God and Satan

"Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it." - Henry David Thoreau

Every morning, an hour of Shinkantaza while wearing Tefillin and Tallis preceeded by Schacharit. Then to the gym, lifting huge weights, and another hour of swimming while repeating the mantra of E – L – O – K – I – M with each swim stroke, then back home and composing ELOKIM for the quartet. Aleph – stroke, Lamed – stroke, Heh – stroke, Yod – stroke, Mem – stroke, Aleph – etc. Over and over again, becoming, being, dropping off body and mind, killing the I, murdering the I, bludgeoning the I, living the life of the letters, letting it change you, deepen you, purify you as you swim back and forth in the cool morning water lap lane, swimming outside of space, outside of your lane, outside of matter, outside of time, truly not moving back and forth, but staying completely still, though to an outsider, swimming back and forth.

That was my hard and fast schedule for over 8 months of the composition of my 50 minute long work for Feinsmith Quartet, Elokim.

God blessed me to be able to work on that piece. What fortune! I could communicate my joy to no man or woman on earth, unfortunately. It utterly pointless. How can a man telegraph joy completely enough? A smile, abounding energy, happiness, these things are the outward effects of an inner sense of completeness and satiation that I don’t think can be explained properly. However, I didn’t care much. I truly did “become” the work throughout the period of its creation cycle, just as I “became” the physical labor as I was a celibate inmate at the New Orleans Zendo, our teacher Robert Livingston doling out the work orders with the mature mind of a 60 year old with great life experience and the intensely-energetic body of a teenager. Robert was a new kind of man to me. Usually you see men wither mentally and physically with age, and the young folk with abounding energy having to wait on the old fellows. Not Robert. Ever-alert, powerful and complete, he truly was a living advocate for the efficacy of Zen practice. Us poor kids had to work hard to keep up. It was actually impossible to do and none of us could come close.

All of that intensive work of cultivation and creative power, and not wasting that power on sexual indulgence – genuinely is a good idea. The mind and body become gem-like. there is a genuine sensation that the animal body is replaced by something made of precious metals and precious gems. Gems in the head, gems in the arms and legs, gems in the torso, and a liquid hot gold pulsing through your nervous system.The Yang power is enormous, and I find that in such a circumstance of built up creative power, at the gym I can outlift enormous guys half my age.

I have to say, this is not the right era for a celibate. Celibacy, at one time the province of the religious or intellectual elite, has fallen very much not only out of fashion, but into suspicion, thanks to the antics of various priests who were supposedly under vows, and the general culture that seems to worship the animal form. All of this is sad, given the mystic potencies of sexual restraint and chastity, meditation and the quest for God Realization, not to mention the great worldly benefits of following the ancient moral law. Not all great men have been celibate, but there sure have been many. The short list of Moses, Beethoven, Handel, Brahms, Sir Isaac Newton, Tesla, Thoreau and Da Vinci are enough to make anyone who cares about human potentiality to seriously consider this path. Writing Elokim was also my first work for the quartet, and served as a good vehicle for getting the band off the ground.

I begin composing once I have determined the title, which is also the mantra for the period of time that the work is being composed. The science of mantra is one of the greatest sciences for the musician. I begrudgingly again give props to the hippies for hauling the Indian musicians to our land, and receiving this marvelous tradition from them, and putting in the heavy lifting of conjoining mantra to sound forms in minimalism, first presented to a drugged out post-vietnam audience.

It is the understanding that a sound form has a power both within and without, and that sound form is predictable in its nature, and in it particularized form. A sound form is a perfectly stable organism. Every single time it is executed, it is precisely the same with no alteration. There is nothing mystical about this to a poet, or even to a child, who can hear a word, and, as open as they are, become effected by the sound form of that word. In Indian music, the term “Raga” means “color” or “coloration”, and this is just an extension of this same concept. The exact form of color does not change. Yes, you could say, what is color in the face of the changes of light? A leaf may be bright green during the mid day, and look black at night time. Any Zen guy with a Satori or two under his belt would tell you that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Of course, yes, from that standpoint, absolutely nothing is ever stable, and life is impermanence. However, in the relative world, in mid-day next day, the leaf is bright green again. Obviously, such vicissitudes must be taken into account when calling any form “stable”, but it is “stable” within given reproducible conditions. And this reproducibility is the craft of the performer and the impresario both to create those conditions. The mantra, the sequence, the collection of tones, serve in a way akin to “color”, in that they are complete creators of experience, of form, and of content.

Raziel, Elokim, Havaya, YHVH, Solomon, Amalek, Leviathan, El Elyon, etc. Each of these titles are taken apart into one number per letter, and material is drawn from them. And this is how I become my work. My birth name is Daniel David Feinsmith, which in Gematria, is 613. 613 is the total number of commandments God gave the Jews, and also is the # of parts of a human body as well as the # of steps to the perfection of man from a broken shard of infinity to a perfected and unified re-join of that original light. But this is just one manifestation. When I compose a work, I shift from 613 to a different number, for example, to 26 (The tetragrammaton), or to 21 (AHVH – ‘I will be’), or 375 (Solomon), etc. The craft of the actor really takes hold here, in that one must completely be capable of switching to that structure of being, and just as quickly jumping out, so as not to become a lunatic in everyday life – Something I have succeeded or failed at different times. I remember at least five individual times getting so lost to my “self” that I couldn’t figure out how to get home or where I lived, or what my name was. How relaxing that is! I have to say, not knowing whom you are must certainly be the most relaxing position a human being can take, aside from death or prior to birth. Not knowing who you are, where you belong, what belongs to you and not to you, who is your friend and whom is your enemy, this is really marvelous. And then when I realize the full implications of what I am, the body, the Jewishness, the composer, the friend, the wise-acre New Yorker in San Francisco, the land where everything is upside-down, etc.

Harrowing Experiences

Raziel, which was suffering from beginning to end, which I managed to dive in to such a degree that my so-called “external” life crumbled apart. I wrote Raziel as a film score for Rob Nilsson’s work ATTITUDE, the story of a luciferan petty car thief who eventually is destroyed by God through the purification of extraordinary suffering. Well, this became my life. As I continued to write, all of the dross dropped away, and I became purified, the worthless things dropped away, the meaningless completely evaporated. This continued to the point of being on the verge of pennilessness during that work. I had lost $50k in the stock market overnight, and was holding onto my beloved Steinway B with passionate intensity, hoping I wouldn’t get to the point where I’d need to sell her and move from my hermitage on Blake Street, Berkeley, former haunt of Whoopi Goldberg and her comedic compatriots during her college days, now built-out by Mexican labor for soundproof compositional glory into the middle of any given night. They were harrowing days, and the work bears it out.

The next harrowing experience when writing of demonic entities in my work for four pianos, Amalek during the ejection of the Jews from the Gaza Strip, evenings and days were filled with visions of bloody and perverse violence, and many bad things overcame me, such as the theft of my auto, all of my computer equipment self-destructing, etc. And then, when I concentrate on topics such as Elokim, generally, it is the beginning of the compositional process that the demons attack strongly, and then give up when I prove too relentless and unstoppable, or more likely when Hashem or His helpers kick some butt and help me out. The Creator gave easier conditions for composing this time, and I was able to complete this long work more or less without too many catastrophes and a decent supply of peace. And now, when I think about writing on the Shoah, as much as I need to go to that place at some time, I have to say it is with considerable trepidation that I make my plans, knowing the danger to my “outer” life and the utmost care to be taken in the coloration of phenomena to that horrific tint of grey and red.

Elokim was a much easier topic to compose on than I had thought. It all seemed to come more or less automatically and naturally, and the light was an easy and non-oppressive light, unlike, for example, Raziel.