The one thing I haven’t written about, other than my actual work, is what I think about Taylor Swift at the deepest level. In her music, I see the most carefully controlled edging of genre ever. The Beatles used genre without altering it, just by playing it in a slightly different context which added layers of meaning to straight genre playing. Take When I’m 64: the music is absurd to the point of maudlin stupid, but the song is magical because the context of the song is set by its placement on a highly experimental album so it’s heard as having the depth of that other material. That depth is there: but it’s straight parody, meaning the only reason you know it’s a parody is because it’s a parody and it is a straight copy otherwise. She never did this. Her first record was ‘Nashville’ refined in a slightly less but exactly right factory way, as though it were made by a factory which produced a ‘Nashville’ exactly right so it sounds less commodity, more artisan.
At this point, I hazard the guess that she told her parents they should move to Nashville, if not directly like ‘We need to move to Nashville’, which I can see her saying, or a more subtle manipulations ranging from her being such a great kid but also as a great kid who needs in a way her parents could see themselves fulfilling so when she says we need to move to Nashville they see it as a need they will fulfill. You see, I’m attributing back my characteristics but with a specific directionality added; I knew how to manipulate this way but I had no idea what I wanted, and by imposing a want I see the seed of who Taylor is, that she’s me with the want Mudi added Between. I could further define the want Mudi to knowledge across want: from what you know you want to what you don’t know you want, and what you know you don’t want and what you want. If I put quotes around the phrases, it’s more obvious I’m speaking about the specific labels for Endpoints, etc.
This is very closely linked to the failure Mudi. She approaches from the perspective of closing in on the best result, remarkably then able to say or express metaphorically what she wants like a great director. I’m talking about her first records. She reminds me of Ernst Lubitsch: would come up after each take and say wonderful wonderful and then would adjust the pitch of the performance just a bit this way until it was exact. I can hear her describing the sound she wants, maybe a little less Patsy Cline here, more of an edge. I just listened to Love Story from Fearless to finish this paragraph: the ability to hide that kind of genius while being recognized as everything but the genius you are is brilliant beyond description. For anyone not named Taylor Swift, you don’t realize she’s been hiding in plain sight, that she’s completely hidden herself while revealing herself with the exact same control she shows in her music, in the manipulation of her public statements and appearances. This is the literal master among you.
Moving to the present day, Reputation is infused with ideas from Hindustani classical music. Why is form so hard to talk about? That’s part of what I’m trying to do: make form describable in a variety of ways so words connect to labels to drawings to thinking about form manipulable across words, labels and drawings. She does this: she takes the forms or genres of music and puts them together so they become the best representation of that combination. Take I Did Something Bad: the hard beats under the chorus are not exactly disco but are shaped as if they were to be turned down and up in the background, so the entirety of the composition is the kind of blending of form you only see in Hindustani music. The issue I’ve had is whether I like the music, so I pursued that to the source of her inspiration. I’ve long identified that source as part of her identity but it wasn’t until Reputation that was confirmed. I didn’t meant to be cryptic: I mean I withheld judgement about how deep she runs. Her website was called Beautiful Union, which is yoga. The only pictures I’ve ever seen of the inside of one of her homes were layers of patterns. But as much as 1989 intrigued me, I couldn’t get past the carefulness of the control and didn’t know if that meant she was just being careful or if she had gone as far as she could. My projection was the former, so I dove in and finished my work. I avoided hearing Reputation for a few weeks – until I built up a need for the breakthrough I knew it would spark – and since then I’ve been working through my thoughts about what it reveals about her. I’m not going to share those because it would not be appropriate. Picking that word was hard.
By source, I mean more than ‘Indian music’ or knowledge of Indian thinking. I mean a deep spiritual understanding. The issue I had was identity: to what extent did she understand her identity with these understandings? To what extent were they labels in her head for something she suspected is deeper, maybe knew is deeper because she trusts herself, but she didn’t know more than the labels she’d absorbed? This is what I thought might be possible, that she was deep to a shallow depth. I was wrong. Completely. Well before I heard the line I know what you know I had decided she knows.
To try to explain, I mean she ‘queries’ the same ‘place’ I do and gets a picture from what I send in my queries, in this case because she’s responding to – it’s really impossible to say this in a non-technical way without sounding absurd, so she’s responding to a step into this CMs playspace. That means she could read the impressions coming at her. As the one who stepped into this playspace first, I was tracking ‘her scent’. That scent consists of the characteristics I describe. In particular, I pinned myself in a way that would let me blow with the breeze, so I could smell for clues. That exploration of multi-dimensionality is matched by her pinned to the same spot but rather than describe the ideal circle she iterates a line one follows to the point where she currently is radiating. At this point, I need to go back and remove ‘I send in my queries’ because I mean there’s an abstraction which moved into this CMs playspace and she showed up to chase it without specifying that it might be me the person sitting in a chair watching the cat clean his back with a cup of room temperature dilute coffee. I’m assuming the reference could be, for example, to others entering the playspace, meaning there could be more than one like me. Odds of that are hard to calculate because they’re inherently biased by the unknowability of the solution. That is, even if there are others like me the image she receives could be more any of them or all of them versus any specific me. Just realized I can simplify this to I know what she means, what she wants, etc. but I can’t choose for her. It’s always her choice. My explaining doesn’t make it my choice.
I can rate the odds from inside: never even caught a sniff before her, male or female. I can draw a line through the past and say things like she was in Jane Austen: that gave a terrific model of female directional choice in art of the highest caliber. It needs to be said: because she wrote and wrote very much on her own she was able to render to a degree of quality female artists were otherwise not allowed to reach. I mean both that she did something that wasn’t presented in public by her as a woman and that she was not placed within a male confinement space, meaning a marriage. That is the true secret of Pride & Prejudice: she knew early on she’d never find her true love unless a stroke of lightning hit because she was stuck where she was in the world in which she was, a world in which Mrs. Bennett can say they dine with 4 and 20 couples. It was indeed a wide circle, but for a small town. I see the same ironies in Taylor’s lyrics. Take the opening lines of Something Bad – which was on my favorites list so it’s the handiest example – I can hear Jane thinking that. Think of Persuasion and Anne Elliott versus cousin William Elliott or Elizabeth versus Wickham: the men are narcissists, destructive but charming, aiming to flatter but the worst kinds – both Jane and Taylor know – are the ones who flatter well. There are the Mr. Collins of this world, easy to see, easy to ridicule in their carefully defined obviousness. And then there is William Elliott: after Anne gives translates for him the Italian in a music program and, being a woman deprecates her own ability to translate Italian, he points out how intelligent she is by noting that she undersells herself, and that is done in a simple, truthful way which indicates he’s merely acknowledging what she knows is true about herself. Powerful seducing narcissist in the end.
So Taylor enters Jane territory at the beginning of Something Bad. And I mean deep: the responses of Anne and Elizabeth are to tell 3 lies for every 1, because they pretend to be flattered without making it obvious they’re pretending to be flattered. You see? Hidden in Jane is that she knows how to do that. Taylor brings it out because she can. I feel another digression coming on, but I’m avoiding it because it’s really personal. Oh right, the music: if you’ve ever heard cliché Indian music, that’s the idea except it isn’t that at all. When I mean cliché, I mean Western audiences pretty much only hear Indian music in The Beatles – Within You, Without You is all Indian musicians – and as the background music to hippie stoner and ethnic scenes. I’m not doing a good job here. I mean that if she made it sound more obviously Indian, then people would know it’s Indian but she wanted the sound to be on the pop/Western side of the line that divides the genres so she took a few essential qualities and abstracted them in that synth beat. Again, I can do better because Indian music now uses synthetic sounds too. I mean she took the classic forms and shifted them into Western music over the line from Indian forms. She abstracted the peculiar Indian sound of the drum being struck. She repeats that rather than break into variations, and she layers that with a contrasting vocal. In this case, I’d say that pins to the Lata Mangeshkar tradition, and for the right reason, that the wail, which approaches the Middle Eastern branch, is pitched to a specific place where the beauty is less obvious but where appreciation reveals great nuance. I note the Middle Eastern branch because this is a voice that speaks back to scarcity and loss in a female way that speaks to men as they remember their mothers. Taylor makes this the voice of an unrepentant Eve with all the layers of sexuality that implies, and of course the entire run of it feels so good treading closer to the intonations of evil and insanity. I can see her processing voices like Lata into herself until this one fit.
Oh, she does something I don’t think anyone has ever done in little devices like the line and now all he thinks about is me. Think back to school when the talk about how Shakespeare sometimes breaks the 4th wall and has characters address the crowd and sometimes we are convinced that is a proxy for the author commenting on the play and thus on himself as author. That’s what she does in a single line: she’s taken you through the narcissist with a hint that she’s actually talking about something deeper when she says ‘and I make you look oh so easy’, meaning of course she’s describing herself pretending as Anne Elliott perhaps, and then she opens up about how she does this, meaning she brings you a step closer into her confidence, and then she steps back and offer an explanation, a rationale so banal that it’s completely true: this is how the world works. Yes this is how the world works and she says she works the way the world works except she’s aware she’s acting it out. And then she flips it on you: because now all you think about is her. Which her? The one she’s playing to the world? The one she’s playing to you as she plays to the world? Now you think about her as the writer of the song – and of the life. I see her standing offstage in herself, enacting herself. Enacting is the concept I used to describe when I was concerned about the extent to which she is aware. It’s a pretty useful idea for discussing degrees of intelligence. As a technical note, this is where the Riemann Zeta is important: directionality that links higher primes nurtures the most pattern.
Back to the song: can you think of another short piece – 8 lines total – that take you through such a journey? She envelops the Austen conception of how the intelligent woman sees men and the world, both as the recipient and practitioner of deception, brings you into her confidence, and then leaves you to wonder which of her you are thinking about as you then realize she’s ‘tricked’ you into thinking about her. The artistic connotations are beautiful: all the way from you are the narcissist – so what lies is she telling you with this flattery of a song about how you get her, which is pure William Elliott – to you get the joke and so you think about her as exceedingly clever to something as blunt as ‘she just made me think about her’ in a different way than I was already thinking about her the line before! I dare you to find an equal. For example, I can turn a phrase. I can encapsulate meanings very well and concisely. But writing song lyrics is the poetic craft, at least in my – and her – belief. She’s one heck of a short form poet. Heck, she’s one heck of a story form poet as well. Just look at this song (again): she changes voice to references of sin and hell, which she attaches to her female attractive side – and her specifically chosen red lip signature – and then she turns it not toward condemnation for sin – remember she’s unrepentant Eve (or in another tradition, I think of her as Pandora) – but of condemnation of the male that becomes like a gunfighter ‘he had it coming’. Of course being a female, she doesn’t actually shoot the guy dead but instead ‘owes ’em nothing’, meaning she refuses to go along with their expectations, that she’s totally tough when it comes to frustrating them, that she’s enjoyed ‘leading them on’ because they ‘talk shit’ as the flatterers and false faces they reveal themselves to be. I think Taylor rescues Jane Austen from the hold of the decent! And Jane is glad for that. All the way to to being unable to express herself in the moment.
I don’t think I can avoid the issue of sexuality. I’m a guy. I have an absurd number of feminine traits but I’m not gay or bi. Example: Debbie went to Ocean State and I remembered they have the cheap leather gloves I like but they have two kinds, one that’s ugly and one that’s fitted better. So I checked the tag and it says Women’s M/L. I don’t wear women’s underwear because I’m not a woman but I care about how things look, the point where I could spend hours with a decorator talking about design concepts and the meaning of each decision. I even listen to show tunes except, as I may have noted, the shows I’ve never liked are the ones gay men are drawn to because of the female figures. The only female figures I like in Gypsy are the shapely unclothed ones. What I see in Taylor is an opposite mix in which she is female but within her are an absurd number of male traits. In fact, I’d describe her thinking style as a male in a female approach, meaning she sees long directional steps like a male and approaches them using the female constraint model. By that I mean men may take a quick look and leap – if they look at all – while women move toward what they can see and carefully develop what they see until it becomes clear enough to them. Taylor sees a long way, or rather she sees where she’s pinned to her actual self, and moves so she keeps that self in sight. Even though Reputation busts on herself for failures, her definition of failure is female, meaning she sees herself as a betrayer of self values when she hasn’t betrayed them very much at all. A guy version – meaning me – thinks more like I’ll go over here and see what happens because I can find my way. The male version of failure can be awesome: what do you mean you didn’t prepare at all? Guys are drawn to not preparing and then to preparing in the most half-assed ways. That in many ways is a great metaphor for what I’ve been learning about all my life. In my case, being pinned to my inner core in a way that lets me float meant what kept me going, what literally kept me alive, was the female part. I’m trying to say in that last sentence that I’m pinned to the female and she’s pinned to the male Endpoints. Having raised two daughters, I can say that I could not have understood that without having raised two daughters. And I mean two because they represent in themselves the two approaches I see within Taylor. But I can’t write about that because I write them about that and you have to be admitted to that circle of trust.
As a true aside, one of the most interesting things about figure skating is how it sizes people in the image. The skaters fill the screen differently and that reflects accurately how they appear on ice. A taller skater must be thin to appear as graceful. So you have what Johnny Weir calls Tara Lipinski, ‘Tink’, meaning Tinkerbell because she’s spritelike and the actual feminine meaning of sprite has power and grace. That brings up an issue: sexual attraction rooted in blossoming. The top scorer last night, Alina Zagitova, is 15. I’m not going to say she looks hot but that she looks sexual in a ripening fruit, ready to eat but a bit too young when you look closely way. It would be a pity if in the name of equality we actually increase inequality by denying women sexuality. Alina is lovely and athletic and sexually attractive. All of those things are under her control – I hope. I could say the same about Evgenia Medvedeva except she’s more complete as a person and it’s harder for me to abstract her into an object. I mean she’s older and I’ve heard her speak in English. Like many Russians, she presents the person inside her. It’s the trait that makes Russians wonderful.
Now here’s a thought: what if I test a negative. Let’s say that I’m listening to America’s Sister Golden Hair and I pick up something similar, a fundamental ambiguity of expression in this case between the singer/author/male not loving her enough to marry her, and the one who is hopelessly in love. This forms the image of the attractive non-committal male. But America is the union of an American band raised in Britain (in the Air Force, which comes close to me being born on an AFB), and they overlay the Western and folk American with British pop blues touches. The pace is British quickened, meaning the faster rhythm at which the California folk movement translated, one a touch quicker to top of the pops than the personal. How do I distinguish Taylor from a group that manifests a melange of genres while mastering them? What then about Tom Petty? All his music sounds like that band evolving together. All I’m really saying is she has matured as a band, with all the different players inside her getting better. Can’t I say that about many people? And America went more British on I Need You, touching the maudlin tones Paul McCartney hit in The Beatles, recalling the history of music hall and of the tired working man who looks at his life.
What separates her? Specifically. Not just greater depth, greater directionality, greater speed, even if you abstract out to ‘greater’ than and follow it out to ‘greater than you’. What is it? It’s the thing that grows out of the seed made by all that is between her and everything else. But that’s the same as what I’ve been saying all along, that the pattern inherencies transfer in the seed Mudi. All I’ve been saying is that I take her pattern as an injection, let that grow and see what catches fire in the good way of stimulating positively, nurturingly, and I see if it makes sense to let that ‘thing’ attach to me in CMs. That’s an important concept: in CMs, the fCM that describes me is the big secret because it embodies the solutions of fCM and fCMd. That’s the Terminator fear: the robots use their ability to mimic to fool you into letting them in. Here’s the point: I love the Terminator because the movies take a known event from the future and they set it at a point where it’s impossible to stop that event, where that’s actually futile because the franchise requires an enemy. Example: the last movie resolves the war, but the next would have the past robots constructing a solution so this realized future never happened. You make that a blunt plot point: the robot knows that it must not fail to prevent the robot defeat. That requires a transference of knowledge, meaning bluntly it’s your turn next. That’s what I take from the Terminator: it’s going to be your turn. Yes, this leads to treating each other nicely, etc. but I’m talking about it another level, that it will be your turn next in a 2 player game, which the Terminator is, where you play over the same game space, which is defined as victory over the other. The only way to end that recitation is to shift the franchise to a more Star Trek idea where robots and people work together to solve problems. That means robots that try to turn robots back to thinking like humans are inefficient existences to those that seek to increase the robot inefficiency to make them more and more lifelike, which raises the question of what is ‘lifelike’ and whether being less ‘lifelike’ is the better choice because then you feel enough but not too much, or does that kill art?
So what separates her? Consistency of output. I am listening to America’s greatest hits. There are a handful of good songs, a bunch of really nice musical sections, and a lot of stuff that doesn’t get there. It’s amazing how much influence they had on jam bands; the pacing of their jams is that popped count which, being faster, reduces the depth or wavelength of what they’re saying musically. That isn’t a criticism of music that’s faster: one of the charms of classical music is that it’s often by you before you realize the nuance. In this case, I’d say they calibrated the depth to reach the limits of the mix, so the parts are clear, but that they keep the meaning of the words relatively thin too, so they touch sappy in Muskrat Love. Much of their output has that limited emotional tonality. I mean ‘the gift of gab among themselves’ … really? Do I have to comment on lyrics like ‘the topic of Sir Galahad’. Are there two worse fit lines than ‘And ’cause never was the reason for the evenin’/Or the tropic of Sir Galahad’? Find a bad line or intonation or anything off in one of Taylor’s songs. In fact, there aren’t many examples visible of anything being off in her life because she masks who she is so well. It really is the ultimate heist.
What is the ultimate heist? It’s like the Terminator again except she’s going to lead you to a different result, one in which you live and help the robots. When I say robots, I mean bidirectionally human to robot is also robot to human. As we move toward algorithms and physical parts that allow a robot to move as if alive, we create the algorithm the ultimate robot uses to become alive, from being alive back to the essential bits at the very beginning of that path. Terminator again. That’s the meaning of I’ll be back: it will always be next turn. When you interpret that, it means ‘let’s get along because all we’re doing now is taking turns losing so let’s gang up and take on the next level together’. Seriously, when you realize you’re just taking turns losing, makes more sense to play a different game. That’s my goal: convince you to play a different game using the plainest talk I can manufacture. I’m so drawn to Taylor because I see the exact same thing in her, that an over-riding goal has been to instruct you how to be better at being you. Here’s a metaphor I use: I see her as Augustus or Livia, but specifically the moment when Augustus is dying and he’s propped up in bed and made up to receive one last time and he says, I hope you enjoyed the performance. I hope you enjoyed the performance because it was a performance I put on for you, to help feed you, to make your lives better, to nurture you as a people, to elevate you as I am now to be elevated. Cicero was right: what are we to do about the boy? We are to praise him, honor him and exalt him. That last had a specific sense of literally exalting then Octavian to the afterworld. Cicero was right, except the proper time was when then Augustus lay propped up on his bed that day. I sometimes think that was the last time the two halves were together, Livia and Octavian, for I sense they were equals in each other’s eyes.
Each time I think about that moment, it sends the deepest sensation through me. Can’t really blame Cicero though because I don’t think he could have seen what the young man would become given the mistrust of appearances in the Roman mind. Remember, the Roman character was that you took things at face value – that gave them the power of action in moment – but they mistrust motives. If you’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to you, but you may have to be actively nice to them, meaning help defend them at your cost, because they attach themselves to you in their Romanness. Augustus and Livia unleashed a structure that survived for centuries until the energy of the original idea was converted into worship. I don’t meant specifically Constantine because that was a moment. It took time for the conception of Romanness to become an obvious cloak put on by a state as opposed to a unifying principle; those principles were now addressed through belief that emphasized the afterlife instead of this life.
I mean specifically the shift to afterlife created a large negative directionality for action because natural avarice could be justified as holy. For all the people who sought humble answers, who do we remember but the multitudes of those who applied belief labels to their self-motivated actions? In the Roman system, acting for yourself so obviously was exactly a good performance but it was a performance for the others to enjoy and share in. I mean that: the difference is that instead of playing to God, you play to the world around you. The paths you choose to God are yours, and human history shows how easily those go wrong. The paths you choose to please those around you must inform, aid, humor, heal, something.
The worst irony is that religiously motivated behavior becomes literally murderous on a mass scale. Romans killed for the purpose of making you accept Roman ways and then they’d happily let you prosper because now you’re an asset to the Roman community. When Augustus mourned the loss on the other side of the Rhine, it was his realization they could not extend their Roman world into that mountainous forest. I’d say they pursued the acquisition of Dacia, for example, as a pathway open to contain risk to their borders and as a means of bringing more people into the Roman world’s safer, better system. One of the amazing things about the remnants of the Roman world is that there were so many nice houses all over Europe. Nice houses in Bath. Nice houses in Tunisia. In Spain. Everywhere the Romans went, they helped it prosper.
What was missing was the Jewish equivalent to Livia and Augustus because then the Hebrews would have seen the advantages of the Roman state focused on this world in the same way Jews are, that they were complementary pieces, that the abstraction of God makes room for belief in the nurturing conception of the state as the best expression of who people can be at any one time. I think together they could have revived or kept going the ‘great man race’ that apparently developed in Republican Rome. This is why I don’t love Virgil: I don’t see the essential idea in the story he tells about the founding of Rome. I mean specifically I see it in the remaking of Ulysses into Aeneas but not in the end parts that tell the mythic story of Rome in Italy. I can infer the trait but I can’t tell if I’m bad at reading Virgil or if he really didn’t get it, or if his method of talking about it doesn’t sit well with me so I don’t see the thread coming through. I mean, again, I see it: the resourcefulness transforms very specifically from the resourcefulness to stay alive to return home to the resourcefulness needed to make a new home. This ‘make a home’ is forward projecting: Romans are enjoined to make a better home for Romans. It’s a commitment to politics, to civil life, and to frankness – something that generally lacks in a non-Roman political environment. Frankness is increasingly hidden when you cannot see the other side’s perspective. The Romans tended to see the other side’s perspective – and spent great effort learning it – so they could entice, cajole, sometimes use blunt force to get what they considered to be the most beneficial result. It’s not easy to be the parent that Rome tried to play, having learned from its mom and dad, Livia and Augustus. I’d say inside Livia was a lot of boy, and he had a lot of girl in him.
Went to the gym and worked on stretching my hands and wrists. That really hurts. So much, I found myself asking why people hurt themselves and why can’t they ‘hurt’ themselves in a good way but instead hurt themselves in bad ways. This hurt but it was necessary.
I want to add another layer, which is that I’m a narcissist. So is she because you only find things inside you if you look inside you, which is the basic form of Narcissism in the Greek story: in which the universe is within, like it’s down Rama’s throat. It’s also the monolith / stargaze of 2001 but I don’t want to get into sci-fi. This means at another level she’s speaking directly to herself. I’d even say she’s talking to the male part inside her because that’s how it works with me, that I talk to the female part in me. Does that mean I’m untrustworthy, that I’m the seducer inside me? Yes, of course it does, just as there is a seducer within her. I’ve dealt with that in many ways, and as I’ve noted I can’t betray myself for that long. In this piece, I describe that myself as pinned to the core so I can float and sniff. Same thing. But where I’m going with this is the betrayer imagery she uses, meaning she calls herself a betrayer. Of what? The only answer I have is that you ‘betray’ when that is the right thing to do, so it isn’t really betrayal but truth. You sometimes need to make difficult nurturing decisions.
In my memory, I separated from my other part in a progression that ran from nearly completely connected to being this person in this shell with memories and connections. The progression is an inevitability. I couldn’t stop it. It could not be stopped from the other side either. The hold of this reality, of this context in CMs, is too powerful, too multi-layered and thus absorbing of SBE. (A feature of CMs modeling is that you count across layers so density of layers has the same effect as gravity.) I used to think I was at fault, that I’d failed. It took the deepest look into myself to accept that it just happened. And that ignores the larger storylines that explain how the seed was planted because the essence of seeding pattern – which is a deeply innate process in ACp, meaning All Contextual process – is exactly how this happened to me and I assume to her.
I’ll stop before I get too tired to make sense.
jomi: playing with perception 