Kundera, Milan
To go back to Mohinder for a moment: they sang songs loudly and played them just as fast; their screams and shouts were aimed inward and spoke of personal struggle; in stark contrast to Codeine, who were also making music around the same time, whose songs were slowed and heavy with age. Two bands playing songs around the same time and both are usually filed under "Punk" at the local record shop yet if one were to hear a song from each an exceptionally polarizing effect will occur: Loud and Quiet, Scream and Whisper, Short and Long, Inward and Outward. One could deduce quite a bit from these already distilled reductions, and it can go even further still if one were to examine the ages of the members of each of the bands. It can almost be said (almost simply because it is hard, when thinking on music, to make any real concrete assertions simply because the sounds are tied to emotions on the part of the listener and those are often subject to change) that Mohinder could represent Youth while Codeine could represent Adulthood.
To go back to Mohinder for a moment: they sang songs loudly and played them just as fast; their screams and shouts were aimed inward and spoke of personal struggle; in stark contrast to Codeine, who were also making music around the same time, whose songs were slowed and heavy with age. Two bands playing songs around the same time and both are usually filed under "Punk" at the local record shop yet if one were to hear a song from each an exceptionally polarizing effect will occur: Loud and Quiet, Scream and Whisper, Short and Long, Inward and Outward. One could deduce quite a bit from these already distilled reductions, and it can go even further still if one were to examine the ages of the members of each of the bands. It can almost be said (almost simply because it is hard, when thinking on music, to make any real concrete assertions simply because the sounds are tied to emotions on the part of the listener and those are often subject to change) that Mohinder could represent Youth while Codeine could represent Adulthood.
Play a Codeine song to a 14 year old today: s/he will no doubt scoff at it for its slowness, deride it for the lyrics (which don't speak to anything that youth can even identify with!), and finally come to the conclusion that it simply does not match the attitudes and plattitudes of the youth and their movement. Sure, the songs themselves have aged over the 10 or 15 years they've been out in the world, collecting moss and dust, but when they were made has no hold over when they can be appreciated: plenty of kids are dazzled by their father's records all the time.
Play a Mohinder song to a 14 year old today: s/he will certainly embrace it for its speed, its way of mimicking the happenings of the teens and their problems (how the singer laments over the loss of his playground because the city wants to build a freeway instead! how juvenile, how appropriately youthful!), and the young person will clamor to the songs for their expressionism. If there is one thing that the youth follow it is the expressions of people, not the conversations or the thoughts, but the expressions. For a young person, to express ones' self is the truest aim --- and Mohinder is, in some lights, an expressionist band: they cry and shout and bang and crash with an imprecision that is admirable.
Reading Kundera's The Curtain, a discursive book containing an essay broken up into 7 parts, quite similar to his Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed. (Kundera, by the way, is not pronounced how I've been pronouncing it since I'd met his books 6 or 7 years ago: KUHN-der-uh is the Americanese way of saying it, and "Kun-DUHR-rahhh" with the "rahhh" turning into a dim mist of sound and the "DUHR" holding most of the emphasis.) The book is fabulous, his always are, and I've noticed that it is the only book that I can read along with while also thinking my own thoughts separately but simultaneously. For instance: He is describing Kafka, his life, his relations, his books and the whole time I am reading along, soaking in the words and their thought, while also branching off on my own tangents of theory. What is even more surprising - the two voices simultaneously bubbling in the brain do not affect one another, do not sound like two men speaking over one another, they simply blend into two individuated voices that each have their own clarity. While my mind was focusing on youth, and music, and Mohinder, my eyes were taking in the following paragraphs:
I have long seen youth as the lyrical age, that is, the age when the individual, focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him. If we start with that hypothesis (necessarily schematic, but which, as a schema, I find accurate), then to pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude.
If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.
He has a knack for doing that, for me; a wonderful way of plucking the words and stringing them into the most logical pattern possible so the most clearest sense of his thought can be derived from within them. Even better is the sense of timing and how reading this coincided perfectly with my own thoughts about Mohinder, Codeine and youth.
The paragraphs make me think of a song by Mohinder called Beautiful. It lasts a terse 45 seconds, maybe 55, and is a barrage of guitar and drums that fold into one another along with the prickly bass plucking. The lyrics are short, sweet, and dramatically youthful in their personal expressive nature: "I love you / You're beautiful / Soon it will be too late / But now at least you know." These bursts of words, not sentences at all, not lyrics even, are screamed with a cry of definitive pain, a real knowing of feeling is at work, and all from a person under the age of 20 (he might have even been just 17 or 18). These words, when examined under the microscope of age, seem to wither slightly now that they mix with the air a little. Is it that the song grew old, or did the listener? There is no disconnect for me, I love the song as wholeheartedly and as naively as I did when I was 13 --- but I can say with complete candor that I have not played the record in over a year. Going back to Kundera for a moment: I believe it speaks quite well to his hypothesis since the song is, start to finish, about the singer and his own individual world. In this sense, it is the nature of youth to want to proclaim to the world: ME ME ME. Soon it will be too late, for who? For the girl who is leaving, or for the boy who will be left? I love the song, I will probably always love the song, but it is only now after more than a decade can I listen to the song and not feel affinity with the singer and there is now a disconnect between the self-ness of his song and the lack of self-ness one starts to pick up as an adult.
And Codeine? What of them? They were older guys playing older music at the same time Mohinder was grasping for air between songs at the Gilman. Not feeling the enormous pressure of creating something for the movement and the youth, they had the equally enormous pleasure of being able to have the freedom to compose the songs as they wished. Codeine, in a sense, is the personification of adulthood and maturity --- it is free from the tethers of modernity and thus free to create without the rules and postures of the teenagers. They are, then, the band that Mohinder should grow up to be. As luck would have it, they did go on to start and end other bands and those bands did make records. Calm was comprised of most of the members of Mohinder and was started only a couple years after they'd disbanded and it is startling to note: They sound a lot like Codeine. Another step for Mohinder away from youth and we have Duster whose music was as disparate and slow as it was lyricless.
More from The Curtain. Kundera shines his spotlight on Flaubert and tells the story of how the famous author came to write his masterwork. It is a short tale and fits a beautiful blown-glass bell jar over the perfect specimen for Kundera's assertion: Youth = Lyricism. Flaubert, younger, had shown his work to his friends who all chastised him and the work for being too lyrical and urged him to drop his "romantic flights" and "great lyrical transports". He obeyed and three years later (in September) began writing Madame Bovary. Kundera is quick to point out, and rightly so, that it is not because Flaubert was smothering his heart and all the ambitiousness of his youth merely to follow the wishes of his friends and critics. "No", Kundera writes, "[it] is not the story of a self-destruction. It is the story of a conversion. Flaubert is thirty years old, the appropriate age for tearing away his lyrical chrysalis." Perfect. In short, just perfect. Mohinder and Codeine linked at the hip as the same thing, only differently aged.
The Bear and The Cat
I haven't a clue where the photo came from or how I found it, and haven't a source to attribute it to. That is how the internet presents its most wonderful gifts, I think. I've saved it for at least two years and look at it often. There is something calming about it. I found a note to my self listing the reasons why I like the photo: #1 - black bear + black cat (matching) #2 - pose is good #3 - facial expression is good #4 - that bear is really, really shaggy looking. #5 - the cat looks like my great-grandmothers old cat. #6 - little fragile thing + big scary thing #7 - innocent (cat) + violent (bear) #8 - both have a sure look of confidence #9 - smallness protecting largeness / largeness protecting smallness. I suppose I didn't have the time to write more about it then, but thank goodness I made that list.
Seeing Immaturity and Maturity as two opposites is not right and it took a long time for that to even come to me. Even more so: to view one as bad and the other as good is simply not right either. We have a black bear and a black cat, that's all. We are old and we are young, that's all. The one protects the other, and the one informs the other, and the two are almost identical twins on the outside just with a different schematic of organs on the inside. It is mature to forgive the immature, and it is the nature of the immature to never understand the mature. A fan of Mohinder will probably not find Codeine's songs to match their taste, and vice versa. I doubt if the guys that were in the former even like the songs now, after they've aged, finished school, gotten jobs, and become part of the world. It is a nice position to be in though, to have that to look back on to either laugh at or appreciate. The black bear protects the black cat in that way. The black cat, in turn, helps the black bear see smallness and isn't that the job of the youth?
Almost finished with The Curtain now. Kundera brings up a philosopher who I have never seen or heard of outside of the confines of my own bookcase and that makes me smile a lot. In fact, I'd even named a character in a published(!) short story after this philosopher simply because I knew he was obscure enough to let the name stand , but to the few that knew might appreciate the nod. How stupid I feel now, years later, seeing this name and realizing that this philosopher was not mine at all! Ah, youthful transgressions, my cheeks redden and my palms get hot to the touch --- but that is not the point. Kundera, writing about this philosopher, explains how in the early 1930s and 40s, when he was a much younger person, he had written a few papers that only later in life came back to bite:
In the 1990s, Europe, once so indulgent toward nascent Nazism, now marches boldly forth to battle its ghosts. The time has come for a major settling of accounts with the past, and the fascist opinions of the young Cioran back when he was living in Romania suddenly became news. In 1995, at the age of 84, he dies. I open an important Paris newspaper and find a two-page spread of obituaries. Not a word on his sixty years of work; it is his Romanian youth that has disgusted, fascinated, infuriated, inspired his funerary scribes. They have robed the cadaver of the great French writer in a costume from Romanian folklore and forced it, in the coffin, to raise its arm in a fascist salute.
If that doesn't sound like the most poignant tale of growing up and becoming an adult who has to live with the fact that his youthful self is not in agreement with his present self, I am happy to quote from Cioran himself, in 1949 when he was 38: "When I think back...to all the delirium of my then self...I seem to be observing the obsessions of a strange, and I am stupefied to learn that that stranger was myself." I hope Mohinder doesn't feel it as strongly as Cioran did. I hope I don't, and I hope you don't. The black bear and the black cat are friends and the same and should protect one another. In my maturity, whenever it may come (and thank goodness, by Kundera's count, a count I respect and therefore agree with, I've got 4 more years of youthful indiscretions as far as art is concerned) I hope to age nicely.
Afterword
What, now, about my character, then, named after the famous French writer? Who is she, now, cast in this light of full awareness? If I saw her from afar, dotted with sun in some park, would she be the same girl? She'd pass me as cooly as she'd pass any stranger or ghost. When I had named her after the writer, I had only read one or two of his books (yes, the youth jump to conclusions to quickly! To name a character after a writer whos books I had only read two of...) and hadn't known anything about his story as Kundera tells it. I think about my girl, my Elsie Cioran, and I think about the story and myself: I was 20 or 21 (far from the lyricless pleasure of adulthood, still locked with the shackles of self-absorbsion) and wrote quite plainly about a personal matter to which I was very focused on (that of losing a love). My Elsie, in a way, seems to represent to me on a much, much smaller scale what the real Cioran says about himself: I cannot distinguish that young man who wrote that story from this older (but still young) man now writing this. Sure, I wasn't siding with fascism nor was I making anything that today would be considered wrong, embarassing, or even worthy of critique, when I made my Elsie. It was personal, and I think that sticks like a perfectly aimed arrow at the target which Kundera sets up: I was young and writing only about myself and what I wanted (or, the converse: I was strikingly not concerned with things that were not related personally to my own life. It was, in a sense, hiding the I behind the mask of You, whereas I assume to be an adult means to hide some of the You behind a mask of the I.) Thank god, though, that I have that touchstone! Thank god for that story, for that Elsie, to show me now that Me-Then was just as innocent as Mohinder and their songs and that maybe Me-Now is a bit more learned, a bit less dramatic, a bit more calm, cool, collected and quiet as Codeine is. My mind confirms the fact: A bear and a cat cannot really be friends; but my heart confirms the thought: it is the adult, not the youth, who wants the two to play nicely with one another.
