“exotic” or even “extraterrestrial” figures

I was thinking again this evening about Jimi Hendrix and the general freakishness of his talent. As mentioned on Blog1, I’m a bit of a Hendrix fan. But even if I didn’t like his music, I would still listen to it in awe. There’s something unearthly about his talent. One might call the Beatles “outstanding” or “unsurpassed in their field,” but in no way do the Beatles seem to belong to some sort of exotic or extra-planetary historical stream.

But in some sense, Hendrix does. Sure, you can always try for an explanation– “blues guitarist working in a rock idiom” does shed some light on what Hendrix is, though you could say the same thing about Jimmie Page or Clapton or many others.

As is so often the case, this reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Lovecraft. It’s the part in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” when the narrator reflects on the strange tiara in the museum display case that later turns out to have been crafted by the intelligent fish-frog creatures.

“All other art objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic defiances of every recognized stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique –Eastern or Western, ancient or modern– which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.”

In recent popular music, I think Hendrix clearly wins the Innsmouth Tiara prize. So often while listening, I shake my head and think “where the hell did he get that idea?”

In philosophy, the Innsmouth Prize has to go to Henri Bergson. When reading Aristotle, or Kant, or Heidegger, or even Nietzsche, you feel yourself positioned somewhere in the long line of famous Western philosophers, and there is nothing really uncanny going on. But with Bergson, I often have the Hendrix-like reaction of: “where the hell did that idea come from?” At times it feels as if Bergson were working entirely outside the Western tradition. Yes, I know influences can be found here as everywhere, but it takes a lot more work in his case than in the others.

In literature, maybe Kafka is a good candidate for the prize.