Nigey --
Doubtless there is a larger correspondence between your need to take great wacks at piano accompaniment of chamber music while under the influence of no-label vodka and your leanings towards rational humanism, very mauve decade of you actually. Indeed it is a rational humanist's only choice nowadays, a positive statement which goes against the grain of techno-cybercutting edgeness to read nearsightedly 20th- century music in the parlor. Commendably retro of you. These days we have so little fun so much time, or is it the other way around? More to the point, it appears that though you inhabit late 20th century your sentiments are with someone living in the 1890's when those kinds of exercises and amusements constituted a civilized evening at home. To my mind (what I share of it with you), it's far preferable than to deal with digital entertainment centers spouting various chromium-plated megaphones of destiny which, revved up like phantom drag racers await their masters bidding after a hard day of cutting edge activities too numerous to list here, the reward for spending a hard day's night at the job.
I've always had a strange affinity for life at the turn of the last century. Maybe it's just because I like the music of Erik Satie, Debussy, Ravel, the artistic vision of Alfred Jarry's pata-physical universe, the pre and post Raphaelites. It was the age too of great leaping queens like Oscar Wilde, flamboyance with or without the eyebrows raised, pleeze!. It could be the graphics too, though that actually started back in the Sixties, the 1960's with the refurbished (then) art nouveau craze. There are lots of correspondences between the two periods: a kind of decadence inspired by technology, the war in the Balkans (ah you say, there's always been a war in the Balkans, and you'd be right), there's an air of goods and services surfeit though underneath there's this discontent which is bubbling, bubbling, bubbling. About the only thing that's different is that money bought a whole lot of something not like now where you have to make the choice between buying a car or sending your kid to even a half-assed college.There was more back then and less too, less people, less chance to world catastrophe (well, global warming hadn't been invented yet for American industrialists who were so busy polluting the landscapes with fumes and toxic waste), or better it wasn't the kind that throttled you at every turn. If you didn't read the papers, well eventually someone would tell you, and if you did, you could still turn to the sports page, file and forget it.
I've been recently amused by the term post-modernism which sort of precludes the possibility of any development after today, the end of history really. I'm glad everyone's so certain that we're in the final phase of our existence. That's what people thought at the turn of the last century, in fact every century thinks that when they're living in the midst of their present cut off from their past, incapable of seeing anything but the moment. It takes a great effort of will NOT to give in to this current mystery trend. Too bad we don't have a Finnish Cultural Society here in Williamstown, MA. I'd like that but the town is a small college town, medieval in its dealings, the senior and junior faculty, not that I'm in that scene, just on the periphery I'm doing some adjunct teaching, missionary work among the first years who want to know something of the Sixties, the 1960's, it's culture, music, colorful folk beliefs, etc. If all else fails and they get absolutely nothing about what I'm talking about since you know how difficult it is to teach about a literate time in a post-literate age, at least they'll have a better understanding of exactly who and what their parents were all about. BTW adjunct means no health benefits but also NO committee meetings or making nicenice with the faculty chair's horse-faced wife either. But then again there are pluses and minuses to everything.
But I do miss the 1890's here and you see it. One hundred years ago, one could theoretically get on a train in Williamstown and go anywhere in the United States by rail and in good time too. These days it's a drive over to Albany for the train, or a fifty minute ride to the airport and the busses only come three times a day in and out to Boston and NYC. But sometimes when I'm on Spring Street, the main drag and I squint my eyes and the light I'm back there in tipping my hat to the ladies and gents as I dodge the horse pucky.
I squint my eyes and walk on to campus, edit out the chrome and glass monstrosities which appear here and there. I walk onto the old section of campus, find a bench and sit, smoke a cigareet.Perhaps one day when I'm in that reverie, when I walk back out onto Spring Street it will be different and I will hear the strains of your chamber music as it emanates out a window of Hopkins Hall. And I will stop and go inside, take a seat and listen as you enthusiastically work out with your friend Judith.
It's lucky I live in this place because dreaming is easier here. I'm sure that I would have had the same gripes 100 years ago, but at least it would have been further away from now, not that I don't live here exactly, but more to the point, I seem to float from time to time. One hundred years ago things were just as complex, only then there was an appreciation of the complexity, scholars were less specialized, more "humanistic" in their approach to knowledge; knowing and being were more or less the same thing unlike today where knowing takes the place of being, where knowledge and information are covalent terms. Does that make any sense? Maybe I'm just in this mood because it's impossible to find a real authentic pastrami sandwich within fifty miles of this place whereas your TexMex food is right down the block. And since I'm talking about time, what rate are you clocking yours at? Shall we contemplate that famous query of Charles Fort, the patron saint of all cranks asked so many years ago,"Is there is a universal mind, must it be sane?" And if not, how to we appreciate it?
Meditatively,
David
My dear meditative floater --
To answer Mr. Fort's question, "No, and No." Certainly we are living in fractal times. Back in 1972, I decided to mess up the 'rates' a little by attending the Renaissance Pleasure Faire dressed in High Victorian garb corset, bustle, high button shoes, picture hat and all. When the occasional detail-oriented person asked me, at first superciliously, why I was 'mis-dressed' in the costume of the 'incorrect' era, I smiled politely and enquired what era we were actually *in* 1600, 1972, 1870, or you name it. I deemed my experiment in Time a success, although admittedly there were some very confused hippies in Agoura that day.
In a sense, my anachronistic 'philostopher', the postmodern state of sort of being and kind of nothingness, as evinced by all those pale souls who 'live' on the Internet, owes more to dislocation in Time and less, perhaps, to dislocation in Space. I remember an occasion when our boy Frankie appeared on a TV talk show in the early '70s. The shtick was, he pretended to be the interviewer as well as the subject, and his first question was, "What time is it?" A lot of people would like to know the answer to that question. It's too bad Frank was prevented from answering.
I, like you, have often wondered why I happened to be born in 1954 and not, say, in 1845. As I walk through Angelino Heights near downtown here, squinting until the hazy light assumes daguerreotype shading, I can almost hear the clopclop of hooves and the jingle of the bells on the tradesman's wagon. I go around to the mews behind the old frame houses and fancy I hear the tinkle of a piano from a parlor. I stand beneath a tall wrought iron lamppost, pull a furtive cigarette from my reticule, and dream of days when I would probably have been arrested for smoking in public. I'm sure had I been around in the 1880s, I would have been considered a thoroughgoing eccentric. But that's no different from the way I am now. For me, the past is a drug, and rather a dangerous one too, I fancy. I'm addicted to old clothes, old recipes, old music, old architecture, not because I'm a nostalgic, but because I value a certain human scale in those things. There's no such thing as a 'good old days', but that's doubly true today.
I suppose the height, or depth, of my fascination with the 19th century was in 1970, when I lived for four months in a miner's shack in Tombstone. Today Tombstone is a theme park, an antiseptic hologram of a rather dull past suitable for consumption by children and the feebleminded, but then it was a bleak, blighted, evocative agony of a ghost town, at once the loveliest and most horrendous place I had ever seen. I dwelt in my shack, cooked on a wood stove, used a chamber pot at night and the four-holer out back in the daytime, took weekly baths in an old metal tub by kerosene light, grew dustier by the minute. At night I sat in the Idle Hour saloon playing my guitar and singing old tunes like "The Curse of an Aching Heart" and "Don't Sit On My Hat, Boys" (the last popularized, it is said, by Texas Belle Giddens, the premier chorine at the Bird Cage Theater across Tough Nut Street). Sometimes I'd have an audience, but mostly not; there were few other residents, and those there were resembled my great uncle, then in his 80s and given to rambling anecdotes like the one about the poker game in 1903 in which he had won the entire municipality. I had no telephone, of course; the town had long since been cut off from the 20th century, or more correctly, it had never entered the 20th century. Mail service was erratic, but since I wrote no letters and expected none, that posed no problem for me. I was in heaven, there in that hell reading brittle yellow issues of the Tombstone Epitaph, riding on horseback through the defiles of Tombstone Canyon under the brazen sky, baking pans of saleratus biscuits for visitors who never came to Sunday dinner. But eventually I began to hear, first in my sleep, but later in my waking hours, the confused murmur of voices long gone hard-scrabble copper miners, Wobbly agitators, diamond-breastpinned nabobs, dance hall queens, rough-handed washerwomen, ranchmen and drifters and Apache mescaleros. The longer I stayed, the louder those voices grew. I was on the verge of beginning to talk back to them when a visit to my grandmother in Tucson one weekend elicited the comment, "You're goin' plumb locoed, honey, out there by yourself" the blow of the Zen master's rod which forced me back to 'reality'. And so I left Tombstone, but only in body. If people sometimes don't know what to make of me, maybe it's because I got 'plumb loco-ed' out there, like Don Quixote with his books of chivalry. Perhaps it's just a slightly more creative reaction to the maddening blankness of modern life who with half a brain wouldn't rather be Elizabeth Gurley Flynn than Madonna? And truly, the old fight goes on, even if in other costume, even if the mining companies have metamorphosed into multinational corporations, even if the windmills we tilt at have become electronic and are spinning faster and faster...we need to speed up our 'rates', that's all, in order to get in a good shot now and then.
Yours for the revolution --
Nigey
