zenpundit.com

That are complementary:

Fabius Maximus –Our fears are unwarranted. America is in fact well-governed.

….America is in better shape than Europe and Japan.  We have good demographics, sound fundamentals, relatively easily solved problems, and no powerful enemies.  Why the constant sense of crisis?  QE2, hyperinflation, climate armageddon, Obama the socialist, AIDS, alar on apples, jihadists, debt, swine flu – a constant drumroll of doom, explained by Peter Moore in “The Crisis Crisis” (Playboy, March 1987).   Answer:  elites govern a weak people by exploiting their fears.  For example, look at the “government is broke” panic.

• The Federal government’s net debt is only 2/3 of GDP, well below the 100% of GDP “red line” (that Italy reached many years ago).
• The short-term deficit is mostly the result of the recession.  The medium-term deficit results from the Bush tax cuts.
• Social security’s funding gap is small vs. GDP and easily fixed.
• The massive funding gap is mostly Medicare, easily fixed by adopting features from the mixed public-private systems in Europe.

Panic pushes Americans to allow cuts to popular social services plus increased and highly regressive taxes.  No matter who wins, after the 2012 election our representatives will implement the necessary policy changes:  raising taxes, cutting expenditures, rebuilding our infrastructure, and beginning the long process of reforming health care.  It will be another morning in America.  There is no crippling polarization, just distracting noise masking a consensus between both parties about the key points of economic and foreign policy.

We do not see this long-standing pattern (see the previous post for details) because our collective OODA loop is broken (see section 6 here).  That makes us easier to lead.  Relying on wealth-based elites to run the country has a cost.  They take a large share of the pie; we take a small slice….

Global Guerrillas –JOURNAL: Global Financial Cancer

….A couple of years ago, I wrote that the underlying structure of the global financial system was a “bow-tie.”  Here’s what I said (it’s worth going back and reading the entire article and this paper on bow-ties from John Doyle at Caltech):

If we look at this new global system from a distance, its architecture is something called a bow-tie. This is a universal control system architecture that underlies complex systems from the Internet to cell metabolism.

What is a Bow Tie?

The bow-tie is a very powerful approach to organizing a complex system (it’s a system design that is used by controls engineers.)  Visually, it starts with complex inputs (the left side of the bow-tie), boils them down into simple build blocks (the knot), which then allows the construction of complex outputs (the right side of the bow-tie….

….Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the earlier article, bow-ties are vulnerable to organisms that attach themselves to the knot at their center (like the way cancer uses the body’s metabolism system).  These organisms relentlessly use the bow-tie’s knot to for selfish ends (rapid growth).  The end result is typically death for the system.  My suggestion was that the instability we were seeing in the financial system was an indication that it had been co-opted by a malicious, self-serving organism.

Of course, at the time there wasn’t much data to support this systemic analysis.  That has been rectified with a new paper, The Network of Global Corporate Control by Vitali et. al. from ETH in Zurich.  This paper finds, through extensive network analysis, that a small group of tightly intertwined financial institutions control the bow of the global financial system.  It is in effect, the world’s first super-organism….

They are both right. Probably not perfectly, the American economy, even more the world’s, is too complex a subject, but right enough.

FM is right that the emerging class of people I have been calling “the Oligarchy” the past couple of years do not intend to deliberately implode the system that is working outrageously to their benefit. They are currently in the stage of trying to come up with an arsenal of tax-farming schemes that will pass political muster (i.e. – not provoke uncontrollable, “Arab Spring” street demonstrations or a successful populist electoral revolt  that would eject their sycophants from government en masse in a single election) and are quietly, methodically and strategically neutering the capacity of the populace to resist their rule over the long term. It is there that we see seemingly unrelated measures as the coordinated political attack on public education and university education, restrictions on the ability of citizens to get courts to review arbitrary actions of Federal agencies, imposition of laws to permit total surveillance of US citizens and acquisition of their personal information and so on.

The elite, who are not completely cohesive or formally organized, are supremely confident in their ability to manage the technocratic economy they are putting into place, or if bumps in the road appear, to squeeze sufficient new leverage from the populace through inflation, devaluation and other forms of expropriation. Unfortunately, I am not confident that these folks are nearly as competent as they imagine themselves to be. Nor am I sure that the global system that they have built, a high-performance, deeply complex, ultra-leveraged, financial sector dominant political economy isn’t as fragile and dangerously unstable as people like John Robb and Nassim Nicholas Taleb have maintained it is. The system might not just crash, it could crash to extreme depths with unprecedented speed with unforseen consequences (financial systems also ensure the reliable and continuous logistical flow of *food* and *power* to population centers).

[ by Charles Cameron — UBL, global warming, elephants, and Al-Shabaab ]
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“Natives with ivory tusks, Dar Es Salaam, Tanganyika” ca 1900, LOC

I’d like to quietly propose a few dots or data points…

*

Alex Shoumatoff has a fine article titled “Agony and Ivory”, in Vanity Fair:

The riverbank is littered with elephant dung. Andrea kicks apart one of the boluses, and it is full of big, hard-shelled seeds — Pandanus, Drypetes, and Gambeya. A new study has found that forest elephants are essential to central Africa’s forests for tree-seed dispersal. They can carry heavy seeds like these (which wouldn’t get very far on their own) in their gut for 50 miles before voiding them. Another study measures the rapid, prodigious growth of the forest trees and concludes that central Africa is the second-most-important equatorial sink for atmospheric carbon after the Amazon, so elephants are important for controlling global warming, on top of everything else.

Here is Shaykh Usama bin Laden, in his radio message “The Way to Save the Earth” from As-Sahab Media:

This is a message to the whole world about those who cause climate change and its dangers — intentionally or unintentionally — and what we must do. Talk of climate change isn’t extravagant speculation: it is a tangible fact which is not diminished by its being muddled by some greedy heads of major corporations. The effects of global warming have spread to all continents of the world. Drought, desertification and sands are advancing on one front, while on another front, torrential floods and huge storms the likes of which only used to be seen once every few decades now reoccur every few years.

From UBL’s perspective, this is clearly a moral issue:

First, the corruption of the climate stems from the corruption of hearts and deeds, and there is a close relationship between the two types of corruption.

And here’s Shoumatoff again, on the situation in Kenya:

A few weeks ago, two poachers were killed and a ranger was wounded in a firefight in Meru National Park. Al-Shabaab, the Islamist youth militia which is in league with al-Qaeda and controls most of Somalia, has been coming over the border and killing elephants in Arawale National Reserve. Ivory, like the blood diamonds of other African conflicts, is funding many rebel groups in Africa, and Kenya, K.W.S. director Julius Kipng’etich told me, “is in the unenviable position of sharing over 1,700 kilometers of border with three countries with civil wars that are awash with firearms: Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan.” Nothing less than a full-scale military operation is going to stop the poaching in the north.

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Now, as EM Forster suggested, Only connect!

Major Michael Few had a short theoretical post that sparked an important discussion at SWJ Blog and other social networking sites. He’s wrestling with the military-tactical effects of diminishing returns. Well worth your time to read through:

Less is Often More?

This is a post that I never would have written while practicing the art in Iraq. On the ground level, every commander wants more forces. In fact, one of the unstated prerequisites for command is that you must conduct at least one daily bitching session where you emphatically describe how much more effective you could be if you were given another platoon, company, battalion, etc…

– More forces equal more villages and more neighborhoods you can clear and occupy.
– More forces equal more visible power and control.
– More resources equal more money to bribe your enemies.

But, sometimes more is actually less:

– More forces mean that you can act unilaterally and just ignore the impotent host nation security forces.
– More forces mean that you can coerce and bully the corrupt political leaders.
– More resources mean that you may waste money building elaborate schools and medical clinics and digging canals rather than repairing the existing suitable structures.

Sometimes with more, we merely attack the symptoms creating short-term visible gains rather than attacking the root problems. Doctrinally, we would call this creating maneuver space on the human and physical terrain.

Read the rest here.

[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict — continuing ]

Move 6: Glenn Gould

Move content:

Glenn Gould was a great pianist whose two recordings of Bach‘s Goldeberg Variations alone would prove both the brilliance of his skill, which could draw forth the individual lines in Bach’s counterpoint in a way no earlier pianist had the technique to pull off, and the depth of his musical understanding.

Late in life, Gould began “composing” radio works for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — he calls them “contrapuntal radio” — which revealed his interest in listening not just to Bach and other music but to life in general with an ear for counterpoint:

Gould set himself up to hear the world in a new way. In diners he ate his lunch alone, eaves dropping closely on the voices around him. He learned to hear conversation as music, the lilting lines, the rhythms everywhere up, down, and around, what Bach does to our sense of talk. There are two part inventions in words, themes and variations in the quarrels of couples and the tales told by friends. Gould met the world on his own terms, and he was fascinated by this way of listening to human voices as if they were a musical interplay, not participating in a conversation but taking it all in, as an audience.

It is that manner of listening which I am attempting in this game…

Links claimed:

To Bach, because Gould is Bach’s great interpreter, taking his interpretation of Bach’s counterpoint not just into the deep riches of Bach’s music for keyboards, but also out into the depth and riches of the world…

Comment:

I see this move as concluding the first, quiet introductory section of the game, setting forth the mode of understanding in which it is played, and honoring those those work has preceded, comforted and confirmed my own.

We shall return to this theme of counterpoint no doubt — the whole work falls under the aegis of Bach, as all of Bach’s work falls under his familiar motto: Soli Deo Gloria.
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Move 7: Daniel Barenboim

Move content:

Daniel Barenboim is another celebrated musician, a brilliant Argentinian-Israeli pianist and conductor, in whose biography we read:

In the early 1990s, a chance meeting between Mr. Barenboim and the late Palestinian-born writer and Columbia University professor Edward Said in a London hotel lobby led to an intensive friendship that has had both political and musical repercussions. These two men, who should have been poles apart politically, discovered in that first meeting, which lasted for hours, that they had similar visions of Israeli/Palestinian possible future cooperation. They decided to continue their dialogue and to collaborate on musical events to further their shared vision of peaceful co-existence in the Middle East. This led to Mr. Barenboim’s first concert on the West Bank, a piano recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University in February 1999, and to a workshop for young musicians from the Middle East that took place in Weimar, Germany, in August 1999.

The West-Eastern Divan Workshop took two years to organize and involved talented young musicians between the ages of 14 and 25 from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia and Israel. The idea was that they would come together to make music on neutral ground with the guidance of some of the world’s best musicians. … There were some tense moments among the young players at first but, coached by members of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony and the Staatskapelle Berlin, and following master classes with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and nightly cultural discussions with Mr. Said and Mr. Barenboim, the young musicians worked and played in increasing harmony.

From the orchestra’s current news page:

In 2005, the orchestra realized the impossible: a concert with Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arab musicians in the Palestinian territory of Ramallah.

Links claimed:

To Edward Said: because they were friends, because the West-Eastern Divan is a a human analog to Said’s view of a symphonic understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and because he stands as an Israeli Jew in counterpoint to Said, the Palestinian.  Indeed, it is Barenboim, not Said, who is quoted here:

Drawing on the fundamentality of counterpoint in music, Barenboim describes how ‘in the act of challenging each other, the two voices fit together’ and that ‘music is always contrapuntal, in the philosophical sense of the word’ – indeed, ‘joy and sorrow can exist simultaneously in music’. He further argues that ‘acceptance of the freedom and individuality of the other is one of music’s most important lessons’. And this is the philosophy that underpins the phenomenon of the Divan orchestra: ‘You can’t make peace with an orchestra’, but one can ‘create the conditions for understanding’ and ‘awaken the curiosity of each individual to listen to the narrative of the other’.

To Bach, because as he writes:

I was reared on Bach. My father was virtually my only teacher, and he attached great importance to my growing up with Bach’s keyboard music. He considered it to be very important, not only for its musical and pianistic aspects, but also for everything else that is played on the piano. For him polyphonic music-making was simply one of the most important issues concerning everything relating to piano-playing. … The music can only be of interest if the different strands of the polyphonic texture are played so distinctly that they can all be heard and create a three-dimensional effect – just as in painting, where something is moved into the foreground and something else into the background, making one appear closer to the viewer than the other, although the painting is flat and one-dimensional.

And to Glenn Gould because —

well, you may consider it a duel or a duet (a decision which shadows all differences, no?) but the two men are both celebrated for their renditions of the Bach Goldberg Variations, which are compared in excerpts back to back here on YouTube for our delight.

Comment:

I have only a couple of things to note here — the name West-Eastern Divan hearkens back to Goethe‘s poetry, and thus to the western world’s discovery of the sufic poetry of Hafez and Rumi — we find here a brief allusion to Yo-Yo Ma — and in the friendship of Said and Barenboim we see personified both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its transcending — in which a potential duel becomes a realized duet..

[ My thanks to Howard Rheingold for a pointer ]

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Move 8: Richard Wagner and antisemitism

Move content:

With Richard Wagner, the ugly shadow of antisemitism falls across our play:

The idea of racial decline, and of German mentality being inherently superior, is integral to everything Wagner stood for. He saw himself as a redeemer, a notion his wife Cosima and her acolytes adopted as their creed. He gave the Aryan saviour-hero a dominant role in his operas. Siegfried is the incarnation of the sun-hero who would set Germany back on the true path – an idea that had existed in German mythology since the Middle Ages. Parsifal has characteristics of an Aryan Jesus.

European high culture had long had a disdain for the Jews, the merchants, the lenders — in Wagner’s writings, in his essay Judaism in Music and arguably in his operas too, he argues for the purity of the German race and the inability of the Jew, talented though he may be, to do more than ape that culture:

Our whole European art and civihisation, however, have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue; for, just as he has taken no part in the evolution of the one, so has he taken none in that of the other; but at most the homeless wight has been a cold, nay more, a hostile looker-on. In this Speech, this Art, the Jew can only afterspeak and after-patch — not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings.

It is a shadow that will touch, a virus that will infect Hitler — who will visit the Wagner family long after the Master’s death, attend and protect the Master’s playhouse in Bayreuth, cause the Master’s music to be played at the Nuremberg Rallies — and in so doing, teach European high culture itself that it is not immune to genocidal fantasies nor their execution in fact — enthrall and revolt and disgust and be deafeated — thus leading to the foundation in 1948 of the State of Israel, the Yom Ha’atzmaut of the Israelis, the Yawm an-Nakbah of the Palestinians…

Consider this press report, from which I have already quoted above:

Until the final scene, the Hamburg State Opera’s November 2002 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg had proceeded without comment. Everyone was primed to applaud the hymn to “holy German art” that brings Richard Wagner’s four-hour pageant to a climax. Then came the bombshell. Midway through Hans Sachs’s monologue about honouring German masters over “foreign vanities”, the music came to an abrupt halt. Suddenly one of the mastersingers started speaking: “Have you actually thought about what you are singing?” he asked.

The virulence of antisemitism, and the shadow side of our common humanity, are not to be excluded from our game.

Links claimed:

To Daniel Barenboim, because he, a Jew and a musician, had the temerity to conduct the Berlin Staatskapelle orchestra in the Overture to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in Jerusalem, in July 2001.

And to Glenn Gould, because…

his piano transcription and performance of the Prelude to Die Meistersinger is a revelation: you might like to purchase it.

Comments:

I will confine myself to saying that Wagner’s concept of the gesamtkunstwerk or “work of total art” with its combination of poetry, drama, dance, song and even architecture is, in its own way, a precursor to many modern cross-disciplinary endeavors — the experimental works of Scriabin, whose “unrealized magnum opus Mysterium was to have been a grand week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas” (Wikipedia), the Orphic poetry-in-film of Jean Cocteau, the crossover between poetry and the visual arts in Guillaume Apollinaire‘s Calligrammes — and not least, in Hermann Hesse‘s great Glasperlenspiel…

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Move 9: Golgotha

Move content:

Specifically, Golgotha refers to the small hill outside the Jerusalem city walls where Christ was crucified — our word “Calvary” is derived from the name:

And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull, They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink. And they crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots. And sitting down they watched him there…

Matthew 27: 33-36

El Greco, The Crucifixion, The Prado, Madrid

Figuratively, Golgotha is the nadir, the lowest point — as in this powerful observation by the soldier-poet Capt. Wilfred Owen, describing the carnage of trench warfare in World War I in a letter to Osbert Sitwell, dated 4 July 1918.

For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands mute before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.

Links claimed:

To Wagner, in a manner that continues the motif of his antisemitism: Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf schools and anthroposophist, gave a lecture on the mythic underpinnings of Wagner’s Parsifal in 1906, which he said:

How was it that Wagner was able to find the right mood for his Parsifal? It is most important for us to recognize that Wagner was able to do this because he knew that what happened on Golgotha had especially to do with the blood, he knew that we had to see there not only the death of the Saviour but we had to see what took place there with the blood, how the blood was purified on Golgotha and became something quite different from ordinary blood. Wagner has spoken of the connection of the Saviour’s blood with the whole of mankind. In his book “Paganism and Christianity” we read these words: “Having found that the capacity for conscious suffering is a capacity peculiar to the blood of the so-called white race, we must now go on to recognize in the blood of the Saviour the very epitome, as it were, of voluntary conscious suffering that pours itself out as divine compassion for the whole human race.”

To Glenn Gould — introducing a contemporary instance of the nadir of human consciousness — because Hannibal Lecter, the insane psychiatrist of Thomas Harris‘ novel The Silence of the Lambs, has a copy he made from memory (“Memory, Officer Starling, is what I have for a view”) of Duccio‘s painting Golgotha after the Deposition on the walls of his cell, and listens to the Bach Goldberg Variations on his tape recorder — Glenn Gould is specified as the performer.

To the Glass Bead Game, because Hermann Hesse in what can only be an autobiographical passage in Demian writes:

The teacher had spoken of Golgotha. The Biblical account of the suffering and death of the savior had made the deepest impression upon me from my earliest childhood. Often as a small boy I had, after my father had read the story of the passion on Good Friday, lived in this painfully beautiful, pale, ghostly and still powerfully living world of Gethsemane and on Golgotha. I had experienced it listening to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, it had flooded me with the somber, powerful tones of this mysterious world, with its mystical drama. Even today I find in this music, and in Actus Tragicus the essence of all that is poetical and of all artistic expression.

and there is no less surely an echo of that in a comment made by Joseph Knecht — the Magister Ludi of Hesse’s novel —

Nowadays, for example, we do not think much of the theology and the ecclesiastical culture of the eighteenth century, or the philosophy of the Enlightenment; but we consider the cantatas, passions, and preludes of Bach the ultimate quintessence of Christian culture.

For Hesse at least, and Knecht himself by implication, the Golgotha of Bach’s St Matthew Passion is “the essence … of all artistic expression”.

And to Bach, finally, for those sections (58-9 in Part II of the Passion) which deal with Golgotha and the crucifixion:

58a. Rezitativ (Evangelist): “Und da sie an die Stätte kamen”
58b. Chor: “Der du den Tempel Gottes zerbrichst”
58c. Rezitativ (Evangelist): “Desgleichen auch die Hohenpriester”
58d. Chor: “Andern hat er geholfen”
58e. Rezitativ (Evangelist):”Desgleichen schmäheten ihn auch die Mörder”
59. Rezitativ: “Ach Golgatha”

all of which can be heard in John Eliot Gardiner‘s performance here on YouTube, although I’d highly recommend Gardiner’s Bach: Sacred Vocal Works: the Christmas Oratorio, St. Matthew Passion, St. John Passion and Mass in B Minor as a boxed set — a stunning treasure.

Comment:

Hesse recommends the practice of meditation between moves in the Glass Bead Game, and rather than comment on this move briefly here, I shall next write a more extended meditation on the game thus far, and on this move in particular.

Here we approach the very walls of Jerusalem.
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[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict ]

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In two previous posts (Intro, and Board and Gameplay), I have described my forthcoming attempt to “play” a 130-plus move game, in which I will use quotations, images and anecdotes to express something of the complex weave of thoughts and emotions that govern — in tense and tenuous fashion — the “Israeli-Palestinian problem”.

Here I will commence play, making my initial “moves” in this area of the board:

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Move 1: The Said Symphony

Move content:

When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes — opposites in the Hegelian sense — that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out. It would require the imagination of someone like Edmund Burke to fathom.

Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, p. 447 — from the section titled “My Right of Return,” consisting of an interview with Ari Shavit from Ha’aretz Magazine, August 18, 2000.

Links claimed:

In his novel of the Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse writes:

Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

It is in the links between moves, the creative leaps of the analogical mind, that the secret of the game can be found — so the “links claimed” sections of moves can be viewed as meditation points — architecturally, they are the “arches” of potential insight between the “pillars” of existing ideas. Here, no links are claimed, since this is the first move in the game.

Comment:

This is where it begins… with a vision of dissonant voices in counterpoint… ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Introductory moves

Before we get directly into the “meat” of the game, I want to explore its purpose via a few more moves that focus on what we might call the polyphony of ideas — thinking in terms of multiple voices.

Move 2: Hermann Hesse and the Glass Bead Game
Move 3: JS Bach and the Art of Fugue
Move 4: William Blake and Fourfold Vision
Move 5: Bob Dylan and One Too Many Mornings
Move 6: Glenn Gould

Then two moves nudging us in the direction of, then directly into — Israel:

Move 7: Daniel Barenboim
Move 8: Wagner

and specifically to the outskirts of Jerusalem / Al Quds:

Move 9: Golgotha

You might want to consider these nine moves a sort of overture.  Let’s see how that goes…

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Move 2: Move 2: Hermann Hesse and the Glass Bead Game

Move content:

Hermann Hesse’s novel Das Glasperlenspiel (English title The Glass Bead Game, also published as Magister Ludi) won him the Nobel for Literature.

The centerpiece of the novel is the Game itself. Hesse doesn’t spell out in detail how it is to be played, but his hints are enough to let us know that in play, different ideas from across world culture are combined as if in a virtual music of ideas:

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.

It is in an attempt to bring Hesse’s idea of a musical synthesis of ideas into practical application in helping us understand — and perhaps even, god willing, help us to resolve — the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that I am playing this game.

The idea is not to come up with a solution, but a richer sense of the interplay of motives and memories as they build the situation we all now face.

Link claimed:

To Edward Said, in that Hesse immediately precedes Said in his intuition that melodies are not the only kinds of thought that can be juxtaposed in counterpoint and thus integrated in a complex, sometimes tragic, often profound, always human music.

Comment:

The graphic I have used is from the cover of a lovely CD, featuring Arturo Delmoni and Nathaniel Rosen, Music for a Glass Bead Game. ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Move 3: Move 3: JS Bach and the Art of Fugue

Move content:

Bach was my first great love in the arts, and when I applied to study at Christ Church, Oxford, it was essays on Hopkins, El Greco, and Bach — specifically the B Minor Mass — that got me in the door. Years later, when I lived in Warrenton and commuted to a think-tank job in Arlington, VA, I found myself muttering To hold the Mind of Bach over and over to myself like a mantram.

And that, I think, is the key to my games.

I want to think as Bach did, polyphonically — to see the world in terms of counterpoint, to read life musically. And my games, which involve holding related, sometimes harmonious and sometimes conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time, invite and encourage me to do that. They also provide me with a method of notating (scoring, in the musical sense) such multi-thought patterns on the various HipBone boards.

It is Bach, therefore, who is grandfather to Said’s thought, as Hesse is its father — and Bach’s greates expressions of this approach are found in such great summary works as the B Minor Mass and the Art of Fugue.

The taste I offer here is from Contrapunctus IX, which you can hear played by Glenn Gould on the organ here (and download it for 99 cents)…

Links claimed:

To Hesse and the Bead Game, because Bach’s presence, and that of counterpoint whose greatest exponent he was, is fundamental to Hesse’s great Game. Indeed, as he writes in the book:

The Game was at first nothing more than a witty method for developing memory and ingenuity among students and musicians. … One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing probably in vogue among ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and Bach — although it would then not have been done in theoretical formulas, but in practice on the cembalo, lute, or flute, or with the voice.

To Edward Said and his call for a symphonic reading of the Israeli-Palestinian situation: because he invokes the mind of Bach himself in the passage quoted in move 1, speaking of the

sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out.

Comment:

It is said that every artist teaches us to see, listen, hear, read, understand in a fresh way, so that the artist’s own work, at first well-nigh incomprehensible, may gradually find its way first into clarity, and then into ease of access, obviousness, popularity, and “classical” status — later stages of the same process will bring it first obscurity and finally oblivion.

We are not yet in a position to hold many thoughts simultaneously in the mind as Bach’s mind held many melodies, but we are opening to the possibility…

Multi-tasking… this will be an early attempt at a game of musical multi-thinking. Please think it through with me… ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Move 4: William Blake and Fourfold Vision

Move content:

Here’s what William Blake saw:

Here’s what William Blake said, in his Letter to Thomas Butts:

Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

And three fold in soft Beulahs night

And twofold Always.

May God us keep\

From Single vision & Newtons sleep.

Here’s a commentary on Blake’s notion from a fascinating paper by Marcel O’Gorman:

Several Blake critics have attempted to unravel Blake’s use of term “fourfold vision.” Accoring to Jerome McGann, beings of single vision see the world in absolutes. Life is a prison term that ends in a final, discrete annihilation. Men of twofold vision see the world dialectically, according to contraries. Threefold vision enables one to recognize the contraries and see that they are not absolute, but that the boundaries of good and evil shift according to each individual. In Milton, Blake defines threefold vision as a peaceful state, and he associates it with Beulah:

There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True This place is called Beulah, It is a pleasant lovely Shadow Where no dispute can come. Because of those who Sleep.  (M 30:1-3)

Beulah and threefold vision are identified with sleep, restfulness. But fourfold vision involves activity, not sleep. Fourfold vision is generation and destruction, life and death, or even life in death. Evidently, Blake’s understanding of death is unconventional, to say the least. For Blake, death is considered as part of the creative process, a part of life.

Links claimed:

To the Glass Bead Game: because Hesse writes:

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.

Yin and yang are the opposites of the dialectic, but in the yin-yang symbol or tai-chih we see them alternating and interpentrating in the subtle and fluid play between them (Blake’s threefold vision) from which, in Hesse’s words, “holiness is forever being created” — Blake’s fourth.

To the Said Symphony, because precisely that kind of fluid flowing between one perspective and another is what allows empathy to triumph over opposition, and the “other” to become “brother” — the condition in which alone “the peaceable kingdom” / “peace on earth” can prevail…

Comment:

Blake was the mentor of my own poetic mentor, Kathleen Raine, and my own early published poems appeared in a Penguin volume edited by Michael Horovitz and titled Children of Albion in Blake’s honor.

I am happy to remember such friends in writing this game — and amazed to find in the Blake illustration above, which I only ran across today in O’Gorman’s article, yet another visual precursor to the boards on which my games are played. ____________________________________________________________________________________________

Move 5: Bob Dylan and One Too Many Mornings

Move content:

The Bob Dylan song, One too many mornings.

You’re right from your side

I’m right from mine

We’re both just one too many mornings

An’ a thousand miles behind

Links claimed:

To Fourfold Vision and William Blake: Dylan captures the utterly wrong double-rightness of conflict that features in Blake’s vision — at an intensely personal level. And I’d argue, personally, that Dylan does in music and poetry what Blake was doing in poetry and visual art — at greater depth than his Blakean friend (and companion on parts of the Rolling Thunder tour) Allen Ginsberg.

Comment:

I believe I was at the Colorado Rolling Thunder Revue concert where Dylan sang the version which YouTube presents here from a Japanese bootleg video tape. You can purchase the Hard Rain album — or just the one track — here. ____________________________________________________________________________________________

— four more moves coming up shortly in a follow-up post, and then I’ll take a break.