Pregnant with words . . .

I can't write when I just sit down to write. One must always have something to write about. They must have a message. Being cute with words will eventually be found out. I was on the verge of dispensing Oscar Wilde on such grounds; but then I came to find he actually said something. And that is what I attended to. Chesterton despised the mere paradox on the grounds that it was lying. I hate when I notice someone straining for a paradox he doesn't believe himself. It's dishonest. It's proud. It displays linguistic dexterity, but sacrifices something more important. It's a man speaking a dozen languages, but speaking nothing but banalities. It's impressive, but insipid. It's the celebrity who chooses his role based on the income, rather than passion in the part. When the audience discovers it - if they are discerning - they rightfully despise him. This is art for money's sake. I forget who said it, but I agree - there's too much of Wilde in his plays, just as there is too much Chesterton in his Father Brown series. That is why they fall short of greatness, in my opinion. Sure, Wilde has his share of social insights, and insights into human nature; but in the end, we have predominately linguistic dexterity. It is a skill well brandished. But aesthetically it seems to me inferior. I prefer much more a work in which the author is hidden. I almost would like to say there's too much Shakespeare in Shakespeare. Each play is drenched with the same meter - but I attribute this more to my ignorance. But that is my immediate reaction, and that is why I've never gone very deep with him. I picked the gems and left the dirt. Wittgenstein felt the same on this score. Even Tolstoy is a grand painter. But it is the whole we prefer instead of the parts. To refer back to Wilde, I do think Dorian Grey a masterpiece - but that is not because there isn't too much of Wilde: it is that Wilde is disclosed so thoroughly to us. He is naked before us and we sympathize, since - deep down - we have the same depravity. But Tolstoy paints the Sistine Chapel. To stare up at that grand ceiling is a near religious experience. It is peopled with many characters and we can get lost gazing on each one. And yet there is a symphonic whole. That is his genius. Characters are created. The whole Tolstoy isn't reincarnated in each character. There are too many characters. Tolstoy strikes me as a reader of persons. He can discern from the look of a face the state of a soul. He does this as Mozart plays music. Human nature is Tolstoy's piano. I've always admired people who can read others: the observant. Sherlock Holmes falls in this category. After a quick scan, things are deduced which baffle the imagination. This must be a trait of the superman. But with admiration comes envy. Are we to strive to attain it? What if our nature is incapable? But we don't know till we try. Does the glory lie in the trying? We try to realize our natures to their fullest. But isn't the point of life to find the key to redeeming our natures, or that this is a condition for realizing them? Sometimes I look out onto the world and I feel dumb. People race past me knowing all sorts of things and I stand dumb, watching them go about their tasks, tasks that they do with great skill. Other times, I feel like an anomaly, caring more for inward things. It nauseates me to think of practicality. It revolts my whole being. For example, I love philosophy. But to be asked what can be done with it stirs within a brooding fury. They cannot understand. They will not understand. Their whole frame of mind is alien to potentially understanding. They are convinced that nothing can be done with it and that is the end of it. If you can get out any reasons, once they leave your mouth, you detest yourself, for when you go to defend your love, you're reduced to babbling nonsense, and the foolishness of your defense further reassures the man of practice of your hopelessly idealistic way of life. That I cannot talk of sports means that I am disconnected from life. On the contrary! That they cannot talk of life is the greatest tragedy. Pascal was right: it's either diversion or indifference. But we've found the source of food. Why fret? Because they think we're foolish. But is it all as selfish as that? What would I want? The veneration of all? It's sane man in the madhouse being labeled insane by the madmen. There comes a point when you want to grab them and scream how insane that is. But you cannot talk to a beast. You cannot talk to the spiritually asleep. They are in the dark, in the desert. Is prayer the only way our of the morass?

Why do I return over and over again to the parts in movies and music that move me? Why do I do that? Wittgenstein listened to Beethoven, liked him, and liked him because of passion. Is the key to the problem of life passion? Maybe not pain. But an inner striving. This is Kierkegaard's point. But I would say I've found Christ. And yet I return again and again to those parts. Why? Do I enjoy the feeling? That's a part, but I don't think it's the whole. Schopenhauer thought a great deal of the effect of music is the role imagination played during the experience. When I listen to Alive by Pearl Jam, I have certain images race across my mind's eye, images which are fed to me from the deepest recesses of my consciousness. If I paid sufficient attention, maybe I could note what those images are and perform a sort of psychoanalysis on myself in the same vein Freud did with dreams. The latent content, being chosen for a reason, needing analysis, and that this might be a bridge to the land of your identity. So, there is a feeling, images, and their cooperation. Lewis' desire or joy plays a role here. The meaning of the experience is given content by those passages in Lewis that analyze the dialectic of desire. The idea of arousal, that it arouses feelings, and that the next step is the satisfaction of the desires, and the notion that satisfaction doesn't exist in this world, and so the probable explanation is that the satisfaction lies in the next world. These ideas flit across my mind as I listen. Is this why I return? There is newness too. If I remember rightly, new images flash before my mind upon each new experience, and if the images remain, their order can change suddenly, unpredictably. This variability is pleasurable; it is the same kind of variability in an ocean disturbed by swells. You're tossed about, you ascend suddenly, you descend just as suddenly, and there's no rhyme or reason about the waves. If in a real ocean, terror overtakes you; but if the ocean is just the gusts of the music stirring the ocean of your imagination and consciousness, there is a distinct pleasure in it, especially if the waves are the images, and that the images come from you. For example, the first lyric is Alive is, "Son, she said, have I got a little story for you." My mother immediately appears. Perhaps even a mysterious female figure. The image of an open book is there, with the cover toward me, and the contents toward the woman, and that her eyes peer just above the top of the book, and they're staring at me. And all these images are blasting me, while the melody embodies its own mood in its own mysterious way. All these forces clash each other like tidal waves. The contact happens in consciousness and it produces in us longing. Do I listen to it, then, to feel the longing? But I don't want to simplify anything. Music has other purposes, as does other forms of art. There are paroxysms of rage without particular direction. No longing here. Just Dionysian reveling. But then I would I long for this. I can't say anything else here.

Why does Justin McLeod in the movie The Man Without a Face fascinate me? His house. It is home for me. I watched the movie a million times. Yet, I'd say the movie is mediocre. His house is filled with books and other things. He listens to opera, he reads The Aeneid by Virgil, he looks at his scarred face in a mirror. The music coincides perfectly with his revulsion. He is alone. Isn't that all of us? I've watched that scene over and over again. What about when Chuck Norstadt reads the poem High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr? Swirled and swung. Put out my hand and touched the face of God. The music by James Horner strikes just the write mood. Poetry sweeps the imagination into realms you have not dreamed of. Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth. How that stabs me as I type it!! Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth. Yes, and Chesterton was saying it to me all along. That Christ's secret was his mirth. Oh, please do not systematize mirth! Leave your claws away. Must you touch everything, Reason? Cold Reason. Come warm me Passion, Emotion, Feeling. Shield me from science's lifeless dissection. And yet the paradox is that I need Reason to say that. Alas.