The Mirror and The Seashore

Thoughts. Mind. Thinking. No-thoughts. No-mind. No-thinking. 

Within Zen Buddhist and Taoist thought worlds there are two metaphors: these are those of the mirror and the seashore. They serve similar purposes: to promote ideas of non-attachment to thoughts and the refusal to be bound by any thoughts, ideas or narratives at all. This is not a vision of the mind which is about the attainment or collection of things and so the agglomeration of something denominated ‘knowledge’. Indeed, it is one which privileges the refusal to hold anything at all within something we might call our mind. The mirror, for example, is a reflecting surface. It does not hold what it captures. It simply reflects it back. In a similar way, the seashore is caressed by the sea which may, from time to time, deposit items upon it. But the seashore, in this case, is indifferent and unconcerned about this and is happy to let that which is left upon it stay indefinitely or be just as easily swept away again. The metaphors of mirror and seashore encourage non-attachment, being dispassionate and acting without action.

In his book Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, towards the end, Friedrich Nietzsche has the following aphorism:

“Life as the yield of life. - No matter how far a man may extend himself with

his knowledge, no matter how objectively he may come to view himself,

in the end it can yield to him nothing but his own biography.”

I see in this thought a mentality compatible with that of the Zen Buddhists and Taoists above. For what is it to imagine that a path of life yields nothing but the tracings of where it has been, a biography? Is it not to look disapprovingly on the notion that one may have collected up things egotistically regarded as ‘knowledge’ or ‘truths’ and to count them all as vanity? In this aphorism Nietzsche is agreeing with the past, present and future versions of himself that human beings are prey to many powerful illusions and that they should regard them all as exactly that and treat them accordingly. Here it is noteworthy that Nietzsche, in general, did not so much think of thoughts in terms of true or false but in terms of therapeutic valuations: he wanted to know if such things promoted health or disease in the human being and in human culture generally. Already when Nietzsche had written this aphorism in the late 1870s he had written of the human being as that creature which is a matter of will and desire where, for such a being, it doesn’t matter much what illusion they become attached to so long as it gives them a feeling of power and of control.

Yet it is just such power and control that, it seems to me, the Zen Buddhists and the Taoists are looking to give up. They think these things to be some of the “illusions that we have forgotten are illusions” which is what Nietzsche calls those things we denominate truth in an essay he wrote earlier in the 1870s. Taoists, for example, speak of and value the idea of ‘wu wei’ a great deal. ‘Wu wei’ is best translated into English as ‘actionless action’ rather than the often common ‘non-action’ since, so I am led to understand, it is not a concept which means doing nothing. Instead, the Taoist practitioner is imagined as an active participant in the things of life - yet not as someone with micromanaged intentions. This is seen as a matter of genuineness or authenticity in a conception of the whole that is the existence of all things in which ‘emptiness’ is seen as the source of all possibility. From such a point of view desires, will, intentions, attachments, are all barriers to possibility and enemies of becoming because they impose upon people mental structures which limit their abilities to see, to imagine, to participate and to dream. In effect, the Taoist asks why we should put up mental walls or restrict ourselves by means of entirely thought-based schemes when nothing about our universe of experience itself imposes such things or presents them as inherent to life itself. The situation, whatever the situation is, is not limited to the things we immediately, or even reflectively, think about it. There is no equation of thought and reality. This is, in turn, to concede, as the theologian and philosopher Jack Caputo does, that there is nothing we think that is not an interpretation.

But if there is nothing we think that is not an interpretation then this surely also means that there is nothing that we think that is not partial - in at least two senses. First, an interpretation is our’s, and not someone else’s, and, second, because of the first reason it is also much, much less than the whole, the whole which would be all the possible interpretations. Realising this, we now see, once again, how becoming attached to things or desiring things is actually a restriction of possibility. In fact, it is the imposition of a fiction simply because we become attached to it, either because we want to be through desire or will or because we are not sufficiently detached from it to see it as simply an interpretation. It would be like trying to become like a mirror that wants to possess the image it reflects or like a seashore which wants to retain the items the sea spits out onto it. Yet such a seashore, if it did this in reality, would soon become cluttered. Over time, it would cease to be the empty expanse next to the sea upon which things might occasionally be washed and would, instead, become a dumping ground, a tip, a public dustbin. The seashore as mind would actually impair its own ability to be that which it is. In Nietzsche’s terms, we would then be able to diagnose the habits of attachment, will, intention and desire as unhealthy and disease-inducing habits. So, actually, refusing to hold onto things, taking a detached attitude to the action of the sea of life as it sweeps across our minds, turns out to be good for the seashore, the seashore that is mind. The thoughts may come and the thoughts may go, the actions of a mind that is thinking, but we do not need to accept them or be under their tyranny. We are not forced to hold onto them them or take them seriously anymore.

There is another saying that comes from these Eastern philosophies and it is the following: “the no-mind thinks no-thoughts about no-things”. It seems, to me at least, to be a riddle and yet I imagine that in this brief essay I might have had some thoughts which illuminate its meaning. Zen Buddhists and Taoists know well that we have minds and we think thoughts. The Buddha himself, in fact, is said to have said that “we are what we think”. (He also said ‘there is nothing to stick to’ which is relevant but a whole other story!) This, indeed, is why I imagine such philosophies are so concerned with thinking in the first place. But, that being the case, it suggests that mental hygiene and psychological health are of primary importance for these most therapeutic of spiritualities in which peace and enlightenment are the highest personal goods and the most valuable possessions. This saying, I think, encapsulates the lack of attachment and refusal of imposed narratives that I have already spoken about. It encourages actionless action and loss of intention and a ‘letting things be’ that is hard for people used to ‘gaining knowledge’ or ‘understanding things’ to accept. They only ever do these things to use them in accordance with their own intentions and desires and attachments in the pursuance of some imagined necessity they call “making sense”. Rarely, however, do they question the narrative, and the values, which have motivated them to imagine that this was the purpose of thinking or the mind in the first place. We have here, then, a completely different way to see the world. But you should not then think that this Eastern way is ‘the right way’ where the other, more Western, one was not. 

For then you will only have fallen into the same trap all over again.

Three Things are Appropriate

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is a book by Benedicta Ward which collects and catalogues the sayings of Christian ascetic monks in Egypt in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. It interests me primarily as an observer of human behaviour and as one seeking to make sense of it. One can read through the book even at random and begin to get a sense of the mentality of these people, how they think, what they value, what their aims in life are, and so on. I find in them a strange mix of the philosophical, the theological and the very human. One saying in particular has stayed with me since I first got the book and not least because it is attributed to a namesake, Abba Andrew:

Abba Andrew said, “These three things are appropriate for a monk: exile, poverty and endurance in silence.”

I must admit that I have stared at this apophthegm many times and found in it many pathways of thought. I note several things initially. For starters, the saying does not say that its three things are good; it says that they are “appropriate” and for a monk. It is, thus, not focused on people in general but on those who have taken a specific religious vocation and what is appropriate, not good, to it. Next I note that the three appropriate things are things which cut the monk off from society in general. A monk is exiled, economically bereft and uncommunicative. There is a sense here that the monk is perfecting himself, taking responsibility for his own existence and not expecting things to just happen except by attention to them and focus upon them. Third, I note that this is a kind of “how to be a monk” saying. There is no reference in the saying to anything outside of this. “Monk” thus seems to be a very single-minded vocation - and perhaps one in which the monk separates himself (it was usually a him) from society and community. It seems a vocation in which the individual life looks beyond itself to an eternal context in which it becomes the thing at stake. Here the existential and the eternal seem to meet and interact, in fact, and in a way in which the temporary and ephemeral existential are not extinguished by the sheer awesome overwhelmingness of the eternal but in which it is, in some sense, purified or perfected by it. We see from numerous other sayings of the Fathers that to take this vocation was to take suffering as a vocation and Christians, in Jesus, have from their very first writings taken their God as their paradigmatic forebear in such “perfection through suffering”. A Christian is led to think, “If Jesus suffered then why shouldn’t I?”

But I turn to Andrew’s three things in turn now beginning with “exile”. Exile is a prominent theme throughout the Jewish and Christian scriptures where the exile is from God but also from his promises such as “land” or “salvation”. We may sum up the notion of exile here as being cut off from God. Meanwhile, both modern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and theologians such as Tom Wright have used “exile” as a metaphor in their own academic work, the former perpetuating an argument about language as an alienating and exiling force whereas the latter has argued that Jesus was God’s agent of the end of human exile from Himself in a theological interpretation of the historical Jesus. If we ask ourselves what the monks are exiling themselves from the answer must be “society” and so, basically, outside influence or temptation to straying from the existential path the monk has set before them. This is not an inconsequential choice or an easy path to take, as anyone who has ever been alone for a decent period of time will likely testify. It is noteworthy, however, that here exile is regarded as a positive thing, something which gives the monk space and time to go about their monkish business. Often exile is perceived religiously as a punishment or in a negative light in contrast to this.

So why is exile appropriate for a monk? Because they are those who have single-mindedly chosen to focus on a vertical relationship with God which, they believe, will result in their own eternal good. But in choosing exile from society they have also chosen exile from friendship, from comfort, from diversion from themselves, from simple help, for such monks historically lived alone in cells. Exile is a choice to bear one’s existence alone without assistance, to forego the horizontal  community for the vertical eternity. This puts oneself under a terrible microscope in which hitherto unnoticed details about the self become apparent. It seems that Abba Andrew finds this entirely appropriate for the monk who must seek to root out all insufficiencies from the one who seeks to dedicate himself to a God thought perfect. That one cannot be of God and of the world is an old Christian thought and so the monk is to choose exile from the world in an attempt to better approach God instead. Abba Arsenius is reported to have heard God say to him, “Flee from men and you will be saved.” This is the attitude that Andrew also preserves here. Human society in general, so it is thought, can only distract and contaminate thought that should be on higher and more eternal things. “The perfection of the self cannot be carried out amongst the distractions of the crowd” is the thought at work here.

Next in the list of things appropriate for a monk is poverty. Monks should not have “things” in general and for much similar reasons as to why they should not have neighbours: they can only act as a distraction from the focus required for the task at hand. Abba John the Dwarf is reported to have said that “if a man goes around fasting and hungry the enemies of his soul grow weak” and we see this thought in Andrew’s imposition of poverty upon the monk. Theodore of Pherme said, “It is best of all to possess nothing,” another desert witness to the same thought. Here possessions are simple distractions, unnecessary things which can only take up time and thought and get in the way. Having things or wealth are those things which will demand attention of their own which the monk can ill-afford to give away since he must always be watchful. Interior peace is regarded by many Desert Fathers as something necessary and how can one have that if one is worried about his possessions - or has possessions to worry about? Better, then, not to have any and here we see the very ascetical bent of the Fathers brought to the fore. This ascetical poverty is an enforced simplicity, a mindset of “having enough” as being good enough. If one survives then one has achieved one’s goal and one, by very definition, has had enough, all that was required, to do so. Here “excess” would be any more than this bare minimum. This poverty would seem to enforce a necessary simplicity and humility upon the monk in his reduced circumstances. And this, in turn, reminds me of the second two of the “Three Treasures” from the 67th saying of the Tao Te Ching, those being frugality and humility.

The third item in Andrew’s list is “endurance in silence,” a composite notion that needs unpacking. “Endurance” suggests something that needs to be endured and in the notions of both exile and poverty we have suitable referents for neither are simple matters easily negotiated. “Endurance” here also suggests to me the New Testament Greek word (the Fathers were Christians after all) “makrothumia” which is longsuffering, forbearance, fortitude (sometimes simply rendered “patience”). It is literally makro - long - and thumia - temper - and so cultivating a “long temperedness” as opposed to being short tempered. Paul gives makrothumia, the ability to calmly play the long game, as one of the “fruits of the Spirit” in Galatians 5:22. But here the endurance is “in silence” and this is not an unimportant addition for, once more, talk is seen as a problem because it is a distraction, something else to be concerning yourself with instead of the thing the monk should be focused on. To be a monk is, as one Father says, “to be always mindful of God.” Another, Abba Pambo, was asked by the brethren to say something to Theophilus the Archbishop when he came to visit the Fathers in their desert cells. But he replied to them, “If he is not edified by my silence then he will not be edified by my speech.” Here silence is taken as having better things to do with one’s time than talk and is indicative of a more important communion than oral discourse. “Endurance in silence” is then an inward attitude of silent resilience without distraction yet also a witness to something beyond words.

Having given brief thoughts I now want to change tack and interpret this from a Taoist / Zen perspective. Consider the following Zen / Taoist sayings culled from a popular Twitter account dedicated to tweeting such things within 24 hours of me writing this:

Mirror facing mirror. Nowhere else. - Ikkyu

If you try to change it, you will ruin it. Try to hold it, and you will lose it. - Taoist proverb

The art of simplicity. - Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Without the Tao, kindness and compassion are replaced by law and justice. - Lao Tzu

The supreme form of wealth is contentment. - Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche

To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders. - Zhuangzi

The valley stream's rushing sound is the eloquent tongue of Buddha. The mountain's vibrant colours are nothing but the Buddha's form. - Dogen Zenji

If you let go a little you will have little happiness. If you let go completely you will be free. - Ajahn Chah

Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity. - Lao Tzu

Silence is proactive. - B. D. Schiers

When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much. - Zen proverb

Fundamentally, the marksman aims at himself. - D.T. Suzuki

What mindset, what attitude, what worldview, is being cultivated and recommended by these sayings? How does it compare with that put forward by Abba Andrew as an example of the Desert Fathers? One big difference is that the Desert Fathers, as Christians and monotheists, have personalised the infinite and eternal, that which is beyond them, whereas Buddhists and Taoists in general have not. Taoists, for example, have “the Tao” which translates loosely as “the Way” and it is thought to be in, around and through all things. “Buddha” itself is a title (like Christ is whether applied to Jesus or not) meaning “the awakened one” or “the enlightened one” and not a name and the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, is not a god within Buddhism but merely the most enlightened human being who ever lived, one in balance with all things and at perfect peace. This latter point, however, is a point of possible contact with the Fathers who also seek peace yet through communion with their god. Yet we may say, in general terms, that there is a very different point of emphasis for these two ways. The focus of the Desert Fathers is God and they themselves are regarded as those who need to be perfected to be in perfect communion with him. Along the way they may expect to struggle, to have to purge themselves of sin or evil desires and this will more than likely be a painful experience. In contrast, the Buddhists and Taoists might be represented by the quote of Zhuangzi above: To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders. Here the focus is the individual themselves, albeit in the context of absolutely everything else one may experience or encounter. Neither Buddhists nor Taoists seek communion with a being but perhaps they do seek it with Being, an ineffable oneness with all things in a peaceful harmony. Peace or serenity we may see as a, if not the, goal of these latter paths.

Here the mention of silence in both traditions is interesting and worth exploring. From both Abba Andrew’s words here and those of some of my Zen and Tao quotes we can see that words have their limitations. For Andrew words were confusers or distractors that pulled the monk from the place he needed to be. Yet for both Abba Pambo and B.D. Schiers silence itself is saying something, perhaps plenty, yet without words. In both these religious traditions more widely conceived it seems to me that there is just so much room for what cannot be said, for acknowledging that words fail and language reaches a limitation. One need not be overtly religious to reach this conclusion either since 20th century philosophers of language, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, both seemingly come to similar conclusions should you read their work. I see in both of these ways, that of Christian Desert Fathers and that of Zen Buddhists and Taoists, that neither perceive of everything as a mass of facts scientifically understood, a very instrumental and detached mode of thinking. The world, existence, could not for any of these people potentially be tagged and catalogued so that one day we could imagine that everything could be logged, known and worked out. Both operate with a much more experiential and even existential understanding of knowledge than that. For them, we are in a world of experience and not one of subjects and objects where the former can, with ingenuity, skill and patience, learn all about the latter. I see the importance of silence in all these traditions as related to this. I see the recognition that words stop as a recognition that “knowledge” stops too. It is not the supreme need, the major requirement. It is merely a tool but the true riches are so much more than it can ever provide. Words are inadequate to experience as knowledge is inadequate to understanding.

So what happens when the talking stops? For one thing, other things then become possible such as listening and thinking (the latter perhaps being a kind of listening to yourself). In the Zen proverb quoted above “understanding” takes one beyond the realm of words so that even one is too much, or, perhaps, never enough. Thinking like this even seems to make something like a Derridean deconstructive operation something of religious significance. Here, according to Derrida, language is itself insufficient to the task it sets for itself. In use we find that it cannot fix the price of things. It sets out to say something but, in the act of so doing, we find that it disrupts its own operation. It can also be seen to say other things it did not mean to say, it can be subverted and used against itself, it falls short of its target. This, in philosophical guise, is not far from the monkish notion that silence can be more edifying than speech or the Zen notion that even one word is too much. According to one Buddhist proverb “the no-mind thinks no-thoughts about no-things” which expresses this mode of thinking perfectly. Not only is there no-mind but there are no-thoughts and there are no-things. How would a knowledge-based, instrumental, objective, scientific mindset cope with something like that? Neither tradition here has to worry about that, though, since, I argue, they are experience-based mindsets and not epistemologically-based mindsets. They are focused on experience not facts. Experience, unlike facts, is not simply known; it is felt, it is intuited, it can be instinctive, it embraces more than intellect. Experience gives cash value to the lives, and the pathways those lives take, of every thinking being.

I discussed above how, for the Desert Fathers, exile was primarily a matter of separation from the world for the purposes of personal devotion to God and the cultivation of that vertical relationship. The figure of exile applies in Buddhist and Taoists contexts too but here it is in the guise of alienation from the Tao, if Taoist, or “all things” if we talk more generally. The aim of these religious paths, it seems to me, is therapeutic: they aim at universal peace and harmony and so rest which becomes understanding or enlightenment. Their aim is the dissolution of a grasping, desirous existence which can only lead to conflict and turmoil. As Ajahn Chah says above, the aim is to “let go completely” and here the notion of Wu Wei, the action of non-action, plays a large part. Here again we can see how knowledge or fore-knowledge is consequently deprioritised for in these traditions we are not knowing subjects who progress through our existence by the manipulation of objects we know facts about. Indeed, it is hard to see how these traditions are based on knowledge at all as an essentialist, foundationalist or realist (in the philosophical sense) might understand these things. This idea of letting things be is totally alien to a modern Western mentality based on knowledge about things and this knowledge as the means to their instrumental use. For the Taoist, for example, it is not our job to impose our will upon things. The viewpoint here is much more holistic than many are capable of being, the idea is that, in a meaningful sense, everything is already a part of everything else and it a part of that in return. So when D.T. Suzuki says that, fundamentally, “the marksman aims at himself” he really does literally mean it. “Mirror facing mirror. Nowhere else” says Ikkyu, to change is to ruin, to hold is to lose, runs another Taoist proverb. The worldview here is one of movement, of constant change, of the idea of knowledge, beloved of others, being one that is static and ossifying and so not at all true to the world of experience for that is never still and always changing. A Buddhist or Taoist experiences exile, alienation, when out of this stream of existence, not in balance with the way of all things. This is not something we know facts about and so attempt to control; it is that which, with non-action, we become one with.

The Taoist and Buddhist alike also know about Abba Andrew’s “simplicity” (which he calls “poverty”) and they would see its necessity. I have already mentioned that the Taoist Tao Te Ching regards frugality and humility as two of its “three treasures” - and this is not merely for monks, those dedicated to a life of religious devotion, but for all to be in accord with that which is beyond them, be that a Way or a God or simply the Everything. For neither religious tradition here, the Christian and the Buddhist/Taoist, is the personalised, self-concerned form of existence that we experience all that there is. For these traditions, Man is not the measure; instead human beings are part of a much greater whole the overwhelming majority of which is unknown and, to all intents and purposes, perhaps even unknowable. For a Christian their God is not reducible to human minds and understanding anymore than for a Taoist the Tao can be put in a box and explained. Both retain concepts of the Beyond, the Ineffable, That Which Can Be Experienced But Not Known. Its also worth pointing out that this isn’t necessarily about us doing anything either. It is about our not-doing. “Do your work, then step back,” says Lao Tzu, suggesting that we just go about our business quite matter-of-factly. In these traditions simple things become sacred things, not because they are special but because the whole, everything, anything, is, in that sense, special. Here we partake in the All just because we are, because we exist. We seek peace within it not by grasping it and bending it to our will but by flowing as it flows. Unlike the God of the Desert Fathers, the Tao is not a will and so it is not a matter of using our will or bending it to that of another. Instead, its absence and negation is sought. “Simplicity” here is a life of non-action lived without will, an openness to all things. And if we are open to all things then the value of specific things dissolves accordingly. Things are made simpler. Less is more.

I have not wanted to suggest in this brief essay that Christian Desert Fathers and those of Buddhist or Taoist persuasions are versions of the same thing. This essay has been far too brief for even a cursory evaluation of such issues and my intuition is that, if such an essay were attempted, it would find areas of common interest but also others of conflict and differing agendas. But what I would take from the words of Abba Andrew, and from the Buddhist/Taoist interests that I introduced to discuss those words, is that exile, poverty and endurance in silence are not merely matters for monks in the desert in the conscious gaze of their god nor Eastern mystics seeking enlightened harmony with all things. They are matters for all of us. Exile, alienation, is very prevalent in the world of anybody who looks out of the window. The question of what is needful for a human being, and if the economic treadmill so many willingly climb onto, and to which so many others are either coerced or forced, is beneficial or necessary, is very apparent. That people’s experience of life is disregarded and vilified to their detriment for a mentality of “knowledge is power,” the logical conclusion of an epistemological approach to life, takes its toll upon the existence of many who are regarded as inconsequential casualties of progress or as natural wastage, those who couldn’t keep up.  “Exile,” “poverty” and “endurance in silence” my seem very objective things in Abba Andrew’s statement but when read through any number of real lives they come to have consequences far more far-reaching than Andrew himself can ever have imagined. They also come to be relevant to every human being.

Human society is constructed from an ever growing number of human beings. Each, by means of any number of connections, is connected to all the rest. Each, by virtue of living in a shared space, has consequences for the rest. It is my intuition that it would do us good to concentrate on these notions of exile, poverty and endurance in silence, and their consequences, some of which I have teased out in this short essay, and that doing so would be to our common good. It is my view that we each have our part to play in the world and that any “change” that we think the whole needs begins with each one of us. You cannot change a system if you cannot change the people within it and so positive change of any kind is a matter not merely of changed circumstances but of changed people. Abba Andrew recognises this in the monk when he requires him to completely change his lifestyle in order to change society for, in fact, the Desert Fathers were taken as examples by many of how to devote oneself to God. They acted for many as examples of devotion and commitment. We may not believe in God but the point remains that to change the whole it starts by changing yourself. (Of course, it may be granted that Christianity in general has had a mixed record of effects upon society in general and that all but the most bitter of its critics would admit that these were not all bad.) The Buddhists and Taoists, too, recognise this in that their thinking is about a program of personal change which works a holistic harmony through the dissolution of both individual wants and an obsession with knowledge as power. No one can force people to change themselves. No one can even enlighten them to the notion that they need to be changed. Yet it remains my own personal, perhaps spiritual, conviction that when people change, societies change. And if they can change then why not for the better? The battle is not merely at societal level but, fundamentally, at the personal one as Abba Andrew, sundry Zen Buddhists and Taoists  seemingly know so well.

This essay is taken from a forthcoming collection of philosophical, theological and hermeneutical essays I am writing called Being-in-the-midst: Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Tradition.

Insights From Artist Interviews

In recent days I've been spending a lot of time reading various artist interviews. As I have a preference for the written word (which is why I write blogs and don't make videos) this has meant a lot of reading. There came a point in this process when I realized that I could probably snip a few of the questions and answers from their immediate locations and make a blog from some of these. These cuttings could address points that I've seen raised recently both in my own former blogs and in some of the discussions they have aroused. All the people I will bring into this blog will be "famous" to a greater or lesser degree. But I don't mean to use these people as arguments from authority (as philosophers call it). Setting aside the trappings of fame, they are just other electronic musicians although, granted, some if not all have great experience. Its just my naive view that people can learn something from the experiences of others. So in what follows I will introduce a few artists, set up the context for them and then present the question they were asked, the answer they gave and what it teaches me. Hopefully, this will have some worth for others too. I'll also slip in a link to their music just because I can and to give a hint to those who may not have heard of some of the artists included.

1. Venetian Snares (Aaron Funk)

Some while ago Canadian Aaron Funk, better known as Venetian Snares, had a magnificent stumble of an interview when he said some things that, apparently, you shouldn't say. Funk, like many electronic musicians, including others I will bring into this blog, doesn't like doing interviews or fulfilling media duties because he is quite secretive and private. Fair enough. I wouldn't either. This is all part of a fame equation it seems. It got to the stage some years back where he started to not want to release music. At which point I snip from an interview with him...

VS: I think 2007 was the point when I became really at odds with releasing music.

Interviewer (I): What made you feel like that? You seem to have always been at odds with it.

VS: Um... I don't know. I love making music but its kinda hard for me to put it out to be honest. The idea of it being heard by people who want to hear it fucks with my head so, you know... its easier to choose to keep it to myself.

I: Its an interesting position to have as an artist.

VS: Of course. As soon as you release records some person hearing it will think that this record is a product for them to enjoy whereas that's not my intent making it whatsoever. Its for me while I'm creating it. I don't know. People coming at you from that angle is kinda sickening, you know?

I: As soon as you create something and put it out there its no longer under your control.

VS: No. Its out in the world of fucking IMDB one-to-tens, its out there in the database of millions of people shooting off opinions at each other that they believe they're formulating on their own.

In print this interview was presented as "Venetian Snares hates everyone including his fans". But the truth, as often is the case, was a bit more subtle than this. Essentially, Snares was presenting a modern dichotomy for the electronic artist who works alone creating and getting the buzz of creation entirely to his or her own requirements. But then, if they choose to share it, it becomes prey to a lot of random views which were nothing to do with the context of creation. The artist becomes prey to a lot of opinions that were nothing to do with what he was doing. Snares almost has a "what has my music got to do with you?" attitude here. And I somewhat understand that as someone who finds his own music very personal. Venetian Snares gives voice to a very modern problem here for electronic musicians who are working away in their homes on essentially very private projects. To then be subject to public expectations is often a burden.

2. David Bowie

David Bowie needs no introduction. The picture here is from when he had a stint as the keyboard player on Iggy Pop's "The Idiot" tour in 1977. Around the same time he was producing his so called "Berlin Trilogy" of albums which were influenced by krautrock and the Germanic sounds of the seventies. Bowie was, perhaps, the consummate artist. Musician was a word too narrowly confined to contain him. His electronic meanderings of the time, such as the track Subterraneans which finished his 1977 album "Low," were highly regarded but Bowie had long since become a star by then. In 1978 Bowie was asked by a British journalist to "assess his greatest contribution to rock". "I'm responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension," was his witty and pithy reply.

But concealed beneath the deflecting wit I see a reservoir of truth. Bowie's career was carried out only through the medium of a succession of characters right from Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane through to the Thin White Duke, the Stadium Superstar of the mid 80s and on. And its not as if these were peripheral to the act. They were the act. A little digging reveals that Bowie had biographies and life stories worked out for these characters. An album like 1995's "Outside", for example, is a whole detailed scenario worked out with characters, storyline and plot. So for Bowie's "pretension" in the quote we can substitute the word "creation". For Bowie the music needed a whole creative context worked out in detail over which the sounds could be laid like a blanket and I wonder how many others go that far? Music and ideas were inseparable siamese twins for David Bowie.

3. Brian Eno

A famous collaborator of Bowie's at the time was Brian Eno, the Roxy Music synthesizer dabbler who had gone off to Germany in the mid 70s to jam with Harmonia, released some ambient music and become something of a sound guru. In the 70s he once made a throwaway comment that he was a "non-musician," a comment which some saw as a reverse conceit of some kind. In a later interview Eno explained what he had meant by it.

"It was a case of taking a position deliberately in opposition to another one. I don't say it much anymore but I said it when I said it there because there was such an implicit and tacit belief that virtuosity was the sine qua non of music and there was no other way of approaching it. And that seemed to be so transparently false in terms of rock music in particular. I thought it was well worth saying that whatever I was doing it wasn't that. And I thought the best way to do it was to say that I was a non-musician.... When I say "musician" I wouldn't apply it to myself as a synthesizer player or a player of tape recorders because I usually mean someone with a digital skill that they then apply to an instrument. I don't really have that so strictly speaking I'm a non-musician. None of my skills are manual, they're not to do with manipulation in that sense, they're more to do with ingenuity I suppose."

Eno is then asked if he ever had any formal music training or felt any pressure to get some.

"No, no I haven't really. I can't think of a time that I ever thought that."

What strikes me about this exchange is how relevant it is to the current situation in which the vast majority of electronic musicians are essentially ordinary citizens at home. With their electronic things. For them, electronic music is not about learning scales or musical theory. Its not about a formal training process or, indeed, anything formal at all. It is about the instant satisfaction of making a noise. It is, to paraphrase Eno, about ingenuity over technical skill. In response to some of my blogs I have found some, presumably of an old school variety, who have mumbled and grumbled about this. But electronic music is overwhelmingly the paradigm of "ingenuity" and Eno stands as one of the greatest examples of this.

4. Coil (John Balance and Peter Christopherson)

I mentioned Coil as an example in a recent blog of mine and in reading several interviews with them to get a feel for what they were about musically I came across the following exchange.

I: You've said before that you work very instinctually. How do you mean, exactly?

JB: I have notebooks and ideas and its just grabbing, really: trying to be informed by the earth and the etheric. And trying, by any means whatsoever, to make that into a solid object, or a sound object, or a record. And that's what we've always tried to do. It seems - we don't create it, really. It's already there. We just assemble a kit. 

PC: We have discussions sometimes about the feeling behind a track that's about to be started. It might be a discussion about a picture or a feeling or a moment in a film.

JB: Sometimes we set down a whole page of parameters: it should do this, it should do that, it should reflect the moon, it should be lunar. Or we'll burn some incense or let the dogs run wild around the room while we're doing it - or we'll shut them in the garden. Anything like that. Or eat carrots for a week and then do something. Just so some chemistry within us is deliberately changed. 

PC: As for the music itself, its not like "Let's set up a rhythm and set up a bass." We'll try combinations of equipment or filters or computer programs almost at random and then...

JB: Something hits.

PC: There will be something about one of them you like and you want to develop. Its almost like the process of selection is the most important thing.

I find this little explicative exchange fascinating. First, there is the notion that to do music you need to change the dynamic, to get your head on. This alone is interesting in a world where many electronic music makers are citizen musicians with a 9 to 5 who do music in their spare time. I wonder, what state are they in when they come to create? Is it a creatively fruitful one? Or is it a lowest common denominator one only good enough to produce a casual You Tube jam not meant to be taken seriously? Further, John Balance held to a view of the musician as conduit. He did not think he created the music. He thought he was an agent through which it manifested itself. This perhaps explains his belief in the necessity for some kind of preparation. Christopherson completes this thinking with his own contribution to the discussion and the suggestion that this random process of selection "is the most important thing". Food for thought indeed.

5. Sean Booth (Autechre)

Sean Booth and Rob Brown of Autechre are different to many of the current electronic musicians of our day, not least the hipster or gear collecting varieties, in that they deliberately and purposefully use software to make their music. The reason for this is they value control most of all as electronic musicians. Maximum manipulation is their overwhelming artistic desire and it is only in designing custom software that they feel this aim is satisfied to its maximum ability. If you have heard much of their music this will begin to make more sense. But this controlling, software-based music might, from the outside, come across as a little cold. In a Q+A session Autechre subjected themselves to back in 2013 Sean Booth of the band was asked if they ever take an interest in how their music "stimulates the nervous system and our physiology (not just in terms of emotions)?" In a related question he was also asked if the main goal of the band was "to produce music that is emotionally appealing to yourselves, or do you lean more towards the sound designs/textures that music can be manipulated into without having the emotive element in the forefront of the music making process?" His answer is interesting:

"To be honest I think that everything has some emotional element but we're not really thinking about that when we do stuff. Its not that we don't feel that emotions are important, more that its hard for me to imagine a sound that does not convey some sense of something. And quite often when people discuss emotions in music they only think of happy and sad as being emotions when, in my opinion, emotions are a lot more than that. E.g. if we put out a really angry track then people rarely describe it that way. They would more likely say it was unlistenable or difficult. The emphasis moves from expression to design. Maybe they just fail to recognise it as expressive if they think its very technical."

The thoughts that come from this quite profound answer are worth pondering, in my view, not least electronic music's image (sometimes) as something cold and technical. As people who use software to create dense and complex electronic noise collages, Autechre might be especially open to such a charge. However, the sonic realities turn out to be somewhat different and this should lead us to ask questions about what is going on and how electronic sound, something on the one hand uncaring and impassive, can come to be intimate and familiar.

6. Jean-Michel Jarre

Jean-Michel Jarre is currently celebrating 40 years since the release of the record, made in his kitchen in 6 weeks, which made his name and gave him a life of fame and fortune. That record, of course, was Oxygène. Jarre has been very active lately. In the last year or so he has put out 3 albums, two volumes of a collaborative project he called "Electronica" and the third part of the Oxygene trilogy. He has also toured his Electronica project. In the corresponding period he has also given numerous interviews and this gives a little insight into the processes that such well known electronic musicians go through. For example, he was asked regarding the track Close Your Eyes which he collaborated on with his fellow Frenchmen, Air.

I: So presumably you travelled to everybody's studios, taking your own software?

JMJ: For every artist it was slightly different. With somebody like Air in Paris we worked first in separate studios and then we joined forces in my studio. Nicolas from Air had this idea where he said it would be great if we used all the different generations of musical instruments. We started with the first oscillators from when I was a student with Pierre Schaeffer (at the Groupe de Recherche Musicales centre in Paris), synthesizers from my time with Stockhausen, and then also doing the first loop of the song with scissors and sellotape and magnetic tape. Then we used the first drum machine, the first modular synth, the monophonic Moog synthesizer moving to the polyphonic analogue synthesizer, the Fairlight, to samplers, to the first digital keyboards, to plugins and the last sound of the track has been made with an iPad. We said it shouldn't be visible, it was more of an exercise for us.

What strikes me here (aside from the fact that if you are Jean-Michel Jarre or Air then you have access to all this stuff!) is that even millionaire superstars need creative ways in which to create, puzzles to solve as part of the creative process. Often creation is approached very unimaginatively, very straight, and it is a chore as a result. This may not be the best thing for encouraging creativity to take place. And so tasks within the task need inventing so that the creativity you require may almost be a by-product of doing something else which may not, in itself, have been creative but encouraged the creativity that you hoped to achieve.

7. Richard D. James (Aphex Twin)

Richard James, better known as Aphex Twin, has been the darling of many fans of a certain kind of electronic music for many years. Known to be excessively secretive and with an autistic need to know everything that there is to know both about every possible electronic device that can make sound and about musical theory, he is rumoured to have a huge backlog of material most of which has never reached the public's ears. All this is true whilst he is largely unknown to the mass of the population and I'm sure he could walk down nearly any street without being recognised. His most popular track is probably Window Licker which was accompanied by a video from Chris Cunningham that received heavy MTV rotation back in 1999 when the track came out. In one of his rare interviews he was asked about what he sees himself as.

I: Would it be fair to say that you're a sound artist as much as a musician?

RDJ: Yeah. Its all about sound but people forget that. They think "Oh, I want to hear a nice tune." But what you're actually saying is you want to hear the combination of frequencies that make you feel a certain way. And more excitingly, its about finding out the new ones. A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament (an equal temperament is a system of tuning in which every pair of adjacent notes is separated by the same interval) and I'm definitely one of those.

You're brainwashed in the West with equal temperament, so its quite hard for people who like following rules to get outside of that and see what you can do. But for me its easy because I don't work like that. I work intuitively. I actually prefer it if I don't know what I'm supposed to do. If you've got an equal temperament piano keyboard then you know what you're going to get if you play certain chords. But I actually like it if you don't know where the notes are because then you do it intuitively. You're working out a new language, basically. New rules. And when you get new rules that work you're changing the physiology of your brain. And then your brain has to reconfigure itself in order to deal with it.

So if you hear a C-major chord with equal temperament you've heard it a million times before and your brain accepts it. But if you hear a chord that you've never heard before you're like "huh?" And your brain has to change shape to accept it. And once its changed shape then you've changed as a person in a tiny way. And if you have a whole combination of all these different frequencies you're basically reconfiguring your brain. And then you've changed as a person and you can go and do something else. Its a constant change. It could sound pretty cosmic and hippie but thats exactly whats going on.

I think this answer pretty much speaks for itself and is a testimony to how doing things differently both requires change and initiates it.

8. Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Kluster, Cluster and Qluster)

Hans-Joachim Roedelius has a very important place in the history of German electronic music. Not only was he one of the men who started the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in late 1960s Berlin, a place which gave birth to acts such as Kluster (later Cluster and two thirds of Harmonia), Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler, but he played a key role in defining the German electronic music of the 1970s. His partner in Cluster (once called the best band in the world by Brian Eno) pictured above on the right, Dieter Moebius, described him as someone who could write the most beautiful melodies. For such a pioneer we might expect some impressive musical background or personal history. The truth is a little different as this snippet of an interview I found shows.

I: When did you start writing and producing music and what or who were your early passions and influences?

HJR: I'm an autodidact. There was no music school I went to. I can neither write nor read scores. But even so, the body of work that I created since I moved from healing (Roedelius was once a masseur) to tone-art in 1967 includes thousands of musical works, about 1000 texts/poems, an uncountable amount of photos, photo collages and films. There's a lot yet to come out from my archive of unreleased works.

I: Do you feel it important that an audience is able to deduct the processes and ideas behind a work purely on the basis of the music you make? If so, how do you make them transparent?

HJR: There are for sure not many people who are able to analyze music in this way and why should they anyway? I am most transparent as a person/artist, after everything that has happened to me and everything that I've done within the 80 years of my life! Its obvious in my work. I don't have to make anything transparent because I am what I am doing. Person and work are one.

What these answers reveal to me is something I think is probably common to all of the artists I'm referring to in this blog today. Its summed up in Roedelius's phrase "Person and work are one". So whether its Roedelius or Aphex Twin or Coil or Venetian Snares or any of the others something of the creator is revealed in the created. There is an identity factor at work which is revealing. Or is there? And what is your electronic music saying about you? What is it revealing that you didn't realize? Or maybe you are intending it to reveal?

9. John Cage

John Cage is a kind of dividing line when it comes to music. He is a person who makes you choose sides. And we should be forever grateful to him for that. For what John Cage reveals in his music as well as his talking about music is that something is at stake. Music is not, as our shallow, commercialized world would love us to think, just entertainment. It is much, much more but also much, much less than that. Music is our environment. Music is about hearing the sounds that are there. Cage is primarily known, in a compositional sense, for two things: chance and indeterminacy. Needless to say, he has been asked about these things many times and in this section of an interview I read he explains how they work and what they are for.

I: Is there a difference between chance and indeterminacy?

JC: Yes. I use the words "chance operation" when I'm writing music and making use of numbers that are derivative from the I Ching that I've used for so many years. That can produce a piece of music, such as the Music of Changes that I wrote in the early fifties, which is determinate. Its fixed and can be read in the same way that you read a piece by another composer. An indeterminate piece is written in such a way as a camera is made. In other words, the camera enables you to take a picture but it doesn't make precise in any way what picture you are going to take. So indeterminacy is like a camera, giving people the ability to take a variety of different pictures, but chance operations can produce a fixed picture or a fixed piece of music. Chance operations could also be used in making something indeterminate but they are two different things. In both cases, the common denominator is non-intention on the part of the person who is working. Most people, when they work, work with something in mind. I always work with nothing in mind.

I: You say you start out a piece with nothing in mind. How do you know when you are on the right track?

JC: There are many tracks, and they are all right. Take the I Ching itself. I recommend it; its the oldest book on earth. It comes from something like 4000 BC and consists of 64 hexagrams. It is a book of wisdom. You can ask a question and get an answer through the use of chance operations, which classically were the tossing of three coins six times to get a hexagram, or tossing yarrow sticks. I didn't do it that way; it took too long. It takes about half an hour to toss the yarrow sticks. Now you can do it with the computer very rapidly and you can get an answer to your question. It would be foolish to ask a question and get answers by means of chance operations if the question asked needed a particular answer. It would be absurd. So, implicit in the use of chance operations is that all of the answers answer all of the questions. That's very interesting. Curiously enough, I learned that when I was studying with Schoenberg years ago but I didn't know that I learned it. 

He sent us all to the blackboard with a problem in counterpoint, even though it was a class in harmony. He said "When you have the solution of the problem turn around and let me see it." I turned around and he said "That's correct. Now give me another solution of the same problem," and I did. I then turned around and he said, "Thats also correct, now another." It went that way until about 8 or 9 solutions. Then when he asked for another I said with some trepidation, "There are no more solutions," and he said, "Thats also correct." Then he said, "What is the principle underlying all of the questions?" I was flabbergasted. I'd always worshipped the man but at that point he ascended. It took me almost 30 years to learn the answer to that question and I think he would accept it. That is, the principle underlying all of the solutions is the question you ask. So there you are, and that goes along with all of the answers answer all of the questions. 

Now it doesn't take a genius to see that this outlook on things is very different to the closed, authorly concept of music making that is the default method beloved of what we might call the received western tradition. This thinks of music as the deliberate choices of writers satisfying their tastes or their "feelz" as modern language might have it. Cage, instead, thinks of writing as about questions and and of the answers as merely different directions of equal validity, all correct. It all puts egotistical tastes vey much in the shade. So what does it matter what you think? Each direction is a right answer.

10. Edgar Froese (Tangerine Dream)

Edgar Froese was the leader of Tangerine Dream from their formation in 1969 (coming out of Hans-Joachim Roedelius's Zodiak Free Arts Lab scene) until his untimely death in January 2015. During this time span he was one of those who invented styles of electronic music and simultaneously provided a voluminous back catalogue of albums both studio based and live. I have often pondered how one might create something "new" since things are always inevitably related to their predecessors. Froese was fortunate to be alive at a time when new music making tools and practices were becoming available but, that said, the genius of what he created must remain his alone. In the end, I think a simple quote of his explains much if you think about it and unpack its connotations:

"In the absurd often lies what is artistically possible." - Edgar Froese

What fool ever thought music had to make sense, right?

If you enjoy discussing electronic music, how its made, why its made or any such questions then my group Electronic Music Philosophy might be for you.