On May 19th, 2016, I bought my first Eurorack module. Five days later, I signed up for Muffwiggler.com. This all-things-synthesizer forum was started back in late 2006 by Mike McGrath and is a global phenomenon that created the largest online synth forum and repository of knowledge for the field that has yet existed. Two years after starting the site, Mike spoke of his 10,000th post in reverence; now, more than ten years later, the forum hosts over 2 million posts.

Yesterday, it was announced that Mike had passed away. There are no other details; there’s not even a confirmation if it happened yesterday, a week ago, or last month.

The strange thing about his passing for me is that it created a new type of void. Sure, I’ve known of plenty of people dying during my lifetime, including people who have made tremendous impacts, but this is the first death in the internet age of someone who created a global community that I was part of where the main objective was people helping other people. Never before in the history of humanity were diverse people from around our Earth able to communicate as a kind of guild to help one another in near real-time before the internet made this possible. While it is obvious there were many other forums prior to this one, this is the first I was a member of whose founder has passed away.

Muffwiggler generated a minor controversy during the past few years due to its colorful name (influenced by the Big Muff and the Wiggler guitar pedals);  it would also drive many a user away due to some of the juvenile hostility of users. Through it all, though it has been the place to learn about some arcane concepts and discover ideas and methods shared by more than 45,000 users from around the globe. To that end, it has been an incredible resource that I hope continues to evolve and that its vast library of knowledge is pulled forward. Rest in power, Mr. Muff Wiggler.

I have issues. Issues with others are more than likely actually issues with me. There are moments when I feel triggered for no great reason. This morning at the first coffee shop I stopped at it was after hearing the fourth and then the fifth Red Hot Chili Pepper song. The barista had tuned in to a Spotify channel that gave him exactly what he wanted, but the redundancy of the songs was seriously annoying to me. The funny thing is that I grew up listening to albums and often I’d play them multiple times. That was 40 years ago, and now I’ve grown accustomed to random playlists. Even 35 years ago, I was making my own mix tapes, and I made a load of them so I could try to avoid the redundancy of hearing the same thing twice a week. So, without having ordered yet, I packed up and left.

At the next coffee shop, I was again about to pack up shortly after arriving when the woman with her toy dog left. Then, I had to contend with the self-important macho blathering of the firemen next to me. The deal is that I never wanted to come to this coffee shop in the first place, as I know it’s busy in the morning, and I cannot help but listen to the banality going on around me. There are times my ears feel especially sensitive to the herd’s ruminations about bullshit, and I’ll either witness their descent into stupidity while I sit aghast in horror while at other times I must vacate the place out of fear that this special brand of doltish inanity could be infectious.

I readily admit this aspect of my personality is annoying to me. It is part of my road rage and a general sense of anger when I find myself at a loss for the sudden intrusion of other people’s hostility. I’m well aware of needing to find my inner zen, but the proximity of the trigger so near the surface of irrationality too often wins the day.

Time to order some earplugs.

Words and the magic they convey can be experienced by the idea behind them or simply by the sound they create in your ear. Frisson arising from music is a common experience people can have, but it can also occur with words and from visual stimulation. Today’s blog entry is a short list of some of the words that have brought that sense of delight to my ear.

I was recently reminded of my affinity for the word Aquitaine while Caroline was reading “Distant Mirror” to me. This look at the 14th century in Europe has more than a few references to the region of Aquitaine in southwest France.

Disambiguation I remember first encountering in Wikipedia where subjects with multiple meanings are marked for needing greater clarity or disambiguation.

Novel, not as in a book, but as in novelty, took on greater meaning for me in the early 1990s as I came to understand the idea from Terence McKenna.

Transcendent was a magic word I first learned while still a teenager reading Alan Watts. It intuitively described to me what I was attempting to do while escaping the yoke of conformity.

Antipathy is the next word that sparked ideas and feelings that were far larger than the nine letters that created it. My visceral sense that far too many people live in antagonism and loathing of their potential and the demands of being a human being described by antipathy is poetic in its brevity.

Defenestration only recently entered my vocabulary when learning more about the Thirty Years’ War and visiting Prague for the first time. Shortly upon hearing this lyrical word, I came across a song titled “Defenestrazioni” by Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten, in collaboration with Teho Teardo. After that, I would hear references to the act of tossing someone out of windows somewhat regularly. How does such an archaic word of such specific meaning reenter the pop vernacular?

Deep in the Grand Canyon back in 2010, I reached out to touch the Great Unconformity and saw my hand straddling a gap in time where nearly 1.5 billion years of history is missing. The ancient geology of our earth was ripped open, allowing us to travel down the Colorado River and be witness to the primordial origins of the landmasses we travel upon while oblivious to how it came to be. The idea of unconformities spills a bit of mystery into an otherwise relatively certain geologic history.

What were you reading at the end of 1985? I had picked up a copy of “Les Fleurs du mal” by Charles Baudelaire. After learning of a bookshop in Frankfurt, West Germany, called The British Bookshop, I quickly became a regular. On one of my first visits, I picked up a copy of this book of poems titled “The Flowers of Evil” and fell in love with this misanthrope, often hoping to one day imitate his skulking on the streets of Paris. The word “Fleur” has a motion of color and punctuation of intensity that sings to my ear and mind’s eye. I mention the bookshop because it was about to play a pivotal role in my life.

As an aside, it was around this time I was able to obtain a copy of “Les Chants de Maldoror” by Comte de Lautréamont, a book I’d never seen in America. While Lautréamont and the word Maldoror could have made this list of favorite words, it really was the entirety of the work where individual words didn’t hold the same kind of impact as the volume did when taken as a whole. But this is deviating from the goal of this entry. By the way, this, too, came from my new favorite bookshop.

Geist needs to make an appearance at this point. Again, I’m at The British Bookshop, but now it’s early 1986 when a clerk named Rosie (she was a Persian from Tehran) introduced me to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The book she put in my hands that fateful day was “Beyond Good and Evil.” The impact cannot be understated. I was smitten and it was in those pages I learned of a complex German word known as “geist.” Its meaning will not be shared here as the difficulty of explaining its nuance is beyond the scope of this entry. Suffice it to say it has something to do with the essence of self.

My book of poetry, should I ever write one, should be titled “The Fleurs of the Resplendent Geist.” Resplendence in all of its incarnations walks with the dandy as they beautify the lyrical chambers of the mind with images extolling the virtues of majestic and imposing intellectual transcendence. We should all have the opportunity multiple times in our lives to luxuriate in the splendor of giving meaning to the wistful unknowns where, without our faculties, reality is nothing more than a void, but with language, we lend profound beauty and extraordinary character to random distillations of matter. This is my resplendent universe.

Here’s an old word now considered obsolete that I’ve found difficulty bringing into casual conversation: sagacious. It’s my perception that we move to a more debased language as time moves forward. Our vocabularies shrink with every passing minute of media consumption in my opinion. Being sagacious in our acquisition of words would do us well, especially when one considers that in average day-to-day conversation talking of ordinary things, most people use less than a thousand words. This is shocking when you learn that the average English speaker might know approximately 40,000 words out of the quarter-million that make up our language, but they do not have practice in using the breadth of words they’ve encountered at one time or another.

Finally, we arrive at étant donné. When I first heard this, it was in reference to the band by this name. The pronunciation is /e.tɑ̃ dɔ.ne/, and while it means “Being Given,” it can also mean “In View Of.” Little did I know at the time that Marcel Duchamp’s final work was titled, “Étant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau 2. le gaz d’éclairage” or “Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas.”

Some people have favorite sports teams, TV shows, foods, travel destinations, or cars; I have an ever-shifting ephemeral list of favorite words, while some, like those above, seem to stay with me over the decades. Maybe this affinity for fragments of speech comes with being somewhat loquacious, though hopefully not too garrulous.

The crushing urgency of excruciating beauty finds the eye at lightspeed, signaling the brain that the overwhelming emotional intensity of ecstasy is encountered. Of course, many may never correctly interpret the impulses emanating from what is observed, as the facility for understanding this particular language was never acquired. Seeing the beauty in what others might find mundane is similar to having learned specialized subject matter that requires formal study. How does one love the sea if they don’t comprehend the body of water they are looking at?

So, do other eyes not see what your eyes see? They do not. Reality is defined by perceptions. Some things are hammered into people to act as hard code, such as common language, respect for authority, basic political precepts, and values, which unfortunately can include racism, bias, intolerance, and aggression towards things they don’t fully understand. Extraordinary beauty, though, is able to break through conditioning, and so things like nature are downplayed as irrelevant or dangerous to discourage people from witnessing too much of it, risking any hint of transcension.

Included here is exposure to psychedelics as they transport the traveler into a universe of incredibly beautiful complexity, which is experienced in an overwhelmingly emotional transposition of perspective. Breaking through the fear of the unknown arrives with the repercussions that the freshly realigned mind may no longer desire to return to a stance that is hostile to personal exploration. We learn to embrace the unknown when we understand that it is hidden in plain sight right before our senses. After that realization, the act of finding the new often brings us profound joy.

To deny our natural relationship with the myriad aspects of beauty is the denial of our basic humanity. I’ve posited previously my thoughts on how language is likely the only differentiator between us and the animal kingdom; well, it is part of language’s utility that we have the tools for singing about and describing those things that fall under the guise of beauty. Love is beautiful, and so are sunsets, rainbows, breaching whales, smiles, fields of flowers, the Milky Way, a gecko scrambling over moss, or a baby elephant with its mother. For all of these situations, humans planetwide have shared the poetry of celebrating our observations. We have reveled for centuries in the symbiotic entwining of us with beauty, used for remembering those special memories that bring us happiness. We need to learn to share more beauty and create more happiness.

It takes a man dying to let people know he’s lived a good life, while a man alive may never let anyone know he is alive at all. We pop into existence with all the potential of something that approaches the infinite or at least as much as human capability allows. Then, too often, we squander our most limited resources before we pop out of existence to join the astral plane. What did we do to validate our existence, not necessarily for others, but for ourselves?

If you should be so skilled to craft a song in the waning days of life, will you be thankful or resentful? Writing this song, you cannot rest on the accomplishments of a society or family you were part of; it must be a portrait of the intrinsic you. Your elegy may not be brought to a song, so maybe it is in words, paint, or some other art, but it has to capture just who you were. Will you have an inkling of who that person was, and while you were being you, could you answer who you are? How many of us, through a visual impression, a sentence, paragraph, or melody, give an impression to others of who and what we are? A flower can.

The flower effortlessly offers its beauty, demonstrating what it is. In its display, we delight in our minor comprehension of its role, at least in our sense of the aesthetic. We gaze into the ocean or the Milky Way and have some idea that we understand what it is we are witnessing. We can make assumptions regarding the stars and whales and feel satisfied we have a semblance of an idea of what is behind our cumulative knowledge.

The same cannot be said of knowing ourselves or, to a far lesser degree, others in our immediate orbit. I’d posit that people know very little of their spouses or even their children. On the other hand, we can make broad assumptions about the mass of humanity just as we might about the ocean or sky above us, though this likely gives us a poor impression of the complexity we are wrapping in gross generalizations. We must either intricately study a thing over a lifetime or accept we’ll only ever have a rudimentary knowledge of that thing.

How much effort do we give to understanding others in our species, or how about ourselves? So how, then, are we differentiated from the animals and insects around us? Maybe we’re not all that different after all. True that the scientists, thinkers, inventors, creators, artists, and musicians exemplify the best of our human qualities, but our consumption of their product does not make us any less the insect, moving grain to the nest. We are worker bees operating on autopilot and doing little to direct the nest. Yet our ego convinces us of our validity because we are watching TV, rooting for our favorite team, playing a video game, or doing a job to pay for the luxury of consumption.

Existence in our moment without intention is not good enough; it does not suffice and is an abject failure of our humanity. Who are you? I demand an answer, and I don’t want to know you from your MAGA hat, yoga pants, tattoos, how much you can share about a movie or game character, or inflated sense of self-worth because you placed your career on a pedestal you believe makes you a better human being.

How do you feel when you witness natural beauty, when frisson occurs while listening to your favorite song, after sharing or giving to someone who needs something more than you? What does love mean and feel like to you? What do the tears of joy taste like? Where are you most at peace? How does your mind feel when sequencing words, notes, or brush strokes? Have you had many mentors, read great works, and celebrated exquisite moments?

None of this can occur without cultivating a sense of being aware and present at the opportunistic moments when the magic of life rises up for our taking. We cannot grasp these chance encounters if we are not operating with the tools that allow us to decipher and subsequently own these fleeting wisps of profound inspiration. We have this brief window of being awake and using our time to reward the very existence of this entity we call self.

Cross-generational mistrust, mistrust between the sexes, hate between political parties, disdain for the other team, anger at people of different nationalities, and biases against skin color are some of the divisions between Americans that are exploited at every opportunity. So, what unites us?

We have been torn asunder from within with the flimsiest of ideas that a shared land called the United States is enough to assure a citizenry that we have something in common. While we may use the same currency and pay taxes to a federal centrally located government, we are hardly Americans as much as we are millions of tiny factions. This wasn’t a ploy from individuals to break out of a dominant oppressive regime, but a fracturing by the powerful, media, and ourselves as we whipped things into a frenzy of polarization.

We no longer have a shared dream, vision, or hope for a better future. Nothing in the world of ideas unifies us anymore. We have lost our rudder. Some will say things like national emergencies can unite a people, yet the events of 9/11 only lasted a brief moment. Here, we are in a racial, climate, educational, and cultural emergency, and we are paralyzed.

At the base of this paralysis is a deep division that is amplified to further separate “us” and “them,” except there are millions of these tiny camps of “us” and “them.”

Yet, we all want the same things: good friends, a healthy family, financial security, job opportunities, viable education, and a safe place to live. So what are we doing to that end? Nothing.

Not only did we extend the infantilism of children well into their early teen years, but we also extended high school far into adulthood. The cliques of our campus years are alive and well as apparently, we saw no need to mature past that. It doesn’t matter if your group is a bunch of white supremacists, football fans, followers of a particular car type, bikers, financiers, hipsters, or some other brand identity. If you belong to a subgroup of loyal followers, you have likely adopted attitudes, fashion, and positions that are accepted by the inner circle of thought leaders who require these signs of your belonging. Being an individual is not an option; conform or go elsewhere.

It is a perverted idea that these acts of conformity and polarized groupings are part of the American DNA that makes us unique and special. We are witnessing the travesty that is destroying the fabric of what we were. Rugged individuals can find strength in their struggle to define their character, but to join the herd is the easy relegation of being responsible enough to risk isolation for defining oneself.