AFTER LISTENING TO TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, I turned to the playlists that Jeet Thayil had sent me to tide through this period of recovery. It included Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations and a standalone song of Thayil with a musician who calls himself The Burning Deck. 'RiverundertheRiver', basedonanoldThayilpoem, remindedmeof Nietzsche's book from which I was just emerging. "Music now brings me sensations such as I have never had before. It takes me away from myself, it sobers me up from myself, as if I oversaw myself from a distance, it gluts my senses … Life without music would be an error, a hardship, an exile," wrote Nietzsche in a letter to Köselitz at around the same time he was writing Twilight. "Without music, life would be an error," says Nietzsche, and then, being Nietzsche, adds, "The German even imagines God as singing songs". The worship of idols also happens through song, the reason, for instance, the word for 'praise' in Bangla can be 'goon gaan', the singing of someone's guna, virtues. A song from Nietzsche's contemporary Rabindranath Tagore comes to my mind, a song that connects these thinkers writing on different continents without either possibly knowing the other's work. It is about walking, walking about which Nietzsche famously said— "Only thoughts that come by walking have any value." 'Aekla chalo re', if no one heeds your call, walk alone; Tagore's song, appropriated opportunistically into an anthem by generations. Inside the verb 'follow' is coded the idea of someone who walks behind, and, in music, the inevitability of the Pied Piper whose survival is dependent on creating a following. Rabindranath, like Nietzsche who dismissed almost the entirety of 'Europe', was rejecting the idea of a following for a creative and spiritual freedom.

Followers

Flight from Followers

Carry on Laughing

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