Music Is Philosophy
MUSIC IS PHILOSOPHY
Music is philosophy that's understood
without a need to read the book.
While Judaism is the Jews' religion, statehood
won't fully let them off the hook.
John Maseng in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal,5/25-31, writes about a production of Osvaldo Golijov's "Ainadamar, " an opera that tells the story of Garcia Lorca's life, and his death at the hand of the Falangists, through the eyes of his mistress, the actress Margarita Xirgu. The opera is being produced by the Long Beach Opera Company. Golijov told Maseng:
Jewish music is a point of view, it's a way of experiencing the world that at is translated into the music…There is something about music that transcends any need for explanation. I always feel that music is a sort of philosophy that's understood without a need to read the book. Not all music is universal, but all good music is universal."
5/28/12 #10336
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Decoding History In Bed
Our histories, though cryptically encoded,
can be decoded once we go to bed,
when sperm and cunty juices are downloaded,
or when a dream removes our maidenhead.
Inspired by Adam Phillips’s review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, ” in the LRB, April 26,2007:
The important thing here—and in all forms of history writing which, like Daniel Mendelsohn’s, have been affected by Freud—is not that everything is ‘reduced’ to sexuality, but that everything is subsumed by memory: desire for the past has the urgency and ingenuity once accorded to sexuality. Sexuality matters because it is one’s history at its most cryptically encoded. Family history shows up at one’s most intimate exchanges with other people. The lost—the literal and more figurative losses from one’s past—are never, in this view, quite as lost as one feared, or indeed hoped.
5/20/07
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Wings Of Music
Music must have wings and float:
ignore all that it signifies,
for the importance of each note
should be apparent when it flies.
Don’t worry about music’s meaning:
its importance is its sound,
which, unless you’re overweening,
should lift you above the ground.
Music basically is like
that strange emotion we call love;
like it, we mustn’t let it psych
us out, but lift us high above.
Terry Teachout writes about Sir Thomas Beecham in Commentary, December 2008 (“Beecham! ”) :
[Beecham] believed that the purpose of music was to give pleasure to its listeners, not to improve their moral condition. “You critics are always writing about the meaning of music, the ethic, the Weltanschauung of the composer, and God knows what, ” he told Neville Cardus. “The whole point of music is that it should sound well. Never mind what it signifies. Music should have wings and float and give delight.”
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Chick Magnet
Don’t play the cello if you want
to be a magnet for the chicks,
a guy who on guitar strings picks
is thought be far more gallant.
I learnt this fact from Yo-Yo Ma,
who probably believes that poets
have also far more luck with coeds
than cellists. Maybe many are,
but I am not, unfortunate
with poems as he is with cello.
I wish I were a magnet fellow,
and made the chicks importunate,
first for my poems, then my bod,
but since I don’t play the guitar,
my life is black as café noir,
and I am lonelier than God.
Charlie Rose on December 3,2008 interviewed Yo-Yo Ma, who accompanied on his cello the singer and songwriter from North Carolina, James Taylor, who also plays the guitar. Yo Yo explained that he has played the cello since the age of three, and that this has not made him a chick magnet. James Taylor started off by playing the cello but gave it up for the guitar, which Yo-Yo considers a wise decision.
12/4/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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God In His Perversity
How God, in his perversity,
ties knots sometimes, unties when time
seems right to him, we learn from rhyme,
but in a university,
where everything is deconstructed,
we learn it isn’t God who ties
and unties knots, and lose the lies
concerning him with which we’d been instructed.
Inspired by a poem by Anne Sexton:
When Man Enters Woman
When man
enters woman
like the surf biting the shore
again and again
and the woman opens her mouth in pleasure
and her teeth gleam.
Like the alphabet,
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Just Laugh And Fall In Love
If today weren’t bright and sunny
would the sky be blue?
If my life was not so funny
would it still be true?
Truth’s the best way to have fun;
if you live a lie,
days will fade away like sun
with a cloudy sky.
Yet when there’s a sunless day
there’s still room and a half
to see the funny side, and say,
“I want to make you laugh,
not cry, although the skies above
are grey, and I feel blue.”
Don’t lie, just laugh and fall in love,
and to yourself be true.
Inspired by something Carrie Fisher says in her book “Wishful Drinking” which Charles McGrath reviewed in the NYT on January 2,2008:
She won’t let you feel sorry for her, which is greatly to her credit in this age of needy, tell-all celebrity memoirs, but neither can she relax or stop joking. She writes: “If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” But her book is sometimes like a smile so forced it must hurt.
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Resonances Come From What We Don't Understand
The greatest resonances come from what you do not understand.
The moment that you do, each resonance is muted.
That’s why you should not only want, but paradoxically demand,
that all your thoughts by those of others be refuted,
resonating in these people’s minds in very different ways
than they’d been resonating beautifully in yours,
engaging with your thoughts while they’re refuting them, which may amaze
not only you but them, and make your thoughts endure.
Mark Swed (Julie Taymor’s Superhero Stumble, ” LA Times.7/24/11) contrasts Julie Taymor’s failed production of ‘Spider-Man” with Peter Brooke’s reduced “Magic Flute”:
The most common complaint about Taymor’s “Spider-Man” was that no one could figure out what was going on. But in many theater traditions around the world (including ours) , theater need not be a narrative art. It’s what you don’t understand that can have the greatest resonance.
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Nouveau Riche
I’d rather be a nouveau riche
than some impoverished veteran.
I’m looking for a nouveau niche
that’s hopefully a better ’un
than that which I now occupy,
without resources that the rich
have, whether old or nouveau––I
don’t really think it matters which.
Too long I’ve been a nouveau poor.
It isn’t fun, you don’t get used
to poverty, the only cure
that gives my poverty a boost
is taking out new credit cards
that have a pleasing plastic glow,
ignoring all the crass canards
I hear from those to whom I owe
a fortune. They must know I won’t
repay them––can’t when nouveau poor!
Repayment cannot be my wont
till I have nouveau riche allure
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Venerable Stones
In the great house of the master stones
are venerable, and those we cast are often
cast only in a brave attempt to soften
the blows cast on our house, our pride, a clone.
The correspondences to all are clear
because our stones, just like our paradigms,
are copies of the master’s, as sincere,
but little more than prose we gild with rhymes.
David Orr reviews Helen Vendler’s “Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form” (“Vendler’s Yeats, ” NYT Book Review, May 11,2008) :
If “Our Secret Discipline” isn’t as strong as it could be, it’s because Vendler has thought deeply about Yeats’s use of form, but not about form apart from Yeats. And this isn’t surprising, really. Her great strength has always been her close reading of individual poets. If that causes her occasionally to find correspondences that don’t exist, well, what steward hasn’t wanted to find a world perfected in the venerable stones of the master’s great house?
5/11/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Romeo And Juliet Go Shopping
Getting out of cul de sacs
where I’m often forced to stop
sometimes makes me think of Sax
Fifth Avenue, and want to shop,
but if there are no nosey parkers
who watch me going on my spree,
I head instead for Neiman Marcus,
where customers can park for free.
If people watch me in the cul
de sac I choose another market,
and head for somewhere cheap and dull
like Macy’s, Bloomingdale or Target,
for when I’ve got the shopping urge
I don’t want anyone to know
My only motive is to splurge,
like Juliet and Romeo
when buying one another drugs,
shared together, going Dutch,
heart-stopping shopping just for hugs
for which they surely paid too much.
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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