Some write down scales or perhaps compose etudes. Some write simple tunes or even multi-part tunes. Others compose concertos and sonatas and symphonies which can’t be fully understood unless fully held in mind, if only for an instant. A section in the third movement might well play off a section in the first movement. Of course, at all levels of complexity, simple tunes or symphonies, there might well be references to matters of Scottish or Czech culture or the work of another musician, perhaps even one from an ancient civilization.
There is, of course, a correlation between the complexity of a tradition of music and that of the encompassing civilization, between the discipline necessary to compose music of a certain standard and the discipline necessary to allow oneself to be properly entertained or enlightened by that music. Yet, can they truly be separated? Or even put back together?
In this way, meaningful texts are no different from musical compositions.
I imagine myself to write symphonies. I’m driven to so write or else I wouldn’t since there is not much to be gained in writing symphonies in an age when the desire and capability is for receiving teen-aged ballads and mood music where the mood is increasingly one of moral emptiness or outright sickness. Would I be overstepping a boundary if I noted at this point the irony of my analogy?: music of a high quality, even opera!, has survived and has somewhat prospered in an age when poets and novelists are selected by publishers for their ability to produce texts which allow American readers to stay within their comfort-zones, to use no more brain-power or heart-power or hand-power than if they were watching bullets going through the body of a good Samaritan on the streets of an Asian city or watching a monkey crapping at the zoo.
Flannery O’Connor once wrote that Americans were neither compassionate nor moral, only squeamish. We’re being trained out of our squeamishness when it comes to the other and being trained to be still more squeamish when it comes to fears of what the other might do to us.
Can we catch a scan of this phenomenon, an image of an evil grin on the skulls hiding underneath our skin? Can we design a non-biased survey which will tell us if Americans place little value on the other other beyond the other’s willingness to submit to our charity, exercised at the point of a gun or under the rule of graduates of Harvard Business School or perhaps under the beatific smile of a 22 year-old social-worker, recently graduated from Notre Dame or Radcliffe and so eager to make the world a better place?
I’ve developed thoughts along this line before, not the moral critique as substance but the moral critique or other commentary as substance and style which are entangled and each as complex as the other and still more complex when held as one line of thinking and feeling and doing. I was encouraged to revive these efforts when I recently read Jacob Neusner’s books Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity and Christian Faith and the Bible of Judaism. Some months back, I had reread Rabbi Neusner’s Confronting Creation: How Judaism Reads Genesis.
Neusner writes of sages who were as little impressed by the usual rules of prose as I am. Some of them wrote stuff that seems to make little sense and others assemble the nonsense in such a way that we can see great wisdom. But then we see the nonsense is something different than what we thought it to be. Maybe we also see the wisdom as questionable.
You see, there are commentators and there are redactors who assemble comments as if they were no more than steel beams. It’s not clear if those redactors bothered to use rivets. Perhaps their efforts are untrustworthy and ready to fall at a breath from the big bad wolf?
Let me try to get back on track. Neusner differentiates between the redactors of major works and the writers of the short `conversations’ which are commentaries upon Scripture or ideas related to Scripture—the sages didn’t always quote Scripture before developing important ideas, nor did they always prooftext as they were carrying out that development, nor, as he powerfully points out, did they always end a story with a prooftext as did the authors of the Gospel of Matthew. The individual commentators created short texts and the redactors arranged them to make points more strongly or to make points which couldn’t be made in short texts and maybe couldn’t be made explicitly—there is no bulls-eye and Hermann Melville knew this as well as did the redacting author of the book of Job. In a sense, and this is my analogy, the redactors were writing poetry where the individual lines were quoted from the works of others. Some modern poets, most famously T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, wrote poetry in which substantial parts were quotes from classic texts or allusions of the sort which were nearly quotes. The meaning is in the ensemble, in the greater structures of the textual symphony. Baudelaire didn’t always make sense either but Eliot quoted him in such a way as to elucidate why lighting candles and praying novenas with the pious old ladies might be better than teaching that the tradition is glorious in a way which is less convincing than whining that the tradition is beyond the reach of modern gossipers. In any case, the two were connected by a fascination with cats which context remained unstateably invisible to those not having a small acquaintance with the greater body of works.
Sometimes, it’s better to write a simple text, or a simple piece of music. Bach was particularly wide-ranging in his musical efforts, writing or sometimes collecting little snippets. Hayden also seems to have been such a collector since snippets sometimes pop up in the midst of a symphony. Beethoven made his living partly by setting popular ballads to music and went on to die in the midst of a possible effort to enlarge our ideas of what music is—and no one has taken up his unfinished task, unless it’s happening as we otherwise finish boring our Western selves into submission to our home-grown parasites. Yet, it’s at least arguable that others followed him and managed to write some symphonies as great as one or two of his. Perhaps the uncompleted efforts of Beethoven could be seen in some greater gathering of works he was able to complete? Perhaps.
But I’m writing about texts and perhaps should stick more to the topic.
We often think of texts, say the writings of great historians, as being in conflict in such a way that one of them “tells the truth” and the others are more or less false depending upon how close they are to that truth. Sometimes, it’s better to think of the historians or poets or political philosophers as being in some sort of very complex musical interplay, even across academic department lines of demarcation. This is not because there are multiple truths nor because there is no truth as such nor even because universities are as useless as they’ve made themselves to be. We often find it beyond difficult to reach a convincing view of matters and should be a little modest about tossing around words such as `truth’, but the problem is something different.
We’re digging down toward a treasure and sometimes Tom tosses dirt to a spot where Dick later works and he might toss it toward Harry’s spot or back at Tom.
We’re feeling up an elephant and sometimes come to a part which we perhaps shouldn’t be touching in such a way and sometimes we come to a part which we falsely think to be private to the elephant or at least embarrassing to the touch of someone not trained in the veterinarian sciences.
We’re dissecting a long-dead mammoth which has recently emerged from the frozen tundra of Siberia and suddenly we come to understand some of those parts of a modern elephant.
We read the Bible to find that David was a God-centered man and we have then to wonder what god he served when he was in business as a soldier-for-hire.
We learn of Wittgenstein spending years studying the logic which some would use to provide firm foundations for mathematics, a much shorter time demonstrating that those foundations were built upon sand, and then went on to small-scale fame as an orderly who wrote short collections of aphorisms which sometimes make little sense except when you step back a little and forget the words.
We read of the Christian faith of the Founding Fathers of these United States and politely try not to notice how few of them raised their children to be orthodox Christians by any reasonable definition. We look away, fearful that we who have failed in the same way may also have little in the way of true faith to pass on.
On that note, I end because I’ll soon be writing upon that topic and I’ll be claiming that we do pass on our faith, as did most of those Founding Fathers. How very sad.