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Laird Stevens
THEMATIC BIO
Laird Stevens
My life–at least, the part of it that I still carry with me today–began with music. My father played the piano by ear. He played, and I wrapped myself ...view moreTHEMATIC BIO
Laird Stevens
My life–at least, the part of it that I still carry with me today–began with music. My father played the piano by ear. He played, and I wrapped myself in the sound. He was my earliest God. One evening, when my mother put me to bed, she said that I would soon begin piano lessons, and the thought was so electric that I stayed awake until morning.
Seven years later, my beautiful world–impossibly intricate, and shamelessly cerebral–was destroyed in a flood of hormones. There were a few survivors, but the shadow of sex was on them all. To make sex pretty, I called it "love" (as I had been trained to do), but it wasn't love, and it didn't become anything like love until a few years later. Certainly, it had to do with love, but the walk from sex to love was long and difficult to understand.
After that, there was literature. At fifteen or sixteen, I developed an incomprehensible thirst for other people's stories. My story, which was both new and exciting, was not yet connected to anything else. Reading Dickens and Dostoevski and D.H. Lawrence, I found a place to fit in.
And then, finally, there was philosophy. Descartes showed me that nothing I knew was certain. At sixteen, it was easy to agree. I knew that music and love were guiding my life. I didn't even presume to ask why. I knew that if I ever made sense of my life, it would be in terms of the stories that I now read compulsively. But after reading Descartes, I started caring about something quite different. I started caring more about questions than I did about answers. I would get my answers in due time, once I started asking the right questions. And the right questions were the ones that cut deepest into my belief system, the belief system that I, like Descartes, had patched together uncritically from childhood to the present.
Much later (I was twenty-two at the time), I was reading Plato and discovered what he called "the divine madnesses." These were things that we did that made us feel like Gods. But, and this was an insurmountable 'but,' we were not Gods, and could never do these things unless we had the help of the Gods.
The four divine madnesses were music, love, poetry and philosophy. Music was possible only if a God took over our bodies and wrote it for us. The same was true of poetry. Love (and I had no trouble believing this) was a gift of madness from the Gods, and so–unparadoxically–was philosophy: th...view less
Books by Laird Stevens
The New Blue Fairy Book Part 2: Fairy Tales 7 to 12 The New Blue Fairy Book Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe New Blue Fairy Book Part 1: Fairy Tales 1 to 6 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Death Fairy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe New Blue Fairy Book Part 3: Fairy Tales 13 to 18 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNationality: A Case of Mistaken Identity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsParadise Lost Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings