In a world stripped of its striving by sneering hiveminds, will porn become a classic art form?

When I write too much, I sleep too little. The notion that I might “write too much” almost never comes to me, but I no it when I sea it, if you can hear where the problem comes from.

That’s housekeeping. Here’s what’s interesting to me:

When I work all through the dead of the night, the music I like listening to best is my own – my own guitar. I have a little amplifier under my desk. With Cherry Bomb, my strat clone, on my lap, I play until I know what I want to say, then I reach over the guitar to type.

It’s just so much bicycle riding for me, I know that: Big ideas often come home with me when I ride my bike. I play the guitar badly, to the ears of anyone who would pay to hear music, and yet I play magnificently well for my own purpose: To fidget while I think.

And as well as anyone else might play, no one else can make the music I most need to hear, because the purpose is me. Not the musician. Not the music or its composer. Not anyone else who might hear. Me. It is art I make with me, by me and for me, with zero other people involved or even aware that there is a sporadic concert going on every day, pre-dawn, in my office.

Like most everything we watch on television, music is an activity we deny to ourselves. Children sing and hum, and everyone has guts enough to sing in the shower – some even when they’re all alone in the car. But almost no one makes his own music for his own enjoyment, with fewer still daring to make music where it can be heard by other people.

How sad is that? We’ve taken one of those precious gifts that make us uniquely human and ossified it in museum exhibits.

The first purpose of music is to make it, to rejoice and be glad in it, but the purpose for everyone not sharing directly in that delight is to dance.

Take careful note: The social purpose of music is dancing.

If you dare to play in public, among strangers, you can easily tell if the sounds you’re making are actually music: If Toddlers, at a minimum, dance to it – you hit the target.

So how do we show our deepest respect and admiration for music as an art form? By assaulting our ears with undanceable music in venues where dancing is forbidden, anyway.

Virtuosity is a wonderful thing – the freakish outlier obsession we claim to admire but which we nevertheless do not emulate. We know we are not Rachmaninoff, and we use that as our excuse to not be anything. Besides, no one else is making audible music – or any music a Toddler could not make. Ane even worse, if I defy that imagined mob of aggressive passivity – they’ll make fun of me!

Imagine if we made love that way. Oh, yes, do keep things private, but imagine if we made love the same way we make music or play football or write prose: If we left everything to the ‘professionals’ and sat idly by in a bored-but-respectful silence as our fears of our own self-inflicted sneering rob us of all striving.

If we made love the way we play music, pornography would be a classical art form – visceral virtuosity!

How can you tell when a machine is broken? When it doesn’t do what it’s built to do.

If no one is dancing, the music is broken.

When humanity is fully philosophically eviscerated, the reproductive act will be a full-on spectator extravaganza – and no one will make love.