to

Re-Vision Radio's TOWER OF SONG
Program

with your host
The Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist

This page is designed to provide a conceptual and imagistic background to "Re-Vision Radio."

"Our High Romantic Argument"

Re-Vision Radio's listeners ask:

What I want to know is
How does the song go?
(Grateful Dead)

And everybody knows that on Re-Vision Radio the song goes perfectly with the essay, because Re-Vision Radio puts its philosophical message across best through song. As the song goes:

That's why I'm telling you in song.
(Van Morrison)

... You'll be hearing from me baby
Long after I'm gone
I'll be speaking to you sweetly,
From a window--
In the Tower of Song.
(L.C.)

Re-Vision Radio's Orphic-Romantic Synthesis:
Burning the Candle At Both Ends

The prototypical conception of the primary opposition of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus is one of the outstanding legacies of nineteenth-century Romanticism (philosophically formulated by Nietzsche). Simply put, as the theory goes, these two gods represent contrasting Greek cultural values and their respective psychological aspects; Apollo representing the Olympian civilizing principle, solar consciousness, masculinity, sublimation of instincts, rationality itself, and Dionysus representing the other side, that is, chthonic nature, lunar consciousness, femininity, sexuality, intoxication, ecstasy. The tension between Apollo and Dionysus was thus interpreted, generally, as the two sides of human nature (or the conscious and unconscious part of the psyche; the principle of individuation and the primal chthonic ground) and, particularly, the psychological situation of Western, nineteenth-century man, who, being too over-burdened by Apollonian values, needed to rectify the cultural imbalance by turning to the repressed Dionysian side of things (especially everything that had to do with the visionary "Romantic Imagination") by eclipsing solar-consciousness with lunar-consciousness--"the nightside of things." (This Romanticism was picked up by Freud and is reflected in his ego vs. id psychological theory.)

For the purposes of Re-Vision Radio, Apollo and Dionysus stand for the two archetypal principles of logos and mythos repectively; the principles, or modes of expression, it wants to unite--philosophy and music, dialectics/ argument and song, rationality or the critical intellect and intuition/imagination. And this uniting, comes in the figure of Orpheus, who, as the threshold figure between worlds, mediates the the respective domains of Apollo and Dionysus.

"Later, in the context of Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, we will see Orpheus as the reconciliation of opposites--that is, as Nietzsche suggests, of Apollo as the principium individuationis and Dionysos as the primal chthonic ground, the Ur-Eine."

Orpheus, then, is the Romantic rapprochement of the Apollonian and Dionysian, and is, therefore, the supreme archetype of Re-Vision Radio.

Yeah in the midnight, in the midnight,
I burn the candle
Burn the candle at both ends,
burn the candle at both ends
Burn the candle at both ends,
burn the candle at both ends
And I keep on, `cause I can't sleep at night
Until the daylight comes through
And I just, and I just, have to sing.
Van Morrison

Re-Vision Radio's host, the Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist—master of radio ceremonies—with his late-night Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, seeking the twilight trance-state of reflection and reverie, in anticipation of the nocturnal enchantment of the heartand, and longing to connect with that soulful dark blue-fire rhythm of things, romantically

the ends logos and mythos; reason and imagination—both scholarly rigor and poetical reverie, both the critical analysis and the enraptured intuition, both the down-to-earth investigation and the flight of poetic inspiration, both the critical/scholarly intellect and intuitive/artistic heart, both secular hermeneutics and sacred hermetic/kabbalistic interpretation, both academic research and mystical insearch, both philosophical questioning and romantic questing, both Apollonian discipline and Dionysian abandon; both the sword of cutting discourse and the rose of healing music, both philosophical aptitude with musical amplitude—the ends of the Argument & Song on your radio dial, tuned to the Romantic Tower of Song.

Therefore, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack begins and ends, like the “Romantic Essay,” with an

“impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose, following from a fairly strict following of traditional ‘public’ discourse to modes of prose requiring the virtual abandonment or annihilation of such discourse and often quite literally disappearing into poetry or into the silence of contemplation and vision.”

Re-Vision Radio's Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist ("Radio Master of Ceremonies") broadcasts in exile (in his capacity of "Minister of Information & Culture" for the Visionary Company") from the
TOWER OF SONG

"I listen to the radio and I like all kinds of music, you know, but I like to hear from people who have been there. Hank Williams has been there." —Leonard Cohen

Re-Vision Radio, discovering its true voice and vocation in the American Romantic-Orphic tradition, would sing "The Bohemian Hymn," a la Emerson, and thus emplay a Bohemian mode of scholarship as an artistic endeavor. In other words, Re-Vision Radio’s modern-day Romantic Gypsy Scholar is distinguished by his ability to play with knowledge and create a collage of ideas or an intellectual chamber music of mind-jazz ensembles--a "work of ecstasy" that celebrates, Dionysian style, with "music or dancing." This means that Re-Vision Radio's scholar-artist--an "Inspired Scholar"--doesn’t put scholarship in service to Thanatos (death) that (as Wordsworth complained) "murders to dissect" (reductionism and literalism), but instead puts it in the service of Eros (life and love), which synthesizes and celebrates in the form of a Musekal Philosophy-- in the TOWER OF SONG.

“… a young man so empowered by the spirit of knowledge that he invites miracles.”

It is because the mind is at the end of its tether that I would be silent. It is because I think there is a way out—a way down and out—that I would speak. Sometimes—most time—I think that the way down and out leads out of the university, out of the academy. But perhaps it is rather that we should recover the Academy of earlier days—the Academy of Plato in Athens, the Academy of Ficino in Florence. . . . At any rate, the point is first of all to find again the mysteries. By which I do not mean simply the sense of wonder—that sense of wonder which is the source of all true Philosophy—my mysteries I mean secret and occult; therefore unpublishable; therefore outside the university as we know it; but not outside Plato's Academy, or Ficino's.” –N.O. Brown, ‘Mind At the End of Its Tether’ (Phi Beta Kappa Graduation Address, Columbia University, 1968)

I have chosen the epithet of “Gypsy Scholar” because I’m a grad-student who has fallen outside the conventional academic role. (An autobiographical account of how this came to be was presented in my radio essay, “Musekal Philosophy,” early in 2005.) Suffice to say here that it all has to do with discovering the Romantic poets, writers, and philosophers as a mere freshman in college. Thus, the epithet is taken from a Romantic poem by Matthew Arnold, entitled “The Scholar Gypsy.” [See below.] The added "Bohemian Essayist" epithet comes from the fact that I discovered that the Romantic poets were the spiritual ancestors of the "Beat" poets, who themselves were the early founders of the "counter-culture" of the Sixties. Thus, the radio handle of "Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist" represents my Beat-oriented rejection of the academic establishment and of its high cutlure: "Rouze Up, Oh Young People of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings ! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University, who would, if they could, forever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War" (William Blake). It represents, more precisely, my own attempt to bring togather the best in learned, high cutlure and popular culture, but not through the Ivory Tower, but "that tower down the track." ('The Tower of Song'): As the Orphic scholar, Emerson, put it: “I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low.” Therefore, the "Gypsy Scholar" stands for the affirmation of my "amateur" status (the "love" of it). The other reason for “Gypsy Scholar” is that I understand myself (because of the underground nature of the radio program, and because of the political reality in America today) to be broadcasting in exile—feeling myself to be an alien in my own country—from the “Lonely Towr” of Song.

“Accident and coincidence play as prominent a role in directing and shaping one’s intellectual work as do research skills and discernment, perhaps a larger role.” (?)

My vocation as a radio DJ began my freshman year at an ivy-league college, when I had my very first experience with radio there, which had its studio at the top of the prominet university bell tower. (My first "tower of song"!) It was in the wake of the 1960s, and I especially enjoyed the wrtings of the new generation of socio-literary critics, who would use epigraphs not form elite poetry but from popular rock lyrics (like those of Dylan). After a while, my appetitie for the mixing of the popular and the academic demanded more; not just popular folk-rock or rock lyrics prefacing a learned tome, but bursting out all over the prose-text in a non-linear fashion. My own process of writing college papers reflected this imagined phantasmagorical style. I would listen to the popular music of the time while writing. Sometimes these curious synchronistic moments would happen, wherein what I was writing about would be echoed in a song over the radio. As I became more atuned to these fanatasic synchronicities, their rate seemed to increase. This caused me to concentrate more on the art of writing, and soon I was thinking about the rhythms of the great prose works we were assigned in my English Lit. courses. I found myself wondering about a way to match these prose rhythms with music; i.e., to literally hear these underlying rhythms of syntax by exteriorizing them with music. Alas, these crazy notions didn't get very far. This was, after all, the academy, and students weren't expected to take these kinds of liberties with their papers. Indeed, even though some of my academic mentors were breaking out of the strict form of the dissertation--blending prose and poetry, or writing in aphoristic style--none of them dared to get this funky. Thus, my novel idea of the scholar-as-artist was shelved in the library of my mind until I graduated. Years after, I found myself doing radio, and with the advent of the computer hyper-text, new life was breathed into my scholarly fantasy. I thought, "Why couldn't a new scholarly form of the dissertation be multi-dimensional --text, images, and music? Yet, it wasn't until recently, when radio stations integrated their broadcasts with the internet, that this fantasy could be realized. Thus, I became the "Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist" (not in the Ivory Tower, but in the Musekal Library in the Tower of Song).

The form that my scholarly fantasy took was what I called the "Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack." However, I wasn't content to push the boundaries of academic form by simply inserting popular song lyrics into the essay as epigraph. I would follow the Orphic muse and let the lyric lusters of snatches from song break out between the lines of prose--all over the page. Thus, the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack is thoroughly song-haunted--memorable song lyrics fading in and fading out between the written lines, generating a steady stream of correspondences between the ideas and the music. In reading between the lines of dialectics and song, moving back and forth between the prose and musical--with margins of nuanced associations--, a Soul-text of Musekal Philosophy emerges as a hypertext.

Interestingly enough, I had a curious confirmation of my choice for a radio-scholar name when the famous NPR radio scholar, Maureen Corrigan, came to town last September to promote her book, Leave Me Alone I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books. It certainly sounded intriguing (being that my program comes out of my passion for books and a magical library)—, and even more so when I read the announcement over the air that she would actually be making an appearance in the KUSP studios for a discussion. I was taken by Ms. Corrigan and got her book, which I asked her to autograph. I told her what I did on radio. But little did I know what was in store for me until I opened the book and scanned through it. This is what I discovered on page 97:

“Even when I finally was awarded my Ph.D at thirty-two, I hadn’t yet held down what my parents considered a ‘real’ job. For years before and after I officially became Dr. Corrigan, I was what they call in the profession a ‘gypsy scholar’—one of a multitude of excess eggheads who roam from campus to campus, teaching introductory courses like ‘Composition.’ I became practiced at moving into temporary teaching positions and other people’s offices.”

This was all new to me, and I couldn’t help feeling that my choice for a radio handle was inspired (since I had been doing radio at KUSP for months before the book came out).

Therefore, although I have not yet earned my Ph.D., I consider myself the holder of another office (a higher office): a Prof. of Song—way up here . . . in the Tower of Song.

My ideal for what I do on radio (the Orphic Scholar) is embodied in one figure—Orpheus. The legendary Orpheus was (other than the founder of the mystery school named after him) a bard, a prophet, a rhetorician, and a musician ("a singer of love-songs”). As is well known, Orpheus’ music could perform magic, making inanimate objects come to life and dance. The ancient writers refer to something called “The song of Orpheus.” And some modern scholars write of “The Orphic Voice: the Speech of the Soul.” My vision is of a new kind of scholar, the Orphic Scholar, who wishes to “write anecdotes of intellect” from “that unknown country in which all the rivers of our knowledge have their fountains.” (Emerson). So let me try to convey the heart and soul of my inspiration from that imaginal place (where “I’m paying my rent everyday”), which is located in that “invisible landscape,” or “unknown country.”

"You see him spend his Soul in Prophecy. / Do you believe it a confound lie / Till some Bookseller & the Public Fame / Proves there is truth in his extravagant claim." –William Blake

"The works that take you there have just one meaning. / Thrown into a burning bush with a crackling sound. / What you learn in silence. / What you win through screaming. / What you have is nothing there till you lay it down... " –Bob Franke, song ‘Holy Ground’

Reclaiming the amateur status of a Bohemian Essayist, I do not pretend any pure originality. I freely admit to being influenced by the creative ideas and visions of my favorite writers. But I have to qualify this by also admitting that I make them my own not because they are something totally new or alien to my mind, but because they are immediately recognized as something I've also known but not articulated—something I've already intuited. Because I've lived with and gotten to know these ideas and visions for so long, its practically impossible to separate "my own" thoughts from "their" thoughts and, therefore, I only claim to contribute to the already circulating intellectual and visionary data the novel imprint of my own interests, passions, and insights on the pre-existing work of others. "Tied to this table / In the Tower of Song, I invoke the ancient "Sicilian Muse" and seek to enter the Blakean mental storm of furious invention; thoughts racing ahead of the mind, as I work on the great Insight.

"In the lonely, dead of midnight
In the dimness, of the twilight
By the streetlight, by the lamplight . . .
In the sunlight, in the daylight
And I'm workin', on the insight . . ."
(–Van Morrison)

My only claim to so-called "originality" could be in organizing the material of others in my own novel way; organizing it so that syncretic connexions are made between ideas that have not been, as far as I am aware, heretofore generally recognized (although the information and the clues for a syncretic re-visioning have been laying around for some time). Because I rely so much on the energy of the speculative imagination of the “poet,” I agree with the image of the scholar-as-artist:

"My way of working is one of letting the mind play freely around a subject where there has been much endeavor but little attempt at perspective."

I enjoy a mode of scholarship as artistic endeavor, where the modern-day "Gypsy Scholar" is distinguished by the ability to synthesize and "play with knowledge"--to create “a collage of ideas.” Of course, it has been said before that the business of the writer is to "play with words" (a serious play, as Plato told his students). The Gypsy Scholar's Orphic-Dionysian style of postmodern scholarship has recently been affirmed:

"Today, in the 21st century, the problem is synthesis--collage--how to put it all together, or put it in juxtaposition so it makes some sense." --Jennifer Stone (7/17/7)

My method is largely intuitive (the intuitive imagination of the poet); that is, generally speaking, intuitions and insights come first about a subject, and then I go to the "experts" to substantiate them, as with the following find:

"To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backward. His conclusions are reached before his premises."

“He is an authentic intellectual, able to make transcendental leaps of intellectual connection. So that he can see buried within a play or deep within the plot of a complex symbolist novel the kernals of philosophical ideas going back to the ancients. He’s capable of seeing these connections and eloquently describing them in an accessible way. Capable of synthesizing connections, roots, sources, that usually only scholars who have studied the material extensively over a long period of time can do.”

And my purpose in citing the “experts” is to bring to bear as much scholarly evidence as I can for my intuitions. In other words, bring the weight of recognized scholarship to support my independent ideas/insights—my "extravagant claim.”

“As creative artists often do, he pursued his work by means of ‘hunches’ and ‘intuitions' that shot ahead of his analytical mind.”

It should be pointed out that my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack falls between the cracks of conventional, academic composition, locating itself in the genre of the Romantic Essay (which demonstrated the Romantic's penchant for the mixing of genres); the "conjunction of Reason and Passion that didn't draw sharp lines of differentiation between poetry and the impassioned, eloquent, and powerful prose". Thus, my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack, begins

"from a fairly strict following of traditional 'public' discourse to modes of prose requiring the virtual abandonment or annihilation of such discourse and often quite literally disappearing into poetry or into the silence of contemplation and vision.”

And therefore, my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack seeks, through the magic of the coming together of the spoken word and music—of argument intermixed with song—, to conjure up a mood, which is, at the same time, a thinking mood; a new mood of thought—“Reason in her most exalted mood”—the thought of the heart in its higher, visionary mode. So, in creating a kind of Orphic medley of knowing and loving, I'm affirming the return of eros to scholarship (from Plato) and, thus, asserting the intimate connection between knowing and desire, between love and ideas; when we love we want to know, we love to know—knowing and desiring are two sides of a single creative moment. This means that the kind of scholarship I practice is not in service to what the Romantic poet, Wordsworth, called “murders to dissect” (to the principle of analytical reductionism), but rather in service to the principle of eros, which unifies and celebrates--a "work of ecstasy" that celebrates, Dionysian style, with "music or dancing." This means that the "Gypsy Scholar" is a scholar-artist--an "Inspired Scholar." This union of philosophy and love (eros) looks back to Plato and Socrates (The Symposium), and means that in the Tower of Song you can’t tell whether the philosophers are singing of love’s ecstasies, or whether the lovers are reciting philosophy’s arguments.

However, it would be a misunderstanding to think that I’m taking a “new-age” position in rejecting (or devaluing) critical thinking and its methods; no, I want to combine both analysis and synthesis.The Prelude, that "glorious faculty," which is noted: "higher Reason or poetic imagination.") My ideal of scholarship is, surprisingly, very ancient, and goes back—“way, way, back”—to Plato’s philosophy, in which: "Intellectual rigor [read: logic] and Olympian inspiration [read: mythopoetic] no longer stood opposed.” After Plato’s synthesis of logos and mythos, it was the nineteenth-century Romantics who took up the abandoned project of reuniting philosophy with poetry, or reason and imagination—attempting to heal the wound between head and heart. Thus, my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack takes its cue from 19th-century “Romantic Essay,” in that “it engages the reader in a discursive process,” and moves in a pattern from “discursive argument to poetry,” being a “text of self-discovery.” In bringing together Argument & Song, my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack“a union of fact and imagination,” which refuses to “separate imagination and intellect, inner experience and the world,” and strives toward that “moment in which poetry, philosophy, and criticism begin to coalesce.” In this coalescence of Philosophy and Music, poetic enthusiasm is no enemy to scholarly discipline.

The way my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack works rhetorically is by utilizing both reason and imagination; both scholarly rigor and poetical reverie, both the critical analysis and the enraptured intuition, both the down-to-earth investigation and the flight of poetic inspiration, both the critical/scholarly intellect and intuitive/artistic heart, both secular hermeneutics and sacred hermetic/kabbalistic interpretation, both academic research and mystical insearch, both philosophical questioning and romantic questing, both Apollonian discipline and Dionysian abandon; both the sword of cutting discourse & the rose of healing music, both philosophical aptitude with musical amplitude—so that the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack finally leads not to ponderous academic desiccation but to ecstatic Dionysian celebration—a sort of mind-jazz ensemble. Therefore my Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack’s hybrid “flowers of discourse” dissolve the boundaries between scholarship and art, dialectics and poetry, rhetoric and lyric; between, that is, Argument & Song—so much so that it is hoped the listener can’t make out where the argument leaves off and the song begins, and vice versa. “Language is a rose, and the future is still a rose, opening. . . .” (Carole Maso)

Therefore, having come this far in my vocation as a Gypsy Scholar & Bohemian Essayist, I can only give this farewell to my academic fathers: (Note: What I reject is the new-age abandonment of the "left brain," i.e., critical thinking in favor of the "heart," which, ironically, is anything but a "balanced" paradigm. I favor not the solving of the Western mind's dominance of "reason" by going to the opposite extreme of un-reason, but by the synthesis of reason/logic and imagination/intuition--the "left"- and "right-brain." Therefore, the new-age claim that one doesn't need reasoning powers because one has "intuition" is myopically wrong-headed. From the synthetic point of view, one's "intuition" is reason--logos--taken to a higher power--thus Emerson's "living, leaping Logos," which he identified with the higher Reason of Hermes Trismegistos. Wordsworth concurs, naming it in his poem, aims at

"Ah ye old ghosts! ye builders of dungeons in the air! why do I ever allow you to encroach on me a moment; a moment to win me to your hapless company? In every week there is some hour when I read my commission in every cipher of nature, and I know that I was made for another office, a professor of the Joyous Science, a detector & delineator of occult harmonies & unpublished beauties, a herald of civility, nobility, learning, & wisdom; an affirmer of the One Law, yet as one who should affirm it in music or dancing, a priest of the Soul yet one who would better love to celebrate it through the beauty of health & [the] harmonious power [of music].” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

In the Orphic Essay-with-Soundtrack’s wild embrace of both mind and heart, the eye of soul opens, and a soul-text gives voice to the full-bloomed gnosis of love and the love of gnosis. "A lady asks me/ I speak in season/ She seeks reason for an effect, wild often/That is so proud he hath Love for a name." (Ezra Pound) In presenting the fruits of my intellectual work, through scholarship as performance art (Blake's “Mental Studies & Performances”), I look back to a mentor (the poet-prophet of Imagination), who addressed his readers in the following way:

"The Author hopes no Reader will think presumptuousness or arrogance when he is reminded that the Ancients entrusted their love to their Writing, to the full as Enthusiastically as I have . . . for they were wholly absorb'd in their Gods. . . . Therefore, dear Reader, forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent." --William Blake

"Mr. ___ writes as an Orphic musician; not one who plays literally on a lyre, but one who calls forth the harmonic and tuneful voice of being itself."