My Appearance On The J. Burden Show
J. Burden and I discuss disenchantment, Akhnaten and the current malaise.
I recently made an appearance on the J. Burden show where we discussed the aura of gloom currently smothering the West, our disenchanted age, and Philip Glass’s weird and wonderful opera Akhenaten.
As I said in the conversation, there’s a great deal to the Akhenaten story and opera that fascinates me. However, one little nugget that I relayed to J. Burden off-air is to be found on the Wikipedia page of Glass’s opera. Akhenaten is actually on stage for 40 minutes before he sings, and when he does he sings in an extraordinarily high-pitched ‘‘Counter-tenor’’ voice. This is in keeping with Akhenaten’s androgynous, some say downright womanly, demeanour. Wikipedia puts it thus:
This is the first time he actually sings, after he has already been on stage for 20 minutes (and 40 minutes into the opera) and the effect of his countertenor voice (which in 1983 was even more rare than nowadays) is startling
In other words, forty years ago it was less common for a man to sing higher feminine notes than today. Alternatively, it could be that forty years ago men were less able to sing in such a high pitch. Such a trend would seem to be a manifestation of decreasing testosterone rates among men. Whatever, the cause, I found it a curious little aside.
I found the discussion about "enchantment" particularly interesting and would love to have a longer piece on that topic by you. To me it seems that, in a strange way, we have more enchantment than, say, in the early 90s, because the "end of history" in the sense of Fukuyama would, IMO, be pretty much the most disenchanted state of affairs possible. At that time, techno-globalism and various other dystopian scenarios did not loom large, at least not in the same way as now. With these now in plain sight, are we ourselves not in a struggle with modern-day Grendel and is this struggle itself not a source of re-enchantment, albeit perhaps with a cyberpunk flavor? It´s almost like being in a real-life computer game.
Morning Morg, was listening to this this morning, haven't finished it yet.
Though I was reading this piece this morn as well;
https://open.substack.com/pub/expressiveegg/p/the-woods?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=ga0u4
Point being when reading this I was reminded of your own piece own the garden you have, I will assume maybe that many people are not able to remain content or more deeply In a State of Tranquility with modernity as it is extremely Civilised and so feel a sense of Gloom.
Could be wrong, cheers for the lovely commentary as always, best wishes, may the gods bless you and yours.