RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,140
(playing baseball blind; pt. 1)
Life is a series of searches?
A series of seizures? A series
of approximations; a large
and complicated shadow-play
of shadows boxing on a wall?
I never determined an answer.
Never being satisfied with the
'conclusions' given, I always
moved forward for more. And,
by that, I learned the lesson
of 'Infinity' is. It's the wall
that keeps moving away from
you as you near it. It's the factor
by which life is never completed
and always left un-done. Proust
said that all 'self' is successively
different. I think that means that
over time we each become an
endless array of different things,
people, personalities, characters.
Perhaps. He then said that 'The
core is permanent, or should be;
the matrix.' We extend - as a
coral reef - accretions transforming
the contours. 'We are not actually
changed within - the kernel. We
are each a metamorphosis, but the
central being does not change.'
-
A lot of that was way out ahead
of me and, at the age I was, being
in a new place meant not taking
so many chances. If I were to
begin dropping thought bombs
of that nature on the people I was
with then, I'd have probably
gotten popped. The intensities
of that time and place went off
in other directions. Right next to
the Art Students League, up on
57th, was a place called The
Osborne. It was a really swanky
and eccentric apartment house.
I guess now it's called luxury
condos and such, by definition,
but in 1967 I didn't know squat
about real estate, so it was just
a bunch of apartments - all
huge and swaddled and many
with multi-layered formats, but
the people within were quite the
upper class of that day's society
anyway. What, say, the Chelsea
Hotel did for the super-hip, down
on 23rd Street, The Osborne did
for the Carnegie Hall crowd. Rich
and successful, these were real
performers and real achievers.
Matter of fact, they could probably
handle something like that far
more easily.
-
'Proust's intuition of himself as an
absolute entity, that is the verity.
The knowledge one must acquire
that nothing is forever save the
central truth. No love is forever,
but the idea of love is eternal.
The distortion of the self is a
continuous death. There is no
greater reference than to self.
All vanishes, and everything
is here...we are all obliterated,
but we are not gone.'
-
Pretty much, when I was 18, I
wanted to invent a new way of
language - not a new language,
but a new way. I tried, and my
outreach brought me numerous
new contacts and people; but
the actual effort was a failure.
Looking at it now, I see it as
much the same way as if, using
a computer keyboard as a
reference, there were new keys
added; single keys, but which
had on them many of the most
common double-letter uses, on
the same key. Since they are
used so much : like a key for
ei, in height, or weight, etc.;
or even ie, used in piece. Or,
say, br, as in bring or bright or
brown....see what I mean?
(ea, as in mean). It seemed
to me (ee, as in seem, esteem,
Noreen, redeem). It goes on;
you can do it. In any case, that
was the idea, though not the
mechanical aspect of it alone,
typewriters, computers and
keyboards for typing be damned.
It held to a connection with
something else, a higher plane,
in the same sense as Proust's
'core' of being. The idea was
was 'concept,' which I had
realized much earlier, as a 7
year old, in fact, first taking
piano lessons (begun, uproariously,
at 6 years old - once I'd 'learned'
the alphabet, my Mother felt
I was ready to 'learn' music.
The idea being that she'd heard
somewhere that piano keys
had letter equivalents and were
paired off to A - B - C, etc. To
her that had some logic and
sense to it. As she always put
it, 'If you learn piano, you'll
always be popular at parties
and dances.' Yeah, sure, Ma
(and there's that shadow-dance
again). Just me.
-
The idea, as I see it, that makes
a real difference in kids (people)
who learn music and the reading
of music notation early on has to
do with unseen worlds and 'concepts.'
To put it plainly, when you know
music you realize that physical
planes and places do exist outside
of the temporal structure and format
we know of physically. Conceptually,
the unseen dimension of sound is
entirely different, and it is able to
bridge invisible chasms - through
the use, oddly enough, of that same
over-and-over x-amounts of notes.
Which is pretty incredible, and also
which is much like life - and has
a lot to resemble too that 'new'
form of keyboard for typing tht
I mentioned. It's pretty much all
the same. Leaving my Mother and
her popularity-mad viewpoints
out of it, what separates a young
person with a musical knowledge
from others is the conceptual idea
that other realms exist. Music is
one of them and acts as an entry
point to fluid consciousness.
-
It was even weirder for me, for
I began this, for the first 2 years
or so, without an actual piano.
My Father had taken a long board
and painstakingly painted on it
the 88 keys, fully-sized, needed
to mimic a piano. I'd only actually
hear myself playing at the once
a week sessions when I wen to
the piano teacher's location, to
play on his real piano what I'd
been 'practicing' silently all
week. If you don't find that
weird, I'll vouch to you that it
was; and I ask you to think what
it did to my head. I was creating
multi-worlds of practice, imagined
sound which I'd only hear to any
satisfaction once, later that week.
These became, to me, actual
dimensional locations, places
of concept, as it were, which
at first only inhabited sound
values that I'd have to imagine
but never proof-out, until heard.
It was quite-very primitive. Like
playing, say, baseball blind? Or,
maybe even better, painting on
a paint-by-number canvas, blind.
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