I’m in management: I spend a higher-than-average percentage of my time in states of stress and anger.  I’m told I’m excellent at my job, which doesn’t really please me so much as it relieves one particular element of the anxiety that accompanies the position (by no means the worst element, though).  I think part of the reason for my talent has to do with my mental restlessness: I cannot stop my mind from chewing, attacking, wrestling with, obsessing.

This is well and good for the corporation which employs me, if not for me personally.  Living alone, as I do, I dissolve into sleep four nights out of five thinking about work: plans, processes to improve, people to assist or utilize, and so on.  So much of my mind’s background chatter has to do with work that it’s fair to describe my imagination as being indistinguishable from my professional attention: all it does is generate variations on the mundane realities of my work environment.  My company has my attention almost completely.

But I try to get real occasionally, because if I don’t I will disintegrate.  I have my various methods for reacquainting myself with reality: I occasionally ride my back, which roots my mind back in the physical universe in a visceral manner; I smoke cigars, which is luxurious and hedonistic and therefore interrupts my mind’s gnawing; and I interact with art.

Art is more real than the dulled, insensate lives most of us submerge ourselves into for social purposes.  In its presentation of order (of various forms), sublimity, beauty, and its forceful provocation of emotional states, art is the best means by which humans articulate their experiential world to one another.  It distills and condenses what it means to be human into an essential and compressed form.

I am more enamored with music and literature than other forms of art, although film is obviously quite close to my heart.  I love literature for its formal purity: it exists in a 1:1 relationship with its message, generally; that is, language being the elemental stuff of the human mind, art in language is the least coded, most undiluted or confused form of expression.  There is little to disentangle, although I exclude those works of literature which are purposefully convoluted or manipulate their readers in indirect ways.  With few exceptions, I consider them of lesser merit.

But music is so deeply affecting that it lately has been predominant in my life, and tonight I was able, in about 30 minutes, to overcome a day of petty managerial fears, corporate political noise, and office interactions gone awry.  I listened to Keith Jarrett’s "Koln Concert," the first track (although the rest is now playing).

If you don’t know Keith Jarrett, you’re depriving yourself of one of the great talents of our time: a jazz pianist who expanded into classical repertory and then developed a kind of supra-genre capability that is more or less without peer, his work is shocking to hear.  It is moving, fascinating, brilliant, and never opaque or referential; that is, Keith Jarrett makes art as I believe it should be: self-defining, self-elaborating, self-sustaining.

I’ve often said and still feel that art which requires textual or verbal explanation has failed (unless it so requires because a gulf of time has made it less accessible; although, still here, there is so much art that has aged thousands of years and yet requires no essays that one must admit: truly timeless art is possible, and preferable).  When one walks in a museum, if one sees a painting that means nothing without the densely verbose accompanying grad-student description of why it matters, keep walking.  Let students argue over the value of Duchamp eroding some set of aesthetic biases.  The fact remains: his art isn’t art, but an essay in object form.

Likewise, if I need to explain to you why a piece of music is so grand, it’s probably that it is too specific in its intent, too narrow in its scope, to be art as such.  Rather, it’s reactive commentary, and deserves to be heard only by those who care to "read" their academic, narrowly resonant screeds through an orchestra.

I love Jarrett because no one, whatever their background, would dispute his music’s beauty.  I recognize that some forms of beauty require the cultivation of sensibilities; art isn’t purely a democratic prospect.  But still: when it takes five years of higher education to understand why Webern is meaningful, who cares?  Who did Webern write for?  How much would I rather listen to Gershwin?

A lot.