UNDERRATED: on Morton Feldman and Mark Hollis by way of Rilke, fatherhood, progress and annihilation, folk music, Dead Poet’s Society, Stockhausen, precarity
“For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”
Those lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies approach a fundamental truth, so much so that they’ve been firmly lodged in my head since I encountered them decades ago. But as piercing as they are, their meaning is also kind of slippery. They gesture toward more of a feeling, one that I’ve often associated with the art, music, places, and events that have led me to the brink of being overwhelmed. The Grand Canyon, gothic cathedrals, Beethoven, Wagner, Pompeii, the Hindu creator-destroyer gods. The simultaneous awe and dread I have felt in the vastness of the Mojave desert, or the sand dunes of Mongolia. Seeing My Bloody Valentine live, and watching audience members cower around me as we all wonder if the bass frequencies will tear our bodies apart. Drugs, feverish love, and the things we allow to consume us even as we think “this can’t be healthy.” The amoral beauty and violence of natural phenomenon, planets crashing into each other in the cold vacuum of space. Big things.
Recently, though, my understanding of those Rilke lines has transformed. I’m now a few weeks into being a dad — my wife Laura and I had little girl named Naomi. I spend a lot of time staring at her in awe, in a sort of trance. Despite not being religious, Laura and I regularly refer to her as an “angel,” a word I hadn’t really used casually before. It’s funny. But our daughter is an angel… and she is terrifying. I have never come close to loving anything as much as I loved her the moment she was born, and to feel that way about such a fragile being is pretty scary. As The National’s Matt Berninger, patron saint of Brooklyn dads, sings, “I’m afraid of everyone / I’m afraid of everyone.” All of a sudden, beauty is the beginning of terror not because I’m overwhelmed by the massive forces outside of myself, but because I’m overwhelmed by the depth of my love for someone very small and delicate. An angel doesn’t have to be as big as a planet to be terrifying; they can basically fit in the palm of your hand.
As I get older, I become increasingly sensitive to ways the culture I live in encourages innovation and progress, the pushing of myself and others toward achievement, without ever really asking “why?” You know, we climb mountains because they’re there, we send rovers to Mars because humans are meant to explore. Albert Einstein gave us an equation that revolutionized our understanding of the nature of the universe, and also led to the creation of the atomic bomb. I think I’m not supposed to ask, but — was it worth it? Sometimes I’m awed by the scope of our accomplishments… other times, I think Gil Scott-Heron got closer to the truth when he said “I can’t pay no doctor bills / But whitey’s on the moon / Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still / While whitey’s on the moon.”
People have a funny habit of referring to the legend of Icarus as though it’s a beautiful, noble metaphor about humans striving to reach greater and greater heights. As far as I remember, it’s about a guy who winds up dead on the ground.
I’m not just questioning Ayn Rand acolytes or tech-futurists here — it’s an attitude as true in any of us who subconsciously view the “point” of art and music as striving toward maximum individual expression and innovation… to blow our collective mind with newness, radical ideas, unseen aesthetic worlds. I’m increasingly bothered by the thought that my constant thirst for novelty in art is inexorably tied to a lifetime of living with capitalism and imperialism. And it makes less and less sense to me why we expect our most groundbreaking musical revolutionaries to exist in misunderstood obscurity like Charles Ives, on the edge of poverty like Blind Willie Johnson, or the precipice of insanity like Kanye West. Why are we ok with the idea that the production of visionary work should be an unhealthy, solitary, destructive undertaking? I get that the concept of “sacrifice” in relation to unlocking the esoteric is neither uniquely modern, nor American — the lonely mystic sits at the heart of the Judeo-Christian mythology. But when that mindset is grafted onto a secular age, enmeshed in an economic system that regularly prioritizes progress and productivity over human lives, things start to get weird. I guess I agree with Rand’s point in Fountainhead — that misunderstood, quixotic architect Howard Roark has something to do with the thrust of capitalism. I just don’t share her enthusiasm about it.
I’ve found myself drawn to folk music lately. I bought a book of traditional English folk songs, which I’m slowly making my way through, and I feel like I finally get the point of the whole Woody Guthrie Pete Seeger Joan Baez thing (though there’s a fair amount aesthetically about that kind of scene that can still turn me off). I like that there are a bunch of songs that can’t be claimed by an author… that can be performed a capella by anyone, you just put them in your pocket and take them with you. You’re allowed to change them as suits your needs. Music that is designed to be free of ego, free of money, free from the burden of originality, free.
Laura hadn’t seen “Dead Poet’s Society” before, so we watched it the other night. Like many films from the 80s there were some moments that have not aged so gracefully, though given the setting and characters it wasn’t too terribly cringey. What I found most surprising on this rewatch was the moral framework of the film. Robin Williams’ character of John Keating is cast as the hero, leading his students in rebellion against a life of drab conformity. But I didn’t necessarily see it that way this time around. As I watched him counsel his class to “Carpe Diem” and “suck the marrow out of life” and “take the road less traveled,” I couldn’t help but feel that he was, in fact, fomenting not a group of radical free spirits but a bunch of little neo-capitalist Elon Musks. When he had his students walk around in the courtyard, spurring them on to adopt a stride different from everyone else’s — to not be followers — I suddenly saw a bunch of flat-earthers and anti-maskers marching around in front of my eyes (at one point, he even implies that to walk in step with the other students would be sheep-like… “sheeple” now being a favorite taunt of right-wing conspiracists).
We’re meant to see Keatings’ as a noble quest to keep these boys from being foot soldiers or corporate drones, to think and feel for themselves, but he never leads us to question the opposing danger of what happens when you combine radical individualism with white privilege and massively inflated egos. I’m not arguing for the virtues of conformity here; maybe just humility. One of the students does wind up committing suicide. I know as the viewer I’m not supposed to blame Keating, but watching this time, I found myself — just a bit — siding with the characters that did.
Wagner once told his friends that he dreamed of staging the Ring cycle over the course of a week, and then burning the entire theater to the ground after the final act. About 150 years later, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen said a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks:
“‘What has happened is — now you all have to turn your brains around — the greatest work of art there has ever been. That minds could achieve something in one act, which we in music cannot even dream of, that people rehearse like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for one concert, and then die. This is the greatest possible work of art in the entire cosmos.”
Of course, his remarks were completely disavowed by everyone around him, and his legacy was permanently tarnished. But should we really find his attitude that surprising? I think he simply exposed the logical endpoint of treating “Art” as a grand striving toward constant expansion, greater heights, individual expression as godlike power: Annihilation. As Harry Potter’s sorting hat reminds us, “greatness” is a chillingly amoral concept. At some point, the only possible aesthetic responses to the Grand Canyon are to either try to fill it up, or jump into it.
Culturally, our version of this annihilative obsession seems to be our slow march toward climate catastrophe. We’re unwilling to trade our industrial practices for sustainable ones, the linear for the circular, even though that’s what it would take to keep all this going on a longer timetable. I wonder sometimes what that shift in attitude would mean in regards to aesthetics — what would contemporary art and music look like that reinforced a sustainable rather than industrialist mindset? What would we gain, and what would we lose? I’m asking questions here, but it’s not like I’ve made up my mind. I’m still just as susceptible to the romance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s candle burning at both ends, that will not last the night but gives a lovely light.
The word “precarity” in the title of this post is taken from the book “The Mushroom at the End of the World” by anthropologist Anna Tsing. It’s about the unique chain of commerce around the Matsutake mushroom, which is foraged by nomadic communities in human-disturbed forests around the world; and more generally, about the economies and communities that naturally grow in the crevices formed by late capitalism. Precarity involves a necessary state of “being vulnerable to others,” and placing “unpredictable encounters at the center of things.” I’m increasingly interested in art that feels like it exists in precarity, rather than as a direct product of a culture thirsting for another trophy.
Believe it or not, this started as a straightforward attempt to write about Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories and Mark Hollis’ self-titled solo album. And now I’m too tired to really do that. But what I basically wanted to say is that their music is as close as I know to an art that is precarious yet epic, individualist yet free of apparent ego, radical yet generous. It is music of a beauty that’s terrifying, not like an atomic bomb’s, but like my daughter’s. It is delicate, affirming of the present moment, and gently rewards attention. Both manage to make musical dissonance sound natural and beautiful, and both create a harmonic field that brings the listener to a point where all possible notes could be the “right” one — such a wonderful state of openness to live in for a while.
Mark Hollis’ record stands the endpoint of a career spent disassembling the pop song, inviting chance procedures, harmonic adventurousness, and silence into the fold, until he arrived at an anti-formalism that — to me — constitutes one of the most beautiful songwriting-based records ever made. Feldman’s work comes from the opposite direction — he began as a student of John Cage’s, and slowly managed to bring the aesthetics the aleatoric into the realm of the sensual. His music might seem a little cold and even boring at first, but once you get on his wavelength he’ll invite you into a parallel universe. Many people find “Rothko Chapel” to be their most friendly entry point to his music, but I always return to “Triadic Memories” — a hallucinatory web of piano notes that Feldman once referred to as “the biggest butterfly in captivity.”
Set aside a couple hours for each, listen, and rise above the need to do anything or be anyone; and if beauty is the beginning of terror, then allow that terror be at the infinite nature of your capacity to care for the things you love.