3 Mar 10
I like your letter. Your religious views are to my mind impeccable. Good that you make the distinction between organised religion and God so clearly.
I like Olive Schreiner's definition of God as "an inscrutable mystery". In fact nothing is known about God that can be put into words. At most it can be a mystical experience, so that Meister Eckhart said : "Anything you say about God is false."
I was just worried that you might be under religious pressures, but it seems it is not too bad with you.
I have an extraordinary faith, that I don't understand at all. I don't see God as loving - that would just be to smear him with a human emotion. I simply see everything in the world as the expression of God's will, and it is up to me to tune into that will as best I can, to go with the flow and to retain my essentially sunny nature.
The hardest thing of all I find to swallow is pop music, such as Michael Jackson. For some reason, to hear the voices of pop singers drives me up the wall, I just can't stand it. Opera singing is a different kind of singing, I like it. Did you hear of the musical called "Pippin"? I liked that.
But mostly I find that music reached its greatest heights by the time of Schubert, and that everything thereafter represents a decline for me. I am glad that you are in an orchestra rather than a band, and are being exposed to what is for me real music.
As for the trauma of your life, naturally you are scarred, but it does create more love in me for you : "God" must compensate you, even if I have to be that "God" (I am a pantheist, I believe that everything is a part of God). So God DOES love you, even if I am the only part of God that does.
One thing I can promise you is a fact : YOU ARE TOTALLY INNOCENT.
Gurth xx
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Beethoven
NOTES (on Beethoven)
One of the most extraordinary books in world literature is Goethe's "Correspondence with a Child". The child was Bettina Brentano. Born in 1785, she married in 1811 the poet von Arnim. Her genial but rather unnatural precocity fascinated other great men besides Goethe, but her writings are altogether too hyper romantic for present taste.
Bettina to Goethe:- "When I saw him of whom I shall now speak to you, I forgot the whole world - as the world still vanishes when memory recalls the scene - yes it vanishes.... It is Beethoven of whom I now wish to tell you, and who made me forget the world and you; I am still in my nonage, it is true, but I am not mistaken when I say - what no one, perhaps, now understands and believes - he stalks far ahead of the culture of mankind. Shall we ever overtake him? - I doubt it, but grant that he may live until the mighty and exalted enigma lying in his soul is fully developed, may reach its loftiest goal, then surely he will place the key to his heavenly knowledge in our hands so that we may be advanced another step towards true happiness.
All human activities toss around him like mechanism, he alone begets independently in himself the unsuspected, uncreated."
Beethoven to Bettina:- "When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. When they again become sober they have drawn from the sea all that they brought with them, all that they can bring with them to dry land. I have not a single friend; I must live alone. But well I know that God is nearer to me than to other artists;
I associate with him without fear; I have always recognised and understood him and have no fear for my music - it can meet no evil fate. Those who understand it must be freed by it from all the miseries which the others drag about with themselves."
Some commentator: "His misanthropic disposition created a fanciful world bearing no positive relation to human nature and social conditions."
One of the most extraordinary books in world literature is Goethe's "Correspondence with a Child". The child was Bettina Brentano. Born in 1785, she married in 1811 the poet von Arnim. Her genial but rather unnatural precocity fascinated other great men besides Goethe, but her writings are altogether too hyper romantic for present taste.
Bettina to Goethe:- "When I saw him of whom I shall now speak to you, I forgot the whole world - as the world still vanishes when memory recalls the scene - yes it vanishes.... It is Beethoven of whom I now wish to tell you, and who made me forget the world and you; I am still in my nonage, it is true, but I am not mistaken when I say - what no one, perhaps, now understands and believes - he stalks far ahead of the culture of mankind. Shall we ever overtake him? - I doubt it, but grant that he may live until the mighty and exalted enigma lying in his soul is fully developed, may reach its loftiest goal, then surely he will place the key to his heavenly knowledge in our hands so that we may be advanced another step towards true happiness.
All human activities toss around him like mechanism, he alone begets independently in himself the unsuspected, uncreated."
Beethoven to Bettina:- "When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken. When they again become sober they have drawn from the sea all that they brought with them, all that they can bring with them to dry land. I have not a single friend; I must live alone. But well I know that God is nearer to me than to other artists;
I associate with him without fear; I have always recognised and understood him and have no fear for my music - it can meet no evil fate. Those who understand it must be freed by it from all the miseries which the others drag about with themselves."
Some commentator: "His misanthropic disposition created a fanciful world bearing no positive relation to human nature and social conditions."
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