WARNING: This discussion could be deadly!

[Birgitte Jorgensen <bj@kemmunet.net.mt>]

Would anyone (Anne M, Anne S, Bob M, David P, Kate, Valeria, and any
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.

It goes without saying that I reject the concept of Gould as a
non-communicative being, a conviction I share with many others on the
list, and this short article expounds the kind of theorizing that can so
easily turn into "evidence" for the case that Gould was psychologically
impaired, yet it also contains some medical findings that might (with a
bit of massaging) find its way into arguments of the opposing camp, so I
would be most interested in your responses.


Jim wrote:
>But really, I'm uncomfortable talking about Gould's personal life and
the
>nature of friendship (which I think of as something much deeper than
being
>on somebody's "guest list" or being invited to certain parties.)

I too am reluctant to dissect the intimate details of his private life.
What draws me to him is a profound interest in the MEANING of his life
and work, since they are but two sides of the same coin. Whether we
discuss his music/essays/radio documentaries/films from a scholarly,
technical perspective or in the philosophical, cultural context of his
life and times, the question that always begs to be answered is: HOW did
he do it? How does he elucidate the architecture of music (especially
Bach) with such soul-piercing clarity? And how does he manage to
penetrate each individual's psyche with such an intensely personal
message? It may very well have something to do with buffstops (thank
you, Bradley) and it may have something to do with his solitudinous
existence, or.. so many many other somethings we try to analyze here.
And, of course, that's exactly what will keep this list churning
indefinitely because his work and life are really this prismatic entity
that we can just keep twisting and turning and scrutinizing for clues.

Jim wrote:
>But who were his friends?  Who did he spend time with?  Who did he
>have what most of us would call intimate relationships with?
>Whose humanity did HE
>delve deeply into?  Who did he commit to?  What we're his reciprocal
>relationships?  Who could depend upon him?

Too many questions for one posting! The biographical literature abounds
with anecdotes of how deeply he cared both for his close lifelong
friends and mere acquaintances, as well as his enduring love for his
mother. (One striking example of his apparent loyalty as a friend: he is
literally begging John P.L. Roberts and his wife not to board a plane
about which he feels an ominous premonition. My interpretation: most
people would simply keep quiet and hope for the best; he risked ridicule
to prevent them from what he believed was imminent disaster. "Wrong"
behavior, perhaps, but the morally "right" thing to do from his
perspective.

Yet, for all his isolation, he was the consummate communicator in his
own inimitable and touching way, not only through his art but also, in
defiance of the iconic "Glenn Gould," in his face-to-face social
relations with people, as David P's friend Phyllis Curtin can no doubt
confirm. (By the way, is she related to the Curtin who is credited with
photos of Gould at the CBC?)

>  I think people often make bad decisions, decisions that hurt
>themselves and the people they are connected to and responsible for,
and
>that if those people had a better understanding of their condition,
their
>past present and future, then they wouldn't choose make those harmful
>decisions.

Bad for whom though? I think he accepted himself unjudgementally (at
least from the standpoint of his steadfast refusal to conform to other
people?s ideas of how he should behave) and I think we must extend him
the same courtesy and respect. I really don't see how a psychiatrist
could help him readjust his controls to suit socially sanctioned notions
of a normal, ordinary life. No question he was uncommon, and I?ll go out
on a limb and speculate that he never yearned to be "normal" even as
young boy.

>I also don't believe in the "people have total free will"
>position.  I think drugs, chemicals in the brain, the very structure of
the
>brain, our history with other people, our beliefs and the beliefs of
the
>people that raised us along with our peer groups limit and determine
what
>we "choose" to do, and sometimes those determining factors lead us to
>make bad decisions.  I look at GG's life and think he made a lot of
them.
>I'm also a firm believer in community and supportive groups
>and I don't see Gould as having belonged to them.

He just wasn?t a group thinker or a joiner type. He went his own way,
but that irrepressible spirit of independence doesn?t necessarily
translate into a rejection of the tenets or beliefs or values of groups
he didn?t actively take part in. And his reputation as a humanist does
stand up to scrutiny: it is well known that he bequeathed the bulk of
his estate to the Toronto Humane Society and The Salvation Army.

>I mean, from what I can tell he never had a significant intimate
>relationship with anyone.   No girl or boyfriend, no wife or
significant
>other.  Never!  Am I the only one who thinks that's strange?  The
question
>is rhetorical, by the way, because I know that most of the world is on
my
>side about this one.

Clearly he wasn?t the type to double air-kiss people upon first
introduction or cement his male friendships with bonding bear hugs, but
natural Canadian reserve and shyness isn't a pathology (at least I hope
it isn't, because I'm very shy) and there is a critical difference
between non-communicative isolation and creative solitude. It's the
difference between the Unabomber holed up in his Montana cabin plotting
to blow up the world and Gould the so-called hermit toiling away in his
private studio on art that would change and enlighten the world. To a
Manhattanite, Toronto might seem like a provinicial backwater, but the
locale in which he operated was not exactly a mountaintop in Tibet. Even
his beloved northern Ontario wilderness has motels.

>What I'm saying is I think Gould, from what I can tell  from my limited

>research, was never involved in a significant
inter-dependent/supportive
>relationship, and that lack of a deep reciprocal commissary
relationship is
>related to some oddities/problems in his personality.
>I haven't seen much evidence
>of his having what I would call "healthy" relationships with people.
I've
>never known a person as sequestered as Gould to not need some help.
?
>did he die early
>because he didn't get the help he needed?

It's true that he never had a lasting conventional domestic arrangement
(though not for lack of trying), but why should he seek outside
assistance for that? ("Herr Doktor, I don't have a wife or significant
live-in other. Please help me.") A person unable to conceive (pardon the
pun) that it?s quite possible to resign oneself to celibacy or
near-celibacy and still have a fulfilling life, might instead have
heartily recommended a dating service for him rather than a shrink. His
own solution seems to have been to pop a Valium, read theology, and
create great and lasting art. Not what I would regard as a solution
bereft of meaning when all is said and done. At least he pursued a
harmonious and anything but ascetic relationship with his art, which is
considerably more than most human beings ever accomplish.

Isn?t it possible that, rather than seeing his bachelorhood and an
absence of domestic bliss as evidence of his status as an emotional
cripple or  indicative of a failed social life, he was just unlucky in
love, too busy (given the immense size of the Gouldian oeuvre completed
by the age of 50 that's a reasonable excuse), and tragically
short-lived?

>Even celibate monks and nuns spend much time in each
>other's company, sacrificing much of their lives in intimate service
for the
>good of their god(s), religion and community.

The short retort is that I loved what Valeria wrote in her posting:

>Gould lived alone!
>But I'm not sure that  his only friend was the Music!
>Glenn Gould was a tender and human man.
>His feelings were strong, he has had many friends!
>He was an Artist who has chosen the loneliness, through the loneliness
he
>enriched his gift and us.
>So he has succeeded to be  a friend for many people in the World
>and we are
>his friends

Bellisimo! Especially the last part.

The point is he knew exactly who he was and never betrayed some secret
covenant he made with himself, from which he clearly drew a great deal
of personal strength, probably as early on as his pre-pubescent
childhood. At times that chosen life must have been a lonely place to
inhabit, but it was surely not without compensatory rapture and the
rewards of expanded consciousness. Self-knowledge is an indisputable
sign of mental health in my estimation. Such a rare mind, firing on all
cylinders (a few rocket boosters in the case of Gould's cerebral
arsenal), is unlikely to get ensnared in the banalities of everyday life
and its mundane expectations. Albert Einstein was forever getting lost
on the Princeton campus, yet he instinctively knew his way around the
cosmos.

Kate wrote:
>I agree that there was
>something "wrong"....but not in the sense that he was in any way at
fault,
>or that his aloneness was a conscious choice on his part. I think that
any
>"wrongness" in his nature was totally outside his control.

I would hesitate to ever use the word "wrong" to describe his behavior
or that of anyone else who displayed such a mastery of craft and such
profound interpretative skills.

I think a genius is by definition "abnormal" and so far out of the loop
that standard measuring sticks of "normalcy" simply do not apply. I
honestly don't understand what "wrong" means in the context of a force
like him, but let's assume, for the sake of argument, that his personal
life choices were "wrong" and that he didn?t know what was good for him
(as Jim suggests), and that his relationship with the world presented
itself as a "problem." If this was the case, then his "problems" were so
inextricably bound up with his creativity, his personality, and his
sense of self, that one could not even begin to separate those strands
without destroying his essence. How does one reconcile psychotherapy
with a condition of hypersensitive perception and cognition, and why
would one even attempt to "cure" the inherent idiosyncrasies of
brilliance and innate talent?

>Personally, I don?t think he ever experienced true joy,(I am not
talking
>about his art here)

Kate, this statement steamrolls me! Unless ecstasy doesn?t translate
into at least transitory happiness, I think his life was touched with as
much if not more joy, and not a little sorrow, than most of us
experience. Happiness is a notoriously individualistic pursuit, and one
far too prejudiced and elusive to amend or accede itself to impartial
criteria. Why should we insist so stridently that Gould was unhappy and
protest when he inexpediently refused to submit to this "fact" of his
life? I truly fail to comprehend why his purely propositional
unhappiness is such an imperative for those who simply can?t fathom how
anyone could be happy in his circumstances.

>I think that to understand Gould, we have to view him using his own
>standards, which are not necessarily ours.
>After
>all, if you dont _know_ that you are unhappy, then presumably ,in a
very
>real sense, you are not unhappy!

So, then? you agree he was happy? I think it?s the "if you don?t know
that you are unhappy" part that straitjackets the dependent clause. I
don't mean to suggest that you or anyone else on the list is attempting
to denigrate GG, since you so obviously cherish him, but I do find it
most curious that you can resort to the assumption that he forfeited
happiness by the act of not realizing he was unhappy!! We can insist
that as a prisoner of his bio-chemical configuration his free will and
determinism were matters of conjecture, but aren't we all stranded in
the same conundrum, constrained by the same push and pull factors?

>In an interview after his death, his cousin Jessie (who possibly was
his
>closest confidante) said that he was the loneliest man she had ever
met.

I choose to appropriate this as a statement of his inherent intellectual
isolation and otherness. With a mind like his, how could he be anything
but lonely and apart?

Was he lonely in a social or emotional sense? Perhaps, but who isn't in
the big picture? While lacking refuge in a comfortable marriage-like
relationship, he evidently found refuge in the bounty of his brain. I
get the impression he actually derived a visceral pleasure from the very
act of thinking, thinking without end. Undoubtedly it beat watching
another sitcom. An interesting example of Gould?s dilemma (that is, the
social burden of owning an extraordinary noggin) comes from the
technician Donald Logan who worked with him on some of his radio
documentaries: "Glenn, of course, was something of a perfectionist. He
had to work hard to stay down just as the rest of us had to work hard to
get up to the level he was trying to stay down to."

Well, on initial reading, this could be viewed as the ultimate in
arrogance and egotism, but if you believe he really was a genius in the
sense of having a superhuman cognitive ability relative to us mere
mortals, then I see this as a rather endearing and compassionate act on
his part. He demanded quite a lot from his friends in terms of pushing
them to their intellectual limits (not to mention subjecting them to
sleep deprivation), but the pressure he exerted on them makes sense in
the context of his genuine and even passionate need to forge links with
people, even if many of them were at one remove. At the very least, it
shows that he was willing to make concessions and meet halfway the
people he worked with, not merely so they could help him advance his
vision, but also for the pleasure of their company.

Did he enrich the lives of others? Yes, beautifully and immeasurably.
And, significantly, he was under no obligation to share his powers with
us; on the contrary, true hermits hoard everything for themselves. Did
he reach out to other people? Yes. Did he connect with them, and with
you? Yes and yes. So, where is the problem, I wonder? Bob M. has
commented frequently on this list that the world is so intimidated and
threatened by the separateness of genius, no matter how benign and
benevolent, that it is compelled to diminish it or hurt it. Anything but
try to understand it.

The philosopher/novelist Iris Murdoch, who recently died, with such
cruel inappropriateness, of Alzheimer?s, once wrote that there is
nothing we possess that cannot be broken or taken away from us.
Personally, I think Gould?s overwhelming, and at times immobilizing,
fear of death goes a long way toward explaining his hypochondria and
seclusion. But, there's no cure for death, so what is the point in
paying a therapist to put a psychoanalytical spin on the inescapable
prospect of personal annihilation? Who can blame a man fully cognizant
of being in possession of such a protean mind (and so thoroughly
enjoying the exercising of it) for dreading extinction? One of the
strangest and saddest attributes of human consciousness is that is
doesn't come equipped with any built-in certainty of immortality. That's
the tragedy of the human condition, and I find Gould?s recordings are a
powerful antidote for despair. (Is it possible that life is futile when
the universe can create from the void a Bach and a Gould and actually
bring them together for our contemplation?) Maybe its that famous
rhythmic drive that manages to keep the unbearable heaviness of being
from crushing us. Whatever it is (and I am determined to get to the
bottom of it), somehow his music relieves me of some of my own torment
and I suspect Gould performs the same legerdemain trick for all of you
out there. For a guy who?s considered a psychological and social
basketcase, that?s a pretty substantial gift he bestowed on humanity.

For whom did he sacrifice, you ask? As glib and inadvertently
evangelical as this may sound, he sacrificed not for Bach, but for all
of us, the listeners who share his pursuit of truth through musical
ideas. So, ultimately, I owe him something for being my
Muse/companion/teacher/inspiration, and for that reason I feel compelled
to defend his right to be Gould, whatever that may have meant to him.

Virginia Woolf said "The dead are at our mercy." Glenn Gould is dead
(and how heavily that word falls upon the page), and because his life is
a fait accompli, it's there to be probed and prodded and quite likely
misunderstood and misappropriated by those of us who, with the best of
intentions, subject him to our chilly gaze. Let's do him justice and
honour him by listening profoundly to his music and embracing his ideas.
Oh, and give him some credit for being so "right."

Birgitte