A Meditation On Certainty
"The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice". -Bertrand Russell
I’ve been trying to write something that lies within the musical domain, which is the area that I am definitely most suited and qualified to write. I had thought to write about a particular musical project that emanated from a friendship; one that was extremely cathartic to me in many ways. As I sat, trying to start writing, I ended up wandering, and in wandering, coming across a group of Bertrand Russell quotes. This coincided with the fact that I have been in Los Angeles during the catastrophic fires that have engulfed the city for the last period. I had been planning on being in a recording studio working on a new project, but for many reasons this project was postponed.
As it turned out, I was exceedingly fortunate to be, along with my family, out of striking range of the fires. This fact however, was of little solace, as scores of our friends have lost their homes in these fires. I realized that had I been in the studio trying to work on a new project, it would be almost impossible to focus on trying to make something that would be fresh and inspired. There is a weight that comes with the specific type of sympathetic agony that one feels when you are a witness to pain and misfortune on the scale that a disaster such as this resides upon…. one that short-circuits the psychological momentum that is needed to try to work on an artistic endeavor.
It struck me that in order to defeat inertia, and to access whatever configuration of inspiration that one is capable of, that we have to access the assumption of some kind of confidence in the perception of the world that we have. We have to access the illusion of some kind of certainty in our perception of the human condition, and of our sense of some kind of innate design in the world. There is an equivalent kind of confidence of perspective that is necessary to work on any kind of artistic endeavor, including that of making architectural or compositional decisions on a piece of music. We have to, for at least a short period of time, access the momentum of believing in our musical judgement.
When I look at the many quotes that one finds that are attributed to Bertrand Russell, and the configuration of his life, it makes sense that he spent a substantial portion of his life in a depressed state. As I have been reading about the events that have accompanied these fires, including the fact that apparently people have been creating more fires to enable them to pursue looting houses in the neighborhoods that are burning, it makes me question basic assumptions regarding what human beings are capable of. This Russell comes to mind:
“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely, or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear”
I am not a philosopher, nor a student of philosophy who is really qualified to write something definitive or new in this area, but I have seen this principle confirmed within the realm of songwriting and recording. In order to make something that is new and fresh in the area of songwriting or making a record, there have to be a few things present. One is a somewhat kindred aesthetic, where participants share a basic sense of what is good and what can be better. Another is an agreement on what the goal is of the song or recording. For me, I look to a song or recording to touch me in a way that somehow changes me; if not for a day, perhaps for an hour, or even 10 minutes. I want a recording to make me more human. This is where I believe that being a merciless editor and revisor can be a prerequisite. If a song or piece of music only succeeds on an artistic or intellectual (see virtuosic) level, it is not something that I will want to come back to repeatedly. At the same time, during the writing or recording process there has to be a suspension of skepticism and criticism, otherwise one risks short-circuiting what might be an inspired idea before it has a chance to pay off. I came across a quote from Russell that encapsulates this idea well:
“Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility.”
One has to feel the freedom to fall on their face in front of good collaborators; to be absolutely wrong, otherwise the fear of being wrong prevents magic from entering the process. In the end, I think that the only certainty is that there will always be uncertainty, until one comes across the magic solution, poetically, musically, or socially.