![]() ![]() This doesn’t mean seeing that the details of our loves are identical, although this can occur. We can also, to an extent, recognize ourselves in others. Neither is it just that we can get good ideas, or follow other people’s methods. It is not just that we can compare ourselves to others, find similarities and draw distinctions. When I see myself, the lower self becomes transparent to a higher part in myself, and that higher part operates under entirely different rules, and has different powers.Įven if I am alone in my room, yet all of my learning takes place within a socially-constructed world, and I am forever learning from and with others. Self-discovery is only possible because a higher part of us is impartial. ![]() If we speak of self-knowledge, then because it is self-knowledge, we can take no one else’s word for it. If one has been touched by the search, then the questions “Who am I?” and “What am I?” always demand a response, although – and perhaps even because – they can never be answered once and for all. However, we must come back to this fundamentally important question of the search for self-knowledge. Only outside of popular music, for example with Gerard Hopkins, do I find even more self-knowledge and musicality combined than I do in Taupin. But in the end, Dylan seems to me to hide behind his presentation, while John and Taupin reveal, and so whatever self-understanding he has remains in obscurity. Incidentally, much as I respect Dylan’s achievements, I don’t hear that much self-knowledge in his songs, although there is certainly tremendous insight and his lyrics often have the musicality I find in Taupin’s. His instrument just happens to be his words, an instrument few can master, and his great achievement is that he developed his art to the lofty degree where his words sing on the page with an unheard melody. And that is that although we exclusively think of Taupin as someone who writes the words, he is in a very real way, a musician. ![]() Meditating on the Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album led me to a discovery which really should have been apparent before, but had somehow escaped me. After all, Taupin is writing lyrics for another person to set to music and perform, and not just anyone, but Elton John. I think that Taupin’s work is marked by an impartiality and even fearlessness as much as Lennon’s was. Certainly, I do not know of anyone else in popular music who has developed such a sustained corpus of work over a period of 30 years. Other than John Lennon, I can think of no other artistes of their era like Elton John and Bernie Taupin for excelling in what I might call “songs of self-knowledge” or perhaps “songs of reflective biography “. But, of course, our experience of our selves on that other level is quite different.Īnd so it is that I return to Elton John, because I sense that sometimes something sublime comes from beyond and can be felt through the songs Of all their work, perhaps John and Taupin touch the sublime most often on these songs of self-knowledge, such as “Someone Saved my Life Tonight”, “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” and “The Sweetest Addiction”. As I said in the first Elton John blog, it is through knowledge of this life and our selves that we come to knowledge of a higher life and, once more, our selves. “It is on your own self-knowledge and experience that the knowledge and experience of everything else depend.”So spoke the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing more than 600 years ago, in what is the greatest work of mysticism in the English tongue known to me (see ch 43 of Clifton Wolters’ translation). ![]()
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