Sex & Death. Chapter 1. Sex.

Okay okay I declined to leap in when we were actually in media res about Glenn's love life, known or hypothetical. But finally these last few posts have lassoed my fingers.

What did Goethe say? "The only things for persons of intelligence to talk about are Sex and Death." Sooner or later, F_Minor had to Go There, but when we finally did, we didn't go there like slobbering voyeurs. We went there with an unusual degree of respect and good manners (as transom-peepers go).

I'm told that East Asia has an entirely different culture of sexuality from Europe and North America, particularly from those Western parts heavily laden with Calvinism/Puritanism. I'm curious to know how East Asian Glenn devotees view this whole subject.

I can imagine (but just barely, I live in the USA where All Fun carries serious criminal sanctions) a culture where talking about Glenn's Favorite Sex is no more taboo or laden with land mines than talking about Glenn's Favorite Food. Or maybe there's a culture on some planet that talks about GG's sexuality constantly, but would be deeply offended if anyone mentioned his nutritional preferences.

(Saturday Night Live used to have a skit about The Planet Where Everyone Tells The Truth All The Time, very ordinary-seeming office workers around the water cooler saying the most bizarre things to one another. Then in "Jumpin' Jack Flash," villains shot Whoopi Goldberg up with Truth Serum, but she escaped, and for the next hour, interacted in the oddest ways with strangers, her friends and her co-workers ...)

I don't think Glenn Gould intentionally *chose* solitude to the degree his life ended up seeming to consist of (as far as we've ended up knowing about it). He was unusually cerebral, and undoubtedly cherished big blocks of Alone Time, but we shouldn't forget that he was also a member of our species, and like it or not, we're a social species. I'd say only one in 10,000 human beings truly ends up an anti-social hermit who moves to the equivalent of a Yukon mining cabin or a cave.

And then there are the False Hermits -- they live in the remote cabin, but if another person wanders by, they drag him inside and talk him to death all night. GG and his middle-of-the-night phone calls seem a lot closer to the False Hermit model. Part of GG's charm for me are the goofy ways he satisfied his need for a lot of human contact.

In "The Idea of North," one of the train travellers remarks that most people think that people who choose to live in the Arctic do so to get away from people, but in reality, life in the wilderness far more critically depends on intimate relationships with your few neighbors than life in the big city with your thousands of neighbors. That was a piece of dialogue that GG chose to keep, not to snip out and discard.

For the rest of us, our "default" emotional needs sooner or later gravitate to social contact. We perhaps overlook that even after retreating to the studio in his musical life, that meant (if only by labor union regulations) constantly being in very close contact with an inevitable five to twenty team members; producing commercial recordings is very like being a member of a sports team. Maybe there's a star, like a baseball pitcher or American/Canadian football quarterback, but you still need the whole team, and the star soon learns that he can't over-prima-donna and annoy or dimiss or disrespect the other team members, or the final product reflects the low team morale.

I doubt that what follows is an Original Insight. Nobody drives a 20-cylinder high-performance Creative (or political) Ego through life without a sizeable Sex Drive. Even in the Puritan West, you're lucky if you can keep a brilliant and accomplished artist of either gender limited to One At A Time, or Within the Bonds of Wedlock.

For insight into this, I think we're better off consulting Wilhelm Reich than John Calvin. Although I think Calvin knew about human appetites as well as Reich; he was just agin 'em.

It's a synthetic and false intellectual and educational construct that one's Sex and Romantic Life is one thing, and one's Creative Life is quite another, separate thing. In truly creative and brilliant creeative artists, life is pretty much a very sloppy continuous spillover from the canvas to the linen. I think a lot of us would be shocked at the difference between a scholar's biography of a great artist or musician, and the memoirs of that artist/musician by a close friend who was also a great artist/musician.

I suspect GG was just unusually frightened about romantic and sexual intimacy. There's a lot of ways this happens to a person without having to resort to any pathological explanation. When unusually sensitive people "get burned" in romance -- either because they were accepted or rejected -- it can take a very long time to "start dating" again, and some just never recover the courage to do it again.

(In one of the "Airplane" movies, the pilot and stewardess break up, and the pilot starts to launch himself into outer space. When the stewardess asks what he's doing, he replies: "You don't understand, Elaine -- I can't hack the singles scene again.")

The closest you get is your interior perception of your lover's Imago -- the entity of your lover who dwells within your mind, stretched and tinted from the actual to the perceived as your heart requires your lover to be. (That's intended to be a much nicer way of saying that sooner or later, we all have to "settle" for the real estate broker instead of the Prince, for Irene Zilchmeyer rather than Uma Thurman.)

Some women search for a male as Perfect as Daddy was; some men measure each woman against Mom. Mom and Dad (as we remember them from a nine-year-old's perspective) are very hard acts to follow. As the years go by, this can become a pathology, where the search for romantic perfection conceals an underlying fear of intimacy and relationship.

I think where GG dreaded being burned or rejected, or perhaps sought but never found The Perfect Soulmate, he did "sublimate" and learn to "satisfy" much of his romantic longings in the music he loved and performed. For me, just listening to some of his passages reminds me most closely, of all human experiences, to romantic, sexual or religious rapture. For a master of technique, I know of no GG recording that strikes me as technically cold or emotionless; his body of recordings overflows with the lush, the lurid, with emotional abandon and thrill. (If you don't instantly recognize it in the piano strings, listen more closely to the humming.)