Oh you pretty atheists

You may enjoy listening to this while reading;



Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in G Minor is one of my favourite pieces of Baroque music. I find it harmonically beautiful and structurally perfect. As with most music from this period, I'm satisfied when the music repeatedly resolves to its root key. It just feels 'right' to me. Safe, even.

Wholesome.

Just like the film where the boy gets the girl, good triumphs over evil and the mystery is solved - its all tied off nice and safe. It meets that very human need we have for meaning, structure and resolution. We are after all, just pattern recognition machines.

Classical music may not be up your street and to be fair, I'm hardly the buff myself (I'm an indy boy at heart), but the beauty of this piece is undeniable. It's as if it has an inherent, tangible beauty - something you might grasp in the palm of your hand.

Kittens are nice too. You can hold them in the palm of your hand if you want. Sunsets, grand vistas and stars are equally beautiful, if rather difficult to get a grip of. Yet still they feel 'right' somehow.

Love and morality have aesthetic similarities too I think, as it's tempting to see them as tangible entities - things that exist in and of themselves and outwith our own bodies.

I've had many a conversation with the faithful about this very phenomenon. They go something like this;

"Just look around you - look at how beautiful the world is. How could something so perfect be random?"

"Erm, we've evolved to see beauty in this 'apparent' order perhaps?"

"Yes, but it would have to be beautiful in the first place, surely?"

or,

"What is love?"

"Fucked if I know mate, but it feels nice..."

and so on...

I find that on these points of aesthetics, I have some commonality with believers. I've never struggled with the notion of gods per-se, but the nature of beauty, love and morality have had me tied up in knots for years. Like the Christian, who believes that God is the absolute root of beauty, I've struggled to get to grips with them as human, relativist constructions.

Until I decided to stop trying to get to the bottom of it and just get on with appreciating them for what they are.

John Cage, the avant-garde composer (and polar opposite to Vivaldi) once said;

"If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience."

Well said, I say.

Oh, to be beautiful

or, Third Treatise: What do ascetic ideals mean? Nietzche;

"What do ascetic ideals mean? Among artists nothing or too many different things; among philosophers and scholars something like a nose and instinct for the most favourable preconditions of higher spirituality; among women, at best, one more charming trait of seduction, a little morbidezza on beautiful flesh, the angelicalness of a pretty, fat animal[!]; among the physiologically failed and out of sorts (among the majority of mortals) an attempt to appear to oneself to be "too good" for this world, a holy form of excess, their principal instrument in the battle with slow pain and with boredom; among priests the true priests' faith, their best tool of power, also the "most high" permission to power; among saints, finally, a pretext for hibernation, their novissima gloriae cupido, their rest in nothingness ("God"), their form of madness. That the ascetic ideal has meant so much to man, however, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror vacui; it needs a goal, -and it would rather will nothingness than not will."

I will be expanding...

Though in what direction I'm less sure.

Too much of a bad thing?

My beautiful wife said to me today,

"You think too much."

She worries that my incessant Socratic Questioning will get the better of me. Perhaps she imagines me in a world of entropy, where everything is reduced to blandness. A world where love, beauty and awe have been swept away by explanation.

I say to her, "It's an impossibility, for I will never truly grasp the immensity of my love for you."

Marvin Minsky came to mind;

"We all are reluctant, with regard to music and art, to examine our sources of pleasure or strength. In part we fear success itself– we fear that understanding might spoil enjoyment. Rightly so: art often loses power when its psychological roots are exposed. No matter; when this happens we will go on, as always, to seek more robust illusions!"

The more I understand not only the world, but myself, the more I appreciate what I have. However fleeting it may be.

Illusion or not, no matter.

My P-Zombie

What is the point to music? If there is no point to it, then why do so many of us choose to surround ourselves with it? And what makes this thing, that has no substance or physical currency, so very valuable to us?

Perhaps, music helps us experience the gamut of our humanity. It enables us to feel things as they really are. Let me describe why this might be so;

Rhythm, being the form upon which all music is constructed, helps us understand our relationship with space and time. The beat of a drum, bone against stone or a staccato violin have us moving along with them. Even if they don't (for many of us are not natural dancers), rhythm becomes significant when it's absent. We all experience the persistence of rhythm when the beat drops out of a dance track, don't we?

Rhythm and bodily movement then, are inextricably linked. Music perhaps, enables us to feel the natural limits of our bodies; back and forth, in and out, shake it all about... In these movements, we test our place in the world.

What other art form exists not in the moment, but over time?

Now, I'm tired after a frantic few days in my personal and professional life. So I'm going to retreat for a while, with my headphones and Four Tet...

Let's leave melody, cadence & timbre for another night.

My Lorrain Mirror

This is one reason why I like where we live. It's not the view from our kitchen door, regrettably, but it's not much of a drive away. Perhaps you're not into landscapes and don't see what I see in ours. It is after all, just a bunch of rocks, trees and grass.

If I were born before 1700, I'd probably agree. In this period, landscapes weren't considered particularly worthwhile, even for the artist. Of course the rest of us were far too busy with our noses to the ground to notice them.

As far as I know landscape art is rare, prior to 1700. The human form took precedence in Europe. Perhaps it was some puritanical notion that the pleasure found in natural things was dangerous to the soul, because it diverted it from god. I'm sure St Anselm had something to do with this rubbish.

Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) it's said, led the surge of landscape art in Britain. He 'perfected' the form, and set strict rules on how landscape should be depicted. To aid the aspiring artistic fop, he advised bringing along a mirror to a sitting upon the hill. Once the fop had found an appropriate vista, Lorraine advised that he turn his back on it. The artist must then set his mirror on its stand, and paint not the landscape, but what he framed in its reflection. Hmmn.

This new form - the landscape, was seized upon by many. It became a mainstay of our aesthetic. One that remains to this day; the world in a reflected frame.

It troubles me to think that the awe I experience, when peering at a 'beautiful' landscape, could be one that I've been educated to feel. There is no beauty in hills. Perhaps I've just been indoctrinated to think that there is. In different circumstances, I could have learnt that barren, glacier gouged landscapes are inhospitable, ugly places that should be avoided at all costs.

A truth according to me

or Schopenhauer's Ennui: Part IV

There are no Gods. Of this I'm quite sure. Without our beloved deities, we find ourselves lost in a vast, cold universe.

We were made in the image of it. Both random and insignificant. Yet we evolved to think of ourselves individually and wholly significant, if only to ourselves. And thus, we engage in the grandest delusion of all.

We see patterns and significance in all that we survey. Yet we are no more meaningful than the meanings we observe.

So, we search for truth, and the nature of things; hoping that we find truth to be real enough, so that we might anchor ourselves to it. But in these truths we find no absolute. Each one leads us inexorably, to the search for the next.

And as we seek, we do so from our individual vantage points. Separate from the very thing we observe.

From time to time, this search leads us to beauty. When it does, we sit in awe of it, unable to fully comprehend why we might feel this way. In these brief moments, we are without ourselves. We shift closer to the truth of it all; That we are no more separate from the universe, than a leaf is to a tree.

Schopenhauer's Ennui: Part II

Market forces have their place. Given a limited supply and a coupling with high demand, the price one pays for consumable pleasure goes up. Thankfully, our kids like mince and turn their noses up at rump steak; too chewy apparently.

For the consumer, one-way entertainment like TV doesn't conform to these market forces. Quite the opposite in fact. When TV is consumed at a high rate, its availability increases. Thus its cost, in terms of convenience, reduces.

Take soap operas for example. As we discussed the other evening, the UK public spoke clearly to Rupert Murdock when we told him that we like soap operas. Lots of them, and repeated regularly thankyouverymuch. So, we we're given it.

The net effect of this model unfortunately, is a homogenisation of output. Programming that pleases the majority within a standard deviation of the mean, gets priority. Programming that's slightly esoteric, cerebral and/or 'artistic' gets squeezed out.

That said, we do have our BBC, funded through a bastardised tax. Surely this venerable institution isn't subject to these ravages? It seems not. In an effort to retain market share, our broadcasting gem has bought in. After all, the easiest way to validate its mandate to the public is to demonstrate a high market share.

It should be said however, that my BBC has resisted this banal feedback loop with Radio 4. This remains, for me at least, the jewel in its stuffy crown.

Now, I've gone on quite enough for one night. So, to sum up the beginnings of my argument let me say this; I believe that human expression and artistic endeavour will ultimately liberate us from our existential plight.

I also believe that homogenisation stands in our way.

Matt over at Far Traveller asks us to play an interesting game; Think of yourself as an alien and ask questions of your earthly partner. I imagine my alien persona asking Louie, how the human race sees itself answering the "What now?" problem that follows our inevitable pointlessness epiphany.

I believe the answer rests in understanding beauty.

More on this another night.

Schopenhauer's Ennui

Monday nights on UK Terrestrial TV are bleak. If so minded, you can muffle your brain with back to back soap operas from 6:30 right through till 9:00. If one ventures into the multi-channel digital kingdom, you can enjoy these melodramatic effusions 24/7.

There was a time when this wasn't so. Back in the dark ages, when we had only three channels to choose from, scheduling was more balanced. The nation would tune in to Coronation Street at 7:30 one evening a week. It was an occasion, you could say.

Then along came Murdock with his Sky empire. He liberated us from our desperate, parochial lives. Now, we chose what to watch and when to watch it. The customer was in control.

Yet, to get our passes to this wonderland, we had to make a Faustian pact. In return for limitless choice, we attached our magic digi-boxes to the Sky mothership. Each night, as we slept soundly in our beds, the magic boxes phoned home and shared our viewing with Murdock and his minions.

Murdock listened well, and what he heard pleased him. He found that we prefer not to think. Given the choice, the majority of us opt to consume programming that's easy on the brain. Programming like reality TV, sitcoms and soap operas.

So, he gave us more of it, and we watched more of it. So he showed us it again, and we watched it again, and again, and again. He'd hit upon a magic formula;

1) Buy cheap & easy TV, repeat it ad-nauseum
2) The masses consume it, along with the bundled advertising
3) Profit
4) Rinse & Repeat

More on this later...