Charlotte Joko Beck:
Intelligent practice always deals with just one thing: the fear at the base of human existence, the fear that I am not. And of course I am not, but the last thing I want to know is that. I am impermanence itself in a rapidly changing human form that appears solid. I fear to see what I am: an ever-changing energy field. . . . So good practice is about fear. Fear takes the form of constantly thinking, speculating, analyzing, fantasizing. With all that activity we create a cloud cover to keep ourselves safe in make-believe practice. True practice is not safe; it's anything but safe. But we don't like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve our version of the personal dream. Such obsessive practice is itself just another cloud between ourselves and reality. The only thing that matters is seeing with an impersonal searchlight: seeing things as they are. When the personal barrier drops away, why do we have to call it anything? We just live our lives. And when we die, we just die. No problem anywhere.
3.24.2009
3.15.2009
3.10.2009
2.17.2009
Anthony de Mello:
Every time I have a concept, it is something that I could apply to a number of individuals. We're not talking about a concrete, particular name like Mary or John, which doesn't have a conceptual meaning. A concept applies to any number of individuals, countless individuals. Concepts are universal. For instance, the word "leaf" could be applied to every single leaf on a tree; the same word applies to all those individual leaves. Moreover, the same word applies to all the leaves on all trees, big ones, small ones, tender ones, dried ones, yellow ones, green ones, banana leaves. So if I say to you that I saw a leaf this morning, you really don't have an idea of what I saw.
Let's see if you can understand that. You do have an idea of what I did not see. I did not see an animal. I did not see a dog. I did not see a human being. I did not see a shoe. So you have some kind of a vague ideas of what I saw, but it isn't particularized, it isn't concrete. "Human being" refers not to primitive man, not to civilized man, not to grownup man, not to a child, not to a male or a female, not to this particular age or another, not to this culture or the other, but to the concept. The human being is found concrete; you never find a universal human being like your concept. So your concept points, but it is never entirely accurate; it misses uniqueness, concreteness. The concept is universal.
When I give you a concept, I give you something, and yet how little I have given you. The concept is so valuable, so useful for science. For instance, if I say that everyone here is an animal, that would be perfectly accurate from a scientific viewpoint. But we're something more than animals. If I say that Mary Jane is an animal, that's true; but because I've omitted something essential about her, it's false; it does her an injustice. When I call a person a woman, that's true; but there are lots of things in that person that don't fit into the concept "woman." She is always this particular, concrete, unique woman, who can only be experienced, not conceptualized. The concrete person I've got to see for myself, to experience for myself, to intuit for myself. The individual can be intuited but cannot be conceptualized.
A person is beyond the thinking mind. Many of you would probably be proud to be called Americans, as many Indians would probably be proud to be called Indians. But what is "American," what is "Indian"? It's a convention; it's not part of your nature. All you've got is a label. You really don't know the person. The concept always misses omits something extremely important, something precious that is only found in reality, which is concrete uniqueness. The great Krishnamurti put it so well when he said, "The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again." How true! The first time the child sees that fluffy, alive, moving object, and you say to him, "Sparrow," then tomorrow when the child sees another fluffy, moving object similar to it he says, "Oh, sparrows. I've see sparrows. I'm bored by sparrows."
If you don't look at things through your concepts, you'll never be bored. Every single thing is unique. Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities. It's a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so that we can have a concept. It's a great help, from the point of view of communication, education, science. But it's also very misleading and a great hindrance to seeing this concrete individual. If all you experience is your concept, you're not experiencing reality, because reality is concrete. The concept is a help, to lead you to reality, but when you get there, you've got to intuit or experience it directly.
A second quality of a concept is that it is static whereas reality is in flux. We use the same name for Niagara Falls, but that body of water is constantly changing. You've got the word "river," but the water there is constantly flowing. You've got one word for your "body," but the cells in your body are constantly being renewed. Let's suppose, for example, there is an enormous wind outside and I want the people in my country to get an idea of what an American gale or hurricane is like. So I capture it in a cigar box and I go back home and say, "look at this." Naturally, it isn't a gale anymore, is it? Once it's captured. Or if I want your to get the feel of what the flow of a river is like and I bring it to you in a bucket. The moment I put it into a bucket it has stopped flowing. The moment you put things into a concept, they stop flowing; they become static, dead. A frozen wave is not a wave. A wave is essentially movement, action; when you freeze it, it is not a wave. Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows. Finally, if we are to believe (and it doesn't take too much of an effort to understand this, or even believe it, but no one can see it at once), reality is whole, but words and concepts fragment reality. That is why it is so difficult to translate from one language to another, because each language cuts reality up differently. The English word "home" is impossible to translate into French or Spanish. "Casa" is not quite "home"; "home" has associations that are peculiar to the English language. Every language has untranslatable words and expressions, because we're cutting reality up and adding something or subtracting something and usage keeps changing. Reality is a whole and we cut it up to make concepts and we use words to indicate different parts. If you had never seen an animal in your life, for example, and one day you found a tail -- just a tail -- and somebody told you, "That's a tail," would you have any idea of what it was if you had no idea what an animal was?
Ideas actually fragment the vision, intuition, or experience of reality as a whole. This is what the mystics are perpetually telling us. Words cannot give you reality. They only point, they only indicate. You use them as pointers to get to reality. But once you get there, your concepts are useless. A Hindu priest once had a dispute with a philosopher who claimed that the final barrier to God was the word "God," the concept of God. The priest was quite shocked by this, but the philosopher said, "The ass that you mount -- and that you use to travel to a house is not the means by which you enter the house. You use the concept to get there; then you dismount, you go beyond it." You don't need to be a mystic to understand that reality is something that cannot be captured by words or concepts. To know reality you have to know beyond knowing.
Do those words ring a bell? Those of you who are familiar with The Cloud of Unknowing would recognize the expression. Poets, painters, mystics, and the great philosophers all have intimations of its truth. Let's suppose that one day I'm watching a tree. Until now, every time I saw a tree, I said, "Well, it's a tree," But today when I'm looking at the tree, I don't see a tree. At least I don't see what I'm accustomed to seeing. I see something with the freshness of a child's vision. I have no word for it. I see something unique, whole, flowing, not fragmented. And I'm in awe. If you were to ask me, "What did you see?" what do you think I'd answer? I have no word for it. There is no word for reality. Because as soon as I put a word to it, we're back into concepts again.
And if I cannot express this reality that is visible to my senses, how does one express what cannot be seen by the eye or heard by the ear? How does one find a word for the reality of God? Are you beginning to understand what Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and all the rest were saying and what the Church teaches constantly when she says that God is mystery, is unintelligible to the human mind?
The great Karl Rahner, in one of his last letters, wrote to a young German drug addict who had asked him for help. The addict had said, "You theologians talk about God, but how could this God be relevant in my life? How could this God get me off drugs?" Rahner said to him, "I must confess to you in all honesty that for me God is and has always been absolute mystery. I do not understand what God is; no one can. We have intimations, inklings; we make faltering, inadequate attempts to put mystery into words. But there is no word for it, no sentence for it." And talking to a group of theologians in London, Rahner said, "The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable." Unexplainable mystery. One does not know, one cannot say. One says, "Ah, ah..."
Words are pointers, they're not descriptions. Tragically, people fall into idolatry because they think that where God is concerned, the word is the thing. How could you get so crazy? Can you be crazier than that? Even where human beings are concerned, or trees and leaves and animals, the word is not the thing. And you would say that, where God is concerned, the word is one thing? What are you talking about? An internationally famous scripture scholar attended this course in San Francisco, and he said to me, "My God, after listening to you, I understand that I've been an idol worshipper all my life!" He said this openly. "It never struck me that I had been an idol worshipper. My idol was not made of wood or metal; it was a mental idol." These are the more dangerous idol worshippers. They use a very subtle substance, the mind, to produce their God.
What I'm leading you to is the following: awareness of reality, around you. Awareness means to watch, to observe what is going on within you and around you. "Going on" is pretty accurate: Trees, grass, flowers, animals, rock, all of reality is moving. One observes it, one watches it. How essential it is for the human being not just to observe himself or herself, but to watch all of reality. Are you imprisoned by your concepts? Do you want to break out of your prison? Then look; observe; spend hours observing. Watching what? Anything. The faces of people, the shapes of trees, a bird in flight, a pile of stones, watch the grass grow. Get in touch with things, look at them. Hopefully you will then break out of these rigid patterns we have all developed, out of what our thoughts and our words have imposed on us. Hopefully we will see. What will we see? This thing that we choose to call reality, whatever is beyond words and concepts. This is a spiritual exercise -- connected with spirituality -- connected with breaking out of your cage, out of the imprisonment of the concepts and words.
How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child. This doesn't mean you should drop your concepts totally; they're very precious. Though we begin without them, concepts have a very positive function. Thanks to them we develop our intelligence. We're invited, not to become children, but to become like children. We do have to fall from a stage of innocence and be thrown out of paradise; we do have to develop an "I" and a "me" through these concepts. But then we need to return to paradise. We need to be redeemed again. We need to put off the old man, the old nature, the conditioned self, and return to the state of the child but without being a child. When we start off in life, we look at reality with wonder, but it isn't the intelligent wonder of the mystics; it's the formless wonder of the child. Then wonder dies and is replaced by boredom, as we develop language and words and concepts. Then hopefully, if we're lucky, we'll return to wonder again.
Every time I have a concept, it is something that I could apply to a number of individuals. We're not talking about a concrete, particular name like Mary or John, which doesn't have a conceptual meaning. A concept applies to any number of individuals, countless individuals. Concepts are universal. For instance, the word "leaf" could be applied to every single leaf on a tree; the same word applies to all those individual leaves. Moreover, the same word applies to all the leaves on all trees, big ones, small ones, tender ones, dried ones, yellow ones, green ones, banana leaves. So if I say to you that I saw a leaf this morning, you really don't have an idea of what I saw.
Let's see if you can understand that. You do have an idea of what I did not see. I did not see an animal. I did not see a dog. I did not see a human being. I did not see a shoe. So you have some kind of a vague ideas of what I saw, but it isn't particularized, it isn't concrete. "Human being" refers not to primitive man, not to civilized man, not to grownup man, not to a child, not to a male or a female, not to this particular age or another, not to this culture or the other, but to the concept. The human being is found concrete; you never find a universal human being like your concept. So your concept points, but it is never entirely accurate; it misses uniqueness, concreteness. The concept is universal.
When I give you a concept, I give you something, and yet how little I have given you. The concept is so valuable, so useful for science. For instance, if I say that everyone here is an animal, that would be perfectly accurate from a scientific viewpoint. But we're something more than animals. If I say that Mary Jane is an animal, that's true; but because I've omitted something essential about her, it's false; it does her an injustice. When I call a person a woman, that's true; but there are lots of things in that person that don't fit into the concept "woman." She is always this particular, concrete, unique woman, who can only be experienced, not conceptualized. The concrete person I've got to see for myself, to experience for myself, to intuit for myself. The individual can be intuited but cannot be conceptualized.
A person is beyond the thinking mind. Many of you would probably be proud to be called Americans, as many Indians would probably be proud to be called Indians. But what is "American," what is "Indian"? It's a convention; it's not part of your nature. All you've got is a label. You really don't know the person. The concept always misses omits something extremely important, something precious that is only found in reality, which is concrete uniqueness. The great Krishnamurti put it so well when he said, "The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again." How true! The first time the child sees that fluffy, alive, moving object, and you say to him, "Sparrow," then tomorrow when the child sees another fluffy, moving object similar to it he says, "Oh, sparrows. I've see sparrows. I'm bored by sparrows."
If you don't look at things through your concepts, you'll never be bored. Every single thing is unique. Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow despite the similarities. It's a great help to have similarities, so we can abstract, so that we can have a concept. It's a great help, from the point of view of communication, education, science. But it's also very misleading and a great hindrance to seeing this concrete individual. If all you experience is your concept, you're not experiencing reality, because reality is concrete. The concept is a help, to lead you to reality, but when you get there, you've got to intuit or experience it directly.
A second quality of a concept is that it is static whereas reality is in flux. We use the same name for Niagara Falls, but that body of water is constantly changing. You've got the word "river," but the water there is constantly flowing. You've got one word for your "body," but the cells in your body are constantly being renewed. Let's suppose, for example, there is an enormous wind outside and I want the people in my country to get an idea of what an American gale or hurricane is like. So I capture it in a cigar box and I go back home and say, "look at this." Naturally, it isn't a gale anymore, is it? Once it's captured. Or if I want your to get the feel of what the flow of a river is like and I bring it to you in a bucket. The moment I put it into a bucket it has stopped flowing. The moment you put things into a concept, they stop flowing; they become static, dead. A frozen wave is not a wave. A wave is essentially movement, action; when you freeze it, it is not a wave. Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows. Finally, if we are to believe (and it doesn't take too much of an effort to understand this, or even believe it, but no one can see it at once), reality is whole, but words and concepts fragment reality. That is why it is so difficult to translate from one language to another, because each language cuts reality up differently. The English word "home" is impossible to translate into French or Spanish. "Casa" is not quite "home"; "home" has associations that are peculiar to the English language. Every language has untranslatable words and expressions, because we're cutting reality up and adding something or subtracting something and usage keeps changing. Reality is a whole and we cut it up to make concepts and we use words to indicate different parts. If you had never seen an animal in your life, for example, and one day you found a tail -- just a tail -- and somebody told you, "That's a tail," would you have any idea of what it was if you had no idea what an animal was?
Ideas actually fragment the vision, intuition, or experience of reality as a whole. This is what the mystics are perpetually telling us. Words cannot give you reality. They only point, they only indicate. You use them as pointers to get to reality. But once you get there, your concepts are useless. A Hindu priest once had a dispute with a philosopher who claimed that the final barrier to God was the word "God," the concept of God. The priest was quite shocked by this, but the philosopher said, "The ass that you mount -- and that you use to travel to a house is not the means by which you enter the house. You use the concept to get there; then you dismount, you go beyond it." You don't need to be a mystic to understand that reality is something that cannot be captured by words or concepts. To know reality you have to know beyond knowing.
Do those words ring a bell? Those of you who are familiar with The Cloud of Unknowing would recognize the expression. Poets, painters, mystics, and the great philosophers all have intimations of its truth. Let's suppose that one day I'm watching a tree. Until now, every time I saw a tree, I said, "Well, it's a tree," But today when I'm looking at the tree, I don't see a tree. At least I don't see what I'm accustomed to seeing. I see something with the freshness of a child's vision. I have no word for it. I see something unique, whole, flowing, not fragmented. And I'm in awe. If you were to ask me, "What did you see?" what do you think I'd answer? I have no word for it. There is no word for reality. Because as soon as I put a word to it, we're back into concepts again.
And if I cannot express this reality that is visible to my senses, how does one express what cannot be seen by the eye or heard by the ear? How does one find a word for the reality of God? Are you beginning to understand what Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and all the rest were saying and what the Church teaches constantly when she says that God is mystery, is unintelligible to the human mind?
The great Karl Rahner, in one of his last letters, wrote to a young German drug addict who had asked him for help. The addict had said, "You theologians talk about God, but how could this God be relevant in my life? How could this God get me off drugs?" Rahner said to him, "I must confess to you in all honesty that for me God is and has always been absolute mystery. I do not understand what God is; no one can. We have intimations, inklings; we make faltering, inadequate attempts to put mystery into words. But there is no word for it, no sentence for it." And talking to a group of theologians in London, Rahner said, "The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable." Unexplainable mystery. One does not know, one cannot say. One says, "Ah, ah..."
Words are pointers, they're not descriptions. Tragically, people fall into idolatry because they think that where God is concerned, the word is the thing. How could you get so crazy? Can you be crazier than that? Even where human beings are concerned, or trees and leaves and animals, the word is not the thing. And you would say that, where God is concerned, the word is one thing? What are you talking about? An internationally famous scripture scholar attended this course in San Francisco, and he said to me, "My God, after listening to you, I understand that I've been an idol worshipper all my life!" He said this openly. "It never struck me that I had been an idol worshipper. My idol was not made of wood or metal; it was a mental idol." These are the more dangerous idol worshippers. They use a very subtle substance, the mind, to produce their God.
What I'm leading you to is the following: awareness of reality, around you. Awareness means to watch, to observe what is going on within you and around you. "Going on" is pretty accurate: Trees, grass, flowers, animals, rock, all of reality is moving. One observes it, one watches it. How essential it is for the human being not just to observe himself or herself, but to watch all of reality. Are you imprisoned by your concepts? Do you want to break out of your prison? Then look; observe; spend hours observing. Watching what? Anything. The faces of people, the shapes of trees, a bird in flight, a pile of stones, watch the grass grow. Get in touch with things, look at them. Hopefully you will then break out of these rigid patterns we have all developed, out of what our thoughts and our words have imposed on us. Hopefully we will see. What will we see? This thing that we choose to call reality, whatever is beyond words and concepts. This is a spiritual exercise -- connected with spirituality -- connected with breaking out of your cage, out of the imprisonment of the concepts and words.
How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child. This doesn't mean you should drop your concepts totally; they're very precious. Though we begin without them, concepts have a very positive function. Thanks to them we develop our intelligence. We're invited, not to become children, but to become like children. We do have to fall from a stage of innocence and be thrown out of paradise; we do have to develop an "I" and a "me" through these concepts. But then we need to return to paradise. We need to be redeemed again. We need to put off the old man, the old nature, the conditioned self, and return to the state of the child but without being a child. When we start off in life, we look at reality with wonder, but it isn't the intelligent wonder of the mystics; it's the formless wonder of the child. Then wonder dies and is replaced by boredom, as we develop language and words and concepts. Then hopefully, if we're lucky, we'll return to wonder again.
2.01.2009
Agnes Martin:
We, each of us feels that our life is not like anyone else's life and that is absolutely true, infinitely true. To live an absolutely original life one has only to be oneself. In nature there is no sameness anywhere. There are no two rocks alike, no days alike, no moments alike even forever. And no two people alike or any moment of their lives. It follows from this that we cannot help one another since our responses are not alike. Since we are not alike the experience of others is of no use to us. This is particularly obvious when we wish to know what to do. We are all born with a certain potential. It is different from that of anyone else and it is necessary to life. We must unfold our potential as a contribution to life. We are born to do certain things and we are born to fill a certain need. If there is a bare spot on the ground the best possible weed for that environment will grow. In the same way our lives are created out of necessity and we are created with the potential to meet the necessity. The resistance to function, that is our resistance to the unfolding of our potential is due to the strength of the negative in life. We are born as verbs rather than nouns. We are born to function in life, to work and do all positive actions that will carry out our potential. When our potential is fully expended we will not be back. Our concrete existence will come to an end. Our ideas - deductions made from observed facts of life, are of no use in the unfolding of potential. Only obedience to the conscious mind counts. That is like saying only inspiration counts. Inspiration is a command. While you have a choice that is not inspiration. If a decision is required that is not inspiration and you should not do anything by decision. It is simply a waste of time. Things done by decision even if it is a summit decision are ineffective and they will be undone. Only actions carried out in obedience to inspiration are effective.
Children make a perfect response to life. They see everything as beautiful and perfect, often telling their parents how beautiful and wonderful they are. Children always love their parents with perfect love regardless of what the parents are like. They have to learn to bear frustration which makes them seem unhappy at times. Living without sufficient inspiration which is the incentive to life we tend to forget the perfect response we made as children and we become more and more blind. It is necessary to make an absolute about face and search out our true response. You will be thinking: "It is easy enough for children because they have no responsibilities", but I assure you that you also can make a perfect response to life without worry or strain. You have to see what you have to do in your mind's eye. You have to give it time. It is hard for your mind to get through to you because of the jumble it is in. With seeing the direction the energy necessary to carry out the action is given. When it is carried out the energy is taken away so that you can rest. If you feel tired it is because you cannot see. If you cannot see the next step you will take and the happiness you will know taking it. Then you cannot see. If you cannot see you must withdraw yourself till you see what your next action will be. In confusion and blindness there is no help for you anywhere except from your own mind. From your own mind there is all the help you need.
We, each of us feels that our life is not like anyone else's life and that is absolutely true, infinitely true. To live an absolutely original life one has only to be oneself. In nature there is no sameness anywhere. There are no two rocks alike, no days alike, no moments alike even forever. And no two people alike or any moment of their lives. It follows from this that we cannot help one another since our responses are not alike. Since we are not alike the experience of others is of no use to us. This is particularly obvious when we wish to know what to do. We are all born with a certain potential. It is different from that of anyone else and it is necessary to life. We must unfold our potential as a contribution to life. We are born to do certain things and we are born to fill a certain need. If there is a bare spot on the ground the best possible weed for that environment will grow. In the same way our lives are created out of necessity and we are created with the potential to meet the necessity. The resistance to function, that is our resistance to the unfolding of our potential is due to the strength of the negative in life. We are born as verbs rather than nouns. We are born to function in life, to work and do all positive actions that will carry out our potential. When our potential is fully expended we will not be back. Our concrete existence will come to an end. Our ideas - deductions made from observed facts of life, are of no use in the unfolding of potential. Only obedience to the conscious mind counts. That is like saying only inspiration counts. Inspiration is a command. While you have a choice that is not inspiration. If a decision is required that is not inspiration and you should not do anything by decision. It is simply a waste of time. Things done by decision even if it is a summit decision are ineffective and they will be undone. Only actions carried out in obedience to inspiration are effective.
Children make a perfect response to life. They see everything as beautiful and perfect, often telling their parents how beautiful and wonderful they are. Children always love their parents with perfect love regardless of what the parents are like. They have to learn to bear frustration which makes them seem unhappy at times. Living without sufficient inspiration which is the incentive to life we tend to forget the perfect response we made as children and we become more and more blind. It is necessary to make an absolute about face and search out our true response. You will be thinking: "It is easy enough for children because they have no responsibilities", but I assure you that you also can make a perfect response to life without worry or strain. You have to see what you have to do in your mind's eye. You have to give it time. It is hard for your mind to get through to you because of the jumble it is in. With seeing the direction the energy necessary to carry out the action is given. When it is carried out the energy is taken away so that you can rest. If you feel tired it is because you cannot see. If you cannot see the next step you will take and the happiness you will know taking it. Then you cannot see. If you cannot see you must withdraw yourself till you see what your next action will be. In confusion and blindness there is no help for you anywhere except from your own mind. From your own mind there is all the help you need.
1.31.2009
Robert A. F. Thurman:
The basis is wisdom. The human being from the Buddhist's point of view is a marvelous machine...is the most marvelous machine in the universe. The reason that human beings stress themselves out and stress each other out is because of their ignorance...because various ideologies and habits and cultural ideas, even religious ideas sometimes have persuaded them traditionally that there is something wrong with them.
Based on ignorance of the nature of reality they are creating themselves a negative situation out of a positive situation. From the Buddhist's point of view if you know your own reality, in a sense of you are a part of the relative world, there's no absolute you that is sort of some little isolated little core that is fighting its way against the universe.
Enlightenment means you see through this illusion of being you versus the universe and you realize that it is you as a part of the universe, you as a relativity with the universe. So suddenly, it's you in partnership with the universe. You then draw strength from the universe. Those of us who have still ignorance, since we're confused - Where are we? What are we doing? Is this helping me or not? Or what is going on? - We have so much energy invested in anxiety and stress and fear, we cannot enjoy ourselves even in the most enjoyable situations.
The basis is wisdom. The human being from the Buddhist's point of view is a marvelous machine...is the most marvelous machine in the universe. The reason that human beings stress themselves out and stress each other out is because of their ignorance...because various ideologies and habits and cultural ideas, even religious ideas sometimes have persuaded them traditionally that there is something wrong with them.
Based on ignorance of the nature of reality they are creating themselves a negative situation out of a positive situation. From the Buddhist's point of view if you know your own reality, in a sense of you are a part of the relative world, there's no absolute you that is sort of some little isolated little core that is fighting its way against the universe.
Enlightenment means you see through this illusion of being you versus the universe and you realize that it is you as a part of the universe, you as a relativity with the universe. So suddenly, it's you in partnership with the universe. You then draw strength from the universe. Those of us who have still ignorance, since we're confused - Where are we? What are we doing? Is this helping me or not? Or what is going on? - We have so much energy invested in anxiety and stress and fear, we cannot enjoy ourselves even in the most enjoyable situations.
1.26.2009
William Deresiewicz:
What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. That's 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, she's never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, she's never alone.
I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she'll sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?
To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few. Through the solitude of rare spirits, the collective renews its relationship with divinity. The prophet and the hermit, the sadhu and the yogi, pursue their vision quests, invite their trances, in desert or forest or cave. For the still, small voice speaks only in silence. Social life is a bustle of petty concerns, a jostle of quotidian interests, and religious institutions are no exception. You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you, and the divine word, their pretensions notwithstanding, demurs at descending on the monarch and the priest. Communal experience is the human norm, but the solitary encounter with God is the egregious act that refreshes that norm. (Egregious, for no man is a prophet in his own land. Tiresias was reviled before he was vindicated, Teresa interrogated before she was canonized.) Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism, a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom. The seer returns with new tablets or new dances, his face bright with the old truth.
Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism. In Marilynne Robinson's interpretation, Calvinism created the modern self by focusing the soul inward, leaving it to encounter God, like a prophet of old, in "profound isolation." To her enumeration of Calvin, Marguerite de Navarre, and Milton as pioneering early-modern selves we can add Montaigne, Hamlet, and even Don Quixote. The last figure alerts us to reading's essential role in this transformation, the printing press serving an analogous function in the 16th and subsequent centuries to that of television and the Internet in our own. Reading, as Robinson puts it, "is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity." "The soul encountered itself in response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass." With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice became available to, even incumbent upon, everyone.
But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. Protestant solitude is still only figurative. Rousseau and Wordsworth made it physical. The self was now encountered not in God but in Nature, and to encounter Nature one had to go to it. And go to it with a special sensibility: The poet displaced the saint as social seer and cultural model. But because Romanticism also inherited the 18th-century idea of social sympathy, Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with sociability — if less for Rousseau and still less for Thoreau, the most famous solitary of all, then certainly for Wordsworth, Melville, Whitman, and many others. For Emerson, "the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society." The Romantic practice of solitude is neatly captured by Trilling's "sincerity": the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of public appearance and private essence, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others. Especially, as Emerson suggests, one beloved other. Hence the famous Romantic friendship pairs: Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Melville.
Modernism decoupled this dialectic. Its notion of solitude was harsher, more adversarial, more isolating. As a model of the self and its interactions, Hume's social sympathy gave way to Pater's thick wall of personality and Freud's narcissism — the sense that the soul, self-enclosed and inaccessible to others, can't choose but be alone. With exceptions, like Woolf, the modernists fought shy of friendship. Joyce and Proust disparaged it; D.H. Lawrence was wary of it; the modernist friendship pairs — Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, Hemingway and Fitzgerald — were altogether cooler than their Romantic counterparts. The world was now understood as an assault on the self, and with good reason.
The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city. In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth: Eliot's London, Joyce's Dublin. The mob, the human mass, presses in. Hell is other people. The soul is forced back into itself — hence the development of a more austere, more embattled form of self-validation, Trilling's "authenticity," where the essential relationship is only with oneself. (Just as there are few good friendships in modernism, so are there few good marriages.) Solitude becomes, more than ever, the arena of heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast and terrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights. To achieve authenticity is to look upon these visions without flinching; Trilling's exemplar here is Kurtz. Protestant self-examination becomes Freudian analysis, and the culture hero, once a prophet of God and then a poet of Nature, is now a novelist of self — a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, a Proust.
But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined. The first of these technologies, the first simulacrum of proximity, was the telephone. "Reach out and touch someone." But through the 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.
Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone.
As a result, we are losing both sides of the Romantic dialectic. What does friendship mean when you have 532 "friends"? How does it enhance my sense of closeness when my Facebook News Feed tells me that Sally Smith (whom I haven't seen since high school, and wasn't all that friendly with even then) "is making coffee and staring off into space"? My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude.
But at least friendship, if not intimacy, is still something they want. As jarring as the new dispensation may be for people in their 30s and 40s, the real problem is that it has become completely natural for people in their teens and 20s. Young people today seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can't imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others. As long ago as 1952, Trilling wrote about "the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment." Now we have equipped ourselves with the means to prevent that fear from ever being realized. Which does not mean that we have put it to rest. Quite the contrary. Remember my student, who couldn't even write a paper by herself. The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.
There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation's experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century. Suburbanization, by eliminating the stimulation as well as the sociability of urban or traditional village life, exacerbated the tendency to both. But the great age of boredom, I believe, came in with television, precisely because television was designed to palliate that feeling. Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one's lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.
I speak from experience. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.) It took me years to discover — and my nervous system will never fully adjust to this idea; I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect — that having nothing to do doesn't have to be a bad thing. The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.
So it is with the current generation's experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn't call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn't always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn't always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.
And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.
But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychology tells us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals. According to David Brooks, that reliable index of the social-scientific zeitgeist, cognitive scientists tell us that "our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context"; neuroscientists, that we have "permeable minds" that function in part through a process of "deep imitation"; psychologists, that "we are organized by our attachments"; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by "the power of social networks." The ultimate implication is that there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."
The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self. The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.
If they didn't, they would understand that solitude enables us to secure the integrity of the self as well as to explore it. Few have shown this more beautifully than Woolf. In the middle of Mrs. Dalloway, between her navigation of the streets and her orchestration of the party, between the urban jostle and the social bustle, Clarissa goes up, "like a nun withdrawing," to her attic room. Like a nun: She returns to a state that she herself thinks of as a kind of virginity. This does not mean she's a prude. Virginity is classically the outward sign of spiritual inviolability, of a self untouched by the world, a soul that has preserved its integrity by refusing to descend into the chaos and self-division of sexual and social relations. It is the mark of the saint and the monk, of Hippolytus and Antigone and Joan of Arc. Solitude is both the social image of that state and the means by which we can approximate it. And the supreme image in Mrs. Dalloway of the dignity of solitude itself is the old woman whom Clarissa catches sight of through her window. "Here was one room," she thinks, "there another." We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.
To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one's way beyond it. Solitude, Emerson said, "is to genius the stern friend." "He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions." One must protect oneself from the momentum of intellectual and moral consensus — especially, Emerson added, during youth. "God is alone," Thoreau said, "but the Devil, he is far from being alone; he sees a great deal of company; he is legion." The university was to be praised, Emerson believed, if only because it provided its charges with "a separate chamber and fire" — the physical space of solitude. Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts. But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. "The saint and poet seek privacy," Emerson said, "to ends the most public and universal." We are back to the seer, seeking signposts for the future in splendid isolation.
Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone. It has undoubtedly never been the province of more than a few. "I believe," Thoreau said, "that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark." Teresa and Tiresias will always be the exceptions, or to speak in more relevant terms, the young people — and they still exist — who prefer to loaf and invite their soul, who step to the beat of a different drummer. But if solitude disappears as a social value and social idea, will even the exceptions remain possible? Still, one is powerless to reverse the drift of the culture. One can only save oneself — and whatever else happens, one can still always do that. But it takes a willingness to be unpopular.
The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn't very polite. Thoreau knew that the "doubleness" that solitude cultivates, the ability to stand back and observe life dispassionately, is apt to make us a little unpleasant to our fellows, to say nothing of the offense implicit in avoiding their company. But then, he didn't worry overmuch about being genial. He didn't even like having to talk to people three times a day, at meals; one can only imagine what he would have made of text-messaging. We, however, have made of geniality — the weak smile, the polite interest, the fake invitation — a cardinal virtue. Friendship may be slipping from our grasp, but our friendliness is universal. Not for nothing does "gregarious" mean "part of the herd." But Thoreau understood that securing one's self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.
1.02.2009
Malcolm Gladwell:
The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.
You ask me an odd question. Of course one can work here, as anywhere else, if one has the will. Paris offers, further, an advantage you can’t find elsewhere: the museums in which you can study the old masters from 11 to 4. This is how you must divide your time. From 6 to 11 you go to a studio to paint from a live model; you have lunch, then from 12 to 4 you copy, in the Louvre or the Luxembourg, whatever masterpiece you like. That will make up nine hours of work. I think that ought to be enough.
I’ll reckon out for you what you should spend. A room at 20 francs a month; lunch at 18 sous and dinner at 22, which makes two francs a day, or 60 francs a month. . . . Then you have the studio to pay for: the Atelier Suisse, one of the least expensive, charges, I think, 10 francs. Add 10 francs for canvas, brushes, colors; that makes 100. So you’ll have 25 francs left for laundry, light, the thousand little needs that turn up.
Before long someone appeared at his hotel with an object wrapped in a cloth. He sold the picture for 150 francs, which inspired him to trot back to his house with the dealer to inspect several more magnificent Cézannes. Vollard paid a thousand francs for the job lot, then on the way out was nearly hit on the head by a canvas that had been overlooked, dropped out the window by the man’s wife. All the pictures had been gathering dust, half buried in a pile of junk in the attic.
Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.
“I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. I could have had a good career. And my parents were very proud of me—my dad was so proud of me. . . . It was crazy.”
He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it like a job. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another—and then another.
In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. It was named a No. 1 Book Sense Pick. It made major regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.
Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.
Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with “Moby-Dick.” Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I grow old . . . I grow old”)? Twenty-three. “Poets peak young,” the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály CsÃkszentmihályi, the author of “Flow,” agrees: “The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young.” According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, “Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.”
A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.
The same was true of film, Galenson points out in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.
The examples that Galenson could not get out of his head, however, were Picasso and Cézanne. He was an art lover, and he knew their stories well. Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas,” produced at age twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career—including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” at the age of twenty-six. Picasso fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.
Cézanne didn’t. If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris—the finest collection of Cézannes in the world—the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career. Galenson did a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.
The first day that Ben Fountain sat down to write at his kitchen table went well. He knew how the story about the stockbroker was supposed to start. But the second day, he says, he “completely freaked out.” He didn’t know how to describe things. He felt as if he were back in first grade. He didn’t have a fully formed vision, waiting to be emptied onto the page. “I had to create a mental image of a building, a room, a façade, haircut, clothes—just really basic things,” he says. “I realized I didn’t have the facility to put those into words. I started going out and buying visual dictionaries, architectural dictionaries, and going to school on those.”
He began to collect articles about things he was interested in, and before long he realized that he had developed a fascination with Haiti. “The Haiti file just kept getting bigger and bigger,” Fountain says. “And I thought, O.K., here’s my novel. For a month or two I said I really don’t need to go there, I can imagine everything. But after a couple of months I thought, Yeah, you’ve got to go there, and so I went, in April or May of ’91.”
He spoke little French, let alone Haitian Creole. He had never been abroad. Nor did he know anyone in Haiti. “I got to the hotel, walked up the stairs, and there was this guy standing at the top of the stairs,” Fountain recalls. “He said, ‘My name is Pierre. You need a guide.’ I said, ‘You’re sure as hell right, I do.’ He was a very genuine person, and he realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to go see the girls, I didn’t want drugs, I didn’t want any of that other stuff,” Fountain went on. “And then it was, boom, ‘I can take you there. I can take you to this person.’ ”
Fountain was riveted by Haiti. “It’s like a laboratory, almost,” he says. “Everything that’s gone on in the last five hundred years—colonialism, race, power, politics, ecological disasters—it’s all there in very concentrated form. And also I just felt, viscerally, pretty comfortable there.” He made more trips to Haiti, sometimes for a week, sometimes for two weeks. He made friends. He invited them to visit him in Dallas. (“You haven’t lived until you’ve had Haitians stay in your house,” Fountain says.) “I mean, I was involved. I couldn’t just walk away. There’s this very nonrational, nonlinear part of the whole process. I had a pretty specific time era that I was writing about, and certain things that I needed to know. But there were other things I didn’t really need to know. I met a fellow who was with Save the Children, and he was on the Central Plateau, which takes about twelve hours to get to on a bus, and I had no reason to go there. But I went up there. Suffered on that bus, and ate dust. It was a hard trip, but it was a glorious trip. It had nothing to do with the book, but it wasn’t wasted knowledge.”
In “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” four of the stories are about Haiti, and they are the strongest in the collection. They feel like Haiti; they feel as if they’ve been written from the inside looking out, not the outside looking in. “After the novel was done, I don’t know, I just felt like there was more for me, and I could keep going, keep going deeper there,” Fountain recalls. “Always there’s something—always something—here for me. How many times have I been? At least thirty times.”
Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual,” Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’ ” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” He continued, “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. . . . I have never made trials or experiments.”
But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental,” Galenson writes in “Old Masters and Young Geniuses,” and he goes on:
The imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves, painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goal.
Where Picasso wanted to find, not search, Cézanne said the opposite: “I seek in painting.”
An experimental innovator would go back to Haiti thirty times. That’s how that kind of mind figures out what it wants to do. When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay.) When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.
Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.
One of the best stories in “Brief Encounters” is called “Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera.” It’s about an ornithologist taken hostage by the FARC guerrillas of Colombia. Like so much of Fountain’s work, it reads with an easy grace. But there was nothing easy or graceful about its creation. “I struggled with that story,” Fountain says. “I always try to do too much. I mean, I probably wrote five hundred pages of it in various incarnations.” Fountain is at work right now on a novel. It was supposed to come out this year. It’s late.
Galenson’s idea that creativity can be divided into these types—conceptual and experimental—has a number of important implications. For example, we sometimes think of late bloomers as late starters. They don’t realize they’re good at something until they’re fifty, so of course they achieve late in life. But that’s not quite right. Cézanne was painting almost as early as Picasso was. We also sometimes think of them as artists who are discovered late; the world is just slow to appreciate their gifts. In both cases, the assumption is that the prodigy and the late bloomer are fundamentally the same, and that late blooming is simply genius under conditions of market failure. What Galenson’s argument suggests is something else—that late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.
“All these qualities of his inner vision were continually hampered and obstructed by Cézanne’s incapacity to give sufficient verisimilitude to the personae of his drama,” the great English art critic Roger Fry wrote of the early Cézanne. “With all his rare endowments, he happened to lack the comparatively common gift of illustration, the gift that any draughtsman for the illustrated papers learns in a school of commercial art; whereas, to realize such visions as Cézanne’s required this gift in high degree.” In other words, the young Cézanne couldn’t draw. Of “The Banquet,” which Cézanne painted at thirty-one, Fry writes, “It is no use to deny that Cézanne has made a very poor job of it.” Fry goes on, “More happily endowed and more integral personalities have been able to express themselves harmoniously from the very first. But such rich, complex, and conflicting natures as Cézanne’s require a long period of fermentation.” Cézanne was trying something so elusive that he couldn’t master it until he’d spent decades practicing.
This is the vexing lesson of Fountain’s long attempt to get noticed by the literary world. On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s just be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counsellor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to accept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?
Not long after meeting Ben Fountain, I went to see the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of the 2002 best-seller “Everything Is Illuminated.” Fountain is a graying man, slight and modest, who looks, in the words of a friend of his, like a “golf pro from Augusta, Georgia.” Foer is in his early thirties and looks barely old enough to drink. Fountain has a softness to him, as if years of struggle have worn away whatever sharp edges he once had. Foer gives the impression that if you touched him while he was in full conversational flight you would get an electric shock.
“I came to writing really by the back door,” Foer said. “My wife is a writer, and she grew up keeping journals—you know, parents said, ‘Lights out, time for bed,’ and she had a little flashlight under the covers, reading books. I don’t think I read a book until much later than other people. I just wasn’t interested in it.”
Foer went to Princeton and took a creative-writing class in his freshman year with Joyce Carol Oates. It was, he explains, “sort of on a whim, maybe out of a sense that I should have a diverse course load.” He’d never written a story before. “I didn’t really think anything of it, to be honest, but halfway through the semester I arrived to class early one day, and she said, ‘Oh, I’m glad I have this chance to talk to you. I’m a fan of your writing.’ And it was a real revelation for me.”
Oates told him that he had the most important of writerly qualities, which was energy. He had been writing fifteen pages a week for that class, an entire story for each seminar. “Why does a dam with a crack in it leak so much?” he said, with a laugh. “There was just something in me, there was like a pressure.”
As a sophomore, he took another creative-writing class. During the following summer, he went to Europe. He wanted to find the village in Ukraine where his grandfather had come from. After the trip, he went to Prague. There he read Kafka, as any literary undergraduate would, and sat down at his computer.
“I was just writing,” he said. “I didn’t know that I was writing until it was happening. I didn’t go with the intention of writing a book. I wrote three hundred pages in ten weeks. I really wrote. I’d never done it like that.”
It was a novel about a boy named Jonathan Safran Foer who visits the village in Ukraine where his grandfather had come from. Those three hundred pages were the first draft of “Everything Is Illuminated”—the exquisite and extraordinary novel that established Foer as one of the most distinctive literary voices of his generation. He was nineteen years old.
Foer began to talk about the other way of writing books, where you painstakingly honed your craft, over years and years. “I couldn’t do that,” he said. He seemed puzzled by it. It was clear that he had no understanding of how being an experimental innovator would work. “I mean, imagine if the craft you’re trying to learn is to be an original. How could you learn the craft of being an original?”
He began to describe his visit to Ukraine. “I went to the shtetl where my family came from. It’s called Trachimbrod, the name I use in the book. It’s a real place. But you know what’s funny? It’s the single piece of research that made its way into the book.” He wrote the first sentence, and he was proud of it, and then he went back and forth in his mind about where to go next. “I spent the first week just having this debate with myself about what to do with this first sentence. And once I made the decision, I felt liberated to just create—and it was very explosive after that.”
If you read “Everything Is Illuminated,” you end up with the same feeling you get when you read “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara”—the sense of transport you experience when a work of literature draws you into its own world. Both are works of art. It’s just that, as artists, Fountain and Foer could not be less alike. Fountain went to Haiti thirty times. Foer went to Trachimbrod just once. “I mean, it was nothing,” Foer said. “I had absolutely no experience there at all. It was just a springboard for my book. It was like an empty swimming pool that had to be filled up.” Total time spent getting inspiration for his novel: three days.
Ben Fountain did not make the decision to quit the law and become a writer all by himself. He is married and has a family. He met his wife, Sharon, when they were both in law school at Duke. When he was doing real-estate work at Akin, Gump, she was on the partner track in the tax practice at Thompson & Knight. The two actually worked in the same building in downtown Dallas. They got married in 1985, and had a son in April of 1987. Sharie, as Fountain calls her, took four months of maternity leave before returning to work. She made partner by the end of that year.
“We had our son in a day care downtown,” she recalls. “We would drive in together, one of us would take him to day care, the other one would go to work. One of us would pick him up, and then, somewhere around eight o’clock at night, we would have him bathed, in bed, and then we hadn’t even eaten yet, and we’d be looking at each other, going, ‘This is just the beginning.’ ” She made a face. “That went on for maybe a month or two, and Ben’s like, ‘I don’t know how people do this.’ We both agreed that continuing at that pace was probably going to make us all miserable. Ben said to me, ‘Do you want to stay home?’ Well, I was pretty happy in my job, and he wasn’t, so as far as I was concerned it didn’t make any sense for me to stay home. And I didn’t have anything besides practicing law that I really wanted to do, and he did. So I said, ‘Look, can we do this in a way that we can still have some day care and so you can write?’ And so we did that.”
Ben could start writing at seven-thirty in the morning because Sharie took their son to day care. He stopped working in the afternoon because that was when he had to pick him up, and then he did the shopping and the household chores. In 1989, they had a second child, a daughter. Fountain was a full-fledged North Dallas stay-at-home dad.
“When Ben first did this, we talked about the fact that it might not work, and we talked about, generally, ‘When will we know that it really isn’t working?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, give it ten years,’ ” Sharie recalled. To her, ten years didn’t seem unreasonable. “It takes a while to decide whether you like something or not,” she says. And when ten years became twelve and then fourteen and then sixteen, and the kids were off in high school, she stood by him, because, even during that long stretch when Ben had nothing published at all, she was confident that he was getting better. She was fine with the trips to Haiti, too. “I can’t imagine writing a novel about a place you haven’t at least tried to visit,” she says. She even went with him once, and on the way into town from the airport there were people burning tires in the middle of the road.
“I was making pretty decent money, and we didn’t need two incomes,” Sharie went on. She has a calm, unflappable quality about her. “I mean, it would have been nice, but we could live on one.”
Sharie was Ben’s wife. But she was also—to borrow a term from long ago—his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career, or Picasso, whose talent was so blindingly obvious that an art dealer offered him a hundred-and-fifty-franc-a-month stipend the minute he got to Paris, at age twenty. If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.
This is what is so instructive about any biography of Cézanne. Accounts of his life start out being about Cézanne, and then quickly turn into the story of Cézanne’s circle. First and foremost is always his best friend from childhood, the writer Émile Zola, who convinces the awkward misfit from the provinces to come to Paris, and who serves as his guardian and protector and coach through the long, lean years.
Here is Zola, already in Paris, in a letter to the young Cézanne back in Provence. Note the tone, more paternal than fraternal:
You ask me an odd question. Of course one can work here, as anywhere else, if one has the will. Paris offers, further, an advantage you can’t find elsewhere: the museums in which you can study the old masters from 11 to 4. This is how you must divide your time. From 6 to 11 you go to a studio to paint from a live model; you have lunch, then from 12 to 4 you copy, in the Louvre or the Luxembourg, whatever masterpiece you like. That will make up nine hours of work. I think that ought to be enough.
Zola goes on, detailing exactly how Cézanne could manage financially on a monthly stipend of a hundred and twenty-five francs:
I’ll reckon out for you what you should spend. A room at 20 francs a month; lunch at 18 sous and dinner at 22, which makes two francs a day, or 60 francs a month. . . . Then you have the studio to pay for: the Atelier Suisse, one of the least expensive, charges, I think, 10 francs. Add 10 francs for canvas, brushes, colors; that makes 100. So you’ll have 25 francs left for laundry, light, the thousand little needs that turn up.
Camille Pissarro was the next critical figure in Cézanne’s life. It was Pissarro who took Cézanne under his wing and taught him how to be a painter. For years, there would be periods in which they went off into the country and worked side by side.
Then there was Ambrose Vollard, the sponsor of Cézanne’s first one-man show, at the age of fifty-six. At the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet, Vollard hunted down Cézanne in Aix. He spotted a still-life in a tree, where it had been flung by Cézanne in disgust. He poked around the town, putting the word out that he was in the market for Cézanne’s canvases. In “Lost Earth: A Life of Cézanne,” the biographer Philip Callow writes about what happened next:
Before long someone appeared at his hotel with an object wrapped in a cloth. He sold the picture for 150 francs, which inspired him to trot back to his house with the dealer to inspect several more magnificent Cézannes. Vollard paid a thousand francs for the job lot, then on the way out was nearly hit on the head by a canvas that had been overlooked, dropped out the window by the man’s wife. All the pictures had been gathering dust, half buried in a pile of junk in the attic.
All this came before Vollard agreed to sit a hundred and fifty times, from eight in the morning to eleven-thirty, without a break, for a picture that Cézanne disgustedly abandoned. Once, Vollard recounted in his memoir, he fell asleep, and toppled off the makeshift platform. Cézanne berated him, incensed: “Does an apple move?” This is called friendship.
Finally, there was Cézanne’s father, the banker Louis-Auguste. From the time Cézanne first left Aix, at the age of twenty-two, Louis-Auguste paid his bills, even when Cézanne gave every indication of being nothing more than a failed dilettante. But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons. The first three—Zola, Pissarro, and Vollard—would have been famous even if Cézanne never existed, and the fourth was an unusually gifted entrepreneur who left Cézanne four hundred thousand francs when he died. Cézanne didn’t just have help. He had a dream team in his corner.
This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others. In biographies of Cézanne, Louis-Auguste invariably comes across as a kind of grumpy philistine, who didn’t appreciate his son’s genius. But Louis-Auguste didn’t have to support Cézanne all those years. He would have been within his rights to make his son get a real job, just as Sharie might well have said no to her husband’s repeated trips to the chaos of Haiti. She could have argued that she had some right to the life style of her profession and status—that she deserved to drive a BMW, which is what power couples in North Dallas drive, instead of a Honda Accord, which is what she settled for.
But she believed in her husband’s art, or perhaps, more simply, she believed in her husband, the same way Zola and Pissarro and Vollard and—in his own, querulous way—Louis-Auguste must have believed in Cézanne. Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
“Sharie never once brought up money, not once—never,” Fountain said. She was sitting next to him, and he looked at her in a way that made it plain that he understood how much of the credit for “Brief Encounters” belonged to his wife. His eyes welled up with tears. “I never felt any pressure from her,” he said. “Not even covert, not even implied.”
12.23.2008
12.15.2008
Jeffrey J. Kripal:
Was that a peace-sign flag I saw waving in Grant Park before President-elect Barack Obama's victory speech? Despite all the talk of Obama's being next generation, 21st century, post everything, and of the divisive culture wars bred in the 60s finally being put to rest, on election night I couldn't help but think of that distant decade that brought us the peace sign and how some of its dreams might now be realized. What's next?
Spiritual exploration and the debunking of religion were other features of the 60s that people have tended to either ridicule or denounce, but we seem to be revisiting those themes as well. Before the presidential campaigns kicked into high gear, David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, wrote an essay called "The Neural Buddhists." In it he called arguments defending the existence of God against atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins easy, and predicted that the real challenge would "come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits." He continued: "In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation."
The phrase "neural Buddhists" calls up the ways in which the conclusions of modern neuroscience and a collection of ancient meditation practices developed in Asia have come to similar experiential and empirical conclusions about a number of things, including the ultimate nonexistence of the individual self or surface social ego. Such ideas, of course, are part of a much broader interest in "mysticism" and "spirituality," themselves, perhaps ironically, markers of that quintessentially modern and eminently democratic turn to the individual as the most reliable source of religious authority and insight.
Significantly, the modern, Western use of those terms — mysticism and spirituality — arose in the middle of the 19th century at the exact moment that science, in the form of an ascending Darwinism, was first seriously challenging institutional religion. This, of course, is a cultural war that is still very much with us in the present debates around religion and science, belief and atheism, creationism and evolution. Add to that volatile mix the violent terrorism of radical Islam, the likely role of modern technology and carbon-burning fuels in global warming and the environmental crisis, and the ability of institutions and governments to monitor our thoughts and words in extraordinarily precise and effective ways, and you have all the ingredients for ... what?
What do neural Buddhists, individualist spiritualities, cultural wars over science and religion and creationism and evolution, a nature-hating technology, the violence of extreme religious belief, and potentially omniscient government surveillance all have in common? They were all core elements in the life and work of the literary prophet Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).
Perhaps not coincidentally, a kind of Huxley renaissance is under way. According to the Los Angeles Times, Brave New World is being made into a film, to be directed by Ridley Scott and produced by George DiCaprio, starring his son, Leonardo. New editions of Huxley's books are in the works, and serious global interest in his writing is on the rise, particularly in Eastern Europe. It is worth returning to Huxley, then, not as he has been for us in the past — the author of the prophetic, dystopian Brave New World — but as he might be for us in the future.
Huxley was an iconic literary figure who embodied many of the tensions and coincidences of our contemporary intellectual scene, particularly those orbiting around those warring twin Titans, science and religion. On the scientific side, Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the great English defender of Charles Darwin — winner of the first great cultural war over religion and science — and the man who, in 1869, coined the word "agnosticism." Other than Darwin himself, T.H. Huxley, a biologist, probably did more than anyone else to lay the cultural foundation for our present scientific worldview. The results, as is well known but not always admitted, were devastating for traditional religious belief. W.H. Mallock captured the tone in 1878: "It is said that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing," he wrote. "One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying." One can only guess what Mallock would say now.
Aldous's older brother was Sir Julian Huxley, a well-known evolutionary biologist. Sir Julian thought that there is "one world stuff" that manifests both material and mental properties, depending upon whether it is viewed from without (matter) or from within (mind). The mental and the material aspects of reality, in other words, are two sides of the same cosmic coin. Aldous would arrive at a nearly identical position, drawn not from science but from comparative mysticism, and described in his still popular The Perennial Philosophy (1945). His primary inspiration seems to have been Advaita Vedanta, a classical Indian philosophy that captured much of elite Hindu thought and practice in the 19th century and subsequently influenced the reception of Hinduism among American intellectuals and artists in the 20th.
But Huxley was suspicious of gurus and gods of any sort, and he finally aligned himself with a deep stream of unorthodox doctrine and practice that he found running through all the Asian religions, which, he proclaimed in Island (his last novel, published in 1962), was a "new conscious Wisdom ... prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taoism and Tantra." That worldview — which Huxley also linked to ancient fertility cults, the study of sexuality in the modern West, and Darwinian biology — emerges from the refusal of all traditional dualisms; that is, it rejects any religious or moral system that separates the world and the divine, matter and mind, sex and spirit, purity and pollution (and that's rejecting a lot). Put more positively, Huxley's new Wisdom focuses on the embodied particularities of moment-to-moment experience, including sexual experience, as the place of "luminous bliss."
Science, particularly what would become neuroscience, was a key part of that mature vision. Very late in life, Huxley would drift further and further into an oddly prescient fusion of Tantric Buddhism and neurophysiology, a worldview captured in the "neurotheologian" of Island, identified there as someone "who thinks about people in terms, simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative nervous system." This Buddhist neurotheologian was in fact a fictional embodiment of Huxley's own philosophy, which we might frame as "the filter thesis." Following the philosophers Henri-Louis Bergson and C.D. Broad, Huxley consistently argued that consciousness was filtered and translated by the brain through incredibly complex neurophysiological, linguistic, psychological, and cultural processes, but not finally produced by it. We are not who we think we are. Or better, who we think we are is only a temporary mask (persona) that a greater Consciousness wears for a time and a season in order to "speak through" (per-sona). That old English bard had it just right, then: The world really is a stage.
Huxley also became profoundly interested in psychical research (J.B. Rhine, founder of the parapsychology lab at Duke University, was a good friend), in animal magnetism (which he would sometimes practice at home, even on an occasional baffled guest), various alternative therapeutic practices (which he was driven to because he was half-blind), and, perhaps most famously, the spiritual potentials of mind-altering plants and drugs. Here, too, Huxley was a pioneer. His correspondence with his psychiatrist friend Humphrey Osmond produced the English neologism "psychedelic" (literally, "mind-manifesting"), and, of course, he wrote one of the earliest, and probably the best, pieces of literature on the mind-manifesting potentials of psychotropic plants and chemicals — that beautiful little Blakean book The Doors of Perception (1954).
Here again Huxley was thinking along neuroscientific lines, if in highly unorthodox ways. In Doors Huxley used his filter thesis to explain how the mystical states so often reported during psychedelic sessions could be related to the obvious chemical catalysts in an associative but noncausal way: Essentially, something like mescaline, Huxley speculated, could suppress the brain's filter, thus allowing what he called "Mind at Large" to bleed through into the individual's experience. Psychotropic substances do not cause Mind at Large; they allow us to become aware of it.
This was no whim or passing phase for Huxley. He was so committed to the sacramental potential of psychedelic substances that he literally ended his life on LSD. Huxley's second wife, Laura, in her lovely biography of her husband, This Timeless Moment (1975), published a facsimile of the very last sentence Aldous shakily wrote a few hours before he died of cancer: a self-prescription for 100 micrograms of LSD to be delivered intramuscularly. That is the door through which he departed the stage.
In what Huxley called Mind at Large lies the deepest secret of his work's significance for us today, caught as we have been for so long in a conflicted world of historically constructed political, ethnic, and religious roles, or masks.
Huxley's vision was not yet in place in 1932, when he published what remains his most famous work, Brave New World. The story revolves around a future civilization that produces happiness through a regime of high biotechnology in which humans are genetically engineered in test tubes on a conveyor belt and then socialized into a rigid caste system. The regime includes abolition of the nuclear family, establishment of a free sexuality decoupled from procreation, systematic hatred of nature, and a constant government supply of "soma tablets" — named after the mysterious ambrosia of ancient Indian Vedic seers — that deliver mindless happiness or, in higher doses, sound sleep. Motherhood is obscene in this brave new world, and all genuine individuality is socialized away. The novel depicts a scientifically savvy but superficial monoculture that accomplishes its day-to-day tasks through social stratification, the systematic suppression of individualism, and an unlimited supply of free sex and drugs. Constant distraction makes the system work.
Brave New World was the mirror opposite or photographic negative of the world Huxley described 30 years later in Island. That novel, the author's utopian answer to his own dystopian legacy, revolves around a jaded Western journalist, Will Farnaby, who finds himself shipwrecked on the island of Pala. Founded by an Indian Tantric Buddhist (the Old Raja) and a Scottish doctor who had become friends, Palanian culture is a synthesis of East and West that answers the authoritarian monoculture of Brave New World point by point.
Biotechnology is present, but as a kind of ecologically wise agricultural system. Family planning is in place too, but through genetically gifted frozen sperm and the disciplined practice of maithuna, a kind of coitus reservatus inspired by the American Oneida community and Asian Tantric practices that allows Palanians as much sex as they wish without the constant burden of pregnancy (maithuna is a Sanskrit term for "ritual sexual intercourse"). The nuclear family has been abolished on Pala, but only to increase human attachment among all its inhabitants and share the responsibilities of child rearing among multiple couples and families. Soma tablets have been replaced by "moksha medicine," a sacred mushroom named after the Sanskrit word for spiritual liberation, which initiates the taker into a direct experience of cosmic consciousness — that is, Mind at Large. Finally, just as Brave New World ends with the despairing suicide of the rare and true individual, Island ends with the political murder of the enlightened island doctor, as Pala is invaded by a foreign power hungry for the island's oil reserves and morally supported by a fundamentalist religion.
Things do not quite end there, though. The novel really ends, exactly as it began, with the island's mynah birds repeating the mantra they have been trained to mimic over and over again: "Attention." Constant attention to the here and now is the key to the island's contemplative culture, even and especially when it is being invaded by a military power bent on oil, with God on its side.
I find it strange, and more than a little depressing, that, despite all of this well-known biographical and metaphysical material, Aldous Huxley is best known today for his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Why is a man who had so much to say about the synthesis of science and spirituality and the deeper dimensions of human consciousness known primarily for a novel about the authoritarian horrors and technological dead-ends of the modern consumer state? Why is this consummate individualist, intrigued by the potential for spiritual ecstasy, still mostly identified with a story of moral despair and fascist political control? Obviously, part of the answer is because Brave New World was so incredibly accurate. But Huxley did more than diagnose the disease; he also provided what he thought of as a realistic treatment in Island.
I interviewed Laura Huxley about Island a few years ago (she died last year at the age of 96). She described the novel to me as "the last will and testament" of her late husband. Island, she suggested, is where he left his most sincere convictions and deepest thoughts about what human beings are capable of at their best. He was very careful, she pointed out, not to include anything in the novel that was not possible, that had not been practiced somewhere before and found useful. So he was quite upset when Island was received as a piece of fantasy rather than a practical program for translating his abstract philosophy of consciousness and existential mysticism into effective social, educational, and contemplative experiments. Island was no fantasy for Aldous Huxley. It was, as Laura said, his "ultimate legacy."
This seems like the right time to entertain the possibility that Aldous Huxley is more relevant now than he ever was, that Island is as important as Brave New World, and that the two novels should be read together. I am particularly struck by Huxley's vibrant critique of religious literalism and the whole psychology of belief in Island. "In religion all words are dirty words," the Old Raja's little green book declared. Hence the novel's ideal of the "Tantrik agnostic" (Aldous's grandfather returns) and its scorn for that "Old Nobodaddy" in the sky (the expression is pure William Blake). Hence the humorous prayer of Pala: "Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief." The scarecrows in the fields were even made to look like a God the Father, so that the children who manipulated them with strings to scare off the birds could learn that "all gods are homemade, and that it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours."
Huxley in fact had already said much the same thing eight years before, in a foreword to the first book of one of his closest friend's, the Indian philosopher and education reformer Krishnamurti. In that foreword to The First and Last Freedom (1954), Huxley wrote that a man who has resolved his relation to the domains of science and religion — to "the two worlds of data and symbols" — is "a man who has no beliefs." He adopts beliefs merely as tools with which to address practical problems, and he holds them lightly. There are many ways, Huxley taught us, to be religious without being religious: Religious identity, after all, is just another muddy filter through which the clear light of the Void shines.
Of course, writers and thinkers have been discussing the fusion of science and mysticism for years; "neural Buddhism," by other names, was an element of the human-potential movement that began in the early 60s at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., partly inspired by Huxley and his lectures on "human potentialities." I sometimes wonder if the counterculture of the 1960s, which arose in tandem with the human-potential movement, in a much more ecstatic and decidedly less intellectual mode, had the unfortunate effect of delegitimizing the mystically inclined Huxley in the broader culture. Certainly many of the counterculture's shortcomings and casualties arose not from following Huxley through the doors of perception, but from not following him closely enough. In particular, the counterculture lacked Huxley's intellectual discipline and his high regard for the arts of reading and writing.
Huxley was an accomplished British-American literary figure, a gifted intellectual product of Eton and Oxford, and a member of England's cultural aristocracy. And he remained so, even in his psychedelic explorations, which were neither casual entertainments nor public parties but profound and private philosophical considerations. Moreover, he rejected the idea that such powerful substances should be made available to everyone. Quite the contrary. At one point, he complained of his good friend Timothy Leary, whom he feared was messing it up for everyone: "I am very fond of Tim — but why, oh why, does he have to be such an ass?" He told Leary to "go about your business quietly." Never was advice more spectacularly ignored.
In his 2002 biography of Huxley, which finally gets the writer's worldview right, Dana Sawyer suggests that Huxley's work can fruitfully be read as a life-long attempt to answer his grandfather's call to agnosticism. "I remain an agnostic," Huxley wrote, "who aspires to be a Gnostic — but a gnostic only on the mystical level, a gnostic without symbols, cosmologies or a pantheon."
And what are we? As a culture, we are in the midst of a vast, decades-long repression and forgetting of Huxley's utopian island Pala, where consciousness is literally cosmic, where the body is mystically erotic, where consumerism is dead and the earth is alive. Until now, we have chosen to enact his "brave new world" instead, a mechanical world of advanced science, unsustainable consumerism, looming nuclear apocalypse, and pending ecological disaster. It seems a good time to bring Aldous Huxley back — but the whole Huxley this time, not just the dystopian one. Yes, we desperately need our literary prophets and social critics. But we also need our intellectual mystics, agnostic gnostics, and Buddhist neurotheologians.
12.14.2008
12.09.2008
Gary Smith:
Gather 'round, children. Uncle Gary has a life lesson he wants to share... just last week, my daughter Katherine recorded her best-ever 2k "erg" (indoor rower) time of 7:54. That's pretty darn fast for a high school junior. Not get-into-any-college-you-want fast, but quick enough to at least have a coach at most schools show interest. That's the good news.
The bad news? She only recorded the time when she absolutely had to: when her back was up against the wall, and she was in jeopardy of losing her "seat" in the varsity boat. All she had worked so hard to achieve looked to be tabled because she was showing little progress.
The lesson? It is hard to constantly challenge ourselves, to raise the bar when no one is looking. In fact, in my experience, Katherine is more the rule than the exception. Yet you never know when opportunity presents itself, when someone notices you without you noticing them. If you're in a position to take advantage of those opportunities, they tend to make a huge difference in your life. Therefore, don't wait until it's the last quarter with no time on the clock. Then you typically have no upside.
Instead, try to be a bit better than you are on a regular basis. Shine your shoes even when you don't have a job interview. Study hard even when there's no exam coming up. Run a few extra miles now so the post-40 "battle of the bulge" isn't quite so arduous.
Yes, Yes, I know. It's hard to do what I say, as "lazy" seems to be built into our systems. (I'm as guilty as the next guy.) Certainly, I've said not one thing you didn't already know. Still, every once in a while, it's good to be reminded of what works. Hope this is one of those times.
Gather 'round, children. Uncle Gary has a life lesson he wants to share... just last week, my daughter Katherine recorded her best-ever 2k "erg" (indoor rower) time of 7:54. That's pretty darn fast for a high school junior. Not get-into-any-college-you-want fast, but quick enough to at least have a coach at most schools show interest. That's the good news.
The bad news? She only recorded the time when she absolutely had to: when her back was up against the wall, and she was in jeopardy of losing her "seat" in the varsity boat. All she had worked so hard to achieve looked to be tabled because she was showing little progress.
The lesson? It is hard to constantly challenge ourselves, to raise the bar when no one is looking. In fact, in my experience, Katherine is more the rule than the exception. Yet you never know when opportunity presents itself, when someone notices you without you noticing them. If you're in a position to take advantage of those opportunities, they tend to make a huge difference in your life. Therefore, don't wait until it's the last quarter with no time on the clock. Then you typically have no upside.
Instead, try to be a bit better than you are on a regular basis. Shine your shoes even when you don't have a job interview. Study hard even when there's no exam coming up. Run a few extra miles now so the post-40 "battle of the bulge" isn't quite so arduous.
Yes, Yes, I know. It's hard to do what I say, as "lazy" seems to be built into our systems. (I'm as guilty as the next guy.) Certainly, I've said not one thing you didn't already know. Still, every once in a while, it's good to be reminded of what works. Hope this is one of those times.
12.08.2008
Rainer Maria Rilke:
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
12.01.2008
David Keenan:
November 2001
"Of course, by the time I hit high school I was a minimalism freak," Jim O'Rourke deadpans. "A total freak. Seriously, it was a really heavy deal. I was insane. Discreet Music had just blown the whole thing open. I knew Brian Eno from Roxy Music and when I picked up that record his liner notes just put a whole lot of things in perspective. That and Michael Nyman's Experimental Music book were huge for me. It was like I finally understood the process, why these people were doing these things, just the aesthetic right in front of you in clear language. I was a Steve Reich freak too. My friend and I would go to the school orchestra room that was next door in the Catholic girls' school and just sit at the two pianos and do this phase thing for an hour." He summons a guttural drilling noise from his throat and starts to drum the air with his hands. "The teacher would just let us do it. We though he was into it, but it turns out he only let us do it because it kept all the girls away."
All this at an age when many of us were still feeling pretty pleased to have mastered full bladder control. But this is also the guy who claims he went from Paul McCartney's first solo album (purchased at the age of six) to Derek Bailey's Lot 74 by a process of "creative cross-referencing" at his local library before he'd even got to high school. This early mis-education, this obsessive attempt to join disparate dots across the face of the map, has defined O'Rourke's subsequent musical career of building, burning and reconstructing bridges between such previously exclusive genres as free improvisation, tape music, glitch electronica, acoustic folk and all-out rifferama. Between his solo work, his producing and engineering jobs, and playing in such diverse groups as Gastr Del Sol, Company, The Red Krayola, Illusion Of Safety, Fenn O'Berg and most recently, Sonic Youth, O'Rourke has plotted one of the most endearingly confusing routes across the face of modern music. Indeed, the release of Insignificance (Drag City in the US and Domino here), and I'm Happy, And I'm Singing, And A 1, 2, 3, 4 (Mego), beautifully illustrate the twin poles of his career. While I'm Happy... sees O'Rourke drawing extended circular patterns from nothing but a Powerbook, Insignificance works in almost hilarious contrast: a Southern fried rock album that reverberates with the redneck rebel rousing of the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd or Danny Whitten-era Crazy Horse.
"Everybody keeps saying it sounds so Southern," O'Rourke burst out, from the decidedly un-ranchlike surrounding of an East London townhouse where we meet during his UK promotional visit. "I didn't intend that, but I guess it's a part of it. I mean I've never really listened to Skynyrd but I guess you can't avoid them. The first song, "All Downhill From Here", was actually written on acoustic guitar, but when I finally recorded it I had been playing electric for a year, I'd been on tour and that's all I was playing so I think that's a real factor. Playing the songs acoustically implies playing them a certain way and with certain arrangements. I purposefully stayed away from that. This is actually the second version of the record. I made a first attempt but when I heard it back I just thought, ugh, this is crap. Just like Eureka 2.5 or something. It was much more pop and super-arranged and I didn't want to do that I just trashed it all.
"The current version was written, recorded and mixed in three weeks, I did it really quick. I was like, can't I just sit down and write songs, learn 'em and play 'em as a band? I didn't want to make another 'built in the studio' record. It's not like I never will again - just not now. It was also a question of practicalities. I don't really live anywhere so I wanted to see if I could just hit it and do it. It's just about songwriting, nothing more."
Still, Insignificance sounds pretty coherent after records such as 1997's Bad Timing (the first of an intermittent series titled after Nicolas Roeg's movies), Happy Days, 99's Eureka and its sister EP Halfway To A Threeway, all of which saw O'Rourke re-investigating American roots music under the benign spell of mavericks like the late guitarist John Fahey, modern minimalist Tony Conrad and Americana composer Charles Ives. O'Rourke's music similarly speaks of epic American space, of accumulative power, looming like the ever-approaching horizon. It often feels continental in scope, as though dictated by the contours of the landmass and the huge arcing skies.
"Oh yeah, my music would have to reflect that," O'Rourke agrees. "After all, I am an American, but the particular thing with me is that I've always been slightly outside of America looking in. Both my parents were Irish, so I didn't have an 'American' house when I was growing up. I would buy The Dandy and The Beano. We'd go to the Irish shop on Sunday after Mass and I didn't get Superman comics, I got Dennis The Menace. It wasn't a super-heavy UK house but I knew a lot more about UK culture than other kids at school. There were America things too, but it was very like an English script with an American set."
Growing up in Chicago, near O'Hare Airport, in the 70s, he encountered Fahey's music early on. "A lot of what's important to me in Fahey's music is the space," he asserts. "The resonance. What he was playing had as much to do with the sound as the rhythm and the notes. Someone like Leo Kottke, well, it's musician music. No insult, but as I got older I got less interested in being a musician. When I was a kid I really got into Zappa and it took me a while to realise what was actually wrong with him. I worked out that I'm not into stuff that's about musicianship. I'm interested in all of it and Fahey is about all of it. It's not good versus bad; it's just not for me."
Bad Timing marked a turning point for O'Rourke. For the first time he seemed to be shaking the conceptual shackles that had bound him to experimental projects like Brise-Glace and Gastr Del Sol, both of which were blatant exercises in genre. Around about the same time O'Rourke had become a personal friend of John Fahey, and for a shile it was almost as if they had morphed into each other. Suddenly O'Rourke was picking some gorgeously buzzing acoustic guitar while Fahey himself was busy slicing swathes of proto-Industrial noise from his electric six-string - most convincingly on Womblife, which O'Rourke produced. Or so it seemed.
"Well, Bad Timing actually happened before I knew Fahey," O'Rourke points out. I was doing a tour with Cindy Dall and the guy who was booking the tour wanted me to do a set, and so I wrote all that stuff then. I actually started all that fingerpicking stuff after hearing "Horizons" by Genesis; it's on Foxtrot, this classical guitar piece. That's where I learned to fingerpick from, more from Genesis than Fahey. I was playing that way for two years in Chicago. I would do a lot of guitar stuff around town, complete phases that I'd never end up documenting. Also, I'd already recorded Fahey's "Dry bones In The Valley" on Gastr Del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife before I even met him, and Tony Conrad had played on it. I fact I sent Fahey a tape of it."
He adopts a mock Fahey whine. "He was like, 'Oh, it's better than mine!' Yeah, whatever. He was very nice about it. Then we did some shows in California and it went from there. He certainly had a big impact on me but not as big as it's been blown up to.
"The thing I find funny with kids in the States is that with the Internet it's so easy to find information. You get these 20 year old kids bitching, 'Oh, there's O'Rourke with his Fahey thin'. I just feel like screaming! You didn't even know who Fahey was two years ago, asshole! There's so much of that, I'm so tired of it. Kids in the States hate me, they turn on you so fast. It's frustrating. Still, Fahey's music was important to me, like Tony Conrad or Loren MazzaCane, there was something about America there. Charles Ives even more so. He was huge with me. I was lucky to get into him early on, when I was eight or nine. My library's classical section was fucking amazing. The first thing I heard by him was The Unanswered Question, I'd just come from Beethoven's Ninth and it fucking blew my mind! His Central Park In The Dark is such a fundamental part of my musical personality, it's so ingrained I don't even know it anymore." You can hear echoes of Ive's brass bands, which he would record to give the feeling of a parade passing in and out of earshot, in the way O'Rourke staggers the instrumentation on Bad Timing, with brass parts marching exuberantly into view from offscreen. "I remember the trumpet player at the time was like, 'This is stupid!' " O'Rourke laughs. "I was like, 'I know'. What's funny is this was a guy who was into Henry Cow and Todd Rundgren, who positively prided himself on his wacky credentials, yet to him I was just too stupid."
Jim O'Rourke can often come across as willfully wayward. His whole career has curved ass-backwards, moving from his early tape and tabletop guitar experiments through songwriting and joining a rock group. "The career that you see is just what I've decided to make public," he explains. "from an early age I was always playing the guitar, I just never thought I had anything to say as me with that stuff. I think one of the biggest turning points was doing the Brise-Glace record, which has kinda got forgotten because you can't even get it anymore."
Alongside O'Rourke, the short-lived Brise-Glace featured bassist Darin Gray (who has enjoyed a higher profile of late, after some great duo records with guitarist Loren MazzaCane), drummer Thymme Jones, and guitarist Dylan Posa, plus guest players like Henry Kaiser and O'Rourke's Gastr Del Sol partner David Grubbs. Their 1994 album Whne In Vanitas (engineered by Steve Albini for Skin Graft) was a collection of freely drifting instrumentals tied up with some neat conceptual baggage. "I was afraid," O'Rourke confesses. "I still didn't think I had anything to say that was worthwhile enough to bother people with. So the way I approached the Brise-Glace record was that it was a tape piece, but instead of car doors slamming I decided to put these four people together, just to see how they worked and almost make a documentary about that, like a tape piece. It was like something I could hide behind a bit, a concept to divert attention from me. I still didn't feel comfortable with having a band, but I did feel comfortable with presenting a band that wasn't a band."
Brise-Glace was originally intended as a songwriting vehicle for O'Rourke and David Grubbs, but once it became apparent that Grubbs wasn't right for it, the duo formed Gastr Del Sol. Gastr were a challenging proposition, especially in their earliest incarnation. Primarily interested in using context to provoke differing reactions, O'Rourke treated Gastr as a Trojan horse, almost, smuggling uncomfortably angular avant shapes into an indie rock record. "Still I think I discovered my confidence during Gastr," he nods. "But I wasn't really allowed to expand on it. It took a while for me to decide to get out of that situation. I knew I wanted out because it was getting very restricting and condescending, but I was always a very timid person, especially back then. I just couldn't do it. It was a weird mindfuck situation and finally it just exploded and I was like, the hell with all this. I'm just gonna do it. That's what Eureka was all about, just being fed up hiding behind something. I started to feel OK enough to do it on my own. I mean, at the end of Gastr I was doing it on my own. I don't mean Grubbs wasn't contributing, but it was just really divide by that point. It also became frustrating playing in things like The Red Krayola, where you'd work your ass off and then wonder, why? It's like: I should just be doing this by myself, why am I waiting to do it with other people?"
He was also growing tired of a certain style of improvising. "The whole Gastr thing, that way of guitar playing, you know - whoosh, ping, ding - that was how I came out of the Derek Bailey thing because I liked referencing harmony a lot. To me dissonance was most interesting when it was battling with harmony. Also, I didn't like the lifestyle of improvising. there's a whole lifestyle there and I simply wasn't interested. I didn't like listening to a constant stream of bitching and moaning and politics. I hate being involved in it. I had real idealistic ideas about improv. I'm sure this sort of stuff goes on everywhere, but when someone is a vicious careerist in rock music it's not really that surprising. I grew up with this ideal image of improvisors so it was a little shocking to me. I never thought of it as a way of making money... but, uh, I'm not going to get in trouble over this again."
He trails off, remembering the storm that blew up over his comments about European improvisors in an interview in the The Wire. It was just a tale of being 20 years old and going over to Europe and realising that the world of improv in Europe was so different than in America," he protests. "I mean John Zorn wasn't playing moneyed gigs in the States then, there's never been a culture of that in the States, so I didn't believe you should make money from it because I didn't come from that culture. I though you got a cup of coffee and maybe $20. It's always been like that. There's more support now than ever but even so, it's something you do at the coffee shop or if you're lucky you do it at Tonic. That's bigtime for an improv gig."
O'Rourke's roots reach deep into the UK's Improv scene. He had been corresponding with Derek Bailey from the age of 17, and with his Irish parents regularly crossing the Atlantic, he laid plans to take the trip over to London and head down to Bailey's East London Incus HQ. On his first visit, the young O'Rourke blew most of his savings on rare Stockhausen vinyl at Harlod Moore's in Soho before making the journey out to Bailey's house. "I went to Derek's to buy as much Incus stuff as I could," O'Rourke grins. "He had me over and he just blew me away. I always remember that his refrigerator was broken, it was buzzing away and Derek wanted to see if I could fix it. But I was like, oh no, I like the buzz! I bought as much stuff from him as I could afford. He was nice and when he was coming to Chicago he would write me and tell me he was coming over." They began playing together, with O'Rourke on tabletop guitar. Two years later, Bailey invited O'Rourke - then aged 20 - to play in the Company ensemble. He's maintained the connection to this day: Last year Incus released Xylophonen Virtuosen, O'Rourke's album with free saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. At the same time he was in touch with AMM's Eddie Prevost, with whom he went on to make Third Straight Made Public (1994).
Parallel to all of this activity, O'Rourke has been forging an alternative route through the Xeroxed world of the post-Industrial noise tape underground. "Oh yeah!" he shouts, punching the air. "That scene was my whole world for many years. There was so much good stuff happening back then and not many people are even aware of it, it's been so under-documented but it was huge. I started out on that scene, putting out some cassettes, mostly prepared guitar stuff and tape music. I also had a group, which I'll never tell you the name of. It was terrible. This was at the end of high school: 17, 18 onwards. 1985 or 86. A lot of stuff came out of that. It''s how I first got to know of Masami Akita's Merzbow stuff. I couldn't get a copy of his first LP, Material Action 2, when it came out but I picked up all his tapes on ZSF. We were all furiously writing back and forth, getting letters from people like Controlled Bleeding, Illusion Of Safety and KK Null."
Japanese guitarist and vocalist Kazuyuki K Null was particularly involved with O'Rourke. Besides Null's resolutely stoopid role in comicbook power trio Zeni Geva, he was a key early collaborator with Merzbow, with whom he released many cassettes and LPs of genuinely stirring beauty. O'Rourke cut some sides with Null too, notably New Kind Of Water on Charnel House. He even expanded Brise-Glace to take in Null's guitar and vocals, renaming the group Yona-Kit. Their self-titled CD, now deleted, was a thoroughly entertaining disaster. "Yon-Kit was a weird one-off," O'Rourke blushes, rolling his eyes. "It started off as a cassette thing where he wanted to do a Prog rock group and we though it sounded cool; Null said he wanted it to be very different from Zeni Geva. Then he sent us a tape and it was just these riffs as usual! He never said he was actually gonna sing on it and here he was, screaming stuff like "Raping an angel!" and we were like, uh-oh, I don't like being on a record where you're being kind of a moron about stuff like rape. He thought it was really shocking. Maybe if you haven't left the house for 30 years. Those songs are actually fucking bizarre though, it sounds cohesive because there are all these driving rhythms, but it's weird if you listen to it. Still, it's not a great recording. Steve Albini is a beautiful engineer but i was scared of him at the time so I didn't mix it, but I should have.
"The whole tape scene came along at just the right time for me." he continues. "I was starting to get suspicious of avant garde music and suddenly I found all these people doing this other stuff. At first I was like, this is the same thing only they're not uptight! But eventually the problem I developed was that once these guys get the sound they're after, they're satisfied with it. I always felt that once you've got the sound you should do stuff with it. That's how I started to lose interest. My aesthetic at the time was coming through in my prepared guitar stuff. I was obsessed with never using a sound that sounded like a guitar., with never using anything that betrayed my source. Years down the road I finally heard Kevin Drumm and I was like, OK, he did it, I can stop now."
Via his connections with AMM, O'Rourke also hooked up with reclusive experimental musician David Jackman and started contributing to Organum. Jackman's elemental Improv orchestra. "When I arrived back in Britain I had this piece I'd been working on as part of a school project," O'Rourke recalls. "Jackman heard it and wanted to put it out as a 12" single on Christoph Heemann's Dom label. That never happened but then David started asking me to do stuff with Organum. It got to the point where he wanted me to mix them and then to the point that he'd have the idea and want me to execute it. He just trusted me to do it. I may be on one or two of the CDs and a whole handful of the vinyl, I can never remember what I'm on."
O'Rourke has become so ubiquitous that he's constantly surprised to hear himself turning up on record he had no idea he contributed to: everything from Bjorks Post, courtesy of a sampled loop that featured him and Robin Rimbaud, through Nurse With Wound's An Awkward Pause, where he plays accodion on a tape manipulated by Christoph Heemann. He crops up again with Heemann on Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa's two most recent CDs, and on the 'supergroup' Mimir alongside Andreas Martin and Edward Ka-Spel. It was Heemann who introduced him to Cologne's nascent A-Musik scene.
"Christoph knew [A-Musik's] Frank Dommert because HNAS had done a split single with him, and Dommert put out my first full LP, The Ground Below Our Heads, in 91 on his Entenpfuhl label. A-Musik was just starting at that point, and I was up there all the time. It was a very heavy time. We'd all get together and sit up all night spinning Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba record [a cult Portuguese proto-electronica record, since reissued on O'Rourke's Moikai label], Lard Free, Agitation Free. At this point there was a lot of interesting electronics stuff happening, I met Christian Fennesz in 1990, at a festival in Vienna where I was playing with Illusion Of Safety, and at that point he'd just stopped playing rock music and Mego label had just started up. Pita, Peter Rehberg, came up to me and gave me all the records that had come out on Mego, but it took me a shile to get to listen to them. I think I might have go Instrument, Fennesz's first record. The guy who ran the festival asked if Pita and Christian and I would play in the bar afterwards, and I was amazed when I saw the stuff they were using. I didn't know that Powerbooks were strong enough to run all this music software. Most people were just using sequencers and stuff but I was amazed at this. Pita had such great software. I knew I had to get a Powerbook but it took me quite a while to save up for one."
In the mantime, Fennesz, Pita and O'Rourke struck up an inspirational working relationship and hit the road, eventually releasing the results as The Magic Sound Of Fenn O'Berg, a record that O'Rourke describes as sounding like "falling down the stairs". "For the first tour I was playing a pretty cheap computer, so al I could run were sound effects." he says. "You can open up sound files and play them and that's all, basically. I had windows open and all I could do was start, stop and play, but I was like, OK, this is all I have, let's see if I can actually work with it. Christian was the hotshot because he had the Powerbook 1400. I love playing with those guys, it's like a vacation where you get to hang out with friends and make a bunch of racket. In the last year or so it's got especially great, Improv-wise. It's different. While it is improvised and we're definitely listening to each other, the way we're relating is not the way you would relate if you had traditional instruments. The recent shows have been killer and the next album is definitely the best yet."
Yet O'Rourke doesn't see the Powerbook's imputed 'democratisation of music making' as inherently good news. Indeed, the ever-increasing proliferation of faceless soundalike glitch makes him despair. "I've stopped doing stuff with the Powerbook for now," he maintains. "Once I had selected tracks for the [Mego] record, even though none of it was new, I was like, OK, done with that, now I need to find a different approach. Powerbook shows were cool early on but the problem is it's so easy. It's easy to make it sound like all the other stuff, and you can just burn your own CD and get it released within a month. A lot of people aren't waiting to 'find themselves' in it. I mean you can tell when it's a Pita thing or a Bernhard Gunter thing, but you've got this glut of stuff with people just doing variants on them. It creates this environment for people who are just getting into it where they can't tell the difference. People say it all sounds the same and that's because a lot of it does. They may not know that there are people doing really great stuff in there, but it's understandable when people who are new to it start to wade through it and just go, 'Oh, forget it', instead of saying, 'There's a lot of crap out there but there's also some really interesting stuff'. I got like that with noise: like, enough! That's the problem when there's this glut, when it's so easy. It also means that people don't develop the music enough and I'm really selfconscious about that. I sit on things for so long, I want to make sure it's worthwhile. I'll sit on it for years. I don't think the [Mego] record sounds like all of that stuff. I wanted to make sure it was what I wanted to do with a computer."
He needn't have worried. The fantastically named I'm Happy, And I'm Singing, And A 1, 2, 3, 4 sounds quite unlike anything coming from O'Rourke's Powerbook peers. He handles his source material with a real musical sense, building evocative structures from overlapping circles of snatched samples. The disc is made up of three live performances. The first, taken from a performance at New York's Tonic, grows from a brief four second recording of O'Rourke playing the accordion into a multi-layered snowball of buzz that expands on his recent drone work with the minimalist composer Phill Niblock (O'Rourke's hurdy-gurdy plaing was sampled by Niblock on his recent Touch CD, Touch Works). But it's the final, 21 minute track that really stands out: an extended melancholy string work that brings to mind such bizarre associations as the Fantasia Suites of 17th century English composer William Lawes. "I used a short snippet of a string quartet for that piece," O'Rourke explains. "It ties into stuff that we had to write at school. I was really into taking a piece of music and multiplying th eviolin part by , the viola by three, the rhythm by two and juust keeping repeating it. They wouldn't ever superimpose, and if you picked good original source material you knew what you would get. That piece was almost like that. I'd written a program to do exactly that, so you have all these elements stretching, and the live component was transforming the sounds and moving them into each other.
"I have to admit, though, that I got to the point where I didn't want to do the Mego record at all because I knew people would say, 'Oh, O'Rourke's jumping on the Powerbook bandwagon'. I know that stuff shouldn't bother me but it does. I mean you could write on the front of the record that this material is five years old and people still wouldn't notice it. It's not important but it is really frustrating. Everyone is getting dumber and dumber. Like when people say to me, 'Oh, you make so many records', and I'll say that I haven't put out a record in two years, and they'll be like, 'What about that new Smog record?' I engineered it; it's not my record! For some reason, with all this massive information that's being thrown about, people can't distinguish what's what any more."
Yet there's no doubt that O'Rourke's strong musical personality ensures he leaves his fingerprint on every production he works on, from Faust's ill-fated Rien LP to albums by Stereolab and Melt Banana. "But it's not mine," he protests. "Hopefully I do a good job. Of course you leave a fingerprint. Everyone has certain mics they use, but I do it in service of the record. If [Smog's] Bill Callahan didn't want something, I wouldn't push it. I don't like imposing, although there have been situations where I've got so excited I've been like, 'We gotta do it!' But anyone who knows me, and I pretty much only work with people who know me, knows what I'm like when I get overexcited. You don't take it too seriously." I ask him what records have been the most rewarding to work on and he comes back without pause. "The Smog records were definitely the most rewarding for me. Bill Callahan is just great, just to sit him in front of a mic and hear him sing th estuff absolutely perfectly first time. The thing about those two records is that Knock, Knock [1999] and Red Apple Falls [1997] sound distinctly different to me from any other Smog records. I mean, I think Bill is strong enough as a singer and performer that if they just stuck a mic in front of him and released the results, I'd go buy it, but I happened to be really luck in that I worked on two records where he wanted to work with the studio more, with a bit more of an expansive sound. It was an honour and a pleasure."
Despite being homeless at the moment, O'Rourke is theoretically based in New York, mostly crashing with his Sonic Youth colleagues Kim and Thurston. Positively balking at the idea of going back to Chicago, he intends to get a place in NYC as soon as he can. "If I never had to go back to Chicago again I'd be happy," he spits. "I hate it there. It's so boring, the city closes at 10pm and I think it's dead musically. You tell me what's been good recently?" I toss him Rob Mazurek's Chicago Underground projects. "Oh yeah, I was about to say Rob Mazurek's stuff, but what else? Kevin Drumm, Bobby Conn... I have a lot of respect for Ken Vandermark. He's a really good guy but it's all overblown, what's happening in Chicago. I mean, who there knows about fold music? Nobody. For a city that's supposedly the top Improv and electronic music centre in the States, it all just seems so half-assed. Not to be mean, but people in Chicago, the musicians, most of them aren't even music fans. They all listen to the same five records; it's like some club where they rotate the same discs. I can't relate to musicians who don't like music. People I know in New York know all the stuff that people in Chicago know, but they also know, like, the whole English folk thing, from the 60s to now. There's an enthusiasm. If you grow up in Chicago you get pummelled with this myth that New Yorkers are mean and cruel, but I don't find that at all - and I've been living there long enough to know. I can go out on the street at two in the morning and it's alive, I feel alive there. In Chicago I feel like I just want to hang myself, there's nothing going on, no energy there. I call it the Chicago Disease: people like to sit around bars and bitch. In New York they just don't have time for that."
Another reason for O'Rourke to stay in New York is his newly acquired status as a member of Sonic Youth. He still can't quite believe it himself. "They won't let me go!" he bursts. "I'm still in this mindset where I'm like, 'Am I supposed to turn up today?' They always say I'm a member, but I don't say it. They seem to like having me around, and I like working with them and that's as far as I consider it. It all started when Thurston and I wer doing something with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and that's how [the recording for] SYR3 happened: we had to swing past the studio and Lee was like, 'Let's jam!' - he's Mr. Enthusiasm."
Sonic Youth's tribute to the New Music vanguard, Goodbye 20th Century (SYR4), came together at the suggestion of San Francisco percussionist William Winant, a childhood friend of Kim Gordon's. Given the modernist repertoire they were about to tackle, O'Rourke's background in avant garde theory and practice made him the perfect player to round off the team. "The reaction to the Goodby 20th Century live show was terrible," O'Rourke remembers. "I wanted to kill people. After the London show I promised myself I'd never play there again. Fuck them. These people don't really follow what Sonic Youth are doing and they don't even read the ticket. They were all shouting stuff like 'You used to be my favourite band and now you're shite!' All asking for "Kool Thing". They believed in Sonic Youth so many times before, yet they won't believe in them for this. I remember a caption in a review that just said 'Goodbye 20th Century, Goodbye Talent'. We pinned it up on the wall of the studio.
"I mean, in many ways it's actually very awkward to fit into the group," O'Rourke continues. "I'm sure to a lot of people it looks like I sneaked in, like I was thinking it was a great opportunity, but they really had to work for a long time to convince me to do it. they really had to push me. It was very challenging at first and it took me a few weeks to feel my way in. Thurston was really excited about me playing synth because he's a big Roxy Music fan, and he was like, 'More synth, more synth!' I was like, 'The more synth i play, the stupider it's gonna be'. They were excited about having this new sound - it was the [type of] synth Eno used in Roxy Music. The real challenge was when we started writing, because it's the first time I'd worked in a truly democratic group. They all approach writing completely differently to me, so I had to think, 'Right, Lee likes to do this and this is how I interpret that'. I like being in a situation that's new. The sound is a little different. Since [1994's] Experimental Jet Set, the songs have been more like interlocking parts rather than verse/chorus; more like a continually fluctuating stream, but the new songs have more definite sections to them. I've really enjoyed playing as a group, but we'd only just started on the new album when the planes hit the World Trade Center."
The September 11 attack on the World Trade Center obviously affected O'Rourke a great deal. He as sleeping in Sonic Youth's studio, just adjacent to Ground Zero, when the first impact hit. As soon as I bring it up I regret it: his mood visibly changes and he starts to speak in a slow monotone drawl. The details are upsettingly grim. "I was luck," he sighs. "I happened to be outside at the safer moments so I didn't get caught by the massive blast, but it was terrible and I saw a lot of stuff I wish I hadn't seen. I heard the first impact and I was outside for the second one, all you have to do is go outside to the corner to see the towers. The I was back inside and there was like an earthquake, which was the building falling. But I didn't know that's what it was, I thought we were being bombed, everything was just turning white. One of the plane engines landed about 50 yards from me, right at the corner of Church and Murray. We were finally alowed into the building just this past Sunday, because we were doing a benefit show with tom Verlaine. We were allowed to go in and get the instruments."
"I have to admit that I'm still at the stage of thinking it's all pointless," O'Rourke confesses. "I haven't done anything since then, the only thing I've done is play the benefit. It always seemed trivial but not as much as it does now. I don't think art is going to become more important after this. Maybe it helps some people because after the benefit a lot of people said they felt better, no necessarily because of what was played but because it was a large group of people who were worried in the same way, you know, because you're on the streets and people are still talking about fucking sports. Even now I'm still remembering details. Every few days I remember something else about it. I have to admit that I don't have enough faith in humanity to think that there's going to be any great change in the American psyche after this, I really don't, there's just too much distraction for people. People in the Western world are physiologically changed because of TV and everything. It's all just distraction. Very few Americans think for themselves. As I'm sure is the case in any country that's run by TV." He shakes his head. "They're going right back to all the same meaningless bullshit as we speak."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
