Listening to John Lee Hooker, “Serves You Right To Suffer”, to the restrained violence of his guitar and his gentle voice, and I know it’s the real thing, that it’s music in a sense that almost nothing made today is, in that it speaks to more than the mind or the body. It’s more than Radiohead (whom I admire) playing games with chords and rhythms; more than uninspired electronic music playing accompaniment to movements of our bodies. The modern performers, who almost never deserve to be called artists, most of them spoiled from birth, accrue and invent suffering: they take up causes, write uninformed stories, or borrow old tales whose resonances they feel without understanding–and John Lee Hooker sits down with his guitar and a slab of plywood to rest his feet on, and makes something that I (spoiled from birth) can feel even though I don’t understand.

And I know this because I can feel him straining against his form: his sorrow pushes and fills the simple chord progression like Shakespeare filled the iambs of his black sonnets, like Borges leaks through his translations…while me and my hyperintellectualized age, we grind up forms, toy with them, give them names which we argue endlessly, recombine them, all in the hope of of hearing something new: like Klee or Burroughs we are trying to find something unexpected; whether it is a new pain or a new pleasure is irrelevant (and probably indistinguishable) to we whose lives are plastic-coated waking dreams.

We shall not. We have already been given all things, and we have been given the desires whose failure means suffering, whose difficulties are joy. So long as everything is satisfied we will be unable to create art, be incapable of revolution, unable to love. There will be beauty and cleverness; there will be violence; there will be desire: and they will all be shadows.