Whatever it Was is Gone

                 TV spreads and tension mounts,
                 Like a guy in a bra it's the idea that counts,
                 It's a picture of a picture of a whore holding a picture of a john.
                 I was looking for what I loved. Whatever it was, it's gone.
                         Verse from Greg brown's song "Slant Six Mind," on his terrific 1997 album of the same name.

We are living with memories of images and remembrances of feelings, two or three or more times removed from direct experience. For some of us, the picture of a picture of someone holding a picture of something is all we know (think we know) about most things, sometimes very important things.

When I was in a rock band in high school, the only songs we performed were covers, and covers of covers. We weren't song writers, not then anyway. The two songs I remember that strike me now as particularly absurd were (White) Cream's--via Robert Johnson--"Crossroads," and, particularly, (White) John Mayall's "The Death J.B. Lenoir." African Americans own the blues; the rest of us rent them, imitate them, borrow a facsimile of them, or fake them, proving that we can certainly love the blues even if we don't fully share the experience. There is nothing wrong with this. Every ethnic group participates in certain things that being a part of that group is necessary to fully "get." This doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Imitation is flattery, when it isn't brown-nosery, or mockery. It pushes us toward understanding.

But four White boys from the burbs singing another White man's interpretation of a legendary blue's man's experience is funny on its face. Our rendition of Mayall's song is funnier still, inasmuch as we didn't know who J.B. Lenior was, and the "blues" song we were performing was written by a White man, albeit about a legendary Black blues man. There is nothing wrong with four white kids learning something about the blues, even through a filter--nothing wrong with looking at the picture of a picture of a picture, unless that's all we ever know. A photograph may or may not be worth a thousand words, but experience beggars any photograph.

The blues isn't my topic, however, it's experience, and the lack thereof: the "picture of a picture of a whore holding a picture of a john," and the guy in a bra--the idea being the thing that counts. I laughed out loud the first time I heard that line. Unless you are a woman living in a man's body, or a woman living in a woman's body, you can only imagine what it is like to be a woman, and the same is true for a man. But we can imagine, and perhaps we can get pretty damn close. It's the idea that counts, because ideas are all we have, ideas formed from experiences, or ideas formed from the lack of experiences. Living brings experience, reading, thinking, and learning help us to internalize, contextualize, and "understand" the experience. This is why, in general, older people are wiser than younger people. Sorry, my young friends, that's just the way it is. Some of you are "wise beyond your years," and some of us are idiots who never learned much, true. But wisdom takes experience and understanding, both of which can only come with time. Some few people can, like the protagonist of the Ben Gazzara series Run for Your Life from the sixties, "squeeze thirty years of living into perhaps one or two," but most of us take thirty years to live thirty years.

Nevertheless, most of what we know we only think we know, and there is no guarantee that we have interpreted any particular experience correctly. For me, everything, including whatever I write here, is according to my present lights, subject to more illumination, which I am always seeking. How do we find further illumination? Experience, reflection, reason, and listening to what others say, and reading what others have written. Particularly the latter, since reading gives us access to what the greatest minds have thought and reasoned about the most important topics and experiences. If I had to choose between experience and reading, a devil of a choice, I might well choose the latter, only because it opens me up to the universe of human experience, even if second or third hand.

Television is neither experience, reasoning, reflection, or what others tell us. It is, by in large, a picture of a picture of a whore holding a picture of a john. Sure, there are programs that can inform us and challenge our thinking that are worth watching, and most of us watch certain things solely for entertainment, and entertainment is a terrific thing. But nothing we see on television is an experience of ours, unless we produced, worked on, or appeared in the show. So if we're looking for experience, we'd better seek it elsewhere. "TV spreads, tension mounts." Generally, the more we watch, the less we know. We gain false impressions about the world, particularly from news programs, and we think we know something. A false impression of something is usually worse than knowing nothing about it, and most impressions are false. It takes a lot of work to know something about anything, and even then what we think we know is always subject to more light.

I am, of course, also talking about epistemological issues. How do we know what we know? How is certainty gained? Can we know anything with certainty? What is certainty? Good luck with these questions. I just try to get closer to knowing more things with a reasonable degree of certainty. And I am reasonably certain that "Slant Six Mind" from Greg Brown's 1997 album Slant Six Mind is an important song. I also like the blues, jazz, and Irish folk music, etc. And, blues forgive me, I like Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. And I will fight for the right of Ramblin' Jack Elliot, a New York Jew, to be a rambler and sing old-timey folk and protest songs, Eminem to rap, Darius Rucker to sing country, Dave Brubeck to write and perform jazz, John Mayall to perform his White interpretation of the blues, Yo Yo Ma to play Bach, Los Indios Tabajaras to play Chopin, and even four adolescent White guys from the burbs to crawl toward knowing something about something by absurdly playing someone else's interpretation of something that that someone couldn't have really known in its essence. We are all heirs to the whole of human experience, though claiming that inheritance requires some serious crawling. A picture of a picture of someone holding a picture can be a door to experience, or it can be nothing more than a representation of being hopelessly removed from it.