of the lyrics. "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" will sound like "I carry water and chop wood". People will go, "wow, they found mystery in their commonplace, rustic daily activities."
Wandering off the beaten track, we are drawn, some of us, to abandoned follies. Abandoned websites by the million, some of them still with active chat lists, which echo occasionally with solitary voices: “Hello? Is anybody there?”
I love to fetch up in areas where a great deal of thought and time has been put into an operation, installation, or structure to no avail. I hesitate to speculate on my motives. What is driving this fascination with architectural failure? Schadenfreude? Identification? Or – and this is the motive I wish you to believe, because I am vain – is it that I recognise the essential beauty of futility, and its concordance with the predicament of the lonely universe? For God is alone, and divides Himself up to maintain the illusion of company. However, He is endlessly drawn back by that frisson of cosmic fear to His true nature: the Only Being, the Lonely Being. The Atheist.
Not just lonely enclosures; but also, lonely little things. A little orchid growing just behind my neighbour's back fence. A tape left in a cupboard from a decade ago which unconsciously records a conversation between several friends at a barbecue – because someone hit record when they should’ve hit play. I want to gather these things, and gather myself, collect my thoughts. It was here, but no-one came.
Bandwagon jumping skills are essential to musical survival, unless you want to play the equally valid but rather less exciting game of keeper of the flame and update records, gather unreleased material, correct other scholars, and generally camp it up as a stroppy but necessary figure in the dusty libraries of musical history.
The bandwagon jumper is a different fish. The adept bandwagon jumper rarely jumps from the ground; rather, she jumps, catlike, from one wagon to another. Some wagons move slowly; some move quickly. The swifter wagons are only jumped by the adept, the gymnastic, the highly courageous. Then, as well, there are many intellectual and planning factors to digest before one dares a jump: there is the speed of one’s own bandwagon; the moods, tempers and attitudes of the bandwagon to which you wish to jump (sometimes the groups is welcoming, sometimes hostile); and so on.
The adept jump on bandwagons that are only about a quarter full of very hard working artists playing the we-are-visionary game. They take over through the magnetic force of their personalities and their business sense.
Never jump on a bandwagon that is already full. There is no room for you unless you jump on top of their heads. They will get annoyed; they will probably kick you off. You may end up under the wheels, or rolled over by the next bandwagon that comes along. Also, a full bandwagon is uncomfortable for everyone aboard. There is so little room that no-one can move or do any work. They travel more slowly as they are heavier, and there is a risk that the wheel axles will break under the combined load. Everyone falls in a heap, and some are squashed. It is, as best, embarassing and undignified; and it is not always easy to catch a fast moving bandwagon from a standing position on the road.
So when is the best time to jump on a bandwagon? If, like us, you are not a charismatic, adept gymnast, but a slow moving, perplexed little tortoise, by far the best time to jump a wagon is when the genre it represents is beginning to smell. It is beginning to be uncool: so uncool that even the uncool people are jumping ship, even though this time last year they were sticky with it like Pooh in a honeypot! See the suckers run and jump!
You don’t need to be travelling at any great speed to jump a bandwagon like this: it’s already coming to a slow halt. Run up alongside it. Ease yourself on. Take a walk around, familiarise yourself. Pick up the bits and pieces people have left behind. Turn them over, examine them in the light. Scrub the decks until they no longer smell of money. Get to know the engine and the steering wheel; the sleeping quarters; the kitchen. It’s yours now. Take your little wagon wherever you like.
She must have a problem with pride, she thinks to herself, because she seems to be always meeting arrogant, talentless types from her past who are now doing a lot better than her. Or maybe they're being set up for a fall, and her lesson is simply to be patient and forebearing? She doesn't know, but really hates having her nose rubbed in it.
That great sigil, the Cosmos, really makes a mockery of the lesser sigil I will call 'my fate'.
He was a fine chef, and every night he would cook simple, unusual meals with fresh ingredients, but few people ever came, preferring the glossily rich prandium of the suavely urbane eatery across the road. So, every night he would cook, and every night he would eat his own food. ‘Even if no-one else wants my food, excellent though it is’, he would muse, ‘I have the benefit of enjoying it myself.’ And as he ate his own food every night, he became imbued with its benefits, and gradually became simple and unusual in himself.
Heaven itself is a haven for criminals.
A man made a wish, and his world promptly fell apart. He thought to himself, 'This is the wish: it is making its presence felt'.
She said, "Institutional Christianity is the religion of flock conformity. Satanism is better, because it at least rejects the mediocrity of social approval. But there's something beyond both".
He said, "It's called nothingism."
She said, "Don't give it a name".
"Such vanity", muttered the Controller of Reputations, "to put his name about when he isn't even famous".
There were seven corridors, each one beholden in a kind of non-sentient trance to the one beneath. The shallowest level opened out to courtyards with gargoyles and fountains; further down they resembled office and hospital corridors, with no people present, until finally the lowest level was a road through a tunnel, with empty cars crashing, one after the other, in slow motion, forever: the sound was a kind of agony of buckling metal, brakes and glass, and was not without a certain horrific beauty.
It is an ingenious machine, a transforming engine, which turns the animus of another into adamantine, transparent light geometry.
'There's a lot of fascinating, delightfully entertaining people out there who really have nothing of substance to offer', L told me. 'They can be detected easily. The trick is that you simply appear to them as if you are not useful to them, yet do not wish to be their follower. You will be brushed off within a few seconds. On the other hand, there are others, far less numerous admittedly, who will instantly recognize you as a status-free person; not that they will do anything about it.'
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that is why he mixes with people who neither know nor care about such things. As for the experts, he is probably waiting for their knowledge to fragment, shatter, and fly away - but that is unlikely to happen, so why did it happen to him?
Despite his evident genius, he is prickly, and waspish, and therefore one is able to discern from these tendencies toward pomposity that he has further work to do, not that anyone need tell him.
It's miraculous to me that, when others are offensive to her, she is not offended. It may be that they cannot disinter any hate or fear, because she has none, which is, in itself, quite remarkable to me. Also remarkable is that no-one else seems to notice her extraordinary qualities in this regard; and that she does not care that they do not notice.
'Compassion fatigue' is of course an oxymoron. False compassion exists so people don't have to look at true compassion, which is rather more direct and brutal than many people can bear.
All art is a mediation on chanelling the large into the small. If we feel frustration in the morning when we review what we accomplished last night, it may be because we see that, in spite of our best efforts, it remains a fact that the large cannnot be channelled into the small. If the frustration melts into proud fatherhood over time, and we come to see the merits of our little work, it may be due to the realisation that the small already contains the large.
A child fantasizes about all kinds of things - marrying its opposite sex parent, sucking on the teat of the universe forever, making the cosmos bow down before its primal urges, smearing the cosmos with faeces, having mummy bring it whatever it wants when it cries, and other fantasies of omnipotence.
As we grow older, we learn to sublimate these very basic urges into blogs, music, and becoming a person of saocial worth. For example, instead of smearing faeces around, we publish a learned critique of someone's scientific theory - especially if they remind us of one of our parents. We still fantasise about omnipotence and the trailing of clouds of glory, but within a more socially acceptable framework.
Infantile wish fulfillment occurs where an adult actually does consummate one of these basic, id-driven, polymorpheously perverse fantasies. Many gurus are like this. They have been protected from the reality principle by their overindulgent mothers. They grow up and become big babies.
This is connected to the oceanic feeling in this way. The child experience bliss and unity with the cosmos in that whenever a need arises, the mother appears and satisfies it. Sucking on the Good Breast, the child feels warm, blissful and unified with the mother. Later, the Good Breast (or Good Mother) may be idealised as a feminine principle of universal bliss and compassion in which one can be absorbed, cossetted and protected. The feeling of bliss that results is intense and is felt as a profound religious enlightenment. All gurus have oceanic feelings of unity with the universe, which cannot be maintained without devotees. This is how society makes big babies.
Lack of insight has a protective function, and is the chief reason why so few journalists kill themselves.
What he is, he hates to see in others. Moreover, what other have that he does not have, he affects to despise, as he loathes competition. He will therefore associate only with people more powerful than him. What they do is no concern of his.
Anonymous writes:
Maybe I'm perverse, but the notion of a music or even artistic career, seems sillier to me the older I get. It just doesn't seem to be something a serious person would entertain.
She has said goodbye to paranoia, mental torment and the monotony of maintaining her historical borders. However, she has not become any easier to live with.
The conflicting opinions of others can put you in a spin. If you are pigheaded, however, you hold to your own counsel and steer your way through the storm, working with the wind and the waves, but only insofar as it conserves energy. You need one helmsman only.
Some happily lost souls will always wave to you from the horizon, as they go about their business, catching only the smaller fish.
Nothing is identical to anything else. There must be two situations in order for the identity comparison to be made. As soon as two situations can be defined, they differ in space.
As for the observation that all situations are self-identical, that is no more illuminating than saying, 'It is what it is'. Fortunately, that unilluminating statement turns out to be very illuminating if one really thinks about it.
"I am discerning your system, your approach to life, at last", he said. "I have become obsessed with a thought pattern", I thought.
The tide goes out, revealing rocks, grey coral pieces, shells, seaweed and dead bluebottles. Some of us supplicate before the receding tide, begging for its return. Others sink to their knees, cursing God, or Lady Luck, or the Fates. Many of us call meetings, gathering round, drawing up plans in the yellow sand, arguing heatedly. Few of us rest while we can.
The problem is not evil, or error, or destiny, but why the universe, on waking up, recoils in horror and amazement.
First as a child in the garden, then as the gardener, then as the one who watches the gardener and the child from a window upstairs, then finally as the garden growing unseen.
It won't be done until it can't be done.
There is no soul. This is the problem with the complaint that electronic music is soulless: a virtue is presented as a vice.
In the same way, those who lack the delusion that they have a soul are sometimes seen as uncanny or cold. However, the hot, theatrical vortex of narcissism that is called soulfulness is seldom appreciated for long by those who have to deal with it in an individual. On the other hand, a truly soulless person is always a pleasure to know and be with. But the pleasure is a cool one, easily overlooked.
So, also, it is easier to appreciate someone when we have no stake in their existence. That comes with time spent apart, too.
Of course, Jesus is the most famous recorded example of a Christ complex, but consider Socrates, a man with the most subtle of Christ complexes, and foiled only by his own ugliness, which instilled in him a kind of playful irony antithetical to the serious messianic task of leading lemmings off cliffs, but sufficiently elitist to ensure martyrdom at least.
By his peevish, self-righteous, and above all public response to a friend who asked him for a favour, I deduce he lacks both the humility and the strength of the thousandfold defeated. I can safely assume he has no balls.
Imagine, at an age when you were sufficiently young and uncompromising to think such things were fundamental to an authentic existence, that you struck an internal deal with yourself to sacrifice all commercial success, in exchange for prolonged joy in your muse, which, as per the terms of the deal, was to be a lifetime contract. Now you find myself wondering why you have very little money, yet, miraculously, always enough to continue to pursue your art. Then you must remind myself of your deal, struck long ago. The deal was for life, struck with all the radical romanticism of a teenager, and cannot be revoked. The child is master of the adult.
I avoid deeply spiritual people. The reason is that the substance of my own ephiphany, such as it was, was that there was no spirit. So extraordinary was this experience that I found I was unable to obtain comfort from spiritual people; I could only obtain it from people who had no spiritual beliefs at all, and who only cared about practical matters.
This includes people very busy with their jobs, young artists and other egotistical types, women who rely on their looks, middle aged men whose spirit has been crushed beyond repair and now only want to read and drink tea, ribald old bohemians who paint, sew or make dolls and like their wine and sunshine, Satanists and Buddhists too lazy to read their respective scriptures, let alone practise them, and of course the French.
Hence, a lot of my friends are deeply materialistic, and only care for pleasure in this life, and I find that quite acceptable, so long as they never get any money to splash around.
What makes darkness visible? Mental imagery appears in the darkness, but is fundamentally of the darkness. It articulates the night, colouring it in its own raiment, characterised by soft light, and permeated by fog and steam. There is an opiate, somnambulist comfort to these dark dreams, and no sense of humour to speak of.
That is why some of us are not afraid of the dark. For us, true terror is clear light, bright light, dazzling light. There is comedy, too, and it is almost too intense and vivid for comfort. I find this keyboard and this screen, and these hands, far more unnerving than any demonic archetype - and if that sounds strange to you, you had better take your comfort in the lesser terrors of the night.
You feel like you should apologise for your perplexity. Perhaps you should make a virtue of it. This is what a charismatic leader, the hypnotic centre of a social gathering, would do. But you remain everyone's inferior, unwilling to assert yourself, as if you could even find a self to assert. A little less insight would do you material good.
Why should I be moral?
As some of us get older and start appealing to generation gaps, or preface something with 'I'm an old fogey, I can't get today's music', we are inviting others to approve of a certain mental state of affable, comfortable, mildly pompous smuggery. We are asking you to help us settle down into a self-enclosed, cossetted, snuggly little world in which we can be king or queen. We are asking you to help us pretend that we will not die. We are asking for dignity and respect without really wishing to earn it. We want you to applaud our cognitive stasis and call it wisdom and taste.
In reality, though, unable to cope with the continous shock of change, we have fallen into a waking coma. We are now dreaming of the permanence of our youth and strength. We take our own childish music far too seriously, and fail to see seriousness in yours.
It is immense cowardice that allows me to persevere, lacking as I do the courage to give up.
As for the subject of culture overload: wean yourself off a taste for cleverness and for the compulsive signposting of trends, remove all polish from your purview, and lose interest in the sparkling, brittle world of industry gossip. You'll quickly discover there's less to enjoy than you may once have thought. You may look for years and find no-one of interest. But by all means get on with it and find these people.
Jane said, more or less, ‘Your normal mind is the hardest state in which to deal with not knowing what’s going to happen. But when you’re drunk, or out of it, it’s fine. It’s not a problem. That’s why so many musicians get intoxicated’.
After a couple of drinks though, you feel confident, relaxed, aware, even a little cocky, just right for rock and roll. It’s seductive, isn’t it?
R: I'm a true singer - I can't keep my mouth shut.
Release a record and you announce your own death. The reviews are your obituaries. The CD tray is the casket, the CD the body, the record launch the funeral and wake, the CD rack in the record shop the viewing of your corpse. We come to the record shop to pay our respects, give money as flowers, remembering you in our own way.
Listen to your releases. This person gave birth to you, and died in labour. You, too, will die giving birth.
Every artist should have an extravert and an introvert project. The extravert project, which is naturally collaborative, should lead the way into the public eye in a blaze of confidence and colour. The introvert project, which is always a silent, private meditation, should absorb the backlash, quelling, dissipating, and stilling the return wash, allowing the sand settle at the bottom, the bubbles to rise and disappear, and the weed to extend its eloquent slow motion gestures through the water between.
It's hard to make it in this world as a synaesthetic musician, with no real skills, just the ability to see music. Your musical choices become eccentric, because they are not musical - they are visual. You traverse genres looking for synaesthetes. If you write music, then you are writing for such a small bunch of these people. However, it's nice to see their faces light up.
Music should be seen, not heard.
Music is a twilight language, best understood in a state of manic lucid somnambulism.
Music is full of wounded souls, looking to each other for salvation, and of course none of us can help each other. A little sympathy.
Dark days... they are dissolved not by meditation, but by wine, women and song.
Does he have dark days, like me? If I had his talent, and the results, and yet the lack of success, would I kill myself? What is his secret?
I like a bruised optimism, don't you? Pessimism, when it is complete, removes all causes for concern. The result: bruised optimism. A bruised optimist has fondness for an unbruised optimist. The latter in all innocence thinks the former might just make a good disciple.
Alcohol: the spiritual anthopomorphicist.
He actually forgets the slights against him without even trying, the same way we forget phone numbers - and others call this his virtue. On the other hand, she will invent wrongdoings out of nowhere, grow them with her fury, and present them to you, in rancid triumph, at every opportunity.
Grace falls from heaven. You don't have to be religious to comprehend this.
The universe is a very odd place isn't it? And human beings are quite strange too. You yourself are quite strange. A freak.
Irony is not the problem. It's postmodernism: the multiplication of irony by cowardice.
Chit-chat, reminiscence, novels and diaries, catching up, telling anecdotes, exchanging pleasantries... to get rid of all this is to lose all your friends. On the other hand, you make a new friend.
Sentences do not refer. If there's anything tethering a sentence to a situation, I'd like to see it. Sentences do not refer, but they do direct. Sometimes.
Read for resonance, not reference.
It takes a lot of face to be that mediocre.
When you are constantly thinking 'I can't do this any more', and yet you continue to do it, it becomes clear that inner speech guides the body when there is silent assent from the latter, and only then.
A fertile garden smells of shit, blood and bone, and people hold their noses as they go past. Later on, they come back to admire the flowers. The causal relationship is lost on them.
Your persistence condemns you to a life of futile invention.
Pretending to be a genius is an international celebrity pastime, but it's really not a matter of wearing crazy clothes, engaging in expensive and complex projects, and generally acting like a shaman or a trickster. The few people I know who are geniuses are rather odd, friendly but socially maladroit and inclined to suddenly disappear on you. They stick to their thing and don't mix easily with the world, and, consequently, are quite small in the social order of things. Genius is not theirs, but resides in them for a while, or until they become famous, at which point it is very slowly sucked right out of them, a process which takes several years and which is irreversible.
When all potential courses of action clearly lead to disaster, thought is curtailed.
When you are a successful artist, you are busy all the time maintaining success, and, in your youth at least, there will be no such thing as fame and leisure together.
Finally, though, you reach old age. There you may enjoy, if you are no longer driven, a golden age of no more work. You simply accept artistic accolades for your past accomplishments, enjoying your few remaining years in the rich autumnal garden of your senescence.
This must be very pleasant, to cruise gently to one's grave in a glow of reminiscence, admiration, and perhaps, also, the gentle warm haze of a little mild senile dementia.
All music lyrics are fundamentally about the absence of a driver.
When you tell people there are no universal moral rules, they reply that you're offering a license for anarchy, murder and pillaging. You can tell what's really on their minds.
Anyone can dispense common sense wisdom. It's like a chef saying, 'We should use fresher ingredients, we should bake a nicer cake'.
I want to see a philosophy which doesn't provide you with a better way to be. Unfortunately, that philosophy can't be put into words without becoming prescriptive.
The smug fat body of mainstream white Anglo-Celtic mediocrity stretches itself comfortably across this fair nation, bellowing for more entertainment and more food, crushing the bodies of its cultural pups, who slowly and painfully asphyxiate.
Are there only non-moral reasons for conforming to a moral code? And if you have only non-moral reasons for being moral, is that truly a moral stance after all?
To be fated to be a lawyer is so unspeakably awful that the matter must never be broached, not even in a lawyer's own mind.
The more we permit in others, the more we permit in ourselves. A critic who understands this will be unsufferable to other critics, and had better just be an artist instead.
Reality rewards evil with little bits of paper.
The burden isn't knowing what you know. It's abandoning it to be with people who don't.
People worship fictional beings all the time. No-one worships sanity.
The ground is only sporadically interested in details.
Choose a miniscule range of musical possibilities and stick to them with the stolidity of a Flemish weaver. You will forge a whole new genre.
People are always asking how they should be moral, but seldom why they should be moral.
Poverty is the only austerity an artist requires.
Just as not everyone who claims to be virtuous really is virtuous, not everyone who claims to be satanic really is satanic - even if they want to be.
Eugenicists typically don’t understand that, as a rule of thumb, the survival of a species is enhanced by multiplying mutations, not by reducing them. Every dog breeder knows this. But the eugenicists don't: they are sufficiently dull witted to qualify as candidates for their own extermination campaigns.
No, I don't want to learn any more exercises. Enough with exercises. But, the alternatives are exiguous, to say the least, when you scour the shelves.
Didacticism is exegesis.
Explain at your peril.
There's much to be said for leaving the gods to their business.
Evil is fathomless and multi-tiered. How do you know you are going to hell? You will hear strange birdsong; your surroundings will become increasingly ornate and antique; there will be more and more servants.
The sane do not reject delusion but indulge it for fun, so as to make life more interesting. Life is pretty boring if you keep in mind the true nature of existence. On the other hand, sanity is the capacity to dynamically switch between delusion and awareness. Delusion is sought when things are getting boring; awareness is sought when things are getting painful or overheated. Temperatures are lowered primarily by graciously acknowledging the partiality of the viewpoint you have hitherto been pursuing.
When you are sane, admitting fault in everyday life is just the same as admitting fault in a dream. I notice that people who are slow to take offense or pass the buck rapidly acquire power and influence over others. This is called improving the mood in dream world and rising naturally to great influence in La La Land.
The difference between an artist and a con artist is that the latter will not try to con his friends.
Human beings do not have cognitions; cognitions have human beings.
Everyone owns popular music: it's an international treasure. As a result, everyone is an expert. They know what makes a good song. If there's something missing, they know that too. They may not be able to put their finger on it; however, if it's lacking, they can hear the lack.
When you get something off the ground and running, anyone who feels safe to express an opinion in your company will do so. If what you are doing is in some way not mediocre, if it is untried, or exemplary of a new aesthetic, and if they are not themselves talented musicians, they will tell you so, often at length - for they, and not you, are the experts, the listening public.
As to the most effective strategy for dealing with the volley of expert opinions to which you will be exposed, I wish to offer a few general rules of thumb. Listen, argue if you like, but do not take it to heart. Stick to your guns and carry on.
If your music is in some way unprecedented, to that extent the average listener will say it is cold, flat, empty, or contrived. These are projective descriptions unconsciously illustrating the fact that the listener does not feel automatically welcome in your musical world. If the listener finds the music cold rather than warm, it is a sure sign that you are innovating. Your music will warm up when the listeners warm up. Then the same music will be deemed classic - and, in virtue of being classic, it will also be history, by which stage, I hope, you will have moved on to something colder.
She tests them out with nonsense. If they laugh along, she moves closer.
Those who go into battle with regretful resolution nearly always defeat me. I prefer an angry, resentful opponent.
It's not so much that you have opinions: nor is it that you have too many. It is simply that you think your opinions are not partial. This fact alone has turned you into a deeply irritating person.
It's not philosophy or psychology per se that interests me so much as each person's unique delusional pattern.
When I listen to maudlin, lovelorn pop lyrics and assume they are the sentiments of the songwriter, they sound dull, superior, and self absorbed; but when I listen from the point of view that they are a message to the songwriter, from a better or wiser part of her nature, or as a message from the unconscious to the controlling ego, suddenly the lyric is deeply moving to me. This never changes.
I wanted to make my own paper, so I asked an expert: he had written a book.
'Paper', he told me, 'Is not longer the fine thing it once was. Modern paper can hardly be compared to the elegantly textured, pestle-pounded sheets used by the ancients'. He paused to see if any of his traditional rivals had overheard him. He was spoiling for the usual argument.
'I'm not so interested in which paper is the best and finest', I told him. 'I just would like to know what paper is actual composed of, and how it is made'. He replied angily, 'Matters of taste cannot be separated from matters of composition!' And with that I sensed my interview was over.
Regarding the manufacture of my own paper, I was able to come up with something that did the job via a process of trial and error, reading, and asking around. As for questions of taste, I have never paid them much attention.
Stall them, stonewall them, then throw them into the hands of the experts.
Perhaps, in dealing with the narcissist, the best strategy is to roll over and play dead.
Sometimes you retract into a private and cold space, into which I cannot climb to join you. It is as if you are preparing me for your death.
He watches over his crueller impulses like a cat watching over her kittens. He knows them all.
He is burned hollow now and can see right through himself, as if he were made of layers of irridescent glass. When the winds are so disposed to move him, he is compelled to sing the praises of the cosmos like a hand puppet.
So you tell fairy stories, as it's the best you can do. You explain it to children, but they are grown, older than you. You do not have the nerve to patronise them, and anyway, they are comfortable with patronising you. Above all, you don't care that much one way or the other.
Fear is her litmus. When ghouls and goblins no longer terrify, there is one more way to frighten the bejesus out of a human being; and when that no longer works, the story ends.
Who can you tell your secret? You can't tell anyone. I don't envy you.
It's too easy for you, and that is the problem. You surpass us: we hate you.
From the sublime to the ridiculous they go, and back again... you think they are contradicting themselves? Then you're an idiot.
She is no fool, but if you are, she will do her utmost to make herself look foolish, in order to get rid of you.
You must become a statesman of your art. This is achieved by being ignored for approximately forty years. Then, you receive the ultimate accolade: you did not spit the dummy.
Genius is cack-handed.
Our voices our so innocent we dare not speak at all.
Some highly skilled and specialised people in the popular cultural industries have a lot of hubris. They are proud of the silliest things. On the other hand, if you're lucky like me, you've had the pleasure of working with technically skilled people who are also humble. How can you pick them? You do not forget their names, nor do you lose their phone numbers.
Say I want to be famous, have no particular aptitude for the arts, yet possess a moderately competent, dull-normal writing ability. I would write about popular culture, hoping to attact some attention.
The expression 'There is no time to waste' has two meanings.
Then again, there are many people I would like to accuse of wasting their time, but I have two problems. The first is that I don't seem to be able to form any conception of time that isn't self-contradictory. The second is that I do not understand where waste could go in this universe, such that it is no longer useful, somewhere, to some living thing.
He is not doing what I value, and I do not understand what he is doing: he is wasting his time.
There is no cure for happiness.
They show you their confidence, which is strong: but their confidence is constructed out of their own hardened shame.
Mirroring the shadow is done unconsciously, as the shadow is not conscious.
Metal techno doesn't exist yet, and we haven't done any, but it might be interesting to try to talk it into existence by pretending it's already here. This is called tactical reification.
The critic was dubious. ‘What is it?’
I said, ‘It’s a new mode of transport that owes a lot to the horse and cart. I call it a car.’
‘Hmmm,’ said the critic, and dubiously rubbed one of the tyres with his shoe. ‘Interesting.’ But he wasn't very interested, and was already looking over my shoulder for someone more important.
There was a pause, while he formulated his thoughts, and I listened to the birds. At last he said, with some irritation, 'But it just doesn’t quite have the feel of a horse-drawn carriage, does it? You can’t beat that good old clippety-clop feel, no matter how well you imitate it. Still, nice try', he lied, and shook my hand. And very quickly, he was gone, as he had seen someone famous who had set up a stall across the road with free drinks and cheese.
Avoiding mass spectacles, going down the side alleys, hoping to catch some precious little event, a private performance just for her.
You describe them in music, and a few months later they walk into your life. Be careful.
Hell is heaven tipping over, and heaven is hell dispersing.
Writers are liars. They fantasize, confabulate, and connive. When you question them, they fly into a rage, knowing they have been found out, unable to accept themselves.
To communicate with the utmost clarity, saying exactly what you mean, so that nothing is in the shade; this is unforgivable.
If they say they are nihilists, this commitment alone proves they are not.
This idea that you exercise creativity solely through what you consume is a corporate invention with obvious utility. Though it is a way of keeping the general public in its place, it may be also one of the key reasons a previously vibrant scene eventually falls stagnant.
Scenes in music are electric when there's a palpable sense that everyone can do it - and that sense is also a reality: everyone is doing it! You look around - my God, your useless mates who can't even microwave their dinner are suddenly cranking out tracks and releasing them around the world! This other friend of yours has started a label or a clothing store, your partner has got the Singer out and is running up crazy looking dress designs and selling them at the local record shop, and getting orders in from all other the place; someone else is making a film or some videoclips, all on a shoestring, and they look great...
A scene eventually dies when money comes into the picture and the free-for-all is formalised by business and legal requirements into a more rigid structure consisting of two camps - the stars, who produce (or who take the role of the producer in the public eye), and the cattle, who consume. This arrangement is dissatisfying to both parties and cannot be maintained for more than a few years. In the end, it kills that particular scene by starving it of exterior inspiration; and the corpses which remain turn into a fertile mulch, providing base nutrition for the next scene.
The perspective that has the dissatisfied customer saying,'feed me something else' is not the one that is going to create a solution.
It's a tragedy that he has seen enough to know the emptiness of masks, but not enough to see the necessity of masks.
It's a circus without clowns, and so we emerge dazzled but none the wiser.
She creates and she listens back, but the creator and the listener are two different people. They exist in a partnership which is grounded in inevitability and a hands-in-the-dirt realism. It is not a contest, nor an uneasy truce any more. One brush with insanity is sufficient for a person to get the joke, if they have a sense of humour.
Our wishes for financial security, recognition, the opportunity to travel, and an exciting and fulfilling love life are sometimes met, sometimes not. If our wish was simply to be killed and brought back to life, we would never be disappointed.
We would rather say something less commonplace. Something wild and a little feverish, likely to cause a sensation. What we are afraid of is what happens after we've attracted idiots to the cause.
The creative impulse is apparently not target focused. Music, cooking, writing, talking, walking, it's all the same. However, within certain more or less contrived social constraints, the quickest route to expression is always favoured.
Upon realisation that your interest has waned, you may also wonder, 'is my life dead or am I tired of it?' This is a strikingly passive stance. There is no thought of getting involved, creating, or altering the process in any way. It is the consummatory attitude of a diner, who, unimpressed with the food, has no aspiration to go to the kitchen and get involved with the cooking.
It's not that time flies when you're having fun. It's that the illusion of time disappears when you don't have time to think about time.
It's there, but you can't see it. So you say nothing's there, and needlessly get into trouble. You should say, "There is something there, but I don't know what it is". It's so simple.
It hasn't happened yet, and they are to blame. Maybe I should be getting on their collective cases. Or maybe they and I are being separated from each other by natural causes, in which case meeting them at all would be an attempt to swim upstream into my past, away from an unknown future.
He has yet to encounter a problem that cannot be solved by inaction, silence, effortlessness, or some artful combination of the three. However, he sometimes finds it sorts things out more quickly to pretend there's some point of issue. Sometimes it even helps for him to pretend to be angry. People think he's taking them seriously, which of course he is, in a way.
They counter her honest but unexplored perspective by sharing an irrelevant joke at her expense. She counters by becoming even more irrelevant, and irreverent, than they are. They have no answer to that trick, which is completely unexpected. They depended upon her embarrassing herself through a sincere and passionate defence, thereby strengthening their group solidarity and marking her as a permanent outsider - it has worked a thousand times before. But she seems uninterested in defending anything, and has apparently forgotten the point of dispute altogether: they are nonplussed. She has not won, but neither has she lost. Characteristically, her technique and the result she seeks via the technique are somehow identical.
I suppose she allows herself to be wounded in order to write with the blood.
One can lay open the situation to others, then hold out a net to catch the return volley. Out the stones, brickbats, grapeshot and shrapnel something can be made.
Revealing aperspectival vision to a body of writers in any field is like teasing a pack of dogs with a stick.
Just as you must kill an animal before you can eat it, you must give new music a name before you can make money out of it.
You do not feel disposed to argue; therefore the boundaries become permeable and you may travel.
Artists do not see movements and genres come and go. They change shape with the changing of shape.
If you are an artist, and you believe that art consists of a succession of movements, that belief alone will turn you into a critic.
"That's another reason I want to be famous", she said, "so I can be in a celebrity car race."
So they revel in cracking and scratching the surface, looking for whatever might be underneath. If there is something there, they are rewarded. If there is nothing, they are accused of vandalism.
One year a beautiful little blue flower grew, but was soon cast into the shade by a large dung heap. “Well”, thought the little flower, “It’s better to be beautiful and ignored than ugly and noticed”. But, on further reflection, she began to realise that what she really wanted was revenge.
Of all the perceptive people on earth, none are more perceptive than those who compliment us on our personalities.
One group fills in the gaps, while another opens the gaps. The latter are afraid to stare too hard, and this preserves them. They feel contempt for the former group, and their contempt is returned with indifference.
We are masks for each other.
Alcohol is a fuel for absurdity.
I had fallen into conversation at the market with him after he had talked and some vegetarian food had been served. I greeted him rather awkwardly with my hands together at my lips, bowing slightly. "No, not like that, but like this, at the heart", he said, lowering my hands to my chest. "It is much more effective that way. Did you hear my talk?" "Only from about ten minutes from before the food was served", I replied. "Ah!", he said, "You heard it all!" Although he looked as if he were Hindu and was Indian, with a silky black beard which I spontaneously began to stroke as he held my hands, we were talking about Buddhism, or more properly, the nature of Buddhahood, the enlightened state. He must have been speaking about the difference between the two, as I was encouraged to say, unconsciously imitating his speech cadences, "Even a person who openly rejects Buddhism, or who has never heard of it, can not be rejected as necessarily not a..." but my speech faltered, as I had constructed my sentence with too many double negatives, and at any rate, he must have already grasped the intended meaning, because he whisked me over to a group of ten nuns on the border, sitting in two rows, and gestured to them, saying, "Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?". Then he immediately drew me over to a stall next to the nuns, where educational text books, many copies of the one book, were displayed protruding from the carboard boxes in which they had been packed. He gave me one. It was a thick, soft, colour compendium of recommended toys for children. The page fell open at a chapter on mechano, including diagrams of a mechano aircraft. However, the writing was too small to read, and I was already waking up.
When there is nothing exterior to which it can direct attention, inner speech begins to direct attention to itself, creating inner dialogue.
It is dark, dark, dark in this world that spewed out of his fingertips. There is gallows humour. I haven't read one good review for this record. Whenever I listen to it I hear demons dancing inside a mind of stony indifference. He must have mastered the art of controlling demons by exiting from the building.
"Observe how I move from the abstract to the particular!", she announced, not unselfconscious in her appreciation of her own beauty.
"How do you do it?" I asked, because I did not have her faculty with words and simply wanted to get to the point, perhaps for my own advantage.
"I do it by finesse", she replied, and the answer was rather deflating for me, because she had not revealed any secrets.
"What is the nature of your finesse?" I asked, because I was aware she was playing a game, teasing me into asking more questions.
"My finesse", she declared proudly, and at that moment she seemed to me like Joan of Arc, holding a shield, ascended to mythology, "my finesse lies only in my capacity to confound by solving".
The sound began as a howl, which before too long splayed out into the horizon as great, long tendrils of thought. Warmed and fattened by the sun, it became poetry. Soon the elegant sentences became joyfully aware of their own importance, and began to blush, colour and fatten into eulogies, laments and prayers; each of which developed its own sprays and branches, bearing fruit that turned golden, hardened and became metallic, solid, smooth, unbreakable, unyielding, magnetic, attractive and repulsive, disputational in nature. The silver and golden cords began to overlap and overtake one another, tying knots, unravelling, pushing through, defining spaces, invading, twisting, rejecting, supporting, undermining. Finally they all locked together, and there was no more room to move. Then, because the force of the howl that began all this was unabated, the knots and coils began to heat, glow, vibrate, sizzle and liquefy until they sprang apart, molten and potentiated. Freed, they were propelled again, singing, humming, beating and so on as dictated by their shape, size, density and composition, forming dizzying sonic terraces like a swarm of insects, generating musical patterns, each of which folded under the mass of sound and was instantly superseded. Shooting up higher into the sky, they lost their density and began to dance, converging, dividing and exploding into astonishing shapes and textures and filligrees, mutating, revolving as brilliant atoms of violet, indigo, blue, green yellow and red, arching, resonating as electrical fields, far, far beyond language, in the realm of pure play, where philosophy ends, and music prevails.
Some people think a fool is someone who doesn't know some fact; or who is so open-hearted and trusting he doesn't know he is being ridiculed; or who doesn't know how to defend herself; or who subscribes to an unfashionable viewpoint.
A fool, though, is really someone who takes the moral highground.
The latter kind of fool not only deserves our ridicule; such ridicule is our social obligation. These fools steal the happiness and the lives of others. To ridicule her, though, is a fine art, and a profession, and a dangerous job, suitable only for those with great courage, subtlety and genius. Not everybody who is merely wise can lay claim to being a natural comedian. To kill a fool, you must be a fool - for the purposes of killing only.
They came here for a reason, or, at least, with a certain feeling of excitement, but when they had arrived, there was silence and inactivity, all of them having forgotten what the reason was - or perhaps the idea had flown, or had hidden like a fox, or maybe, some were already saying, there never had been any idea after all.
Some of them left at once in search of dinner and a show. Others raged and fulminated, unable to find the idea anywhere, and resorted to kicking things and storming out, loudly slamming doors behind them. Silence descended at once.
Only a few were left. They started to work, hardly knowing what they were doing, their confidence and pleasure growing as the thing began to take form.
Ethics are simple rules for those who are too thick to act morally.
Snakelike, he has squeezed himself through many changes over fifteen years to keep himself in the public eye. He is a pathological diplomat, a mystery to himself. Always, he names the right names, going no deeper than required, for he does not want to cause unease. As he brings forth the shibboleths and codes, his audience visibly relaxes. He is one of them, and will remain so, until their fortune wanes. One of them may hence discover him, miles away, in a new place, a new town, wearing new clothes, speaking a new language to a new coterie of endowed young princes, basking with great dignity in what they truly believe will be an eternal good fortune.
She is neither meretricious nor duplicitous, but she reminds me of a writer, in that when she says ‘he’, she may mean ‘me’, ‘she’, ‘you’, ‘they’ or even ‘it’. She seems to use these terms interchangeably, or perhaps for their poetry, as the mood takes her, ratcheting up from her personal experience - if they are grounded there, because it is hard to say – to the general, the abstract, and the performative. Moreover, it is clear that the view she describes may not be hers. However, it is equally clear that she never lies.
Her indecision is so charming and irresistible that we all play up on it, encourage it, and ultimately reinforce it. We're not doing her any favours.
This country is a good breeding ground for talent, because it is hostile to talent. What survives here, survives there.
The first friend you meet when you enter the creative world is boredom. He wants to share some quality time with you.
If they live in Melbourne, and you live in Brisbane, they say you are Japanese, because you're closer to Tokyo than anyone else they know.
By imagining their urges have lives outside of themselves, as exterior demons and so on, by attempting to contrive a distance between themselves and their instincts, they hope to sup with a longer spoon.
The occultist is a stolidly unrepentant romantic who has disowned and projected all his nasty urges.
She's a pseudo-intellectual, parading the breadth of her reading for its own sake.
Some of them notice every colour and name. Some of them can’t even remember their own name. Steeped in the liminal, they have forgotten how to excogitate, and move through the world like solid ghosts, living in the still space just behind intent.
When things get nightmarish, the nightmare itself may be sufficient to wake you up. When things get too dull, you may drift asleep again. Perhaps we cannot dream properly unless we are thoroughly deluded.
When dealing with humourless people who only want to get ahead at your expense, intimidate them by being extremely, unforgivingly precise and clear.
Eventually, I came to see no value in a permanent state of wakefulness. It was spoiling my fun. So now I prefer to dream on oblivious, though I still wake up from time to time, disturbed from my slumber by the indigestion of insight.
Many musicians prefer dull, mechanical jobs even if they take up most of the working week. The reason is that if the job is sufficiently dull, the brain begins to hum a little tune.
The creation of the discipline of psychology depended on thought becoming an insomniac.
Studying the mind is like making a fist out of thought.
His web diary is full of lamentations about the purposeless of his life. Sometimes he talks knowledgeably about this or that cultural artifact or tradition. Sometimes he pines for a purpose, a task, or a life's work he feels sure must be waiting for him at some time in the future. His yearning is so intense it becomes a prayer which keens into the ether, unrecorded by any angel or master being.
I think that the web diary itself is his masterpiece. Although I want to tell him, I prefer it that he doesn't know, or maybe I'm afraid he already knows it. If the former, why make him self-conscious? If the latter, why show a magician the mechanics behind his own trick?
They are agamic, much the same as they were ten years ago. Hard as nails in the beginning, they had nowhere to go but tighter, harder, faster and more complicated. They were surprising at first, but now they never surprise anyone. That is why, in spite of feigning outsider status, they appeal only to the ossified in mind and spirit, the mentally prematurely aged, the subliminally fearful, the ones who do not want to be surprised any more.
The moon is desolate. If you were to be king of the moon, you would have total power over a dead world.
Nevertheless, there are those who aspire to be king of the moon. Vanquishing their enemies, they compete for the honour of ruling over a barren wasteland.
You work between two poles, at the exact point at which there is no gravitational pull to either extreme. People shout from each pole, saying, 'What are you doing? Come to my end, where everything has already been worked out.'
You catch yourself knowing too much, and think, 'that can only lead to trouble'.
Your choices becomes less governed by taste, and more situational, more instrumental. Music, in particular, is a powerful thing. It is an active ingredient. You add the appropriate music at the appropriate time, without holding any of it close to your heart.
Persuasion is completely beside the point. Even those who say they understand usually don't - especially those who say they understand.
Religion is a cavalcade of con artists and their dupes.
Authoritarianism: the authority dispenses what she believes is wisdom, and expects only devotion in return. Thoughts or views not emanating from, or reflecting, the her views are not permitted to flow back up the tree. The authoritarian is fueled only by unconditional love.
When you meet someone like this on the net, you can make your excuses and leave. They will not follow you as you are of no use.
I don't think that much of value to anyone can be achieved by posing yourself, and looking at your own life as others would. I think you have to work from the inside out. You examine, develop and refine your materials and your methods, not your self-image. The reason is that you wish to avoid becoming a trope or a type. There must always be surprise and change, or the result is not true. Truth in life is not in accurate representation, but in the implicit acknowledgement of change.
Some people think that being an artist is a matter of showing us their lives. "Look, here I am having sex, here I am taking a dump - I'm an artist!"
On the other hand, there is an art to both these activities.
History alters to accommodate the hypocrite.
Being a pyromaniac, I launch outrageous propositions for the pleasure of watching them burn.
When considering creative partners, it can be helpful to distinguish, not between egotists and non-egotists, but between those who are willing to keep going and those who are determined to stay put.
The greatest curse is not to know how to sell out.
Following the dictum, 'the mistake is the hidden intention', seize upon your weaknesses and explore their permutations relentlessly, to the exclusion of all else, loudly and firmly proclaiming your genius.
Any pyromaniac with real ambition is going to move into explosives sooner or later.
If you want to live in the modern world without coffee, sugar, and alcohol, well, good luck pal. One day without at least one representative of the unholy trinity is sufficient to bring forth the realisation that we are all mad.
Avoid befriending authors, less you become immortal.
No-one is more debauched than an idealist.
Just because it's obvious, doesn't mean it's not worth saying over and over.
Is the player piano roll digital or analogue?
Those who make toys have no use for them.
Edit down to the bones; or, if you wish to attract leeches, flesh everything out.
Overplaying the diplomat persona, you show yourself to be untrustworthy to everyone. Underplaying the same persona, you show the world that you cannot see a situation from any other angle but your own.
This it is done as method acting. It is interpersonal systems analysis, applied and embodied as behaviour. It is also a form of shapeshifting, if you are comfortable with that word.
I think I enjoyed reading Weininger for the same reason I enjoy a cheesy horror movie - grotesquery is horribly fascinating. Weininger is really a gothic writer: he combines the commonplace, and the keenly observed, with the bizarre and the incredible. Everything is lashed forcibly together with hooks and wires that dig into the skin. He constructs monsters that almost walk.
Abstraction is the most effective form of revenge.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that there is a laughing competition, and on the board to judge this competition are the cream of our cultural laughing stock. Respected and envied by their peers, they loom large on the face of joke culture, and have been laughing all their lives. They know talent when they hear it.
Sorting though the hopefuls, they select carefully, on the basis of learned discussion, argument, and who they know. One by one the young jokers perform for the judges; one by one they meet their fate: joy or tears.
The technique behind laughter is well understood by the judges. Then, also, each has his or her speciality: the guffaw, the sneer, the chuckle, the giggle, the heehaw. Where appropriate, they defer to each other on matters of specialist expertise: such matters as tuning, rhythm, melodic progression, intonation, dynamic range and so on are understood to be at the heart of a good laugh. The technique of many of the contestants is razor sharp, prodigious, precocious. The most skilled jokers effortlessly traverse 1/32 and 1/64 notes. They employ pleasing portamentos and vibratos; they invest strong and moving emotional touches to their phrasing, to create an agreeable complexity; and they make pretty melodies.
Where technique is lacking, this is pointed out; where it is present, the judges are effusive and encouraging.
If it should happen that the judges encounter genuine laughter, they are embarassed - for themselves, or for the performer, they are not sufficiently awake to tell. The technique of such a one is frequently lacking, for she is not thinking of perfecting technique. Rather, she laughs because she is amused. The judges may even laugh back, -a different kind of laugh - a laugh of ridicule betraying, possibly, a subterranean fear of humiliation. Perhaps they feel, around the borders of their tunnel consciousness, that they might have been exposed, made fun of. Do they sneer at the performer? Or is the homunculus who sails imperiously over the surface of their waters, the one who is playing master, sneering at the depths? Even a puppet master can, for his own amusement or the amusement of others, have the puppet ridicule the puppet master’s technique. As for the genuine laughter artist, there are no glittering prizes for her. However, she is not too dismayed. It is a comedy.
One can be non-mediocre, brilliant even, but still a fool. Conversely, one can be an ordinary person with no particular aspirations over and above doing a simple job well, and become wise. I've known a few up-themselves people in my time - but not recently. I evicted all fools, mediocre or talented, from my life almost a decade ago. I still encounter them occasionally of course. I treat these bores with the utmost civility.
She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But I do. Why should we feel contempt for the mediocre, I ask her? It’s bad manners to despise someone for lacking good looks, or money, or education - so why not talent, insight, or wisdom as well? The foolish man knows in his bones he lacks all three, that his security is highly specialised and dependent on ready public access to certain facts, facts he has at his disposal and will not share unless forced to do so. But he feels the lack of something overarching, and is angry in an ill-defined, restless way. He will pick on you, because you are torturing him. He senses your freedom, you are not dragging chains of quite the same weight, nor moving through such dense air.
But, she says, you suffer a fool to make foolish decisions on your behalf. And I think, you know, maybe she’s right not to suffer fools gladly. My life may have been different if I had been less patient with fools.
And I think about it further, and realise, well, if you become exasperated with a fool, the fool is using you up. To treat the foolish with respect must involve something else, something skillful and self-protective, some kind of nuance or subtlety that saves energy so one can concentrate on one's larger purpose or interest without unnecessary distraction.
Here's what I think it means to suffer fools gladly. One keeps one's distance and does not rouse the nest. One's manners remain impeccable. One excuses the fool from one's life, and with great decorum and ceremony, shows her out of the house. Isn't this how an experienced bouncer removes a drunk from a club? When we see a bouncer gently, and with great respect, leading a troublemaker from the room, it's as if he's showing the fool to his limousine. His expression remains courteous and detached, and he neither tugs nor pushes. He takes his time and never embarasses his guest. He is the very model of good etiquette. This is what it means to suffer a fool gladly.
Now, this woman I know does not suffer fools, and rarely evicts one with much grace. She likes to give them a kick in the behind as they leave, even. But then again, I rarely evict a fool at all until the damage is done. She is missing the mark, but so am I. Dealing patiently with a fool is not simply a matter of patiently putting up with him as he messes up your program. Rather, it is an elaborately polite ceremony of respectful eviction of the fool from the domains of one's life in which his aggressive promulgation of his own agenda or skill at any cost to you is neither required nor welcomed.
There’s that bird again, the one that always sings at this hour, the one you only ever hear when you’re aware in the early morning hours. It is a cool, smooth, damp, eerily dipping sound, irresistibly tied in your imagination to this hour and this place.
So when the situation starts to unfold rapidly, you also unfold rapidly - no effort required.
Many of us read blogs backwards through time, delving further and further back into the archives. I don't know if this is an unusual practice. Blog reading becomes archaelogical when one reads back from the present to the past. Running themes appear out of the blue. It's disorienting but you get used to it: mysteries appear, and then are resolved, as you read further and further back and get a retrospective handle on the causation. You uncover the conditions of change in the writer's life much as you do in real life: first you see the face of a stranger, then, as you come to know them, you begin to understand why their faces are lined and scarred.
You become a famous psychoanalyst, an explosives expert, or a world authority on the I Ching. You have all this knowledge, and ultimately this is all you learn. Every skill you acquire leads you back to the kernel. This is why, even though neither of us know anything much about botany, or particle physics, or pottery, or cordon bleu cooking, we have enough in common with you to spend a pleasant evening together talking about what matters most. Drifting away from our institutes of learning, we become curious about this: the way that a self-possessed individual finally finds a wellspring of courage and strays from the path.
What’s the difference between an artist and a critic? There are a thousand answers to this question, some with more merit than others. However if we compress out minds into the shape of a professional critic’s mind, several things immediately become apparent on introspection. One, we are in the theoretical domain of a battle of wills. Two, we have strategies at our disposal to defend, attack, advance, retreat, observe and unify. All this is done through thought and linguistic concepts. The critic’s eye is acute and peers through holes in the battlements, or scans from a hill or the sky like a general.
Now, when we relax our mind to think like a true artist (false artists are much more common of course; they are people who profess to be artists but actually the ground troops paid by critics in fame and money to fight their wars), we see lines of battle which may be freely traversed. The critics appear to be at war over scarce resources. There is territory to defend, territory to scorch, territory to overwhelm. True artists feel like scavengers, moving freely where they choose, dodging the draft. Occasionally they may bump into a critic who will wonder what they are doing getting in the way. Happily, no critic fires at a true artist, because, in the game of battlefield strategy, they are neither much of an asset nor much of a liability. Such an artist is little better than a rather irritating presence, like a bird looping across the field of a dramatic struggle for survival played out between lions and hyenas. The true artist is free to go about her business without attracting undue attention; and her business is to roam free, investigating interesting situations.
I think it's necessary, really, for the weirdo to come out of the closet and not be a shrinking violet about his or her strangeness - even if such strangeness is only sporadic rather than chronic. There seems to be no doubt that many people love and treasure harmless but interesting weirdos. I know I certainly do.
Never apologise for being a weirdo. Many of my friends are quite eccentric, and I would be horrified if any one of them became apologetic about their uniqueness. I would rather normal people apologised for not being weird enough.
As for people laying strangeness trips on us for our weird behaviour the question becomes this: how do we protect ouselves from losing confidence in such a situation?
I would like to know your answers to this very important question, as every weirdo could use the tools and techniques to avoid being undermined simply for not following minor social rules. I think the answer has to do with systematically ridding yourself of all forms of self-monitoring. Self monitoring is the process by which one says 'what am I doing?', 'is this appropriate?', 'did I just come over as an idiot?' and so on. That inner voice might be attenuated, or even disappear completely - making one that most envied of souls, the completely unselfconscious weirdo.
It's been said here and there that creativity is aligned with mental illness. The evidence cited is usually correlative, which is to say, there is plenty of evidence that mental illness is more prevalent in the artistic community than in the general community (incidentally, what a Victorian curio is that phrase, ‘mental illness’ – a sickness in the mind).
Correlations... they are the very devil. They invite us to draw causal relations where none have been established. Poverty is higher in the artistic community than the general community too? Are we going to conclude that poverty is congenial to art? Are you an artist? Do you find it really helps not to be able to afford to repair your equipment, buy your paints and canvas, pay the rent? Do you get the album finished more quickly because you break a guitar string and can’t afford to replace it? Because you can’t afford a studio, a rehearsal room, a CD burner to run off demos? Or does it hinder your creativity? It's the latter, isn't it? Poverty and being creative are correlated, they go hand-in-hand, but the former does not cause the latter. Maybe being creative causes poverty though! However, even though this seems more plausible, the correlation itself is no evidence. We can’t conclude anything causal from a correlation.
‘Oh, but poverty makes you resourceful’. No it doesn’t. Being aware of resources make you resourceful. Poverty just limits your resources. A good thing? How is that a good thing? It's an imposition to have limited resources: an imposition which we accept and work around, because we have no choice.
Insanity might be the demon that destroys creativity. It might just be the searing delusion of personal grandeur, resplendant in hallucinatory visions of self-reference and destiny, with all the attendant paranoia, that undoes an artist. Now, that might be worth considering.
Plenty of great art has been made by people who went through periods of mental instability. However, we are not entitled to assume that what we admire in the likes of Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson, Brian Wilson and others was created from their insanity. It seems more plausible that it was created from their sanity, since their productive years were also their sane years. When they lost their sanity, they were unable to create comprehensible art.
'Oh, but they were really, really inspired on the run-up to the full-blown psychosis'. Isn't that tantamount to saying they were at their most creative when they were sane yet full of energy? Is that conclusion too obvious and commonsensical to be exciting to our romantic sensibilities? Or would we be equally comfortable saying that the acceleration of a car is caused by the crash that results from accelerating too much? The form of the argument which claims that insanity assists with creativity is the same, and equally absurd.
Sanity is definitely underrated, as it does not fit in with our rather romantic artistic schema. However, if an artist can give to his or her audience a dose of genuine sanity, what more is required?
Barrow's paradox holds wherever some piece of advice cannot be given without the giver of the advice contradicting herself. For example, 'human beings should never follow general principles of behaviour' falls prey to Barrow's paradox. Such statements may well be true: however, to make them is always self-contradictory. So, to avoid Barrow's paradox, one should lead by example, rather than by giving advice. And I see I am now falling prey to Barrow's paradox myself.
A special case of Barrow's paradox very relevant to web discussion groups is the principle that some disputes are best resolved by not getting involved - and yet, one cannot point this out to the disputants without getting involved. The canonical example is the response of list members to a troll in the forum. The troller gets various members' backs up; they react by naming the poster as a troll and an attention-seeker; and, before too long, the temperature rises to flaming point, people firing off all kinds of posts which they may later regret. Now, the best way to deal with a troller is to disregard the post. Eventually the trolling will extinguish due to lack of positive reinforcement.
What's reinforcing about becoming notorious, and why does a troller seek negative or hostile attention? Perhaps it's just that having negative attention is more reinforcing than having no attention at all. If this were true, then negative attention, up to a point at least, would be preferable to being shunned by all and sundry. This is the troller's predicament. No-one likes him. Everybody hates him. He has no friends. He has little experience with positive attention and praise. What's a lonely guy to do? Stir up some trouble! Off he goes! In fairness, haven't we all felt the thrill of notoriety from time to time? Isn't it just a little bit of a rush to have complete strangers arguing with each other about you, even if much of it's negative stuff? Does Marilyn Manson get a kick out of being blacklisted by fundamentalist Christian groups? Does he seek to provoke them? Do you cheer him on? We can relate to the troller, I think.
So, when dealing with the persistent troll (who should be distinguished from the penitent troll) it's understood that the way to get rid of a troll is to let his incendiary posts fall by the wayside. However, not everyone on a typical forum understands this principle to the extent of allowing it to guide their behaviour. Those who post to the effect that 'this is a sad person, ignore him' are just feeding the troll! Those who post to the thread saying, 'let's let this thread die' are keeping the thread alive! How to teach someone to allow a disputation to pass unstoked, without contributing to the stoking? There is no way. Those who understand the troll dynamic post nothing, and thereby demonstrate their understanding. Those who try to contribute to an understanding of the troll dynamic by posting advice thereby demonstrate their failure to understand it. I'm not the first person to point this out. But I am the first person to realise that, in so doing, I am falling prey to Barrow's paradox.
There's also the obvious point to be made that the most complex machine in a modern studio is a human brain. However, many electronic artists seem to use their gear as prosthetic devices, or brain-substitutes. It's as if they are afraid of themselves. Or, more accurately perhaps, the intellectual/planning part of their brain is afraid of their deep, instinctual brain. This affliction, too, is not limited to music or to the arts, but is a problem of life. I don't want to know who's using what piece of advanced gear or what new techniques are being developed, whether they're playing this or that piece of gear etc etc. I want to know what kind of person they are.
Almost all Kraftwerk's songs were about some kind of new fangled technological innovation or other. Do people really get very excited about technological innovation per se any more? I wonder if the very idea of Kraftwerk is a thing of the past. In about 500 years, Kraftwerk lyrics will be like Chan poetry, because the innovation factor will have evaporated entirely from everyone's perception of the lyrics. "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" will sound like "I carry water and chop wood". People will go, "wow, they found mystery in their commonplace, rustic daily activities."
Wandering off the beaten track, we are drawn, some of us, to abandoned follies. Abandoned websites by the million, some of them still with active chat lists, which echo occasionally with solitary voices: “Hello? Is anybody there?”
I love to fetch up in areas where a great deal of thought and time has been put into an operation, installation, or structure to no avail. I hesitate to speculate on my motives. What is driving this fascination with architectural failure? Schadenfreude? Identification? Or – and this is the motive I wish you to believe, because I am vain – is it that I recognise the essential beauty of futility, and its concordance with the predicament of the lonely universe? For God is alone, and divides Himself up to maintain the illusion of company. However, He is endlessly drawn back by that frisson of cosmic fear to His true nature: the Only Being, the Lonely Being. The Atheist.
Not just lonely enclosures; but also, lonely little things. A little orchid growing just behind my neighbour's back fence. A tape left in a cupboard from a decade ago which unconsciously records a conversation between several friends at a barbecue – because someone hit record when they should’ve hit play. I want to gather these things, and gather myself, collect my thoughts. It was here, but no-one came.
Bandwagon jumping skills are essential to musical survival, unless you want to play the equally valid but rather less exciting game of keeper of the flame and update records, gather unreleased material, correct other scholars, and generally camp it up as a stroppy but necessary figure in the dusty libraries of musical history.
The bandwagon jumper is a different fish. The adept bandwagon jumper rarely jumps from the ground; rather, she jumps, catlike, from one wagon to another. Some wagons move slowly; some move quickly. The swifter wagons are only jumped by the adept, the gymnastic, the highly courageous. Then, as well, there are many intellectual and planning factors to digest before one dares a jump: there is the speed of one’s own bandwagon; the moods, tempers and attitudes of the bandwagon to which you wish to jump (sometimes the groups is welcoming, sometimes hostile); and so on.
The adept jump on bandwagons that are only about a quarter full of very hard working artists playing the we-are-visionary game. They take over through the magnetic force of their personalities and their business sense.
Never jump on a bandwagon that is already full. There is no room for you unless you jump on top of their heads. They will get annoyed; they will probably kick you off. You may end up under the wheels, or rolled over by the next bandwagon that comes along. Also, a full bandwagon is uncomfortable for everyone aboard. There is so little room that no-one can move or do any work. They travel more slowly as they are heavier, and there is a risk that the wheel axles will break under the combined load. Everyone falls in a heap, and some are squashed. It is, as best, embarassing and undignified; and it is not always easy to catch a fast moving bandwagon from a standing position on the road.
So when is the best time to jump on a bandwagon? If, like us, you are not a charismatic, adept gymnast, but a slow moving, perplexed little tortoise, by far the best time to jump a wagon is when the genre it represents is beginning to smell. It is beginning to be uncool: so uncool that even the uncool people are jumping ship, even though this time last year they were sticky with it like Pooh in a honeypot! See the suckers run and jump!
You don’t need to be travelling at any great speed to jump a bandwagon like this: it’s already coming to a slow halt. Run up alongside it. Ease yourself on. Take a walk around, familiarise yourself. Pick up the bits and pieces people have left behind. Turn them over, examine them in the light. Scrub the decks until they no longer smell of money. Get to know the engine and the steering wheel; the sleeping quarters; the kitchen. It’s yours now. Take your little wagon wherever you like.
Astonishing, given the cadences of his prose, their gentle intensity, and his love of the human world, the quivering spirit in each of us, that he was never moved to write music. Then again, being able to fire that arrow directly to the heart with words alone, maybe he is in no need of that medium, since after all his prose is almost poetry, a music of words.
She must have a problem with pride, she thinks to herself, because she seems to be always meeting arrogant, talentless types from her past who are now doing a lot better than her. Or maybe they're being set up for a fall, and her lesson is simply to be patient and forebearing? She doesn't know, but really hates having her nose rubbed in it.
That great sigil, the Cosmos, really makes a mockery of the lesser sigil I will call 'my fate'.
He was a fine chef, and every night he would cook simple, unusual meals with fresh ingredients, but few people ever came, preferring the glossily rich prandium of the suavely urbane eatery across the road. So, every night he would cook, and every night he would eat his own food. ‘Even if no-one else wants my food, excellent though it is’, he would muse, ‘I have the benefit of enjoying it myself.’ And as he ate his own food every night, he became imbued with its benefits, and gradually became simple and unusual in himself.
Heaven itself is a haven for criminals
A man made a wish, and his world promptly fell apart. He thought to himself, 'This is the wish: it is making its presence felt'.
She said, "Institutional Christianity is the religion of flock conformity. Satanism is better, because it at least rejects the mediocrity of social approval. But there's something beyond both".
He said, "It's called nothingism."
She said, "Don't give it a name".
"Such vanity", muttered the Controller of Reputations, "to put his name about when he isn't even famous".
There were seven corridors, each one beholden in a kind of non-sentient trance to the one beneath. The shallowest level opened out to courtyards with gargoyles and fountains; further down they resembled office and hospital corridors, with no people present, until finally the lowest level was a road through a tunnel, with empty cars crashing, one after the other, in slow motion, forever: the sound was a kind of agony of buckling metal, brakes and glass, and was not without a certain horrific beauty.
It is an ingenious machine, a transforming engine, which turns the animus of another into adamantine, transparent light geometry.
'There's a lot of fascinating, delightfully entertaining people out there who really have nothing of substance to offer', L told me. 'They can be detected easily. The trick is that you simply appear to them as if you are not useful to them, yet do not wish to be their follower. You will be brushed off within a few seconds. On the other hand, there are others, far less numerous admittedly, who will instantly recognize you as a status-free person; not that they will do anything about it.'
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that is why he mixes with people who neither know nor care about such things. As for the experts, he is probably waiting for their knowledge to fragment, shatter, and fly away - but that is unlikely to happen, so why did it happen to him?
Despite his evident genius, he is prickly, and waspish, and therefore one is able to discern from these tendencies toward pomposity that he has further work to do, not that anyone need tell him.
It's miraculous to me that, when others are offensive to her, she is not offended. It may be that they cannot disinter any hate or fear, because she has none, which is, in itself, quite remarkable to me. Also remarkable is that no-one else seems to notice her extraordinary qualities in this regard; and that she does not care that they do not notice.
'Compassion fatigue' is of course an oxymoron. False compassion exists so people don't have to look at true compassion, which is rather more direct and brutal than many people can bear.
All art is a mediation on chanelling the large into the small. If we feel frustration in the morning when we review what we accomplished last night, it may be because we see that, in spite of our best efforts, it remains a fact that the large cannnot be channelled into the small. If the frustration melts into proud fatherhood over time, and we come to see the merits of our little work, it may be due to the realisation that the small already contains the large.
A child fantasizes about all kinds of things - marrying its opposite sex parent, sucking on the teat of the universe forever, making the cosmos bow down before its primal urges, smearing the cosmos with faeces, having mummy bring it whatever it wants when it cries, and other fantasies of omnipotence.
As we grow older, we learn to sublimate these very basic urges into blogs, music, and becoming a person of saocial worth. For example, instead of smearing faeces around, we publish a learned critique of someone's scientific theory - especially if they remind us of one of our parents. We still fantasise about omnipotence and the trailing of clouds of glory, but within a more socially acceptable framework.
Infantile wish fulfillment occurs where an adult actually does consummate one of these basic, id-driven, polymorpheously perverse fantasies. Many gurus are like this. They have been protected from the reality principle by their overindulgent mothers. They grow up and become big babies.
This is connected to the oceanic feeling in this way. The child experience bliss and unity with the cosmos in that whenever a need arises, the mother appears and satisfies it. Sucking on the Good Breast, the child feels warm, blissful and unified with the mother. Later, the Good Breast (or Good Mother) may be idealised as a feminine principle of universal bliss and compassion in which one can be absorbed, cossetted and protected. The feeling of bliss that results is intense and is felt as a profound religious enlightenment. All gurus have oceanic feelings of unity with the universe, which cannot be maintained without devotees. This is how society makes big babies.
Lack of insight has a protective function, and is the chief reason why so few journalists kill themselves.
What he is, he hates to see in others. Moreover, what other have that he does not have, he affects to despise, as he loathes competition. He will therefore associate only with people more powerful than him. What they do is no concern of his.
Anonymous writes:
Maybe I'm perverse, but the notion of a music or even artistic career, seems sillier to me the older I get. It just doesn't seem to be something a serious person would entertain.
She has said goodbye to paranoia, mental torment and the monotony of maintaining her historical borders. However, she has not become any easier to live with.
The conflicting opinions of others can put you in a spin. If you are pigheaded, however, you hold to your own counsel and steer your way through the storm, working with the wind and the waves, but only insofar as it conserves energy. You need one helmsman only.
Some happily lost souls will always wave to you from the horizon, as they go about their business, catching only the smaller fish.
Nothing is identical to anything else. There must be two situations in order for the identity comparison to be made. As soon as two situations can be defined, they differ in space.
As for the observation that all situations are self-identical, that is no more illuminating than saying, 'It is what it is'. Fortunately, that unilluminating statement turns out to be very illuminating if one really thinks about it.
"I am discerning your system, your approach to life, at last", he said. "I have become obsessed with a thought pattern", I thought.
The tide goes out, revealing rocks, grey coral pieces, shells, seaweed and dead bluebottles. Some of us supplicate before the receding tide, begging for its return. Others sink to their knees, cursing God, or Lady Luck, or the Fates. Many of us call meetings, gathering round, drawing up plans in the yellow sand, arguing heatedly. Few of us rest while we can.
The problem is not evil, or error, or destiny, but why the universe, on waking up, recoils in horror and amazement.
First as a child in the garden, then as the gardener, then as the one who watches the gardener and the child from a window upstairs, then finally as the garden growing unseen.
It won't be done until it can't be done.
There is no soul. This is the problem with the complaint that electronic music is soulless: a virtue is presented as a vice.
In the same way, those who lack the delusion that they have a soul are sometimes seen as uncanny or cold. However, the hot, theatrical vortex of narcissism that is called soulfulness is seldom appreciated for long by those who have to deal with it in an individual. On the other hand, a truly soulless person is always a pleasure to know and be with. But the pleasure is a cool one, easily overlooked.
So, also, it is easier to appreciate someone when we have no stake in their existence. That comes with time spent apart, too.
Of course, Jesus is the most famous recorded example of a Christ complex, but consider Socrates, a man with the most subtle of Christ complexes, and foiled only by his own ugliness, which instilled in him a kind of playful irony antithetical to the serious messianic task of leading lemmings off cliffs, but sufficiently elitist to ensure martyrdom at least.
By his peevish, self-righteous, and above all public response to a friend who asked him for a favour, I deduce he lacks both the humility and the strength of the thousandfold defeated. I can safely assume he has no balls.
Imagine, at an age when you were sufficiently young and uncompromising to think such things were fundamental to an authentic existence, that you struck an internal deal with yourself to sacrifice all commercial success, in exchange for prolonged joy in your muse, which, as per the terms of the deal, was to be a lifetime contract. Now you find myself wondering why you have very little money, yet, miraculously, always enough to continue to pursue your art. Then you must remind myself of your deal, struck long ago. The deal was for life, struck with all the radical romanticism of a teenager, and cannot be revoked. The child is master of the adult.
I avoid deeply spiritual people. The reason is that the substance of my own ephiphany, such as it was, was that there was no spirit. So extraordinary was this experience that I found I was unable to obtain comfort from spiritual people; I could only obtain it from people who had no spiritual beliefs at all, and who only cared about practical matters.
This includes people very busy with their jobs, young artists and other egotistical types, women who rely on their looks, middle aged men whose spirit has been crushed beyond repair and now only want to read and drink tea, ribald old bohemians who paint, sew or make dolls and like their wine and sunshine, Satanists and Buddhists too lazy to read their respective scriptures, let alone practise them, and of course the French.
Hence, a lot of my friends are deeply materialistic, and only care for pleasure in this life, and I find that quite acceptable, so long as they never get any money to splash around.
What makes darkness visible? Mental imagery appears in the darkness, but is fundamentally of the darkness. It articulates the night, colouring it in its own raiment, characterised by soft light, and permeated by fog and steam. There is an opiate, somnambulist comfort to these dark dreams, and no sense of humour to speak of.
That is why some of us are not afraid of the dark. For us, true terror is clear light, bright light, dazzling light. There is comedy, too, and it is almost too intense and vivid for comfort. I find this keyboard and this screen, and these hands, far more unnerving than any demonic archetype - and if that sounds strange to you, you had better take your comfort in the lesser terrors of the night.
You feel like you should apologise for your perplexity. Perhaps you should make a virtue of it. This is what a charismatic leader, the hypnotic centre of a social gathering, would do. But you remain everyone's inferior, unwilling to assert yourself, as if you could even find a self to assert. A little less insight would do you material good.
Why should I be moral?
As some of us get older and start appealing to generation gaps, or preface something with 'I'm an old fogey, I can't get today's music', we are inviting others to approve of a certain mental state of affable, comfortable, mildly pompous smuggery. We are asking you to help us settle down into a self-enclosed, cossetted, snuggly little world in which we can be king or queen. We are asking you to help us pretend that we will not die. We are asking for dignity and respect without really wishing to earn it. We want you to applaud our cognitive stasis and call it wisdom and taste.
In reality, though, unable to cope with the continous shock of change, we have fallen into a waking coma. We are now dreaming of the permanence of our youth and strength. We take our own childish music far too seriously, and fail to see seriousness in yours.
It is immense cowardice that allows me to persevere, lacking as I do the courage to give up.
As for the subject of culture overload: wean yourself off a taste for cleverness and for the compulsive signposting of trends, remove all polish from your purview, and lose interest in the sparkling, brittle world of industry gossip. You'll quickly discover there's less to enjoy than you may once have thought. You may look for years and find no-one of interest. But by all means get on with it and find these people.
Jane said, more or less, ‘Your normal mind is the hardest state in which to deal with not knowing what’s going to happen. But when you’re drunk, or out of it, it’s fine. It’s not a problem. That’s why so many musicians get intoxicated’.
After a couple of drinks though, you feel confident, relaxed, aware, even a little cocky, just right for rock and roll. It’s seductive, isn’t it?
R: I'm a true singer - I can't keep my mouth shut.
Release a record and you announce your own death. The reviews are your obituaries. The CD tray is the casket, the CD the body, the record launch the funeral and wake, the CD rack in the record shop the viewing of your corpse. We come to the record shop to pay our respects, give money as flowers, remembering you in our own way.
Listen to your releases. This person gave birth to you, and died in labour. You, too, will die giving birth.
Every artist should have an extravert and an introvert project. The extravert project, which is naturally collaborative, should lead the way into the public eye in a blaze of confidence and colour. The introvert project, which is always a silent, private meditation, should absorb the backlash, quelling, dissipating, and stilling the return wash, allowing the sand settle at the bottom, the bubbles to rise and disappear, and the weed to extend its eloquent slow motion gestures through the water between.
It's hard to make it in this world as a synaesthetic musician, with no real skills, just the ability to see music. Your musical choices become eccentric, because they are not musical - they are visual. You traverse genres looking for synaesthetes. If you write music, then you are writing for such a small bunch of these people. However, it's nice to see their faces light up.
Music should be seen, not heard.
Music is a twilight language, best understood in a state of manic lucid somnambulism.
Music is full of wounded souls, looking to each other for salvation, and of course none of us can help each other. A little sympathy.
Dark days... they are dissolved not by meditation, but by wine, women and song.
Does he have dark days, like me? If I had his talent, and the results, and yet the lack of success, would I kill myself? What is his secret?
I like a bruised optimism, don't you? Pessimism, when it is complete, removes all causes for concern. The result: bruised optimism. A bruised optimist has fondness for an unbruised optimist. The latter in all innocence thinks the former might just make a good disciple.
Alcohol: the spiritual anthopomorphicist.
He actually forgets the slights against him without even trying, the same way we forget phone numbers - and others call this his virtue. On the other hand, she will invent wrongdoings out of nowhere, grow them with her fury, and present them to you, in rancid triumph, at every opportunity.
Grace falls from heaven. You don't have to be religious to comprehend this.
The universe is a very odd place isn't it? And human beings are quite strange too. You yourself are quite strange. A freak.
Irony is not the problem. It's postmodernism: the multiplication of irony by cowardice.
Chit-chat, reminiscence, novels and diaries, catching up, telling anecdotes, exchanging pleasantries... to get rid of all this is to lose all your friends. On the other hand, you make a new friend.
Sentences do not refer. If there's anything tethering a sentence to a situation, I'd like to see it. Sentences do not refer, but they do direct. Sometimes.
Read for resonance, not reference.
It takes a lot of face to be that mediocre.
When you are constantly thinking 'I can't do this any more', and yet you continue to do it, it becomes clear that inner speech guides the body when there is silent assent from the latter, and only then.
A fertile garden smells of shit, blood and bone, and people hold their noses as they go past. Later on, they come back to admire the flowers. The causal relationship is lost on them.
Your persistence condemns you to a life of futile invention.
Pretending to be a genius is an international celebrity pastime, but it's really not a matter of wearing crazy clothes, engaging in expensive and complex projects, and generally acting like a shaman or a trickster. The few people I know who are geniuses are rather odd, friendly but socially maladroit and inclined to suddenly disappear on you. They stick to their thing and don't mix easily with the world, and, consequently, are quite small in the social order of things. Genius is not theirs, but resides in them for a while, or until they become famous, at which point it is very slowly sucked right out of them, a process which takes several years and which is irreversible.
When all potential courses of action clearly lead to disaster, thought is curtailed.
When you are a successful artist, you are busy all the time maintaining success, and, in your youth at least, there will be no such thing as fame and leisure together.
Finally, though, you reach old age. There you may enjoy, if you are no longer driven, a golden age of no more work. You simply accept artistic accolades for your past accomplishments, enjoying your few remaining years in the rich autumnal garden of your senescence.
This must be very pleasant, to cruise gently to one's grave in a glow of reminiscence, admiration, and perhaps, also, the gentle warm haze of a little mild senile dementia.
All music lyrics are fundamentally about the absence of a driver.
When you tell people there are no universal moral rules, they reply that you're offering a license for anarchy, murder and pillaging. You can tell what's really on their minds.
Anyone can dispense common sense wisdom. It's like a chef saying, 'We should use fresher ingredients, we should bake a nicer cake'.
I want to see a philosophy which doesn't provide you with a better way to be. Unfortunately, that philosophy can't be put into words without becoming prescriptive.
The smug fat body of mainstream white Anglo-Celtic mediocrity stretches itself comfortably across this fair nation, bellowing for more entertainment and more food, crushing the bodies of its cultural pups, who slowly and painfully asphyxiate.
Are there only non-moral reasons for conforming to a moral code? And if you have only non-moral reasons for being moral, is that truly a moral stance after all?
To be fated to be a lawyer is so unspeakably awful that the matter must never be broached, not even in a lawyer's own mind.
The more we permit in others, the more we permit in ourselves. A critic who understands this will be unsufferable to other critics, and had better just be an artist instead.
Reality rewards evil with little bits of paper.
The burden isn't knowing what you know. It's abandoning it to be with people who don't.
People worship fictional beings all the time. No-one worships sanity.
The ground is only sporadically interested in details.
Choose a miniscule range of musical possibilities and stick to them with the stolidity of a Flemish weaver. You will forge a whole new genre.
People are always asking how they should be moral, but seldom why they should be moral.
Poverty is the only austerity an artist requires.
Just as not everyone who claims to be virtuous really is virtuous, not everyone who claims to be satanic really is satanic - even if they want to be.
Eugenicists typically don’t understand that, as a rule of thumb, the survival of a species is enhanced by multiplying mutations, not by reducing them. Every dog breeder knows this. But the eugenicists don't: they are sufficiently dull witted to qualify as candidates for their own extermination campaigns.
No, I don't want to learn any more exercises. Enough with exercises. But, the alternatives are exiguous, to say the least, when you scour the shelves.
Didacticism is exegesis.
Explain at your peril.
There's much to be said for leaving the gods to their business.
Evil is fathomless and multi-tiered. How do you know you are going to hell? You will hear strange birdsong; your surroundings will become increasingly ornate and antique; there will be more and more servants.
The sane do not reject delusion but indulge it for fun, so as to make life more interesting. Life is pretty boring if you keep in mind the true nature of existence. On the other hand, sanity is the capacity to dynamically switch between delusion and awareness. Delusion is sought when things are getting boring; awareness is sought when things are getting painful or overheated. Temperatures are lowered primarily by graciously acknowledging the partiality of the viewpoint you have hitherto been pursuing.
When you are sane, admitting fault in everyday life is just the same as admitting fault in a dream. I notice that people who are slow to take offense or pass the buck rapidly acquire power and influence over others. This is called improving the mood in dream world and rising naturally to great influence in La La Land.
The difference between an artist and a con artist is that the latter will not try to con his friends.
Human beings do not have cognitions; cognitions have human beings.
Everyone owns popular music: it's an international treasure. As a result, everyone is an expert. They know what makes a good song. If there's something missing, they know that too. They may not be able to put their finger on it; however, if it's lacking, they can hear the lack.
When you get something off the ground and running, anyone who feels safe to express an opinion in your company will do so. If what you are doing is in some way not mediocre, if it is untried, or exemplary of a new aesthetic, and if they are not themselves talented musicians, they will tell you so, often at length - for they, and not you, are the experts, the listening public.
As to the most effective strategy for dealing with the volley of expert opinions to which you will be exposed, I wish to offer a few general rules of thumb. Listen, argue if you like, but do not take it to heart. Stick to your guns and carry on.
If your music is in some way unprecedented, to that extent the average listener will say it is cold, flat, empty, or contrived. These are projective descriptions unconsciously illustrating the fact that the listener does not feel automatically welcome in your musical world. If the listener finds the music cold rather than warm, it is a sure sign that you are innovating. Your music will warm up when the listeners warm up. Then the same music will be deemed classic - and, in virtue of being classic, it will also be history, by which stage, I hope, you will have moved on to something colder.
She tests them out with nonsense. If they laugh along, she moves closer.
Those who go into battle with regretful resolution nearly always defeat me. I prefer an angry, resentful opponent.
It's not so much that you have opinions: nor is it that you have too many. It is simply that you think your opinions are not partial. This fact alone has turned you into a deeply irritating person.
It's not philosophy or psychology per se that interests me so much as each person's unique delusional pattern.
When I listen to maudlin, lovelorn pop lyrics and assume they are the sentiments of the songwriter, they sound dull, superior, and self absorbed; but when I listen from the point of view that they are a message to the songwriter, from a better or wiser part of her nature, or as a message from the unconscious to the controlling ego, suddenly the lyric is deeply moving to me. This never changes.
I wanted to make my own paper, so I asked an expert: he had written a book.
'Paper', he told me, 'Is not longer the fine thing it once was. Modern paper can hardly be compared to the elegantly textured, pestle-pounded sheets used by the ancients'. He paused to see if any of his traditional rivals had overheard him. He was spoiling for the usual argument.
'I'm not so interested in which paper is the best and finest', I told him. 'I just would like to know what paper is actual composed of, and how it is made'. He replied angily, 'Matters of taste cannot be separated from matters of composition!' And with that I sensed my interview was over.
Regarding the manufacture of my own paper, I was able to come up with something that did the job via a process of trial and error, reading, and asking around. As for questions of taste, I have never paid them much attention.
Stall them, stonewall them, then throw them into the hands of the experts.
Perhaps, in dealing with the narcissist, the best strategy is to roll over and play dead.
Sometimes you retract into a private and cold space, into which I cannot climb to join you. It is as if you are preparing me for your death.
He watches over his crueller impulses like a cat watching over her kittens. He knows them all.
He is burned hollow now and can see right through himself, as if he were made of layers of irridescent glass. When the winds are so disposed to move him, he is compelled to sing the praises of the cosmos like a hand puppet.
So you tell fairy stories, as it's the best you can do. You explain it to children, but they are grown, older than you. You do not have the nerve to patronise them, and anyway, they are comfortable with patronising you. Above all, you don't care that much one way or the other.
Fear is her litmus. When ghouls and goblins no longer terrify, there is one more way to frighten the bejesus out of a human being; and when that no longer works, the story ends.
Who can you tell your secret? You can't tell anyone. I don't envy you.
It's too easy for you, and that is the problem. You surpass us: we hate you.
From the sublime to the ridiculous they go, and back again... you think they are contradicting themselves? Then you're an idiot.
She is no fool, but if you are, she will do her utmost to make herself look foolish, in order to get rid of you.
You must become a statesman of your art. This is achieved by being ignored for approximately forty years. Then, you receive the ultimate accolade: you did not spit the dummy.
Genius is cack-handed.
Our voices our so innocent we dare not speak at all.
Some highly skilled and specialised people in the popular cultural industries have a lot of hubris. They are proud of the silliest things. On the other hand, if you're lucky like me, you've had the pleasure of working with technically skilled people who are also humble. How can you pick them? You do not forget their names, nor do you lose their phone numbers.
Say I want to be famous, have no particular aptitude for the arts, yet possess a moderately competent, dull-normal writing ability. I would write about popular culture, hoping to attact some attention.
The expression 'There is no time to waste' has two meanings.
Then again, there are many people I would like to accuse of wasting their time, but I have two problems. The first is that I don't seem to be able to form any conception of time that isn't self-contradictory. The second is that I do not understand where waste could go in this universe, such that it is no longer useful, somewhere, to some living thing.
He is not doing what I value, and I do not understand what he is doing: he is wasting his time.
There is no cure for happiness.
They show you their confidence, which is strong: but their confidence is constructed out of their own hardened shame.
Mirroring the shadow is done unconsciously, as the shadow is not conscious.
Metal techno doesn't exist yet, and we haven't done any, but it might be interesting to try to talk it into existence by pretending it's already here. This is called tactical reification.
The critic was dubious. ‘What is it?’
I said, ‘It’s a new mode of transport that owes a lot to the horse and cart. I call it a car.’
‘Hmmm,’ said the critic, and dubiously rubbed one of the tyres with his shoe. ‘Interesting.’ But he wasn't very interested, and was already looking over my shoulder for someone more important.
There was a pause, while he formulated his thoughts, and I listened to the birds. At last he said, with some irritation, 'But it just doesn’t quite have the feel of a horse-drawn carriage, does it? You can’t beat that good old clippety-clop feel, no matter how well you imitate it. Still, nice try', he lied, and shook my hand. And very quickly, he was gone, as he had seen someone famous who had set up a stall across the road with free drinks and cheese.
Avoiding mass spectacles, going down the side alleys, hoping to catch some precious little event, a private performance just for her.
You describe them in music, and a few months later they walk into your life. Be careful.
Hell is heaven tipping over, and heaven is hell dispersing.
Writers are liars. They fantasize, confabulate, and connive. When you question them, they fly into a rage, knowing they have been found out, unable to accept themselves.
To communicate with the utmost clarity, saying exactly what you mean, so that nothing is in the shade; this is unforgivable.
If they say they are nihilists, this commitment alone proves they are not.
This idea that you exercise creativity solely through what you consume is a corporate invention with obvious utility. Though it is a way of keeping the general public in its place, it may be also one of the key reasons a previously vibrant scene eventually falls stagnant.
Scenes in music are electric when there's a palpable sense that everyone can do it - and that sense is also a reality: everyone is doing it! You look around - my God, your useless mates who can't even microwave their dinner are suddenly cranking out tracks and releasing them around the world! This other friend of yours has started a label or a clothing store, your partner has got the Singer out and is running up crazy looking dress designs and selling them at the local record shop, and getting orders in from all other the place; someone else is making a film or some videoclips, all on a shoestring, and they look great...
A scene eventually dies when money comes into the picture and the free-for-all is formalised by business and legal requirements into a more rigid structure consisting of two camps - the stars, who produce (or who take the role of the producer in the public eye), and the cattle, who consume. This arrangement is dissatisfying to both parties and cannot be maintained for more than a few years. In the end, it kills that particular scene by starving it of exterior inspiration; and the corpses which remain turn into a fertile mulch, providing base nutrition for the next scene.
The perspective that has the dissatisfied customer saying,'feed me something else' is not the one that is going to create a solution.
It's a tragedy that he has seen enough to know the emptiness of masks, but not enough to see the necessity of masks.
It's a circus without clowns, and so we emerge dazzled but none the wiser.
She creates and she listens back, but the creator and the listener are two different people. They exist in a partnership which is grounded in inevitability and a hands-in-the-dirt realism. It is not a contest, nor an uneasy truce any more. One brush with insanity is sufficient for a person to get the joke, if they have a sense of humour.
Our wishes for financial security, recognition, the opportunity to travel, and an exciting and fulfilling love life are sometimes met, sometimes not. If our wish was simply to be killed and brought back to life, we would never be disappointed.
We would rather say something less commonplace. Something wild and a little feverish, likely to cause a sensation. What we are afraid of is what happens after we've attracted idiots to the cause.
The creative impulse is apparently not target focused. Music, cooking, writing, talking, walking, it's all the same. However, within certain more or less contrived social constraints, the quickest route to expression is always favoured.
Upon realisation that your interest has waned, you may also wonder, 'is my life dead or am I tired of it?' This is a strikingly passive stance. There is no thought of getting involved, creating, or altering the process in any way. It is the consummatory attitude of a diner, who, unimpressed with the food, has no aspiration to go to the kitchen and get involved with the cooking.
It's not that time flies when you're having fun. It's that the illusion of time disappears when you don't have time to think about time.
It's there, but you can't see it. So you say nothing's there, and needlessly get into trouble. You should say, "There is something there, but I don't know what it is". It's so simple.
It hasn't happened yet, and they are to blame. Maybe I should be getting on their collective cases. Or maybe they and I are being separated from each other by natural causes, in which case meeting them at all would be an attempt to swim upstream into my past, away from an unknown future.
He has yet to encounter a problem that cannot be solved by inaction, silence, effortlessness, or some artful combination of the three. However, he sometimes finds it sorts things out more quickly to pretend there's some point of issue. Sometimes it even helps for him to pretend to be angry. People think he's taking them seriously, which of course he is, in a way.
They counter her honest but unexplored perspective by sharing an irrelevant joke at her expense. She counters by becoming even more irrelevant, and irreverent, than they are. They have no answer to that trick, which is completely unexpected. They depended upon her embarrassing herself through a sincere and passionate defence, thereby strengthening their group solidarity and marking her as a permanent outsider - it has worked a thousand times before. But she seems uninterested in defending anything, and has apparently forgotten the point of dispute altogether: they are nonplussed. She has not won, but neither has she lost. Characteristically, her technique and the result she seeks via the technique are somehow identical.
I suppose she allows herself to be wounded in order to write with the blood.
One can lay open the situation to others, then hold out a net to catch the return volley. Out the stones, brickbats, grapeshot and shrapnel something can be made.
Revealing aperspectival vision to a body of writers in any field is like teasing a pack of dogs with a stick.
Just as you must kill an animal before you can eat it, you must give new music a name before you can make money out of it.
You do not feel disposed to argue; therefore the boundaries become permeable and you may travel.
Artists do not see movements and genres come and go. They change shape with the changing of shape.
If you are an artist, and you believe that art consists of a succession of movements, that belief alone will turn you into a critic.
"That's another reason I want to be famous", she said, "so I can be in a celebrity car race."
So they revel in cracking and scratching the surface, looking for whatever might be underneath. If there is something there, they are rewarded. If there is nothing, they are accused of vandalism.
One year a beautiful little blue flower grew, but was soon cast into the shade by a large dung heap. “Well”, thought the little flower, “It’s better to be beautiful and ignored than ugly and noticed”. But, on further reflection, she began to realise that what she really wanted was revenge.
Of all the perceptive people on earth, none are more perceptive than those who compliment us on our personalities.
One group fills in the gaps, while another opens the gaps. The latter are afraid to stare too hard, and this preserves them. They feel contempt for the former group, and their contempt is returned with indifference.
We are masks for each other.
Alcohol is a fuel for absurdity.
I had fallen into conversation at the market with him after he had talked and some vegetarian food had been served. I greeted him rather awkwardly with my hands together at my lips, bowing slightly. "No, not like that, but like this, at the heart", he said, lowering my hands to my chest. "It is much more effective that way. Did you hear my talk?" "Only from about ten minutes from before the food was served", I replied. "Ah!", he said, "You heard it all!" Although he looked as if he were Hindu and was Indian, with a silky black beard which I spontaneously began to stroke as he held my hands, we were talking about Buddhism, or more properly, the nature of Buddhahood, the enlightened state. He must have been speaking about the difference between the two, as I was encouraged to say, unconsciously imitating his speech cadences, "Even a person who openly rejects Buddhism, or who has never heard of it, can not be rejected as necessarily not a..." but my speech faltered, as I had constructed my sentence with too many double negatives, and at any rate, he must have already grasped the intended meaning, because he whisked me over to a group of ten nuns on the border, sitting in two rows, and gestured to them, saying, "Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?". Then he immediately drew me over to a stall next to the nuns, where educational text books, many copies of the one book, were displayed protruding from the carboard boxes in which they had been packed. He gave me one. It was a thick, soft, colour compendium of recommended toys for children. The page fell open at a chapter on mechano, including diagrams of a mechano aircraft. However, the writing was too small to read, and I was already waking up.
When there is nothing exterior to which it can direct attention, inner speech begins to direct attention to itself, creating inner dialogue.
It is dark, dark, dark in this world that spewed out of his fingertips. There is gallows humour. I haven't read one good review for this record. Whenever I listen to it I hear demons dancing inside a mind of stony indifference. He must have mastered the art of controlling demons by exiting from the building.
"Observe how I move from the abstract to the particular!", she announced, not unselfconscious in her appreciation of her own beauty.
"How do you do it?" I asked, because I did not have her faculty with words and simply wanted to get to the point, perhaps for my own advantage.
"I do it by finesse", she replied, and the answer was rather deflating for me, because she had not revealed any secrets.
"What is the nature of your finesse?" I asked, because I was aware she was playing a game, teasing me into asking more questions.
"My finesse", she declared proudly, and at that moment she seemed to me like Joan of Arc, holding a shield, ascended to mythology, "my finesse lies only in my capacity to confound by solving".
The sound began as a howl, which before too long splayed out into the horizon as great, long tendrils of thought. Warmed and fattened by the sun, it became poetry. Soon the elegant sentences became joyfully aware of their own importance, and began to blush, colour and fatten into eulogies, laments and prayers; each of which developed its own sprays and branches, bearing fruit that turned golden, hardened and became metallic, solid, smooth, unbreakable, unyielding, magnetic, attractive and repulsive, disputational in nature. The silver and golden cords began to overlap and overtake one another, tying knots, unravelling, pushing through, defining spaces, invading, twisting, rejecting, supporting, undermining. Finally they all locked together, and there was no more room to move. Then, because the force of the howl that began all this was unabated, the knots and coils began to heat, glow, vibrate, sizzle and liquefy until they sprang apart, molten and potentiated. Freed, they were propelled again, singing, humming, beating and so on as dictated by their shape, size, density and composition, forming dizzying sonic terraces like a swarm of insects, generating musical patterns, each of which folded under the mass of sound and was instantly superseded. Shooting up higher into the sky, they lost their density and began to dance, converging, dividing and exploding into astonishing shapes and textures and filligrees, mutating, revolving as brilliant atoms of violet, indigo, blue, green yellow and red, arching, resonating as electrical fields, far, far beyond language, in the realm of pure play, where philosophy ends, and music prevails.
Some people think a fool is someone who doesn't know some fact; or who is so open-hearted and trusting he doesn't know he is being ridiculed; or who doesn't know how to defend herself; or who subscribes to an unfashionable viewpoint.
A fool, though, is really someone who takes the moral highground.
The latter kind of fool not only deserves our ridicule; such ridicule is our social obligation. These fools steal the happiness and the lives of others. To ridicule her, though, is a fine art, and a profession, and a dangerous job, suitable only for those with great courage, subtlety and genius. Not everybody who is merely wise can lay claim to being a natural comedian. To kill a fool, you must be a fool - for the purposes of killing only.
They came here for a reason, or, at least, with a certain feeling of excitement, but when they had arrived, there was silence and inactivity, all of them having forgotten what the reason was - or perhaps the idea had flown, or had hidden like a fox, or maybe, some were already saying, there never had been any idea after all.
Some of them left at once in search of dinner and a show. Others raged and fulminated, unable to find the idea anywhere, and resorted to kicking things and storming out, loudly slamming doors behind them. Silence descended at once.
Only a few were left. They started to work, hardly knowing what they were doing, their confidence and pleasure growing as the thing began to take form.
Ethics are simple rules for those who are too thick to act morally.
Snakelike, he has squeezed himself through many changes over fifteen years to keep himself in the public eye. He is a pathological diplomat, a mystery to himself. Always, he names the right names, going no deeper than required, for he does not want to cause unease. As he brings forth the shibboleths and codes, his audience visibly relaxes. He is one of them, and will remain so, until their fortune wanes. One of them may hence discover him, miles away, in a new place, a new town, wearing new clothes, speaking a new language to a new coterie of endowed young princes, basking with great dignity in what they truly believe will be an eternal good fortune.
She is neither meretricious nor duplicitous, but she reminds me of a writer, in that when she says ‘he’, she may mean ‘me’, ‘she’, ‘you’, ‘they’ or even ‘it’. She seems to use these terms interchangeably, or perhaps for their poetry, as the mood takes her, ratcheting up from her personal experience - if they are grounded there, because it is hard to say – to the general, the abstract, and the performative. Moreover, it is clear that the view she describes may not be hers. However, it is equally clear that she never lies.
Her indecision is so charming and irresistible that we all play up on it, encourage it, and ultimately reinforce it. We're not doing her any favours.
This country is a good breeding ground for talent, because it is hostile to talent. What survives here, survives there.
The first friend you meet when you enter the creative world is boredom. He wants to share some quality time with you.
If they live in Melbourne, and you live in Brisbane, they say you are Japanese, because you're closer to Tokyo than anyone else they know.
By imagining their urges have lives outside of themselves, as exterior demons and so on, by attempting to contrive a distance between themselves and their instincts, they hope to sup with a longer spoon.
The occultist is a stolidly unrepentant romantic who has disowned and projected all his nasty urges.
She's a pseudo-intellectual, parading the breadth of her reading for its own sake.
Some of them notice every colour and name. Some of them can’t even remember their own name. Steeped in the liminal, they have forgotten how to excogitate, and move through the world like solid ghosts, living in the still space just behind intent.
When things get nightmarish, the nightmare itself may be sufficient to wake you up. When things get too dull, you may drift asleep again. Perhaps we cannot dream properly unless we are thoroughly deluded.
When dealing with humourless people who only want to get ahead at your expense, intimidate them by being extremely, unforgivingly precise and clear.
Eventually, I came to see no value in a permanent state of wakefulness. It was spoiling my fun. So now I prefer to dream on oblivious, though I still wake up from time to time, disturbed from my slumber by the indigestion of insight.
Many musicians prefer dull, mechanical jobs even if they take up most of the working week. The reason is that if the job is sufficiently dull, the brain begins to hum a little tune.
The creation of the discipline of psychology depended on thought becoming an insomniac.
Studying the mind is like making a fist out of thought.
His web diary is full of lamentations about the purposeless of his life. Sometimes he talks knowledgeably about this or that cultural artifact or tradition. Sometimes he pines for a purpose, a task, or a life's work he feels sure must be waiting for him at some time in the future. His yearning is so intense it becomes a prayer which keens into the ether, unrecorded by any angel or master being.
I think that the web diary itself is his masterpiece. Although I want to tell him, I prefer it that he doesn't know, or maybe I'm afraid he already knows it. If the former, why make him self-conscious? If the latter, why show a magician the mechanics behind his own trick?
They are agamic, much the same as they were ten years ago. Hard as nails in the beginning, they had nowhere to go but tighter, harder, faster and more complicated. They were surprising at first, but now they never surprise anyone. That is why, in spite of feigning outsider status, they appeal only to the ossified in mind and spirit, the mentally prematurely aged, the subliminally fearful, the ones who do not want to be surprised any more.
The moon is desolate. If you were to be king of the moon, you would have total power over a dead world.
Nevertheless, there are those who aspire to be king of the moon. Vanquishing their enemies, they compete for the honour of ruling over a barren wasteland.
You work between two poles, at the exact point at which there is no gravitational pull to either extreme. People shout from each pole, saying, 'What are you doing? Come to my end, where everything has already been worked out.'
You catch yourself knowing too much, and think, 'that can only lead to trouble'.
Your choices becomes less governed by taste, and more situational, more instrumental. Music, in particular, is a powerful thing. It is an active ingredient. You add the appropriate music at the appropriate time, without holding any of it close to your heart.
Persuasion is completely beside the point. Even those who say they understand usually don't - especially those who say they understand.
Religion is a cavalcade of con artists and their dupes.
Authoritarianism: the authority dispenses what she believes is wisdom, and expects only devotion in return. Thoughts or views not emanating from, or reflecting, the her views are not permitted to flow back up the tree. The authoritarian is fueled only by unconditional love.
When you meet someone like this on the net, you can make your excuses and leave. They will not follow you as you are of no use.
I don't think that much of value to anyone can be achieved by posing yourself, and looking at your own life as others would. I think you have to work from the inside out. You examine, develop and refine your materials and your methods, not your self-image. The reason is that you wish to avoid becoming a trope or a type. There must always be surprise and change, or the result is not true. Truth in life is not in accurate representation, but in the implicit acknowledgement of change.
Some people think that being an artist is a matter of showing us their lives. "Look, here I am having sex, here I am taking a dump - I'm an artist!"
On the other hand, there is an art to both these activities.
History alters to accommodate the hypocrite.
Being a pyromaniac, I launch outrageous propositions for the pleasure of watching them burn.
When considering creative partners, it can be helpful to distinguish, not between egotists and non-egotists, but between those who are willing to keep going and those who are determined to stay put.
The greatest curse is not to know how to sell out.
Following the dictum, 'the mistake is the hidden intention', seize upon your weaknesses and explore their permutations relentlessly, to the exclusion of all else, loudly and firmly proclaiming your genius.
Any pyromaniac with real ambition is going to move into explosives sooner or later.
If you want to live in the modern world without coffee, sugar, and alcohol, well, good luck pal. One day without at least one representative of the unholy trinity is sufficient to bring forth the realisation that we are all mad.
Avoid befriending authors, less you become immortal.
No-one is more debauched than an idealist.
Just because it's obvious, doesn't mean it's not worth saying over and over.
Is the player piano roll digital or analogue?
Those who make toys have no use for them.
Edit down to the bones; or, if you wish to attract leeches, flesh everything out.
Overplaying the diplomat persona, you show yourself to be untrustworthy to everyone. Underplaying the same persona, you show the world that you cannot see a situation from any other angle but your own.
This it is done as method acting. It is interpersonal systems analysis, applied and embodied as behaviour. It is also a form of shapeshifting, if you are comfortable with that word.
I think I enjoyed reading Weininger for the same reason I enjoy a cheesy horror movie - grotesquery is horribly fascinating. Weininger is really a gothic writer: he combines the commonplace, and the keenly observed, with the bizarre and the incredible. Everything is lashed forcibly together with hooks and wires that dig into the skin. He constructs monsters that almost walk.
Abstraction is the most effective form of revenge.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that there is a laughing competition, and on the board to judge this competition are the cream of our cultural laughing stock. Respected and envied by their peers, they loom large on the face of joke culture, and have been laughing all their lives. They know talent when they hear it.
Sorting though the hopefuls, they select carefully, on the basis of learned discussion, argument, and who they know. One by one the young jokers perform for the judges; one by one they meet their fate: joy or tears.
The technique behind laughter is well understood by the judges. Then, also, each has his or her speciality: the guffaw, the sneer, the chuckle, the giggle, the heehaw. Where appropriate, they defer to each other on matters of specialist expertise: such matters as tuning, rhythm, melodic progression, intonation, dynamic range and so on are understood to be at the heart of a good laugh. The technique of many of the contestants is razor sharp, prodigious, precocious. The most skilled jokers effortlessly traverse 1/32 and 1/64 notes. They employ pleasing portamentos and vibratos; they invest strong and moving emotional touches to their phrasing, to create an agreeable complexity; and they make pretty melodies.
Where technique is lacking, this is pointed out; where it is present, the judges are effusive and encouraging.
If it should happen that the judges encounter genuine laughter, they are embarassed - for themselves, or for the performer, they are not sufficiently awake to tell. The technique of such a one is frequently lacking, for she is not thinking of perfecting technique. Rather, she laughs because she is amused. The judges may even laugh back, -a different kind of laugh - a laugh of ridicule betraying, possibly, a subterranean fear of humiliation. Perhaps they feel, around the borders of their tunnel consciousness, that they might have been exposed, made fun of. Do they sneer at the performer? Or is the homunculus who sails imperiously over the surface of their waters, the one who is playing master, sneering at the depths? Even a puppet master can, for his own amusement or the amusement of others, have the puppet ridicule the puppet master’s technique. As for the genuine laughter artist, there are no glittering prizes for her. However, she is not too dismayed. It is a comedy.
One can be non-mediocre, brilliant even, but still a fool. Conversely, one can be an ordinary person with no particular aspirations over and above doing a simple job well, and become wise. I've known a few up-themselves people in my time - but not recently. I evicted all fools, mediocre or talented, from my life almost a decade ago. I still encounter them occasionally of course. I treat these bores with the utmost civility.
She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But I do. Why should we feel contempt for the mediocre, I ask her? It’s bad manners to despise someone for lacking good looks, or money, or education - so why not talent, insight, or wisdom as well? The foolish man knows in his bones he lacks all three, that his security is highly specialised and dependent on ready public access to certain facts, facts he has at his disposal and will not share unless forced to do so. But he feels the lack of something overarching, and is angry in an ill-defined, restless way. He will pick on you, because you are torturing him. He senses your freedom, you are not dragging chains of quite the same weight, nor moving through such dense air.
But, she says, you suffer a fool to make foolish decisions on your behalf. And I think, you know, maybe she’s right not to suffer fools gladly. My life may have been different if I had been less patient with fools.
And I think about it further, and realise, well, if you become exasperated with a fool, the fool is using you up. To treat the foolish with respect must involve something else, something skillful and self-protective, some kind of nuance or subtlety that saves energy so one can concentrate on one's larger purpose or interest without unnecessary distraction.
Here's what I think it means to suffer fools gladly. One keeps one's distance and does not rouse the nest. One's manners remain impeccable. One excuses the fool from one's life, and with great decorum and ceremony, shows her out of the house. Isn't this how an experienced bouncer removes a drunk from a club? When we see a bouncer gently, and with great respect, leading a troublemaker from the room, it's as if he's showing the fool to his limousine. His expression remains courteous and detached, and he neither tugs nor pushes. He takes his time and never embarasses his guest. He is the very model of good etiquette. This is what it means to suffer a fool gladly.
Now, this woman I know does not suffer fools, and rarely evicts one with much grace. She likes to give them a kick in the behind as they leave, even. But then again, I rarely evict a fool at all until the damage is done. She is missing the mark, but so am I. Dealing patiently with a fool is not simply a matter of patiently putting up with him as he messes up your program. Rather, it is an elaborately polite ceremony of respectful eviction of the fool from the domains of one's life in which his aggressive promulgation of his own agenda or skill at any cost to you is neither required nor welcomed.
There’s that bird again, the one that always sings at this hour, the one you only ever hear when you’re aware in the early morning hours. It is a cool, smooth, damp, eerily dipping sound, irresistibly tied in your imagination to this hour and this place.
So when the situation starts to unfold rapidly, you also unfold rapidly - no effort required.
Many of us read blogs backwards through time, delving further and further back into the archives. I don't know if this is an unusual practice. Blog reading becomes archaelogical when one reads back from the present to the past. Running themes appear out of the blue. It's disorienting but you get used to it: mysteries appear, and then are resolved, as you read further and further back and get a retrospective handle on the causation. You uncover the conditions of change in the writer's life much as you do in real life: first you see the face of a stranger, then, as you come to know them, you begin to understand why their faces are lined and scarred.
You become a famous psychoanalyst, an explosives expert, or a world authority on the I Ching. You have all this knowledge, and ultimately this is all you learn. Every skill you acquire leads you back to the kernel. This is why, even though neither of us know anything much about botany, or particle physics, or pottery, or cordon bleu cooking, we have enough in common with you to spend a pleasant evening together talking about what matters most. Drifting away from our institutes of learning, we become curious about this: the way that a self-possessed individual finally finds a wellspring of courage and strays from the path.
What’s the difference between an artist and a critic? There are a thousand answers to this question, some with more merit than others. However if we compress out minds into the shape of a professional critic’s mind, several things immediately become apparent on introspection. One, we are in the theoretical domain of a battle of wills. Two, we have strategies at our disposal to defend, attack, advance, retreat, observe and unify. All this is done through thought and linguistic concepts. The critic’s eye is acute and peers through holes in the battlements, or scans from a hill or the sky like a general.
Now, when we relax our mind to think like a true artist (false artists are much more common of course; they are people who profess to be artists but actually the ground troops paid by critics in fame and money to fight their wars), we see lines of battle which may be freely traversed. The critics appear to be at war over scarce resources. There is territory to defend, territory to scorch, territory to overwhelm. True artists feel like scavengers, moving freely where they choose, dodging the draft. Occasionally they may bump into a critic who will wonder what they are doing getting in the way. Happily, no critic fires at a true artist, because, in the game of battlefield strategy, they are neither much of an asset nor much of a liability. Such an artist is little better than a rather irritating presence, like a bird looping across the field of a dramatic struggle for survival played out between lions and hyenas. The true artist is free to go about her business without attracting undue attention; and her business is to roam free, investigating interesting situations.
I think it's necessary, really, for the weirdo to come out of the closet and not be a shrinking violet about his or her strangeness - even if such strangeness is only sporadic rather than chronic. There seems to be no doubt that many people love and treasure harmless but interesting weirdos. I know I certainly do.
Never apologise for being a weirdo. Many of my friends are quite eccentric, and I would be horrified if any one of them became apologetic about their uniqueness. I would rather normal people apologised for not being weird enough.
As for people laying strangeness trips on us for our weird behaviour the question becomes this: how do we protect ouselves from losing confidence in such a situation?
I would like to know your answers to this very important question, as every weirdo could use the tools and techniques to avoid being undermined simply for not following minor social rules. I think the answer has to do with systematically ridding yourself of all forms of self-monitoring. Self monitoring is the process by which one says 'what am I doing?', 'is this appropriate?', 'did I just come over as an idiot?' and so on. That inner voice might be attenuated, or even disappear completely - making one that most envied of souls, the completely unselfconscious weirdo.
It's been said here and there that creativity is aligned with mental illness. The evidence cited is usually correlative, which is to say, there is plenty of evidence that mental illness is more prevalent in the artistic community than in the general community (incidentally, what a Victorian curio is that phrase, ‘mental illness’ – a sickness in the mind).
Correlations... they are the very devil. They invite us to draw causal relations where none have been established. Poverty is higher in the artistic community than the general community too? Are we going to conclude that poverty is congenial to art? Are you an artist? Do you find it really helps not to be able to afford to repair your equipment, buy your paints and canvas, pay the rent? Do you get the album finished more quickly because you break a guitar string and can’t afford to replace it? Because you can’t afford a studio, a rehearsal room, a CD burner to run off demos? Or does it hinder your creativity? It's the latter, isn't it? Poverty and being creative are correlated, they go hand-in-hand, but the former does not cause the latter. Maybe being creative causes poverty though! However, even though this seems more plausible, the correlation itself is no evidence. We can’t conclude anything causal from a correlation.
‘Oh, but poverty makes you resourceful’. No it doesn’t. Being aware of resources make you resourceful. Poverty just limits your resources. A good thing? How is that a good thing? It's an imposition to have limited resources: an imposition which we accept and work around, because we have no choice.
Insanity might be the demon that destroys creativity. It might just be the searing delusion of personal grandeur, resplendant in hallucinatory visions of self-reference and destiny, with all the attendant paranoia, that undoes an artist. Now, that might be worth considering.
Plenty of great art has been made by people who went through periods of mental instability. However, we are not entitled to assume that what we admire in the likes of Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson, Brian Wilson and others was created from their insanity. It seems more plausible that it was created from their sanity, since their productive years were also their sane years. When they lost their sanity, they were unable to create comprehensible art.
'Oh, but they were really, really inspired on the run-up to the full-blown psychosis'. Isn't that tantamount to saying they were at their most creative when they were sane yet full of energy? Is that conclusion too obvious and commonsensical to be exciting to our romantic sensibilities? Or would we be equally comfortable saying that the acceleration of a car is caused by the crash that results from accelerating too much? The form of the argument which claims that insanity assists with creativity is the same, and equally absurd.
Sanity is definitely underrated, as it does not fit in with our rather romantic artistic schema. However, if an artist can give to his or her audience a dose of genuine sanity, what more is required?
Barrow's paradox holds wherever some piece of advice cannot be given without the giver of the advice contradicting herself. For example, 'human beings should never follow general principles of behaviour' falls prey to Barrow's paradox. Such statements may well be true: however, to make them is always self-contradictory. So, to avoid Barrow's paradox, one should lead by example, rather than by giving advice. And I see I am now falling prey to Barrow's paradox myself.
A special case of Barrow's paradox very relevant to web discussion groups is the principle that some disputes are best resolved by not getting involved - and yet, one cannot point this out to the disputants without getting involved. The canonical example is the response of list members to a troll in the forum. The troller gets various members' backs up; they react by naming the poster as a troll and an attention-seeker; and, before too long, the temperature rises to flaming point, people firing off all kinds of posts which they may later regret. Now, the best way to deal with a troller is to disregard the post. Eventually the trolling will extinguish due to lack of positive reinforcement.
What's reinforcing about becoming notorious, and why does a troller seek negative or hostile attention? Perhaps it's just that having negative attention is more reinforcing than having no attention at all. If this were true, then negative attention, up to a point at least, would be preferable to being shunned by all and sundry. This is the troller's predicament. No-one likes him. Everybody hates him. He has no friends. He has little experience with positive attention and praise. What's a lonely guy to do? Stir up some trouble! Off he goes! In fairness, haven't we all felt the thrill of notoriety from time to time? Isn't it just a little bit of a rush to have complete strangers arguing with each other about you, even if much of it's negative stuff? Does Marilyn Manson get a kick out of being blacklisted by fundamentalist Christian groups? Does he seek to provoke them? Do you cheer him on? We can relate to the troller, I think.
So, when dealing with the persistent troll (who should be distinguished from the penitent troll) it's understood that the way to get rid of a troll is to let his incendiary posts fall by the wayside. However, not everyone on a typical forum understands this principle to the extent of allowing it to guide their behaviour. Those who post to the effect that 'this is a sad person, ignore him' are just feeding the troll! Those who post to the thread saying, 'let's let this thread die' are keeping the thread alive! How to teach someone to allow a disputation to pass unstoked, without contributing to the stoking? There is no way. Those who understand the troll dynamic post nothing, and thereby demonstrate their understanding. Those who try to contribute to an understanding of the troll dynamic by posting advice thereby demonstrate their failure to understand it. I'm not the first person to point this out. But I am the first person to realise that, in so doing, I am falling prey to Barrow's paradox.
There's also the obvious point to be made that the most complex machine in a modern studio is a human brain. However, many electronic artists seem to use their gear as prosthetic devices, or brain-substitutes. It's as if they are afraid of themselves. Or, more accurately perhaps, the intellectual/planning part of their brain is afraid of their deep, instinctual brain. This affliction, too, is not limited to music or to the arts, but is a problem of life. I don't want to know who's using what piece of advanced gear or what new techniques are being developed, whether they're playing this or that piece of gear etc etc. I want to know what kind of person they are.
Almost all Kraftwerk's songs were about some kind of new fangled technological innovation or other. Do people really get very excited about technological innovation per se any more? I wonder if the very idea of Kraftwerk is a thing of the past. In about 500 years, Kraftwerk lyrics will be like Chan poetry, because the innovation factor will have evaporated entirely from everyone's perception of the lyrics. "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" will sound like "I carry water and chop wood". People will go, "wow, they found mystery in their commonplace, rustic daily activities."
Wandering off the beaten track, we are drawn, some of us, to abandoned follies. Abandoned websites by the million, some of them still with active chat lists, which echo occasionally with solitary voices: “Hello? Is anybody there?”
I love to fetch up in areas where a great deal of thought and time has been put into an operation, installation, or structure to no avail. I hesitate to speculate on my motives. What is driving this fascination with architectural failure? Schadenfreude? Identification? Or – and this is the motive I wish you to believe, because I am vain – is it that I recognise the essential beauty of futility, and its concordance with the predicament of the lonely universe? For God is alone, and divides Himself up to maintain the illusion of company. However, He is endlessly drawn back by that frisson of cosmic fear to His true nature: the Only Being, the Lonely Being. The Atheist.
Not just lonely enclosures; but also, lonely little things. A little orchid growing just behind my neighbour's back fence. A tape left in a cupboard from a decade ago which unconsciously records a conversation between several friends at a barbecue – because someone hit record when they should’ve hit play. I want to gather these things, and gather myself, collect my thoughts. It was here, but no-one came.
Bandwagon jumping skills are essential to musical survival, unless you want to play the equally valid but rather less exciting game of keeper of the flame and update records, gather unreleased material, correct other scholars, and generally camp it up as a stroppy but necessary figure in the dusty libraries of musical history.
The bandwagon jumper is a different fish. The adept bandwagon jumper rarely jumps from the ground; rather, she jumps, catlike, from one wagon to another. Some wagons move slowly; some move quickly. The swifter wagons are only jumped by the adept, the gymnastic, the highly courageous. Then, as well, there are many intellectual and planning factors to digest before one dares a jump: there is the speed of one’s own bandwagon; the moods, tempers and attitudes of the bandwagon to which you wish to jump (sometimes the groups is welcoming, sometimes hostile); and so on.
The adept jump on bandwagons that are only about a quarter full of very hard working artists playing the we-are-visionary game. They take over through the magnetic force of their personalities and their business sense.
Never jump on a bandwagon that is already full. There is no room for you unless you jump on top of their heads. They will get annoyed; they will probably kick you off. You may end up under the wheels, or rolled over by the next bandwagon that comes along. Also, a full bandwagon is uncomfortable for everyone aboard. There is so little room that no-one can move or do any work. They travel more slowly as they are heavier, and there is a risk that the wheel axles will break under the combined load. Everyone falls in a heap, and some are squashed. It is, as best, embarassing and undignified; and it is not always easy to catch a fast moving bandwagon from a standing position on the road.
So when is the best time to jump on a bandwagon? If, like us, you are not a charismatic, adept gymnast, but a slow moving, perplexed little tortoise, by far the best time to jump a wagon is when the genre it represents is beginning to smell. It is beginning to be uncool: so uncool that even the uncool people are jumping ship, even though this time last year they were sticky with it like Pooh in a honeypot! See the suckers run and jump!
You don’t need to be travelling at any great speed to jump a bandwagon like this: it’s already coming to a slow halt. Run up alongside it. Ease yourself on. Take a walk around, familiarise yourself. Pick up the bits and pieces people have left behind. Turn them over, examine them in the light. Scrub the decks until they no longer smell of money. Get to know the engine and the steering wheel; the sleeping quarters; the kitchen. It’s yours now. Take your little wagon wherever you like.
Previous Posts
- To do creative work you need to be like a camel: b...
- My words are music for people who cannot hear.
- To see through the manipulation is to understand t...
- When you have no opinions, you start to drift aiml...
- Can you live well if you are deprived of enemies? ...
- Censorship is for the easily alarmed, and no-one i...
- She lay silent for a billion years, and then one d...
- He is a coward, and so he puts his grievances into...
- He is not my friend, but I envy him. I wish I coul...
- On the left, there is inaction. On the right, ther...
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