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unlike a machine, i can do things unprompted
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out of sight, out of mind
over matter, out of touch
going under, hard of hearing
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a touch of genius, a taste of madness
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the spirit never changes, the body is always changing.
thus an individual soul can be an eternally moving slice of eternity.
to strive towards it is the duty of all lovers of beauty.
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in the Alice book, there is a short diatribe about jazz by one of the main characters, Isaac, which goes like this: it’s actually more revolutionary now, because everything’s so ugly and stupid and soulless, but jazz is beautiful and it’s true, and its mere existence and continuation is a statement against the age.
the context is humorous (he is battling an imaginary romantic rival), and is supposed to sound slightly pathetic, and pedantic. having said that, i think Isaac is right.
jazz is in many ways a revolt against the age. of course every true human endeavor is, as long as it's also sincere. but jazz has some very specific qualities that make it a perfect enemy of the machine. much is made of it being a symbol of liberation, and it was in specific ways for specific people in a specific time, but it may have more meaning to us now, an expanded but also more individual and personal meaning, because of what the world became.
mechanicity, and the relentless pursuit of it for its own sake, is one of the features of our age. and jazz is very much its antithesis.
from the swing of the beat, whether throbbing and frenetic or soft and timid, that inexact, loose, almost taoist feel for the perfect balance; to the harmonic extension and progression into more and more abstraction, layers upon layers of story and meaning and tension and resolution, their combinations exponential, requiring neural plasticity and creativity to perceive;
(sometimes i listen to jazz and wonder if there are really only twelve notes. though of course, there are microtones, and even musical traditions around the world that focus on them. mostly i find them unlistenable, at least in a sustained fashion. but cultural mismatch aside, what makes jazz more significant than, say, gamelan music, is that it uses precisely the same twelve notes but in combinations and voicings that stretch human perception. an overcoming of constraints from within. as i read recently, and immediately agreed, jazz is the spiritual successor of turn of the century european classical music; it carried on its legacy of inventiveness and expansiveness and freedom and romanticism).
(it's unsurprising that jazz is the least popular of genres now, and for a while).
all these things make jazz a perfect enemy of the machine. but there's a cherry on top, which is that all this rhythmic and harmonic and melodic and narrative richness is found around and in and through improvisation, all in the thick of an unrepeatable moment, in the conscious context of other equally unrepeatable moments. the precise opposite of mechanicity.
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things against the machine: jazz, Jesus, the Tao, me, beauty, taste, freedom, nature, Uncle Ted, humor, laughter, friendship, family, romantic love, romantic sex, gardening, intelligence. also Paul Kingsnorth (presumably).
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eternal spleen malaise
surreal ethereal millennial
nonsequitur de force touring france
turing tests and testicular cancer
far from the tropic of capricorn
free from absinthe and consumption
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i can imagine tragedy in heaven, but not cruelty.
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(.) agnostic chic. agnosthicc. argentina turner. turner diaries of anne frank zappa. zapotec discotheque. nihilism with a side of fries.
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creativity is progressively lost one way or the other, beaten out of us sooner or later. if not by society, by age and death. still, i think it's obvious and a tragedy that most people stop growing way too early. mostly by choice.
(i don't mean the arts, necessarily. i mean everywhere. a creative approach to life; though it manifests i think, almost necessarily and with few exceptions, as either a desire to practice an art or several, or to actively enjoy the practice of them by others).
(incidentally, active listening to music is almost a lost art at this point. recorded music created it but its ubiquity now debased the practice. music is only ever allowed to be background for something else now. but it doesn't need to be that way. all we have to do is sit down, close our eyes, and only listen. that's it. it helps to listen to things more involved than the average pop song)
as far as i can tell (and i've been trying to figure this out for a long long time, which of course doesn't mean i'm any close) creativity is an inborn disposition that every one has, potentially. thus, like every common denominator, it doesn't really explain anything. the difference is in what comes from the outside. the call. and that is independent from the me that will make the decision to pursue it. (without risk, there is no reward; only let your intentions be clear and true and noble).
this is i think what the ancients called the voice of the gods, the muses, the angels, whatever. (you can get super esoteric and say that it's your higher self or whatever). and it was both for what we consider now artistic pursuits but also for everything else in life, because living is also an artistic pursuit, we have just forgotten.
either way, people reject all that now. even higher selves, and even more so higher beings. and it's obvious looking at so many people that this metaphysical emptiness is a void sucking the life of them. (yes, social bonds and systems are all in shambles, and that takes a toll too, but the cause is reversed: meaninglessness is what lets people be ok with this obvious and absurd level of decay; it is also a feedback loop).
i have made this point to what i consider to be intelligent normies who have good taste and artistic feeling, that the sublime in art, which they can feel, is obviously not meaningless. beauty and our capacity to perceive it and connect with it and even help it come into being, and the intensity of the process, all of it is proof enough of intention, and purpose, and thus a moral order to the universe and a creator with a peculiar preoccupation with aesthetics.
but despite their strong feelings, they generally land back on it being ultimately meaningless, just like themselves, and their relations, and everything. it's a strange form of blindness, which of course they are also blind to. they don't actually live as if they believe it (it's impossible). but they'll retreat to it when asked for an explanation.
this is why so many people are dead inside.
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i've seen the quote attributed to Arnold Schoenberg, Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter: composition is simply improvisation slowed down. and or vice versa. either way it applies to life as well.
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to succeed at anything is hard. there are too many variables. too many wills all acting individually at once, and hence much randomness. success requires being at the right place at the right time with the right disposition, and hence also persistence (or else extreme luck). you never know when that perfect moment will arrive. and you have to keep moving or you'll miss it. the perfect balance is found only in perpetual movement.
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twenty twenty five was a very musical year. by its mid point it was already a more musical year than the previous... ten years, perhaps; but then in the fall it really went into overdrive when i very unexpectedly fell in love with jazz again. the infatuation continues into the new year and i want to share it.
why not start with a classic, Blue in Green.
warning: do not listen to this song while in love, or really in any state of quiet yearning, you might just die from injuries acquired through exposure to acute beauty.
