Music and Contemplation

Saraswati: goddess of music, wisdom, art, and knowledge

The spirit that animates the music of traditional civilizations is very different than the one which dominates our modern Western culture. I think that one of the factors behind this great difference is the West's exaltation of action which has become opposed to contemplation.

It does not take great powers of perception to see that Western society is propelled by action, there is a tangible and inescapable obsession with work and production, and we see the fruits of this all around us: from our private time spent gazing into the void of virtual worlds to the sparkling towers which dominate the horizon of the earth. Activity which is not entertainment or work has no place in such a world, intellectual activity is not understood and even looked down upon, this is the natural result of the unnatural glorification of action, and it poisons everything it comes into contact with. Much has been written on this wide and important topic, and it is not my purpose to set forth a full exposition of the significance of contemplation and action (for this I would recommend Pieper's Leisure the Basis of Culture and Guenon's The Crisis of the Modern World), here I wish only to focus on how these principles apply to music and see what deeper meanings we can draw from them. As always, what I say here is only some aspects of the greater picture, not an exhaustive or perfect treatment.

Laughing at the World

 June 2020 was the month that humour died. It was in this month that the pitch of public outcry reached such a frenzied point that even someone as checked out as me began to grow weary of it. No longer could anything be tastefully mocked, but now commentators and citizens alike on all sides began to burn with ardent zeal for whatever position they had fallen into. 

Perhaps I don't take things seriously enough but I can't help but laugh at the person in a store wearing 2 layers of medical masks, goggles, and a face shield. Another might be rather disturbed by this sight - which is a fair reaction - but I don't see how one can keep sane if they respond to every bizarre sight with such gravity. Humour can keep men sane when the only other option is despair and resentment, anyone who has worked in a degrading fast food or retail job knows that this is true.

By laughing at the unreality of the world we recognize its falsity and refuse to submit to it, it is put below us in its proper place. Our clown world is funny precisely because it is wrong, the pieces are out of place and the image formed grows stranger and stranger. Without humour it is easy to become the inverse of this distorted image, wrong in different ways but wrong all the same.

Another factor behind the mass inability to laugh at this world is a plague of self-importance. The origin of this self-importance is nothing I can fault anyone for, as it has arisen out the universal desire for meaning in life. All the crises, social movements and phenomena of the past year or so has revealed the bizarre things people will do and believe to fill this void. When you base your life around opposing the group at the opposite end of the social/political spectrum then of course you can't laugh at them because they threaten your very being. Our identities have been reduced to transient political platforms, social goals, and silly moralisms. We are all like children playing a vast school yard game, except that we have forgotten that the whole thing is make believe and that at any second the bell will ring and we will be shocked back into reality where trifles have to be put away.

Covid-19 and Advertising

Fuck that.

Billboards – and other forms of large scale intrusive advertising – are disturbing as is, but plastering the typical Covid-19 slogans and shibboleths on them makes things exponentially worse. Modern advertising is a form of psychological violence; it is no secret that the ads that populate the screens that dominate our daily lives have been meticulously designed by psychologists to have a powerful effect upon the viewer. Having lived in a digital environment my entire life there is no doubt that the images and slogans of advertising have had a profound impact on my psyche, it is only in the past few years that I’ve developed a healthy aversion to this sort of manipulation. Which brings me to the present situation of our sterilized world, I think one of the things that the Chinavirus situation can illuminate for us is the power that advertisements have over belief.

I’ve been inclined to think that the powerful nature of advertising is the most immediate cause of the Covid hysteria and resultant changes in way of life and worldview among the population. Here the slogans and advertising serve no other purpose but to implant a set of dogmatic beliefs into the masses, and it is astonishing how readily this has been assimilated. It’s like normal advertising but on the steroid of fear. And the new sterile way of viewing the world has been prioritized over what were once more fundamental concepts like family, religion, and social norms. Now our neighbours are the enemy if they profess a different creed. I suppose this is not the first time a new radical set of beliefs has been successfully implanted into the masses through media, but now it has been done so well that there is not even any real resistance to these ideas. In a detached, historical way of looking at things it is interesting to see this in action; but in reality it’s just fucking depressing. (A great analysis of the Covidian worldview is found here on Cosmos Crouched.)

Lastly, there is no doubt in my mind that slogans like “stay home” and “stay safe” do nothing but produce a pathetic society. Living in safety is no life at all. I can’t think of a lower goal for a society or an individual than simply being “safe.” A life worth living must be dangerous, nothing is more antithetical to the human spirit than sterility and confinement.  

Against Beer and Bacon Theology

What is Beer and Bacon Theology? Well it's certainly not a concise set of propositions, a coherent system, or thought of one man or specific group, it is instead based on a general inchoate mentality towards the use of base pleasures, specifically alcohol. The attitude I take issue with is one that I’ve personally encountered having been around very conscious Catholics and institutions for a few years now. The most concrete example I can think of is that of people who put a caricature of Chesterton and Belloc at the heart of their thinking; they seek to divinize the pleasures of food and especially drink, I term this view Beer and Bacon Theology, or, as a Catholic Answers article put it, Theology of the Bottle.

While I haven’t found anything these people say that is explicitly objectionable – their statements on the virtues of eating and drinking are always qualified by admonitions against drunkenness and excess – there is still something troubling to me about the way they approach alcohol, and the mentality that they are fostering amidst the Catholic culture. On the surface Beer and Bacon Theology seems to breed merely a pretentiousness surrounding drinking with its insistence on high quality and decorum, but deeper than that is something that seems to me truly disordered and corrosive to the culture.

Procession of the Black Madonna

Below is Carlo Levi's description of a Marian procession held in a village of Southern Italy in the mid 1930s. 

“In the afternoon, when the heat of the day had subsided, there was a procession, beginning at the church and winding its way through the village … first in line were boys carrying poles with white sheets and cloths attached to them for banners which they waved in the breeze, then the band players from Stigliano with their loud and shiny brasses. After them, on a throne supported by two long shafts, which a dozen men at a time took turns in carrying, came the Madonna.

 ...

Amid this warlike thundering there was no happiness or religious ecstasy in the people’s eyes; instead they seemed prey to a sort of madness, a pagan throwing off of restraint, and a stunned or hypnotized condition; all of them were highly wrought up. The animals ran about wildly, goats leaped, donkeys brayed, dogs barked, children shouted, and women sang. Peasants with baskets of wheat in their hands threw fistfuls of it at the Madonna, so that she might take thought for the harvest and bring them good luck. The grains curved through the air, fell on the paving stones and bounced up off them with a light noise like that of hail. The black-faced Madonna, in the shower of wheat, among the animals, the gunfire, the trumpets, was no sorrowful Mother of God, but rather a subterranean deity, black with the shadows of the bowels of the earth, a peasant Persephone, or lower-world goddess of the harvest.

...

They pinned to the Madonna's robes five and ten lire notes and even dollar bills jealously saved from their labours in America. Most of them, however, hung garlands of dried figs around her neck or put eggs and fruit at her feet; they ran after her with other gifts when the procession had already moved on and mingled with the throng amid the noise of the trumpets and the shooting and shouting. As the procession advanced it became more and more crowded and uproarious, until, after it had gone through the entire village, it went back into the church. A few heavy drops of rain fell, but soon the wind swept away the clouds, the storm blew over and calm returned along with the first evening stars."

- Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli

I believe that Carlo Levi's description of the event as "pagan" to be very apt, for there is more in Catholicism (especially in its folk expression) that retains elements of our pre-Christian heritage than most would like to admit. When Catholicism isn't sanitized for a modern intellectual culture it tends to take on an ecstatic character with a ritualistic language and expression that is foreign to us, this is due to our lost connection with the land and lack of reliance upon divine powers for our daily necessities. Levi's book was immensely interesting for displaying this pre-modern worldview and way of life.

Conscious Catholicism

There was a brief but important time in my life when I thought that everybody would subscribe to my version of high-powered Catholicism, if only they were given the right education and means to do so. I now believe that this was an impossible dream, as my attraction to such things is – in reality – highly eccentric. The amount of people that will live up to the demands of modern Catholicism and “take their faith seriously” will always be the significant minority.  And indeed, this has always been the case, the difference now is that there seems to be little room for the “cultural Catholic” in the post-Vatican II world of active and enlightened faith.

Among traditional and conservative Catholics, there is a persistent and shrill cry against the enemy of people who only go to church (often only twice a year) out of purely human or cultural obligation. These normal people rarely think of religious questions, unconsciously follow the ways of the world, and certainly do not read the Summa for fun and edification; yet still feel compelled to enter the doors of their local Catholic church for holidays or family functions.

What the traditionalist fails to realize about this way of life is that it really is what held together the traditional societies of pre-modern times. The only difference now is that simply attending to religious duty out of familial allegiance or cultural obligation means far less than it did even 100 years ago (especially in Western Europe and North America). For nearly everyone in traditional societies, adhering to the faith simply meant doing what everyone else did, and this was living according to cycle of religious feasts and fasts, and following the norms dictated by society, which were greater in number and often harshly enforced. Those who went above and beyond this became clerics and monks. But the average man would just go with the stream of society, and his more personal devotion was performed to gain heavenly intercession through the saints in order to put food on the table and avoid a horrid death at the callous hands of nature. Just living according to these norms at their bare minimum gave one a secured place in the community and the Church.