Reading a passing reference to the Upanishads, by the shimmering lights of my small, comfortable, living Xmas tree (I'll post a picture on Xmas Eve), I think: I would like to spend time studying them, reading them... of course they're coming up obliquely, at a sort of angle, in the paper I'm writing; but I'm not allowed to say too much about them, as they aren't my specialty of course.
I remember my friend Frits Staal, who taught Sanskrit at Berkeley (an eminence I would be overjoyed to have a chance at someday). He had retired the last time I'd seen him; I'm sure he's still around, though, as he was almost obnoxiously healthy. A charming, intelligent man; his apartment was fill of enormous tomes (there is no other word for them) in various Eastern languages, and serious European books trying to interpret them – the kinds of books that make you really take books seriously, the kind that make all my paperbacks, and my poststructuralism and current philosophies of current art forms, look like a few bits of paper trash floating on the ocean of the infinite.
He actually quoted me in what was probably my first academic reference, before I ever went back to graduate school – his research in his last few years was on Vedic hymns and how they structured number and time, and I set him straight about Schoenberg and dodecaphony for one of his books. As it happens, Frits was also the kind of Dutch man who had black rubber sheets. So confusing to pigeonhole people: they always have so many aspects that are hard to fit into any coherent whole – no wonder I have such a tangled and undependable memory.
I wish the structure of our universities didn't militate against large changes in one's reading, in the direction of one's thought. I'm frankly not terribly interested in musicology these days, of any kind, or in music at all, really – I'd rather talk about Rilke or Woolf, philosophy or Buddhism, or the Upanishads of course. If I could figure out some course that had music in it, I could teach that of course in our department (which is unavoidably a Music Department), but it's very hard to imagine one. And, on that exasperating merry-go-round where academics are forced to start over with new students every year, I would have to teach Required Courses anyway, so I'd be stuck with the same old stuff – I will be stuck with the same old stuff, again, in just about six weeks or so. Rite of Spring all over again, here we go.
But if I could, I would drop it all and learn Sanskrit, read the Upanishads, and argue about some of the oldest theories of awareness and godhead: sitting around among trees, I suppose....
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