The last few weeks have found me in a constant state of confusion. My job has plunged me into deeper into philosophy (and I mean in the broad, colloquial sense not the Plato to Kant Rortyian sense) than I've been since the great color crisis of '06 where I spent several weeks pacing madly around my apartment in China, talking to myself about perception and what Mary knows. My current crisis is just as consuming, but I'm getting paid for it, though I think about it for many more than 40 hours per week. I'll not concern my music blog readers with the problems, which have taken me from meta ethics to political theory to epistemology to truth to relativism to philosophy of science. It's been a wild ride and I've never wanted to write a 500 page book detailing how all of these things are important and why everyone is wrong about everything more than right now.

I couldn't take being in my own head anymore. I usually get myself to shut up by working out, but it wasn't enough today. Even my relaxing swim at the pool was interrupted by inspired nonsense that caused me to get out of the pool and scribble this is a notebook:

Science is instrumental. The world is round because that's the best way to predict what happens to things that we perceive. But it's the best way because of the stuff that is the world. Because there's a fact of the matter about the way world is because it is. And so when we say that the world is round we are both describing and predicting. The description is one that can be refined and redescribed, but that doesn't somehow make it only political, it doesn't make it nonreferential and it doesn't mean that that reference isn't true or false in both Rorty's sense and in the sense of objectivists (EVERYONE ELSE!). It is both, one dependent on the other. And at the root is the stuff as stuff.

I was desperate. Of course, because I'm an idiot, my way to calm down was to read a collection of interviews with Rorty (I'm writing about him for my job). Eventually I stopped mid-sentence, put the book down, grabbed my computer, plugged in my hard drive, put in my headphones, and lay naked on my bed surrounded by books while I listened to Nina Simone's Black Gold, an import live album from 1970.

I bought the record because it contains my favorite moment/piece/recording in music of all time: Simone's version of Sandy Deny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes." I can't write about it because I just can't. There is no one I would want to see more perform live than Nina Simone. Not Beethoven improvising; not Coltrane and Monk; not Callas; not Hendrix; not even Redding. It's all about Simone. And this record, even without my favorite song (I know I said "Running Up That Hill" the other night, but I lied, or I at least meant that's my favorite song, not my favorite thing to hear). Simone has a way of putting everything else in the world in the dark when she sings. I hear her and the pages of text and the gobbldygook of ideas melt away and I'm left with Simone, the most human of humans (see my post for my personal blog).

And tonight I was most affected not by "Who Knows," not even by a piece of music, but by the introduction she gives to "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." She says, in the playful but dead serious and gracious way that only Simone can say, "[The song] is not addressed primarily to white people, though it does not put you down in any way. It simply ignores you. [applause and laughter] For my people need all the love and inspiration that they can get." And for a brief few moments I was able to let go all the way. I didn't have to take her at her word. I've heard the piece many times. Sometimes ignoring her, sometimes considering her. But tonight I took her at completely at her word. I was othered, but I was still human. I was allowed to not be involved for the remaining six minutes and twenty-one seconds of the song, until the final fifty seconds of the record where I was more than happy to give my ovation for the umpteenth time.

Art does many things. Music is transcendent in all the Romantic ways. It can take us out of time and space and let us experience sound and emotion. It can challenge our analytic skills and force to think in relation to other works. It can also keep us uprooted but not in the experience; it can put us in limbo where there is nothing, not even the art. To be othered but not objectified; this is humbling. Simone wasn't acting in bad faith, she was, as she always seems to do, acting like a person being honest about her and mine and everyone else's situation.