When I express dismay about posthumous threads conjecturing about GG's psychological inner life and infirmities ... my dismay comes partially from a frustration that some of us seem to be pandering to a tendency to look on human beings as Far Too Psychologically and Physiologically Fragile to Survive ... that all of us who got Bs or better in school have launched ourselves into an intellectual and emotional realm so vulnerable to a riot of psychic cancers that we have only days to live or to remain allowed out unsupervised.
Human beings in my view, the smart ones as well as the dull, are really much more tough, vigorous and resilient than that. We survived being stalked by sabre-toothed tigers. We can survive some loneliness. The lonely can survive social interaction or a weekly session on a couch.
If our blood pressure fluctuates -- well, it's supposed to, we evolved that way. I've been shot at (or bullets were thoughtlessly aimed in my general direction) a couple of times. It happened to Churchill when he was a young Boer War correspondent, and he wrote something like: "Being shot at, and missed, is one of the most invigorating experiences in the world." He's right -- to realize you're in mortal peril, and a second later to realize you're perfectly safe pumps you full of a fantastic cocktail of pressures and weird fight-flight-terror-pleasure hormones. Nobody dies from the blood pressure spike of being missed; you crawl or run from a very memorable, even positive experience. And if we can live, even thrive, through that, we can easily slide through the itty-bitty blood pressure spikes of conversation.
I guess I'd tolerate these mordant threads better if they were ever balanced by threads about "Glenn Gould's remarkable vigor and emotional and creative energy and stamina." I mean, remember why we're all here: because of the astonishing volume of remarkable things he accomplished and created. If this was a Shrinking Violet perpetually on the verge of momentarily expiring, I think we need to rethink our ideas about Shrinking Violets.
He died much too young and seemed to have some very bad hypochondriacal habits. So what is the point? Are we likely to create a Hygienic New World of great artists who also jog, work out, brush after every meal, treat their bodies as a temple, and have superb nutritional habits? I am standing on a chair here and looking to the horizon and I just do not see this happening. And all my experiences with the "my body is a temple" crowd don't give me much hope that from them we're going to get our next generation of Billie Holidays and Glenn Goulds and Jack Kerouacs and W.C. Fields and Janis Joplins and Jimi Hendrixes. I'm still convinced by the Hindu insight that Creation and Destruction are inseperable natural and psychic forces. Great artists are instinctively going to need and crave stimulations that you don't get at the gym or the veggie tea room.
As I've mentioned, I've had the thrill of retracing GG's "Idea of North" train trip to Hudson Bay -- this is not a trip for the faint of heart, it's an ancient, rugged train that's been in continuous service through the Canadian wilderness since the 1950s, and passengers leave most of the niceties of civilization behind as soon as it chugs out of Winnipeg. The five-day wilderness roundtrip, and the crude, challenging frontier destination town (with polar bears wandering the streets in season) are quite the ordeal. Yet Gould thrilled to it, and it inspired him to do some of his finest creative work in a field he was entirely unfamiliar with.
Oh -- the central experience on this elbow-to-elbow cramped, jammed old train (and most trains, that's why I love them) is that life-threatening Talk mentioned in Salon's current Theory du Jour. It goes on all day, and for those (like me) too thrilled to sleep, it goes on all night. Gould must have loved that aspect of it as much as I.
Of Salon -- as a longtime journalist, I'm very impressed by its hard-hitting accomplishments in investigative and muckracking journalism. It's gutsy, ballsy, fearless, irreverant, and many of its scoops have grabbed American and world headlines for very good reasons. But here it strays into that Silly Zone of trendy psychological theories that -- pardon my crystal ball -- will not be around to worry us for very long.
Is loneliness of itself a factor in health? Yes, it's well documented that living partnerless is a significant factor in lifespan and suicide. But those are statistics, and they have no bearing whatsoever on the experience of any particular individual.
And it must be pointed out that, far more than most lonely people, Gould chose most of his loneliness. He was never forgotten or abandoned in a lonely old age; to the last year of his life, he could pick up the phone and order up the respectful, worshipful company of hundreds of stimulating, intelligent people as easily as I can order a pizza.
He had other needs in his personal and creative life. To argue otherwise is to champion the "Normal" theory of human existence and interaction that so irks me in the context of these discussions of Gould's personal and inner life. Just as we would be very wise not to expect to "understand" the life and customs of an aboriginal village, we need to back off from our negative responses to not fully understanding Gould. I see him as a guy who just refused to take Life off the rack -- he liked to roll his own, to hand-make many aspects of day-to-day life that most of us are content to get off the assembly line. Except to the timidly conformist, non-conformity is not a pathology. Or, rather, I am increasingly uncomfortable living in a world that increasingly views non-conformity as pathology.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the most shocking aspect of Gould's musical career -- his abandoning the concert stage. A plane trip to a distant city and a few nights enjoying room service in a fine hotel are an occasional delight. But no one on this list has ever discussed what a horrible drubbing a regular lifetime of this kind of life actually is for the concert artists who have to submit to it 300 times a year. The finest hotel is NOT your home and familiar surroundings. Your food may be excellent (read: lots of fat and sugar), but every dish is either unfamiliar or cooked otherwise from how you like it. The mattress and pillows are doomed to be expensively wrong. The loneliness in a hotel room at night is a hundred times more unpleasant than the loneliness of your own home on a sleepless night.
I don't fear flying, but to me, it's not Travel in any nice or exciting sense -- it's being mass-processed at a hectic, frenzied pace by a huge, rude, abrasive, scary, noisy industry (which saves money by recycling stale cabin air which makes people quite sick). Gould's choice to leave the concert circuit may have shocked the music world, but I'll bet insiders, people like Andre Watts, understood it perfectly and probably envied Gould's being able to get away with it. Gould made a brilliant, courageous choice for his health and sanity. Those who insist the live concert experience is seminally important to classical music and performance are right in some sort of traditional sense -- but ignore the savage personal price world touring demands of an artist.
Harumph! And I hope all of you are having an enjoyable, laid-back summer. Birgitte -- when's that big gathering of the Malta GG Fan Club? Can I still get reservations?
Bob
Birgitte Jorgensen wrote:
Would anyone (Anne M, Anne S, Bob M, David P, Kate, Valeria, and any<snip -- but i read the Salon article>
others I've not heard from but would like to) care to read and comment
on this article vis-a-vis GG? (I am excusing you, Jim, because you have
gentlemanly eliminated yourself from further participation in this
debate in favour of discussing claviorgans and buffers.)http://www.salon.com/health/books/2000/07/05/lonely/index.html
Titled "Can Talking Kill You?" it's a provocative piece that suggests
lonely people, or people who isolate themselves and have problems
communicating, are a medical menace to themselves whenever they engage
in discussion with others, especially psychiatrists, about matters of
self import. The theory is that the elevated blood pressure which
accompanies even casual self-revelation results in accumulative and
insidious damage to arteries and cardiac tissue. The contention is that
talk-therapy may actually be detrimental for such people.