Writings of Wainamoinen

“There was a musician playing a piece of music to a man. When the musician had stopped playing the listener said: "That was really beautiful. What was it about?" Instead of answering him the musician played the piece again.” – Zen Story

Perhaps music is one of the few ways of communicating, without the mediation of symbols, we have left. Just think about the advanced melodies of the birds, the melancholic howls of wolfs and the out worldly whale songs. As a free improvising musician one could be so lucky to come even close to such a pure expression, completely free of intellectualization and ego.  

After years of actively being involved in the work of a non-practicing, non-disciplined and non-thinking approach towards music and improvising, I can honestly say that I have experienced moments of such pure expression. I can claim that because there are moments, when I have performed, that I have virtually no memories of. I have seen myself on video and heard myself on recordings playing stuff that I can’t remember.

Some of us spend our whole life searching for a method of shutting down the chatter-box in our heads, and when we find something, we stick to it. Sadly enough it has only given us a temporary relief from the suffering of our everyday modern life. Thor Heyerdahl’s wife, in his book Fatuhiva – Back to nature, describes how she didn’t feel any need to listen to music while she was in the jungle, simply because she was surrounded by the “music” of the jungle all the time.

Defenders of civilization are very eager to point out that the life of
hunter-gatherers/Paleolithic people are/were not free from suffering, pain, violence and decides, and therefore aren’t/weren’t as happy as we might think. They say that it’s one thing to go fishing and picking berries as a recreation but a different thing to have to be dependent on it to survive.

In fact they claim that anarcho-primitivists make themselves guilty of just the kind of utopist dreaming that the communists do/did. And this is where they completely miss the point. First of all, I don’t believe in happiness. It’s an illusion. What I do believe in is to be in the moment. And while being in that moment we can experience a lot of things to it fullest like pleasure, fear, anger, joy, love and pain. Sometimes we even experience all these things in the same time. 

Honestly now, who is just in one emotion? Aren’t the feelings we experience a mixture of all these sensations we have tried to put a name on? And this is the mistake a lot of musicians do. Instead of expressing what they actually feel, which they don’t usually have a clue of; they try to act like they feel the blues or whatever.

So what they do is that they imitate the symbols of blues that they have been interpreted with. And then they are thinking that they are playing the blues just because they play 12 Bar Blues Chords, pentatonic scales, “blue notes” and B.B. King licks. But they’re not. They couldn’t be farther away from what the blues is really about. There’s more blues in the music of the Baka pygmies than they will ever experience. I just want to cry when I here the music of The Baka Pygmies because it’s so incredibly intense.

But for us it’s all about sounding right and looking right today. Like when I was in music school and these fusion-kids would play their licks and tricks, trying very hard to sound and look just like Jaco Pastorius or Herbie Hancock. After that “education” almost all my joy in music had died but luckily I came in contact with my guitar teacher Andy Fite. The first thing he said to me was to stop practicing, never to be disciplined and only play when I felt like playing.
 
When I was in music school I was also forced to be in a comp band for these singers. One of them actually asked me one time if I could lower the guitar so that I would look more like a “rock guitarist” because we where playing a “rock” song. I wonder if Jimi Hendrix ever had to put up with that kind of bullshit. And these singers were trying very hard to look sexy because that’s what they saw Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears do on TV.

And then they put down an intense piano player like Lennie Tristano as cold and intellectual, (when in fact, he was all about feeling and intuition), because he wasn’t pleasing the audience with well recognizable symbols (clichés), but instead expressed what he truly felt.  

"You could make your fingers reproduce exactly what you felt, if you really worked at it. I achieved it, not only spending a lot of time at the keyboard but finding ways I could make my fingers reproduce my deepest feelings. It meant, when you hit a note with a finger, you sank into that note all the way to the bottom of the keyboard until it went pow! Right?…" – Lennie Tristano

I like to listen to music where they sing in a language I don’t understand. Right now I’m listening to a song where it sounds like their singing something like: “iyaoeayo” with endless variations and keeping a steady rhythm by clapping their hands. I have no idea what it means but it sounds very joyful and playful. It sounds like they are having a lot of fun.

How can these undeveloped, primitive people living in the Central African rainforest have such a blast? Don’t they know that their lives are poor, nasty, brutish and short? Or maybe that’s a lie. Maybe they are living a good life getting everything they need from the forest, a surrounding they are perfectly adapted to and know from the inside out. That is, if they could only be allowed to live there. But now they find themselves threaten by massive deforestation, which deprives them of the natural resources essential for their survival. Soon it will perhaps be impossible for them to continue with their lifestyle that has work for thousands of years. And we know what’s going to happen then: alcoholism, boredom and just pure misery. Welcome to the civilization I’ll say. Here’s some Prozac. You’re going to need it.  

But there’s something else that I recognize in their music but are incapable of expressing in words. I know this feeling. I have experienced it but I can’t put it into words. I know this feeling.

“Music has a central role in the life of the Baka… as soon as a baby is able to clap it is encouraged to participate in all the communal music-making… There is no sense of performer and audience…This communal music-making constantly helps to strengthen the bonds between the individuals in the groups…The sense of hearing is very important when living in the forest…By recognizing the different sounds made by different streams or rivers… and by talking to each other across surprisingly long distances in the forest, they are able to know exactly where they are in the thickest undergrowth. This need to hear… with the absence of background noise of cars, radios and machines … has meant that the Baka have developed an incredibly keen sense of hearing… in the cacophony of modern life in the West we learn to filter out unwanted "noise", the Baka learn to hear all sounds since they are all produced by the forest and are therefore all potentially important to their survival… in their music… they will listen very well to each other and can pick up new melodies very quickly. The Baka believe that the forest… looks after them. It provides all their needs - food, clothing, shelter and tools. Like a good parent it is vigilant in watching over them, but like a human being it has lapses… they believe that if something bad happens to them such as bad hunting or an illness it must be that the forest is sleeping. They then use music and song to make things better again - to wake up the forest and make it happy. If things have been going well they will also sing, to share their happiness with each other and with the forest.” - http://www.baka.co.uk/baka/bakamsc.htm

There’s a war that has been going on for 10,000 years where the civilized people always have won over the uncivilized, with their superior weapons, organizations, brainwashed people and germs. You might not like it. But it’s the truth. The few uncontacted indigenous people that are left can’t be expected to win the war with their spears.

So it’s really up to us. We have to fight the system, for the sake of the only true undomesticated, untamed people that are left. For the Sentinelese, (yes they are some tough guys throwing spears and shooting arrows at helicopters, but it’s not enough, even though they have won our hearts and respect by doing that), for all the Indian tribes in the amazons that are facing extermination because of our diseases, getting killed by people wanting their land and having soon nowhere to live because of deforestation of the amazons.

Civilization has to be fought from within. It’s the only way. Everything else is bullshit and contrary to our goal. If the civilization will collapse by itself we all are going to die, because the system will not collapse until everything is gone and poisoned. Time is running out and the last thing we need is escapism and pretentious nostalgia that leads nowhere.

We say: Fuck the system and fuck it real good. If you don’t have the guts to do it then go and hide in some forest and pretend that everything is going to turn out alright by itself. We do however recognize the need for learning primitive skills and to be out in the nature as a personal process of becoming feral, but it really breaks our hearts to hear critics of civilization talking with misplaced optimism, about a mind shift towards awareness about the possible collapse of the global system, as it would actually mean something. Just because a crack addict knows that crack is killing him doesn’t necessarily mean that he is going to stop using. And besides, these people are warning that the system will collapse not because they want it, but to find means how to prevent it. And therefore they are more dangerous than people living in complete oblivion.

And it’s the same thing with capitalism. The reason to why the madness of destroying the planet is still going on, even though people know this, is mainly because there are people that are making money on it. And money is far more addictive than any drug on this planet. Just like a crack addict that does things like robbing people and stealing from his mother to get his drug, the money and power addicts creates an ecological disaster, threatening to destroy the environment, to the point where no human creature can survive on the planet any longer, just so they can get their precious money and strengthening their power.

And just as a crack addict usually continues his destructive lifestyle until he is dead, money and power addicts will continue until not only they are dead but everyone and everything else is also dead. The Leftists recognizes this but they make a fatal error in their conclusions. What they don’t understand is that capitalism can’t be separated from civilization and modern technology, as communism has proven by it’s failure to achieve it’s utopia every time. The first state was formed because of the necessity to protect the capital of the ruling class and not it’s people in general, and modern technology have never had the task of satisfying an existing need but to create a need that people didn’t have before.

Modern people like us find it very uncomfortable and frustrating when the car breaks down or the subway stops, even though we have lived thousands of years without these things, just like a heroin addict gets very uncomfortable and frustrated if can’t get his fix. So we can say that the modern man has become a comfort-addict, (he can also be described as a consumer-addict, but the underlying drive in this case is comfort).   

One of the most fundamental defense mechanisms addicts have is denial. The subject may deny the reality of his addiction altogether (simple denial), admit the fact but deny its seriousness (minimization) or admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility (transference).

The scientists, and the laymen who quote these scientists, who claims contrary to overwhelming evidences, that the extreme weathers we all are experiencing all over the earth, doesn’t have anything to do with the deforestation of the amazons and thereby releasing the carbon contained within the vegetation and thus accelerating global warming, are making themselves guilty of simple denial.

Then you have the scientists, and laymen who quotes these scientists, who claims that even though there has been a shift in the climate it’s not as alarming as some people tries to make it. They claim that the climate has shifted many times during the history of mankind. You also have the leftist who even go as far as demonstrating about different environmental issues but yet find it more important to fight for their union rights and such.

There are even critics of civilization who claims that we can outlive the insanity we refer to as “modern civilization” and that we will adopt to the change in environment because people are “smart”. In this category you also have the environmentalists who believe in the development of “environmentally friendly” technology (whatever the hell that is), despite the fact that modern technology has been nothing but a disastrous chapter in the history of mankind. Like a Pandora’s Box it has released the capacity of humans destroying themselves and their surrounding many times around. All these people make themselves guilty of minimization which is one of the most dangerous forms of denial because it’s so deceiving.

In the third category you find the doomsday prophets who claim that the world is coming to an end based on various scripts such as The Book of Revelation, The Prophecies of Nostradamus, and numerous other books, one crazier than the other and possible to be interpretered in any way the reader would like to. They claim that the end is coming soon and that there is absolutely nothing to do about it. They also claim that there is a secret organization (The Illuminati) or a supernatural entity (The Devil) to be responsible of how things look right now. These people are making themselves guilty of transference. And they usually put there hope to some sort of messiah like Jesus Christ.

Then you have the people who don’t live in denial and are fighting for their lives with any means they can. They might not be successful but at least they try. Our hearts and respect is for these people who risk their freedom and life’s in a (seemingly) hopeless situation.  

“To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.” – Mikhail Bakunin

- Wainamoinen