mills baker

I went with Will and Matt to see Mono, a Japanese instrumental band completely unknown to me.

In several songs, their instruments merged together and grew into the loudest sound I’ve ever heard, a sound so loud and that during its duration I lost the ability to tell if it was loud or not; it had a powerful oceanic intensity, within which one could detect swells of melody and harmony but the overwhelming effect of which was a kind of collapsing of one’s senses.

This amused me: I stood smiling as my whole mind was overcome, my ears not pained but lost, disoriented, uncomprehending of scale. As a child, late at night when all was silent, I used to hear a roaring which seemed to me to be louder than all other sounds, so long as I didn’t relativize it by snapping my fingers to demonstrate its quietness. I used to think this was the sound of matter, of the universe!

Mono reminded me of it, and of the difficulty one has in contextualizing experiences at the extremities of one’s senses: the flickering brightness of absolute dark, the din of silences, the stillness within cacophony.

∞ Comments | 37 notes | Sep24

“And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which [experiential data] are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. ‘The youth that was I’, you may come to speak of him in the third person, and indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.”

Erwin Schrödinger, in the absolutely wonderful What is Life? (which you can read online). He argues that the only logical conclusion one can draw from the statistical facticity of determinism, given our structure, size, and subjugation to the laws of science, is that consciousness is not individual but universal and -so to speak- at the base of all things; in the words of the Upanishads, which he cites, Atman is Brahman.

The book is fascinating, and the co-discoverer of DNA’s nature claims it anticipated and sped his research: significant praise for a work by a physicist. Beyond its discussion of the basis of life in a physical sense, it contains Schrödinger’s thoughts on mind, a phenomenon of special complexity and meaning that is taken for granted despite being scarcely understood. In “The Mystic Vision,” he wrote:

“Knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it… For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours… is, in a certain sense, the whole… This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula… ’Tat tvam asi’ — this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.’ Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you … For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”

I find the insistence of a Nobel laureate such as Schrödinger that these ideas are to be taken as literal descriptions of the world, not as metaphors in any sense, to be extraordinarily interesting.

Tags: erwin schrödinger religion philosophy

∞ Comments | 23 notes | Sep23

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Funkadelic - Hit It and Quit It

As is my habit, I will briefly drape some quasi-intellectual dross over this post before letting it stand on its own bitchin’ merits (which are ample). “Hit It and Quit It” presumably refers to an amorous liaison of the most superficial sort -though who am I to disparage pleasure, which can be profound- but it also reminds me of how a hero of mine toyed with addiction.

William Vollmann, about whom I’ve posted before, is one of my favorite writers. In addition to the essentially flawless Europe Central, he’s written extensively about life among prostitutes and the poor, and in researching and experiencing their lives he decided to use crack cocaine. He’s asked about it often since, as Mr. Show so memorably demonstrated, people who haven’t used crack can’t believe anyone who has isn’t a crackhead:

Interviewer: I gather you often used drugs with people in the Tenderloin to get a better sense of the life there. Did you ever worry you’d get addicted?

Vollman: I don’t know, not really. I probably used crack over 100 times in my life, but I never found myself craving it. But there’s a really nice coffee shop down the street from my house, and I go there sometimes to get a coffee and a cookie. And sometimes I find myself waking up really wanting that cookie. That never happened with crack.

So take it from National Book Award-winning genius William Vollmann: good cookies are more addictive than crack, which you can pretty much hit and quit at will.

Tags: funk music william vollmann

∞ Comments | 22 notes | Sep23

Semi-GPOYW with Abby: hanging out in the Dust Storm.

Tags: gpoyw abby

∞ Comments | 45 notes | Sep22

“I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”

Ingmar Bergman, quoted by Que Barbaro. This is probably as it should be.

In neurotic contrast to Bergman, I send my intellect -such as it is- in first: a bumbling, babbling army of disorganized thoughts firing at one another and incurring disastrous collateral damage before feebly establishing small, poorly-lit beachheads in the dark. I then hurl instinctually recriminatory spears at the few surviving soldiers of my intellect, disconnected thoughts stranded at their outposts, picking them off one by one with my intuitive anxieties and doubts.

Different strokes.

Tags: ingmar bergman film

∞ Comments | 23 notes | Sep22

Japhetic Theory: Linguistics with Uncle Joe Stalin

It is probably worse than redundant to post something about linguistics so long as Tristn, Raynor, Simen, and others I admire are discussing the subject, but “like a child who wanders into the middle of a conversation” I had to share this:

Yesterday I followed a link from Gospel of Moll to a spectacularly deranged Rapture web site which, among other things, repeatedly referred to a forthcoming War of Gog and Magog. I was curious about Gog’s lineage -who wouldn’t be- and learned that he was a son of Japheth, who was a son of Noah, who built a floating zoo.

While reading about Japheth, I came across Japhetic Theory:

Japhetic theory is…a linguistic theory developed by the Soviet linguist Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (1864–1934). In linguistics it is consideredto be the equivalent of Lysenkoism in biology: a theory that was promoted and supported for ideological rather than scientific reasons, because it was thought to represent “proletarian science” as opposed to “bourgeois science.”

Error fascinates me most when it is driven by ideology, and Marr’s desperate attempts to apply Marxist ideas to linguistics exemplify academic derangement in a way I find delightful:

“He even claimed that the same social classes in widely different countries spoke versions of their own languages that were linguistically closer to one another than to the speech of other classes who supposedly spoke “the same” language.”

And:

“Marr also insisted that the notion that a people are united by common language was nothing more than false consciousness created by “bourgeois nationalism”.

To paraphrase Jackie Treehorn: Of course he did. But what is most amazing about Japhetic theory is not its stupidity, its pitiful role as lackey to Marxist ideology (however clearly that illustrates that Marxism and its associated theories were never “scientific,” despite their claims, as their teleological imperatives make testable hypotheses too dangerous), or even its name.

It is that it was rebutted, and thereby officially discredited, by Joseph Stalin, an academic event comparable to having one’s racist ideas about genetics contested by Adolf Hitler.

Stalin’s paper -probably ghostwritten- appeared in Pravda and can be read here. Linguists: watch your backs!

Tags: linguistics politics religion

∞ Comments | 36 notes | Sep21

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Hildegard of Bingen - O tu suavissima virga

Sydney’s child Vera was born on September 17, and because I’m fond of coincidence -though not credulous about its purported meaning, numerological or astrological or otherwise- I was eager to learn what resonances that date might have.

As it happens, it is the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen, a venerated and polymathic mystic, composer, scholar, artist, and theologian who died in 1179. Particularly for a woman in the Catholic church of the 12th century but indeed by all standards, her life was remarkable.

Hildegard in the Liber Scivias.

Among other distinctions, she is the earliest known composer whose music we possess, making her a mythical figure in the classical canon which would soon exclude women. In addition we have much of her writing, an invented language (possibly the first constructed language, alphabet below), illustrations, and stories of her spiritual intensity and strong will.

Happy, Raynor?

I first learned of Hildegard of Bingen in a class I took on Julian of Norwich, the 15th century English anchoress and mystic. For many Christian women of the Catholic or Anglican churches, they are among the most beloved figures, alongside Saint Teresa of Avila and Mary. In her life, Hildegard corresponded with popes and men like Suger, considered by many the main source of the Gothic style in architecture; she is even listed in the Roman Martyrology, the 16th century list of Catholic saints published by the Church, although she has not been officially canonized in the current process.

“Universal Man” illumination from the Liber Divinorum Operum.

While I share a birthday with Joseph Goebbels, Vera’s birthday is intertwined with Hildegard, whose music I listen to on occasion and who wrote that

“Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.”

Happy birthday, Vera, and congratulations, Syd and Q!

Tags: hildegard of bingen music religion

∞ Comments | 37 notes | Sep21

“In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

Franz Kafka, “Aphorism 52.” Is this because the world will win, or because the world is right, especially about you?

Tags: franz kafka

∞ Comments | 30 notes | Sep20

All of the brightest things live in the darkest places. [ expired film ], by Cursive Buildings.

∞ Comments | 27 notes | Sep20

“As Balzac said, ‘There goes another novel.’”

A post-coital Alvy Singer, in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. For the companion site to Filmosophy, I shared this quote because one can defend it as an illuminating commentary on the relationship between frustrated sexual or romantic longing and creativity or just admit that this is pretty much how it feels sometimes.

Tags: losing one's mind the nice way woody allen annie hall

∞ Comments | 58 notes | Sep19

I think Propellers for Umbrellas takes perfect photographs.

∞ Comments | 13 notes | Sep18

BMKK, whose posts I love, shared Leoš Janáček’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, IV. Adagio, alone with a mysterious epigraph of sorts:

“—The sky is a roof, with windows in it for rain to fall through. People live up there, you see. And if you climb up high enough you can visit them.”—WG

Nearly as much as did Kafka’s, Janáček’s reputation benefited from the intervention of Max Brod, whose relationships with the great Czech figures demonstrates that people who do not understand art can nevertheless love it -consolation for me!- and even help it. Many of Janáček’s difficulties derived from his rejection by Czech musical culture, particularly the Communist devotee of Smetana Zdeněk Nejedlý (never sufficiently punished for his pettiness, viciousness, or conflation of the aesthetic, political, and personal, in my view).

Janáček and his wife Zdenka.

Janáček’s marriage was not a successful one: he fell in love with other women and refused even moderate discretion, provoking his wife to a suicide attempt and an eventual loveless cohabitation as he pursued his affairs and his work.

His music is fascinating and relentlessly inventive; he seems to have been compulsively original, restlessly exploratory, and as such he anticipates many better-known composers of later years. Two of his great popularizers aside from Brod -Sir Charles Mackerras and Milan Kundera, in whose Testaments Betrayed I first read of Janáček- speak of his work as though it approached the prophetic, particularly his interest in psychological realism in operatic melody. Mackerras has said that he was “the first minimalist composer.”

An unrequited object of affection, Kamila Stösslová.

Kundera concludes his brief biographical sketch of Janáček by describing his happier late years, when he was finally afforded international success and no longer required to accept meddlesome and moronic changes to his work. He also finds himself (again) in love with a young woman, Kamila Stösslová. On a trip with her, Kundera says, the 74-year-old plays light-heartedly with her son, catches a cold which develops into pneumonia, and dies in the midst of happiness. I cannot say how much of the anecdote is invented, but it expresses the arc of his life well even if it is apocryphal.

Tags: Leoš Janáček cold war max brod milan kundera music franz kafka

∞ Comments | 57 notes | Sep18

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who knew about evil, expressing what I consider an axiom of realist morality to be believed even when one perceives evil in a group as surely as one perceives light. (From Self Doubt)

Tags: Alexander Solzhenitsyn morality

∞ Comments | 3 notes | Sep18

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Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm - Ghetto Funk

Posted by the always-brilliant Gospel of Moll.

Tags: music

∞ Comments | 25 notes | Sep17

“Wish I was a little bit taller, wish I was a mahout, wish I had an elephant named Réglisse I would ride her.”

Sarah Belfort remixing Skee-Lo upon seeing this awesome photo, posted by L. Hootenanny (who is right: Helen Twelvetrees is a wonderful name).

Sarah Belfort, Locomotive Hootenanny, and Skee-Lo are all great, so great that I am posting this despite it’s hideous failure to properly construct the subjunctive.

Tags: mahouts are ballers Réglisse would be a good name for a girl or an elephant skee lo