But ... that little hint of Gould's being a visiting alien ...
Where does ethereal genius like Gould's and Mozart's come from?
Can any of us be so "scientific" that he or she would reply, "Although we may not yet have a perfect scientific explanation for such things, they are certainly all eventually entirely explicable at the biomolecular, even the genetic level." ?
I think we get Gould and Mozart and Faulkner and Pynchon and Theresa Stratas and Newton and Paganini and Billie Holiday as special gifts from a source beyond and independent of simple molecules. That's as far as I'm willing to go here; I'm not saying there's a benevolent Santa-Claus-like God who tosses these wonderful things our way by occasional whim and caprice. Would that these spectacular gifts were so easily explained even by theologians.
But when I consider how minor an influence colleges are to spectacularly moving writers, how minor an influence conservatory seems to me to have been to what Gould eventually made of himself ... Mozart blossomed into genius at barely kindergarten age ... I don't think the answer will ever be scientific or materialistic or even psychological. I think we'll always be gratefully teased and mystified that such people occasionally live among us. I think scientists who even ask these questions are wasting everyone's time. Part of the thrill is in never being able to know where the next Caruso will come from, or when. Abraham Lincoln came from an illiterate squalor and poverty we today can barely imagine.
On another recent thread ... any engineer who deliberately cut out The Hum from newly reissued Gould CDs ... this is an Evil Person. Simple as that. If there's any possibility that the more Gould we get, the less Hum ... well, Save The Hum!
Of course Gould communicated his love and mastery of this music through his fingers and feet ... but the childlike thrill of what he was experiencing that he communicated through The Hum ... I can't begin to describe the electric thrill it sent through me the first (and all subsequent) times I heard it. We can rarely read another's soul ... but when I hear him Hum ... this is a Happy, a Transported guy.
Bob
"Anne M. Marble" wrote:
From: Elmer Elevator <bobmer@javanet.com>>finally, there on the computer screen in front of the excited scientists, was:
<Snipping alien symbols>
>SEND MORE CHUCK BERRYAre you sure they didn't send the message, "We want more songs from
that guy who hums..."? I have this strange fear that if the aliens
come to earth, they're going to try to steal my Glenn Gould albums.
:->There was an anthology of stories speculating what would happen when
the aliens came in contact with Voyager. What would they think of us
after seeing and hearing that gold disc? Though I can't find the
anthology, I'm sure the stories range from, "Wow, what great music..."
to "Call the Postmaster, somebody sent us naked pictures!!!" And dare
I mention a possible plot line? The aliens whisper in amazement, "So
that's the planet Glenn decided to land on!" (Just kidding, just
kidding!)