For the past 40 years I, Michael Art Moss, Ph.D., have been compiling thought pieces aka gedenkenexperimenten.  Many are gems of introspection, compact, compressed, and evocative.  Most arise from the depths of the unconscious, vary in intensity and focus, but all are thought provoking.

When I began writing, my unconscious was stirred up by anti-war activism, the evolution of consciousness, studies of Jung, Freud, Reich, Sullivan, Anna Freud, and other psychologists.  I was playing the music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, the Chicago Blues, Otis Redding, James Brown, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy and demonstrating in the streets.  I had just started to compose and was stretching out from tunes to concept pieces.  Energy was everywhere, I was in love, working with my soon-to-be wife Judith Canner as she and her dancer colleagues choreographed new pieces.

But I always had my own voice.  I’d been improvising since age 9. My father, H. Baron Moss, a graduate of Eastman School of Music, and a product of Julliard in NYC, was a prodigy with enormous wit, talent, intelligence, and energy.  He brought me along through an often tempestuous and stormy relationship into my own, always encouraging me to find my own voice–but only after learning the fundamentals.  His belief in me filtered down to my choice of reading and eventually to my desire to both compose and to write down my thoughts.

It is my strong belief that you define yourself by writing down your ideas.  This follows from Apollinaire, cubists, poets, physicists and other scientists, and artists.  My written work is often difficult to read, often self-referential, and occasionally rewarding for those who undertake it.