“As soon as you were born, you had to hit the ground running. You were forced to start leading your life even though you had no idea how to do so. What did you do? You screamed, you wiggled and you took on information about how the world reacted to your screams and wiggles: Does this make the pain go away? Does that? By the time we have the conceptual wherewithal to wonder about how we would live our lives, we’ve long been taking heaps of answers for granted.” Agnes Callard
“I never have the feeling, even when I’m happy with a text I write, I never have the feeling that it’s me. That is why, when I write, I feel strangely responsible and irresponsible, as though I had transcribed something, that imposed itself on me.” Jacques Derrida
“The one problem with relating is that there’s no practice.You know if you want to play tennis you get a chance to practice and learn how to do it before you get on the court to play. If you want to be a writer you can practice and learn before you actually have to write something. You can learn a profession, you can practice a profession. But there’s no practicing for relationships. You’re up at bat all the time. It’s a shame.” Werner Erhard
When first I came up with the “Hard Listening” musical project for piano it was during a period in my life (2011-2016) in which all of the foundations for my life were crumbling in all sorts of disconnected and staggered ways that made them more or less illegible to me. I could make out single and singular events but I could not see any larger pattern or connection regarding any event.
But instead of dwelling upon things happening to me I worked at developing some ideas of playing the piano in a certain kind of way, with consciousness of specific musical languages and awareness of the piano’s possibilities as a physical instrument with volume and mass. I really could not tell you why or even how I embarked upon this project at such a low point: the conditions of my life felt or seemed arranged to be against it. (The last place I was living in Boston, thankfully for only a year, forced me to sign a document promising to never practice my piano at any time of the day or night, necessitating me having to rent a piano practice space by the hour, something I probably hadn’t to done since the early to middle 1980s when I was in some kind of dorm and having not piano of my own).
The philosophical and frankly abstract ideas which were the roots really of what was and is a purely instrumental music for the piano were also ideas which form one of the plural reasons for this very podcast.
Now that I have been reunited with my beloved Steinway after being separated from it for thirty-two years I am often astonished that I began to entertain ideas about the piano as a compositional and creative instrument when I had settled living with a far inferior instrument and no imagination that I would ever live with that Steinway from my boyhood ever again. But lacking any alternative language or articulation the only phrase I can evoke to discuss any of the foregoing matters is that of intrinsic value, that is, value that doesn’t exist for any other reason or goal however exalted these latter might appear. You could say that this is a return to things themselves. It seems opposed to quite fashionable ideas of transaction, function and utility. (Although the first of these it seems acceptable to criticize even though in fact there is a place in life for all three of these).
I look upon all of the foregoing as the practice of creating artistic objects - musical compositions - under conditions of maximum adversity.
But there are other practices in life that can be conducted with an attitude of maximum artfulness while not being in any way objects or works of art (as they are not representational, or “make believe” and so on). There has been and continuing into any future I can possibly imagine contrasting and competing concepts and definition of what constitutes art itself and what the boundaries are of the category. I don’t want to reveal here what my opinions are concerning the question nor which, if any, of the various camps best reflects those opinions. One important example, from dramatic and theatrical art, can help us to reflect best upon how we might conceptualize art itself as well as the lifeworld from which any art emerges.
I have in mind the work of the 20th century author Harold Pinter whose possibly overused dictum could be taken as a key not only to his unique genius in dramatic art in particular but perhaps our human social life in general:
“I think we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to
ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else's life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility”.
Another way of looking at this fact of our lives is to say that the purpose of speech or writing is not communication, least of all transparency of information, but rather to express ourselves as the humans we are, which, we most often forget, not only involves us a simply relational creatures. That is with we might connect with that part of ourselves - a part intimately intertwined with culture and the arts rather than society and it’s functions per se, including even human relationships - which wants to make a beautiful object of one kind or another simply for its own sake and to display the accomplishment to another person. I suspect that fewer of us look at any human activity in this way (because it is so often indifferent to goals and functions) than I hope would be the case.
All of this leads me what feels like an inevitable sequel to the previous month’s post on Analog or anachronistic forms of expression: the art of letter writing.
I really stumbled upon conscientiousness about letter writing for the most atypical of reasons: faced with the reality that many people seemed to be moving around quite a bit and giving the social world what felt like an atmosphere of general transience, I wondered what it would be like to communicate to any interlocutor in prose form as if the then already dominant mode of email simply had never happened.
One of the longest standing or running discussions and/or debates in the history of arts and letters is the question of whether craft and technique - in a word skill - is decisive in how we evaluate and experience the work of culture, or whether the internal feelings, the sincerity and authenticity and value of these is what is decisive. In regarding the act of writing letters in the way that I have for at least three decades now I am privileging the pre or non-Romantic bias in favor of craft.
To be most clear there is some value in Romanticism. Consider the following: I did a book lunch on Andrea Wulf’s magisterial book on the Romantics, having a fondness for some, but not all, American popular Romantic music, and liking certain artists who are dogmatic in their application of Romantic principles to the arts, in particular those arts that indulge and privilege authenticity, rawness of emotion and affect, naive conceptions of honesty especially in John Cassavetes, some rock, some DIY music, radical performance artists, Andy Kaufman, jazz improvisation itself and so on.
There is actually a technical term from my favorite field of philosophy for some of these notions and it is emotivism. There are many problems with it and not only the excess of subjectivity involved but a doctrine like emotivism, in itself a bargain basement residue from David Hume, if it is anything like a coherent doctrine, is really a symptom of the larger crisis of the destruction or loss of the “traditional” worldview and the perceived absence or at the very least experience of absence of any meaningful replacement.
The fashionable term now for this state of affairs is nihilism.
To make all of the preceding abstraction more real. I will begin with a few principles that guided my development of letter writing and then exhibit actual examples from my life.
Since I have spent so many hundreds if not thousands of hours reading some of the finest prose to have been created in the English language, I asked myself what would it mean to try and write in those ways as a matter of course or even a regulatory regime in my daily life? The word that came up of course was the word beautiful.
What if, instead of writing to express to send any kind of message, however important, or to express my innermost authentic self, whatever that could be,or my honest convictions of whatever period in which I found myself, I instead strove to write the most beautiful and frankly formal, even “high style” prose I could possibly write?
I am here using the category pf “high style” in the sense impressed upon me by the great Richard Lanham in his two books Analyzing Prose as well as Style: An Anti-Textbook.
Here is Lanahm describing in the former text:
“It is thus impossible to describe high style terms of specific intrinsic elements. A high style often uses a Latinate diction but not always. So too with the other traditional ingredients - suspended syntax, frequent or forceful metaphor, isocolon, chiasmus and other devices of parallelism and balance, alliteration, patterns of word repetition, marked variations in sentence length, and so on. Conversely all of these put together need not make a high style. The high style, in this meaning of sublime, awesome, grandly important can be defined only by interpretations and thus only through touchstones, through significant examples.”
Here are some excerpts from letters I have written from personal life.The first is one of the earlier examples, close to when I made my decision as described above. This was a letter I wrote in admiration of a filmmaker :
"There were two problems I had to confront and overcome if I were to ever properly write you. The first was of course handwriting and the fact that it is a problem is very much in evidence to you at the moment that finds you reading this piece of paper you now hold. But alas I could not type you this on the computer, especially considering that handcrafted gem you shared with all of us at MassArt. Hopefully what is lost in legibility will be more than made up in personality - such as it is. Secondly I had to disabuse myself of any perfectionistic notions…”
The second example is most personal. It is a letter written to a woman to whom I was most attracted but it was written after I had discovered she was marrying a dentist (!) and thus not for any personal or relational gain. I had written nothing of this kind whatsoever during the time in which we were acquainted and during which she was single. Although what follows was sent as an email, the style could not be closer to a handwritten letter barring actually being one.
"It would be the grossest understatement to simply say I will miss you. There are many things shared between people, especially a man and a woman. Some are obvious, others are ignored; still others are at least unacknowledged, at most, repressed.
I never fully acknowledged adequately my fondness for you. There are so many reasons for this omission on my part, chief among them, a high premium I tend to place on politeness and deferential civility. (I think this last fact particularly ironic given my excessive boldness in matters of public opinion, emotional reaction, and general rhetoric.) Then there is the additional problem of introducing unwanted or conspicuous elements into an otherwise convivial and congenial atmosphere.
Above all, however, I would have to say that there is the fact of your essential inwardness, or "introversion" as they are wont to say in the psych trade. I had thought it was merely a perception of an essentially outwardly directed person like myself, but then I noticed Minh, of all people, had mentioned a similar appraisal. I mention this as one would mention the wallpaper, with no judgement whatsoever."
Of course the task of writing something beautiful to a persona you believe and experience as beautiful might seem easier than not. This stands as one of the most difficult letters I have ever written. Interestingly - and perhaps appropriately given her dramatically changing circumstances of life - she wrote me back a couple of simple sentence, saying she liked what I had written and would write something more to match my efforts. This she never did and I haven to spoken with her since 2007.
I include here an excerpt of a letter a girl I had dated in the wayback machine of the 1990s. I so loved her letters. I have a basket of them I took with me when I moved to North Carolina (where the writer in question is from). She wrote more of them than I ever did and so consistently. Sometimes there were cards with doodles and drawings upon them in addition to her lovely cursive. Sometimes they were typed in pastels.
Here is an example:
This is very much the kind of letter that (hopefully) millions of persons might have at one time written to others. The goal here is very much in the spirit of information and message from the writer, quite contrary to the style of letter writing I adopted in the earliest 00s.
Now all of the foregoing information about how I write letters could not be more directly connected to this podcast: the principles I came upon (or devised) are identical to the ones that govern me every time I write a letter to a potential guest.
Sometimes my letter writing idea and ideal can have some positive effects in the world outside of the persona realm.
Here is something I wrote to a travel agent who was working with Amtrak:
"Each of us inevitably will know some kind of change in fortune in a single lifetime and if not in fortune at least a couple of great changes in life circumstance, such as the journey from childhood to adulthood or the introduction into one's life of a brand new job or career. One of the greatest change in my life occurred for me in later middle age, when I had to leave the territory of the Eastern seaboard and move to a territory that was (to me) far away from there.
One contact in my life has been Amtrak. I don't believe I had ever had the occasion to even consider contacting a travel agent when I would take the Acela from Boston to New York City or D.C. in all those decades but I must say that embarking upon a trip into the heart of Michigan is quite a different journey indeed. One of those differences is a new need to plan such a trip well in advance.
I don't believe there has been a single human being in all the decades that I have been going anywhere - including hundreds of trips by air I should add - who has been more helpful and kind than yourself. It seems odd in a way to think that anybody should want a computer to assist them with such business of life. I don't know how to adequately express my gratitude for a humane process of travel, one in which you evidently are so greatly skilled.
Without your services my trip in the year 2024 would not half been the most enjoyable one it was. There is really no other way for me to put it, so thank you!
Happy New Year"
She responded:
"I’ve had many emails and notes of praise over my career, but this is by far the only one that has almost made me cry. You are too kind with your words and thoughtfulness. Whenever you need anything train around the world, I'm your gal!"
The current book lunch series I have been doing is devoted to the author John Updike. Among the several extant documents out in the world featuring him discussing his craft, one of the things he has said is that among the first duties of the author is to avoid cliche.
Another favorite grammarian, Bryan Garner, author of Dictionary Of Modern American Usage as well as fundamental legal texts, introduced me to the ideas of “vogue words” and I can’t help but see a lot of current writing as not much more than a bunch of said “vogue words”.
Sometimes vogue words or phrases are called for, however. Thee is the phrase “the elephant in the room”.
That elephant is what is unfortunately called Artificial Intelligence.
I am not going to be coy here.
The two worlds I have mentioned in this post - music and human prose - are mostly threatened by AI, not helped, nurtured, evolved, progressed, or any other other positive formulations its advocates would proffer.
None of these machines, even if they contained all of the data of every known human civilization, while they might be engineered to exercise what appears to be agency, are by definition missing interiority. They might proclaim that this or that has been considered beautiful, but they don’t feel beauty; there is absent the very human stakes upon which all of human life is always already predicated. These senses of interiority and experience and there being anything “at stake” is not only what makes us human but also what has always constituted either music or writing.
I should add in conclusion that there is nothing to prevent society from using these new machines and devices “as if” they were more or less identical to a human being; it must be very hard for us to conceive of an entity making decisions but not being animate or alive in any sense. Perhaps the word decision is a misnomer; but I am discussing how it will be described in most discussions, not what it in fact is or will be.
All of this is to say that there are no plans for me to have AI ask any potential guests to be on our show.
I should like journey of an aesthete to be one place where we have some kind of sense of humanness. This can be capaciously understood, in the interest of pluralism but it will still be bound by principles of value that can be said to travel from one era or epoch to another and, in the last instance, principles that can be truly usable.
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