Futile Horn

01.07.2004 - 8:37 am (staring at the ceiling)

There’s a book I read on the train. It’s long and it’s slow, and I only read it when I’m on the train, so I’ve been reading it forever. I try to identify with one of the characters. He’s a quiet musical genius living in a proud country going wrong. He cannot abide the swarm of mediocrity that is the culture of his day (or any day), so when he laughs it is a loud, uncontrolled laugh at the absurdity of the commonplace. He has a sort of disparaging view of his own work, because he utilizes the forms of the day to express his fatigue with the forms of the day, so it tastes more like satire to him than seriousness or (if the word must be used) art. But he makes because he can find no use in living in a world than is not unmade. His work is cold and full of strict rules, and only with that strictness can he feel free at all. He’s reclusive, pensive, ambitious but pessimistic about the profits ambition, and perhaps only truly desirous of what he might have lost or once overlooked.

I’m much more like the narrator though, intelligent but without foundation, constantly second guessing, fanatically obsessive with following the life of a hero, trying to absorb through osmosis what he cannot produce for himself, seeking the embodiment of the ideal without any drive to embody the ideal himself. A chronicler, a waste. He’s even a classicist too.

I’m so terrified of this character, because when I used to write short stories (when I was busy failing at that), I drew him a thousand times as an expression of myself, someone chasing the image of what he inexplicably wants to be, so far what he has the power to become. I hate him, because anybody at all can see him for what he is, a coward.

There are two sins notwithstanding the existence of God, ignorance and cowardice. It seems fair to say the sin in the Garden is one of appetite because it involves a piece of fruit, but it must be one of ignorance. To know that it is evil to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is something of an absurdity. How could anyone have that knowledge until they got it from the source? The truly disgusting sin committed was the hiding after the fruit was eaten. They knew they were guilty but they also were aware they hadn’t intended to do something worthy of guilt. But still they hid, adding to their guilt, knowing they added to their guilt, choosing a worse punishment than the one deserving them.

For Socrates courage was not the absence of fear, but what sprang from the knowledge that the outcome of another course of action is worse than the possible outcomes from the one that causes fear. Cowardice must be the opposite. It arises from choosing to surrender to fear with the knowledge that the outcome of surrender must be worse than any outcome where fear is confronted. Unlike ignorance where the sin its own defense, cowardice has no rational defense. It is the complete debasement of character, the perfection of ugliness.

So you understand what I mean by coward.

I want to say I am misunderstood, but it is me who cannot understand. There is so much I want to build, but the tools I need to build any of it with fundamentally confound me. I feel so far away from the rest of the world; how can I make anything that belongs in it? So I’m always looking for that thing I need, the key, that thing I wouldn’t recognize if I saw it. But part of me knows that people have made much more with less. And I can’t because I am scared. I am so scared. And when fear leaves me to choose between nothing that matters to me and the possibility of something, I choose nothing again and again.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn