A Meditation on the Cult of Complication, Eagle Cap Wilderness . . .

ON THE CULT OF COMPLICATION—
a rant in search of a key . . .

The contemporary worship of complication mistakes the
contortions of the intellect wrapping round itself for the mystery
of the new and unknown. The worship of complication, or
the deliberately difficult and obscure, is cultivated and
consumed by a style of thinking that has completely lost its
resonance with the natural world.

The cult of complication is like the obsessive figuring of a
mind caught up in the random zig-zag noise of 12-tone
melodies biting at my ears like hordes of hungry horseflies
in a hot, unbearably dry afternoon sun, or in the degenerative
chaos of money markets before they surge like drug-induced
erections and then just as suddenly and precipitously collapse.

I say to you, the energy that we sense when we spontaneously
encounter the new and unknown is an altogether different
order of movement. It instantly aligns, challenges, and speaks
to our whole being, like the firebolt of attraction we experience
when unexpectedly encountering an attractive stranger's face.
Or when I'm struck dumb by Rilke's magic wand of cascading
sound images as it releases a flood of insight and emotion
within me. Or when I hear that one Mozart violin sonata in a
minor key that I must learn by heart and arrange. Or when I
stand before the hurricane of sound of a Varèse that sweeps
away in a heartbeat all the piles of accumulated contemporary
rubbish with one true call of a solitary trumpet, or roar of a
contrabass-trombone. That, Sirs, is the miracle of the new.
Like the northface of an unclimbed mountain, it is simply there,
pristine, pure and utterly indifferent to the confused chatter
of our clever and oh-so-petty coffeehouse reviews.

Hidden Lake,
Eagle Cap Wilderness,
Oregon, IX.5.2008