I have not posted for two months.
Every so often, I bob up for air, only to feel overwhelmed by the pace and the enormity of events - local, national and global. Then, gurgling and gasping, I drop below the waterline again.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine in 1776. It’s the first sentence in his series of revolutionary pamphlets called The Crisis.
Thomas Paine was very much a child of the Enlightenment. So were many of his contemporaries. The Enlightenment was the zeitgeist of the late 18th Century. It embraced a universalist belief that all knowledge and all opportunity should be available to all people, if they wanted to seek it. All people - regardless of age, gender, race, social class, national origin, economic status, ethnicity or religion - were capable of just about anything. The theme was, literally, one of limitless enlightenment, on both an individual and on a social level. Each person could pursue his or her own life, liberty and happiness. Out of your individual pursuit, so, too, would the society of humankind rise to new heights.
The zeitgeist of the Enlightenment is embodied in the “Ode to Joy,” Friedrich Schiller’s exuberantly optimistic poem that is the guts of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The spirit of the Enlightenment not only spawned the American War of Independence, but also the French Revolution, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the decolonization of India, and the best of music and literature of the 19th Century.
The Enlightenment was the leitmotif of the anti-colonial creation called the United States of America. In fact, the leitmotif of the Enlightenment was the basis for the inspirational language found in several of our foundational texts - the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the preamble to the Constitution.
Two and a half centuries later. We are very far from where we started. Very, very far.
Every so often, I bob up and gulp air, only to feel overwhelmed by the absolute twisted-ness and decay and evil that permeates the local, national and global scene. I cringe to read, to watch and to listen to “the news,” the propaganda, the distortions, the gladiatorial sports extravaganzas, the misinformation, the exaltation of might over right, the outright lies, the perversions of ethics and morality. It hurts to recognize that the “enlightened” country I was born into has become an unenlightened state where everything and everyone is for sale, hucksterism and hubris reign supreme, and only wealth and glamor and naked power are lauded. It hurts to know that we who have now undertaken to recolonize Cuba and South America, and who seek to continue oppressing the oppressed, keep company with the worst of the worst - despotic Saudi and UAE princelings; homicidal Zionists; servile political toadies and Quislings; deceivers, misleaders and exploiters; revanchists who want to ignite world war in the name of democracy, but with the actual aim of empire.
Every so often, I bob up, gulp air and then I go down again, gurgling, overwhelmed by the size of the waves of the storms that are blowing.
If the age of the Enlightenment were the times that tried men’s souls, then these are the times that turn our stomachs.
I am sure that western style ‘democracy’ does not lead to the promised land. The promised land is in our heads, in an enlightened society, if it lies anywhere at all.
Yet.
I see that the youth have risen and France is in flames again - peut-être une autre revolution? The unrest and the disgust is spreading across old Europe. The Albanians are in an uproar and revolting against western style cronyism! Young people around the globe have nurtured a growing sense of camaraderie, a growing sense of revulsion, and a common sense of a generational enlightenment. Iran still stands proud. It has shown that it can deliver a punch as well as take one. The Yemeni Ansar Allah have proven that courage and determination can defeat an illegitimate oil kingdom’s wealth and mercenaries. Despite all odds, Palestine is still there. Gaza, sorely beaten and bloodied, still stands and is not forgotten. Africa is tearing at its colonial dog collars. For obvious reasons, you aren’t reading or seeing the stories in the usual suspect places. Still, the seething is palpable. It is happening in real time, right now. You can find the stories if you look for them. It seems to be real.
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
Then there is still music - both written and imagined.
I spent a lot of time working on this tone poem for our trying times. That’s bad, of course, because I’ve discovered that the longer I work on something, the less appreciative the audience.
“The Hippo and the Platypus” is comprised of three tracks. It is meant to be bitter-sweet, the cheerful lilt of the recurring instrumental theme offset against the more somber words. I actually composed the guitar section about 50 years ago in the basement of my college dormitory in Munich, Germany. It’s keyed in A Major. A Major is a happy key - I can’t remember the last time I wrote a song in A Major! Certainly not since I became better aware of the truer political-economic contours of our world.
I dubbed a transverse flute accompaniment on top of the guitar. The flute is generated via a piano style keyboard using my E-Mu Proteus sampler. I used the open source digital music editor, Audacity, to tie things together. Finally, I added a vocal track - a free form poem - read in through a Shure SM 58 cardioid microphone piped through my Mackie 1202 mixer. The poem is spoken softly, like a persistent train of thought that bothers your subconscious while you listen to something else, something elsewhere, late at night, almost asleep, almost awake.
I think I recorded and discarded this at least 20 times over the last four weeks.
No artificial intelligence was used to create any part of this tone poem. (Well, you think, maybe it would have sounded better if I had!)
The Hippo and the Platypus:
For those who want to read while listening:
The Hippo and the Platypus So here we are, one quarter through the century; I see a gate; is that an entry or an exit? Do I go in, or out, or back, or up, or down? The road is very foggy, the signs are contradictory. The milestones get closer, The distances seem longer As the road gets ever narrower. Like a lab maze for a gerbil, Like a human hamster wheel. All the crossroads are just cloverleafs That take me back to where I started. I see no on-ramp; I see no off-ramp. No U-turns are permitted In this endless traffic circle. The hippo and the platypus don't have a lot in common. One is large and one is small, One has a mouth that's big and wide; the other has a bill, Neither looks much like an otter; In fact, the hippo and the platypus Don't look at all like one anudder. The rhino runs in Africa, The walrus swims in oceans; Like the ostrich and the humming bird, Some live alone, some in a flock or herd. But rhinos, birds and walruses, Hippos and platypuses, For all their oddball oddities, Don't seem to us absurd. The hippos and the walruses, rhinos and platypuses In nature co-exist And fill their various niches; So why do human beings, I ask, (At least their ruling classes) Behave like we're the animals, And act like sons of bitches? Of course, we're all just animals, Some with two legs, some with four - some insects have a whole lot more - The point is not that we're the same, The point is the point of the game; We evolve from one thing to the next And always stay the same in Nature's bigger context of animals being animals, Some with two legs some with four, Does anyone get off this road? Can anyone get through the door? A beatnik cat in a black beret and smoking a Gauloises, Came up and meowed to me a question: "Yo, human being, what's with you peeps, And toutes les chose you're doing? You're giving all us animaux some très mal indigestion!" "Par exemple," asked the cat of me, "Who are these chiens in Washington In London, Paris, Brussels, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, Warsaw, Berlin; Who bark and growl and drool? Have they got rabies? Distemper, mange, heartworm or scabies? Are these the leaders of your pack? Malhonnête, deceitful, ugly, cruel, The apex chiens in your gene pool?" A neighbor's German Shepherd Dog then talked with Cat and talked with me; He sniffed and pawed and disavowed Those top dog types around the world, "Sind keine Hunde," growled the hound, "Maybe they're just being human. They lie and cheat quite shamelessly, Their false flag ops are just shambolic Ways your top dog dogs remain on top Like power hungry dog-a-holics. Divide et imperium," growled the dog, "Your puppies only eat leftovers While all the top dogs live like hogs. This is how they build empires, With circus stunts, scapegoat villains, children's stories told by liars; The top dog dogs remain on top, The Epstein class, the parasites, War-mongering generals... They live well, Most other dogs just live in kennels." The crows and blue jays joined our talk And squawked: "everything just goes round and round and round; You humans, you once learned to fly, You've got machines and now AI, But for natural smarts, talk to a dog, a cat, a bird, a bug; You send rockets to the Moon and Mars, and you can buzz around; So smart, you think you are; so smug. And yet your head's stuck in the ground." So cawed the flock of crows and jays. Leonardo da Vinci, it's not hard to convince me That you and Galileo, Johannes Kepler and the rest Of the Enlightenment, from Joan of Arc to Jefferson to Voltaire and to Marx, from Spinoza on to Mao; from Einstein's relativities; thence to Heisenberg's uncertainties; That all of us are capable of being something better, something else. Cognito Ergo Sum? asked Descartes while scrolling through his cell phone, If you sum up all our cognitos, are we still dumb as rocks and stones? No, it's not hard to convince me, Leonardo da Vinci, That what you did the rest of us can too, If we want to, but we don't, and, really where's the evidence That we don't just evolve from one thing to the next And always stay in Nature's wider context Of just animals being animals, Some with two legs some with four, Is that evolution's bottle-neck? The real intelligence we seem to lack, To get us through that narrow door. One quarter through the century; We see a gate, but for the fog, Where it leads to we can't quite see. All crossroads now are cloverleafs That spiral back to earlier paths we've plowed. There's no way in, there's no way out, No U-turns are allowed. One quarter through the century The road signs contradict themselves. The fog has gotten thicker, The milestones seem closer, As the distances look longer But the road itself gets narrower. Like a maze that's made for gerbils, Like a human hamster wheel, In forever traffic circles, Endless grinding through the gears; One quarter through the century, A millennium of centuries, Fourteen million million years.