Wow… I have so many different ideas roiling around in my head sometimes. I recently reread my favorite review of The Dark Knight. I can’t tell whether it’s amazingly astute or simply tongue in cheek. Nonetheless, it prompted an idea for a blog post. That idea is already a day old, so I may have lost some of the themes that were swirling around with it.
The rewiew of The Dark Knight ties together with some of the themes I’m picking up from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which I’m currently reading, and personal thoughts about healthy cultures which I’ve accumulated over the past few years.
My thoughts are basically this: that we (the US, and most of the first world) have no culture. That statement warrants some qualification because obviously anybody that looks for it is going to find art and music and literature. That’s not what the statement is referring to. What I save “have no culture” I’m referring to our mass culture. The shows, TV, news, etc., that most all of us have in common. And what I mean distinctly is the focus on negative culture as opposed to positive culture.
What does negative culture mean? It could mean a few different things. It could simply refer to celebration of the anti-hero or a focus on the dark, messy side of human nature. Or it could be vapid, mass-produced shlock that makes no real contribution to the average person’s quality of life.
However, negative culture seems to have a few key elements:
• It is non-participatory on the part of the general public
• It presents a dim or low view of human nature
• It is almost never a work of devotion, inspiration, or gratitude.
• When it does celebrate something, it is almost always destruction, avarice, apathy, or some other negative trait.
• It is more likely to provide the sense of a lack of meaning or purpose rather than the presence of it.
This characteristic of mass culture is a reflection of the society in which it resides, not of the normal state of culture or human nature. And the reason for this present state of society is the destruction of real culture that was to make way for the commoditization of things normally shared openly within the society.
Culture is not just some small part of the human experience, it is a very central part of human nature. To lack direct experience and participation in this process is to lack part of your humanity. My favorite quote on this comes from Chris Hedges in War is a Force That Gives us Meaning: “…reconciliation, self-awareness, and finally the humility that makes peaces possible come only when culture no longer serves a cause or a myth but the most precious and elusive of all human narritives – truth.” To understand how exactly any art form beyond literature could lead to truth, I turn to the eloquent words of Bill Holm:
I sink into the music of a particular composer as if I were a sleepwalker. For six months, nothing but Brahms, for another six, nothing but fugues of Hindemith. Then six on “Carolina Shout” and others by James P. Johnson, then another six on the old-man music of Liszt. I never “perform” these composers. I play them only in a room alone. After a while some little stone from the unconscious rises to the surface of the brain. Whoever I’ve been playing delivers to me some insight about my interior life formerly a complete mystery to my consciousness. Brahms became the composer of mourning I had neglected to accomplish. Hindemith puts me in order when some exterior chaos threatens me. Haydn calms my fear of death. Beethoven gives me courage to stand up to foolishness. Johnson, Morton, and Joplin remind me I have a body. Liszt reminds me not to talk too much or to practice too much charm lest silence and loneliness extract their final revenge. Now I have been playing Gabriel Faure for six months, the “Theme and Variations,” the late nocturnes and bar-caroles. His music writes me letters full of wisdom. A few words are already clear. Faure is stingy with his musical materials, but profligate with surface beauty. The beauty hides (from all but those who play him or who listen with the passionate attention of a Daoist mystic) the precise, even steely, mathematical logic and order inside his music. Those who do not like his music call it gray. It eschews climax, and , when others might thunder or whisper, his pieces generally end in a calm moderate voice. I think Faure’s letter to me says, “Be a little gray outside, it’s all right. Pay more attention to the currents running under the sea, less to the noise of big surf pounding rocks.” Bach, whom I play all the time, brings me God, or the gods, or something I have no idea how to describe. Neither did the poet Robert Bly.
Listening to Bach
There is someone inside this music
who is not well described by the names
Of Jesus, or Jehovah, or the Lord of Hosts!
Bach may be what the universe has in mind next.
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