ON TEXTURE
How shall we find off the textured, the splotched, the mottled, complicated harmony? It’s a question those who deal in the verbiage of superlatives and excess („the best book of the year,“ „the worst poet in America,“ „the most impossible man I have ever met“) are always half-asking themselves, seeking to fend off the encroaching depression that arises when their megalomaniacal wish to order and control life encounters life’s reistance to willful domination.
Which is why, as soon as one bothers to examine it, the deep depression thinly veiled behind the grandeur and self-assurance of the judgemental quickly unmasks itself. For what, in the mere neurotic, reveals itself as an inability to tolerate ambivalence without radical, usually panic-stricken action, finds its analogue in the intellectual’s inability to tolerate uncertainty, chaos, the undecipherable world of disorder, without reducing it to some sort of hierarchy.
Enforcing my will upon the world by decree, like an imperious dictator, I quiet (at least for a moment) the dread produced in me by qualities and emotions that challenge my artificially induced self-esteem. If I can proclaim, with utter self-assurance, that I „detest“ rock-and-roll (i.e. that it is „vulgar“), I needn’t contend with the sensuous, often uncontrollable (even though, perhaps, subliminal) gyrations of my body each time I hear it.
But texture terrifies us because it threatens our rage for order, for control, for an impenetrable– though artificial– coherence. It threatens our wish to be fixed, which helps us to secure our boundaries. If, on the other hand, we confess– as did the Boston Symphony’s young conductor Michael Tillson Thomas some years ago– that our favorite composers are „Brahms and James Brown,“ that our tastes and impulses are a seemingly contradictory jumble of the superficially divided „sacred“ and „profane,“ we are forced to contend with the complexity (and the complex beauty) of life itself, the very antithesis of facile self-definition.
For some of us, there is a joy– a sense of relief from the enclosures of precision, the straitjacket of too much definition-in that realization. But, for others, a terror.