The Blues

Somewhere Ralph Ellison, an African-American writer, described the Blues as an impulse to keep alive painful detail and episodes of raw experience in your consciousness, to touch the roughness, to transcend it, not with philosophical comfort, but to extract tragic, almost comical poetry from it …

In essence, the Blues is the expression of personal suffering in lyrical mode.

The Blues reflects at the same time the angst of life, its pain and the possibility through blatant toughness of spirit to rise above it all.

The Blues is the imaging of the tragic, but offers no solutions, supplies no scapegoat and is limited to the self.   

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

July, 2023

Source of Ellison’s words has been lost.

Max Scheler – a peep

For me, Max Scheler (1874-1928) is a fresh, bracing wind blowing over the arid rocks of empiricism.  He was a philosopher at the heart of modernism and became deeply concerned with the “reductive mindset of the positive sciences.”  Philosophy for him is “the loving act of participation by the core of the human being in the essence of all things.”  He was a spiritual man.  Born into an orthodox Jewish home, he became a Catholic in later years, though in the end he found this restrictive in his work.  He spent much time as an anti-fascist activist and his work was suppressed by the Nazis after his death. 

The philosopher, he says, relates to the world through love.  He uses the Greek word agape which is given, tolerant love.  The world is approached with wonder and with reverence.  Knowledge is built from an affective foundation, possible only for a loving being.  This love is “a going beyond oneself, an opening to ever richer meaning.”

Max Scheler

In his life he moved in rarefied intellectual circles comprising of people like Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich and Rainer Maria Rilke.  His work was prolific and influential.  He examined politics, war, ethics and sociology, to mention a few.  The chief influence in his life was the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.  In 1928 his health failed him (he had been a heavy smoker) and he died, being spared the horrors of the 1930-40s.

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

July, 2023 (9)

Source

Stanford Encyclopedia:  Max Scheler

Image of Scheler:  Getty images / Google.  

The world as a place of reverence

Two songs

Decades ago I was told that rock lyrics don’t have to make sense as long as they fit the vein-splitting beat comfortably.  And yes, I wonder many of the millions listening to Elvis Presley’s  Jailhouse Rock (1956) realized that it was actually a short story set to music.  How many of the millions realized that the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction (1966) was a criticism of advertising?  These are lyrics that make sense.  Here are some thoughts on the lyrics of two songs where the lyrics don’t yield to easy (or any!) analysis. 

I am a walrus on the Magical Mystery Tour album (1967) by the Beatles has probably puzzled many who have attempted to find meaning in the words.  I quote the notes that accompanied the lyrics.

“John Lennon wrote the lyrics for this song as a consequence of receiving a letter from a pupil of Quarry Bank High School (Lennon’s old school) where it was said that a teacher had tried to analyse The Beatles’ lyrics in class. Lennon felt it was funny and decided to write a song that would be very hard to analyse.”

A technique in songs like this is the combination of the strange, even surreal, with the ordinary everyday events:  Sitting on a cornflake waiting for the bus to come.  Also from the notes on the song:  “The walrus was inspired by the poem “The Walrus and The Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll from his book “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There” (1871).

The Rolling Stones’ song Walkin’ the dog is a 12-bar blues lyric written by Rufus Thomas (1962) also mixing the extra-ordinary with the ordinary:  I asked her mother for 15 cents / to see the elephant jump the fence / jumped so high, touched the sky, didn’t get back ‘till quarter to five.  One critic commented on the fact that not hearing all of a lyric in the white-hot delivery and even listening to a line that defies the world as we know it doesn’t matter to listeners  –  the words just need to sit well in that rhythm.  The critic described the phenomenon as “the unspeakable mix”. 

Interesting then, to contrast what I like to call the age of the lyric – the 1930s –  with what happened from the 1950s onward. 

©  Will

www.willwilltravel.wordpress.com

Bridgewater, Somerset West

July, 2023

Sources

Wikipedia and AZlyrics

My drawings and graphic