Historian Robin Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original sets out to humanize Monk. We should question the image of the human that's being offered. In place of Mad Monk, Monk the childlike genius, images which Kelley is right to regard critically, Kelley presents us with an image of Monk the Revolutionary Worker. It makes one wonder whether there could be an intelligible biography that didn't traffic in cultural doxa, thereby assuming rather than demonstrating ways of life, a biography that, to stick to our current topic, didn't traffic in preformed images of the human, but rather arrested images, for a brief moment, spun them around, talked to them. Is it possibly in the nature of history to form an image of the human as we go along, we who are marked by historicity?
Myth, the bête noire of so many of our discourses, creeps in through the most improbable fissures. Is severe mental illness a fissure in the human?
Perhaps if the gods seem childlike it's because they don't accept their fates—naturally they do end up being who they are, but there's something both more than and less than fatal about the whole affair of coming to be a mythological figure, a simulacrum of fate that any message about fate must pass through. That's myth.
The image of the human generates its own inhuman, It stirs its own negative image from the depths of its mythos. But is that true? Doesn't the inhuman arise in the telling? And doesn't the human itself ask to be thought of as something more akin to story than to myth?
Labels: bios, historicity, Monk, myth, narrative, Robin Kelley
5 Comments:
"...a biography that, to stick to our current topic, didn't traffic in preformed images of the human, but rather arrested images, for a brief moment, spun them around, talked to them."
The good thing is we can get this for ourselves, through the music.
-Yusef
Agreed. But my reading of Jankélévitch helps me keep the questioning open. Images? Biography? Do these go together? If both are interpreted, is interpretation the best use of music? Is critique? And of course as I raise the questions I can't conclude that music must be acritical or closed to hermeneutics--on the contrary indeed. This difference though between music and talking about music won't go away, and I wonder whether we don't end up meaning "images" in some weird sense. The alternate title to "Portrait of an Eremite" (which wasn't Monk's) is "Reflections." How is the title related to the tune, the ballad in Ab?
I wonder if by "images" you are referring to the attempt to represent music with words, an effort which I reject.
We don't want the difference between music and talking about music to go away, do we? If not, why would we act AS IF we did want it to go away. I think there are ways to respond to music with words which do not rely on the misdirection and delusion of making the difference between music and talking about music go away.
-Yusef
I wonder if by "images" you are referring to the attempt to represent music with words....
Not necessarily but the broader effort to find meaning in music may inadvertently perform the same sorts of operations it would perform were it interpreting texts, which presumably (I'm not really sure why) would be more easily represented with words.
If we feel that music should be in some measure heterocosmic are we demanding and at the same time sabotaging a hermeneutics of music?
One of the best books I've ever read about Michel Foucault is called, Michel Foucault:Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by HL Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Foucault had written a book about Magritte called This is not a Pipe.
-Yusef
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