Goodbye to a Dream

 This is a very hard post to write and record, because in so doing, I am probably saying goodbye to a ten year dream from which I never want to part. 

For a decade or more, I've had a massive work of fiction in my head, probably uncompletable nor meant to be completed, going from the very origins of the Abrahamic story all the way to the present day and covering the entirety of Jewish history - a Jewish Arabian Nights perhaps, with the main character of the present day narrative being one A.C. Charlap, which perhaps just happens to be the initials of the Hebrew name and original family name of this present podcaster, dear listener, whom unfortunately like the present podcaster, dear listener, experiences all sorts of psychotic delusions, delusions which in the case of his fictional semi-avatar, take him through all manner of consequential and trivial moments of Jewish history and the results of its whole inheritance on the present day. Dear listener, it was gonna be fucking great!!!

And yet for all its thousands of pages, dear listener, I could never get more than a couple pages in without second guessing, without it seeming like a shit start, without it seeming as though I approached it from the wrong angle, without it seeming as though I could not lay a foundation for a work so large without the entire edifice crumbling to the ground before I even began. 

And yet I thought I could make it work. If anything, I took coronavirus as a sign, and I packed myself off to a condo on the Delaware beach, where I would finally commence serious work on the epic of a lifetime dear listener. Yet for four months not only did I barely write, dear listener, I barely read. Yet even then I persisted in chasing this dream in my head, with stories formed over four thousand years of history. Why? Because I spend part of the weeks of my life working on a similarly massive musical project, in which I set all 150 Psalms to music, the results of which you can listen to online at any time simply by searching Evan Tucker music and clicking the results. 

But the Psalms, if they work artistically, and I'm not sure they do though I like some of them very much, work not because they make any great important statement about Judaism and Jewish life, or history or existence itself, and if they work, it's not because they have anything deep and profound to say. No, if they work, then the reason simply is that insodoing a project like this, I'm inevitably relieved of thinking what to do next. There's no paralyzing indecision about the next project: when you finish Psalm 17, the next project is Psalm 18, and with every time you face these massively significant texts to the human experience, you struggle to come up with an aural equivalent that essentializes the spirit of the words, and so does in a way that's original, and innovative, and un-boring. When you have texts this good, the challenge is only to make music worthy of them. No one could ever think of a worthier life-long project than the set those 150 texts of the Divine Image to music, and certainly I couldn't, so rather than beset myself with indecision and worry that the work I'm pursuing is not a substantial enough artistic project, I always know I've chosen one of the best artistic projects a musician can choose, and it relieves me of the worry that the project itself isn't the best use of my time. The only worry is whether I'm good enough for this project, and that's a worry other people can eventually decide for me. 

One of the best pieces of criticism I've ever read is from Terry Teachout when he wrote about 'Importantitis.' I'll let him take over for the rest of this reconstituted daily podcast:

"Voltaire said it: The best is the enemy of the good. Ralph Ellison, like Bernstein and Welles, learned that lesson all too well. In 1952 he published "Invisible Man" and was acclaimed as a major novelist. The well-deserved praise that was heaped on him gave Ellison a fatal case of importantitis, and though he spent the rest of his life trying to finish a second novel, he piled up thousands of manuscript pages without ever bringing it to fruition. Why did he dry up? Because, as Arnold Rampersad's 2007 biography of Ellison made agonizingly clear, he was trying to write a great book. That was his mistake. Strangled by self-consciousness, he never even managed to finish a good one.

Contrast Ellison's creative paralysis with the lifelong fecundity of the great choreographer George Balanchine, who went about his business efficiently and unpretentiously, turning out a ballet or two every season. Most were brilliant, a few were duds, but no matter what the one he'd just finished was like, and no matter what the critics thought of it, he moved on to the next one with the utmost dispatch, never looking back. "In making ballets, you cannot sit and wait for the Muse," he said. "Union time hardly allows it, anyhow. You must be able to be inventive at any time." That was the way Balanchine saw himself: as an artistic craftsman whose job was to make ballets. Yet the 20th century never saw a more important artist, or one less prone to importantitis.

Yes, it's important to shoot high, but there's a big difference between striving to do your best day after day and deliberately setting out to make a masterpiece. What if Welles had gone back to Broadway after "Citizen Kane" and directed "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on a bare stage, with no expensive bells and whistles? Or if Bernstein had followed "West Side Story" with a fizzy musical comedy that sought only to please? Or if Ellison had gritted his teeth, published his second novel, taken his critical lumps, ignored the reviews, and gone back to work the very next day? Then all of those gifted, frustrated men might have spared themselves great grief -- and perhaps even gone on to make more great art."