cherry-picking the past

Jimmi lived an intense short life and yet, left a legacy wondrous artistry   

Dear class:

I should clarify some of the points discussed in our last class, since a lot was said. I implied that we should learn to see the past with the proper lenses of the past. You have to start at the bottom and build up to the next level and so on. Without proper context, one's analysis of history is disconnected. History supervenes on events. History is always a collection of events and events are big lumps of contexts. One doesn't go all the way up without proper understanding of what happens at the bottom. 

To that effect, I brought up the Flower Generation of the 1960s and their use of drugs, which is quite different, in terms of social consequence, from, say, our present opioid epidemic. Past & present belong in different social & political contexts. It's a mistake to hastily link the two without sorting the contextual differences. To that effect I made the point that Jimmi Hendrix's formidable artistry cannot be separated from his drug addiction.*

What I meant to say is that wishing for a different outcome in the case of Hendrix's life, i.e., that his life would have been better off without his drug addiction, simply points to a fruitless projection of the present into the perfect sufficiency of the past.

One cannot cherry-pick the past into an idyllic version of one's choosing.

But my point was broader. I wasn't talking about drugs per se, but about comprehending the past in its proper context. Judging the past demands subtle analysis.  

The past comes together with all its GLUNK.

I had Spinoza's Property #33 of his Ethics in mind:

Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order different from that which has in fact obtained.

Which brings us to the actual world. Ours. With all its seemingly unsolvable problems. Our world is perfect in all its foul-smelling nastiness, boundless greed  and gaping horror. But there's also youth, faith, honesty and much beauty. Embrace the world: all of it.

AMOR FATI.

 This world cannot not have you in it!  

____________________
* This in no way glamorizes drug addiction. There is no "glamorization" of a life, because a life is irreducible to any possible description of it. Heroin was the drug of choice of bebop virtuosos that revolutionized jazz in the 1940s: Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, et all. Why do we find this problem? Bebop's context! Perhaps bebop was a sort of "contagious disease." There was the hardship of racial segregation, musical discovery, the hardship of a music form understood only by a few, etc.