shakey ground
Monday, August 29, 2005
 
10.~~~~~~~~~~~

A well-accepted tenet of contemporary liberalism is the blessings of individuality, as in “each person is an individual“ and presumably we should view ourselves as individuals first of all. This is not a starting point for reflection but the stopping point of a belief system, an ideology that claims wisdom, a directive: “Be an individual, make sure your thoughts are your own!“ It goes along with, “don’t trust anyone!“ As such it is an assertion of rights to be recognized, thrown against a background of the pressure to conform, which in liberal thinking has taken on the image of the tyrant or commanding God. As an ideology, it does not include a respect or interest to explore the content of individuality when that content resists the assertion of individuality. Moreover, it obscures another viewpoint, that of the interrelation, the connectedness of minds, which has a subtlety that is harder to demonize than the tyrant. It is easier to stand against the coercion of one’s mind by another than the interrelation of our mind with another.

There is no individual mind, just as there is no individual art. That is, in the concreteness of the individual content is absolutely unique, however similar, but the form of the mind is relation. Mind is the very making of relation, the desire of relation, the interplay of relations. A fascination, which seems so individual, is a desire for relation. Each is specific, existing among the myriad of possibile fascinations, yet this myriad is the context without which the one could not exist. A claim to superior validity is an assertion of one relation over another, one that we make at one moment, replaced or reinforced at another moment. How important could it be to notice and speak of some relations--for instance, ask this question--and not others?

Every perception we have of a relation between things takes on its meaning only in the relation with other minds. The organ of the brain itself, in its genetic evolution, is entirely dependent on all those that preceded and contributed to it. If we do not own our brains then certainly we cannot think alone. When we believe we are, when we have the energy that comes from thinking we are the producers of our thought, we are pushing others away and so are not alone. What we are doing is not thinking unless we are aware of this, awareness itself being another word for relation. Thinking is then, in my narrow definition here, a very particular activity of the mind, quite rare. It would be hard to call it a function of the mind. It is vision, a broadening, an expansion that includes the other as condition of oneself, a falling off of the illusion of individual selfhood. It may not interest anyone at all, yet still it is done in relation with everyone.

Writing can be a mode of thinking in that it assumes others, even if imaginary, who could find and share one’s thinking, simply by being expressed in language. Similarly, there is no creating art or music alone, even if our intention is completely otherwise, following the notion of individuality. Performing music, for instance, can either be the demonstration of what we alone can do or have decided to do, or it can be the actual playing we do at one moment, by which we allow each other to enter and share a space. Even a solo can be played in this way, not to create a space for oneself but a space that is shared, even created together at the same time. One plays the sounds that others are giving, just as in writing one gives back the thoughts and images and sounds of words that come from those who read what has been written. And even from those who will never read it--especially those are the ones for whom, or with whom, one writes. One writes, plays, thinks, when one and the other touch. This is the source of pleasure for all these activities, and what all ideologies resist.
 
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
 
9.~~~~~~~~~

Is it possible to be aware of the mind, when it is only the mind that can be aware? There is nothing new in this question, and yet it continues to move towards the horizon.

I’m fascinated by the way my individual mind moves--it is my moving and playing, that I can observe as my body is still. And then I watch how I/it shifts focus to “the mind”, mine to ours, from individual to species. This mind is the mind, yet it still exists in the sight of this particular mind in one time and place. I can stand between the two and know myself as the link between subject and object, as in, this human is every human. So one of my primal fascinations, which is, why am I fascinated by this or that?, shifts to: why is the mind fascinated, what is fascination. If I follow the pathway of one thought to another it is the mind which is doing this; I am the pathway of the mind.


This is not Buddhist meditation, which requires that one be fully aware of thoughts but hold no interest in them; meditation is pointedly disinterested, cuts at the root of interest as a form of desire. Fascination, which here fascinates me, is rather like a light guiding me down the path of the mind. It is desire, and my desire is to know it not extinguish it. I didn’t say, know about desire, but know it, as the Delphic oracle didn’t suggest to us to know about ourselves but to know ourselves. I take that to mean, face to face and suddenly, or finally, speechless. And I could speak forever about desire, but to know it is to know myself as desire, and to face it speechlessly. That has nothing of renunciation or opposition in it, but nonetheless a kind of extinction and silence. It is extinguished not as something that we overpower but by its own strength and fullness.
 
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
 
8.~~~~~~~~~revised 12-08

A career is a kind of machine, of which we set ourselves up to be operators. It is intended to manipulate something we think of as nature, not our material but our social environment and our relation to it. We think it is ours to control and serve us, to mold to our interests, only to find that we have built ourselves into it and cannot disobey or escape it. The career is not at fault, it is we ourselves who invite it to take over, believe in it, and can’t imagine we would let it come to dominate. James P. Carse’s description of the relation of humans to the machine could well be applied to the career:

“We make use of machines to increase our power, and therefore our control, over natural phenomena….To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does. Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them. Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. There is no [individual] style in operating a machine. The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operation….Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves….A machine is not a way of doing something; it stands in the way of doing something.” (Finite and Infinite Games, p. 122-3)

In the past a career was not so much a machine or collection of techniques for self-advancement as it was a socially and economically accepted role in which one chose to place oneself for a lifetime, a step above simply taking whatever job was available. It still had some of the earlier sense of a “calling”, derived from the early Protestant conception of each individual’s sanctified vocation in the world, involving a certain asceticism. To have a career in the twentieth century at least involved some degree of personal interest and discipline, with higher status as a further motivating factor. Career distinguished the office worker from the industrial worker; a secretary was “a career girl” even if she made less than some factory workers and made no moves to advance herself. In the higher ranks of career, one could be considered very highly as an artist, an engineer, or a doctor, and far advanced in one’s profession but not in terms of financial reward. For some the integrity of following professional standards, doing things the proven right way rather than what one was ordered to do, stood above career advancement. This was especially true of professions that were considered implicitly noble and self-sacrificing. Such people saw themselves as giving of themselves for the good of others, like doctors serving a community, scientists and scholars contributing to the store of human knowledge, or even, despite a hostility to bourgeois society, avant-garde artists opening perceptions beyond present limitations. In fact this covered even the obscure artists and others whose career might yield little immediate visible success but who worked on the assumption that they were in touch with the future, the visionary thinkers and scientists before their time.

After the crushing of sixties altruism and utopianism, cynicism about such motivations in the Reagan era and the development of the New Economy of the nineties convinced people that the only valid goals are individual, immediate reward and not social contribution, or at least that the individual need not sacrifice in order to fulfill public need. The individualized career, aimed strictly at advancement over one's peers, has become the means to that end, to which idealistic motivation is an obstruction of old-fashioned vintage. This is the kind of career that is not aimed at status gain over manual labor, but at the singular aim of success. This is not the success of the physicist at the moment of discovery but at the podium of the Nobel Prize, nor of the artist in the studio but at his or her opening in a highly visible gallery and a feature in a major publication.

The importance of idealistic motivation is still alive among artists, however, particularly those who want to feel they are contributing something new and of value to the world, and not just attractive enough to sell. It is the function of this motivation that has changed. In the early twentieth century the avant-garde offered their art to an ungrateful world, or at least could imagine that world ungrateful and themselves oppositional, holding out for higher values. They may have been politically on the left but were contemptuous of popular judgment, instead turning to their peers for judgment. Contemporary artists who honor that avant-garde, however, prefer the appearance of autonomy and opposition while never doubting that their efforts will attract buyers. If disillusioned they will try something else, no point doing something that has been rejected. Unlike their predecessors, they expect and are expected to be appreciated immediately if they are doing anything valuable, and widely enough recognized to draw a significant viewing and buying public. There is no cultural lag allowed if one needs to get gallery shows or performances here and now in competition with one’s peers. A large part of creativity today is finding what arouses a response, a practical problem to be solved, leading to the convergence of the high art and advertising worlds. What does not elicit response is considered elitist, in just the sense that the business enthusiasts and “values” defenders have named elitism as the enemy of democracy. With the explosion of the art market beginning in the fifties and then finally with the nineties’ marketplace populism (the notion that market demand determines ultimate values) the gap between artist consumer and producer has practically vanished. The two flatter each other with their good taste, each serving the other on opposite sides of the bargaining table.

The myth at large, and held often sincerely by artists themselves, is that they live for their art, and so their idealism runs the show. However, their very status as artists is inseparable from the career—the shows, reviews, the contacts, the rising price tags. The same word—strategy—is used interchangeably for artwork and career; whatever works for one will work for the other. Without a strategy you will never get past the entry-level stage, the wide-open door that everywhere proclaims the unity of democracy and market. But when everyone gets to call him or herself an artist then who is the significant*** artist? Only the career can tell: significant equals successful in the complicated hierarchy of demand. So here is the contradiction of idealistic myth and commercial reality, such as one would find rare among doctors or scientists today, whom everyone, including themselves, expects to be mercenary.

Musicians of the past had no such complications. They thought of themselves not as artists but more humbly as skilled workers, providing a service to entertain, selling their skill, bargaining for wages through a union, and deferring to the entrepreneur who was their boss. Musicians were distinguished from composers; even if musicians improvised it was over chord changes that were laid down in writing, of which the composer was owner and recipient of royalties. For some exceptional players, especially singers, there came to be agents who intervened on their behalf (the legendary figure that approaches them from the bar with a promise of a “real” career). Many musicians do still play for weddings and in clubs as cover bands, but generally today they have been upgraded from workers to entrepreneurs of their own ventures without middleman agents. Most musicians need to be recognized in public media and to compete with one another for revenue, rather than to be picked from the crowd on the basis of relative competence. We—I include myself--either manage their own careers or are relatively enough in demand to be able to get gigs with a minimum of this work. This role assimilates us to contemporary artists, whether we call ourselves that or not, and as such we are pressured to acquire the image and self-image of composers—creating rather than reading or interpreting a score--even if we are free improvisers. (In fact, the role required of the contemporary musician is in conflict with the approach of free improvisation, dooming it time and again to the margins, as I have pointed out in numerous writings. The only improvisers who make any kind of living have developed a repeatable style or attractive career trajectory—legend or innovator, etc.) We are expected to have a style, identity within a genre, resume, associates and contacts, perhaps even a philosophy presented in interviews, just like the successful visual artist.

The fact that art has become the entertainment choice for a portion of the urban audience means that we are still judged by our ability to bring in revenue (paying audiences, cd sales) yet must do so in the image of idealistic artists—independent, following our individual muse, etc. It would defeat our project to acknowledge that we are in fact entertainers, dependent on market demand. The artist image obscures the reality that we are a good step down from the working musicians of the past, who did, after all, earn a living playing music, unlike the bulk of musicians today. We have been paid on the cheap, with the status of artists and entrepreneurs, “boss of my own”, liberated from the working class with a self-managed career. The skilled musicians in dance bands in the thirties, on the other hand, were self-acknowledged entertainers. They were largely neglected and unknown, disinterested in pursuing higher status, and are often upgraded today to mirror how musicians present themselves, as artists, just as “outsider artists” are now discovered and brought into the fold. We see them as deserving more, perhaps waiting to have their fortunes reversed. How could anyone be truly happy who is talented and yet invisible? That is the modern blind spot, and there is no vision available today to see beyond this notion, sadly little coming from self-respecting artist/musicians themselves.

Above I’ve called the contemporary career a kind of machine, which tends to take over its operator. For the artist-entertainer, the nature on which the machinery operates efficiently or not is called the art world or the music world. This is the spontaneous nature that we feel needs to be controlled, to serve us, rather than us just going along with it and letting it be, ignoring publicity and image. This world is the audience, the readers, the viewers, the critics, the promoters, the favored venues, the trendsetters who will either help us or harm us, and will have the control over us that we dream of having over them. In fact we can manipulate it, but only if we are willing to be manipulated by it. We might decry others’ manipulations in order all the more to deny that we are doing the same thing with the tools we are more skilled in using.

One musician/entrepreneur told me that the actual playing of music was half of what we were about, the other half was publicity. I have come to the conclusion that to maintain this balance is impossible; one will be master and one will be slave. Not only do audience, readership, viewers of art, not want art to be self-defining, but the shocking thing is, neither do we the artists. That is, we do not behave as if we want art to be what we do, we want it to be what that doing represents to others. Without some reason to advocate the actual playing of music for its own sake, the entrepreneurial side will always triumph. Conversely, if making art is even just 51% it will be impossible not to see entrepreneurial activity as anything but interference, again and again.

To paraphrase Carse, a career is not a way of doing something, it stands in the way of doing something. For thirty years I have tried to see it otherwise, ever since I first realistically imagined myself as a musician. But now I see that it was only my own desire for acceptance, my desire to represent myself to others in some favorable way, that led me into that illusion.
In all I am writing here I am not judging my fellow musicians, on the contrary I am speaking on our behalf, of our deepest dreams and most troubling frustrations and sources of confusion. Many musicians respond to my writings such as this, not insulted but pleased, relieved almost, to see our experience laid out in print, how career and marketplace requirements make it so difficult to play the music we wish to play for others. How many would be improvising, for instance, if they did not have to disguise and apologize for it, sacrificing livelihood for it? People hold in highest esteem the after hours jam sessions of the thirties when musicians played only for themselves. Yet few critics show any interest in what musicians do for themselves today, and too many musicians are confused by standards of financial success and failure into thinking that they have reached their musical heights when their career starts to take off. My belief is that we have not begun to see—or hear--what is possible for us to do.

I am a musician directing my writing primarily to other musicians, and encouraging non-musicians to look over our shoulder at what we might say to each other, if freed of the hype and illusions we generally have to hawk to get a few people to show up at a performance…or a foundation to fund us. We need to see ourselves not as competitors for ever scarcer resources but as people who share in common a situation brought on us and not of our choosing. We cannot be the working class musicians of the past, paid to read a score or do whatever the bosses think will turn out an audience, nor are we fulfilled as entrepreneurs, masters of image creation, dependent on others for our self-esteem. I would say that we deserve to be paid well, but that only brings the response from the music world, “then give us what we want.” So I say instead, we deserve first of all our own self-respect for the years of our lives we give to our love and passion, what we would do without social support or reward, the invisible that we must always distort into visibility in order to justify ourselves.

For our sake I mourn the loss, the absence at least, of what our musical experience could be. I mean ours here in the broadest sense of what is shared: there is no true listener who is not also playing; there is no player who is not at the very same time listening--the two are only inches apart. Music for all of us lies buried under the layers of judgment about what should be played and who should be heard, which indicates just as much what should be unheard and who deserves to be unheard. For the musician, if our desire to be one of those heard drives our music, then our musical experience will follow the fate of that desire and not the actual playing. Only an honest and deep indifference, an indignant refusal to be driven by that desire, no matter how strong it is, can free our music from this.
 
Monday, August 15, 2005
 

7.~~~~~~~~ revised 12-08

At least for now, no one would arrive at this blog except as I direct them individually, and any others to whom they might suggest it. Its location is something of a secret--the formally incorrect spelling in the address alone does something to hide it from those who might otherwise stumble onto it. Its readers then form something of an intentional community rather than a conventional readership; chances are they would know each other, as consumers of writing who scan the blogrolls would not. This is a peculiar relation for writing to have with others, on the border between the one-of-a-kind letter and the text directed to an anonymous audience. As with more accessible blogs, it is facilitated by the internet, the technology that has finally challenged the book. Despite the huge advance of the internet, however, our culture still defines the book as the medium of the most serious writing. Publishers are constrained by economics to be selective, and cultural seriousness means that someone more knowledgeable or at least more powerful than the reader has pre-selected the text. On the other hand, the democratic internet God accepts all, and so has weakly challenged the idea that anything can be serious. Rather it joins market democracy in celebrating each offering as worthy and so equally unworthy. With one hand it giveth opportunity to the writer while the other taketh away presumed value.

The writing of my blog is like a series of letters, yet it is written not in a manner addressed to specific friends but as if offered to anyone. The reader of a letter is a specific you, distinguished from the writer, I whereas in writing for anonymous others, when readers are referred to they will generally be joined with the writer in the universals we or one. Those to whom I've offered the writing of this blog most likely have personal knowledge of me, as in the letter form. However, I am not speaking out of that personal relation but rather creating something in the presence of my friends. Art, whether primarily material or mental, is created for human beings, available to friends, perhaps, but in their existence as humans. Here, this individual you know is attempting to speak to the nature of things, just as any book writer of non-fiction would do, and can be held accountable. So in this form friend and human being are joined; there is this one person speaking, but he displaces himself from the personal relationship in order to think outside that immediacy, and might lead you to do the same. Even though we are not in the same room, we find ourselves thinking together, as intimate as a house concert. This approaches the relationship of friendship known to Socrates and takes a detour around the notion of philosophy that has evolved in the West, confined to elevated and depersonalized texts presented to anonymous others, just as music has evolved in relation to the abstracted audience. I have no objection to this, I merely operate as a writer outside the circle of published writers/anonymous readers as I am outside the ranks of the music world as a musician.

Writing separated from the act of writing, thought separated from the act of thinking, and music separated from the making of music, are all forms of abstraction. The substitution of the object for the activity encourages the further separation of those acting from those receiving, subjects receiving objects. This abstraction creates an audience rather than listeners, students rather than co-creators, a readership rather than readers. In a small way--and all creating is small, concrete in time and place--the form of writing/giving I am engaging here is an attempt to deal with these forms of separation, to heal the painful breaches I face in myself and to offer what I am at this moment coming to understand in my thinking. Like the forms of musical communication I prefer, it is the outcome of the desire I have as I create, to be fully present to myself and to others at the same time. This is a desire in myself, but perhaps it engages something vital in others--in you.

I began by saying “at least for now.” That would also hold true for all the thought and decisions of this writing; thought may be worked through to an extreme degree but in the end it is always “at least for now“. Unlike a book, which has reached a finished point all at once when it is released to the printer, the blog encourages writer and reader alike to think of each entry as a short chapter, complete at the moment it is uploaded, but awaiting the next installment. It is not thought which is frozen but the medium, allowing us the pause to take it in, to respond and for the writer perhaps to recoil, move, shift. Seeing one’s writing as a text is not an end but another beginning; following the nature of thought it will continue to evolve and dispute itself. There is no point when thinking is done with, only temporary arbitrations, articulations, lacking any guarantee of progress or protection from betrayals. Thinking is learning how to think; writing is learning how to write; playing is learning how to play—and that is my standard expression, and at least for now I can’t do any better.
 
Sunday, August 14, 2005
 

6.~~~~~~~~~~


Writing for me frequently includes examining my effort and process of thinking, and not just the conclusions. Another word for this process might be self-questioning—self-doubt and the analyzing of assumptions. This is personal writing, meaning, I write for myself but then with some adjustments hand it over to potential readers--and to myself, to view critically at some later point. I do this not as therapy, any more than overcoming a block would send a fiction writer into therapy, but there is certainly an emotional pressure to write in this way that I don’t try to disguise. Those questions I would share with others, such as this very one, are personal and at the same time public in significance, relating to a culture and time I inhabit with others. If I consider myself a writer among writers who leave no such self-referential traces, then I feel on the defensive, even self-accused. What could be the validity of sharing what I write for myself with others? Further, can I make such writing public and not distort what is “for myself”? I can imagine myself alone when I write, but can I write anything truly for myself alone?

My writing comes up against my own criticism of the self-referential turn of contemporary culture, in the urge to put oneself constantly on stage or in print, and in the therapeutic reflex (the self-esteem movement, for example) upholding our social order. Unless I can find my way clear of this dilemma I should consider not publishing this writing and confine myself to the more conventional critique (which I also do at times).


If I am writing personally then I will openly admit to writing only what engages me, what bothers and obsesses me. There can be only what I myself need in the space between myself and what I put down here. The writing will attempt to trace the path of my thinking as accurately as possible and explore the roots of that in my history and psychology. I will be hunting out problems, dilemmas, dishonesty, attempts to deceive myself. Thoughts of what you the reader might want to find in it do not figure in. As I read it at some later point, however, I may feel I have touched on something I wish to express to others, and I edit it to this end. I negotiate, as consciously as possible, the distance of some imagined reader from myself. Some image of what a reader might understand inevitably appears, and a corresponding image of what I am to do as a writer. These are social roles, the producer and consumer of writing, dependent on each other, just as we find in music and art. The producer typically expects to interest and satisfy at least a certain niche of readers, and so works with some hypothesis of what they would want and need, perhaps an antagonistic stimulus. But where do these images come from, and how accurate could they possibly be?

There is a dilemma here I wish to open up to scrutiny—and not just for my benefit. So right here is where the reader, the other, intrudes; there must be some inkling however submerged that specifically this or that point I wish to make in print should be said to others, and not just to myself. We is found in the I. This is distinct from thinking there are others who want to hear it, that I could find a market for these thoughts; almost the reverse is true, that if I felt my thought was already accepted by others there would be no point in saying it. For all my humility about my intellectual powers, then, certainly I am writing from a moral purpose, and choosing out of all my musings what I would like to correct of the world’s received ideas and behavior.

I don’t oppose writing that lacks the self-conscious perspective of the writer; I simply elaborate a space for what I have found myself doing. As with the strange music I play, its value may be restricted and obscure, understandably making little impact on the world, but even so something can be said for it. It engages a certain discipline, first of all accuracy, awareness and honesty. Moreover it seeks to avoid the intrusion of images of the reader and writer leaning over my shoulder as bothersome phantoms. To write anything in a common language, even a diary entry, assumes other readers of this language, and so intimates at least a common humanity of reader and writer. I must have an appreciation of at least one reader, myself, who does not want to be deceived. The reader images, however, that I seek to banish are those aroused by fear of rejection or by the desire to flatter and attract. So as I adjust my personal writing for others I ask, am I thinking this through or am I seeking to gather and fortify a circle of opinion, of which I am the center?


When I seek to write with clarity and consistency I am more likely to face contradiction, confusion and weakness in my thinking, which I must then acknowledge and record. That is not a drawback, it is exactly what I want to do; there is no adventure and little truth if we plan for comfort. Such self-awareness survives the adjustments I make when I make such writing generally available. Perhaps readers of the current age would like to see vulnerability on the part of the writer; they would see that in me (perhaps “refreshing honesty”) and miss the content of thought. No writer can control what readers will do, but they can state their awareness of the possibility of misreading. For most writers, I imagine, there is an end to vulnerability in the finished product; finished means the mind has come to the end of its work and has achieved closure, until the next work perhaps sees the flaws. In writing we are making an object, and by the time of the last edit we can expect to be in control; at that point we will not genuinely be vulnerable to what is now on the page. We can fully affirm every word of it, for we are thankfully outside the thought we have produced and the vulnerability of ambivalence. Writing personally for the sake of thinking itself, however, it is difficult for me to escape anxiety in this way, and so difficult to complete anything. I can never believe that I have adequately nailed anything down, much less take pride in it. I try not to think of myself as cowardly, but the temptation is there.


I can’t deny that I have an image of a reader after all, one who reads and chooses what to read somewhat as I do. If I write for myself then it would follow that I am my own guide to the reader. As reader I pursue what seems to open a pathway to more questioning, often despite the author’s intentions; the absence of closure allows space for my own thought. If I need the writer to say more and he or she is not there, then I get to speak, to continue the other’s writing. I don’t focus on the person of the writer so much as the person the writer evokes in myself. I may not be able to repeat or summarize the writer’s thought, as I could in school, but my own creativity is set in motion. If on the other hand as writer I were to imagine myself required to motivate a reader, then I would lose my bearings. “Say something interesting; spice up the imagery!” So my guiding image of the reader is one who does not want me to abandon my discipline of writing for my own sake, who wants us both immersed in thought.


The danger of presenting personal writing to others is for the writer to use it to direct the focus onto him or herself as an object of interest to readers, a familiar turn of American culture ever since the New Journalism. By doing this one seeks approval for a specific image of oneself, a diversion. It uses the readers to establish a separation from them, as if daring readers to be as interesting. And further, if writing is presented not as a shared space but as the writer’s own conquest and possession, then there is little reason for the reader’s thought to extend and develop the writer’s. Much autobiography falls into this trite category, playing up to contemporary voyeur-exhibitionist taste.


What is it that we truly need to speak to others? Can we say what we want? Can we write freely? As a test, put it this way: can we say things that would create an image of ourselves that we don’t want others to have?
 
Monday, August 01, 2005
 
4. and 5.~~~~~~~~~~~~

That moment when we sense we have found a form for our life that suits us is an event of great significance to us as individuals. It is particular, marked off from moments of the everyday; later, it shines out at us as the foundation of our story. “Now I know what I really am, what I really want, what will fulfill me.” It is an assertion of choice, often a risk against obstacles and well-meaning others; at the same time it seems like the final discovery of something essential, what has been waiting for us as our true nature. It could be a choice of sexual preference, or artistic direction, or political commitment, or an obsession to get to the bottom of some peculiar question. We feel we choose it at the same moment it chooses us, we are at the meeting point of our individual history and the world’s many options. That moment of conscious choice seems magical and subjective rather than a rational conclusion, and frees us from questions about the choice we’ve made. There is even a roadblock of unquestioned absolutism particular to our selfhood that hinders our retreat. For instance, for me the answer to, “why do you play only improvised music?” is not the good reasons I could give for valuing it but the moment that choice became clear to me. That moment of discovery feels like an infinity, without limit to the unfolding of the form. Similar is the moment years before when I heard an SDS (radical student group) speaker in 1965; I knew where I had to go without knowing any of the details, I found out who I already must have been. A few more of these moments would go far to describing the general path of my life.

Each such form is specific, one among many, that we then proceed to fill with content. Each is a possibility for our being to resonate in the world, and only in the world can we be received and assigned a meaning, whether welcomed or rejected. The moment in which the form appears to belong to us and us to it is a conjuncture between our singular self and the world, a moment that one’s life conjoins a moment of the world. Henceforth we define it and it defines us. Since the world is another word for all others and all forms, it is a moment of relation with all human existence, with one’s own existence as a human being. We may be hidden in our lair, our fastness, like a Zarathustra, but we are still only concrete human beings. We are found out by forces within and without, and after that we can no longer rightly maintain the myth of our isolation. That is, we might call ourselves isolates, but that is our form of defining ourselves in relation to others.

Of course there are many forms that are initially given by our family, class and society that we have not chosen but rather inhabit. There is no magic to these forms, we merely learn them as the given, in the unconscious interest of psychic or physical survival. We have not yet developed any reason to resist and reject such forms, nor the ability, drive and confidence to do so. Deferring to family ties, choosing a heterosexual partner, driving on the right side of the road, responding to the friendly greeting at the checkout counter, following automatically the succession of stages in academic life and employment, are diverse examples of forms that the vast majority of us reproduce but have never specifically chosen. It takes little effort to do such things, we could do these things in our sleep. We look around us and find broad agreement and that’s enough reason not to disturb others with eccentric behavior that would call attention to ourselves. Here we are in the mainstream, as are also the narrative form of writing, the song form of music, the masterpiece orientation in art. Today we could also include acceptance of marketplace democracy, for which there is no alternative in sight. The list goes on, down to the details of our gestures and behavior, by which an acute observer can distinguish an American from an Italian with only a moment’s glance. These forms we think as morally and politically indifferent, we might search but cannot find the interest to question them or choose something else, to be something other than what is initially given in our surroundings. In most cases we invest ourselves in such forms so deeply, with ramifications and obligations so convincing, and resistance so perilous to our pleasure system, that to break with them or even imagine what a different form would be like is highly improbable.

It would be interesting, and probably disturbing, to view every form we inhabit as contingent, originally prescribed by our environment and then locked in a security/insecurity system that--how can we not be sure?--betrays us. If only for a few moments, as a harmless exercise of the imagination, we can distance ourselves from our knee-jerk behavior and beliefs that are so familiar we don’t even know they compose who we are. For instance, to consciously walk down the street with a limp, for only one block of a city street, would be frightening and liberating--an enlightening experience we would never forget if only for the flood of self-consciousness chatter we would hear in our minds. One would think, everyone is noticing me, I am lying to all these strangers—and yet really, what does it matter? It seems foolish to do this until we realize that despite our huge claims to have chosen to be who we are (unlike those poor souls of traditional society), we have a huge, anxious and irrational resistance to do this simple thing. We learn that we identify ourselves with forms that only seem to be natural, that we have accepted without thinking. We have defined “natural” as the path of least resistance. This experiment (just one example of harmless nonconformism) threatens to be a permanent change that cannot be rescinded, opening a floodgate to others, a betrayal of our self-concept. Our supposed individuality is highly selective; we don’t really know who we are after all. It opens up the realization that we live in an iron cage of our own making. But if we look for traces of resistance to ourselves not outside but inside ourselves, we can view such paths and self-questioning as a necessary complement to our need for a secure unity. That unity is always there yet outside our grasp; the mind--in its phase as ego--teases us with the thought that we have grasped, comprehended and approved ourselves, or at least we know what we don’t approve of. But there is no end to ourselves, and to the forms, the ways we can be.

A new, chosen form to which we are magnetically attracted is a quite different thing, building rather than threatening our individuality. It seems like a line extending who we truly are towards the world; at the same time, since we have chosen one form among many we are aware of our separation, our distinctness. At any rate it resonates in both ourselves and the world. But we fool ourselves, necessarily, in thinking it will continue to have the same meaning. By choosing it we risk staking ourselves on something that will change and make our relation with the world obsolete and ourselves abandoned. We initially, usually with the boldness of youth, trust something that will carry us through a fluid world, yet as the world changes the form may become a hindrance. Or it may become so much a part of the world that it is no longer a line extending from us in our distinctness. It loses its adventurous and risk-laden character and becomes the norm, diluted, without delineated edge or imagination. This is even considered “success”, when the tension with the world is relaxed in general toleration, as if our goal had been to convince everyone to adopt that form.

If at the moment of our choosing we were to think through this problematic fate we might be more tentative, and not take the bold actions of creative work. There is a tension between our desire to be part of the world, to have a place for our being that resonates with others, and our awareness of the ephemerality of the forms we once blindly chose. Lleftist politics is a good example; the desire to be effective is often hidden behind political ideals, and what “makes a difference” today will probably not do so tomorrow. The moment of choosing founds or changes the story we have of ourselves, our personal myth, in fact it creates a new one with a positive, confident direction. It projects an image of our future, and we forget that a story can only continue, it has no future that is beyond change, dissolution and betrayal.

Our conscious choices, grounding us as autonomous subjects and true believers in ourselves, is immanent to our lives, yet we tend to seek legitimacy for them in some transcendent reasoning. I choose improvisation and so have sought out the reasons that would convince others of its value, transcending my strictly personal choice. Similarly, I work today to transform my political commitment of forty years ago into something valid today, rather than think it just my personal quirk. We can at least imagine a subgroup that might respond to our choices, and we are one of that group. A form belongs only in the world, so it has others who can not only relate to it but adopt it and put energy into it. A form gives us a human community, at least potentially. And that can change more rapidly than one’s own attachment to it.

When our chosen forms lose their energy and capacity as vehicles of self-definition we continue to assert their reasonableness, but now it is in retrospect. Perhaps the form has lost its strength to define us as individuals and become broadly acceptable and routinized, pursued by those for whom the desire is success rather than adventure. Viewing this development enhances the power of “I told you so”, selectively applied. We look at our past choices and think, certainly it is clear that I would go this direction, use this form for my life, my art, politics, etc. rather than another. The choices were inherent in me, natural. I haven’t been wasting my life, we would say; I’ve been accomplishing what I was supposed to do. The unspoken corollary to this is, now I can die in peace, as if this had been the point of the adventure.

In that monologue the mind is teasing us with an image of unity and personal fulfillment, the common theme of our therapeutic society. Better to live at the point where we don’t expect ever to know if our choice was the right one. Absolutely certain that we don‘t know, we move ahead on with the full assurance of the naïve adventurer.
 
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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