Rachmaninoff, Chopin and Liszt were much more mature than I am. Their music doesn’t speak to child’s emotions, but to the experience of adult life to death, laden, history- and moment-made emotion and feeling. When I listen to their music, I can “resonate” with the adult passions and morbidity. But I know in my heart that’s not really where I am, that I am elevating myself by work. I’m in harmony with Peter, Paul & Mary’s “Autumn to May,” Gottschalk’s Berceuse, Grieg’s “At the Cradle.” Since we (or I) judge the world from our own frame of reference, there is a strong part of me that doesn’t see complex feeling in music as legitimate. It seems made-up. And yet I know it must be valid. While an adult can fake intellectuality and entertain recondite and cynical ideas when he is in fact still a psychological child, I can’t conceive that Chopin faked the sage awareness that informed his Ballades or his Étude op. 25 no. 7; that Rachmaninoff wasn’t one with the determinations of the second movement of his Second Piano Concerto.
People are sometimes close to shocked to learn I am seventy years old. They’ve guessed in the sixties, fifties, even late forties. I don’t exercise, and eat healthy half the time. I wonder if this is my version of Alexander Lowen’s observation about Narcissists: that they tend to look younger than their chronological age because their superior sense causes the vicissitudes of life to waft over them, leaving them superficially unscathed. My time-abort may be that my feelings are still the simple and excited and sweet ones that a young child should feel most of the time.
Then again, maybe I am right about the illegitimacy of grownup feeling. Can happiness and joy be nuanced? They can certainly be blended with duller, darker, painful feelings. But then they are not happiness and joy but an adulteration, a ruining. We then buy into that corruption – which is always caused by harm – as if it is right and wise.
Maybe we are all wrong about feeling. Maybe we shouldn’t resign ourselves to the negative any more than we would apotheosize a dog turd or write paeans to a stomach virus or a painful divorce. What if the only feelings we should accept are the simple ones that come with health and goodness? Happiness is right. Sadness will leave.
I know we have to be adults. But we really, really don’t do it well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mESI7f-qkhQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9ymPjPhWJc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znlUBaLH2zY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS8SmcrBcbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfDmUk7ie6s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wslm1ZL9EI8
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.