Captain, O My Captain...

There are some things which seem insanely simple on the surface and other stuff which appears beyond the ken of normal human beings. I'm minded tonight of two people: Richard Feynman and Captain Beefheart, both late of this parish we call life, God rest their genius souls; the hope being that on some Astral plane, they will be discussing metaphysics over red wine and bongos. On the one hand you have Richard Feynman, noble laureate in physics, and on the other, Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart: in my humble opinion, geniuses both, but for such very different reasons.

Physics, in my experience, was taught in the form of a series of abstract rules - a bit like our mathematics at school, too - rather than with any given insight as to how or why the rules actually existed. Abstraction in a vacuum is not especially helpful in learning any subject in my estimation, history being possibly the most heinous case of mis-education one can imagine, it usually being purveyed as a series of dates and isolated events that don't connect with the student's mind or experience. Feynman took the most difficult physical concepts and taught them in such simple and relatable terms, that even lay people wandering into his fabled university lectures could understand, without the formal mathematical logic that ultimately describes the physical world. He taught through deep personal understanding of his own subject in a way that only the most supremely talented of communicators can.

On the other hand, and I won't say by contrast, as that implies a dichotomy where one is not intended; we have The Captain. A composer/poet/performance artist/conductor: a navigator, no less, of his Magic Band. Someone who appeared to present, very often, a fairly straight, if tangential, urban blues music: at least in his earliest recordings, anyway. Even then, nothing was quite as it seemed on the surface, and none of it was ever a historical recreation of the musics he loved. His later output - and I think particularly his late-early to middle period albums such as 'Trout Mask Replica' and 'Lick My Decals Off, Baby' exhibit a complexity of musical invention, which while lost on most of humanity outside of my mentalist brotherhood, went and still goes unmarked.

Both men were geniuses in their respective fields: I listen to Feynman's insights and Beefheart's music on an equal basis: both help to make sense of the world, even today. Taken together - throw in Joseph Beuys' artistic philosophising - another sadly long gone hero of mine [blog posts passim], and you might start to get a glimpse of a fragment of a measure of my personal mindset and motivations: I learn as much as I can; I take as much as I can from the people who have taught me in the past and whose lessons I thought either beyond me or of no interest to me at the time, in the arrogance of youth. In short, I revel in coming to terms with the unthinkable, the unknowable, and the unfathomable; and relish all of it unreservedly, despite the fact that when I'm gone, all of it is vapour: the now is all that counts...