- Mood:
Neutral - Listening to: Two Days in February - The Goo Goo Dolls
- Reading: Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse
- Watching: Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood
- Playing: At building a personality or two.
- Eating: Fasting.
- Drinking: 'Get Clean' detox tea
"The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is known to you. It is also known to you that man consists of a multitude of souls, of numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the personality into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science has invented the name Schizophrenia for it. Science is in this so far right as no multiplicity may be dealt with unless there e a series, a certain order and grouping. It is wrong in so far as it holds that only a single, binding and lifelong order is possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves. This error of science has many unpleasant consequences, and the only advantage of simplifying the work of the state-appointed pastors and masters and saving them the labours of original thought. In consequence of this error many persons pass for normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are incurable mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who are geniuses. Hence it is that we supplement the imperfect psychology of science by the conception that we call the art of building up the soul. We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life. As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups, with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are eternally inexhaustible. ..."
...
"This is the art of life," he said in the manner of a teacher. "You may develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art and fantasy. ... Here, take your little pieces away with you. The game will often give you pleasure."
~*~
"Yes," said I, "what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again."
With a laugh Gustav replied: "You talk like a book, my boy. It is a pleasure and a privilege to drink at such a fount of wisdom. And perhaps there is even something in what you say. But now kindly re-load your piece. You are rather too dreamy for my taste. Any moment may bring a few buck, and we cannot kill them with philosophy. We must have bullets in our barrels."
~*~
"Look, there's Brahms. He is striving for redemption, but it will take him all his time."
I realised that the thousands of men in black were the players of all those notes and parts in his scores which according to divine judgment were superfluous.
"Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted," Mozart said with a nod.
And thereupon we saw Richard Wagner marching at the head of a host just as vast, and felt the pressure of those thousands as they clung and closed upon him. Him, too, we watched as he dragged himself along with slow and sad step.
"In my young days," I remarked sadly, "these two musicians passed as the most extreme contrasts conceivable."
Mozart laughed.
"Yes, that is always the way. Such contrasts, seen from a little distance, always tend to show their increasing similarity. Thick orchestration was in any case neither Wagner's nor Brahms' personal failing. It was a fault of their time."
"What? And have they got to pay for it so dearly?"
"Naturally. The law must take its course. Until they have paid the debt of their time it cannot be known whether anything personal to themselves is left over to stand to their credit."
"But they can't either of them help it!"
"Of course not. They cannot help it either that Adam ate the apple. But they have to pay for it."
"But this is frightful."
"Certainly. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One's born and at once one is guilty. You must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not know that."
...
Mozart laughed aloud when he saw my long face. He turned a somersault in the air for laughter's sake and played trills with his heels. At the same time he shouted at me: "Hey, my young man, you are biting your tongue, man, with a gripe in your lung, man? You think of your readers, those carrion-feeders, and all your typesetters, those wretched abettors, and sabre-whetters. You dragon, you make me laugh till I shake me and burst the stitches of my breeches. O heart of a gull, with printer's ink dull, and soul sorrow-full. A candle I'll leave you, if that'll relieve you. Betittled, betattled, spectacled and shackled, and pitifully snagged and by the tail wagged, with shilly and shally no more shall you dally. For the devil, I pray, will bear you away and slice you and splice you till that shall suffice you for your writings and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten."
***
There are several more and better passages, but they are so long... go read it for yourself.
Best book I've read to date.
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**Inanely Inspired Insanity ~3EyesClub**
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\"There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.” -Charles Bukowski.
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