Thanks to people for the sympathy for the olds. But they passed on a month or so ago (obits take time to write) and I think they were unhappy waiting for the inevitable. So, better to have moved on. Unfortunately the “Rosabelle believe” signal that was to be sent back has failed to appear, possibly as they are otherwise engaged.
I am now at the end of stage one of the doctorate, and trying to cram paper writing in between the job and the other job and preparing for the next shows. I have to admit I’m a bit behind, not too badly considering I’m doing three careers at once. But today I had to admit I didn’t see what was coming. I knew there was something pretty slippery inside the entire notion of visual music, but lord help me I didn’t expect
Annie Besant. You can Google it if you like, won’t take long.
It’s like a onion. You start peeling away, finding little bearded men and their light organs, futurist films and all the usual early 20th century modernist rigmarole. You note that Kandinsky mentions Theosophy. So does Shoenberg. Mondrian. Thomas Wilfred, creator of the Clavilux turns out have started work in a Theosophical think tank. You try find the connections – here is Goethe and his ideas on light – there is white and black that add up to blue or yellow, depending on which way you tilt the prism. How does this idea get to Kandinsky? Well it’s Goethe after all but, now you find frickken Rudolf Steiner as the middle man, peddling mystical interpretations of Goethe’s higher levels. We haven’t even gone near the lunatic fringe and we’re already deeply embedded in yogis and astral claptrap.
Which is rather bewildering.
Because what I thought I was doing was using a psychological tool to categorise video, simply as a means to performance. No great claims to universal truth here – simply the need for something that puts on a good show. Disclaimers apply. No attempt to make aesthetics into a metric any more than 24 frames a second is the UrSprache.
But it is quite possible that what I am doing is part of an occult history which I think anyone would agree IS COMPLETELY ROCK N ROLL. In the early 20th century they believed in colours. Now here I am, believing in psychometrics. Paging Mr. Foucault, white courtesy telephone. Following my own ‘World’s Fair’ rule (50 percent scholar 50 percent drunken maniac) I really should take this thing and run it as far as I can get away with it.
I wouldn’t have to change a thing. All I do is change the way I speak about it. Chuck a bit of Jung in there. Oops.
Actually Jung is the best guide here. He’d pop out of the coffin and say “look, you’re at the right age for the big one. The big kapow. This is the moment in life where you put together everything you have so far learned, push the red button on the blender and come out with a nervous breakdown and a theory of everything that will leave them guessing for years to come. You’re already a closet Freudian, come over the dark side.”
He’d then pull out a bunch of photographs that I recently scanned that my old man took on a lake near Zurich. That lake. Synchronicity.
I think what I’ll do is hold it on the right side of sanity until I get the floppy hat. Then go apeshit. Over the last few years the siren call to occultism has been growing, and there are few pleasures left to the older man. I will drown in cymatics and entrainment, colours and thought broadcasts, ghosts and video synthesisers. There will be FUN.
No, not THAT far.
(Actually having read back over this entire post I think I might need some sleep.)