Post-Modernism

What would one day be called ‘the modern’ was, at least as far as its sharpest and most hidden point is concerned, a legacy of the Buddha. Seeing things as so many aggregates and dismantling them. Then dismantling the elements split off from the aggregates, insofar as they too are aggregates. And so on and on in dizzying succession. An arid, ferocious scholasticism. A taste for repetition, as agent provocateur of inanity. Vocation for monotony. Total lack of respect for any prohibition, any authority. Emptying of every substance from within. Only husks left intact. The quiet conviction that all play occurs where phantoms ceaselessly substitute one for another. Allowing the natural algebra of the mind to operate out in the open. Seeing the world as a landscape of interlocking cogs. Observing it from a certain and constant distance. But what distance exactly? No question could be more contentious. Adding this last doubt, then, to a trail of other gnawing uncertainties.  - Roberto Calasso, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India

I thought this quote, culled from Robert Calasso's masterful tapestry of Indian mythology, might be pertinent to some recent discussions going on about the issue/concept of post-modernism in music. I don't have much to add to the conversation, because post-modernism has always struck me as be little more than a conceptual dead end, and ultimately it has proven itself of little use to my own thoughts and writings. I think, like many other theories, if taken to an extreme it is definitely a dead end, but it can be of use conceptually as an ingredient rather than a main course.

The issue of quality as it relates to post-modernism reminded me of another quote, this one from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, page 290:

"When you're not dominated by feelings of separateness from what you're working on, then you can be said to 'care' about what you're doing. That is what caring really is: 'a feeling of identification with what one's doing.' When one has this feeling then you also see the inverse side of caring, quality itself."