Music In Sag Harbor

One of the most memorable passages in all of Sag Harbor for me was when present-narrator Ben explaining bit of own musical “coming of age” becoming aware of past Benji’s reception of when he calls out Afrika Bambaataa’s sampling of Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express.

I didn’t understand back then why Marcus was hassling me, but I get it now.  A couple of years later, if someone said “I stole that off an old Lou Donadon record,” and the sample kicked it, you got respect for your expertise and keen ear.  Funk, free jazz, disco, cartoons, German synthesizer music—it didn’t matter where it came from, the art was in converting it to new use.  Manipulating what you had at your disposal for your own purposes, jerry-rigging your new creation.  But before sampling became an art form with a philosophy, biting off somebody was a major crime, thuggery on an atrocious scale.  Your style, your vibe, was all you had.  It was toiled on, worried over, your latest tweak presented to the world each day for approval.  Pull your pockets out so that they hung out of your pants in a classic broke-ass pose, and you still had your style.  If someone was stealing your stlye, they were stealing your soul. (61 [hard back])

Here Whitehead takes us not just through a brief history of sampling but of the philosophy behind the argument for and against “stealing” other people’s work/music.   I used to very much hold onto the idea that music should be original in its entirety in “pure” form.  As I have grown older I have realized that everything is a ripoff of everything else.  Sampling as a philosophy is not a “modern” invention.  Every piece of music is just imitating previous pieces of music.  What is so important that Benji already is onto (that Marcus is against) is that this isn’t a bad thing!  With modern technology sampling has taken on different meanings, but the concept is the same.  Think of how a composer takes a bass line from another person, tweaks it a bit, and then incorporates it into their own work.   This is exactly the same with modern sampling – just it is maybe even more obvious because you can search specific audio files instead of just comparing harmonies. 

            

Personal Relation to Jason Taylor

          Jason's inner-monologue of things he wouldn’t say out loud very similar to my own (and I think everyone to some sense) in that it honestly nails the slightest of social perceptions (like sarcasm “below adult radar”, Hugo laughing “like I’d made a really funny joke, so I grinned like I had”, “frowning smile”, how Jason watches the social ranks and how people worship the “popular” people [49, 57, 61]).  I think these are all perceptions that we might notice in conversations and in our day-to-day life, but have trouble articulating in such an elegant way like Jason does.   

           I also really relate to Jason (like everyone also) in how he “self-edits” himself depending on who he is talking to – one of the lines that resonated most with me was when he Gary Drake asks him why he is there and he narrates “You can’t just say, ‘I’m out for a walk’ ‘cause walks are gay” (77).  There have been so many times when I remember doing something (like going for a walk) when I was younger and having to “make up an excuse” for something more “socially acceptable” I was doing.  We all self-edit our behavior to fit the norm, but one of the things I have realized is that some norms are ok to break.  If I feel like just going outside to just listen to music in the middle of a free period, why *not* just do it? I, like Jason, often when just choose not to do what I want but what other people around me deem what I “should” be doing.   If I’m walking home from school and really feel like skipping, why *not* do it?  “It looks weird!” is what keeps me from keeping to my boring walk – YET if I saw someone skipping home would I also judge them?  BSG has made me question some of my own self-editing hypocritical judgments.

Sylvie Freaks Me Out (in a possibly positive way)

Throughout the novel I have felt a sense of unease, frustration, and fear towards Sylvie’s character.  This has confused me in many regards, but mostly because I couldn’t quite figure out what creeped me out so much about her.  I was intrigued by her philosophy towards life and really enjoyed trying to wrap my head around how on a geological scale everything human civilization does is just a little *blip* in the water (like the train sliding into the lake [like a weasel]). Everything we give purpose to in society eventually will recede back into the lake as nature takes control.  But Sylvie, unlike me, is not disturbed by the purposelessness of society and accepts that into her own life.  Sylvie’s purposelessness initially was what bothered me the most about her, but looking back on the novel as a whole I was most freaked out by something far simpler than that: her happiness.

            Many times in class Mr. Mitchell has eluded to how at peace Sylvie is and how happy she seems in the most uncomfortable of situations, which I read off initially as simply aloof dreaminess.  How can one be happy without purpose?  Our society shuns and discourages purposelessness for very good reasons.  Biologically our purpose is simple: to make sure the human race survives.  Yet, what is the point in that survival?  Eventually all will be gone, whether North Korea/Trump nuke the entire planet in the next four years or we last for the next ten thousand, it will all be the same.  So, in response to the inevitability of our eventual demise we find meaning and purpose by conforming to society’s standards and comforts (and discomforts!).   Yet Sylvie is able to reject these societal confirmations, accept the inevitability of life, and be happy.  That being said, I think someone who does not see purpose in life is not necessarily the best person to look after children from a “safety” perspective and emotional perspective.  What I find especially interesting is how Sylvie finds *purpose* once she knows Ruth might be taken away – a sign that she really does care and love Ruth just in ways that are so foreign to our society’s standards it is hard to wrap our heads around it.

  

Esther needs a friend!

Esther has major qualms with society and finding purpose in her life.  Reading The Bell Jar is extremely painful and frustrating when Esther’s frustrations seem so REAL and valid, yet no one in her surrounding society, friends, or family ever have any legit conversations with her.  As Esther is beginning to lose control of her body and life, no one really steps in to help her in any productive manner.  After she receives her rejection letter, her self-esteem for her “work-life” completely collapses.  Esther’s work life (and school) seems to be the predominant force keeping her moving forward, but as her schooling is beginning to come to an end she cannot really see herself in any career after she is out of college.  Since school is her “thing”, when it (and the camp) is removed from her life she does not see much left to it.  One could imagine the “pillars” of one’s self (sorta Inside-Out-esque), and her school/camp pillar would be the one supporting all of the other pillars up.  When this falls out, everything begins to come crumbling down.  (The cracks were already forming as her schooling is running out.)

As  “the hollow voice” takes over and detaches her from her friends and family, Esther falls further and further into depression, insomnia, and a variety of other really scary mental problems (not eating, reading, writing, etc).  Esther narrates her decisions as if she does not even have control over her own body: after Ester rejects Jody’s offer for her to still come live in their apartment and realizes that she “knew [she] should have said [she] would come.”  Esther narrates herself trying to call Jody back: “I reached for the receiver.   My hand advanced a few inches, then retreated and fell limp.  I forced it toward the receiver again, but again it stopped short, as if it had collided with a pane of glass” (118).  This is way more than Esther being a little upset about getting rejected from the program – this is all of the pillars of her life crumbling down preventing her from living. 

There is not one person in the novel that she can comfortably turn to and discuss her feelings openly.  Doctor Nolan seems to do the best job listening and understanding, but even that relationship is not one necessarily built on the best of trust.  Doctor Gordon is probably the most depressing part of the book for me.  Someone who she opens up and is vulnerable to, takes COMPELTE advantage of her and makes everything so so SO much worse.  He does not validate any of her thoughts, blames everything on her, and makes her pay one hell of a bill to have her tortured and imprisoned.   I really really wished that SOMEONE in Esther’s life would be willing to actually listen to what she is going through and help her not blame herself for not being able to deal with the meaninglessness of life. 

Holden’s Life Lessons

My favorite part of The Catcher in the Rye is how Salinger manages to deal with deep, difficult to discuss/articulate ideas and fears, while maintaining an “easy to read” connectivity to the narrator (Holden) and without bluntly throwing ideas out to the reader. We have to stare deep into Holden’s snippets of narrated past while trying to understand how they shape and impact his present day state of mental “falling”.   Holden is deeply dissatisfied with society and how he fits (/fails to fit) into any part of society.  His ideals and “purity” from childhood are constantly trounced on by the “phonies” of the world and cannot seem to figure out how to fit into a phony society.   

Holden, like all of us, struggles with understanding/dealing with changes to any part of his life (just imagining the museum scene where he finds reassurance in the stability of the contents inside the glass boxes).  Even after Pencey and the very end of the novel he has nostalgia for Stradlater and Ackley and all of their “phoniness”.   The hardest part of transience for Holden, and most humans, is death, and trying to grapple with/comprehend how our life can move forward without our loved ones, and how everything we have ever known can come to a close.  Although Holden doesn’t explicitly discuss many of his own grief/worries/problems, it is evident in his narration, depression, and pieces of “ideal past” described that demonstrate his struggles with dealing with Allie’s death, and the change of people/society around him.

Most of my favorite scenes in The Cather in the Rye are towards (/at) the end of the novel when Holden talks to and hangs out with Phoebe.  For me, no matter all the “phonies” and messed up terrible things that plague the past and present state of the human race, the most special, beautiful part of life is our connectivity and love and positive energy that passes through loved ones.  Throughout the entire novel, Holden lacks a good friend who he can talk to about these deep feelings and “falling” he is going through, and Phoebe IS that friend who really picks him up and gives him love back into his life.   

Personal Rambling Reflections on Stephen’s Self-focused Superiority

           Throughout all of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of our class’s big frustrations/critiques of Stephen Dedalus as a character is how incredibly self-centered he appears from the very beginning to the ending of the novel.  In the first four sections of the book we hardly view any of his interactions with other people and Stephen seems to lack any friends or people he trusts.  The reader never gets any narration of Stephen discussing his personal thoughts or emotions with anyone until chapter five.  Stephen’s world is very self-centered in that everything that comes into it he takes as if it were solely for him, despite being surrounded by classmates and family for the majority of the novel. During the retreat, Stephen feels that every word out of the priest’s mouth is directly for himself, and never even thinks about what the other people in the room are feeling.  For me, the pinnacle of Stephen’s inward focus is in his relationship to God:  in the beginning of the Stephen feels that every single thing he does has a direct response from God.  We see how personal a relationship Stephen takes with God and how he feels like he can only be “super devote” or “super rebellious” in both cases seeming “above” all of his peers and humans on earth. 

            Yet, even if Stephen’s case may be a bit on the extreme side, I believe that to some extent this is how every human views their world at some points in their life.  Personally, I had a lot of similar perspectives when I was very young in so far that I genuinely believed that EVERYTHING I did was being watched by God or some higher-power that I had a direct relationship with. The important difference, however, is that as I got older I actually talked with other humans that made me realize I am not the center of the universe – Stephen begins to start talking to other people during his college days, but even then it feels like 99.99% of his focus is on himself.  Other people sort of follow him, but he does not seem to give any of that back.  He has “friends” but I don’t think he really *cares* about them the way they might care back. 

Naturally speaking, it makes sense for humans to be self-centered in that our reality literally is centered around ourselves.   Everything that comes into our reality we view in relation to ourselves and how it impacts us – often if it does not impact us then we are likely to pay attention to it.  For instance, let’s just think about evolution and a thousands-of-yeas-ago human living in a cave ***SORRY THIS IS SORTA WEIRD***. Everything is about survival.  Old-human’s reality is full of things coming in and out, but it is most important for old-human to not die.  Let’s take for instance the literally reality of what is coming in through old-human’s senses:  Old-human is looking out of cave and sees grassy area, barren area, rocky area, and forested area.  Old-human would view each one of these in relation to how they might benefit old-human’s survival.  Old-human would not care about the areas that do not relate to his survival – old-human would think naturally about which areas would lead to plants, animals, or tools and how they would help with their own survival.  Old-human would not give much thought to the barren area.  Now imagine this old-human to be Stephen Dedalus sitting in church with all of his peers and the preacher yelling over them about the fires of hell – Stephen does NOT think about the barren ground of his peers which he views as completely unimportant in his survival but is just focused on what societally has been prioritized in his consciousness which is his relationship with God which dictates his “survival” in various sense.   So in this sense a lot of Stephen’s self-focus has been naturally drilled into him by his religion.  YET (going back to the old-human) A CRITICAL PART OF THIS SURVIVAL IS ONE’S RELATIONSHIPS – Old-human needs to reproduce, protect children, etc for survival.  This young-Stephan COMPLETELY lacks, and older-Stephen MOSTLY lacks.  I think there definitely is improvement in Stephen’s relationships, but in my mind this is the aspect of his life in which he still has not “come-to-age” in: he chooses to leave ALL his relationships to pursue his artistry – something that Old-Human could never have done.  To me, this abandonment of his friends/family is still rooted in his self-centeredness specialness of how he prioritizes his art over his relationships, which he wasn’t too fond of in the first place.  I would say what is most “heroic” or most impactful personally for him is his abandoning his relationship with God as he leaves – God is the only “character” in the book that Stephen seems to from the beginning to communicate and care about his relationship with. This is the biggy in my mind in what he truly abandons/sacrifices to become “free” from everything and devote himself to his art.  

Eternity

One of my favorite passages so far in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the scene where the preacher at the retreat is attempting to explain what “an eternity in hell” truly entails.  As we mentioned briefly in class, it is not only humorous/satirically specific in detail, but is quite a thought-provoking description of eternity for any of us 3-diminsional beings that do not have any control over time.  The preacher starts off by stating how “un-understandable” the meaning of eternity is:

Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell.  Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?  And, remember, it is an eternity of pain.  Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are yet they would become infinite as they are destined to last for ever.  But while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive.  To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment.   (131 Penguin Books 1978)

Pain, on of the most important (life-saving, death-preparing) emotions of our human existence, is the focus of hell the preacher is trying to convey to the students. 

Yet, it is not the pain that is the worst part of hell, but the eternity of that pain. It is not just the sting that hurts, but the continuousness, helplessness, and hopelessness of the continuum of stings that terrifies Stephen(/the reader too).  An eternity is *impossible* for us to understand, yet Joyce (through the preacher) does a pretty mind-blowing/expanding description of it:

What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness, and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air. And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been carried all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals – at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not even one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time, the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would have scarcely begun. (131-132)

Sorry for the ginormous quote, but the language, set-up, and descriptions of the preacher’s description is unparaphrasable (how can one summarize eternity?).  Similar to how Stephan’s mind keeps on “exploding” when he realizes that an old thought-process could possibly be erroneous or changed, the reader (and Stephan) struggle with grabbling around the preacher’s description of what “life after death” entails in hell.  Every human, no matter what belief of what happens to us after we die, has no way of understanding what eternity of anything that follows.  Nothingness.  How can we imagine death when all we have understood in our own reality is life?  It is very reassuring/disturbing to imagine a physical manifestation of our souls in an after-life, yet terrifying to imagine what alternative “nothingness” actually is.  Forever and ever.  What does that actually mean?  Yet, why worry when we can’t feel nothingness?