shakey ground
Friday, September 16, 2005
 
12.~~~~~~~~~~~


Pointless beauty


If we live long enough, and can remember the beliefs that held our lives together at earlier times, we might come to realize that we now occupy a spot 180 degrees from where we once were. And to the extent we can accept our changing without self-judgment, we might see that these positions do not fundamentally contradict each other but form a greater unity. For this to happen involves another requirement, something like suffering and isolation because of the road we have chosen. It strips us of the arrogance of belief, of the prized and confident status of the "true believer" in oneself, and leaves us with a clarity of vision that can come no other way, and can only barely be communicated. The most important change that evolves is how we are with who we are. Instead of inhabiting a house we choose, we realize that we are the house we have not chosen.


Perhaps as we pass deeper into life we come to what looks like the end of a road, where we turn around and greet ourselves now coming towards us, our many selves, with joy and understanding. I’m so glad to see you again, we might say.


When I was young I wanted my life and work to have meaning, to have a point, to represent me. I wanted to have some place in the world that would produce an effect that I would judge as good. Money, fame and respectability I saw as pointing towards goals of individual security that were of no use to me since they were of so much use to the world. I wanted something else, that did not benefit me personally but served a higher purpose than my private existence. I was suspicious of all personal benefit beyond my basic survival needs. Political work, organizing for revolutionary change, came to fill that need, at a time when revolution was in the air. What I scorned about art was that it seemed to serve the very society I wished us to change, and the artist was one more functionary, including those who said art had some benefit in changing society.


That revolutionary dream and movement collapsed; in doing so it revealed to me that the turning of the world was in charge of my self-definitions. Out of a need for something to sustain my spirit I began to play music, and I entered a new dilemma. I refused to call what I did art, or myself the artist, but rather one who played music to pursue his pleasure, which was to improvise freely. Of no use to society, this could hardly be called a role or profession. The improviser was the one kind of musician that could not, certainly in the 80’s in America, be considered an entertainer. We were unpaid, and I at least had no expectation of ever being paid. We had no audience, only listeners, often reluctant; we played as an activity and did not fulfill a genre. Each time I saw a partner turn in the direction of entertaining, as a so-called underground artist or a more conventional musician, I felt abandoned and isolated, and realized that I myself could only be a fraud at that game.


After envy and rage at the music world, time and again, comes the realization that I have another place for myself, a place in myself, that I betray but is ultimately inalienable. This is a place that has no name, no identity, and so is pointless from the perspective of the world. I have come to name this as the place of beauty. Pointless until it yields things called art, as pointless as religious experience until it yields religious belief, or love until it yields a relationship, rage until it finds the target of anger, or life until we are gripped by the fear of death. To the desire to be special, to excel, to create something, it has nothing to say. Art teaches us things, can be judged, analyzed so that we can benefit from it, and its practitioners are valued by reputation if not by money. Beautiful is an adjective we can apply or refuse to award to things of art or nature, a matter of taste and dispute. Beauty, however, is a place that is no place. To come from beauty is to have nowhere to go.


To say these things does not create a better world, any more than playing gives the world more beauty.


For years I refused the word beauty because I could not free it from the social meanings it has been given, could not make it my own word. It was a word I would have to define in order to satisfy others. I was under the spell of ideology, of society’s control of language; like the word “God“ (and how many other words!), I did not dare “beauty” to be determined by my experience. I adopted the scorn for the word common to the avant-garde, suspicious of conventional sentiment and feeling, from which it vainly and tragically hopes to free itself. It turns beauty into something so rare and precious that none of us would dare claim to be engaged or associated with it; at best it can be an achievement of past culture. But if beauty is no thing and has no place then it is available to all at all times. That which has no future or past can only be present. When we ask ourselves, why are we playing?--and pause a moment, really needing to know--then we realize it is not to create any thing, but to enter and experience this barely nameable place that has no place except in our experience.
 
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Someone once asked me, "How can you be so sure of yourself?" The kind of certainty that reaches the level of expression is only through active self-questioning, not the presentation of ideas that look convincing (the job of lawyers). Toleration and pluralism begins at home, far better than tolerating the fools we run into. In the home of the mind we let the fools in the door and have a good laugh-and-think time together.

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