Goodness

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Editor’s note: the personal letter reproduced below, the provenance of which will not be revealed, is the second in what is intended to be a six-part series on the transcendental states of being (beauty; goodness; truth) and the three chief virtues of 1 Corinthians 13 (faith; hope; love) within the context of art criticism. The reader is directed to part one of the series, which appeared on this blog a few months ago. The full completion of the six-part series remains doubtful.

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Dear [REDACTED],

“Water under the bridge” doesn’t really seem to do justice to our case. Think for a moment how long it had been: the last time, if I recall correctly, that we had seen each other was sometime in 2001. So much has happened since then. Are we even in the same world? Think of it—twenty-five years. The last time we saw each other was before there was any social media. It was before 9/11.

I’ll admit it was a shock to see you. I had completely written you out of my life; in all my calculations I had never admitted the possibility that I might see you again. But there you were. And you approached me: “Do you remember me?” you said. Of course I do. You were the first girl to whom I ever professed love; and guys don’t forget things like that.

I will fully admit it was all my fault that we had ended things on a bad note back then, back in good old two-thousand-one. I was a sixteen-year-old fool, and you knew that; and you did the most reasonable thing you could have done, damping my teenage ardor in the most tactful way you could. Of course I was disappointed; and I like to tell myself I was devastated. But people of that age don’t really know themselves yet; and I bounced back. But that story is for a different time.

About all of this water under the bridge. It’s unreasonable to think we are still the same people as we were back then; but I don’t feel any older—mentally, that is. My body is beginning to break down faster than it can repair itself. But my mind still considers the teenage problems to be the most important ones: art, culture, the world around us—the world of ideas; of human society and relationships. Sometimes it is hard to focus on those problems when the “adult” problems come creeping in. I’m like Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With Andre (have you seen that movie? Surely you have seen that movie): “When I was younger all I thought about was art and music. Now all I think about is money.” In my case there are times when I feel desperately trapped by having to think about money. But I’m tempted to assume that you, as well as me, still care about the same teenage things—really, they are the most important things—as I did.

If I could analyze your talk: you mentioned just a few things in the ten minutes we were vouchsafed after twenty-five years—where you live now, the weather—but one of them was your recalling to me an event of our friendship from before I’d soured it. I can only explain this to myself as your attempt to restore things to how they once were, to “picking up where we left off,” but without that nastiness I managed to stir up right there at the end. In mentioning that CD you gave me all those years ago—and tying it to me, and to you, and to who you are now—I have hope that you have not forgotten the most important thing of all those years ago: namely, music. And if we ever were to meet again, you know I would want to talk about only two things with you: your general broad-brush take on the twenty-first century so far; and music.

I have listened to so much good music in the past twenty-five years. And we always did like to listen to music together. More than recounting the big events of my life so far—my growing family, my job, my house (heaven forbid we have become so vulgar as to talk of our respective political opinions), I would, if you said “explain yourself to me so I might understand you,” share with you the music that is the best. The music that still sends tingles down my spine despite having heard it a thousand times, that got me through rough patches, that pulled the curtain back and showed me: “this, this is the possible goodness in music.” So here we go.

I started listening to Cocteau Twins a few years after you left town. It took me about ten years to get through their discography; and I must say, their EPs are better than their albums. With one exception: Victorialand remains their best effort. But “Kookaburra” from Aikea-Guinea is still one of the best verse-chorus songs I’ve ever heard. Listen to the piano in the second verse, as well as those upward glides Elizabeth Fraser does with her voice—but I’m not ready to talk about melodic shapes yet. Well get to that.

I also started listening to things like Flaming Lips and Wilco at this time: and you’ve simply got to hear the last track from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots—it’s flawless. The Flaming Lips are a silly band, though. Wilco is serious. “Radio Cure” and some of the songs on A Ghost is Born taught me more about sound in relation to form than I would ever have learned from listening to all those symphonies, or the Yes and King Crimson records I kept urging onto you. “Spiders” is still one of the best long-form guitar excursions ever recorded. It’s so sparse, though. After listening to Yes’ Topographic Oceans would you ever have expected me to enjoy something like “Spiders”? Strangely, I do.

There’s one other Wilco song I want to mention, but not yet. It’s simply too different from the rest of their work; it’s on an altogether different level. But first, a few other things.

Of course, I listened to all of Radiohead. They were a rock to me in the first few years after you left. But the more contented I become with my life, the less I care for Radiohead. They are, fundamentally, about being in despair. Except for In Rainbows. I was sitting at a coffee shop and talking with a friend the first time I heard “All I Need” from In Rainbows; and I stopped listening to what he was saying, told him to stop talking even, and said to myself: they’re back. I’ve never before or since had the same feeling of gears-meshing, planets-lining-up, something-is-right-in-the-universe as I did that evening when I knew that Radiohead had a new record out and it was good.

I’ve got to let you know about all this Canadian music I listened to all the time: music by bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor, Do Make Say Think, Fly Pan Am, Silver Mt Zion. It taught me the same things that the symphonies and sonatas and concertos taught me, but in a more minimalist way. I will defend with everything in me the fundamental goodness of repetitive music. That is why, in all the past twenty-five years, I still keep coming back to the old favorites of Reich, Glass, Riley, et cetera. The best of all that music is undoubtedly Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. I hope one day you get a chance to hear it all the way through, uninterrupted. And I would love to watch you listen to it. But the heirs to that tradition—Arvo Pärt, Górecki, The Necks—are just as good.

The last quarter-century has been a continuous story of musical discovery for me. Every year some new band or musician will come into my notice, and I will examine it to see if it has that spark of goodness. As I grew older and watched my kids come into the world I suppose I got wiser as well; and aesthetically, the biggest difference is that I listen to the shape of melodies now, where once I listened to the volume of the guitar chords.

Van Morrison sometimes destroys me in this regard—listen, if you have the chance, to the contours of his melodies on Veedon Fleece or Astral Weeks. Listen also to the melodic shapes in Stereolab’s works: simple, but powerfully effective, balanced, right, and of a gemlike perfection. Truly, good melodies pop up all over the place: The ornaments in songs like Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” or Grimes’ “Genesis” have that same delectable quality as the best of any lieder or sonatas.

I haven’t talked about lyrical content yet. Musical lyrics are really just a kind of literature and don’t concern me very much. But when the lyrics and the music mesh together—for instance on Arcade Fire’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains” or Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade or Sam Amidon’s “Lily-O” or David Byrne’s “Strange Overtones”—well, that’s pure magic. And I ought to tell you of the lowest and bleakest time of my life, when I was morassed in frustration and despair; I drove aimlessly for a long hour, accompanied by Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation—and when I was done, I felt much better.

I told you there was one other Wilco song I wanted to mention. The thing about Wilco is they can be so boring sometimes—after A Ghost is Born they’ve made music which is mostly forgettable. But one has to keep paying attention to them because every ten years or so they plop down a track of absolute perfection. “One Sunday Morning” is such a track. It’s sung in the character of someone who has disappointed their father a long time ago, leaving the father’s religion after a bad shouting match. Now, ages past, the father is dead and the song’s speaker wonders what his relationship to the past still ought to be. He puzzles about his current state of philosophical unmoored-ness, and is honest enough to admit to himself that the strictures of religion are, in a way, comforting. He vacillates, and will continue to vacillate, forever. But the utterly amazing thing is that the music itself vacillates in the same way—it quavers between themes and moods at the very end, mirroring the narrator’s drifting. It’s perfect, and devastating. It reveals what music is capable of being; it justifies the art.

I write a little blog where I talk about art and aesthetics (actually, these days, I barely write on there at all). And I wrote about this Wilco song once—only a few paragraphs as part of a longer essay, in the standard mode of descriptive music criticism. But I deleted that post last year because it simply didn’t do justice to the goodness in the music. Honestly, for all their words, music critics aren’t a bit helpful at all. Their talky-talk is, at worst, mere posturing, and, at best, blank emptiness; the best way to discuss music is just to play it for a friend—

—as I hope you can again be; my best hope is that one day I can listen to some of this music with you, and we can hear it together in mute and silent joy, glad that we are in the same world as it, glad for its goodness.

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Regards,

Your old friend,

[REDACTED]

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