The chamber music of Imre Prozac, a part of my earliest childhood,
as in Listening to Prozac, Prozac Plays
Prozac, Prozac's Quartet #3 with the
Prozac String Quartet, in fact the entire
ambience of mid-1980s Hungarian postminimalism, had nothing
whatsoever to do with the Sheepfiends, but this was true in a
very important way. Another unimportant debt in Sheepfiends
cultural heritage is deeply owed to the French sociological
theorist Jean Baudrillard, whose avowedly faddish
theory of the hyperreal I found gross and outmoded long before I
understood it. I decided to understand it merely because, well,
if I could write software saving a major corporation $30 million
on a slow day, while simultaneously grasping to perfection wherein
I wasn't entitled to a nickel more of that money than I was, still
am, paid, I could understand stupid crap like the hyperreal.. The
Sheepfiends begins where the hyperreal leaves off. It's music which
cannot be unless it isn't. The least important or necessary element
of Sheepfiends music is, of course, its most invariable component,
which, I need hardly say, is taping the Sheepfiends. What has been
taped thus becomes the "Sheepfiends jam," and arduously
acquired mental disciplines, taught by the Sivananda Ashram three
doors down the street, have been deployed in never permitting
awareness of a reason to ask why something has been taped and
something has not. If it be true, it has not; all that is known is,
it isn't on the tape. The tape is what we have. Have for what?
For, if there is nothing good on, deconstruction, perhaps. Or,
even better, making money. I have written software for an immense
corporation whose corporate HQ is an important, very important,
part of what Chicago looks like. Philosophically, this inclines
me to the supposition that the corporation and my salary along
with it will pass away without a trace quite soon and with steady
cashflow from Sheepfiends cassettes, CDs and tie in sales, I can
put a little by. Sheepfiends embodies the orphic principle along with
the disorphic principle in antagonistic contradiction which by
design is ill-understood. The musical and unmusical, the good and bad,
each has its mike and amp channel. I mix, but know not what. All
Sheepfiends and friends are free to say "that rocks,"
"that sucks," and so on, but I alone know not what I am
doing to have full confidence of having done it right, once the
final cooked tape has been selected, properly edited and altered
from the raw. CF.
Claude Levi-Strauss
"The Raw and the Cooked."
It is because it isn't. But not necessarily. But I wouldn't always go
that far.
At the very end of Chinese Antiquity, the Jin Dynasty briefly
succeeded in reunifying the Empire (280-304). Outside the
frontiers were the proto- Turkic southern Xiungnu. "The
Xiungnu and other northern nomad groups, taking advantage of the
disunity and instability of China, increasingly infiltrated the
frontier. In 304 a Sinicized Xiungnu chieftain declared himself
the only legitimate heir to the imperial throne and established a
state called Han (later changed to Zhao) in Shanxi; and from this
base the Xiungnu sacked Jin's capital, Loyang, in 311, capturing
and eventually killing the Jin emperor. The Jin government
reorganized itself under a new emperor in the ancient western
capital, Changan, but in 316 this too was overwhelmed by the
Xiungnu." (Hucker, 1975, p. 135).
At this time, a major revival of Daoist philosophy occurred;
there were many schools. There are, by definition, always many
schools of Daoism, if it is properly Daoist. The schools agreed
on nothing; or, technically speaking, the only thing they agreed
on was Nothingness, *wu*. While some debated "Who lost
China," coming up with all sorts of answers, mostly
unimaginable, the most famous Taoist school, the Seven Sages of
the Bamboo Grove, resolutely adopted a (drunken) posture of
"who cares, why bother."
"One of the Seven was always attended by a servant
carrying a jug of wine and a shovel, so that his master might
take a drink whenever he thirsted and might be buried on the spot
if he happened to fall dead. Another, having walked a great
distance to a friend's house, turned on his heel without even
saying hello and returned home; when asked why, he explained with
a shrug that he went because he felt like it and came back home
because he wanted to.
Anticipating the Sheepfiends, the group improvised music,
poetry and "pure conversation" whilst intoxicated on
liquor and, I wouldn't put it past them, possibly smoking their
hempen garments.
Guo Xiang (d. 312), author of a commentary on the Zhuangzi
(Chuang-tzu), adopted a Daoist version of the Confucian
functionalist friction-free hierarchy in a heroic intellectual
effort (and it was exclusively an intellectual effort) to save
Civilization; it having been obvious that any Daoist intellectual
effort was, necessarily and by definition, essentially futile. In
his commentary on the Zhuangzi, Guo Xiang "honored Confucius
as China's foremost patron saint," (Hucker, p. 201) a
magnificent achievement of textual annotation, as lesser beings,
like ourselves, surely must realize, having gathered from our
superficial readings of the Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) that the
latter, to all outward appearances, loathed and despised
Confucius.
The Daoist rationalization for the Confucian hierarchical
social order, that is, "feeding the Superior Man," is
thus:
"Now, the workman does not act to cut down the tree; his
action lies in using an ax. The ruler does not act to manage
affairs personally and the ruler is able to use ministers; if
the ax is able to cut down the tree and the workman is able to
use the ax--if all do what they are properly able to do, then
Heavenly principles are manifested spontaneously; it is not a
matter of taking action. If, on the other hand, the ruler does
the ministers' work, then he denies his rulership; and if
ministers take over the ruler's powers, then they deny their
ministership. Therefore, each should perform his own function,
and then superiors and subordinates will all be successful, so
that the principle of nonaction [*wuwei*] will be attained.
"Nonaction does not mean folding the hands and being
silent. It is simply that one should always do what is natural;
then a person is content with his nature and his fate. If one
cannot avoid [being a ruler], one should not act oppressively
with severe punishments; one should simply embrace The Way,
cherish simplicity and tolerate any extreme that is inevitable.
Then everything in the world will fulfill itself.
"Now, sorrow and pleasure arise from losing and getting.
A scholar who understands the Mysteries and harmonizes with the
Transformations is always content with the times and always
comfortable in making necessary accommodations. In quiescence he
is at one with the creative processes. Wherever he goes, he is
not self-conscious. What is to be got, what lost? What dies, what
lives? Since he accepts whatever he is given, sorrow and pleasure
have no way to get mixed into the matter." (Hucker, p. 202)
The mystic Bao Jingyen, around the year 300, became the
Uncarved Block, made his consciousness a Oneness with the mystery
of actually-existing social relations and by means of inner
illumination had a Direct Experience of the following:
"The Confucian literati say: 'Heaven gave birth to the
people and then set rulers over them.' But how can High Heaven
have said this in so many words? Is it not rather that interested
parties make this their pretext? The fact is that the strong
oppressed the weak and the weak submitted to them; the cunning
tricked the innocent and the innocent served them. It was because
there was servitude that the people, being powerless, could be
kept under control. Thus servitude and mastery result from the
struggle between the strong and the weak and the contrast between
the cunning and the innocent and Blue Heaven has nothing
whatsoever to do with it." (Hucker, p. 203)
This isn't Karl Marx or some other terminally
hard-core-unemployable depressive Jewboy whining &
wallowing-in-selfpity; this is an authentic Sage of the Mystic
East talking. And he's got a complete theory of the class
struggle, ideology as an expression of class interest, structure
and agency shaped by coercion and violence and alienation as the
means whereby exploitation sustains and reproduces domination.
We know, of course, that Mystical Experiences cannot lie.
Right?
****
At the end of the first century, thanks to a triumph of
diplomacy on the part of the Later Han Dynasty of the sort that
would later be known as "Byzantine," the southern
Xiungnu, in the service of the empire, defeated and shattered the
confederacy of the northern Xiungnu. Part of these set out on a
very long migration.
Second only to silk, the northern Xiungnu were, in
chronological terms, China's greatest gift to Europe. Centuries
later, they were halted in what is now northern France by the
Roman general Aetius, commanding Visigoths, who themselves had
migrated from what is now Romania. The commander on the other
side was called Attila the Hun.
Daniel A. Foss
Cris,
Yesterday, did I or did I not distinctly state with Alice
aforethought that *all sex-type stuff* in posts in re Kali-flower
Kate, et al, Al is a good friend of mine, etcetera, were phony? I
did. It was *toute entiere* phony. Why? I am forbidden to
associate with the female gender in Chicago. The management of
the Heartland Cafe on Lund Av, near the Morse Av El stop called
the Chicago Police on me as a Probable Serial Killer because
there was Something In My Eyes (possibly LSD, I forget) and the
pocket full of quarters was Obviously a gun; on top of which, I
was Just Sitting There.
Diane is at this time in Wellington NZ, where she belongs. No,
that didn't come out the way I wanted. But anyhow, Diane is not
due back until November. That's a threat. If you really insist,
I'll fantasize Diane looking like you. Got no idea what you look
like, but I'm supposing there's some phenotypic variation of
genetic origin from Diane. Which is what I have in mind. Don't
get me wrong. Diane has a wonderful smile. I stare at that smile
early and often, like a Chicago voter. <sigh>. Below the
neck, Diane looks like my mother, except she looks like my mother
if my mother knew how to cook.
Alsomore, you aren't an anthropologist. Diane is an
anthropologist. A true anthropologist does not take anything
anyone who is not an anthropologist seriously. Such a person is
an "informant." So, Friday night, I got home at 6:30am
Saturday morning after a conversational hasslement over "the
future of our relationship" via Telnet-TALK. Ten hours of
it. This is why, Saturday, I blindfolded myself, an idea picked
up from Scotto, dressed in dishrags left behind from Diane's last
refrigerator-polishing and had myself Human- Sacrificed at the
Sheepfiends Jam by an imaginary anthropologist. Brian still
hasn't caught on to this, since there were at least eight other
levels of unreality I never mentioned on the tape.
