It is so beautiful and also so sad to live in a world that sees the West as foreign. I take this perspective more and more and don’t understand much anymore. The obsession with career, comfort, security, prosperity, accuracy, correctness, know-it-all attitude and arrogance, ignorance and intolerance. All this becomes clearer, it becomes almost evident.
I was sick for a few days, and as many people do, I watched movies, nothing inspiring. Series garbage. I haven’t done that for a year and I felt sick afterwards. My brain was overloaded, the synapses were sparking, the ideology of an ideal world that has to be protected from the bad guys to strengthen the community and help the individual to be ‘right’ is actually unbearable.
But then I wanted some nice memories of the culture I left so far behind. That is then 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. Which was so different from anything I know that I don’t even want to outline it here. Chastity would be one word, but that is completely missed. So I was listening to Purcell Solitude…. and I was overcome again by that feeling of self-pity that is expressed in such music. The pain of loneliness, the longing for death, comfort and fear, a search for support that only finds peace in melancholy. This great feeling of Europe, melancholy, what would Europe be without melancholy? A joke?
Well, since I was already listening to Purcell, I gave in to it and found Jessie Norman. I was tired of seeing beautiful young white women. And there she appeared majestically, in a universe of mirrors, pleading for memory. And so this image became emblematic 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 the Medusa. This whole culture is built on misunderstanding.
And before the music algorithm changes to French pop, I’ll end this.
Om
