Sweet Intoxication
Another cloudy morning with a stiff cool breeze. It is June and we’ve had rain with more to come. Wet and cool does not augur well for the corn just planted in the fields.
There’s no comfort on the front page of the New York Times this morning. Depicted on the front page, — a demonstration of hundreds of thousands in Hong Kong. The citizens of Hong Kong protest a draconian extradition law. China desires to extradite those accused of crimes to the mainland for trial. Residents of Hong Kong do not relish the prospect of torture to extract confessions. I cannot blame them.
Another front page article takes note of the spreading influence of Attorney General Barr. Barr functions as consigliere for the President.
I live in a crazy-town world. Summerfest in Milwaukee is coming up in a few days, I can hardly wait. I have held on for months, in a shit-storm of political crazy talk, in the reports of extreme weather event disasters, and the reports of increasing cruelty at our southern border. I long for the healing ecstasy of Summerfest music.
Over the past few days I have thought about the importance of a founding story or myth; and how this story establishes a common bond between all residents, and no one is excluded from those born to good fortune, or those born into meager circumstances. In the enactment of the founding story, the ritual of the telling, repeated, one feels that he and she has a stake in the past, the present, and the future. One “knows” in a way transcending words one’s origin and one’s place in the present time.
Music, tune and lyric often results in such an experience of oneness; of the dynamic human bond realized between Americans of widely divergent backgrounds, and of different stations in society. With a little luck I will be present on the 5th of July to hear and feel the music of Berlin at Milwaukee’s Summerfest. Terri Nunn will sing her 1986 hit tune, Take My Breath Away, and we, a few thousand of us, will be transported to an ineffable plane of heart and mind. That is what I need. That form of experience is what our whole society, indeed our whole world needs; a grand myth in which we lose ourselves, and find ourselves, others, and as well as the strength to manage our fear and our desire.
Here are some lines from Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse which convey the point.
—the intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy. I had often heard it spoken of. It was known, I knew, to every servant girl. I had often observed the sparkle in the eye of those who told me of it and I had always treated it with a half-superior, half-envious smile. A hundred times in my life I had seen examples of those whom rapture had intoxicated and released from the self, of that smile, that half-crazed absorption, of those whose heads have been turned by a common enthusiasm. I had seen it in drunken recruits and sailors, and also in great artists in the enthusiasm, perhaps, of a musical festival; and not less in young soldiers going to war. Even in recent days I had marveled at and loved and mocked and envied this gleam and this smile in my friend, Pablo, when he hung over his saxophone in the blissful intoxication of playing in the orchestra, or when, enraptured and ecstatic, he looked over to the conductor, the drum, or the man with the banjo. It had sometimes occurred to me that such a smile, such a childlike radiance could be possible only to quite young persons or among those peoples whose customs permitted no marked differences between one individual and another. But today, on this blessed night, I myself, the Steppenwolf, was radiant with this smile. I myself swam in this deep and childlike happiness of a fairy tale. I myself breathed the sweet intoxication of a common dream and of music and rhythm and wine and women—I, who had in other days so often listened with amusement, or dismal superiority, to its panegyric in the ballroom chatter of some student. I was myself no longer. My personality was dissolved in the intoxication of the festivity like salt in water.
—excerpt Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse p. 168
Finally a video of a great song. Enjoy!
