The Veil of Time
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The Veil of Time description --Vincent Van Gogh, shortly after cutting off his ear but also at the time he began to make his greatest paintings, wrote to his brother Theo: “How strange these
last three months do seem. Times of indescribable mental anguish, times when the veil of time and fatality of circumstance seemed pulled apart for an instant.”
Since I began composing this piece concurrently with the horrific attacks by Hamas on Israel, I dedicate it to both the Israeli survivors of this unfathomably
monstrous attack, and the friends and relatives of those murdered.
Regarding van Gogh, it seems his truly psychotic moments such as cutting off his ear were due to his reaction to absinthe. I quote from the following article:
“In the early part of the 20th century, absinthe became outlawed in most countries because of its psychotoxic effects. During his stay in Paris, where he was introduced to absinthe, van Gogh
developed complex partial seizures with gradual accentuation of partially preexisting emotional and behavioral changes.” And: “The illness of van Gogh has perplexed 20th-century physicians, as is
evident from the nearly 30 different diagnoses that have been offered, from lead poisoning or Ménière’s disease to a wide variety of psychiatric disorders.” Regardless of what name one puts on his
disorder (if one chooses to call it that) what is undeniable is that he experienced extremes of emotion just as all the greatest composers and artists have done. The best example of this in Beethoven
is his Sonata 32 in C minor, of which the editor of my edition, Hans von Bülow, calls its two movements: “Resistance, resignation, or better still, Samsara, Nirvana.” See my rendition (and
commentary) here. For Bach the best is the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue — my rendition here. For Schubert it might be his Sonata in B-flat composed a scant two months before his death from syphilis
at age 31, especially in the middle of the development where I write: “In the development however, the pain returns and builds to unbearable intensity . . . but what follows are some of the most
beautiful bars ever composed. Softly repeated chords in one hand, like a heartbeat. A simple three-note questioning theme in the other. Here is revealed as nowhere else the extraordinary beauty of
the mind that knows, despite and because of its most dire circumstances, that there is no choice but to find its way free of wanting and fearing.” See here for my rendition. I myself have experienced
such similarly: see my Notes to Myself While Sitting. And also my book, Cabeza and the Meaning of Wilderness: An Exploration of Nature, and Mind. And I might further suggest that the great popularity
of these works even among so-called normal people shows that they have these extremes within themselves but perhaps buried due to the pressures of daily life. I know this was true for my parents, as
they deeply appreciated when I gave them these pieces as gifts or even performed some on their piano. My mother said after I had played only about one fourth of the last movement of Schubert C minor
Sonata (composed just a few months before the B-flat), “I’ll be dreaming of that tonight.”
(I’ll note that perhaps my favorite artist is actually Ralph Albert Blakelock: see the book The Unknown Night: The Genius and Madness of Ralph Albert Blakelock, by Glyn Vincent. He is most
famous for his moonlights. I may write more about him here after I reread the above book.)
Frederick Nietzsche wrote: “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” Beethoven wrote, “We finite beings, the embodiment of an infinite spirit,,
are born to know both joy and pain, and it may be said that the most distinguished of us know joy through pain.” He also wrote (about the same time in 1815 just a few years before he began writing
his greatest last works, the last sonatas, the late quartets and the Ninth Symphony): “Man cannot avoid suffering. He must endure without complaining, feel his worthlessness, and then again achieve
his perfection, that perfection which will be bestowed upon him by the Almighty.” Van Gogh wrote almost exactly the same thing roughly the same time as the earlier quote: “To suffer without
complaining is the one lesson that has to be learned in this life.” To have chaos in oneself means to allow all the defenses of the finite being to fall away, which allows us to know the extremes of
joy and pain. There are no greater extremes than those expressed in Beethoven’s C minor Sonata 32. But perhaps I have come close in The Veil of Time.
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And what is the ultimate meaning of these extremes? In Cabeza and as I will discuss further in my book on my cousin Nell who committed suicide, I consider the root of what is called
manic-depressive illness to be fear. And that this fear is in fact our link to the infinite. What Beethoven calls the finite being senses that it is doomed to dissolution, and reacts by either trying
to conquer the world through its mania, or withdraw from it in depression. But the only true resolution to this fear is through what neuroscientists have called free won’t. Cabeza, chapter The Unfree
Will:
“Experiments have shown that “although volunteers’ conscious decisions to perform a simple action preceded the action itself, they occurred just after a distinctive burst of electrical activity
in the brain signaled the person’s readiness to move.” In other words, people “decide” to act . . . “after their brains [have] unconsciously prepared them to do so.”
On top of that it has been discovered that even though the conscious mind has not initiated the act, there is still time—one-tenth of a second—for the mind to intervene and abort it. Abstain
from it. Dennett, Daniel, in “The Self As Responding and Responsible Artifact,” in The Self from Soul to Brain, edited by Joseph Ledoux, Jacek Debiec, and Henry Moss, p41, writes, “As the astute
neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran once quipped, ‘This suggests that our conscious minds may not have free will, but rather “free won’t”!’ ” Interesting.”
I will note here that since I was 21, in 1969, and joined the Zen Center of Rochester New York, I have been doing 4-5 hours daily meditation, what I call “sitting.” I have found all the
meditative techniques promulgated by the Zen Center and other disciplines worse than useless (as they tend to keep buried the emotions that need to come up to the surface for us to be free of
them).
Cabeza: “Maybe I’m just too screwed up. Maybe those techniques work for others. I don’t know. But I did see many give it up; I sense that many, including Zen “masters,” sooner or later reach a
point of resistance beyond which they are unwilling to go (see the Guru chapters). Those techniques in my view are just something else for the self to cling to. For me it is clear my will would
always take over, because I wanted so badly to get out of the trap. I worked very hard at that first retreat . . . reinforcing the bars of my cage. . . .
And this is what being “one with the moment” is really all about. All you have to do is allow free won’t to operate, abstain from unfree willing, allow all the feelings of wanting and fearing
profoundly programmed by our genes to come up to the surface without acting on or reacting to them, allow the whole body-mind to feel, if necessary, as if it’s experiencing nothing less than death
itself . . . and there’s nothing to it.”
But this to my mind is the only way a human being can find freedom from the unfree will, from what Beethoven called the finite being — and allow the Infinite Spirit to manifest itself, “that
perfection which will be bestowed upon him by the Almighty.” For Beethoven and van Gogh and a few other rare souls I think their art, their creative effort, served as the equivalent of what
meditation is for me. Still, if they had had meditation to help them find freedom from reacting to their inner anguish, they surely would have not only lived longer but have created even more
profound works.
For myself, it was my own indescribable mental anguish (which partly manifested through three suicide attempts in my teens), which gave me no choice (after having seen three worthless shrinks)
but to devote myself to meditation all these 57 years since. At about nine minutes into the music is a section I planned to call The Dark Night of the Soul and intended to make a set of variations
based on that theme. Perhaps I will in the future but in Cabeza I quote from the book of that name by St. John of the Cross. But the “dark night” is nothing less than meditation: giving up all our
striving, giving in to everything that comes our way, and letting go of the whole thing. This is hardly fun or easy as the quote from St. John I put in Cabeza says: “Not to will anything, but to will
nothing. . . . For to come to the All you must give up [wanting] the All.” Interestingly, he used “the All” interchangeably with God. Zen master Huang Po spoke similarly.
And again St. John of the Cross, of the “Dark Night”: “It is a painful upheaval, stirring up a myriad of fears and delusions that battle inside the soul. . . . The sorrowing and sighing of her
spirit are so profound that they turn into a mighty roaring and bellowing. She is so powerfully wracked by pain that sometimes she cries out and dissolves in tears. . . .”
Note that Beethoven had on his desk under glass copied out in capital letters the following from ancient Egyptian sources which he likely learned from his Freemason piano teacher:
I am that which is. I am all that was, that is, that shall be.
No mortal man has lifted my veil.
He is of himself alone, and it is to this Aloneness that all things owe their being.
As mentioned, Beethoven called us finite beings who are the embodiment of a Infinite spirit. In Cabeza I call the finite being the unfree will, which is programmed by evolution for the drives of
sex, status, and security so that the organism passes on its genes. We could call this the “mortal man” in the second line above, and the death of that mortal man/finite being entails nothing less
than indescribable mental anguish. And this is what allows the veil of time to be lifted, to be pulled apart.
For me this indescribable mental anguish comes up especially in sitting because my way of sitting entails attempting to abstain from any of my reactions to those drives of sex, status and
security. And the finite being says NO! Evolution has profoundly programmed those drives and to abstain from them means nothing less than death to the genes. See Cabeza and especially my Notes to
Myself While Sitting for more detail on this, and what I go through on a daily, hourly basis. Including those moments when the veil of time is indeed pulled apart… for a bit……
To repeat the words of Rainier Maria Rilke on the video: “As soon as we accept life’s most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it… Then an intuition of blessedness will open
up for us… Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of
dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces of the same divine head, indeed this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that according to our distance from it or the state of mind in
which we perceive it —: this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets.”
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