CHAPTER SEVEN: THE MUSICIAN AS PHILOSOPHER

Ultimate Realities

Spiritualism is not the promise of a better life but the highest level of discussion one entertains in life – an agreement to partake of a discussion of the largest and most difficult problems. My main problems are, “What is really happening? How inaccurate am I? How inadequate am I?” I realize my map doesn’t fit the real world. Spiritualism is the agreement to deal with this problem.²⁵⁷

Eno characteristically poses the question of personal “inaccuracy” as a “spiritual” matter. The tone of his language when dealing with such matters is decidedly cool and detached. Indeed, “fervor” is a word that one would find singularly inadequate to describe most of Eno’s music, the phrase he prefers, when dealing with his more agitated progressive rock music, is “idiot energy,” which seems entirely more fitting. Eno has come close to expressing something similar to the conventional religious image of awakening to a greater reality:

All the musical experiences that have had an important effect on me have prompted the same feeling, of being faced with this strange connection of familiarity and mystery embodied in the same source, as if a door has unlocked into a whole universe of feeling that exists somewhere deep inside. It’s the feeling of being awake, rather than automatic. You get hooked on that feeling, everybody who has once felt it wants it for the rest of their lives.²⁵⁸

Eno’s attachment to a religious viewpoint goes no further than this. He is decidedly unsuperstitious, and his philosophical stance in general is probably best described as that of the freethinking agnostic. In accordance with such a stance, he takes a curious yet cautious view towards paranormal phenomena. When an adventurous interviewer asked him what he thought about flying saucers, Eno lamented the lack of a “serious investigation ... that wasn’t conducted by crackpots,” and at the same time revealed that he had seen one as a child with his sister, and had written to her years later to confirm his memory:

She wrote back and described it exactly as I had remembered it, so I figured that I had actually seen it unless we mutually manufactured this myth. So I’m prepared to believe in their existence, or in a phenomenon strong enough to create the impression of their existence in your head.²⁵⁹

If Christian philosophy and mythology has had little impact on the formulation of Eno’s conscious and public world-view, the role of oriental ideas is pronounced and explicit, although he has apparently never made a systematic study of Eastern religions. He has mentioned repeatedly the impact made on him in his early years by his uncle Carl, who was a painter and gardener who had lived in India for about fifteen years, coming “back from the East with a number of very exotic theories about reincarnation and so on and so on which struck the Suffolk farmers as extremely odd.” Eno was transfixed by uncle Carl’s tales, they gave him “an impression of how strange the world was outside our small town.”²⁶⁰

Reading Cage’s Silence also contributed to his growing awareness of Asian ideas. In 1986, Eno spoke of his interest in “the Chinese point of view,” and of its direct impact on the way he works. He singled out two of its aspects as being particularly important to him. The first is the idea “that every moment is a concatenation of hundreds of forces which just meet at that instant, and will never come together in the same way again – synchronicity.”²⁶¹ In much of his ambient music, but especially in his audio-visual installations of the 1980s, this concept is given a direct artistic embodiment, with multiple tape-loops of different lengths running simultaneously, never overlapping in precisely the same way twice, and producing a series of unique moments or events. The second is the Eastern view of the passage of time:

Our mental model is that we look into the future, the past is behind us. I was told that the Chinese see things quite differently: they look at the past, and the future washes over them, which seems to me to be much more sensible. There’s a kind of peacefulness in that attitude that I appreciate. You’re standing in one place, or treading water in one place, and meanwhile the drift of things is coming past you from behind. As the events recede, they cluster into bigger groups and become generalities, so you have this nice transition of specific events to a background of generalities.²⁶²

Again, this philosophical point of view has found musical expression, particularly in the solo album On Land of 1982.

Eno’s interest in cybernetics was the focus of his article, “Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts.” In the context of another discussion of cybernetics, Eno dismissed two other twentieth-century Western disciplines or practices as being of little use to him. Cybernetics, which acknowledges the complexity of systems, points (as does quantum theory) towards certain classes of results, rather than to specific outcomes and “in that sense it’s an inexact science, and it’s the first inexact science that actually can do something. As far as I’m concerned, those other ones, like sociology and psychology, are very inexact and they really don’t seem to work.”²⁶³

Eno has made a number of intriguing remarks that can be grouped loosely together under the rubric of epistemology – remarks that reveal him to be curious about the nature of knowledge. One has to do with a hierarchical concept which he uses to explain the creative process:

Ideas are the result of meta-ideas, which are the result of meta-meta-ideas. I sometimes think I could put together all the ideas I’ve ever had that led to interesting things in about 20 seconds ... An idea can generate a host of other ideas, which in turn will generate a host of pieces of work.²⁶⁴

In musical terms, Eno’s meta-meta-ideas have been two: a certain approach to rock music involving harnessing of his “idiot energy,” and a certain approach to musical materials that resulted in the creation of the ambient style. Each of his solo albums springs from one of these, and can be seen as revolving around a meta-idea – a specific approach to specific problems of style, of group organization, of musical theory and presentation.

The limits of understanding are expressed by Eno in his rephrasing of a Socratic aphorism: “You can never understand anything totally. But when you begin to understand something, you realise how much more there is that you don’t understand.”²⁶⁵ The context for this remark was his close study of paintings of Ron Kitaj. Reading criticism of the paintings, Eno said, has not lessened his appreciation of the painter’s work, on the contrary, he found it more fascinating the more he learned about it. A final facet of Eno’s thinking about knowledge is the idea that one’s sum total of knowledge remains the same, as if one had a maximum available at any given moment, though its contents might shift:

Luis Bunuel said that in a film every object obscures another object. That’s a great maxim for me. I have another version of that: Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well²⁶⁶