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Sex & Death. Chapter 1. Sex.
Okay okay I declined to leap in when we
were actually in media res about Glenn's love life, known or hypothetical. But
finally these last few posts have lassoed my fingers.
First of all, I'd like to give all
posters who did post about GG's romantic life a gift certificate to the Miss
Florence Diner
because the whole damned dialogue was
done with (IMHO) exquisite good taste and thoughtfulness.
What did Goethe say? "The only
things for persons of intelligence to talk about are Sex and Death." Sooner
or later, F_Minor had to Go There, but when we finally did, we didn't go there
like slobbering voyeurs. We went there with an unusual degree of respect and
good manners (as transom-peepers go).
I'm told that East Asia has an entirely
different culture of sexuality from Europe and North America, particularly from
those Western parts heavily laden with Calvinism/Puritanism. I'm curious to know
how East Asian Glenn devotees view this whole subject.
I can imagine (but just barely, I live
in the USA where All Fun carries serious criminal sanctions) a culture where
talking about Glenn's Favorite Sex is no more taboo or laden with land mines
than talking about Glenn's Favorite Food. Or maybe there's a culture on some
planet that talks about GG's sexuality constantly, but would be deeply offended
if anyone mentioned his nutritional preferences.
(Saturday Night Live used to have a
skit about The Planet Where Everyone Tells The Truth All The Time, very
ordinary-seeming office workers around the water cooler saying the most bizarre
things to one another. Then in "Jumpin' Jack Flash," villains shot
Whoopi Goldberg up with Truth Serum, but she escaped, and for the next hour,
interacted in the oddest ways with strangers, her friends and her co-workers
...)
I don't think Glenn Gould intentionally
*chose* solitude to the degree his life ended up seeming to consist of (as far
as we've ended up knowing about it). He was unusually cerebral, and undoubtedly
cherished big blocks of Alone Time, but we shouldn't forget that he was also a
member of our species, and like it or not, we're a social species. I'd say only
one in 10,000 human beings truly ends up an anti-social hermit who moves to the
equivalent of a Yukon mining cabin or a cave.
And then there are the False Hermits --
they live in the remote cabin, but if another person wanders by, they drag him
inside and talk him to death all night. GG and his middle-of-the-night phone
calls seem a lot closer to the False Hermit model. Part of GG's charm for me are
the goofy ways he satisfied his need for a lot of human contact.
In "The Idea of North," one
of the train travellers remarks that most people think that people who choose to
live in the Arctic do so to get away from people, but in reality, life in the
wilderness far more critically depends on intimate relationships with your few
neighbors than life in the big city with your thousands of neighbors. That was a
piece of dialogue that GG chose to keep, not to snip out and
discard.
For the rest of us, our
"default" emotional needs sooner or later gravitate to social contact.
We perhaps overlook that even after retreating to the studio in his musical
life, that meant (if only by labor union regulations) constantly being in very
close contact with an inevitable five to twenty team members; producing
commercial recordings is very like being a member of a sports team. Maybe
there's a star, like a baseball pitcher or American/Canadian football
quarterback, but you still need the whole team, and the star soon learns that he
can't over-prima-donna and annoy or dimiss or disrespect the other team members,
or the final product reflects the low team morale.
And then there's romance and then
there's sex.
I doubt that what follows is an
Original Insight. Nobody drives a 20-cylinder high-performance Creative (or
political) Ego through life without a sizeable Sex Drive. Even in the Puritan
West, you're lucky if you can keep a brilliant and accomplished artist of either
gender limited to One At A Time, or Within the Bonds of Wedlock.
For insight into this, I think we're
better off consulting Wilhelm Reich than John Calvin. Although I think Calvin
knew about human appetites as well as Reich; he was just agin 'em.
It's a synthetic and false intellectual
and educational construct that one's Sex and Romantic Life is one thing, and
one's Creative Life is quite another, separate thing. In truly creative and
brilliant creeative artists, life is pretty much a very sloppy continuous
spillover from the canvas to the linen. I think a lot of us would be shocked at
the difference between a scholar's biography of a great artist or musician, and
the memoirs of that artist/musician by a close friend who was also a great
artist/musician.
I suspect GG was just unusually
frightened about romantic and sexual intimacy. There's a lot of ways this
happens to a person without having to resort to any pathological explanation.
When unusually sensitive people "get burned" in romance -- either
because they were accepted or rejected -- it can take a very long time to
"start dating" again, and some just never recover the courage to do it
again.
(In one of the "Airplane"
movies, the pilot and stewardess break up, and the pilot starts to launch
himself into outer space. When the stewardess asks what he's doing, he replies:
"You don't understand, Elaine -- I can't hack the singles scene
again.")
Great courage and great timidity very
often dwell inside the same creative personality.
Then there's also, in some romantic
individuals, the never-ending quest for romantic perfection, the search for The
Perfect Soulmate.
Uhhhh ... TPS isn't really Out There,
there is no such person.
The closest you get is your interior
perception of your lover's Imago -- the entity of your lover who dwells within
your mind, stretched and tinted from the actual to the perceived as your heart
requires your lover to be. (That's intended to be a much nicer way of saying
that sooner or later, we all have to "settle" for the real estate
broker instead of the Prince, for Irene Zilchmeyer rather than Uma
Thurman.)
Some women search for a male as Perfect
as Daddy was; some men measure each woman against Mom. Mom and Dad (as we
remember them from a nine-year-old's perspective) are very hard acts to follow.
As the years go by, this can become a pathology, where the search for romantic
perfection conceals an underlying fear of intimacy and
relationship.
I think where GG dreaded being burned
or rejected, or perhaps sought but never found The Perfect Soulmate, he did
"sublimate" and learn to "satisfy" much of his romantic
longings in the music he loved and performed. For me, just listening to some of
his passages reminds me most closely, of all human experiences, to romantic,
sexual or religious rapture. For a master of technique, I know of no GG
recording that strikes me as technically cold or emotionless; his body of
recordings overflows with the lush, the lurid, with emotional abandon and
thrill. (If you don't instantly recognize it in the piano strings, listen more
closely to the humming.)
Would I rather listen to Glenn's Mozart
or the Byrd and Gibbons than have a wild, passionate romantic encounter?
That question isn't simple to answer,
it's not the no-brainer it first appears.
Elmer
(the violinist guy passionately kissing the pianist in that perfume
ad)