shakey ground
Saturday, September 29, 2007
9/28/2007 - revised 5-4-08
From my personal journal:"Playing on this last tour awakened me to a demon I hold within myself. I realized one night that the feeling of inadequacy which is so familiar to me as a musician is actually a kind of possession by an alien, hostile power. My confidence, of which I am normally unaware, is sucked out of me and with it my actual power to play in a way united with the others. I came to this realization afterwards, at a point where I felt absolutely destitute and helpless, having no right to be on the stage with the others, in all appearance very strong and confident players. I felt crushed by them, robbed, but in reflection I knew there was no truth to this, so what diminished me must have lain waiting in my own mind. It has been my habit to take this sense of inadequacy at face value, as the insuperable reality, only challenged by my desire and effort to overcome it. In this case however my effort collapsed, futile, beyond any previous point of struggle. I have resisted it as one tries to shut a door against an intruder; such an action is only a confirmation of the intruder, through the pressure I feel exerted on the door. Yet I can see now that motivating this struggle and masking it is its antithesis: the intruder is also the confident belief in my power, which I fear not because it is false but because I imagine it offending others and isolating me. Hidden from my conscious thought, I have operated as if self-humiliation were useful and necessary to keep my expansive ego from taking charge of my self-estimation, a necessary counterbalance to the illusions and consequences of pride. I can even imagine myself wanting to believe I am inadequate and the desire leading to this kind of possession as the triumph of that belief."
“This fits well with my earlier [twenty years ago] understanding when I was playing solo that I had completely merged with a demon, a Dionysus whom I allowed to rule for the duration of my moment of playing. I expressed this at the time in Theatre of the Moment, which I read now as a text through the lens of this new insight. Then I was surrounded by rage at the world for betrayal of my revolutionary hopes and guilt at my inadequacy to find a way to continue to be engaged. What I was sure of was the musical IT which I entered each time I performed, which took me over and which I trusted--at least this could not betray me, I felt. Ultimately it did, and put me in the same ambivalent situation I am in now and trying to work my way out of. And isn't this the same pattern I followed when my political ecstasy was broken [in the mid-70's] and I stepped out of that skin and began to question myself?”
"At any rate, the metaphor of “possession” comes in right here to help resolve this. I cannot step outside of what I believe or want to believe myself truly to be, but I can step outside a possession, which is a kind of personification of internal antagonisms. Once outside I can go further: if it is a demon that tells me that nothing I do can be valid as music, then I can say to it, “you must know better what music is; you do the playing”. I escape the consequences of praise or blame for what I play, the ugly aftermath of the ego. If I can invite a possession to take over in this way then I can see it for what it is, whereas if I fight it and am humiliated by it time and again then I cannot possibly see what I have allowed in without invitation. The power of a demon is that it is taken seriously as unassailable reality, one half of a duality that calls out for its counterpart, the mistake in the opposite direction, of merging with my power and being unable to be aware of what I am doing. If there is a corner of my self which neither is it nor fights it then I can have a more playful relation with it; it simply accompanies me and is not my antagonist."
“This is a kind of surrender, and music, politics, and religion all engage some form of surrender. The question is, whether we can direct it in any way, eyes wide open to which way we are going and what we are experiencing.”
"Demons whisper secrets to us. For some the secret is that we are more powerful or more loved than we really are, that we deserve all, certainly more attention than we get. For others it is the opposite, the secret is that we are unworthy of attention. (And our egalitarian culture encourages the former demon!) Such demons can work in pairs within the same person; one voice will be telling us we are nothing while another is saying we are everything. I might feel inadequate, humiliated, unloved by the world but operate out of a belief that my true worth will ultimately be vindicated. When it is obvious that I am being praised or honored or given attention then I must rectify this picture by contradicting it, wrecking it in some way, what psychologists call compensation. The false humility of the famous (on radio interviews, for instance) is a commonplace; they do not wish to appear to be enjoying their fame to the extent that they do. It might look like a humble and virtuous embarrassment but actually it comes from a desire not to have one’s self-image ruined and a fragile harmony destabilized. In my dynamic, it is all out of fear of confusion, of being just something on the planet, not everything and not nothing. The mind races to extremes, and seeks to create balance by holding the extremes at the same time, and withholding this knowledge of what is going on, rather than settling for what seems a mundane compromise in the middle."
Now I leave that journal and allow a different question, why have I offered part of my personal writing in a publicly accessible blog? Have I been caught in the drift of contemporary culture, which argues that we, the "we" led by artists, have no private space of expression that is of any worth? All private value is to be made public, available, shared—an extension of the egalitarian faith that predominates. The private church confessional became the public breast beating of the Protestant; the private psychiatric couch became the "personal is the political", and now the artist statement, auto/biography, and blog. Once Luther proclaimed (and later probably regretted) that every man is his own priest; now every man woman and child is his/her own artist, creator, publisher.
Whether I like this evolution or not I am to some extent an example of this trend. I can see the debasement of art into the ambition of Everyman, the proliferation of boring cd's and blogs. I refuse to draw the line, as every entrepreneur does: “Hey, my stuff is a cut above the others!” I have to sift through these artifacts of postmodern effluence and choose which to pay attention to without the aid of what were once called artistic standards, the 18th century myth of universal "taste". In the view of Romantic and Modernist aesthetics, art was considered scarce, artwork unique, valued in each instance as the masterpiece, and the Artists clearly separated from ordinary mortals. Duchamp himself came out of that world. He was sufficiently confident to be distinguished as an Artist that if he were to label something as art it would be taken by others as such. But this chess move against Art could not be continued indefinitely, eventually it had to turn back on itself. Duchamp did not forsee the historical move by which Everyman would become Artist. Now the readymade and the readymade artist are universal in place of Art and Taste; if everything is art then nothing is, or at least it is highly problematic and subjective. Income made from art now derives from shrewd entrepreneurship and a dependence on the distinction between what is and is not of market value, which modernist haute culture spurned.
So I reluctantly submit to be included in this trend, aware that I am in some kind of mainstream here and do not wish to poke my head above the level of ordinary mortals, as the Artist once did. Yet I put my personal journal in quotes, indicating a separation, a privacy I will not allow to be violated, if only in being the one to choose what I offer publicly. I have no words, no standards for predicting what that will be. Perhaps I need to feel that what I experience of myself behind the screen, in my green room, might be of value to others in seeking their self-understanding, as in my political writings their (our) liberation from the entanglements of current ideology. I work to refine my writing so as to be clear, concise, and to develop reasonably, while thinking of the reader's work as paralleling my own. So it has something to do with a desire to have a positive but not grandiose image of myself and my work on the planet. An illusion, perhaps, but not a demon that haunts me. ¶ 7:45 AM 0 comments
From my personal journal:"Playing on this last tour awakened me to a demon I hold within myself. I realized one night that the feeling of inadequacy which is so familiar to me as a musician is actually a kind of possession by an alien, hostile power. My confidence, of which I am normally unaware, is sucked out of me and with it my actual power to play in a way united with the others. I came to this realization afterwards, at a point where I felt absolutely destitute and helpless, having no right to be on the stage with the others, in all appearance very strong and confident players. I felt crushed by them, robbed, but in reflection I knew there was no truth to this, so what diminished me must have lain waiting in my own mind. It has been my habit to take this sense of inadequacy at face value, as the insuperable reality, only challenged by my desire and effort to overcome it. In this case however my effort collapsed, futile, beyond any previous point of struggle. I have resisted it as one tries to shut a door against an intruder; such an action is only a confirmation of the intruder, through the pressure I feel exerted on the door. Yet I can see now that motivating this struggle and masking it is its antithesis: the intruder is also the confident belief in my power, which I fear not because it is false but because I imagine it offending others and isolating me. Hidden from my conscious thought, I have operated as if self-humiliation were useful and necessary to keep my expansive ego from taking charge of my self-estimation, a necessary counterbalance to the illusions and consequences of pride. I can even imagine myself wanting to believe I am inadequate and the desire leading to this kind of possession as the triumph of that belief."
“This fits well with my earlier [twenty years ago] understanding when I was playing solo that I had completely merged with a demon, a Dionysus whom I allowed to rule for the duration of my moment of playing. I expressed this at the time in Theatre of the Moment, which I read now as a text through the lens of this new insight. Then I was surrounded by rage at the world for betrayal of my revolutionary hopes and guilt at my inadequacy to find a way to continue to be engaged. What I was sure of was the musical IT which I entered each time I performed, which took me over and which I trusted--at least this could not betray me, I felt. Ultimately it did, and put me in the same ambivalent situation I am in now and trying to work my way out of. And isn't this the same pattern I followed when my political ecstasy was broken [in the mid-70's] and I stepped out of that skin and began to question myself?”
"At any rate, the metaphor of “possession” comes in right here to help resolve this. I cannot step outside of what I believe or want to believe myself truly to be, but I can step outside a possession, which is a kind of personification of internal antagonisms. Once outside I can go further: if it is a demon that tells me that nothing I do can be valid as music, then I can say to it, “you must know better what music is; you do the playing”. I escape the consequences of praise or blame for what I play, the ugly aftermath of the ego. If I can invite a possession to take over in this way then I can see it for what it is, whereas if I fight it and am humiliated by it time and again then I cannot possibly see what I have allowed in without invitation. The power of a demon is that it is taken seriously as unassailable reality, one half of a duality that calls out for its counterpart, the mistake in the opposite direction, of merging with my power and being unable to be aware of what I am doing. If there is a corner of my self which neither is it nor fights it then I can have a more playful relation with it; it simply accompanies me and is not my antagonist."
“This is a kind of surrender, and music, politics, and religion all engage some form of surrender. The question is, whether we can direct it in any way, eyes wide open to which way we are going and what we are experiencing.”
"Demons whisper secrets to us. For some the secret is that we are more powerful or more loved than we really are, that we deserve all, certainly more attention than we get. For others it is the opposite, the secret is that we are unworthy of attention. (And our egalitarian culture encourages the former demon!) Such demons can work in pairs within the same person; one voice will be telling us we are nothing while another is saying we are everything. I might feel inadequate, humiliated, unloved by the world but operate out of a belief that my true worth will ultimately be vindicated. When it is obvious that I am being praised or honored or given attention then I must rectify this picture by contradicting it, wrecking it in some way, what psychologists call compensation. The false humility of the famous (on radio interviews, for instance) is a commonplace; they do not wish to appear to be enjoying their fame to the extent that they do. It might look like a humble and virtuous embarrassment but actually it comes from a desire not to have one’s self-image ruined and a fragile harmony destabilized. In my dynamic, it is all out of fear of confusion, of being just something on the planet, not everything and not nothing. The mind races to extremes, and seeks to create balance by holding the extremes at the same time, and withholding this knowledge of what is going on, rather than settling for what seems a mundane compromise in the middle."
Now I leave that journal and allow a different question, why have I offered part of my personal writing in a publicly accessible blog? Have I been caught in the drift of contemporary culture, which argues that we, the "we" led by artists, have no private space of expression that is of any worth? All private value is to be made public, available, shared—an extension of the egalitarian faith that predominates. The private church confessional became the public breast beating of the Protestant; the private psychiatric couch became the "personal is the political", and now the artist statement, auto/biography, and blog. Once Luther proclaimed (and later probably regretted) that every man is his own priest; now every man woman and child is his/her own artist, creator, publisher.
Whether I like this evolution or not I am to some extent an example of this trend. I can see the debasement of art into the ambition of Everyman, the proliferation of boring cd's and blogs. I refuse to draw the line, as every entrepreneur does: “Hey, my stuff is a cut above the others!” I have to sift through these artifacts of postmodern effluence and choose which to pay attention to without the aid of what were once called artistic standards, the 18th century myth of universal "taste". In the view of Romantic and Modernist aesthetics, art was considered scarce, artwork unique, valued in each instance as the masterpiece, and the Artists clearly separated from ordinary mortals. Duchamp himself came out of that world. He was sufficiently confident to be distinguished as an Artist that if he were to label something as art it would be taken by others as such. But this chess move against Art could not be continued indefinitely, eventually it had to turn back on itself. Duchamp did not forsee the historical move by which Everyman would become Artist. Now the readymade and the readymade artist are universal in place of Art and Taste; if everything is art then nothing is, or at least it is highly problematic and subjective. Income made from art now derives from shrewd entrepreneurship and a dependence on the distinction between what is and is not of market value, which modernist haute culture spurned.
So I reluctantly submit to be included in this trend, aware that I am in some kind of mainstream here and do not wish to poke my head above the level of ordinary mortals, as the Artist once did. Yet I put my personal journal in quotes, indicating a separation, a privacy I will not allow to be violated, if only in being the one to choose what I offer publicly. I have no words, no standards for predicting what that will be. Perhaps I need to feel that what I experience of myself behind the screen, in my green room, might be of value to others in seeking their self-understanding, as in my political writings their (our) liberation from the entanglements of current ideology. I work to refine my writing so as to be clear, concise, and to develop reasonably, while thinking of the reader's work as paralleling my own. So it has something to do with a desire to have a positive but not grandiose image of myself and my work on the planet. An illusion, perhaps, but not a demon that haunts me. ¶ 7:45 AM 0 comments
