Favorite Musical Book Quotes?

I share with you a musical quote from the book Beyond the Robot:  The Life and Work of Colin Wilson by Gary Lachman who himself was a founding member of the rock group Blondie.  The book is a biography of Colin Wilson, the author of The New Existentialism - a book I previously quoted above, as well as other famous titles such as The Outsider.

Quote

          The society of free spirits gratuitously helping each other had yet to appear and Wilson had to find another job.  This time it was as a hospital porter in Fulham.  He received patients, wheeled them around on stretchers, fetched their meals, took dead patients to the mortuary, and emptied rubbish bins.  He was given a tiny cubicle to sleep in and meals.  Privacy was at a minimum.  For the first few weeks, Wilson was still speaking anarchically--representing the syndicalist workers--and he kept their soapbox with him at work, bicycling to Hyde Park Corner with it strapped to his back.  The work wasn't hard and the pay was decent but the long, empty hours, waiting to receive a patient, were demoralizing.  Cards, tea breaks, and football matches on the radio filled the void.  The stagnant atmosphere bred sexual chitchat; the porters reeled off exaggerated accounts of their success or drooled over pornography.  Death, too, was nearby.  Once Wilson saw the body of a young woman after the postmortem.  He had seen her alive a few days earlier; now her brains and intestines lying on the slab seemed to deny that humanity had any importance in the scheme of things.  He asked himself what seems a naive question, but one that would play an important part in his philosophy to come:  why do we die?  Are we so unimportant to nature?  Or do we, as Shaw believed, die because we are too lazy to make life worth living?

          The negation symbolized by the young woman's body was offset by a "near mystical experience."  Lying on his bed, he was listening to the "Liebestod" from Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde on the radio.  For Wilson music ranks with sex and poetry as a reliable means of inducing what he would later call "the other mode of consciousness," and he would go on to write a book about it.  At the time he was fascinated with the life of the dancer Nijinsky--he would feature in both The Outsider and The Ritual in the Dark--and when the spirit grabbed him Wilson would improvise a dance to whatever music he was listening to.  He did so then.  He stood up and in his cubicle began to make slow movements with his arms.  He tensed his muscles and as the music reached a climax "it seemed to penetrate the depths of my being."  For a brief moment he was "above time" and could look down upon life from a height.  He had glimpsed some of mankind's evolutionary possibilities.  Sheer concentration, an effort of will, he believed, had induced the "timeless moment," and indicated that the relentless flow of time, from life to death, could be halted.

          Time may have stopped for a moment, but the relentless need to write remained ...

On 12/23/2025 at 6:33 PM, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

I share with you a musical quote from the book Beyond the Robot:  The Life and Work of Colin Wilson by Gary Lachman who himself was a founding member of the rock group Blondie.  The book is a biography of Colin Wilson, the author of The New Existentialism - a book I previously quoted above, as well as other famous titles such as The Outsider.

 

 

Ha, I read parts of Wilson’s books a while back and this account sounds very “Wilson” indeed, lol.

On 2/28/2024 at 12:06 PM, PeterthePapercomPoser said:

LoL - I looked on my secret bookshelf in my closet and I realized that I have some great musical books in there that not even *I* have read!

I never read books on my shelf lol!!!

I come to you with yet another quote from Gary Lachman's "Beyond the Robot:  The Life and Work of Colin Wilson".  There is a pertinent insight about creative artists at the end of the quote in this chapter which has to do with peak experiences.

Quote

          But there was one part of Maslow's findings that Wilson questioned.  Maslow believed that peaks could not be induced at will.  They were a by-product of an optimistic, purposeful way of life.  But you couldn't make one happen, he thought, just as you can't make yourself be happy.  Yet Maslow had written about how, when he spoke to his students about peak experiences and asked them to think about any they had had, they suddenly started having them, simply by remembering earlier ones and focusing their attention on them.  It seemed that Maslow had missed this point.  It would play a central part in the philosophy of consciousness Wilson was developing.  It seemed that the human mind had the ability to alter itself, through thought and imagination alone.

          Around the same time as Wilson absorbing Maslow's ideas, the work of another thinker came to his attention.  I've already mentioned Robert Ardrey.  Wilson had bought a copy of Ardrey's African Genesis for Joy, thinking she would like it.  When Wilson read it too he was struck by Ardrey's thesis.  Ardrey argued that human beings emerged from their simian ancestors on the African savannahs some two million years ago, and that the transition came about because by learning to walk upright they left their hands free to use weapons--a theme Stanley Kubrick employed in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

          This suggested that humanity came into existence through an "evolutionary leap," a sudden advance rather than a slow, cumulative process.  The idea of such a leap had been on Wilson's mind for some time, ever since he contemplated the nineteenth-century Romantics who made up many of his Outsiders.  Sometime in the late eighteenth century, a kind of "imagination explosion" took place in the West, which Wilson later attributed to the rise of the modern novel.  Writers, poets, musicians, and artists found themselves experiencing strange states of a godlike ecstasy, unlike anything that had come before.  In Maslow's terms the Romantics experienced profound peak experiences and it was precisely their fall "back to earth" that led many to alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide.  The Romantics, Wilson felt, were too weak and undisciplined to bridge the gap; they couldn't maintain the forward drive that created the conditions for peaks.  They succumbed to self-pity and despair, believing they were stranded in a drab, dreary world. The contrast between their visionary states and the "triviality of everydayness" defeated them.  But perhaps they were the first sign of a change in human consciousness, or a growing hunger for the kind of inner freedom that H. G. Wells had demanded.  Perhaps, like Ardrey's early humans, humanity for the past century or so was undergoing an evolutionary shift.

. . .

          Yet it was Ardrey's ideas about dominance that really excited Wilson.  Ardrey told him that precisely 5 percent of all animal groups, including humans, was dominant.  This fact had been uncovered during the Korean War, when it was revealed that surprisingly few Americans escaped from North Korean prison camps.  This happened because their Chinese captors first observed the prisoners to determine which were dominant, that is, which were motivated, showed initiative, and displayed other leadership qualities.  They isolated these under heavy guard and left the rest relatively unguarded.  Without the "troublemakers" the others were easily controlled; they were passive and quickly accepted their situation.  The number of "dangerous" prisoners was always the same:  5 percent.

. . .

          This insight into dominance seemed to offer Wilson a clue about his Outsiders.  He had pointed out that the Outsider is not necessarily a frustrated man of genius (although he later modified this view).  But he now recognized that he or she was certainly a frustrated member of the dominant 5 percent.  Wilson suggested that in early times, with a smaller population, a dominant character could more easily rise to his natural level in society.  Today it is less easy.  There are many more people, which means many more dominant individuals, and the competition is greater.  Many dominant individuals do not get the chance to express their dominance naturally.  This results in an accumulation of frustrated energies and a resentment toward the society that frustrates them.  Shaw said, "All men are in a false position in society until they have realized their possibilities and imposed them on their neighbours."  But Shaw also realized that this is not always easy.  "The finding of one's place," he admitted, "may be made very puzzling by the fact that there is no place in ordinary society for the extraordinary individual."

           This is something the Outsider knows firsthand.  And if a dominant individual is frustrated for too long, he may rebel, and act out his dominance criminally.  Wilson points out that in test done with rats this is exactly what happened.  In overcrowded conditions, a highly dominant or "king" rat took over a cage for himself and his harem.  All the other rats were jammed into another cage.  Among these were other, slightly less dominant rats, and they took to expressing their dominance in "criminal" ways.  They raped other rats, ate babies, and attacked their less dominant fellows.  Dominant humans in similar conditions--slumss--with no positive venue for their dominance, often react in much the same way.

          Yet not every member of the dominant 5 percent is an Outsider.  Most do find their natural place in society.  Wilson points out that every store manager, drill sergeant, pop star, or sports figure is a member of the dominant 5 percent.  (Having worked in the rock and roll business for many years, I cam across quite a few of them.)  Yet there is a further level of dominance that exceeds even these.  Members of the dominant 5 percent need other people to express their dominance.  An actor needs his audience, a pop star his fans, a CEO his vice chairmen, a dictator his masses.  Without other people, their dominance has no means of expression.  They are dependent on other people.  If they found themselves stranded on a desert island, their dominance would have nothing to do.

          This is not true of a small number of the population.  Wilson suggests that .005 percent of the population displays a very different kind of dominance, one that does not need other people.  If these people found themselves on a desert island, they would be amazed at their good fortune.  For them, creative work is an end in itself.  They are what Maslow calls "self-actualizers."  They are more interested in exploring and actualizing their own creative potential than in dominating others.  A philosopher, a scientist, a poet, a mystic, or a composer can express his or her dominance through the work itself.

Go forth and dominate the world with your creative "originative intellectual work"!