|
Hi List!
Jost (who makes me very nervous because he knows so much
damn stuff and is so damned smart, I was not, as he
suspects, being ironic) accidentally went Off-List
with this thread, and now asks me to put it back On-List.
Please send all small children (large children can remain)
out of the room before you get down to my reply about the Hildesheimer
biography of Mozart. If not Hildesheimer, as Jost says, can anyone remind
me which (originally German-language) Mozart biography I'm remembering?
I seem to recall (not directly!) that it must have been originally published
in German in the 1920s or so when Freud was still alive. (The bio I read
was borrowed, and I made the mistake of returning it to its owner.)
=====================
Jost writes:
=====================
I don't want to know that GG has been in bed with Monika Levinsky on
april the 1st from 3 to 6 am and all the rest, up to the resumée
that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But then again the very fact contributes
to the picture of the personality, to a better unerstanding of the inner
conditions of that very personality, and in the end to a better understanding
of why and how he did something this, and something the other way. Where
is the borderline between gossip and intelligence? Any fact is meaningless
as long as it can't be related and valorized within a coherent picture.
As so often the purpose marks the borderline. It doesn't matter if this
or that artist is gay or not. But how that fact is received and feeds back
his/her self-awareness matters a lot. Maybe some of you know Hildesheimer's
book on Mozart. Hildesheimer was a psychoanalytically
trained german writer who wrote a book about Mozart from an angle which
said a) Mozart lived in a prepsychologic time and might have felt things
untintelligently different to our antennas, b) next to nothing personal
(i.e. understandbly different from rhetoric commonplace language) comments
of Mozart are left, c) the collective memory has been falsified by every
witness for their very own reasons, so we can d) only try to conclude by
what seems probable and likly. Following Mozarts marriage to Constanze,
in this context, tells us a lot about how the time defined marriage and
its variants and to which extent the individuals defined themselves within
these patterns, as far as can be concluded from the so-far-away distant
of today's society. In a feedback this might help us to a better understanding
of certain rhetoric figures in f.i. opera drama. So, no way for gossip
on its own. But great importance for a conlusion from the pars to the toto.
I understand Elmer's intervention as an implicite comment on the current
perverseness of Big Brother and its implications for society, and
I understand Jim's intervention as profiling an individuals picture, an
individual, that can't reclaim total discretion after having decided to
function partly in public and thus - to a certain degree being of public
interest (in the above scetched way, in which I read Kim's post). Jost
========================
Elmer replies:
========================
SUBJECT: Bob = Not Subtle
Jost = Subtle
Jost Ammon wrote:
> Maybe some of you know Hildesheimer's book on Mozart.
Wie Gehts Jost!
Ach meine liebe Gott, is this the Buch that says in the
introduction:
"All contemporary authorities, including Dr. Sigmund
Freud, who have
examined Mozart's correspondence have concluded that
Mozart was a
coprophiliac."
I was so upset by this, because I knew it was some kind
of perversion, but I had
never heard of it before and so had to look it up in
the dictionary. (I thought I at
least knew all the perversions.) This was soooooo much
more than I wanted to
know. (Now I realize there are slight hints in the dialogue
of Schaffer's "Amadeus"
when Mozart first meets Constanze.)
Yes, my post was Not Subtle about these issues, but your
post is more subtle and
balanced. Particularly you hit die Nagel on der Kopf
when you write:
Where is the borderline between gossip and intelligence?
The trouble for me is that so few people today seem to
have any grasp for this
borderline, they want to know so much about every accomplished
human being
that the entire concept of privacy -- and its handmaiden
dignity, I think dignity (or
the illusion of dignity) is as necessary to human beings
as oxygen -- is destroyed.
Jost -- I need to tell you this -- your posts scare me,
you are SO DAMNED
SMART and you KNOW SO MUCH DAMNED STUFF!!!
Yours,
Bob / Elmer
P.S. Sorry about my pathetic Deutsches. I studied Latin.
All I know is
Wurstundeisenbahndeutsches.
===================
Jost writes:
===================
Hey Bob,
I still have to get used to this list's settings. the post was meant
onlist, but since I only hit the reply
key it went exclusivley to you. Do you mind posting it ex post to the
list?
And I didn't think you weren't subtle. You have made your point transparently
and intelligeable. No
flaws in your thoughts. the matter simply is ambivalent.
I don't think your quote comes from Hildesheimer. I can't recall him
refer to "Dr. Freud", if so, only
implicitely. He talked sure about scatologic turns in Mozart verbal
ductus, but as I've said, not for
the scoop but to assess his state of mind with all reserve for what
we don't know and what we fail
to see correctly. Hildesheimer was a novelist btw, at times very surreal
and a real thinker, a very
human. His Mozart book influenced me like no other thing, except for
interpretating Monet's late
nymphéas. It follows the principle only to take into account
what can be valorised and put into
relation and to conclude that you don't see anything as long as you
can't proceed in this way.
And thank you for your flowers. If you weren't ironic I'd like to ask
you not be scared by any
posts coming from my pathetic knowledge of things. Maybe these posts
are a last, soft and
desperate call against a stormy downhill ride of culture, education
and - as the essence of it all -
humanity. But isn't the attempt honorable, no necessary? BTW - one
of Hildesheimer's stories was
titled "Der Untergang einer Welt" (the srepuscule of a world).
And thus you're damned right about dignity, nothing to add, besides
the question if you watched
Wim Wender's Buena Vista Soacial Club, the music of which is secondary,
an exemple, but its
primary message is to ask about dignity of our western capitalist culture
by putting the picture of a
totally ran down and empovered society, which has at least kept its
dignity, aside. No hymn to
poverty or such a crap, not at all, but a question of what we seem
so sure of about ourselves.
Bob=subtle!
Jost
|