[중앙일보 정진홍] 13년 전 오늘 새벽 성철 스님이 입적하셨다. 법랍 58세, 세수 82세였다. 그는 밤에도 눕지 않고 참선하던 장좌불와(長座不臥)의 오랜 수련 때문인지 마지막 순간에도 앉아서 숨을 거두는 좌탈(座脫)을 택했다.

그런 성철 스님의 생전 밥상은 간단하고 소박했다. 소금기를 뺀 무염식으로 반찬이라곤 쑥갓 대여섯 줄기, 얇게 썬 당근 다섯 조각, 검은콩 자반 한 숟가락 반이 전부였다. 거기에 감자와 당근을 채 썰어 끓인 국과 어린애 밥공기만 한 그릇에 담은 밥이 한 끼 공양이었다. 게다가 아침 공양은 밥 대신 흰죽 반 그릇으로 대신했다.

이런 밥상을 두고 혹자는 ‘원조 웰빙식’이라고 말할지 모르지만 성철 스님이 웰빙족이어서 그렇게 드신 것이 아님은 물론이다. 그는 밥을 먹되, 그 밥에 먹히지 않으려 했던 것이다. 사실 성철 스님의 말씀처럼 세상에는 밥을 ‘먹는’ 사람보다 밥에 ‘먹히는’ 사람이 훨씬 더 많다. 한마디로 주객과 본말이 뒤집힌 거다.

주객과 본말이 뒤집히면 속고 속이는 게 다반사가 된다. 성철 스님은 생전에 투박한 산청 사투리로 “쏙이지 말그래이”라고 말씀하셨다. 남을 속이지 말라는 것에 그치는 말이 아니라 자기를 속이지 말라는 것이다. 말 그대로 ‘불기자심(不欺自心)’이다. 남을 속이는 것이 좀도둑이라면 자기를 속이는 것은 큰도둑이다.

하지만 사람들은 자기가 스스로를 속이고 있는 큰도둑인지조차 모르고 산다. 자신을 바로 볼 수 없기 때문이다. 자신을 바로 볼 수 없는 것은 마음의 거울에 먼지가 잔뜩 앉아 흐려져 있어서다. 뽀얗게 먼지 앉은 거울이 사물을 바로 비출 수 없듯이 먼지 낀 마음은 자기를 속인다. 그러니 마음의 거울에서 그것들을 털어내야 한다.

성철 스님은 생전에 “이 뭐꼬?”라는 화두를 자주 던지셨다. “이 뭐꼬?”라고 스스로에게 묻는 것은 자기 마음의 거울을 닦는 일이다. 결국 “이 뭐꼬?”라는 화두는 마음의 거울에서 먼지를 털고 닦아내 자기를 성찰하고, 끝내 자기를 속이지 않으려는 몸부림이다. 스님은 “팔만대장경 전체를 똘똘 뭉치면 마음 심(心)자 한 자 위에 놓이게 된다”고 말씀하셨다. 또 “옷은 다 떨어진 거 입더라도 마음만은 절대로 떨어지면 안 된다”고도 했다. 그 마음이 해지고 떨어져 마음의 거울이 흐려지면 자기를 속이고 결국엔 자기 본래됨을 잃게 되기 때문이다.

성철 스님은 세 가지 병을 이야기했다. 돈병.색병.이름병이 그것이다. 이 중 가장 무서운 것이 이름병이다. 돈병이나 색병에 걸리면 주위 사람들이 눈총을 주지만 이름병에 걸리면 내심 내켜 하지 않으면서도 겉으론 더 박수 치고 환호해 여간해선 고칠 수 없는 고질병이 되기 때문이다. 결국 이름병도 알고 보면 속고 속이며 자기를 바로 보지 못하게 만드는 병이다.

마음의 거울을 잘 닦아 자기를 바로 보면 자기 속이 금광이요, 자신이 순금임을 발견하게 된다. 자기 안에 금광을 놔두고 바깥에서 찾으려 하는 것은 마치 황금으로 된 집안에 있으면서 돈이 없다고 하는 것과 같다. 성철 스님의 말씀처럼 행복은 받거나 주는 것이 아니라 짓는 것이다. 내 안에서 스스로 지어내는 것이다. 그러니 스스로 있는 힘껏 복짓기를 하라. 자력(自力)을 다했을 때에야 타력(他力)이 나타나는 법이다. 노력이 부족한 탓이지 굴복해야 할 운명은 따로 없다.

성철 스님은 가신 지 오래지만 그 가르침은 여전히 살아서 장군죽비처럼 우리를 내리친다. 그 장군죽비를 기꺼이 맞으면서 속고 속이며 간첩마저 활개치는 이 혼돈의 시대에 졸지 말고 깨어 있자! 그리고 음흉한 이 시대의 밥상에 먹히지 말고 우리와 후손이 제대로 먹을 새 시대의 밥상을 새로 차리자!

정진홍 논설위원 atombit@joongang.co.kr

▶기자 블로그 http://blog.joins.com/center/journalist.asp

=====================================
FROG SPEAK: Larry Polansky on James Tenney
=====================================
A Few Words about Jim Tenney
Larry Polansky
4 October 2006

1.
Our sadness at Jim Tenney’s passing is combined with the awareness that
there is now a hole in the planet. Jim deeply understood something many
of us have trouble with — that there are things “out there” that
deserve our serious attention. Music, ideas, beautiful work, friendship,
even the fate of the human race and the current status of the cosmos —
these things equally concerned and impassioned him. And when Jim gave
something serious attention, he was, well, serious about it. He cared
and thought deeply about what we always hope there will be time to care
and think deeply about. He appeared to do that each day of his life,
every hour of every day. This was his nature.
2.
In my opinion, Jim Tenney was the most important and brilliant
composer/theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. I usually
avoid statements like that: they’re by definition fatuous, and it’s not
a competition. But for Jim I’ll make an exception. After Cage, no other
composer so elegantly and beautifully integrated ideas and music. No one
else’s work, as a whole, is as profound, experimental, wide-ranging,
accomplished, or revolutionary.

Jim wrote more text than most people realize. Starting with Meta + Hodos
and the computer music articles of the early 1960s; through his work on
“timbre,” pitch, and other composers in the late 1960s and early 1970s;
his theoretical articles of the late 1970s (like the few but brilliant
essays in Perspectives… and the Journal of Music Theory); and
culminating with his wide-ranging work on pitch-space, intonation, and
perception in the last 25 years, he left an almost immeasurably broad
and important theoretical, aesthetic, intellectual and musical corpus.
His writing is poorly acknowledged, not widely read, and almost
completely misunderstood. In addition, it’s mostly unavailable — he
intentionally placed much of it in small, non-academic publications.

His ideas delineate and explore the most important musical ideas of the
past 50 years: form, perception, timbre, harmony, and the nature of the
compositional process. When I teach courses in advanced musical theory,
I sometimes have to force myself to use writings by other theorists —
not much other work seems quite as interesting, relevant or important as
Jim’s. He wrote and thought about elementals: form, pitch, cognition and
perception (among other things).

He meant things in a way that few others do, and we should take a lesson
from him in this. He cared little (in fact, not at all) for academic or
intellectual fashion. He was singularly focused on getting it right. He
wanted to know how the ear, the brain, and music worked (and might
work). He was among the first (if not the first) theorist (and composer)
to focus on ideas like the examination of deep musical processes
irrespective of style, the use of cognition and perception as the basis
for music theory, and a phenomenological understanding of our musical
perception. His investigations began at a much deeper level than what
passes for music theory (even today). I think we should revise our
definition: whatever Jim Tenney did, and however he did it, is music
theory.

Jim never advanced an idea until he was convinced he could win an
argument about it with himself. His discussions were deep, brutal, and
lengthy, with the most exacting person he could find (himself).
Sometimes he checked in with a few others lucky enough to have earned a
bit of his confidence, but by then it was unlikely that anyone else
could help much. He did so much homework, and thought so hard, that
there was rarely a new idea, technique, or avenue he hadn’t already
considered and probably discarded.

3.
All his life, Jim taught. As a teacher, he avoided the remedial. He had
little interest in, time (nor, I think, aptitude) for that kind of
pedagogy. As a theorist and composer, he had things to say and
investigate. He pursued ideas at a depth that was usually intimidating,
often a bit scary, always exciting. His teaching sprang from these
investigations, and he taught at a very high level, not some imagined
least common denominator. Jim believed, and acted upon the assumption
that the academy was a place of ideas, of search — an intellectual and
artistic eden where everyone was more or less like him!

Jim was a throwback: an artist and thinker whose love for teaching
emanated directly and completely from a love for ideas. He was happiest
when describing some new insight he’d had about harmonic space, gestalt
segregation, fundamental perception, the octave, Webern, cacti. His love
of art, the world and ideas was unfettered. I’ve encountered a very few
people like that in my life, and one of the saddest things about his
passing is that now there’s one fewer.

4.
I always suspected that some deranged gods had granted Jim the gift of
eight extra clandestine hours a day to work, during which he calmly
entered an alternate dimension, read twenty books and articles (maybe in
Latin or German, languages he taught himself as he was doing research),
filled up several of his ubiquitous graph-paper pads, and returned to
the corporeal plane with what he needed.

5.
Reverent of history, Jim enjoyed it immensely, and was in it. He taught
(maybe “taught” is the wrong word: he inspired) his students to share
his respect and fascination for so many traditions, and to consider them
alive. He showed us that history was fluid, incomplete, not over: there
was work to be done. Schoenberg, Ruggles, Partch, Satie, Var?se,
Nancarrow, Cage, and Crawford Seeger (even, at various times in his
life, Wagner!) were his colleagues.

Jim’s immediate musical family consisted of composers of the past,
present, and future. He understood, collaborated, and conversed with all
at great length, built on their ideas the way a scientist does. He
never, ever disrespected them. They dwelled in his musical house along
with the rest of us. One learned from Jim how precisely and seriously to
cherish other composers, and all other artists, because he was so
careful, sincere, and active about it. He gave great credence to the
making of art and the life of the idea — everyone who at was at least
nominally a fellow traveler got the benefit of the doubt, often more
than we perhaps deserved.

6.
In Meta + Hodos, and his later writings, Jim redesigned the architecture
of twentieth century music theory. In the Bell Labs pieces (like Phases,
Ergodos, Noise Study), he invented fundamental techniques for using
computers as compositional tools (creating the idea of a compositional
subroutine for synthesis environments). He freely moved between “art”
and “science,” applying his engineering acuity and musical vision to
some of the philosophical insights he gained from his close association
with Cage (and Var?se).

He sought connections, and had no patience for arbitrary distinctions. I
don’t think it ever occurred to Jim that emotion, intellect,
spirituality, science, harmony, creativity, knowledge, curiosity were
all that different. Nor should they be parsimoniously doled out in
support of some strategic artistic agenda. They were all part of being
human, and an artist. His epiphanies often emerged as marriages of
ideas, what he called “bridges.” He sought and found the profound
connections between the work of Hiller, Partch, Cage, Var?se and others.
He created new species from these breeding pairs — not hybrids, but
fertile new organisms that reproduced again and again, evolving with
each generation.

Jim’s ideas were startling in their originality and scope, but because
they were great ideas, they had precursors. Each piece led and could be
traced to other pieces, and always to some fundamental idea. Somewhere,
somehow, Harry Partch led to Quintexts which led to Diapason and
eventually to his final string quartet, Arbor Vitae (which the young
composer Michael Winter helped him finish near the end of his life).

Jim was intensely curious, but not restless. He asked, “What’s next?”
not because he was bored, but because he was hard-wired for forward
motion. He remained in perpetual morphogenesis (to borrow a term roughly
meaning “evolving and changing in shape,” from one of his favorite
writers, D’Arcy Thompson) until the end. The morphogenesis of his ideas
won’t stop because he did: it will increase in strength like some kind
of electro-magnetic resonance — steadily and exponentially.

7.
Over the years, one of my greatest pleasures was listening to Jim
describe seemingly fantastic theoretical speculations, some a little too
strange to talk about publicly, semi-cosmic ideas reserved for close
friends, late at night. Yet even the wackiest of these (his word, not
mine) seemed somehow believable. They were modulated by his intelligence
and refined in the crucible of his impatience with “just making stuff
up!” I always expect to pick up the New York Times Science section some
Tuesday morning and read the headline: “James Tenney’s conjecture about
the cosmos verified by experimental result!”

8.
The homes that Jim and Lauren Pratt made over the past 20 years —
whether in New York City, California, Toronto, or Berlin — were always
full. They were places where art and ideas were welcome, there was no
need for pretense, and there was all the time in the world. Careerism,
gossip, gig-talk, pettiness and the like seemed inappropriate. His home
was a haven for art — a safe and necessary respite from the quotidian.
Anyone and everyone was welcomed: his and Lauren’s idea of the “open
house” (in Toronto) was among the most brilliant ideas he was ever
involved in.

He listened with a singular intensity, imbued personal relationships
with deep gravity. You always felt that he considered you essential,
somehow, to the well being of the planet. You walked in to his and
Lauren’s home, a beer appeared in your hand, and all of a sudden your
life, at least for the next few hours, was really about music.

9.
Like Cage, Partch, Var?se, Hiller, Harrison, Ruggles, and some of the
other composers of his genus, Jim dealt with large ideas, systems of
thought, “embodiments of mind” (a phrase from another of his favorite
authors, Warren McCullough, whose work he was revisiting the last time I
spoke to him). His writings provide the foundation for a remarkable
edifice that we will spend a long time completing.

For me, though, much of the joy in remembering Jim emanates from small,
often very practical notions, which seemed to arise almost incidentally,
like wildflowers. These musical and theoretical “volunteers” delighted
him as much as anything in his life, but he rarely talked about them,
except among friends. I think he thought of this stuff as part and
parcel of being a composer. When he’d casually show you something like
this, his tremendous glee in solving some “smaller” compositional or
theoretical dilemma was evident. He’d get a particular kind of grin on
his face, like he’d just solved a riddle rather than proved a theorem.

All of this is in the music, sometimes deeply embedded, sometimes
immediately apparent. I remember the moment the compositional idea of
Chorales for Orchestra clarified itself to me: the vertical was the
horizontal; each was the primes of the harmonic series in a
crypto-palindromic-Jim-homage to the music of Ives, Stravinsky and
Ruggles — and who knows what else!? Understanding Jim’s techniques
reduced you to a kind of dumb, teenage-inflected “how cool is that?”
grin, wishing you’d thought of it yourself.

He seldom published or formally described these intermediate
compositional ideas. Nor were they premeditated: he created them as he
went along; necessary pieces to some larger, cosmic-musical puzzle he
was forever trying to solve. It was as if while busy inventing the
wheel: at some point he realized he needed to come up with the idea of a
spoke, but didn’t think it important enough to mention! It reminded me
of the way brilliant mathematicians sometimes invent entirely new
branches of mathematics en route to solving a theorem. Jim contributed
new concepts with nearly every piece.

These ideas give a sense of Jim’s playfulness and deep commitment to
compositional craft, something I think that is often overlooked when his
work is discussed. I believe that craft was the most important thing to
him, but his conception of it was unique. He loved music too much to
exploit it, enslave it to his own ends. His mode of expression was not
the liberation of himself but of other things — ideas and sound —
which he neither hamstrung to ordinary expectation, nor indentured to
“success.”

In a world increasingly obsessed with the super-saturation of the
immediate, Jim took a different approach. In the early 1960s he was
close to the great experimental psychologist Roger Shepard, who
pioneered a powerful technique called multi-dimensional scaling (MDS)
which allows a set of complex multi-variable differences between even
unrelated objects or concepts to be viewed in a simpler space, like the
plane. An MDS plot of the way a group of listeners perceive differences
between sonic events can illustrate what the most important “dimensions
of similarity” might be. One of the most fascinating concepts associated
with MDS is the idea of stress. If the mathematical reduction of the
complexity of some perceptual space produces too great a stress, it
means that the picture we’re looking at isn’t reliable, that there are
too many important dimensions: the fit is very bad. In this case, the
MDS algorithm automatically adds a dimension (from line to plane to
3-space, etc.) so that the sets of differences will fit more
comfortably, be more meaningful. Jim consciously integrated this idea
into several pieces (like Changes), in which the prime dimensionality of
harmonic space was increased when things got too “ambiguous” at the
“next lower dimension.”

But I think this is a deeper metaphor for Jim’s work. I often feel that
more and more, composers (and regrettably the rest of society) have
become like what mathematicians call fractals, functions which are
extremely complicated, but in a low dimensionality. We have so much
information readily at hand, things move so quickly, decisions are made
with such immediacy, that depth, ambiguity, taking time to explore ideas
is not generally tolerated, much less encouraged. Music is judged
quickly, often after being heard just once! Jim’s music inhabits a very
different world. His ideas are of sufficient richness to be forced into
higher dimensions, and require more complex perceptual and aesthetic
geometries.

10.
In recent years Jim’s work received far more attention than it had over
the previous thirty years. But this was not his goal. As a point of
honor, a measure of integrity, he sought far less attention than he
deserved. He made sure, though, that when someone did pay attention,
they would be rewarded by what was heard. Maybe Jim thought that it was,
in some literal way, good to leave the world in one’s debt, and not vice
versa. He did.

11.
Many of our conversations over the years had little to do with music. In
Toronto, late at night, Jim would pull out a graph-paper pad on which
he’d been working out some odd idea. One night, I think, he showed me a
kind of universal theory of matter that he was considering. He was
trying, in his own way, and by the sheer power of his own deduction and
instinct, to explain “everything,” at least to himself. I remember
nothing of the content of that graph-paper pad, but what I clearly
recall was that somewhere near the end, he said to me, with great
seriousness, that he’d very much like to be remembered as a “composer
and amateur cosmologist.” That is, in fact, how I remember him.

(Coda)
A few days before Jim died, in the hours after which he finally lost
consciousness, something odd happened at home here in New Hampshire,
three thousand miles away.

Early that morning we came outside to find a Great Blue Heron perched on
top of our red minivan. I stood with neighbors for nearly an hour,
watching as the large bird made itself at home. The theory was that
construction on a small bridge over the Mink Brook, just a few yards
away from our house, had disturbed his nest.

When I learned the chronology of his final days from Lauren, I realized
the coincidence and thought: “That’s just the kind of thing Jim would
do!,” and was glad that my old friend stopped in to say goodbye.

But maybe Jim didn’t pull off that stunt entirely on his own. Perhaps
the cosmos, being so firmly in his debt, was paying him back a little.

By Adam Fresco

  
Syd Barrett in January 1970 (Barry Plummer)  
  
::nobreak::

Syd Barrett, the founding member of Pink Floyd, has died aged 60 at his Cambridgeshire home where he became a recluse 30 years ago.

The inspirational guitarist, singer and lyricist founded the band in 1965 and was one of its biggest songwriting talents in the group’s early days.

But his behaviour became erratic during the psychedelic drug haze of the 1960s and he split with the band in 1968. He has since lived reclusively in Cambridge.

A spokeswoman for Pink Floyd said: “He died very peacefully a couple of days ago.” It has been reported that he died last Friday from complications related to diabetes.

The band said today that they were “very upset” to learn of his death and that he was the “guiding light” of the early days.

A spokesman said: “The band are naturally very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett’s death. Syd was the guiding light of the early band line-up and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire.”

His brother Alan confirmed his death, saying only: “He died peacefully at home. There will be a private family funeral in the next few days.”

Pink Floyd formed in the 1960s and became one of the most successful groups ever, with worldwide album sales of more than 200 million.

Known as an album band they had only one No 1 in this country, their iconic hit Another Brick in the Wall.

Pete Paphides, The Times’s Chief Rock Critic, said that Barrett could be seen in the same context as Van Gogh – a genius who saw things differently to other people.

“He will be remembered fondly and seen as someone who created compellingly disturbing work. He was a troubled, tortured genius who saw the world differently from the rest of us and we will always be intrigued by that.

“With his two solo albums you get a real sense that he was someone who was processing what he saw and how his senses perceived things in a different way to the rest of us.

“Technically he was not a great musician but he was a great artist and one of a kind who deserves his iconic status.”

Barrett is said to have come up with the name for the band by fusing the names of bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council in 1965. He created Pink Floyd with his old friend Roger Waters, and became a huge star at the age of 21. But he could hardly perform during his final days with the band, because he was taking so much LSD.

When his drug-fuelled behaviour became too much, the band drafted in Dave Gilmour as guitarist, and decided not to pick Barrett up for gigs.

The song Shine On You Crazy Diamond, written by Waters and performed during the band’s 1974 tour, is an appreciation for the contributions Barrett made to the band.

It includes the lines “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Shine on you crazy diamond. now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky”.

Gilmour said in an interview earlier this year that he thought that Barrett’s breakdown would have happened anyway. He said: “It was a deep-rooted thing. But I’ll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don’t think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it.”

After a period of hibernation, Barrett re-emerged in 1970 with a pair of albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett, which featured considerable support from his former bandmates.

With increasing psychological problems, Barrett withdrew into near-total reclusion after these albums and never released any more material and rarely appeared in public.

Born Roger Keith Barrett in Cambridge in 1946, he acquired the nickname Syd aged 15.

He left Pink Floyd in 1968, just as the band was about to achieve worldwide recognition, and lived in the basement of his mother Winfred’s semi-detached house where he boarded up the windows to keep out the eyes of both the press and fans.