SELF-CRITICISM, II Ill tell you a shameful secret. I often write when I have listened to pop music. In the vacuum that is human ennui I can only think of things, not write them down. But when the stream of pop music flows into me, my thoughts also flow into paper, or into this electronic sheet. It must be the beat, it must be the violent brutality of sticks plunging into the plastic and taut strings being plucked, and the ensuing shrieks used as part of a collection far greater than their sum. As I write that last sentence, I stop and wonder if I had just made a confession of hedonism. Someone taught me the best lesson of my life, which was on hedonism. It was a guy from the Sinosphere (wont say where). But he didnt mean to teach me the lesson, it was something I derived on my own. The lesson being that people usually feign affection to get something for themselves, that people are unconsciously hedonic, and that they cant help it. As a result I began to let myself loose. But this came in stages, with the last stage learned at a small, independent bookstore. I still retain the green in greenhorn, though. My descriptions of things have merely improved with the turning of the years. When you fully realize that you cant expect any reward from the great blue expanse for being good, you begin to create in your mind an evocation of your most earnest desires as your own reward. Dreaming is free: you create your paradise out of thin air, and as long as you know that it is simply your plaything, not your home, you can enjoy it. You also perceive people in a different way, using a thousand different viewpoints. Its like a super ChemDraw program for people who have devoted their lives to imaging molecules, only it can last for as long as you live and not as a contracted one-year, renewable license. And, as mentioned earlier, its free. But, lest people throw the book at me, I wouldnt say this is a strict hedonism. Which leads to another confession, that is, I hate extreme book-throwing. But thats a story for another day. Now, some people would laugh at me for patronizing pop music. I would be too conventional for them, and therefore my level of artistic sophistication would be low. I simply laugh, and say that for the true lover of music, pop is not a classification. That it exists as a taxon because people like certain kinds of music more than others, and nothing else. A statistical accident - it just so happens. That was not the reason why I labeled my confession as shameful. In Tagalog society, we must never think of our own benefit, of our own properties as individuals. Like people in the Sinosphere, we were taught to think of the family, of the greater society, of connections - without thought to their tenuity. So Im awaiting your e-pitchforks and your e-torches. Haha.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 03:25:34 +0000
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