I recently saw the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor inside of a cave of all places. Truly amazing experience. The sound felt thicker in the air than a normal venue. I hear shades of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening album in their work.
I have repeatedly got lost in the muddle of abstraction. I once strongly felt that abstraction was the only pathway to answers/insights but lately being caught in the muddle of abstraction just as likely leads to stiff necks, headaches and greater or lessor degrees of anxiety. But such results haven't meant I'm totally giving up on abstraction--just trying to restrict the amount of my time I spend in the muddle and also spending increased time with poetry, music and nature.
Learning to live with/accept a high degree of uncertainty about reality is a real tough one for me
A poem by Saint John of the Cross comes to mind, regarding the term "Enlightened Dark Age": it describes the Original Fountainhead of light and being, where all creatures quench their thirst... "even though it's night time", as the refrain goes. It was turned into a beatiful, intense song by Enrique Morente:
Plenty food for thought in this piece; I specially like your proposal to study sacred chanting, ideally having been born within a living folk tradition. Those traditions are really the key, I think, as the song above perhaps demonstrates.
I am pitifully non-musical, so far as making music goes, and this has stretched my mind in a good way. Thank you. I sympathize with the term “enlightened dark age”; this really speaks to our situation realistically. We are tunneling out areas of light, to share with other lights we might find in the tunneling. This has a hopeful but non-utopian feel to me.
May 10, 2022·edited May 10, 2022Liked by Jack Leahy
This is all good stuff Jack (and thanks for the shout-out.) I have felt the same for years. My current essay series is an insanely ambitious attempt to use what I suppose is abstract thought, of a kind, to understand the state we're in. Having been at it for a year now I've noticed two things, I think, which your post has prompted.
One is that this writing, and the research required, is proving genuinely useful for me in working out what is going on and what I think about it. Of course, it also reveals how much I don't know, but that is an endless revelation for any of us.
The other thing is that I think the ultimate goal I have is to write my way through it all. In other words, to use thought to render thought ultimately redundant. (I know this sounds quite Zen.) But I have a sense that a point will be reached at which silence will make a lot more sense than words, finally. It sounds like you might be talking about something similar. I wonder now if the words are necessary to achieve the silence. For some people, at least. It's how we get there.
I grew up in a middle-class, high church home in a midwestern college town. I was exposed to a lot of classical music, as well as the occasional Gregorian chant. I went to many concerts at the university, some a bit odd.
Even after Hendrix, Zepplin, Zappa, I was still drawn to, primarily, baroque music. I did follow some of the modern composers like Glass, but find myself listening more to Gregorian, or similar, chant.
I recently saw the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor inside of a cave of all places. Truly amazing experience. The sound felt thicker in the air than a normal venue. I hear shades of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening album in their work.
I have repeatedly got lost in the muddle of abstraction. I once strongly felt that abstraction was the only pathway to answers/insights but lately being caught in the muddle of abstraction just as likely leads to stiff necks, headaches and greater or lessor degrees of anxiety. But such results haven't meant I'm totally giving up on abstraction--just trying to restrict the amount of my time I spend in the muddle and also spending increased time with poetry, music and nature.
Learning to live with/accept a high degree of uncertainty about reality is a real tough one for me
A poem by Saint John of the Cross comes to mind, regarding the term "Enlightened Dark Age": it describes the Original Fountainhead of light and being, where all creatures quench their thirst... "even though it's night time", as the refrain goes. It was turned into a beatiful, intense song by Enrique Morente:
https://youtu.be/z2q8qZJ4eo8
Plenty food for thought in this piece; I specially like your proposal to study sacred chanting, ideally having been born within a living folk tradition. Those traditions are really the key, I think, as the song above perhaps demonstrates.
I am pitifully non-musical, so far as making music goes, and this has stretched my mind in a good way. Thank you. I sympathize with the term “enlightened dark age”; this really speaks to our situation realistically. We are tunneling out areas of light, to share with other lights we might find in the tunneling. This has a hopeful but non-utopian feel to me.
This is all good stuff Jack (and thanks for the shout-out.) I have felt the same for years. My current essay series is an insanely ambitious attempt to use what I suppose is abstract thought, of a kind, to understand the state we're in. Having been at it for a year now I've noticed two things, I think, which your post has prompted.
One is that this writing, and the research required, is proving genuinely useful for me in working out what is going on and what I think about it. Of course, it also reveals how much I don't know, but that is an endless revelation for any of us.
The other thing is that I think the ultimate goal I have is to write my way through it all. In other words, to use thought to render thought ultimately redundant. (I know this sounds quite Zen.) But I have a sense that a point will be reached at which silence will make a lot more sense than words, finally. It sounds like you might be talking about something similar. I wonder now if the words are necessary to achieve the silence. For some people, at least. It's how we get there.
I grew up in a middle-class, high church home in a midwestern college town. I was exposed to a lot of classical music, as well as the occasional Gregorian chant. I went to many concerts at the university, some a bit odd.
Even after Hendrix, Zepplin, Zappa, I was still drawn to, primarily, baroque music. I did follow some of the modern composers like Glass, but find myself listening more to Gregorian, or similar, chant.