Something Happened--Easter 2011

Something Happened
Easter 2011

I was raised in the Nazarene Church, a fundamentalist denomination on the far right of a continuum between Episcopalian and Southern Baptist. I went to church 3 times a week. I got to play on the church pianos before and after church and during Thursday night choir practice, but other than that, I got nothing from the experience but guilt and condemnation.

Due to my eccentric Asperger's personality I felt rejected and misunderstood by my family. My mother’s only care was for my eternal salvation, her only real world was the church, so, aside from daily warnings about Hell, she had nothing to say to me. She was proud of me for singing those Sunday school songs I performed so well, but, outside that limited repertoire, even my musical identity made me a stranger to her. She had some kind of vague idea that music was important to me, as it was to her, but, like my father, she could not imagine music as a modus operandi in this wicked world, and therefore gave me only slight encouragement. As a family member, I orbited on the periphery of all activities, just like on the school playground, and as a child of God, I was pursued by the tangy scent of sulphur.

Nobody in my extended family had any mercy either. Everybody was convinced I put on my antic disposition out of spitefulness, and there was no-one in the entire Toole clan willing to toss me a crumb of forgiveness or understanding. To my mother I was a lost soul destined to burn in Hell; indeed, Hell loomed large in her mind as the most clearly defined pre-destination of my entire future—high school, college, skid row, Hell. Hell was invoked daily as the ultimate punishment for the most minor moral infractions. She wept over me and my undone chores with an hysterical passion, sobbing, "Rickie, honey, Jesus WANTS you to take out the garbage! You don't want to go to Hell do you?" (She also told me that the Bible says, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.") I was even publicly attacked from the pulpit of my church by not one, but a string of small-town ministers who made overt reference to my personal eccentricities as object lessons of evil which the other children must avoid if they didn't want to burn in Hell.

“You don't want to go to Hell do you?" Well, no, I didn't actually want to burn in Hell, so, in one incredibly momentous moment, when I was thirteen, I simply chose not to believe in Hell; which, of course meant not believing in God, in Jesus, in the afterlife, and just about every other article of my mother's fundamentalist Protestant belief system. This choice allayed a good number of my existential anxieties, but aggravated just as many other ones. I had to reject my parents' religion, because I rejected a God who sent people to Hell for not taking out the garbage; but I couldn't reject my own religion, the Church of Music, which had already, at my tender age, shown me angel faces and heavenly light. It was a quandary.

Anyway, a career of staunch atheism ensued for about ten years. The turning point came during my two and a half year tenure as a church choir director at a little Methodist church in Redondo Beach. I've told this story before, but want to tell it again, because it leads directly to my Easter message:

One particular Sunday, midway through those two and a half years, the choir was not well‑prepared, and I was nervous about the performance about to take place. I still didn't believe in God, as we know, but I did believe in good performances; so I decided to indulge in a little motivational manipulation to try and focus the choir's performance energy up to a little higher level. Right before the anthem I turned to the congregation and asked if someone wouldn't be so kind as to offer up a prayer of dedication. Of course, I didn't believe in prayer either, but I knew they did, so I figured a little cathartic adrenalin rush wouldn't hurt (a good conductor, like a good psychologist, knows it's all in your mind). A woman from the congregation rose, invoked the presence of Jesus, and asked that the choir be inspired to sing with the voices of angels.

I could feel that things were better as I raised my arms to begin the number, but I was not prepared for the surprise they had in store for me. They opened their mouths, and out poured a sound just like ANGELS! These people whom I had coached and coddled for more than a year had never even remotely approximated the sounds I heard at that moment. It was pure, it was elevated, it was IN TUNE! Not only their voices but their faces were transformed as well—there was something ecstatic, infinitely knowing about their eyes, as the piece flowed from harmony to harmony. Something had entered that space and filled those people. All the clever mind games in the world could not have induced that scene. With all my charisma and linguistic virtuosity, I could not have brought forth that kind of power from within them—this power came from OUTSIDE. There was a presence there that lent us all (me too) some extra octane in our pistons. We became vessels for the transmutation of higher intelligence into the mundane. It was one of those moments C.S. Lewis talks about, when a moment transcends its earthly definitions and vibrates with an archetypal, mythological resonance. It was by far the peak experience of my infant conducting career.

From that moment I was utterly changed. The religion of music had finally presented me with a supernatural sacrament I could endorse, a sacrament totally new, totally exciting;

and lo, the Angel who chose, through grace, to reveal this sacred insight unto me, was merely pointing a tremulous finger back in the direction of my broken past, my demon, my doubt.

In that moment, my dedicated atheism was brought into serious question—where had those angel voices come from? Now, to reclaim the theology, that I had just spent the last ten years aggressively rejecting, was a hard row to hoe for me, pride and stubbornness being what they are—but, no matter how hard I tried, I could not ignore that choir performance. The more I relived the experience, the more profound it became for me. The event was deeply shocking to me and gave me much more food for thought than I had consumed in years. It reminded me of all those emotion-laden altar calls I had suffered through at my mother’s church: all that wailing and weeping for Jesus that called to me on a visceral level, but which ultimately amounted to a low-vibratory thud in the basement of my mind--an act, a feint, a pimp, a parlor trick.

This angelic event at the Methodist Church was more than a parlor trick, this was REAL, this was TRUTH; and no matter how much it conflicted with the dogmatic principles I had mentally fixed in place, no matter how much it compromised the comfortable sense of cognitive security I had installed in my mind, this REALITY refused to be ignored. It would not be consigned to a back seat. I had to consider where this experience had come from, and where it would lead me; because lead me it must, as a composer, as a conductor, as a man. The heaviest part of the revelation was that it appeared to bridge the gap, the painful yawning chasm I had struggled with my whole life, between the fantasy world of creativity (with which I was very comfortable), and the real world of people and things (with which I was extremely uncomfortable, to the point of abject denial). Here was music that not only spoke to me as a musician, but as a person. A person. A spiritual being.

Remember that, as an aspie, I still had no experience of myself as a person—my whole identity was based on my sympathetic resonance with music; I was music, only music, nothing but music. But now music had become an energy that not only sang with the voice of pure reason, an oasis of static, perfect sense, soaring above and beyond the vain illusions of terrestrial madness--it had become imbued with PERSONALITY; there was a face behind the voice, and it exalted not only the impersonal truth of itself, it EXALTED ME. ME, the pitiful, disguised, mild-mannered reporter, who had nary a phone booth from which I might spring in superhuman triumph over the pedestrian mediocrities of the world. The angels had raised the meaning of music from “the fitful tracing of a portal” to a living, individualized identity, corporate, but singular, universal yet discreet.

The event shook the foundations of my whole world view, and since I could not incorporate it into the weave of my otherwise cynical and shallow attitudes, I was plunged into a deep depression. I felt that everything I had understood about life was being called into question. I know, I should have felt joy at having the clouds lifted from my eyes, but instead I just felt insecure. Having to revamp the philosophical underpinning of your existence is a lot of work, and I did not feel quite up to it, what with U.C.L.A. and all. Nevertheless, I could not deny what I had heard—I could deny almost anything else in my life, but not what I had HEARD. It resonated in my memory every day, and twice on Sundays, ha ha, and made me hungry for more. It was no accident, I thought, that the name of the tune, through which the angels had chosen to sing to me, was "Open Our Eyes". "Open our eyes, oh loving and compassionate Jeeeeee-sus." I remembered the line, hearing it over and over, and always in conjunction with that special look I had seen on my lead soprano's face-- Betty her name was—a look of peaceful mindlessness, yet somehow knowing and seductive. It was so real—real, and deep, and beautiful, and disturbing.

This event precipitated the first major spiritual crisis I had experienced since becoming an atheist back in junior high. I began to get very depressed, burdened by many nagging questions I could not answer. I could not go back to my mother's religion, but I could not forget those angel voices. They sang to me every time I entered the sanctuary, and haunted my doubts with intimations of a dimension of existence whose reality I could not accept, nor forget.

The bottom line of all my ruminations was death. I started to spend every waking moment thinking about death. It wasn't as though I had decided to contemplate death, as if it were an intellectual curiosity, a subject for academic study, a mind game—it was an irrational obsession over which I had no control, no ability to edit out, from which I could not protect himself. It was like the French fry machine at McDonald's, whistling relentlessly in my ear, which I could not turn off, from which there was no escape, in which I could find no peace. I remember sitting in that church looking up at the cross‑frosted‑white windows and imagining myself disappearing forever, never to know another thing, another sensation, another impulse of life. I did this a lot, trying to get used to it, and, each time I tried to imagine nonexistence I experienced a sinking feeling, my hands went sweaty and cold, and a panic gripped me with such ferocity I felt like screaming. The more I thought about death, the more I tried to accept it, the more terrified I became. A friend of mine once said that we already knew what it was like to dead, because we had not existed for an eternity before we were born. I cannot tell you what small comfort that was. It was not the unknown eternity I feared, it was that split second after death when I would never ever know what happened next.

Then, one Easter morning, the pastor gave a particularly thoughtful sermon from which I can remember, distinctly, only two words: "Something happened." The pastor was saying that no matter what you had to say about Jesus as the Son of God, or prophet, or philosopher, or whatever, on that very special day, "Something happened." No matter what the precise significance of Jesus' crucifixion worked out to be, you could not argue with the fact that "Something Happened." Something important. For these many years I had been so busy rejecting all the popular ramifications of what happened, that I had failed to notice that something really big had happened, and that Jesus (or somebody) had really created a Kingdom on earth. I began to suspect that a disturbed and foolish teen‑ager had thrown the baby out with the bath.

Something happened. To interpret this something has been the task of thoughtful men for 2000 years, and nobody has ever been able to measure its full significance. Clearly one big item is redemption, the restitution for original sin with a commensurate sacrifice.

Restitution for whose sin? Many New Age writers have suggested that Jesus is the reincarnation of Adam; that, therefore, His crucifixion may be seen as restitution for His own ancient failure. I am not any more interested in debating this point than I am in arguing about whether the world was created 5000 years ago or five billion years ago. I simply don't care.

However, I would like to remind you of last week's sermon about the humanity of Jesus and His ability to SYMPATHIZE with mortal man's griefs and to SHARE in his limitations. From this perspective it is not at all difficult to see how Jesus was able to claim Man's Original Sin as His own, and to take responsibility for it. Let me say that again: as a MAN, Jesus had no choice but to take responsibility for Original Sin; He therefore had no choice but to redeem it with a commensurate sacrifice. As Al Rothfuss observed last week, this was in the plan since before time began. And the fact that this debt was finally paid in full, on the cross--that an immortal being poured out His HUMAN blood on a specific spot, in a specific moment in time -- is perhaps the most miraculous thing of all.

Something happened. The flamboyance of it, the pure showmanship of it, staggers my imagination. The demonstration of Divine Love in such a dramatic symbolic gesture makes every other artistic performance, I can think of, pale to insignificance. That he could stand before the world and proclaim that the old impersonal gods are dead; that there is a now new order, never seen on Earth before; that there is now a PERSON in whom we can find comfort and help by the merest act of humble supplication. That is a very big wow.

The establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth through this magnificent demonstration of compassion was completely new, revolutionary, epoch-making. True, countless atrocities have been committed in Jesus's name; Man's ability to vulgarize every beautiful created thing is almost as mind-boggling as the Crucifixion, but still--for the disciple willing to reach out and touch the face of the PERSON Jesus, what happened is--well, we are saved. And that is enough of a bottom line for me.

There is a David Mamet movie called "We're No Angels" about a couple of convicts who escape from prison and pretend to be Catholic priests visiting a monastery. At one point they steal some clothes off a clothesline, and one of the guys forgets to take a clothespin off the collar of his stolen shirt. One of the monks at the monastery asks about the clothespin, and the convicts says, "You know what that is? You know what that is? Uh, uh, it's a reminder." The next day the gullible monk is seen wearing a clothespin on his collar. For us, the cross, the dove, the lamb, the lilies, the communion, should all serve as reminders that every day we live in peace on Earth is a gift from God--reminders that Jesus watches over us and blesses us, and invites us to take our place in His Heavenly Kingdom.

Glennallen, AK
April 21, 2011

On the Relationship of Irony to Abstract Expression

On the Relationship of Irony to Abstract Expression


I have mentioned previously that one of the difficulties of 20th century art is that it, more than other style periods, has depended on irony as a primary synthesizing force in the formation of its internal abstract relationships. The following piece was written some time ago, but I find that it has some relevance to the subject at hand; and although its presentation here may be perceived as a sidestep away from the subject of genius, it nevertheless has a bearing on the choices made-- a resonance achieved in much 20th century music.

Irony: if something appears to be a certain way, but new information, external to the context of the immediate situation, is introduced which reinterprets the situation to mean something else, it is said to be ironical; a man miraculously escapes from a den of ravenous lions, exultantly grasping life from the very jaws of death, then in his triumph slips on a banana peel and splits his head open--irony. The dictionary refers many times to the idea of "incongruity" to make clear the meaning of "irony." All forms of humor depend, to a greater or lesser degree, on this element of incongruity--the sudden reversal of a the meaning of a word, a situation, even a feeling. This reversal of meaning generates psychological tension, which we expel with laughter. Laughter feels good in the same way a sneeze feels good, or a sexual climax feels good--tension built up then released, feels good. It is the alternate generation and release of psychological tensions that is the stock-in-trade of art.
The questions this article proposes to ponder are these:

1.) Does the presence of incongruity in an expression signal any kind of meaning of a higher nature?
2.) To what extent does the spiritual mind participate in the lower material plane of dualistic opposition and contradiction?
3.) What effect does the abstract energy of super-physical reality have on the mundane universe of human existence?

Of some relevance is the idea put forth by Julian Jaynes in his The Birth of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind: Jaynes' ingenious conclusion is that consciousness is, part and parcel, a by-product of the mental reality created by the use of language. Already, in terms of our present discussion of irony, it can be seen that the "incongruity" between the "thing" that language represents, and the linguistic signifiers that generate mental images of that "thing" in the mind, seriously calls into question the very validity of consciousness at all. Jaynes provides much food for thought in the detailed defense of his theory, but a fundamental flaw may be seen in his insistence that consciousness is merely a product of the functioning brain; to a spiritually-minded person, it is an a priori principle that the brain is merely a physical organ, capable only of processing material input, whereas the "Mind" is something that resides on a higher plane of the infinite continuum of cosmic existence. Therefore, consciousness, on one level, may indeed be a vestige of verbal manipulations performed by a clever physical organ, but our sense of self, which, since Aristotle, has been thought of as the state of mind which separates human consciousness from the animals, may originate from a place not only higher than but also externally separate from the brain. The reality of higher mind is not fixed in the tension between opposing dual polarities, it is not vitiated by the artificiality of representational expressions, but, rather, is a dynamic, animating force which manifests as a personal presence; it is an eye into the infinite, capable of a breadth of vision far beyond the brain's paltry powers of perception.

The great composer Herbert Brun laments the inability of language to live in the present moment in his poem Futility:

For it is believable
that you do not yet believe
in hearing the sound of events
as they call on you
to create the suitable language
that will let you say to yourself
that which is said to you
just once and never again
for the first and last time

There is no second time
since a language gained
is a language lost

In Brun's aesthetic lexicon he consistently distinguishes between "statements' and "arguments"; a "statement" is an expression which exists in anomalous singularity, while an "argument" depends for its meaning, at least partially, on its pedigree: the idea that expressions must come from somewhere, and that this general (or specific) somewhere roots the expression in the past to the precise degree that it bears a resemblance to anything that has been expressed before. Brun clings to the possibility that a completely new expression is possible, even though, in his poem, he admits defeat in this regard by virtue of the inability of language to live anywhere but in a single moment.

I have always disagreed with the proposition that "arguments" have less expressive validity than "statements" for two reasons:
1.) It can be seen from the strong implication of Futility that the creation of a "statement" without a pedigree is virtually, if not completely, impossible, given the dualistic character of language; and, more importantly, that
2.) it is the relational interplay of various degrees of an expression's history that drives it into the realm of abstraction.

By abstraction, I mean a reality of mind, (we might say a spiritual state of mind) disconnected from the material referents of the expression. Art is always echoing the material plane by virtue of imitation: this sounds like thunder, this represents buzzing bees, etc.; but, when two material referents are placed in opposition to each other, a third meaning emerges. The relationship between the two becomes an expressive entity in its own right, with a meaning, nay, a resonance that transcends the material origin of either of the two referents.

My contention is that the aesthetic response is, and always has been, a response to this abstract reality, not to the physical reality represented by the abstract expression's lower level components. Hence, if a material expression comes encumbered with a backlog of stock associations that drag it from the present moment into the past, this action does NOT attenuate the potential of the abstract relationship, between the parts, to bring into the physical dimension the power and the living truth of higher mind. The multi-dimensional structure of human consciousness allows the self to traverse many (infinite?) levels, above and below, in a quest to affirm its cosmic identity. Thus, the ironical effect, in its resolution of opposing incongruities, may be seen as an important ingredient an an artwork's effort to penetrate the world of abstraction, and thus enter the world of spirituality.

A discussion of the Aristotelean definition of tragedy may be useful in clarifying this idea. (There is some disagreement as whether it was Aristotle or Shakespeare who defined tragedy in the following way, but, clearly, SOMEBODY did.) In a classical Greek tragedy, the hero is always of high birth, and possessed of all human virtues except one: the tragic flaw. This unfortunate flaw always wreaks the hero's ruin, and drags down numerous of his other personal associates with him. The tragic effect depends on the audience's sympathetic participation in this "fall." The experience of the tragic "fall" is very much connected to the incongruity of the personal values incorporated into the personality of the tragic hero, and degree of our cathartic response to his plight is proportional to our ability to "fall" with him.

Santayana has stated that, "Beauty is pleasure objectified." Hence, although the subject matter of tragedy is always human pain, suffering, and dissolution, our personal reaction, to the events in a good play, is, ultimately, pleasure. It is not only like a good sneeze, the expulsion of pent-up tension, it is also the feeling that the characters have drawn us out of our mundane selves into a world of rarefied spiritual truth. The truth of tragedy is not that life sucks and all is for nought; the truth of tragedy is that the tragic fall is not a downward, but an upward flight into a dimension of higher meaning. The tragic hero, suspended between the opposing attractions of ironical incongruities, is elevated to a higher level of existence; the tragic fall affirms and enhances the hero's sense of cosmic identity.

We are all familiar with the neurotic tendency to generate tragic implications out of our personal life stories. A neurotic person is, in many ways, more alive than a happy person, because pain emphasizes existence with its special brand of attention-getting. Of course the problem with this scenario is that when a play is over, we can return to our lives renewed, ready to start again to integrate our mundane lives into our spiritual ones, but if your whole life is a play, you can never escape the pain that leads to the fall, and hence never obtain the position of objectivity necessary to witness the effects of the fall and benefit from it.

Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress is a study in incongruity with its ever-tempting nostalgic indebtedness to an older, more comfortable, musical style. The music of the Rake is attended by a swirling aura of abstract relationships, as reference after reference to 18th century music is mitigated by perversions and misdirections which reinterpret, in every moment, the apparent pedigrees of its expressions. The ideas of false bass, polytonality, and stylistic permutation, are just a few of the expressive incongruities that pervade this work. Thus, the intense pleasure we derive from this complex of incongruous contradictions is directly related to the power of abstract relationships to force us out of one mind state into another.

The Quixote by Luis Borges, the story about the 20th century author who rewrites, word for word, the Cervantes novel, by BECOMING Cervantes, is an examination of how time itself draws antique expressions into the present. A word written in 1550 does not mean the same thing as the same word written in 1950. Why? Because the ever-evolving world of spirit does not allow the abstract relationships, inherent in a work of art, to stagnate like a dead thing, but always revives it Lazarus-like, in the anomalous now.

James Joyce has suggested three stages in the life of the artist: the Heroic, the Epic, and the Dramatic. In this third stage, the Dramatic, Joyce likens the work of an artist to God paring His fingernails. It is not unlike the episode in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna enjoins Arjuna to "fight without desire." The middle path of objectivity frees the warrior (artist, human being) to act without reference to what he is acting on, or where or when he is acting. The arbitrariness of the context does not emasculate the potency of the relationship between the doer and the done; the quiet mind ignites the fires of the heart.

Indeed, the dispassionate mind state frees the self from the seductions of mundane existence, and frees it to walk the earth with lighter feet; in this higher mind state, the subject takes what he is given and molds it with his will into expressions which transcend their materials. Thus, the effect of irony is to manipulate the dualities of the physical to a point where their opposing energies explode upward into a dimension of spiritual truth; a dimension in which the self is both less and more than it was. The world may heap tragedy upon tragedy on your helpless life, but your highest self, witness to it all, will only laugh.

On the Ethics of Genius

On the Ethics of Genius

"If a tree falls in the forest, with no one there to hear, does it make a sound?" Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. Definitions of sound may be consigned to the quibble/semantics garbage pail for all I care. However, sound or no, I have never had any doubt that if a tree falls in the forest, with no one there to hear, it makes no music. Music is communication or it is nothing. With no one there to hear, there is no transmission of idea or energy from one subjective reality to another. Musical truth brings the soul of the individual into more intimate communion with the oversoul, with the saints, with God. The divine intelligence of music wouldn't even bother manifesting without an audience--put another way, it is the subjective reality of the audience that brings the truth of music into energetic manifestation.

There is a commonly held opinion that genius dwells in a rarefied atmosphere beyond the ken of the common man. I vigorously reject this attitude. It may be true that savants like Mozart and Mendelssohn have insight into the mechanics of creation that surpasses the average or even above average aptitude for understanding the abstract mathematics of music, but without the innocence of the child and the connection with the pulsing blood, those abstractions mean nothing.

The following comments are taken from my doctoral thesis article, "On the Ethics of Music Composition."

The single most powerfully validating attribute an expression can have is the ability to invoke the collective mind in the subject, thereby giving him a super-personal experience of himself and, vice versa, the collective mind a super-personal experience of him (see p. 9 of "On the Improv Mind State"). Therefore, since entering a transcendent state, in this regard, becomes a social act, the degree to which an expression is absorbed into the collective mind is very much a measure of its ethical legitimacy.

The "social" dimension of art is the critical point here--the artist does not create in a vacuum, even if there is never a single other living person listening, the vestiges of human intelligence residing in the collective mind field hear every note.


The rightness or goodness of an expression is intimately linked with its presence as a universal identity. A basic proposition of this paper, supported by suggestions made in "On the Improv Mind State," is that humans are multi-dimensional beings. Human beings exist as foci of ego-consciousness graduated over a vertically aligned strata of planes of existence; a whole person does not live on one single plane at a time, but simultaneously on several, possibly an infinite number. A truthful expression of a multi-dimensional being must, therefore, initiate shifts in mind state, and must generate trans-dimensional energies; otherwise the living referent of the expression is only partially represented. Therefore an expression, if it refers to the multi-dimensional world of humanity, must have something to say to humanity, just as any vibration has something to say to a potentially sympathetic frequency.

Contrariwise, if the elements of an expression are fixed in one dimension or another, then the expression cannot be parallel to humankind; since a human being cannot duplicate the experience of such a non-parallel expression with his whole being, complete contact cannot be made. Such a lapse is sufficient to invalidate the expression and to ensure its hasty demise.

Thus an expression may be said to be ethically invalid when it does not engage the whole multi-dimensional being in an intercourse of sympathetic resonance (or duplication). Because higher and the lower constitute a unified reality, the omission of any aspect of this unity makes for a false representation. This invalidation can occur in the material dimension
(1) with expressions which slavishly repeat the literal identities of their referents without initiating a shift in mind state, or
(2) with expressions whose referents are completely ideational, or abstract, with no material point of reference.
The choices a composer makes in building his composition may initiate psychological responses which lead the subject, step by step, toward an experience of his higher self; or they may not.

The virtuoso mental gymnastics at play in a work of genius will always take a secondary place relative to the motion of the heart in its strivings to reach out to the world and touch the heart of another. The heart's desire moving across the waters, undefined or contained by an abstract form, does not express or manifest true feeling, but rather sentimentality, the echo or shadow of feeling; but form without feeling is sounding brass signifying nothing. The a priori logic of music supports and directs the energy of musical truth, but it is not a substitute for this energy; the truth of music cannot be expressed by rational constraints, only articulated by it. The logic is the needlework that holds the magnificent gown of light in place over the restless frame of transcendent reality. Focus on any single aspect of the multi-dimensional resonance of music, at the expense of the others, limits the range of the expression, deflating it, emasculating it, killing it. Thus the work of genius, while in need of abstract underpinnings, must always strive to embrace the scope of a WHOLE person--an holistic spiritual being.

Since humans exist simultaneously on more than one plane of being, expressions must resonate sympathetically with human intelligence trans- dimensionally. Only by resonating in tune with all levels of the personality's subjective experience can an expression be meaningful; only by inspiring the ego to experience itself in its vast array of articulated forms and inarticulate modalities, does an expression validate itself as truthful. Thus the challenge and the opportunity of art is to seduce consciousness out of its comfortable literal mode and direct it towards higher levels of its mental constitution.

In Christianity and Evolution (1971), Teilhard de Chardin describes the way the personal mind relates to the collective mind. Chardin says that a human mind generates a kind of magnetic force-field, and that all the minds of mankind, all those little force-fields, exert an attraction on each other, creating a kind of merged consciousness (the Omega Point). The energy of all those individual minds creates (or, at some point in the distant past, created) a magnetic vortex which draws (drew) all similar minds into it. This vortex manifests itself as a kind of magnetic cloud that hovers over the world of man, a cloud into which an individual mind may reach to access information or to make personal contributions. Living beings thus constantly rebuild or modify the corporate content of this cloud, which is made manifest not only in individual consciousnesses but in an anomalous super-personal mind-space of its own.

The content of this cloud, is truly corporate, because in the collective mind environment the individual is subsumed into the group. The collective mind is an egalitarian environment, an average-seeking energy; no one person is more important than another, even though individuals may sometimes influence whole classes of materials. To borrow an expression from Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1971), the collective mind may be thought of as "patterns of interconnection probabilities," (p. 68).
Interconnection is needed to link
(1) the vertical axis of existence through which a human being encounters his multi-dimensional self, and
(2) the horizontal axis, through which he encounters the rest of humanity.

This discussion is leading somewhere--it is leading to the invalidation of the whole idea of genius in favor of a more democratic system of validating art. Ultimately, we are moving to a definition of genius that negates the word's meaningfulness.

Next week: John Cage Stories

Undiscovered Genius - 1

UNDISCOVERED GENIUS
A commentary on the history, contexts, and meanings of the word "genius."

My history, wrestling with the word "genius," dates back to about age 14 or 15.

I am a musician, and an Aspie (a victim (sic) of Asperger's Syndrome): at a very early age it became apparent that I was gifted with that Asperger natural fluidity of thought and muscle memory, such that musical instruments and music composition were a mystery revealed. However, having been brought up in the most basic of white trash traditions of Jesus and Mr. Ed, I became a musician in a cultural vacuum. My precocity was noted by all, but my "all" was a congregation of country hicks, to whom the existence of professions of the mind was unknown and unacknowledged. It had not yet occurred to me to compare myself to anybody else, so I was fairly clueless as to the scope of my gift; I did not realize how special I was, and thus I proceeded along my innocent way, uncorrupted, the serpent's apple as yet untasted.

It wasn't until music camp after 9th grade that I met my mad painter friend, son of two nationally known university musicians. He brought the word "genius" into my life. He was an insanely brilliant artist, (who later distinguished himself nationally), but as a teen-ager, he was really pretty much of an asshole. But he had been involved in high culture all his life, and had grown up in the typical artistic atmosphere of ego strife that is always the consequence of intense self-involvement. Thus, the concept of "genius," I'm sure, had been a common subject bandied about his family breakfast table from earliest memory.

To him, to be the BEST was the only way he could validate being who he was. Perhaps, by claiming a divine right of kings, he sought to justify in his mind the excesses of egocentricity that densely characterized his daily life. Surely, as a teen-ager in the 60's, to establish your own personal moral universe must have seemed a reasonable desire for many, and a necessity for some.

My friend introduced me to the idea of hierarchies of excellence, and insisted on putting himself on the top rung of the ladder. And, of course, having once heard of it, I wanted to be a genius TOO. An intense ago battle ensued for the next year or so, I constantly testing myself to see if I measured up to the lofty standards of my mad painter friend.

It's interesting that my first step across the Rubicon of genius-self-validation was accompanied by Robert Schumann, the composer and critic who first brought the word "genius" to public consciousness in his new music magazine of the 1830's Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (English: New Journal of Music). To Schumann, the term genius did not refer to some specific artist of towering accomplishment, but, rather, to the zeitgeist, the spiritual muse that whispers in the ear of ALL artists. Only later did the word come to refer to somebody who was BETTER than everybody else. I did not know this then. (We'll get back to this.)

It was during the contemplation of Schumann's Traumerei that I first noticed a subtle movement of spirit permeating the internal workings of the music; the music flowed by and there was a "click" like the tumblers in a padlock syncing into place, and suddenly the music was illuminated with the light of truth; notes that were just notes before were transformed into symbols of portent and significance. I could not put a name to this experience, but I could feel the sense of it, the rightness of it, in my body; I know not whether it was in my gut, in my groin, or in my head. But I could FEEL the music come alive in me.

Then I noticed that I could have the same experience listening to a piece of mine. (By this time, say age 16, I had already written two string quartets, other string chamber music, several piano pieces, a full-length musical, and a symphony concertante.) The detection of subtle movements of spirit became the index of greatness in my mind--if I could sense this movement, the piece was great, if I could not, it was trash; no middle ground for me--genius or nothing. And it was with a solemn and frighteningly overwhelming sense of responsibility that I accepted myself into the ranks of the music immortals.

It took me over 30 years to come to truly understand what a crock this was, but considerations like this haunted me and corrupted me for most of that time. School didn't help: college musicians spend 1/3rd of their time learning about music, and
2/3rds of their time learning how to be a snob, and I learned my lesson well. Being a professional failure didn't help either: as an aspie I have always achieved professional distinctions like teaching jobs, commissions, awards, publications, etc., on a level far below musicians of comparable talent and attainment who weren't autistic; thus my ego had to battle with the dissonance that arose from my own sense of inner excellence and the pitiful dearth of tangible rewards it had brought me. I hasten to add that I can claim the admiration and respect of some of the best, most famous musicians in the country, but the musical establishment at large has essentially passed me by. Poverty and anonymity were good breeding grounds for bitter twisted attitudes; sometimes clinging to the persona of undiscovered genius was the only thought that kept my mind afloat during years of emotional hardship and neglect.

If I had not been an aspie, perhaps these critical mind obsessions would have damaged my music more than they did; but, as an autistic person, my conceptual world hardly ever touched my creative world. Therefore my artistic activities were spared the corrupting influence of the ego-centric self-consciousness that has invalidated the work of so many artists, thank God--but my philosophy of art, and my professional personae were not spared. I strove to become as much of an arrogant asshole as my friend. And so, through conversion reaction, I repelled every possible professional distinction I MIGHT have accrued, and became my own worst nightmare--misunderstood genius, eccentric weirdo, professional failure.


There was one tempering consideration that gained positive ground as time went on: all through my ego battles of the 70's and 80's there ran a motto theme that resounded in my ears with a comforting ring: "here we are with eternity on one side and eternity on the other side, and you're telling me it's 1975!" In other words, in the long run, the glittering bauble of earthly fame counts for less than one note of music reverberant through the eternal halls of the astral plane. If nobody listens to me in this world, at least I am known by heart in higher dimensions. Words of comfort to an unrecognized genius, to be sure!


How my attitude changed on the subjects of genius and greatness is to be the primary concern of this blog, with sideways flights into musical aesthetics and ethics. I intend to provide many examples of unrecognized greatness, and reflect on the larger cosmic significance of creativity.

RFT
Glennallen, AK
Jan 17, 2011

Next week: Skalkatos.