failure and resistance

failure and resistance

[…] The only thing I deeply, avidly, wanted was a lucid, unillusioned eye. I finally found it in the art of the novel. This is why for me being a novelist was more than just working in one “literary genre” rather than another; it was an outlook, a wisdom, a position; a position that would rule out identification with any politics, any religion, any ideology, any moral doctrine, any group; a considered, stubborn, furious non-identification, conceived not as evasion or passivity but as resistance, defiance, rebellion. I wound up having some odd conversations: “Are you a Communist, Mr. Kundera?” “No, I’m a novelist.” “Are you a dissident?” “No, I’m a novelist.” “Are you on the left or the right?” “Neither. I’m a novelist.” Since early youth, I have been in love with modern art—with its painting, its music, its poetry. But modern art was marked by its “lyrical spirit,” by its illusions of progress, its ideology of the double revolution, aesthetic and political, and little by little, I took a dislike to all that. […]

(from Testaments Betrayedby Milan Kundera)

“…doing while thinking, thinking while doing,” said Franco Donatoni. I can’t even speak or write decently in my mother language anymore, let alone think … but all in all I don’t mind or care anymore. Losing contact with forms and rhetoric to favor sound thinking, or a “sounding” thought, beyond any language, is what – willingly or unwillingly – seems to be my constant behavior. Reality also seems to demonstrate that despite everything, (… all the work, all the compositions, all the performances, activities, speeches, seminars, essays, books, parties and scores) I cannot verify any effect of my work in the reality of the world. Failure seems obvious. A torn planet and a desperate humanity do not seem to receive any beneficial influence from any aesthetic or philosophical position of/on “musical discourse”. Then non-identification: aware and tenacious, not as evasion or passivity but as resistance seems to be – with Milan Kundera – not just a choice but the real necessity.