Autobiographical Note

Music is about resolution. Tension is created, only to be ultimately resolved. It is always the same story, but it's the telling of the tale, the specific telling details and surprises, that makes it art. Art is about resolution, but it can suspend a point in the tale or tell only part of it, leaving the other mind to sort it out and resolve it.

When I was 17, I went through an explosive tour through the world of art, a world beyond ken for me, the Mormon boy from the suburbs of L.A. Our parents were aerospace workers, their parents immigrants to California, from somewhere else. My father was born in Kansas, my mother in Compton, the Model City. Art meant nothing to them. Craft, yes, but not art. They literally had no idea of it. So, reading Dostoyevsky, listening to Ravel, and repeatedly watching 2001, The Wild Bunch, and Clockwork Orange, I slowly realized that everything religion had promised me and failed to delivered, art offered and more. Art is about resolution, but did art resolve the questions religion posed? Glimpsing, almost mystically, the ultimate resolution at the source of all resolutions through immersion in so many great works, and listening to the voices of artists who claimed their works had come upon them almost like possession, I realized that great art was the result of revelation, and that all great art echoed the ultimate resolution at the heart of all things, and I named that ultimate resolution, God.

Art is about God. Art is the ongoing revelation of God on the human plane. We humans can only contact God humanly. No other option is available to us. There are no tools or instruments that do not ulimately require the use of our all too human senses and brains to understand it. We cannot experience the ultimate resolution, the point of the big bang, the unseen forces that still link all into one. This is not a human experience, but we can resolve the tensions in our own selves and come to a point of living in the shadow of the ultimate resolution, experiencing it as a human being. This is the point of religion, or should be. It should provide a ritualistic method, combined with a powerful narrative, to allow the person to resolve the unresolved issues of his life. The unresolved is poison and the decision to resolve the unresolved is the one decision a human being actually can make with his free will. It is this decision which sets a person on the path.


I came to the conclusion that contemporary art was excellent at portraying the unresolved issues of moden life, they offered little in the way of resolution. If anything, they pointed to some ill-defined and sentimental communist paradise where there would be no tension to resolve or they cynically advised to hunker down and accept the inevitable unresolvability of life. I made note of this approach, which pointed to the limits of spiritual knowledge and experience available to human beings, but I wanted to experience life in a community where everyone was trying to live resolved lives and actively trying to create a community to support this process. Having been raised in a newly minted religious institution, I didn't trust any modern religions, so I began reading about the classical world religions, as well as taking an interest in astrology, alchemy, tarot, and hermetics as different symbolic systems. I believed that each of these systems, if examined as a whole, would point to the ultimate resolution which would be manifested in an irenic ethical system.

I found that within any strand of religion, even Mormonism, one could find the way to the ultimate resolution laid out intellectually, but it was seldom practiced. Practicing it entailed undergoing various epiphanies brought on through testing and study. These were often elaborate and illogical rules governing every aspect of life, but pursued properly, with personal instruction, these methods ultimately induced an experience of the ultimate resolution