Cool Titles

I've started reading books mainly cause they have cool titles.  Like, I'm finishing "Violence and the Sacred," by Rene Girard right now.  What's it about?  Does it really matter?  It's called "Violence and the Sacred," what does it need to be about?  Something something mimetic desire and the monstrous double, the inherent rivalry that rises as difference disappears, the pharmokon that is both the poison and the cure, the scapegoat that short-circuits the endless cycle of retributive violence, critiques of Freud, Levi-Strauss, Sophocles, yadda yadda yadda.

And the tome does have some potentially illuminating insights on real world issues--the Croats and the Serbs, for example, have mutually intelligible languages, their tongues are more closely related than the various dialects of Italian, or of Chinese, or even between Spanish and Portuguese.  Yet the Croats and the Serbs don't exactly get along.  The Uzbeks and the Tajiks are also incredibly similar groups that are at each others' throats.  So why all this hatred between such similar groups?  Girard would argue that it's precisely because they are so similar that there's so much rivalry.

The fewer differences there are between two groups, the greater the significance of the differences that do exist--e.g. in Northern Ireland, your pronunciation of the letter h is what gives you away as Protestant or Catholic, and heaven help you if you wander into the wrong neighborhood in Belfast.  Same goes for Israel/Palestine, a region fought over desperately by two Semetic groups of a common Abrahamic heritage.  The problem, I believe Girard would say, isn't that they're so different--oh goodness no, it's that they're so much the same!  You'd think that these two religious traditions would understand the atoning need for a scapegoat, a pharmakos to short-circuit the endless cycle of violence, above all others.  But as Girard points out in his reading of "Oedipus Rex," it is precisely the one who is too close to the violence who is least able to observe one's key role in it.  Oedipus, recall, didn't realize the tragedy he had been inadvertently causing all along until it was too late.

Girard then worries about how similar we are all becoming today--thanks to mass-markets and globalization, the world is more alike than it ever was before.  My Mom, I remember, was opposed to the formation of the E.U. for strictly cultural reasons, because of how she feared the Euro would erase the continent's rich cultural distinctions, and lead to the McDonaldization of Europe as had already sadly happened in America.  One of my roommates believes that Western culture was the first casualty of globalization, the same Borg-like force that now goes about assimilating the cultural-distinctiveness of other civilizations. 

As globalization erases differences, then rivalry for the same finite resources increases.  The nations of Europe were so economically-interconnected that they assumed World War I could never happen.  The U.S.'s biggest trade partner before WWII was Japan.  For Girard, globalization is not encouraging but frightening, an erasure of difference and distinctiveness that begets ever increasing violence, a violence that primitive people genuinely feared could consume and wipe-out entire communities, a fear not lessened but accentuated by modern man, especially with the pall of thermonuclear holocaust still hanging over us all. 

Clear back in 1972, Girard saw how similar we were all becoming--and we still had the Soviet Union as a counter-culture to the West.  But then, as Milan Kundera makes clear in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," the Soviet Union was a very conformist-heavy regime, inflicting a debilitating sameness on everything.  But the West, however, with its mass-fashion-movements, commodification of dissent, dress-codes, obsession with "marketability," Houses of Un-American Activities, and large, gray, square, uniform, unimaginative Borg-cubes for buildings, is surely not less conformist.  It is a difference not of kind, but of degree--the Soviets enforced conformity at gun-point, the West merely enforces conformity through market pressures.  But the end-result of both is an erasure of difference, which, says Girard, does not increase societal cohesion, but destabilizes it. 

But in the end, I read "Violence and the Sacred" not to enlighten me on current sociopolitical problems, but because "Violence and the Sacred" is a frickin' cool title.  I'm next going to read "Anti-Oedipus," the first volume in "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," because hey, with a title like that, why wouldn't I read it? 

Emerson and Silence

So first Sunday of every month, we LDS types have at church what's effectively open-mic night--no planned sermons, no assigned talks, just anyone and everyone who's there can get up and speak "as the spirit moves" them.  And just like other open-mics, you get quite the eclectic grab-bag of participants: mostly generic, lots of repetition (especially from the kids), lots of self-consciousness, some achingly heart-felt, some ramblers, some funny, some unintentionally funny, a few who miss the whole point...and then once in awhile, if you're really lucky, some truly, crazy, wild testifying comes across the microphone that sets your hairs on end--not often mind you, but just enough to keep you comin'.

It's hard to be too hard on any of these folks, really--everyone who testifies puts themselves out there, makes themselves vulnerable, in front of both their peers and strangers, not for fame and certainly not for money, awkwardly trying to express the inexpressible. 

There are days, though, that I wish we really were like, say, some Southern Baptist congregation, with some bona fide testifyin'!  I had a mission companion who served on St. Croix, and he told me that the LDS branch out there is so new, that everyone's a convert, many from Evangelical faiths, and when it comes to the first Sunday of the month, these folks get up and shout out, without self-consciousness and without guile, "I knooooow that Joseph Smith was a prophet o' da Lord!" "Amen, brutha!" someone will shout back.  "And I done do testify that the Book o' Mormon is da word o' God!"  "Ow!" "Preach it!" "Hallelujah!" come the call-backs.  "I done got the spirit!" someone else will shout. Oh my mercy, I would love to see that in Utah.

Of course, at the same time, no Mormon I know is Mormon due to theatrics--"I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching," wrote Emerson, and I think I know what he means.  We done got the Spirit too, I believe--at least, I can't think of a believing Mormon who is so otherwise--but it's something we sit in silence of, in awe of.  In fact, I would love to sit in a Sacrament meeting where precisely that happens: silence.  So many of the more awkward testimonies that come up, I believe, come up out of a sense of mere social awkwardness, that, well, someone's got to break the intolerable silence, and guilt-ridden, they trot up to the stand, like they're paying for their sins or completing a duty.

Well, to paraphrase Emerson again, these folks "do what is called a good action...much as they would pay a fine.  Their works are done as an apology...Their virtues are penances.  I do not wish to expiate, but to live."  Only approach the mic if you have something to say--and if we pass 2, 3, 5, 10 minutes in silence, well, what of that?  Whence cometh this strange American intolerance of silence?  Don't fear the silence, embrace it, enjoy it, be filled by it--who knows, we may find that, like Emerson, we will enjoy such a service better than any preaching.

Claude Debussy

So, ya'll know already that itunes is a rip-off, right?  Amazon.com has a much cheaper 1-click-purchase mp3 store, one that offers the same massive music library for (often significantly) cheaper than the same titles on itunes. All your amazon purchases are even automatically saved into the cloud, it's marvelous.  How Apple's itune store stays in business is simply a triumph of marketing, because their business model sucks.

Of Amazon's many perks, the spiffiest I've found of late is that they currently offer entire 100-song collections of the masters of Classical music for only $1.99.  That's right, for 2 bucks, you can own 10+ hours of, say, Mozart, or Bach, or Beethoven--and professionally recordings at that!  You're guaranteed to own all the best known--or even barely known--masterpieces of each respective composer, and then some, all at bargain-basement prices and saving you the hard work of trying to figure out and gather on your own the best pieces of these artists.

I hate to sound like a salesman, but these collections are seriously breath-taking--and if these collections are pulled from amazon due to lack of downloads on all ya'lls parts, I'll be seriously pissed.

It's through these collections, for example, that Claude Debussy has officially become my new favorite composer.  It used to be Beethoven, then Tchaikovsky, and I've certainly warmed to Mozart over the years (as would please my mother).  But sweet merciful heavens, Debussy overwhelms me!  Have you given "Nocturnes, L 91 III. Sirens" a listen lately?  I never understood how Odysseus's men in The Odyssey could be tempted to crash their ships on a mermaid's song; but if these sirens' sounded anything like Debussy's...Mercy, I'm listening to it right now, and am so overcome that I feel an urge to throw myself upon the ocean rocks as we speak.

I also never quite understood the cliche of how a music piece can "transport" you until I heard "Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faun."  Even when he's just jamming on the piano he's amazing: witness for example his Arabesque #2, justly used as the outro-theme for that lovable goofball Jack Horkheimer's stargazer show.  I learned Clair de Lune on the piano about 7 years ago (again, to remember my later mother), and even through my own many, stumbling, imperfect renditions, that piece still has the uncanny ability to move me, near to tears (shame that it's best known today merely as the ending montage score to Ocean's 11). 

And as I've delved deeper into this 100-song set, I can testify that all I've cited thus far is but the tip of the iceberg.  The man was a phenomenon.

The hell is it with this Debussy guy, anyways?!  I mentioned once that my trip to France a year ago left me borderline enraged--they make us look bad you see, what with their dazzling architecture, world-class art, delicious food, stylish people, and beautiful language that is as sweet honey on the ears--and I guess if all that wasn't enough, they had to produce Debussy, too!  The guy was so good he appeared on their 20-franc note before the debut of the Euro. 

The man is artistic experimentation done right--not novelty for its own sake, not boundary pushing just to push boundaries (though all that has its place), but experimentation specifically to make things even more beautiful.  He opens your ears and eyes to sensations you didn't even know were possible, to sounds you weren't aware could exist but now you can't conceive of a world where they don't.  He challenges you, not through some facile project to discomfit the audience, but by showing how much beauty is possible beyond the standard structures. 

He's what I might aspire to emulate as an artist, save that he Debussy didn't become Debussy by emulating others.  Even a century later, he still feels like something strange, something new, yet also something that always should have existed...