Awake in the early morning hours, as often this week. The remains of Monday's full moon in Pisces. The hum of the computer in the next room, trying to do its automatic backup – which is clearly screwed up, so I got up to erase and try again.
And continued reading Mann's Doctor Faustus in the wonderfully clear new translation. Hit the passage early on – about chapter five or six? – where the young composer and his friend hear public lectures on Beethoven's late works, by a brilliant and rather asocial musician; full of the stuff that fascinates – used to fascinate? – me about music, the sense of drama and meaning attached to large forms and ideas. The passion and eerie disorientation of understanding these vast abstract canvases, of seeing what amazing depths of understanding seem to be there.
At a point in the year where we're bogged down in the trivia of more pragmatic aspects of music education, and when I'm traitorously thinking of Jungian psychology – as if that could replace music and musicology in my affections; oh fickle! – this brings on resonance, passion, guilt. Longing.
And blog entries by a former teacher who went to Hawaii with my friend Mitchell among others are full of another passion, that for the beautiful, warm and lush, places of the world. Many Facebook messages with Gavin, the sensualist and poet, who now lives in Hawaii and daily tells me of the fruits and plants, meals, immediate joys he experiences – in contrast to the meetings and agendas I experience. Longing.
They're all piled up on top of each other in my head: the grand mystical longings of great music, great art, and visions of amazing possibilities; and the dense sensual longings of beautiful places, warm air. None of which are particularly lying around, here....
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