Admittedly, my ideal audience is a bit extravagant. According to most they “take their art too seriously.” According to themselves they take art “exactly as it should be taken.”

In a world where all that was once sacred is now mocked, my ideal audience treats theatre like church; poems as scripture; artists as the prophets of God. Their cencers are rosewood pipes and Indian cigarettes; eau-de-cologne of Tobacco, Oud, Vanilla.

In this after-Modern theme of sugar pop and other ephemera, my ideal audience is drinking their bitter wine out of the available cups, reading sweet smoky pages from The Oxford Book of American Verse; out loud and under fire; they hold forth an elegant middle gesture to the mocking world.

On this spinning, post-Shakespearean globe, post-Virgil, post-Homer, post-Solomon, post-Abraham, post-Gilgamesh, my ideal audience is sailing the wild oceans with and without letters of marque, preferring Zorba but understanding Des Esseintes, being hundreds of thousands of Faerie Queenes and Sir Walter Raleighs.

My ideal audience in this dawning aion does not care for displays of non-dramatic irony, nor for those bad-faith religious propagandations which seek to mutilate and invert the holy myths; nor for those moralizers who hate death, rebirth, and The Golden Wheel.

In this post-Euclidean, post-Galileean, post-Copernican, post-Newtonian uni-verse; beyond all gods, truth or intuition; where the last anti-men consume themselves with pretensions of perfect sub-atomic vibrations, my ideal audience—knowing that light is approximate—are dancing in sunshine; certain of magic, giving the gods their due.

Excerpted from The Philosophy of Jazz Music and Other Essays, Manasseh David Israel is the editor-in-chief of The American Sublime magazine.