Homage To The New iPod

This is a working draft of a essay that will be fully developed in time.  I assume that the rhetorical iPod frame will disappear in the mature version, but this fledgling draft  has allowed me to briefly go places that I’ve known I’d have to visit.  I post it here, as several friends have expressed an interest in reading my “iPod piece.”

A flagrant bait and switch, for which I offer no apologies.

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Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

~Berthold Auerbach

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This past December, I bought a refurbished iPod.

The purchase was a leap into mainstream culture for me.  For some years,  I’ve railed against the MP3 detached, those unable to connect with the here and now because they tune into to the worlds they choose, oblivious to their environment and the people around them.  Electronic nether regions.  Selective reality.  How convenient.  How self-absorbed.  How very American.

Narcissism.  I made the call.  Even put a nice political spin on it by finding a relation between the iPod phenomenon,  fundamentalism, and the election of George W. Bush.  I was pleased with my insight.

But in December, I reluctantly decided to buy the iPod.  I wanted to workout harder and longer, especially during the winter months, for sanity’s sake.  An iPod was necessary.

I’ve had to rethink the merits of narcissism.

I have over a thousand CD’s, perhaps fifteen-hundred.  I’ve never counted.  The number reflects two decades of hoarding, a gluttonous consumption of genres, artists, and performances in an untrammeled pursuit of beauty.  Five versions, I discovered last week, of Bach’s “Well Tempered Clavier.”  I’m unwilling to count the number of Lady Day compilations that I’ve acquired–apparently, the music industry found Billie worth a tidy sum, after her death.  I’ve acquired the beauty, terrors, and pleasures of the human heart in an unconscious acquisition of discs, a sublimation and projection of my own psyche into others’ art, I’m guessing.

But greed leads to failure.

The majority of my CD’s silently sit. Remnants of my past pushed into obscurity, some played hundreds of times, then shelved into forgetting as I unwittingly yielded to the present and its tyranny.  Too much work to put them in order.  Though I’ve had them grouped by genre, finding individual recordings is time and effort, and organizing them requires a patient mind more methodical than my own.  So they’ve been sitting in neglect and collecting dust.  As does the beauty, the pleasure, the pain, and the moments of my life.  Like my life, existing in dusty silence.  The discs are an image of my soul, its disregard seen in their abandon.

Hyperbole?  Perhaps.  But Beethoven wrote that “music is the mediator between the spiritual life and the sensual life,” so looking at these discs, I may be onto something.  For too long I’ve been driven by the inconsequential, banal necessity having overtaken my life.  And without a change, it will have the last laugh at the road’s end.

So since December, I’ve embarked on a return journey to my soul, beginning with a trek into memories marked by music.  In some instances, simply seeing a disc has been a kind of epiphany: Yuuji Takahashi’s “Satie: Pièces Pour Piano” was one of the first CD’s that I ever purchased, sometime in ‘86 or ‘87.  The delicate transformation of melancholy into beauty caressed innumerable hours and days in those years, as nothing or no one else did.  Sadness made sweet by skill, each note separated by a measured quality of silence, and the remembrance made me smile.

But stumbling on the Brahms CD was the moment which gave me an uneasy pause.  I knew that it was among the stacks, somewhere, the fear of finding it there from the beginning.  I didn’t know what I would do when I saw it, wasn’t sure how I’d react.  This wasn’t just any Brahms CD, but the one with Yo-Yo Ma and Isaac Stern on the cover, a tea brown colored backdrop behind them, the case cracked on the left side.  The Brahms CD marking the loss of everything I knew and counted on, including my mind, in less than three years.

So when I saw Stern and Ma on the cover, saw the familiar crack in the plastic, I traced my fingers over their faces, then the break in the case, and I put the disc to the side. But I wondered what that performance would mean to me now, if I could still hear what I heard then, or if I would be so changed as to find it a completely different work.   A day or two passed, then Brahms went into the iPod.

It was another two or three days before I listened.

Brahms wrote the Piano Quartet #3 in C minor during extreme emotional distress, I learned after my obsession with it during my own psychic disintegration.  If time had meaning during those days, I could tell you the number of months and weeks that I listened to this performance.  But there were days when I lost both time and language, so I can only relate that it was the sole work that I listened to during my waking hours, other than lengths of silence.  The work’s pathos flowed from Brahms’ love for Clara Shumann, and their mutual love of her husband, Robert.  Known as the “Werther Quartet,” Brahms wrote that his inspiration for the piece was Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.”  In Goethe’s novel,  Werther  shoots himself when he falls in love with a woman who will forever be inaccessible, as Clara was to Brahms, or so it is usually presumed.  I remember reading somewhere that the opening notes were meant to bring to mind the gun shot, the entire piece being a meditation on that fraction of a second between the shot and its implosion into the skull, an examination of the heart’s struggle between life and death when its love object is denied.

No musical piece so movingly conveys the heart’s quest for expression and its drive to fulfill desire.  Brahms captures the longing for another, the heart’s movement towards the beloved, and its falling back on itself when love is denied.  If Goethe’s “Werther” was the hallmark work of German Sturm and Drang (storm and stress, storm and urge, storm and longing), its reaction to rationalism, and its insistence on subjectivity, expression, and emotion, then Brahms gives us the musical counterpart of Goethe’s novel.

For the sophisticated, a bit of Romantic tripe. But for those of us who eschew hard realism, who see reality as governed by the imagination, who believe that the curtain between heart and world, imagination and reality can be torn in two, such tripe is genius.  Perhaps lethal.

It’s odd how the psyche gravitates towards something it recognizes, a sympathy for which there is no logical explanation.  For before I learned about Goethe’s Werther, Clara Shumann and Johannes Brahms, I met my own unobtainable love object, that man whom when I first saw him, I knew without question that nine years of my life had just disappeared, the irrevocable knowing that happens a few times in one’s life, and I knew that a deep change was going to take place, vaguely sensed the dissolution on the far fringes of that knowing.  I wasn’t prepared for what that knowing meant, as we never are, didn’t know how entirely wrong this love was for me, as they all were, but simply knew that I was in the middle of something larger than myself.  Because love denied ceases to be about the beloved and becomes about the lover, the heart’s catapult into imagination when desire is left unfulfilled and ricochets back into the abyss of the lover’s want.  Denied its object, love turns and implodes like a gun shot into the psyche, creating a wasteland from which we may rise transformed, if grace deems it so.

So when I listened to Brahms in December, after too many years, hearing those notes, I remembered when I stubbornly refused to let life’s dust to collect around me, and when I unflinchingly rode those chords which strive to rend the curtain separating reality and imagination, the heart and the world.  “Beauty,” I recalled reading in Rilke sometime before I lost myself, “is only the first touch of terror, and it awes us so much because it so serenely disdains to annihilate us. ”  I welcomed beauty’s annihilation.  Better to die like those who have lived, I decided, then live like those who are dead.  Narcissism.  Folly.  Mania.  Take your pick.

The lover’s narcissism resembles the artist’s urge to transfigure the world, and the mystic’s striving for hidden realities, for the lover recognizes no law but the one written in their heart.  Just as the artist must create, and the mystic must commune, the lover must love, no matter the consequences.  And the lover has no choice but to reach beyond society’s restraints, as if this “I” had a special privilege to exert the will in its pursuit of the beloved, desire being its only guiding force, transgression proving its truth.

Listening to Brahms once more, my cheeks moistened and salted.  I again yearned to reach for something beyond the necessary, the stuff which easily attaches itself to us and before we know it, leaves us deaf to our rhythm, the music beating beneath life’s surface, waiting for our attention.

My heart cracked under the weight of the inconsequential.

My mind then wandered to the 30 year old boy who so effortlessly told me that he loved me just weeks ago, unaware that his hormonal infection will pass as quickly as the symptoms of a rhinovirus.  And I thought of the 49 year old boy, who for four years has been unable to utter that terrifying word, trapped as he is in a world dependent on social rubber stamps, in a seemingly endless invisible bureaucracy.

Nothing deafens the heart more quickly than the need for approval and its assorted fetishes.

And I took note that neither one really differs much from that boy who led me to something larger than myself not quite two decades ago.  A boy whose soul remained unchanged after our brief silences, for whom beauty was no more than an indulgence to placate his advancing mortality, a delicacy which in the end I refused to feed him, because I demanded music that he couldn’t hear.  And because I was stronger then I knew, and stronger than he had thought possible, his sensibilities dictated that he do what he could to make me bear his cruelty when I placed my narcissism above his ego.

What I did not realize until setting down these thoughts, too long after the fact, given the dust and clutter, was that my dissolution was never about him.  Or any of the other circumstances swirling around me, pedestrian details which have become convenient labels to pigeonhole the reasons that my psyche split in two.  For I had decided long before the moment when I recognized that nine years had slipped into nether regions, that love was everything or nothing at all.  And with a decision that was written in concealed places, I unknowingly accepted the lesson that the love requires uncommon courage, for it is as tightly tethered to Thanatos as to Eros, the two impulses inseparable if love is to find its fullest expression.

Love requires falling headlong into death’s arms, or at the very least, death’s possibility.

For it requires the self’s death.  While the ego enjoys comfortable affirmations and pleasurable codlings, love’s beauty demands an annihilation.  The self must be severed from the ego and its comforts, for only then is the heart’s capacity revealed, its empty expanses waiting to be filled with the other.  Unless it burn us away leaving nothing, love falls short, its longing a fledgling thumping bereft of melody.  As it was once said, “The one willing to loose her life will find it, and she who clings to her life will loose it.”

Before I stumbled on a CD in a music store that has faded into forgetting, and found a work without meaning except that it featured Stern and Ma, I had determined in unseen inner recesses to put the psychic gun to my head.  The rest was merely the unfolding of a score already written.  In places that I had never visited, but which were part of the composition, I had decided that this fragile bubble called reality, on which so many hang their expectations, had to expand beyond its breaking point, and into the ether of the eternal current, music’s infinite source.

When my mind split it two, it was a grace given to me, for the curtain separating the world and my imagination was severed.  My mind left time and its restraints, sanity, language,  everyday life’s easy rhythm, and I was made dead to this world and released into another.  Yes, looking back, I can write that it was a grace, for as Rilke wrote, “Isn’t it time that we lovingly  freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension, so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself.”  So you see, that self-important bow string boy simply released me into something greater than myself.  And after the fact, he fell to the ground, useless except for his brief holding of this sharp arrow for so short a time.  And being the stronger of us,  I was shot into a vast void, the limitless space beyond our individual lives, where converge dreams and the eternal ether, and taking me into its arms, its terror violently shook me from who I was while making me who I was too become.

I no longer strove to rend the curtain.  It was torn, and the flood overwhelmed me.

Life rarely affirms the infinite space beyond our waking lives; perhaps it does, but we turn from its existence, wisely fearful of it.  And few of us require more from life than its creature comforts, while the best of us find meaning in the small things: an apple, a smile, a teardrop.  As well we should, for life on its own terms is beautiful, indeed.

But for those given to untrammeled excesses and unruly demands, for whom this life isn’t enough, who sense that the cosmic big bang resonates through time as the original bullet of desire released by the lover for the beloved, folly endures.  Such foolishness sees the everyday as dust, and it naively understands that all music started with that first implosion of the timeless into time, a stubborn mania which hears an eternal gunshot reverberating underneath every note emerging from silence, returning us to awe and the soul’s source.

Many of my naive excesses and demands are tempered now.  Or so I tell myself.  These days are dictated by the everyday and commonplace: I go through my discs, load the iPod, and find moments of happiness during the onerous winter months.  And I offer my gratitude for this humble 160 GB electronic servant who has helped me reclaim a healthy dose of narcissism.

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Synopsis of the Brahms Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 60

The most poignant of the work’s four movements is the last; however, I wasn’t able to find an a quality audio on YouTube. This performance of the third movement by Chin Kim and friends offers a clear, melancholy sample of Brahms’ “Werther Quartet”: