Life Is Not A Problem To Be Solved

I suspect that, for many people, the sadness, anxiety, and confusion of life are problems to be solved, but for people who work in (pardon this hollow term!) "art," the pains of life are fuels that drive (pardon this one!) "creativity."

Experience, and reflection upon experience, are what allow people to write, draw, compose, dance, build. Others, uncompelled to do such things, emphasize recovery, closure, "moving on," but these healthy responses would harmfully deprive "creative" people of the forces that drive their work.

This is the paradox of mental pain: most of us, quite understandably, hate pain of the private skull, steer away from it however we can, and work to overcome it when it strikes, but for others, mental pain is what makes work necessary. Without broken hearts and minds, would we have the arts at all?

All Dreams End

At the end of a complex dream, I held my last girlfriend close, and said, "I'm sorry to be so difficult: I never expected anyone to love me back."

Maniacs Of Music

Click for a better jpeg.

Although I've never understood jazz (in all of its variety, a complex form of music), I could probably understand jazz fanatics, because I, too, am fanatical. Many of us in the "classical" world are wild-eyed maniacs, always in search of that elusive live bootleg CD of Klemperer and the Orange County Abbatoir Philharmonic performing the undestroyed Sibelius Eighth, or of Reiner's doubly rare phonebooth recording of the Scriabin "Scratch 'n' Sniff" Concerto.

But for unbridled rabid devotion, nobody, no human being, can match an opera fan. Even baseball fans, with heads full of batting averages that go back a century, are no match for opera fans, with heads that go back to Monteverdi.

Opera fans are the Star Trek fans of the music world, and their well-stocked brains, like an Escher print, twist and recoil back and forth in tunnels that no sane lover of sound could imagine.