DRAWING DISTINCTIONS LINKS CONTRADICTIONS
Herbert Brün




I shall tell what I think while remembering Arnold Schoenberg, rather
than tell what he thought while predicting us. Where he was right, we
should be deeply ashamed, and where he was in error, I, at least, shall not
gloat. I can hear and understand the music he desired to compose, and
while writing the following pages I thought, not only, but in particular, of
his Trio.




DRAWING



Arnold Schoenberg, just as Karl Kraus and Charles Ives, knew and ex-
pressed how passionately dedicated he was to the society which, as he
understood it, he could not stand, and which, as it understood him, could
not stand him. His life and letters and prose and poetry and theory and
composition demonstrate how he tried to distinguish himself in and from
this society. Both. To draw both distinctions at once was his theme and
subject matter, even though this meant courting blatant contradiction
while dealing, apparently, with mere conflicts.

To the understandable horror of all believers in consistency, coherence,
communication, perfect models, and other such comfort providing, dis-
tinction removing paradigms, he successfully drew this distinction; is suc-
cessfully drawing it.




DISTINCTIONS



Not many people know how passionately dedicated they are to the society
which they can not stand. Unaware of their living in contradiction they
live in conflict.

Not many people know how passionately dedicated they are to the society
which can not stand them. Unaware of their living in conflict they live in
contradiction.

Nobody can stand not being stood.

Nobody wishes to admit that.

Everybody, therefore, searching for an admissible degree of relative com-
fort resorts to proper English and falsifies the issue, thus: It is difficult to
understand why one is not understood.

This proper English falsification underlies the prose and poetry written
about Arnold Schoenberg by those of his friends and followers who, once
his apologetic avowers, today, equally apologetically, disavow him. It is an
underlie, because it is not at all difficult to understand why one is not un-
derstood, and that one is not stood because one is understood, and that one
can not stand that which one understands precisely because one does.

Not many people know that a discovered contradiction needs to be pro-
tected against apologetic explanations reducing it to mere conflict.

Even fewer people know that conflicts can be resolved within the system
in which they are said to be conflicts, and that contradictions can not.

To turn contradictions into conflicts is the concern of the reformer who
criticizes the flaws in a desired system.

To turn conflicts into contradictions is the concern of the revolutionary
who criticizes the flawlessness of an undesired system