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imagine someone hands you a puzzle. it's very difficult. you can at most put together small disconnected sections, and only from the corners. a sane man would conclude that he is simply not good enough at puzzles, or else that the puzzle is very difficult, or both. but he wouldn't doubt there is a complete picture beyond the small parts he was able to reveal.
an insane man, on the other hand, would instead insist that actually the other pieces don't fit at all, there are only the corners he was able to put together, the rest of the puzzle doesn't really exist, those other pieces were in the same bag by mistake (and probably do not belong to any other puzzle either).
strangely, this is the shared consensus of our time with regards to existential questions. it doesn't help that pretty much every metaphysical school insists they have finished the puzzle when you can clearly see there are still pieces missing here and there, and worse, many of them were forced together but do not fit. i don't think we can ignore the missing pieces or the cheating anymore.
the modern puzzle is a void with corners.
the traditional puzzle depicts a corner with voids.
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i tried putting myself in other people's shoes, but my room ended up looking like Imelda Marcos' closet. (fun fact, her son is called Bongbong. yes. Bongbong). that was the smallest inconvenience (well, that and the smell of other people's feet). i got yelled at a lot, spat on and beaten up, especially on rainy days (when it's really unpleasant to walk about in your socks). once i was even sent to jail. all for stealing people's shoes. i tried to explain, but that required getting into the officer's boots. you can imagine how that went. i have since decided to stop this nonsense. to each his own shoes.
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hierarchies are natural (meaning innate, inborn), in the heavens and on the earth and everywhere free beings exist. they are an expression of freedom. high and low is another way of saying free action. thus the highest degree of freedom occupies the highest place in any hierarchy. the highest god must be a respecter of freedom, or deny the very highness of his status. a god who would want to control everything is not fit for the job.
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whatever your approach to life is, you won't survive it. think about that.
it should not fill you with despair, but rather with hope and amusement.
there's more to life than rules and we can go beyond both life and rules.
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the transcendent unity of all religions is true.
the life abundant unity of all religions not at all.
all this unity, who wants it anyway. everything is relational. or everything is united.
i prefer relations. one individual connecting to another. not just one undivided.
but to each his own, even if it is someone else's.
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different strokes of genius for different generations of folks
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it's been a month since i've used the social media site previously known as twitter. i spent a lot of time there and i liked it. the medium was good for my aphoristic production, but the other aspects of it (the social aspects) were wearing me down. at some point it becomes an obligation, and you adopt certain patterns that hinder creativity rather than help it.
it's been good to have a reprieve. i met interesting people there, but i don't think the medium offers anything to me now. i don't feel like commenting on hot topics, and the general tone of the thing bores me beyond tears.
so i'll stay off it for the foreseeable future. (the same is true of this site's version of that other site's feed or whatever it is.)
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my friend Susana Imaginário's Asterius (which i previously reviewed and recommended) was included in this list of best books of 2025. it's a good opportunity to recommend it again.
this is not one of those silly lists put together by silly men and women, nor is it part of some campaign or movement or trend or whatever else. it's just a very well read man of sophisticated taste showing his appreciation for an actual living and present display of originality and intelligence in words. how rare. and welcome.
it's hard to believe, i know, but there actually are amazing things being created today. some consciousnesses actually did evolve. imagine that. it didn't stay all in theory. it exists. amazing. to me at least.
the artist of the twenty first century refuses to die. and good things deserve praise.
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speaking of good things that deserve praise. i know i haven't shut up about jazz for months but it keeps coming up as a topic.
i was looking for something else unrelated in William Wildblood's blog (pause to let that incredibly strong name breathe in your mind), and found this article, which had this quote: 'Certain writers at the time regarded the advent of jazz as extremely destructive of higher sensibilities and a real factor in the degradation of civilised values, indeed of civilisation itself. It's hard to argue with that and when you see where this sort of music has led the conclusion they were right is unavoidable.'
as you might imagine, i disagree.
Evola famously thought the same (he really was a bore; quite unlike Guenon, who apparently liked to listen to popular egyptian music of the forties on the radio, among other non boring activities, like following sharia law; Guenon was also the only perennialist to ever follow any kind of law, which is amazing in itself).
Evola and others who had this opinion about jazz in the thirties and even forties were of course unaware of the great explosion in creativity and intelligence that was already happening in jazz music (though perhaps they wouldn't understand it even if they were aware). at the time it was already well on the way out in terms of popularity.
what started as folk dance music, had become too abstract and artistic. if this sounds familiar it's because many forms of classical music also began as dance music... music is supposed to engage the whole man and woman, which is also flesh and bone and blood, not just a spirit and a mind.
. music (as all sound) requires certain conditions. it cannot happen in a void. it is spirit (air) moving through a particular kind of enclosure and bumping against more solid things than it. this will still be true in heaven or any world that actually exists with more than spirit. spirit worlds alone cannot have music, because the air has nothing to bump into. what this means is that music is actually not spiritual... but soulful, meaning, emerging from the interaction of spirit and matter. (another influence and also offshoot of jazz is called soul music, incidentally) .
with the emergence of bebop and its culmination in the nineteen sixties (post bop, hard bop, modal, etc etc), the jazz that Evola and others complained about was really gone. (truly popular at the time was doo wop, also born from african american blues, but very far from jazz in every other respect; one of the precursors to Elvis and that whole line which, again, is completely alien to jazz).
the truth is the responsibility of jazz for the state of popular music is minimal, and tangential. at best. and this for a long long time. (since the fifties, at least). that is not to say that it has had no influence (in the sixties and seventies, especially, there was a back and forth between the serious and exploratory world of jazz and popular music. but this is long gone. we are closer to the twenty sixties than to the nineteen sixties).
for a long time jazz is consistently the least popular form of music, and as for jazz aspects within popular music, it is a very seldom used set of ingredients (the ingredients being polyrhythms, odd meters, extended harmonies, improvisation or any or all of these combined; whether by themselves or together, these things are incredibly unpopular).
((extended harmony in film scores is common, but also extremely formulaic and unintelligent; though it is still good for small children to be exposed to it, as the plasticity required to feel the higher levels of dissonance resolution in extended harmonies is most easily acquired in childhood, just like other forms of mental plasticity))
these things that define jazz are really nowhere to be found prominently in the culture, and the reason is precisely that they appeal to more than meat in the human being, but also more than the mind. as i wrote before, jazz is really the musical antithesis of the machine, it involves the whole human being and aims to expand it and elevate it. (one aspect of this, from the side of the player and composer, is that jazz requires years of intense study and practice; it requires much more of a player than it does of the average member of an orchestra or even a chamber ensemble, for example).
(also improvisation in jazz is a resurrection of medieval and even baroque improvisation; yes, it's a thing)
for me, jazz is no doubt a phenomenon inextricable from what's called the evolution of consciousness. it's not a return to pagan music (absurd), nor is it church music (even though gospel was one of the ingredients added to jazz in the transition from pure dance into high art).
bebop is advanced human feeling and thinking, in music.
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i picked the tune below before coming across the quote above, but it really is perfect given the discussion, because it is an interpretation of a popular song in an elevated idiom, which is what the great european classical composers did as well most of the time. (pure, original compositional genius i guess i'll address some other time)
the music itself is a better argument than i could ever make. jazz is the only true continuation of the western musical tradition, not as a vain repetitious museum relic for bored upper class middle managers, but as a true individual expression and exploration of creativity.
so here's Bud Powell's rendition of Moonlight in Vermont. a slow swinging Debussy. no wonder he was so beloved in France.
i don't know how anyone can listen to this and think it is a degradation of the human spirit rather than one of its bright manifestations.
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news:
. i have a new site to put all my stuff in:
gnostalgia.art
. two new reviews of the Alice book by my friends Sean and John Gois:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8284347169
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8290606743
John's is very original in its interpretation (he has in fact convinced me that the main theme of the book is artistic inspiration, not romantic tragedy).
. (also i dropped the price on the Alice paperback)
