Beethoven Sonata 30, Opus 109, Phil Grant, Piano
[If reading from YouTube, scroll down to the dotted line] Those who, like myself, don’t know where they’d be, if they’d be, if it weren’t for the greatest works of Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert (see my renditions on YouTube), might be interested in my book, Cabeza and the Meaning of Wilderness: An Exploration of Nature, and Mind, available at www.meaningofwilderness.com . (24p color photos, $14.95, free shipping in US. Mounted and unmounted prints also available) While perhaps only 10 to 20% of the book directly concerns music, all of it, in one way or another, delves deeply into that wilderness of Mind from which all great art arises.
Also, I encourage anyone with even the slightest interest to visit my webpage at the above website, “Learning or Relearning the Piano as an Adult; A Spiritual Endeavor.” Since I myself only started at age 19, I feel I might be able to offer especial insight into the difficulties involved, and how they may be overcome. Also on that page I provide information on the stunning virtual piano I use for recording.
Below is an excerpt from Cabeza followed by further discussion and excerpts:
“. . . . . . And part of me, a mysterious and silent inner part of me . . . just watched the whole thing.
And somehow—I don’t know how, I didn’t try to make it happen, I didn’t want it to happen—somehow that still, unmoving, unmovable part, throughout that long night, began to take precedence. All the other turmoil was still there but . . . it was as if there were a glow in my mind, albeit behind a curtain, not fully revealed by a long, long, long shot, but still . . . a glow . . . as if the entire Universe were right there . . . gently . . . and ever so tenderly. . . .
Smiling. . . . In stillness unutterably profound. . . .
I often wonder if there’s a single person out there who will like this book, even assuming I find a publisher. And I’m absolutely certain there are many who will hate it or just think, “This is ridiculous!”
But there’s at least one person who might have appreciated it: my buddy Beethoven. . . . . . .The sonata of his I’ve been working on for the last thirty-five years, No. 30, Op. 109 in E Major, which, when its meaning seeped into my mind at a time of great despair, changed my life and led me to meditation, has in the second variation of the third movement a phrase marked teneramente: tenderly. That entire last movement describes with the depth, precision, and intensity impossible for words, unimaginable through words, the “gently . . . and ever so tenderly. . . . Smiling” . . . Universe? God? Reality? Truth? Christ? Call it what you will, this IT is, in the English mystic Lady Julian of Norwich’s words, “The ground of our being.” And as the movement progresses the curtain dissipates, evaporates, and before our eyes heaven and earth break wide open . . . and all is radiance, sheer radiance, until the concluding “gentle and ever so tender” refrain returns.
The first movement might be summed up in Zen master Huang Po’s words: “glorious and mysterious peaceful joy.” But the second may seem totally and terribly out of place, as it reveals an inhuman and apparently demonic and chthonic power of infinite intensity that does not give one single whit for what we want. Think tsunami, which in moments wipes out the lives of a quarter million and the livelihood of many times that. (But the movement of the earth’s plates that caused it may be one of the many conditions necessary for making the evolution of complex life possible. See Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon In the Universe, by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee.) Think asteroid, which extinguishes 90% of earth’s life including the supremely successful, but dumb, dinosaurs. (But makes conditions propitious for the evolution of a certain self-aware creature sixty-five million years later.) Think supernova, which vaporizes all in its vicinity. (But creates the very atoms necessary for life. See Atom, by Lawrence Krauss.) And, also, think of a certain sexually transmitted organism that so “tragically” foreshortened the life of a certain composer. (But led to the composition of some of the most sublime works known. [Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat — see my rendition on YouTube — and Quintet in C major]).
............................................................................................................................................................ And now I shall present a view, learned from long and hard and painful experience, and from my “friends [Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert],” that I’m certain virtually every reader (if there are any left) will find completely unpalatable, indigestible, unbearable, and unendurable. To wit, that the first and third movements, and the second, are just two sides of the same coin . . . and that every last gram of human misery, not pain but misery and suffering, is due to our wanting and fearing . . . which themselves are rooted in our genes, driving us to attain reproductive success. Beethoven himself understood this profoundly, for he wrote, “We finite beings, who are the embodiment of an infinite spirit, are born only for joy and pain, and it could be said that the most distinguished of us know joy through pain.”
And also: Let us begin with the primary original causes of all things, how something came about, wherefore and why it came about in that particular way and became what it is, why something is what it is, why something cannot be exactly so!!! Here, dear friend, we have reached the ticklish point, which my delicacy forbids me to reveal to you at once. All that we can say is: it cannot be.
But, in the second movement of the Sonata and in the first two movements of the Ninth Symphony he drops his “delicacy” and reveals, in all its utterly terrifying glory, that “ticklish point.” But here, even in this movement of the Sonata we have not yet reached the limits of unpalatability.
There was a Zen “master” who said, “You must endure the unendurable.” I would not say “you,” I would not say “must,” I would not say “endure.” I will only say, for myself and at least a few others, it has been unavoidably necessary to experience quite considerable, to put it very mildly, mental and physical “discomfort,” learning ever so painfully slowly not to react . . . but just to let it sit there in the mind. Not attempting to do a single thing about it. In full awareness, without trying to be aware because as human beings we are aware . . . if we don’t try to deny that awareness.
I once related to my astute spouse Yogi Berra’s maxim, “Baseball is 90% mental; the other half is physical.” Instantly she put her finger on it: “They overlap!” Precisely, and most if not all of us have observed how our mental resistance, i.e. fear, can make physical pain far more intense, just as fear also dulls or diminishes physical pleasure. So, if in an incomprehensible manner all of our near-infinite resistance to pain can be let go of . . . then, and only then it becomes possible for the second movement to transform into the third. . . . . . .”
I have also recorded Beethoven’s Sonata 31 and 32
For a discussion of the latter see the short chapter from Cabeza, Me and the Moon, at www.wildernessofmindzc.org/
Interestingly, not long ago I was thinking of the three last Beethoven sonatas, running their keys through my mind: E major, A flat major, and C minor.
First, I think he chose C minor for the last because it could be considered a revision of his famous C minor Fifth Symphony. Beethoven called us “Finite beings with an infinite spirit . . .” the Fifth Symphony is the embodiment of the finite being struggling, struggling , struggling mightily to overcome its fate. Cabeza:
“. . . . . .It is truly an extraordinary, revolutionary symphony, often paired on albums with Schubert’s “Unfinished.” But they are really quite dissimilar. It’s driving, haunting theme, described by Beethoven himself as “Fate knocks at the door,” pervades all four movements. The Fate that made him deaf. The Fate that drove him to think of suicide. The Fate that is at bottom Fear personified and demonized. And it is Fear Beethoven is showing us in its starkest, most terrifying intensity in this symphony. And showing us how he has . . . “conquered” Fear.
Oh, how gloriously he convinces us (and himself) that he has triumphed over Fate and Fear, stamping the knowledge deep into our minds with the last movement’s almost-unending final chords, exhilarating us too, to think that . . . we can do it too!
But perhaps in that work . . . a few too many “final” chords. . . .”
In the C minor Sonata, on the other hand, the finite being is indeed struggling, utterly in vain, through the entire first movement. But, Cabeza, Me and the Moon:
Beethoven’s last Piano Sonata, No. 32 in C minor, opus 111: Hans von Bulow, the late-nineteenth-century pianist and conductor, writes in the notes to my edition that the two movements of this piece may be characterized as “Resistance . . . Resignation, or, still better, Samsara . . . Nirvana.”. . . . . . A Zen koan: What do you do if you are trapped in a burning house with no escape? The answer . . . lies in the second movement. Von Bulow says “Resignation” but this is not accurate in its usual sense. Nirvana? A term trivialized by the perhaps justly cynical. One answer to that koan (there is no “right” answer to a koan because the “answer” is . . .) is given in The Three Pillars of Zen: Die, what else. Beethoven understood. The first movement—the last pages of which remind me of nothing so much as a bird fluttering wildly, hopelessly trapped in an inescapable net—literally dies away. And from the ashes arises. . . . . . .”
But getting back to the keys of the last three sonatas, thinking to myself, E major, A flat major, C minor . . . it suddenly hit me! E, A flat, C: that’s a tritone. The most unpleasant sound in all of music. It was even banned during the Middle Ages and called the devil’s chord. (See my commentary on my rendition of the Prelude and Fugue in C Major by Bach.) That’s what Beethoven had to go through to get to that “Nirvana,” bliss, joy, whatever you want to call it, that can only be found in the province of the infinite spirit. Cabeza, Me and the Moon, again:
“And then there is. . . . . . . Words are impotent here. They only have use in describing shared emotions and experiences. The second movement, the Arietta, is shared by few indeed. Not by me for sure until . . . Beethoven “spread ITs rays.” You could call it ecstasy, but there’s that drug and besides, ecstasy is something that happens to you. The second movement does not happen to anyone. It is, when there is no one there wanting. Or trying. Or fearing. Just “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.” . . . . . . Let’s call it J-y. All-caring. All-consoling. All-suffering. All-embracing. All-loving. All-encompassing. All-knowing. All-everything.
Not much more I can say. It’s there, waiting: here . . . now . . . always. Listen to it . . . when you’re ready. . . .”
It’s also important to note that in the great slow movement of the previous Sonata, No. 29, the “Hammerklavier,” one of the most soulful pieces ever composed, there are two moments when he seems to reach a state of utter perfection, utter most profound infinite peace . . . . . . but then falls back. And the last movement is filled with to my mind, the very unsatisfactory manic striving — intentionally almost impossible to play? — of the fugue.
But sometime between finishing that Sonata and starting the last three . . . Beethoven’s finite being “resigned,” gave in, gave up, let go of the whole miserable mess of being human, let himself know those devil’s chords to the nth degree, and passed on to us three of the greatest treasures in all music, which are among the limited few which have truly guided my entire life. And it’s interesting to note that Beethoven himself said he composed those three sonatas “in a single breath.” While it took him from 1820-22 to get them down on paper, it’s obvious the same experience — of the infinite spirit — informed them all, as well as the Ninth Symphony, composed concurrently.
Getting to the quotations I put with the portraits of Beethoven (which incidentally are chronological, from 1818 to 1823), the first two were to Countess Erdody (on whose estate he seems to have attempted suicide by self-starvation after his failure in love in the famous Immortal Beloved affair, disappearing for days only to reappear highly disheveled; he also came very close to suicide in 1802 when he realized he was becoming deaf) in 1815:
1. “We finite beings, who are the embodiment of an infinite spirit, are born only for joy and pain, and it could be said that the most distinguished of us know joy through pain.”
2. “Man cannot avoid suffering . . . he must endure without complaining and feel his worthlessness, and then achieve his perfection, that perfection which the Almighty will then bestow upon him.” [Note the “feel his worthlessness.” This does not mean berating oneself through thought; rather, feeling intimately how incapable of approaching the infinite spirit the finite being is . . . through its own volition.]
And then, around the time he was writing the Ninth Symphony in 1823:
3. “There is nothing higher than to approach the Godhead more nearly than other mortals, and by means of that contact spread the rays of the Godhead throughout the human race.”
Also, Beethoven at the end of his life had on his worktable under glass the following quotes, copied out in capital letters, of inscriptions he had recently learned were found in the temple of the goddess Neith in lower Egypt:
I am that which is.
I am all that was, that is, and that shall be. No mortal man hath lifted my veil.
He is of Himself alone, and it is to this Aloneness that all things owe their being.
Interestingly, Jan Assmann writes in The Mind of Egypt that the religious understanding expressed in these quotes very likely influenced Moses, for in Exodus 3:14 (in the King James translation), God responds to Moses’ asking of his name: “I am that I am.” (In newer translations it’s “I am the Being One.” I also just saw Wikipedia that in Hebrew I am can also mean I was, or I shall be — or perhaps all three, since Being is beyond time and space.)
Then there’s the quote from Rilke: “. . . as soon as we accept life’s most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it . . . then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us. . . . Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it—: this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets. . . .”
It’s clear to me that Beethoven understood from quotes 1 and 2 precisely what he needed to do. This was a very dry time for him but in 1816 he composed Sonata 28, Opus 101, the first movement of which is extremely beautiful (and which I’ve worked on) and shows his entering the realm of the Infinite Spirit. Then the slow movement of Sonata 29, in 1818 (which I’ve also worked on) brings him even closer . . . . . . until finally in 1820 . . . he breaks through. And “explains” it all to us over the seven years he has left, which also include his final masterpieces, Quartets 12-16.
Regarding the Rilke quote, he really just means it all depends on we view from the vantage point of the finite being, or the Infinite Spirit within us, that determines if we experience dreadfulness or bliss.
And the “No mortal man has lifted my veil.” I.e. no finite being. Interestingly Vincent van Gogh wrote almost the same thing as the second quote at the time of the famous incident when he cut off his ear. “To suffer without complaining is the one lesson that has to be learned in this life.” Sadly, he did not learn it thoroughly — do any of us? — and killed himself a year and a half later.
Van Gogh also wrote: ““How strange these last three months do seem to me. Sometimes moods of indescribable mental anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time . . . seemed to be torn apart for an instant.” Indescribable mental anguish — for the finite being. But “the veil of time . . . torn apart” . . . allowing him to see “for an instant,” that state of utter perfection beyond time and space. See this page of my website and scroll down for more about van Gogh.
Finally, others have noted that the final bar of Sonata 30 has a pedal down indication, but not followed by pedal up. They take this to mean it’s meant to go on forever. But recently, when I played the end of Sonata 30 followed by 31 for my wife, she said she couldn’t tell where one ended in the next began. I think that perhaps was Beethoven’s intention, even to have all three performed in succession. Hans von Bülow frequently did this in recitals, even with all five of the last sonatas. In the excerpt above I mentioned how the meaning of Sonata 30 “seeped into my mind at a time of great despair, changed my life and led me to meditation,” but actually I had tape recorded the last three in succession and was playing them over and over and over . . .
But meditation, prayer, whatever you want to call it, is utterly pointless unless one learns what Beethoven so well in his last works showed to us, the eternal necessity of suffering . . . without complaining. Because this is the only way to find freedom from the finite being, created through 3.8 billion years of evolution. See Cabeza for more, but all of the meditation, prayer, techniques I’ve ever heard of — and I probably tried them all — ultimately end up as just a way for the finite being to stay in control. Maybe to have a nice experience from time to time . . . but never, never, never, find freedom from that finite being (which I call the unfree will in Cabeza). I think I show conclusively in Cabeza that the five spiritual teachers I’ve known the most about never found that freedom.
There is more at my review of Beethoven: The Man Revealed at www.meaningofwilderness.com , my other website pages, and especially my piano/photo videos of the greatest works of Bach and Schubert, all of which include discussion of the works.
The following is something I wrote for a friend regarding Beethoven 30, and how I came to have my life revolutionized by it:
Hello Tim, A year or so ago you told me regarding my Beethoven 30, “The musical ideas expressed are truly brilliant.” Well, they aren’t ideas, rather spiritual understanding. If you desire some insight as to how that came about, read on. If not what I’m writing will not be wasted as it may go in my cousin Nell’s book (who committed suicide).
Some I’ve already told you: Beethoven came close to suicide at least twice. The first when he realized he was going deaf. His Heiligenstadt testament (worth the read)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Heiligenstadt_Testament
reads like a combination last will and testament and suicide note, as if Beethoven thought he might at any point end his life. This was 1802 just before the third Symphony. Then in 1812, the Immortal Beloved affair (both of these only revealed by documents found in his desk drawer after his death), after which he realized he would always be alone and would write in his Tagebuch, “Your only happiness lies in your Art.” Following that event, whatever was, he disappeared for days while visiting the Countess Erdody — everyone thought he had returned to Vienna but he reappeared in a disheveled state, suggesting he had been attempting suicide by self-starvation. Even in his last year he admitted to a childhood friend that he wished he had married.
Three years later were the quotes from letters to Countess Erdody that I put with the last three sonatas: “We finite beings who are the embodiment of an infinite spirit are born to know both joy and pain, and it may be that the most distinguished of us know joy through pain.” And: “Man cannot avoid suffering. He must endure without complaining, feel his worthlessness, and again achieve his perfection, which will be bestowed upon him by the Almighty.”
As I’ve mentioned, he came very close to that perfection in the third movement of Sonata 29, only to fall back into the rather manic fugue. Then the last three which, as I’ve said, I think he intended to end on C minor as a reprise of the fifth Symphony, and with the E major and A flat before that, this forms a “devil’s chord” — the most unpleasant sound in all of music from which there seems no resolution. No biographers seem to have picked up on that. I would dearly like to know when he obtained the TWO copies of The Art of the Fugue which were found in his possession at his death. I’m certain he chose D minor, almost never used by him before, as the key for the Ninth since it’s the only work — the first three movements — that expresses what is in Bach’s supreme masterpiece — in the key of D minor. But all biographers are far too obtuse to be concerned with such “minor” details.
I feel I myself was born with an unbearable devil’s chord, a knot of unbearable intensity — call it a koan — of which I’ve had no choice but to find freedom from, find a resolution to … else end my life. When I was 15 I got up early, took the train into New York City, walked to the center of the George Washington Bridge… but didn’t quite have it in me to jump. Three months later I took a bottle of my mother’s phenobarbital tablets she had carefully hidden … but when I didn’t fall asleep right away, told my parents and had my stomach pumped out. Cabeza: “But there was music. Classical music was often in the background in our home and while much of it seemed forgettable, I did at one point discover Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. My parents didn’t even own a copy so I’d scan the radio program listings in the Sunday New York Times for when it might be on. I cannot even recall what it meant to me then—the first few listening I found it unintelligible—but I was certain that it was Something important.** “Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain.” Mikhail Bakunin, quoted in To the Finland Station (1940) by Edmund Wilson.”
Although I was admitted to the National Honor Society, and took advanced placement calculus, I almost didn’t graduate from high school: my mother had to practically drag my hand across the page to write my English term paper. First semester in college I did well, but stopped going to classes in the second preferring to go for long walks along railroad tracks through the early hours of the morning and then sleeping through my classes. And flunked out.
Living at home the next year I had been listening to such masterworks of despair as Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony and the Verdi Requiem when fortunately my friend Steve recalibrated my compass and introduced me to the greatest works of Bach. A few months later I took a noncredit course on Beethoven at The New School. I didn’t get much out of the class time but the assigned reading was Beethoven: His Spiritual Development by JWN Sullivan (regarding the 14th: “The opening fugue is the most super human piece of music that Beethoven has ever written. It is the completely unfaltering rendering into music of what we can only call the mystic vision.… Nowhere else in music are we made so aware, as here, of a state of consciousness surpassing our own, where our problems do not exist, and to which even our highest aspirations, those that we can formulate, provide no key.… To Wagner, [it was] a melancholy to profound for any tears. To Berlioz it was terrifying. To Beethoven himself it was the justification of, and the key to, life. In the light of this vision he surveys the world.… We arrive, in the next moment, as a newborn creature in a newborn world.… And after floating through this outspread world we do, at that rapturous outbreak of trills in the last variation, rise up on wings and fly. And it is not only we, but all creation, that seems to be taking part in this exultant stirring. If ever a mystical vision of life has been presented in art it is here.…”).
Also, at that time WQXR was playing the complete Beethoven quartets; I had just acquired a tape recorder so I taped them all. The course also gave me a New York City library card so I was able to go to the Lincoln Center record library and take out various works to record, which included the last four Beethoven sonatas. I also began playing the piano at that time.
But I was hardly free from misery: once when my parents were away I got drunk and went out driving with the intent to drive at high speed into a tree. I also smashed up some things in the house — they came back early before I’d cleaned up and insisted I start seeing a psychiatrist again (I had seen my first worthless shrink — out of three total — in high school). Although I didn’t care at that point whether I lived or died my parents had my shrink write to my draft board — this was the height of the draft for the Vietnam War — and got me a 4F deferment like Donald Trump.
(It was only in the mid-1990s that, after reading Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, I realized I had manic-depressive tendencies, albeit on the depressive side. Jamison illustrates how there’s a definite genetic aspect to this, and I thus realized this was the case in my family. Cabeza: “In my family I had two cousins and an aunt who didn’t make it: they killed themselves. A sister, most of whose brief thirty-nine years were a sad parade in and out of mental institutions. An uncle I never met, writer and pianist who, probably with semi-suicidal motivation, joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight Franco and fascism in the Spanish Civil War. And never returned.”
And after having over the years read numerous accounts, including biographies and autobiographies, of manic-depressive illness (also termed bipolar disorder), schizophrenia, and autism, it’s clear to me that the root cause of all of these is the Fear: it just manifests itself differently. I go into this in depth in the book on Nell. As to the cause of that fear, I would describe it as the finite being’s reaction to the Infinite Spirit. In Cabeza I write of fear being our link to the infinite, and is likely much stronger on the surface in those who are “Touched with Fire.” But that Infinite is devastating to our little selves, created by evolution, programmed for sex, status and security. My life’s work has been devoted to seeing if somehow it is possible to allow that devastation just to flow through the mind and thus allow, as I write in Cabeza, “mind to know Mind, Being to permeate being.”)
But I did begin to appreciate the eternal profundity of the late quartets: as I wrote in Cabeza, the adagio of 15 — what Beethoven called “The Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Godhead” — raised the Great question of how this man, so alone and isolated by deafness, could know such joy and love. There is a comment on YouTube that if you listen to this movement it will change your life. Well, it didn’t change my life, yet, but it got me started.
I also tried listening to the late Beethoven sonatas but didn’t like them much then.
Also that year, 1966-1967, there was much in the news about Timothy Leary and LSD: Some people going crazy, others claiming to see God. Either would have been preferable to my current state, so I was open to the experience . . . if the opportunity should arise.
Back to college. Did a ditto. Drugs were everywhere. Tried marijuana but after the initial high I became extremely depressed. Would’ve tried heroin if it had been around. But LSD was.
My first nine trips were unremarkable except for one — being driven with friends to a Jefferson Airplane concert, looking out the window I got a glimpse of eternity in the trees reaching for the sky and clouds.
But my 10th I was alone — except for the last four Beethoven sonatas playing in the background. So finally we come to the dénouement. Earlier in the year I had begun writing what I called “Notes to Myself,” an attempt to understand myself better.
November 8, 2 AM, 1968. Eight hours into a trip. Two hours into a halfhearted drunk. [I was in my apartment; neither of my roommates was there. Sitting on a couch I felt nothing less than crucified against the wall behind me. In fact the finite being was being crucified so the Infinite Spirit could arise from the ashes. I’ve had very similar experiences at retreats, especially my first, and sitting, and playing piano up until the present. Over the past 51 years though, the finite being has been worn down enough that it allows, momentarily at least, the Infinite Spirit through: these are my jerks.]
Spent the last 10 minutes beating myself with my fists. I should do that more often. Strike some sense into myself.
DESPAIR!!!!!!
November 8, continued. Beating yourself is good. Pain and tingling sensations — you feel like you exist. Look at your life, Fool! What gives you hope? Eh? Come on!! What! I hereby turn in my card. [Reference presumably to something; suicide, withdrawal from life.]
Steve, Nancy.
If I die, and someone finds this, would someone do something for me? Eh? Just tell me why? WHY?! Not just me. Billions. Suffering, trapped, INSANE. WHY?
At least I realize now that I am insane. It’s better than being insane for all your life and not knowing it. By the way, if a music connoisseur’s reading, try Beethoven Sonata 32 in C minor. Just the right music when friends are in for tea.
Wine has soothed me . . . but I’m getting a headache. Probably from hitting my head. Do I like pity? EH? No. Only from myself. S E L F ? Where . . . What . . . Who . . .??? I’m not me. I swear to God I’m not.
PLEASE
I keep stopping to look down at myself. I am very analogous to Michelangelo’s St. Matthew [unfinished: writhing body emerging from the stone. I must have read something about it]. Not my body, but 21 years of conditioning, habit,
Y E U C H, etc.
Something is very wrong with Dave [my roommate; evidently I saw for the first time how “insane” he was, just living on the surface with a superficial persona.] I looked at him objectively for thea first time tonight. [I.e., not reacting; with the awareness from being on LSD.]
Tune in tomorrow for the next episode of: “When Will Phil Give Up?”
“Hammerklavier” [Beethoven Sonata 29] is good too. Third movement . . . DAMN
GOOD !!!!
Why? . . . Balance of wine and LSD puts me in an almost normal state. No. Beethoven, Ludwig van.
Writing keeps me calm.
I am living for the moment when, after my suicide, someone reads this.
I truly believe LSD could help someone who is not as firmly entrenched as I am. LOVE. HK fourth movement [Beethoven Sonata 29].
I wish I could shut my self up in the basement until it decided to conform to MY standards.
And now, for those few who have gotten past 32 and 29, prepare a paper for me, due next Thursday, entitled “Why Beethoven’s Piano Sonata #30 in E major is ETERNAL . . . and keeps me alive.”
When World War III occurs I shall damn mankind to the nth degree if only for destroying LVB’s works.
How valuable is an artist’s piping [reference to Kafka?]? God. G o d.
Steve. . . — I say yes in theory if not in practice.
To myself and any other suicide: I am GLAD I did not commit suicide five years ago. I don’t understand, but . . . yes! 29, 30, 31, 32.
Hesse . . . . . . . . . Beethoven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LSD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . all . . . . . . . . . . . . one.
The vision is fading. [Of Eternity, Truth, Reality that led me to sitting.]
God G O D
G
O
D
Week later (LSD to the nth) [took a triple dosage trying to recover the experience of the previous trip. It was 30 hours of sheer hell, resistance to the nth, the finite being fighting for its life. Perhaps wine might have helped. Never took drugs again.] Started meditation two months later, ramping up to the four hours daily I do now. Never to stop, but when I “flunked out” of the Zen Center the next year, started piano again (I had given it up the year before because it seemed so impossible) and attempting 30.
Final note: the last time I saw my friend Steve he was working on his PhD in nuclear physics. I know I was at least as smart as he was. I could’ve taken that route. Instead, part-time jobs of school bus driving and housecleaning with Anne (we have been retired for the last decade)— so I’d have time for sitting and the piano.
.
Print