Steven Parmenius

Many people have expressed disappointment with author J.K Rowling for her views on transgenderism. My first reaction to this is that anyone disappointed in an author does not know authors. What I mean by this is that the authorial voice is a mask that hides as well as reveals the empirical individual. Sometimes it is a highly antithetical mask. The empirical individual behind it is not at all the person we expected: they may be a raging alcoholic or an abusive partner. They might be a boring conversationalist or cranky and opinionated. This individual can be very, VERY ordinary compared the exciting persona of the creator. Indeed, like Salieri in Amadeus , we might well wonder why great artistic talent is not conferred on people more deserving of it (like ourselves!). History also confers prominence on less than stellar people. These people become ‘heroes’ and here again I must say that anyone disappointed in a hero does not know heroes. The heroic mask is like the artistic person

I have a shelf of authors such as John of the Cross, both St. Theresas, Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Catherine of Siena and so on. We call these people mystics and on the whole their books are not laden with complex semantics and jargon or dense, close reasoning. That said I find them the slowest form of reading there is and after 20 pages of John of the Cross one despairs to see that there are hundreds more. This is because every such writer struggles with the same fundamental problem: how to speak of things too simple and ineffable to put in words. Every such work is almost by definition a failure. One senses that those able to understand them do not need them and those who need them will never understand them. This, though, is a counsel of despair. We may move by the light of analogy when other lights fail and on such a principle I find these works the most crucial and crucially human that I possess. I say this even though the weight of mystical experiences may well take a

What exactly is the aura of a pop song? Well, broadly, it is the context in which the song is received or rather the context which makes reception possible. I don’t know how this works today for I don’t listen to pop songs that much and what is more if I do they do not, for me, have an aura. In fact, along with polkas and contemporary Christian hymns,most of them belong in the modest category of ‘music I don’t like and can’t imagine even teaching myself to like’. I can, though, recall what gave songs an aura in my day and I don’t think human nature has changed much in the interim. A pop song is part of a social ritual and takes its aura from certain generic features which make it apt to be used in such a ritual. I recall that this used to be bound up with the radio based ritual of counting down songs from an arbitrarily chosen number like 10 or 40. The point of this was that everybody listened and everybody proceeded from the same touchstone of taste. Songs such as these were design

There is an entire level of engagement with music that has nothing to do, really, with its aesthetic properties except, perhaps, incidentally. Long ago I would have said this was a bad thing but now I take a more neutral attitude. There is something given for the music connoisseur that is not given for most people: that music per se is valuable regardless of where it comes from or when it was written. This means that music as an object of appreciation is abstracted from a personal, familial or social aura which it possesses and on judged on its own merits. To such a standpoint it does not matter that the Hurrian hymn (the oldest known piece of notated music) belongs to a world so ancient we can barely conceive of its values and priorities as our own. It is a nice series of notes and its very antiquity gives it a fascination it might not otherwise possess. It does have an aura but not the aura it originally had as that is forever lost. I have always gravitated to pieces of music like