Sometimes I wish changing our perception of the world
were as simple as putting on a different pair of glasses.
Ah:—Sudden clarity. More depth of field. A wider angle of view.
It would be nice if it were that easy.
I’m afraid I’m more of a philosopher with a camera than
a real photographer. Compared to all my experience in music,
I have to admit that I do not have much technique. But at
least I know enough to keep things simple. Like the great
alpinist and designer Yvon Chouinard says, “It’s easy to
make things complicated. What’s hard is to keep things
simple.”
The central miniature below is about that problem of the
difference between complexity—which is always a part of
natural simplicity, which is always good and experienced
as diversity, richness—and mere complicatedness.
Complicatedness is, in this view, unnecessary difficulty,
difficulty which serves no purpose, which wastes vital
energy. This kind of complicatedness, it seems to me, has
become a key and salient feature of contemporary existence.
I learned more than I’d be willing to admit about
complicatedness or unnecessary difficulty as the leader and
conductor of a contemporary music ensemble. The more difficult
the music was the better.*
And then, after finishing a piece by a well-known American
composer at a concert in Amsterdam, I, as conductors do,
motioned to the orchestra members to stand, and turned to face
the audience. At that very moment—I can still see and hear the
scene in my mind’s eye as if it were happening right here,
right now—I had something of an epiphany. I just thought:
This is all wrong. This is all fake. This isn’t what doing
real music is all about. This isn’t what I should be giving
energy to, doing with my life.”
That’s when I set out to the mountains and decided to stop
performing for the most part. To my mind, there’s nothing
really that’s gone wrong with musical culture in the West
that is specific to music itself. The problem space, it
seems to me, is a general one. Like the kind and quality of
glasses we have on as a culture. And I feel strongly that
one of the things we need to see more clearly is why we do not
yet understand this crucial difference between true, vibrantly
alive complexity, and just more stupid, boring and amazingly
wasteful an destructive:—complicatedness.
* It’s really a kind of cult of collusion which, while it
is now losing its energy, still enjoys considerable prestige,
especially in Europe. Just this week, critics and performers
are trying to make something of Schönberg’s Moses und Aron—
I would run away from the sound of this music now faster
than I would a rancher out on a 4-wheeler spraying thistles with
gallons of toxic Roundup—while in Amsterdam an entire festival
is devoted to the Russian composer, Galina Oustvolskaia, about
as interesting and refreshing for me as dealing with the fallout
from a certain reactor that exploded in the Ukranine in 1986.
It does not bother me if people are in some confused way
still interested in this music. What does bother me a great
deal, however, is when it is described to the young as being
important somehow, something which one must master, give
one’s energy to, which I think is just utter rubbish. Why?
because in my view it corrupts perhaps irreversibly one’s
sense of wholeness and natural, resonate, sound.
PAGE & MINIATURE AT
http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/at-the-beach.html
Poetry, like music, is movement. A movement of sound
and meaning. What we call form is the outward envelope
or shape of this movement, which carries the sound
and the meaning like a wave carries water.
In perception shaped by the current metaphysical and
cultural bias, both Music and Poetry are dominated by
the sense of sight. I visualize this as a very limited,
dark, bandwidth drawn about the eyes, almost like a pair
of blinders. This means, generally, that we as a culture
pay more attention to how the flow of sounds we call music
and poetry is written down, than how it actually sounds as
living movement.
Thinking of form as movement can be liberating, I think. One
of the many species of movement I’m keenly interested in is
a poetry with a longer, narrative, matter of fact, consistently
understated, composed of short phrases always articulated by
pauses of almost equal duration. It is a kind of movement I
first encountered in the work of the late Harold Pinter. For
me, it works with meaning which is too ugly, too brutal, too
appalling for words.
Too appalling for words. Yes. Like the current US
government’s enthusiastic use of drones.
In my view, anyone with any sense of history instantly
associates drones with the deadly V2 rockets developed by
Werner von Braun and built in the underground hell of
Penemunde. Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow was the
first to focus on this theme in literature. But his self-
consciously overly complicated work evoked nothing like the
horror I experienced upon watching a Dutch documentary,
produced by the VPRO and Andere Tijden, which lets
survivors of the rocket hell-factories, also in a
remarkably point-of-fact, unemotional style, tell their
story.
Unlike Aristotle, I do not believe that war can ever be
justified. This is especially so in the current era. So
I do not believe in, nor do I wish to participate in, any
kind of glorification of it. At the same time, the instrument
of violence which is the drone takes the violent use of force
to a completely new level. It is the cowards instrument of
choice. What does he have to loose? Nothing. It is the
instrument of clean death so sought after in an age which
prefers not to get dirty. But from the compassionate angel’s
point of view, it is obvious that the US dominance in this
first chapter of easy-chair video-game warfare shall not
last for long. That is, if we citizens of the blue planet
of peace simply sit back as obsequious drones ourselves,
and allow it to continue. For higher still, I’m quite sure
goddess Nemesis will eventually restore balance and truth,
and call to account, as she always has, those who in their
hubris now terrorize the skies of lands they have never set
foot in, in lands they have never seen.
POME & PAGE at:
http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/night-stations2.html