Healthy stability, which is not excessive or rigid, is an important part of good order.
I have constructed this model with an emphasis on change and progress but in our everyday affairs, people also need stability. It is indispensable to the development of good habits and practices. Emotionally too, people need a sense of orderliness in their lives, even people whose lives we would not use as models of stability or orderliness. Stability is what makes it possible for us to function in such a way that we can be confident of our actions, and thereby develop our capacities and express them more fully.
Real
True Narratives
On the virtues of monarchy, flawed as it is:
- Paul Thomas Murphy, Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy (Penguin Books, 2012): in outliving most of their “subjects,” long-reigning monarchs “reassure their country that it too will survive.”
On personal stability:
- Mary Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976): “As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is antinostalgic: it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the “female avenger”—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.”
From the dark side, on a large scale:
- Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (Viking, 2021): “Ackerman contends that the American response to 9/11 made President Trump possible.”
Documentary and Educational Films
- Surfwise: a documentary that portrays the instabilities in the life of a strange and problematic Israeli doctor driven by a desire to surf, and take everyone with him
Imaginary
Visual Arts
- Paul Klee, New Harmony (1936)
- Ivan Aivazofsky, View of Constantinople by Moonlight (1846)
Shadow side:
- Marcel Duchamp Sad Young Man in a Train (1911-12) (shadow side)
Fictional Narratives
Novels:
- Jean Thompson, The Year We Left Home (Simon & Schuster, 2011): “a Midwestern family strugglest for economic and emotional stability.”
Film and Stage
- Videodrome: a antithetical film on some simple virtues, Videodrome follows the protagonist’s descent from hardcore pornography into the torture, murder and mutilation of “snuff films”
Poetry
Poems:
- John Keats, “Bright Star”
- Robert Frost, “On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
The Three Sounds was a piano-forward jazz trio, consisting of a pianist (Gene Harris), a bassist (Andrew Simpkins) and a drummer (Bill Dowdy). The group stayed together from its formation in 1956 to its disbandment in 1973. Their membership never changed, though occasionally they recorded with a guest artist. To get the point further, listen to their first album, then to their last album; then listen to any of the others. They all sound the same, except in “Groovin’ Live at the Penthouse, 1964-1968”, on which they stepped forward, perhaps in response to a live audience; and on “Coldwater Flat” and “Soul Symphony”, on which they played with an orchestra. The group never grew and never changed. It just pumped out solid, listenable jazz, on album after album.
- “Introducing the 3 Sounds” (1958)
- “Bottoms Up!” (1959)
- “Good Deal” (1959)
- “Moods” (1960)
- “Feelin’ Good” (1960)
- “It Just Got to Be” (1960)
- “Blue Hour” (1960), with Stanley Turrentine as the headliner
- “Here We Come” (1961)
- “Hey There” (1961)
- “Babe’s Blues” (1961)
- “Out of This World” (1962)
- “Black Orchid” (1962)
- “Blue Genes” (1962)
- “Blues After Dark”
- “Coldwater Flat” (1968)
- “Elegant Soul” (1968)
- “Groovin’ Live at the Penthouse, 1964-1968”
- “Soul Symphony” (1969)
- “Live at the ‘It Club” (1970)
Jazz, which grew out of blues and African-American traditions during the Jim Crow era, was therefore naturally predisposed toward challenging musical conventions. Perhaps in reaction to this, cornetist Bix Beiderbecke became an exponent of hot jazz, which employed more traditional, even box-like forms of musical expression. With its vocal passages that sound like a men’s ensemble from an Ivy League University, the idiom that could well be termed “white man’s jazz.”
In another vein, Jimmy Lyons was an alto saxophonist known mainly for his work with free jazz master Cecil Taylor. Despite the inherently avant garde qualities of the music, Lyons used his grounding in bebop to keep the eccentric Taylor “tethered to the jazz tradition.” For example, listen to some of Taylor’s albums and live performances:
- “Live at the Cafe Montmartre” album
- “Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come” album
- “Cecil Taylor Unit” album
- “3 Phasis” album
- “The World of Cecil Taylor” album
- “Conquistador” album
- “Unit Structures” album
- “Dark to Themselves” album
- Live in Paris, 1969
- Live at the Knitting Factory, 1991
- Live in Köln, Germany, 1977
- Live in Germany, with dancers
- Live in Prague, 1999
Compositions:
- Haydn, La vera constanza (True Constancy) (1778)