[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: solitude
A thing to remember about all those
"lonely Glenn Gould" photos ... all of them were taken with his
cooperation, he posed very consciously for them, they reflected an image of
himself that he wanted to show to the world. I don't think it was exactly
trickery or a scam; it was one very authentic face of GG -- but the public image
of the lonely, tormented, artist and genius (think Beethoven) is a very romantic
and attractive image, over the centuries it's helped sell more than a few albums
and paintings and fill up more than a few theater audiences.
(It's also real good for getting dates
if you're a manipulative cad who preys on the unsophisticated, but I don't think
GG ever used it that way.)
My career has been in newspapers, and
over the years reporters get very sensitive to the ways celebrities very
carefully present themselves to the public. I think GG was unusually careful and
conscious and controlling of the way he permitted the public to see him. He was
also very conscious, I think, of the old show-business adage of showing less of
himself to the world rather than too much. Getting a public glimpse of GG was a
very rare thing, somewhat like spotting the ivory-billed woodpecker, and that
made it a very memorable and valuable thing. Compare this to other entertainment
figures whom you see so much of everywhere that you become tired of seeing them
and wish you could see less of them.
Yes, those joyous moments of
conducting, and those joyous hums while performing. GG's life was overflowing
with joy and rapture -- just not in the ordinary ways of happiness and pleasure
that most people are "trained" to call happiness and
pleasure.
Exactly how or why GG first drifted
toward solitude as a young man I don't know. But eventually a lot of it ceased
to be subconscious and unconscious, and he began thinking about "the idea
of solitude" very consciously, and wanted to consider and explore it very
consciously.
One of the pivotal conversations in
"The Idea of North" is about this business of human closeness among
people who choose to live in the Canadian Arctic. A Canadian Arcticer says that
most people just assume people choose to live in these remote, isolated
wilderness places because they dislike people and want a lot of isolation from
them. But the actual experience of wilderness living is quite different: You
actually are far more intimate with your (few) neighbors than Toronto people are
with their many neighbors. In the wilderness, your very life and survival
depends on your neighbors. In Toronto, you may have hundreds of neighbors whom
you see and recognize every day. But most of them are really very remote
strangers to you, almost nothing of any substance passes between you and them as
you rub elbows in elevators and public transportation. In the wilderness, quite
the opposite: Getting along with and intimately knowing your neighbor is a
matter of Life and Death for him or her and for you at least once a
year.
Our modern urban and suburban
experiences with total solitude are rare. But that's not the way everywhere and
at all times. Early Christianity was a legendary time of mystic hermits who fled
to the desert to pursue their vision of closeness to God; Eastern mystics living
in caves as they seek the Meaning of Life are almost a joke cliche to
Westerners. The Old and New Testament are rich in stories of people seeking God
-- usually successfully -- in extreme solitude.
In fact, from living in downtown
Toronto to living in the Arctic, the Antarctic or the Sahara, there's a fluid,
continuous spectrum of human needs about closeness and distance with other
humans; and in just one single life, there are years of thriving in the midst of
a crowd, and years of deep need for solitude. When the frantic city businessman
whose ear is glued to his cell phone 24/7/365 takes his holiday to fish for
trout totally alone on an isolated lake, he expresses both needs in a single
personality and a single year. Another common millionaire's passion is sailing
solo across an ocean or around the world. It's synthetic and misleading to say that the isolation is a pathology or
an aberration, but the crowd is the normal human state of things. Our schools
train us to be functional units of the crowd; our souls scream to flee to the
woods.
Like the religious mystic --
exactly like the religious mystic -- the truly creative personality
craves and needs and seeks extreme experiences so that he or she can reach
mental, spiritual and intellectual realms that are not available in ordinary,
day-to-day life. Solitude is one of these classic creative experiences. A lot of
you probably know what the MacDowell Colony is -- a dozen or two tiny, austere,
very isolated cabins in the New Hampshire woods for musicians, writers, poets,
painters. At night they all meet in the Big Log House for meals and chat -- if
they want. But mainly what MacDowell offers is the Garbo experience: "I
want to be left alone." To compose. To write. To paint. To think. To dream.
Other classic creative experiences
include liquor and drugs, just a binge now and then, or as a lifelong addiction.
You can decry it, you can condemn it, you can demand an immediate stop to it,
but the list of great creative artists who've used these things either to dull
the pain of This Realm, or to reach Other Realms, is a very long and
distinguished list.
I love every film instant of W.C.
Fields. It's very hard while I'm rolling around on the floor and crying in
hysterical laughter to remember that he was a lifelong dypsomaniac. In a nursing
home a few weeks before he died, his mistress asked him if he'd have done
anything differently. He thought for a moment and said, "I'd like to see
what it would have been like without alcohol." What's scary is, with
Fields, I really don't know. Totally lifelong sober, he might not have been
funny at all. He might not even have been a particularly good juggler; he was
universally acknowledged the greatest juggler in the world.
Who knows what's strange? Who knows
what's normal?
Bob / Elmer
>> Elmer wrote
>> > "I think
if we try to evaluate his life from our experience and
>> >our
standards, we're doomed to come to the wrong
conclusions."
>>
>> Exactly. The problem is that we are
trying to evaluate his life in
>> accordance with our own ideas and
standards of what is "normal".
>
>Furthermore, I do not
think Gould's case is something *special*. I would never
>call a lonely
man unhappy, even if he is not rich and famous as Gould. It's as
>simple
as some people being introverts and enjoying every minute of
their
>loneliness or aloneness.
>
>If a person wants bad to be
in the public and can't achieve it, his life may be
>sad. But if a person
consciously chooses to live in a hut deep in a forest, how
>can we judge
him?
>
>Juozas Rimas Jr (not the one playing)
>http://www.mp3.com/juozasrimas (oboe,
piano, strings)
>