Et is so wonderful and also so sad to live in a world that sees the West as foreign. I am adopting this perspective more and more and no longer understand many things. The obsession with career, comfort, security, prosperity, accuracy, correctness, know-it-all attitude and arrogance, ignorance and intolerance. All of this is becoming clearer, it is almost evident.
I was sick for a few days and, as many people do, I watched movies, nothing inspiring. Series garbage. I hadn't done that for a year and I felt sick afterwards. My brain was overloaded, my synapses were firing, and the ideology of a perfect world that needs to be protected from the bad guys in order to strengthen the community and help the individual to be 'right' is actually unbearable.
But then I wanted a few nice memories of the culture that I left so far behind. That's always the music for me. And that's how I came across Purcell. It's not particularly original, but it's still beautiful.
A friend told me about her idea of love. It's so different from anything I know that I don't even want to outline it here. Chastity would be one word, but that's a complete misnomer. So I listened to Purcell Solitude... and I was again overcome by that feeling of self-pity that is expressed in such music. The pain of loneliness, the longing for death, comfort and fear, the search for stability that only finds peace in melancholy. This great feeling of Europe, melancholy, what would Europe be without melancholy? A joke?
Now that I was already listening to Purcell, I gave in and found Jessie Norman. I was tired of seeing beautiful young white women. And there she appeared majestically, in a universe of mirrors, begging to be remembered. And so this image became a symbol of the beautiful sadness of the subject exploring herself, largely without regard for others or anything else. A narcissistic disorder. Self-pity, melancholy and self-righteousness, and so beautiful. The head of Medusa. This whole culture is built on misunderstanding.
And before the music algorithm switches to French pop, I'll end this here.
Om
