800 Words: The Goldberg Variations Ideal

“...two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.” - Sir Thomas Beecham

It can be done on the harpsichord, or the clavichord, or the clavecin, or the clavicembalo (I still can’t figure out if those four are just the same instrument…), just please, for God’s sake, don’t play it on the fucking piano. The piano is just too boring for Bach. I know, I know, everybody hates the harpsichord, and justifiably so, because the harpsichord sucks. But the instrument to play Bach can’t simply be a harpsichord. It has to be one of those mid-20th century harpsichords big as a battleship with ‘16 stops, pedals, terraced dynamics, and expanded keyboard ranges. The Goldberg Variations require the ecstasy of a church organ and the sensuality of a guitar. The work is actually far more difficult to play on the piano than on the harpsichord, and Bach did not write the Goldberg Variations for a modern Steinway he could never have imagined, nor did he write it for a harpsichord, an instrument whose limitations he was always complaining about, Bach wrote his greatest keyboard work for an ideal keyboard instrument that still doesn’t exist; an instrument which makes the mountains dance with the valleys and rides the music of the spheres to the source of our giant cosmic vibration (wow, have I been taking acid?...). He wrote the Goldberg Variations to be performed on something in between a DIY accordian and a franken-lute.

As I’ve written at length about before, I am an avowed Bach-skeptic. For all his obvious greatness, there are enormous swaths of his music which I find a chore to sit through. I often can’t help holding with Thomas Beecham’s view of Bach: “Too much counterpoint; what is worse, Protestant counterpoint.” Along with all the great beauties in Bach’s music comes the endless note-spinning and prattling on about a God in whom I don’t believe. Considering the seeming universality of his appeal, I can understand why Bach felt justified in writing the way he does. But Bach takes it as a given that you’re going to buy what he’s selling, and he’s usually uninterested in engaging with the concerns of difficult customers. Doubt and human longings can be found aplenty in Handel and Monteverdi, but in Bach you barely find it. Even so, The Goldberg Variations is not just another Bach piece. For me, it’s the ideal house for Bach’s furniture. It has all his weaknesses; there’s plenty of note-spinning in a long-form piece with nary a dissonance to find, but the formal structure is so intensely ironclad that the piece (in a good performance) grows as one listens. Every variation builds upon the last to create an edifice of universal appeal.

But even in this most secular of Bach works, nothing is more important to its vitality than its Lutheran grandeur. Bach may have written this work for the drawing room, but there is little in Bach’s biography to suggest that he was ever comfortable mingling with aristocracy (Handel, on the other hand…). Bach is often thought of as the world’s most practical musician, but he was constantly in trouble with authorities because he could not sufficiently tailor his music to the desires of his intended audiences. Most of The Goldberg Variations sound little different from music he wrote for Church services, and unless the keyboardist can get his instrument to have an organ-like quality to complement the rhythmic vitality which comes so naturally to every keyboard instrument except the organ, the performance will not capture Bach’s particular musical ecstasy. The ecstasy of Bach involves neither the aristocratic sensuality of Monteverdi nor the martial grandeur of Handel, it is an entirely bourgeois ecstasy from the land of Luther. It resounds with the sense of pride which Bach’s contemporaries got from having tilled their fields for 17 hours every day before they spent six hours posing for a Rembrandt painting so they could sleep at night for a half-hour and spend three minutes around midnight impregnating their wives. What Bach expresses is the peculiar Protestant ecstasy of the early reformed Church, in which the possibilities of history were yet again fresh and unspoiled. This is the spiritual need which all Bach performances must convey. There can never be more than a hint of the decadent in Bach, because were there anything decadent about Bach’s music, the early protestants would have repressed it.

There is something about the piano which is simply too louche, too polished, too refulgent, too ‘pretty’ for Bach. The most famous piano recordings of the Goldbergs, (obviously except Glenn Gould’s), are much too conventionally pretty. Murray Perahia, probably more praised in this piece than any pianist since Glenn Gould, has the dubious distinction of making the Goldberg Variations sound like Mozart - everything is limpid and lithe, and much too elegant for a work written by Bach’s organ-sausage fingers. Andras Schiff, their nearest “rival,” is a little better, but still wants everything to be beautiful. There is little more exuberance in his world than in Perahia’s, and the air the performance breaths is vacuum-packed. Wilhelm Kempff plays, as he always does, beautifully, with masterful pacing and great feeling, but where’s the fun? The humor? The high spirits? Simone Dinnerstein plays with assembly line efficiency in the fast sections, just getting through them as quickly as possible so she can bask (beautifully) in the slower, quieter stuff.

And then there are the piano recordings that are just plain bizarre. Rosalyn Tureck recorded it six times, and from what I can bear to listen to, they all sound like Bach preserved in embalming fluid - ultra-reverential, overcontrolled, and slow. By far, the most interesting conception among pianists I’ve heard is Daniel Barenboim’s. As often happens, Barenboim has a musical conception which is leagues ahead of his rivals, but the conception is almost completely wrong for Bach. Rather than dance ecstatically, he tries to coordinate the music to change color with every harmonic shift - but how many colors can you get out of a piece in which the same harmony repeats itself 32 times every 32 bars? Unlike Perahia and Schiff, there’s fun to be had with Danny, but the conception is always more important than the music. Never does Barenboim, however perceptive he is, give himself completely to Bach’s torrential flow of ideas. Jeremy Denk recently wrote a piece for The Guardian in which he claimed that until recently, he hated playing The Goldberg Variations, and his recording makes it sound like he still does.

In many ways, the best piano recordings come from the beginning of the recorded era. No doubt, the pianism of the young Rudolf Serkin and Claudio Arrau was considered the height of austerity in the pre-WWII era because they performed the entire Goldberg Variations in Bach’s own arrangement, but in the hands of these blooming soon-to-be-giants, The Goldberg Variations sounds like a Beethoven sonata or a Liszt showpiece. It’s so unbelievably wrong, and yet so fantastic.

Nearly all the greatest recordings: Wanda Landowska, Helmut Walcha, Igor Kipnis, Karl Richter, George Malcolm, Anthony Newman, were done by harpsichordists who predate the period practice movement’s most rigid dogmas (or, in Newman’s case, was severely  controversial within it). By the time history arrived at historically informed performance ‘Giants’ like Gustav Leonhardt and Trevor Pinnock , the doors of perception were closed, and the Goldberg Variations became just another dusty ‘masterpiece’ which you appreciated without feeling any true passion for it (Ton Koopman is better, more on him in a moment..).

It’s an odd thing about Bach that the two most celebrated players of his keyboard music are a pianist who made the piano sound like a harpsichord, and a harpsichordist who made the harpsichord sound like a piano. Glenn Gould will get his own paragraphs, but at this point in history, it’s almost impossible to talk about Wanda Landowska without talking about Gould too. Gould was a creature of the 20th century, and delighted in Bach the contrapuntalist, the rhythmatizer, the virtuoso. Under Gould’s hands, the sheer overflow of Bach’s invention is enough to make you giddy. If Murray Perahia’s achievement is to make Bach sound like Mozart, then Gould’s great achievement is to make you think that Mozart himself is playing Bach.

But even if she played the harpsichord, Landowska was a creature of the 19th century. She clearly loved Bach the Christian, the celestial harmonist, the life-affirmer. Listening to Landowska at her miraculous best is to listen to the very process of catharsis. Her harpsichord had as many stops on it as some organs, and she was unafraid to use them to create the grandest possible sound. The celestial ‘ring’ of Bach’s musical overtones was never heard more pellucidly than in her performances. Listening to Gould is like listening to delight, but listening to Landowska is like listening to joy. I’m elated and exhausted by the end of either Gould recording, but at the end of either of Landowska’s recordings, I’m consoled and hopeful. And yet even Landowska, this amazing force of nature, didn’t record the greatest harpsichord recording of the Goldberg Variations (more on that in a bit).

Some more iconoclastic players, like Ton Koopman and Anthony Newman, err on the side of too much flash. Both Koopman and Newman (Dutch and American) are somewhat controversial within the ‘early music’ community, both of them are staggeringly virtuosic keyboardists whose performances are so laden with ‘ornamentations’ (improvised extra notes) that they drive other scholars crazy. Next to the forbidding austerity of their authentic performance practice godfather, Gustav Leonhardt, the effervescence of Ton Koopman must have been the most direly needed breath of air in Holland since they switched off of windmill power.  But Koopman rather overdoes it, and his Goldberg Variations feels like a kid on a sugar rush. The spiritual import is gone, and there is nothing in its place. Newman is a somewhat better, but his performance can be downright gawdy. It is an amazingly fun, almost ‘rock’n roll’ performance (pardon the stereotyping…). The virtuosity is so unbelievable that even Gould has to take second place, but intellectually his footing is nowhere near as solid as Gould’s, and therefore it seems a bit like empty (though thoroughly delightful) gymnastics. Both Newman’s and Koopman’s Bach has plenty of personality, but why would you ever want to imprint your personality on a work which is already so perfect?

Other players, more stolid German players like Helmut Walcha and Karl Richter, get a little closer to Bach. In the mid-20th century, there were not two men alive more associated with Bach than these two. Neither was best known as a harpsichordist, but both were known as the ultimate authorities on their repertoire.

(Helmut Walcha playing my other favorite Bach piece…)

Helmut Walcha and Bach organ music are virtually synonymous. No keyboardist has ever achieved easier access to the calm center of Bach’s storm. Every phrase in Walcha’s playing feels so unbelievably right and natural, there are very few ornaments, and every variation has a moderate pulse which stays as close to absolute as humanly conceivable. This is the kind of playing which allows Bach to speak for himself, and no one ‘speaks’ in the language of notes as fluently as Bach, but there’s still something missing. Surely Bach - the great improviser, the world’s most practical musician - wouldn’t stop at a simply perfect rendition of music he already wrote. If he’d already achieved perfection, he would muss it up so he might plumb new depths.

(Karl Richter leading the St. John Passion old school. Sorry, but the St. John Passion kicks St. Matthew’s ass.)

If Walcha was synonymous with Bach and the organ, then Karl Richter was synonymous with Bach and the large ensemble. To be sure, Karl Richter was a great organist in his own right. But he is, by far, best known for conducting the Munich Bach Orchestra and Chorus - a mostly amateur organization which is the only major ensemble in the history of major record labels which I’m convinced comes close to the spirit of Bach’s music. Like Bach on the piano, professional orchestras and singers are far too seasoned, mannered, and lacquered to view Bach on his own terms. Bach went to such artful lengths to craft his works so that his extremely amateurish performers wouldn’t have to perform with any artfulness at all. Bach’s music is the definition of music for skillful amateurs - pure in intent, serious in their passion, and earnest in their feelings. Richter’s performance of the Goldberg Variations transfers this earnest feeling perfectly, and perhaps too perfectly. Until his death from a heart attack in his mid-fifties, Richter was a heavy smoker in terrible health for much of his adult life, and perhaps his performance of the Goldberg Variations is indicative of that. It abounds with wrong notes, slowed up rhythms, and even a bad memory lapse or two. It doesn’t matter much. His feeling for Bach was amazing. Think of it as a fantastic but rusty piano (harpsichord) teacher playing in your living room.

(George Malcolm, the closest to ideal you’ll find on youtube.)

And that leaves two. Two that trump even Wanda Landowska herself. The English keyboardist and conductor, George Malcolm, is one of the forgotten heroes of Baroque music. He, understandably, hated the modern harpsichord, and pledged himself to the newer model harpsichords with modern accoutrements. No harpsichord, not even Landowska’s, sounds like this. In his 1963 recording, is none of the percussive hardness which usually pervades baroque keyboard instruments. The notes on this instrument sound as though they’re being plucked by human finger, in a sound that is the perfect mix of harpsichord, organ, guitar, lute, and piano. Oh… and the interpretation ain’t bad either.

(Igor Kipnis)

But the greatest, closest to ideal of all, is Igor Kipnis. Kipnis didn’t play harpsichord seriously until he was nearly thirty, and while he’s no technical slouch, he does not quite have the easy virtuosity of a Landowska or Anthony Newman. But in its place, Kipnis has that one extra element which no other keyboard player uses to nearly the same extent - improvisation. Bach, who could write a perfectly formed work as easily as the rest of us could sweep a floor, couldn’t possibly be satisfied with a merely perfect rendering of his pieces. In his compositions, he so often mined the same basic musical material for different results that it’s impossible to believe he didn’t do the same as a performer and improviser. And like voodoo magic, Kipnis always has a new way to shock us into hearing differently a piece the world knows so well. He’s never too excessive in his divergences from the score, and were he, it wouldn’t be nearly as shocking. There is just enough diversion from the score to surprise us expertly at every turn. Save one, Igor Kipnis realizes better than any other keyboardist that the score is only the beginning of understanding Bach. And in so doing, he channels the spirit of the master as no other performer ever has in this most Bachian of works.

But what if there are conceptions which are greater than the ideal? What if a musician comes along who completely changes everything we’ve ever known about a work in a manner that could never be duplicated - and turns a work of art into something still better?

This is the accomplishment of Glenn Gould. No work was ever associated with him more than the Goldberg Variations. Under his fingers, the Goldbergs were no longer a forbiddingly austere behemoth, it was a work of pure delight. When Glenn Gould was 23, he set down a version of the Goldbergs so legendary that it’s moreso than the piece itself. Many other players take nearly 100 minutes, but Gould gets through the whole thing in 37! No repeats, and at top speed, with not a single use of the damper pedal! Under every other pianist, The Goldberg Variations is an epic journey, but when it becomes the Gouldberg Variations (sorry), it becomes an exercise of pure counterpoint and exuberance - as though filtered through the mind of a pure genius who assimilates everything at top speed. Murray Perahia makes the work sound like Mozart, but Glenn Gould brings to mind the image of Mozart himself playing it.

But even Gould’s 1955 performance must take a back seat to his 1982 rerecording. Glenn Gould, a few months before his early death, shows us what real genius is when he manages to play the entirety of the Goldberg Variations in mathematically related tempos - sometimes bizarrely slow, sometimes disturbingly fast - but never had this piece ever sounded this beautiful or exciting or unified or masterly under any other pianists hands. Only Gould could do it; is this Bach? Or is it, dare I ask?... an improvement on Bach? Regardless, the result may be the greatest recording of Bach ever made.

No keyboard player could sound like Gould, even if they tried (and many have). Whatever his secret, it’s his alone. Like only the very greatest re-creative artists can, he took the raw material of a piece that was already a work of genius, and transformed it to something even higher. Everything in music is a matter of taste, but there are some classical performances for which the appeal is so obvious and immediate - Pavarotti doing Bel Canto, Furtwangler in Bruckner,  Horowitz playing Liszt, - that if you don’t hear the greatness, I question whether you have a pulse. These moments are more than simply great, they’re moments in which human limitations are clearly transcended in a manner they’ve never been before, and never will be again. None of the above examples, including Gould, are doing precisely what the composer asked, but if anything, they’ve improved on the original. Horowitz completely re-arranged Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody to get those effects, no acceleration is written in the score during the closing pages of Bruckner’s 5th Symphony, and those nine high-C’s which Pavarotti tossed off were originally written with instructions to yodel, but what these performers have done is more than simply realize what the composer wanted - they improved on the composer’s music.  

The two greatest recordings of the Goldberg Variations were, of course, done by a pianist. Glenn Gould is the alpha and omega, the north star by which this piece will always be navigated. Don’t let anyone tell you that his recordings, either of them, are overrated. They are, if anything, still underrated. They are the most profound musings left to us by a genius who uses his imagination to reshape the curvature of the earth to his own design. For whatever reason, the mid-century was full of those artists - Gould, Horowitz, Richter, Cliburn, Dinu Lipatti, William Kapell, Julius Katchen, Leon Fleisher, John Ogdon, Menuhin, Josef Hassid, Michael Rabin, Genette Neveu, Nikolai Golovanov, Sergiu Celibidache, Ferenc Fricsay, Guido Cantelli, Carlos Kleiber, Bernstein, Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Alban Berg, Jacques Brel, Edith Piaff, Jerome Robbins, Bird, Coltrane, Brando, James Dean, Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, Arthur Penn, Erich von Stroheim, Jean Vigo, Grace Kelly, Carole Lombard, Lauren Becall, Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Nicol Williamson, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Isaac Babel, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, Paul Celan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, Richard Hofstadter, Loraine Hansberry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Nathaniel West, J.D. Salinger, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Norman Mailer, John Kennedy Toole, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, Otis Redding, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sam Cooke, Patsy Cline, Brian Wilson, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Elvis Presley- performers so absolutely gifted that our confused, compromised world had no way of accommodating the true breadth of their talents, and therefore we only have mere glimpses of their genius stretched its fullest plumage.

My Favorite Album: David's Contribution

It's an odd question to ask about a favorite album in a time where albums have become increasingly irrelevant.  I searched the recesses of my mind for an album that stuck out to me as great.  A few albums came to mind, all of which could be associated with a time and place.   Californication by RHCP was the album of my summer at Ojibwa sleepaway camp, I used to sit in my bed and try to memorize the lyrics.  Chronic 2001 by Dr. Dre was the first non clean rap album I owned.  A Place in the Sun by LIT most famous for My Own Worst Enemy, carried me through 6^th and 7^th grade, as well as a long car ride to a cabin in West Virginia with Jordan where we knew every word to every song.  Ultimately I settled on an album that launched a career and supercharged an ego, an album that was omnipresent during one of my most formative years.  An album that brought people together, and was also the first time I ever cared about skits on a rap album.  That album is College Dropout By Kanye West.

The album gives us our first taste of the lyrical genius that can come from Kanye - We Don’t Care features lines like “drug games’ bulimic its hard to get weight” and All Falls Down has the line “couldn’t afford a car so she named her daughter Alexus”  (….get it?!).”   All of this with incredible guests.  The songs that were released were great, but the best songs are reserved for those that listened to the whole album, and only get better with time.  Long before we knew how pompous and self-aggrandizing Kanye was, long before he was a world superstar, we had College Dropout. 

David is a Medical Resident, Music Lover, Drummer, and Close Relative living in Chicago

Click here for The Purdy's Contribution

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800 Words: Living in the Past - Part IV (Conclusion)

“Optimism is the opium of the masses. A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long Live Trotsky!”

- Milan Kundera

I often think to myself that I’m an advance scout for my own generation. I show them what it’s like to get old quicker and experience disappointment earlier. Growing up as I did in a background that was entirely too privileged to feel the way I do, I feel like I’ve shown many all too blessed people of my age-group what it’s like to fall out of love with the world at an early age, and then to indiscriminately lash out as so many older people do at this world which has proven so disappointing so often, and so prematurely.

For somebody whose life has been extremely easy, I’ve had it pretty tough over the years. I’ve prattled on in these posts in a spiral of seemingly endless self-abasement about precisely why that is, and I wish that there was some means other than writing to turn it all into something productive. But it would be all too easy to pretend to an optimism which neither I nor most people earn. An optimistic attitude may get you something, but it won’t get you much. Regardless of our attitude towards life, we’re born when we are born, and our life unfolds as it does, followed by a death which seldom announces its precise time of arrival. We are neither the captains of our souls nor masters of our destiny; we are along for the ride, and only get a tiny sliver of input in our lives’ direction. Biochemistry determines virtually all of our life for us, right down to our temperamental capacity to change our life circumstances, and those of us who fight against our fates usually end up living out the same pathologies we were trying so desperately to avoid, only more fanatically. However unlikely, it's possible that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is no vice, but there is definitely not a single virtue in the pursuit of extremism - be it the extremity of politics or extremity of character correction or extremity of obsession. If a person wants to correct, truly correct, the circumstances of his life, he well may be able to. But there is an ironclad guarantee that the spiritual and emotional losses incurred along that path will be incalculable to someone - you or someone you love, someone you love or someone you hate, deservedly or not.  As my father recently said so memorably: “There are no solutions, only problems.”   

Unfortunately, the past is all we have, and while the future is not yet written, there is little which history proves except that future will mercilessly repeat the past. The idea that we can aspire to be better people than we are is as dangerous and laughable as it is laudable and inevitable. The world is a treadmill that never stops, and we run on it not to move forward, but merely to stay in the same place. Hopefully, we'll sometimes be in good enough shape that the treadmill won't feel as burdensome, but eventually, we all step off, and sometimes we fall off quite painfully. 

Life doesn’t exist to be triumphed over, it exists to be lived. Whenever I hear people say that they triumphed over life’s vicissitudes like so many battles with proud scars to show, my bullshit detector flies through the roof. Physical wounds heal into scars because they are merely openings to be filled, but spiritual wounds are like the sepsis which fills them when the opening is not properly treated. The infection can spread through you or to others at the slightest opportunity, and it always seems to make itself visible at the least opportune moment. And when that puss is popped like a bad or fatalistic attitude which suddenly reveals itself, the wound is either felt as intensely as when it was first made, or it is passed on like an infection to be someone else’s burden. The soul is a very fragile thing, and perhaps it would be best were we never to be conceived. Otherwise, we subject a soul to the sickness which the world inevitably provides. And when our souls get sick, the pathologies of our sicknesses are passed on, and there is nothing we can do about that. It isn’t just the sins of the father which are passed on, it’s the sins of the friend, of the teacher, of the collaborator.

To a certain extent, I live morbidly in the past. I write about it endlessly - world history, personal life history, history being made, history not yet made. The world is a museum whose collection is still growing, but since most people don’t realize that, most people go crazy chasing certainties in places where nothing is certain. The past and its memories are the only thing in this world of which we can be reasonably sure. The past is fact, the future is opinion.

The fact remains, I wish my life was better than it is. Everybody does - most people have much better claims on that wish than I, though some have worse. But if there is any hope for the future to stop (or at least delay) the repetitions of the past, then the exacting study of the past is the only way which it will happen. There is no guarantee that learning the truth of it will set us free, and plenty of reason to believe it will make us miserable.

Perhaps I fudged that earlier statement a bit: without a doubt, the past is the best certainty we have, but even the past is not exact data. It is a hall of mirrors in which we can all only see what we’re permitted to see (a less charitable person would say ‘what we choose to see’). Perhaps I should amend the previous statement to say this: the future is opinion, but the past is perception. The objective truth is not for any of us to pronounce, but if we perceive a truth, then it is either objectively true, or it is untrue, and we have no way of knowing which. Most people can’t deal with that level of moral uncertainty, and they will do everything within their power to avoid its presence. The rest of us have to deal with burdens of potential truth which are far too heavy when there are far too few of us to carry them - if only more people could occasionally help us, or didn't pretend to help when they only meant hinderance… But we all exist within our own echo-chambers of self-validation, and some people are far more blessed than others to live within that chamber’s cocoon. We’re all a little self-deluded. But no matter what we perceive, there is a true version of what happens, and it may one day reveal itself. And if it did, then like today’s elderly Germans, some of us would have to spend an entire lifetime atoning for what we did and what was done in our name.

There is a moment in Milan Kundera’s most famous book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which Tomas, the main character, talks about how the current Czech government - a relatively liberal authoritarian regime - pleaded ignorance to the Stalinist crimes of the past. He argued that like Oedipus, even if this government never saw what was being done in its name (itself an incredibly dubious claim), the new, more tolerant government was morally culpable for what was done because it reaps the privileges of those crimes. Whether or not intentional, the truth of what happened was so horrible that its members must put out their own eyes. For this comment, and a dissident’s exploitation of it, Tomas was disbarred from medicine and never again worked as a doctor. Perhaps the old government would have shot him, but the new government's reaction didn't speak very well of it, and in any event, the newer more liberal dictator - Alexander Dubceck - was soon replaced by a still more authoritarian government for the crime of trying to make dictatorship palatable.

We have no moral obligation to discover such truth or learn it if we’re reluctant to do so; but if we’re not prepared, the truth will confront us at moments too inopportune to ever know how to justify ourselves - because there is no justification. If we truly believe in conscience, then we must admit to our crimes, and never stop atoning for them. We will try our best to explain why we did what we did as best we can, but there is no justification that grants absolution. There is only the nagging hope that one day, maybe, we can do enough good in our lives to eventually counterbalance the evil.

My Favorite Album: The Purdy's Contribution

Frank Zappa's Apostrophe. 

wise words in my most formative years: "Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow"

The Purdy is a music professor and virtuoso percussionist in the Baltimore area.

Click here for Der Kaurich's Contribution

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Click here for My contribtuion

800 Words: Living In The Past Part III - The Sublime Pleasures of Degeneration

“One epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and another is announcing its approach. There is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with to-day. Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man is weary, and there is no faith that it is worth the effort to uphold them. Views that have hitherto governed minds are dead or driven hence like disenthroned kings, and for their inheritance they that hold the titles and they that would usurp are locked in struggle. Meanwhile interregnum in all its terrors prevails; there is confusion among the powers that be; the million, robbed of its leaders, knows not where to turn; the strong work their will; false prophets arise, and dominion is divided among those whose rod is the heavier because their time is short. Men look with longing for whatever new things are at hand, without presage whence they will come and what they will be. They have hope that in the chaos of thought, art may yield revelations on the order that is to follow on this tangled web. The poet, the musician, is to announce, or divine, or at least suggest in what forms civilization will further be evolved. What shall be considered good to-morrow--what shall be beautiful? What shall we know tomorrow--what shall we believe in? What shall inspire us? How shall we enjoy? So rings the question from thousands of voices of the people, and where a market-vendor sets up his booth and claims to give an answer, where a fool or a knave begins to prophesy in verse or prose, in sound or colour, or professes to practise his art otherwise than his predecessors or competitors, there gathers a great concourse, crowding around him to seek in what he has wrought, as in oracles of the Pythia, some meaning to be divined or interpreted. And the more vague they are, the more they seem to convey of the future to the poor gaping souls grasping for revelations, and the more greedily and passionately are they expounded.”

Max Nordau - Degeneration

Degeneration is a very bad book, but it is an absolutely fascinating bad book - a book written by a 19th century psychologist/pseudo-philosopher who clearly suffered from the degeneracy he accused his subjects of displaying, and like many second-rate German thinkers of his time (including Nietzsche...) obsessed by the horrors of modern moral permissiveness - not least of which was a contempt for modern democracy... - stumbles into a truth by the very incompetence of his methods which the more rigorous minds of his generation could never have seen. The book dabbles in long-since discredited pseudo-science like theosophy and phrenology, and yet it's through the backwardness of its methods that it creates a theory of civilization’s decline that is absolutely correct, even if one-sidedly so.

“Degeneration” itself is an extremely loaded, dangerous, term. The recent re-discovery of 1500 works of art banned by the Nazis for being ‘degenerate’ should be enough to warn us about the dangers of using this term lightly, and warn us of what’s coming if we focus too much on the degeneration itself rather than the far worse perniciousness of its remedies. But when a society is deeply ill, it is much like a person. Just as the antibodies will inevitably kill cells and hamper other bodily functions, the remedies to societal degeneration will inevitably kill people. The people who would seek to cure degeneration itself, cure it by revolution rather than heal it by reform, are the most degenerate people of all, and must be viewed like medieval doctors who use bloodletting and unsterilized instruments to cure illness. Just as medicine has advanced to the point that life can be prolonged, we have to have faith that the day is coming when the world will be rid of medieval concepts like revolution and war; and politics, like science, will be a matter of incremental reforms through data and empirical research to obtain a ‘true’ and verifiable conception of the best possible government. The “right to be degenerate”, however corrosive it seems, is inviolate, and inevitably must be defended from those who would repress it. As Nordau’s intellectual successors proved, there is no person more dangerous to the world than the movement who would seek to cure degeneration.

But degeneration, as disgustingly as the term is generally used, most definitely does exist. It is the state when the vast majority of the public becomes unhealthily obsessed by certain components of the world’s culture at the exclusion of the culture’s other parts. When a cultural world grows so large that its ever-increasing complexity assaults people’s brains, people retreat into simplistic explanations for why the world they live in is the way it is - and they become fixated on small parts of the culture, endowing these small components with a significance they absolutely do not deserve. The assault on people’s brains by cultural stimuli becomes so unremitting that our overstimulated brains demand constant stimulation in order to be engaged at all, and this demand can only be gratified by obsessions, obsessions which by their very simplicity obscure truth rather than clarify it.

In its ideal state, the human brain aspires to clarity, and has no need for vague obfuscating terms like spirit or humanity or sexuality or the id. In an optimal situation, an ‘innocent’ situation, it would not even occur to a brain to require more than the pleasure of formal perfection. It would derive its pleasure from purely rational pursuits, like the solving of a mathematical equation or the construction of a home appliance (or perhaps a Raphael painting or a Bach fugue). But since we live in a world of messy human longings and ‘ugly’ human needs, the brain constantly strives for greater, more amorphous connections. If there are ‘groupthink’ solutions to these messy human problems which are generally accepted by the clique to which a person belongs, the person’s brain needn't seek its own solutions, and can therefore stay that much more at rest and think that much more clearly about other matters (after all, ‘groupthink’ is occasionally a good thing. To give the most obvious example, it’s how children are socialized into the world.).

But in order for the human brain to feel at peace with itself, it requires clarity at all times, and often requires clarity from situations that are completely irrational. Even in an irrational situation, the human brain must make sense of it. Human matters are far more nuanced and complex than even the most specialized mathematical fields, and the way we solve human problems is through metaphor. Metaphor is the algebra of the soul, the humanistic equivalent to mathematics, in which we try, however imperfectly, to create equations from situations which appear at first glance to have nothing in common. Within our lives, we have situations which challenge us, and the best we can do to solve them is by comparing this situation to preceding ones. We compare and contrast them, and work out just how like or unlike every new problem in our lives is to old ones. Just as in higher-level mathematics, we can perceive connections between things which seem completely disparate. In the brains of people who maintain their clarity even in the face of human frustration, human motives can be explicated as clearly as any mathematical proof.

But most of us are extremely muddled thinkers. Most of us never learn how to solve higher-level mathematics, let alone our dealings with other people. Our metaphors are inexact, and our reasoning nearly as approximate as if we chose our actions at random. We are confused by the world; we’re neither the creatures of reason and light which Rousseau and Kant would have us believe, nor are we the creatures of darkness and irrationality from the fevered imaginings of Schopenhauer and Freud. We are creatures who try to act rationally as best we can, and usually fail. Our brains attempt to perceive the world in all its complexity, but our perceptions continually let us down because no one person can take in the largeness of the world, though perhaps we all can try a little harder...

And in place of a complexity we can’t understand, we simplify our lives so that we can make sense of them. In an era like the 1950’s when so many people shared the same worldview, the simplification of life is all-too-simple, because who could possibly want to harm another person in whom you see so much of yourself? It is easy to be a tolerant liberal reasonably open to new cultural experiences when you know that everybody else wants the same goals out of life which you do, shares your worldview, your values, and your frame of reference. But the stability of such a world makes the world a duller place. It requires visionaries of true genius to force the world to open itself up to a different way of seeing.

The ‘great geniuses’ who grew up in such eras, geniuses like Dylan and Spielberg and George Carlin and Matt Groening and Francis Collins and Barack Obama (and pre-boomers like Orson Welles, James Watson, Louis Armstrong, Franklin Roosevelt, Mark Twain etc…), are that much greater than the great geniuses after them, because the geniuses of this older generation had to rise up from the homogeneity of their upbringings to claim their individuality in a milieu where individuality was intensely discouraged. And in doing so, they taught their followers to be themselves. Thanks to the preceding geniuses, people of genius and talent who follow in their footsteps are already liberated. Nothing in the history of the America we know today which follows in the particular genres of The Times They Are A-Changin’, or ET, or Seven Dirty Words, or Bart the Daredevil, or the mapping of the Human Genome, or the passing of the Affordable Care Act, could possibly have the same apocalyptically elemental power on the larger public, or on history, as the originals did. The work of opening people’s minds to new horizons has already been done. Just as these works redefined America, if a new genius emerges who is on their level, that person would completely change the curvature of American history as much as these other figures have. Music as we understand it would no longer be music, science as we've known it would no longer be science, movies not movies, politics not politics.

But there is an inevitable price for such greatness. Once these horizons have been opened, there is no ignoring them, no turning back the clock, no unseeing what has already been seen. There will always be people resistant to such changes, and they will believe with all their might that these changes must be resisted by any and all means. There will also be people so eager to look forward that they will view all these new discoveries uncritically, and refuse to acknowledge that progress has equal potential for bad as well as good; and in order to affect the change they want, they will attempt to destroy all connections with the past both beneficial and destructive. In every historical epoch, both sides of the argument become obsessed by these changes and would do anything within their power to return the world to the conformity which they view as inevitable so long as the world conforms to their particular worldview. 

The tragedy is, both sides are absolutely right. If humanity were simple enough to ever conform to a total worldview, then humans might be completely happy within one weltanschauung or the other, and it wouldn't matter which. Instead, all these monist ideologues rage against developments which conflict with their view of the world, and can't understand why their glorious vision of the world never comes to be. And as new explanations for why the new world never materialized proliferate, each side bifurcates again and again by infighting, and while discussions about the world used to take place in which everyone fundamentally agrees and only argues over particulars, perceptions of the nature of the world run the entire gamut with every conceivable point of view taken. Everybody becomes unique, just like everybody else, and nobody understands how anybody else could believe what they believe. 

And as this process grows exponentially more volatile, people retreat further and further into like-minded communities, the chasms between them and the ‘other’ growing ever greater, with gulfs of understanding that eventually can never be surmounted. This is the story of history, and in every culture and civilization, it becomes only a matter of time before each group perceives the ‘other’ as a threat which must be eliminated at all costs, by any means, with total war until the enemy is eliminated totally. Within a culture in decline, each person becomes his own feedback loop of self-generated obsession, unavoidable and tragic with consequences that are all too foreseeable.

Some people become obsessed by religion, others by sin. Some are obsessed by mysticism, others by rationality. Some are obsessed by violence, others by pacifism. Some are obsessed by anti-intellectualism, others by intellectual obscurantism. Some people become obsessed with extremist politics of the right, others by extremism of the left (give it twenty years…). Some are obsessed by futuristic science fiction, others by fantasy literature which recreates the past. A fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject, but when people become obsessed with their subject, the maintenance of this obsession endows the brain with all the stimulation it needs to maintain the stimulation with which this incomprehensible world initially endowed them.

What Nordau states as polemic, I submit as inevitable. As a culture degenerates, it grows ever more unstable, unmanageable, insane. But stability is boring, and the great works which stability brings about inevitably shake us out of the very stability which the unstable world which preceded them worked so hard to build. And as we wrestle with the idea of making the world better - more sensible, more manageable - the messy nuances of human nature get in the way to such an extent that in the long run, we can’t help but fail. The world does not become, the world is. We cannot improve the world, but we can temporarily heal it.

And as the world grows more insane, so too do the consolations which make the world a finer place to live. We already have the achievements of past generations to improve our lives’ lots, but we can also build upon them to create a still greater world. We know fully well that with every step we take to create what we perceive as an improvement to the edifice of civilization, there will be many who bristle at our every effort, and do everything they can to resist and destroy it. Such is the lot of a world grown too interesting, and eventually, the contradictions will become so great that there is no way to stem destruction’s tide. Our world, and everything we know about it, will eventually collapse, and the finer our world grows, the more inevitable such a collapse will be.

The closer we get to the ‘fall’, the higher we reach to the cultural mountain’s summit. The more energy and stimulation is gained, and the more splendid culture becomes. The more diseased a civilization becomes, the more it bifurcates into different cliques governed by different obsessions; each of which takes on a different response to the world’s spiritual disease, and each of which requires all manner of diversions to distract each obsessive from his particular sickness. Just before the "fall" of World War I, the world produced splendid riches from its many, many niches, and even if there was not a Beethoven or a Shakespeare or a Michelangelo (or a Spielberg) among their creators, there were hundreds upon hundreds of ‘lesser geniuses’ who sprayed a rain of beauty upon this earth unequaled before or since. As we draw closer and closer to next fall, we will see ever more and more of that beauty. In movies, there may be no equivalent in the younger generation to giants like Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, or Lucas, but there are hundreds of filmmakers from the next few generations which are candidates for greatness - from Spike Lee to Richard Linklater to Jason Reitman to Alexander Payne to Sofia Coppola (to say nothing of other American directors I don’t much like but others love…), and even if the world of television will never inspire the world like movies, it’s a golden period so amazing as to defy quantification. 

Even if there’s barely a “giant” among the younger generations of musicians the way there are so many in the older who monolithically inflamed the entirety of the music world - like Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen or Johnny Cash or Otis Redding or Stevie Wonder… make your own list (to say nothing of pop giants…)  - among the next generation, we’ve had hip-hop artists over the last quarter-century who've inflamed an extraordinary chunk of the world population - Public Enemy, De La Soul, L.L. Cool J, Wu-Tang Clan, Biggie, Tupac, Dr. Dre, Jurassic 5, Eminem, R Kelly, Snoop Dogg, Lauryn Hill, Beastie Boys, Jay-Z, Missy Eliot, Beyonce, Outkast, Little Brother, 50 Cent, Gnarls Barkley, MIA, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Frank Ocean - and even if hip-hop is a 2-year project to learn which I haven’t even begun, I can’t help but be impressed by its popularity, and by how seriously people take it. And even among more old-school style rockers of various types, the comparative little leaguers among the younger generations - musicians like James McMurtry, Sufjan Stevens, Regina Spektor, Charles Bradley (a late bloomer), The Mountain Goats, Gogol Bordello, Arcade Fire, Neko Case, (among many others…many of whom aren’t mentioned because I don’t like them…) - create songs with quality enough that it’s possible that people will still see value in some of this after another century, and we underestimate their potential claim on posterity at our own peril. 

Even if there are no young scientists yet whose discoveries seem to have inspired the intellectual world’s attention the way Francis Collins and Craig Venter have, or Watson and Crick, or Brian Greene and Ed Witten, or Noam Chomsky, or Persi Diaconis, or Steven Chu, or James Hansen, there are thousands of scientists whose work creates new reality out of their research every day, and no doubt, there will be a new generation of great American scientists soon enough. 

And even if Barack Obama is the final great president in US history, the tide is most definitely turning toward liberalism in the next generation. Whether or not the gains are incremental or stupefyingly large, they will have been made possible by Barack Obama’s patient educating the American public against a conservative campaign of ignorance and fear. We don’t know what the future brings, but the near future of America seems overwhelmingly liberal, and it is President Obama who made that possible. 

All this great talent is possible in one era. The more volatile America gets, the more creative it becomes - with amazing talent, amazing potential for talent, and amazing talent still unknown to us. Because as the world gets worse and worse, the need for culture gets more and more desperate. However unlikely, it’s possible that the current rain of American-founded beauty could continue for another hundred years without interruption. Just think of it, as America (hopefully) continues to slowly crumble, the American Carnival could snowball into a greater and greater party with all the terrible beauty of an avalanche. Long may it rain!