.diminished discords (viii)
harmonic metaphysics? again?
my recent renewed infatuation with music led to calling the series diminished discords (also i liked the name of the last one, Wee Wisdom, the repetition of the W, so i wanted something with the same format; the other option was bizarre babbling, dodged a bullet there, uh). and now i think the name is causing me to write more about music than i normally would. a feedback loop. appropriate.
(Zappa says writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and he’s right)
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i’d like to talk about the free jazz heaven and the impressionist heaven. i’m a partisan of the latter. (despite having jazz in the name, free jazz is not really jazz, or anything; and it’s not really free either, which is a point i will make later; it applies to heaven too, i swear).
the direction of both a human life and human history is towards more awareness, and thus more freedom. but does freedom mean a lack of boundaries and limits. is growing up a form of having less limits. it doesn’t seem to be. if anything, growing up is more like growing constraints.
a totally free being in a structureless world is nothing special. this i believe is every being’s original condition. a being with no constraints, but also no extension.
to be free within constraints of structure, that is where the special sauce is. the mastering of constraints is the higher freedom, not their abolition. it’s also these structures which give any meaning to the exercise of freedom, since reality is beings, and action is always interaction. every other being’s freedom is a constraint to ours, at the very least. and pure freedom, as such, can only exist in a larval state of disconnection with anyone else. a world of pure thinking, and nothing more.
but even thinking would be pointless. both freedom and limitation are what make meaning possible. not just one, and not just the other; much like light and dark make seeing possible. sight and meaning are the proper combination of contrast, and inexistent when one of the contrasting realities is abolished. thus the actual state of nothing but pure thinking is… unthinkable.
a life, whether this one or any other before or after, to be both free and meaningful, cannot do away with limitations, no more than a virtuoso improviser can do away with tonality and tempo (or even the cultural associations that certain phrases, sounds, rhythms have). and if these are ignored, there are consequences.
so will heaven be free jazz or impressionistic. will it do away with all the structural limitations that give meaning to life and everything, or will it instead expand it, build upon it, see new meaning in it.
a heaven without the givens of every other world we know (in fact, of the very possibility of knowing or being anything): like time, change and thus death and rebirth, is a free jazz world of cacophony with no possible meaning. the freedom of its denizens is meaningless because there are no stakes, no context.
if instead heaven is a mastering of this universal reality of contrast, a levelling up, a reharmonization of previously established themes and melodies and structures, then our freedom within it is meaningful, we are improvising with a purpose. plus, it does not abolish meaning from the previous life, as if it was only a stepping stone, a filler track on an album that we can skip to get to the hit single.
the impressionist heaven expands the existing harmonic perception because it uses freedom within the constraints of existence. and it not only exists within them, using the given boundaries, but reinforces them by pushing them. it doesn’t abolish structure, but rather makes it more intricate, replicates its shape at higher levels. thus notes, like pain and death, which strike us as uniquely dissonant, can be shown to resolve to higher forms of life, and harmony.
music is inseparable from time. it can only exist in time. with time. like any kind of life. it starts and ends. and must do so, otherwise it’s not really music, or life. if something goes on forever in the same form it has overcome the given of time (and thus change, and death) and became a given in itself. and givens are static, in themselves. time is always moving, but is always there.
how do we tell music apart from other sounds. we know it’s music because it has a structure of pitches and rhythms and so on. and also because it’s purposeful (a cat walking across a piano is music only to the extent that he or the listener recognizes the specific notes and their sequence; that is, to the extent that we know the constraints of harmony and tempo).
and this is no mere human convention. it is built in to the very experience of reality within a physical universe. if we do away with these specifics of physics in heaven, then we must also do away with what they make possible. (a fleshless and timeless heaven, is a heaven with no music. grim).
every note contains higher pitched overtones that resonate with the original pitch. these other notes are in a way implied by it, contained within it. thus to a large extent, harmony is baked in.
the impressionist heaven unlocks more of the harmonic series of mortal life.
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my approach to thinking is a bit like my approach to music. if i like a tune, i probably will start making more music over it (my poor wife).
the fans and the composers probably do not approve. but i still think you should make your own music. i mean thinking.
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i find it very difficult to separate thinking from feeling. of course there is and must be an ebb and flow of both. ecstatic moments are to think about later. but outside these moments thinking and feeling feed off each other. the feeling gives feedback on the thought, and then the thought reflects on the feeling fed back, and on and on.
and the moments i am most present, like creating something, having a conversation, a book, music, that’s when feeling and thinking are most intertwined. not, say, when paying taxes or standing in line at the post office.
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it’s funny how, after two years of focusing on fiction, most of my readership is still for the non fiction stuff. this goes for both old pieces, which still get odd likes out of nowhere (the mormon one especially), whereas old stories rarely, if ever, get read or liked again. and also for new ones. even when the content is not fiction, but only about fiction, like a book review, the same thing happens.
i know i’ve talked about this before, but i find it very interesting, as a phenomenon. so i think about it and this time it struck me as comical. for the following reason: my non fiction about theology, or inspiration, or even music, all these diatribes about different topics… are all speculation, my own framing of experience; they cannot be said, in any way, to be facts, or accurate (they might be, but then again they might not); they are not holy writ (i’m pretty sure); you can agree or disagree or find interesting, but in the end, this side of the veil no one really knows. in other words the nonfiction is an imaginary rendering of reality. that is, it’s just as fictional as the fiction.
maybe people prefer characters named, oh idk, Metaphysics, rather than John. or Mr. Final Participation, rather than Jesus of Nazareth.
i guess what i’m saying is non fiction is a lie. with fiction you know from the outset the details are made up. it's honorable. with non fiction, you are tricked into believing it's talking about real things, and that's the only reason you read it.
stop polluting your brain with lies. read fiction.
the real cleavage then is not about veracity, but about structure. instead of something with a beginning, middle and end, there is a sort of timeless, static quality to most non fiction. more often than not, you can even rearrange the paragraphs and get the same message. expanded bullet points with clear takeaways. this does not work with a story (generally speaking, i’m willing to experiment).
maybe it does makes some sense that a society divided so starkly between devotion to an eternal present (left?) and the desire to return to some past iteration (right?), has a hard time relating to the idea of progress, development, expansion. yet this is what stories are about. they are not a collection of snapshots, but a song.
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current events are meaningless. it’s all hearsay until you can see it from your window. why should i believe it. i have better things to think about. (don’t you, if you’re reading this). anyway, i’m not living through any history except my own and that of my friends. that’s my decision to make.
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you should never finish a glass of water. that way if you die before getting back to it, your loved ones can say: he never even got to finish this glass of water.
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if you could win them all it would feel like loss
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finally, the music portion.
bopping the hardest anyone has ever hard bopped, this is a Mingus’ dirty blues appropriately called Moanin’.