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"We Can Fight with the Mind": Rethinking Transcendence |
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"I ask that more of us remember the potency of questioning what we have been taught or come to value, recall the verity that no creature is precisely identical with the conceptions professed to order it."
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To make an inventory or a critique of our civilization, what does that mean? It means trying to clarify in a precise manner the trap which has made man the slave of his own creations. We can fight with the mind. You know, we never talked about responsibility at the university, not in my time. We never discussed ethics. We were never taught value- thinking. ... We were taught in our closed rooms that we were doing pure science, in the pursuit of pure truth - the noble pursuit of pure truth. What is the true value of knowledge? That it makes our ignorance more precise. We are all players, and we are all being played. For some time now, close to the semester's end, I have turned with my students from laboring at the critical analysis of written texts on behalf of crafting exploratory essays to watching Keith Jarrett play movement 2d of his Tokyo Solo (2006), filmed live at Metropolitan Festival Hall, in 2002. There is, however, a back story to that turn: during my fifteen years of teaching in the essay-driven university classroom, I have used varieties of music in terms of genre, instrumentation, and time-period as a means of fostering students' abilities to critique the patterns among which humans and non-humans live. I appreciate, of course, that we belong to a culture generally disinterested in, and disinclined to value, musical education; that, because of this disinterest, we are led to experience music according to whim, frivolous to the extent that personal preferences often remain ignorant of the analytical rigor in the sound they presume to judge, so that sound itself is doomed to an inconsequence ordained, already, by culture's educational vision. And I appreciate that the human and the non-human alike exist on account of patterning acts which order what both categories know as the world. Sharing my multiple appreciations with students, I advise them that we ought to take music as one instance of the pattern-making whereby we set about the activity of living, adding that what any culture deems unworthy of its schooling-time need not be called simply trivial. Yet my students counter that music is so "abstract" for them that it seems unreal. My reply: though the Latinity of "abstraction" may mean to draw off or away from, these prepositions point to the world of things on whose authority our conceptual acts stimulate our seeming to lift off, away from that world, abstraction and reality thus becoming nouns related not by contradiction - but by their necessary coordination. I understand, nevertheless, that my students' sense of musical unreality has been prepared for by their lack of training; I know that the latter shapes their manners of seeing, hearing, engaging. But we, in or outside the university, are here to enlarge that capacity for engagement. I offer students musical texts, in the hope of enhanced engagement, beginning with our first day together, selecting pieces ranging from a twelfth century ode by Hildegard von Bingen, praising Mary as a "door ... that has been opened," to the incantatory singing of Salif Keita, from Mali; to a section of John Adams' El Niño (2000); to 'Sun in My Mouth' (2001), by Björk, whose swooping, upturned vocal line never quite summons the finality of cadencing, its female voice in a rhapsody of longing to "leap into the ripe air, alive / with closed eyes." All these texts share and manifest a devotion to the difficult. They teach us that our contact with the troublesome thing arises from exposure to a form capable of affecting us, in company with our behaviors, with the concept that human conduct can be rethought, re-patterned, provided that we linger in the meditation which any irksome text enjoins on its participants and resist seeing interpretation as being in the business of expunging from our attention those charges fixed to it. At the service of imagination and what it can produce, I ask students to listen; to watch (if the text's format is audio-visual); to think; to write, simultaneously, in response to the prompts I have outlined for them. I oblige them to describe, in writing, what they hear, see, along with any tensions in the works themselves, any textual elements which appear not to coalesce with their intuition of the wholeness at which each individual piece aims. Such tensions indicate that the text must be different from our expectations regarding it, that the shaped thing is not our duplicate. Unfamiliarity with musical form supports, ironically, the perceiver's (possible) avoidance of confusing what she thinks she knows with the sounds she struggles to draw close to. And this lack of duplication, this making way for the differential, facilitates that mutual speaking by which any dialogue proceeds. Finally, I request that students qualify the character and performance of the patterned sounds themselves, that they detail how these aural shapes affect them, going on to say that they must identify what specific components of the music impede their qualifications, if that impasse should occur, as the effort to enumerate what obstructs us does not destroy relationship but affirms our re-commitment to its urgencies. When they balk at these multiple promptings, when students express amazement at their difficulties, I recall how they were required to negotiate concurrent phenomena on their way to class, for example, how they undertake - all the time - coincident tasks in their mathematics lectures, most likely without complaint. But the entitlement to complain issues from the appeal to partiality to which music and the other arts have been consigned by culture: it marks their apparent frivolity, even if all arts demand from their partakers the perceptual, cognitive, imaginative skills by which any person continues to survive. While the complaints diminish after months of such work, the arduousness to which students must entrust themselves does not, though their experience of it improves over time. Yet, nearing the term's end, over-worked, under-slept, students tell me that, at first hearing/watching Jarrett's performance, they see only an old man in oval glasses, hunched over a piano, sometimes almost moaning, his hands passing over the keys in an umbrella of light that makes the auditorium a sort of cave. And they insist: how can that hunching figure teach me anything; what will I gain from listening to him? These are good questions; they require additional context concerning Jarrett and his career; they demand another envisioned listening. Much of the above suggests, as does Liv Ullmann's character in Mindwalk, that students and teacher may find themselves in "closed rooms," but they bring the outside in with them on their clothing, their books, in the air they breathe, the thoughts they resort to when faced with class-materials that disallow ready-made thinking. Because outside and in always intercommunicate, nothing "pure" ever happens here, in the sense of remaining unadulterated, unmixed, the "truth" to which university coursework aspires at once initiated by, modified in relation to, redirected at, the world on the other side of our classrooms' walls. To proceed ethically, in recognition of such reciprocities, would necessitate our remembrance that what occurs within those walls influences the human management of a world whose physics of friction and balance permits them to go on standing. So, after learning that Jarrett began his career as a pianist at the age of six; that he toured and played with Miles Davis for a number of years; that he never forgot his grounding in classical vocabularies, which extends his ability to silhouette jazz melodies against the harmony that supports them; that his preparations for each solo, improvised concert last a year in which he flexes and nuances the muscular operations of hands, forearms, shoulders, only to "sit at a piano, bring[ing] no material" with him, "clear[ing] his mind completely of musical ideas," as he tells us in the liner notes to his recent release, Testament, all the while acknowledging that "utmost chemical importance" of the audience, since the quality of its members' presence can catalyze, "change the potential and shape of the music" more easily "than the difference of pianos or hall sound," when on tour - my students see, now, more than an old man bent over the keys. They listen to Jarrett building a nine minutes' long near-waltz, the propulsion of its tempo tempered with the ruminative cast of a melody that rises and falls, beginning in the upper voice, moving to middle and lower registers, cradled by the complex harmonies intersecting it. They hear Jarrett start to hum, halfway through, watch him stand close to full height, look at how his right hand, tracing the melody's ascent, leans its index finger hard on a sustained note, bearing down on the key as if fingering a cello string in order to elongate the croon of its vibratory power. They will sense the crux of this auditory-visual moment, and a few will write, following their second experience of it: it seems that Jarrett's moaning hum is two or so bars in advance of his present placement in the music, a future time-scale intervening in the current instant, both modulated by the past, by Jarrett's listening to the sonic form he began assembling there. Those few students who pinpoint this gathering together of what is, according to received wisdom, separate, disjoined, will assist their colleagues in approaching the claim that a mind in concentrated action allows us to intuit that what divides may, from another perspective, connect, that "player" and the "played" modify each other, as do instrumentalist and audience, as do the intervals of duration in which each body exists, all interlinked by the air between them. Such ideas have many antecedents, among the oldest being those pictured for us in Werner Herzog's film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Dominique Baffier, the curator of Chauvet Cave, is standing alongside the Panel of the Horses, whose images - like everything humanly constructed in the cave itself - originated 32,000 years ago. She asks us to observe the animals' procession across the undulating curves of the limestone wall, to grasp how the cow, the bison, two female lions, rhinoceroses, horses, and aurochs progress in a company of movements thirty feet wide, twenty feet high, from right to left, to mark the ways in which each positive, charcoal outline is impressed on, seems to spring up from, the textured vivacity of the stone, so that drawing, for our ancestors, entailed the ability to remark and to heed those animals recumbent in the wall, to listen for them as they vaulted out under the beseeching, human hand. Pointing to the four horses, arrayed in ascending perspective just above two rhinoceroses, who bunt and jolt their horns in patterned play, Baffier urges us to notice the intermeshing of sound and image: the lips of each horse are parted; each whinnies as the four heads fan out together, up the wall, the whole a polyrhythmic overlay of horse-neigh, horn-jab, and clack. The kinship represented between hearing and seeing, among animals whose assembly is unusual even in art of the Upper Paleolithic period, takes me to Jean Clottes' speculations, in The Evolution of Rationality, that to venture deep underground into the complete dark in order to make paintings and engravings is an exceptional occurrence in human history. Those actions cannot be ascribed to any recognizable practical necessity. If such a tradition persisted for so long (more than 20,000 years), it must have entailed the powerful constraints of beliefs passed on from one generation to the next. (142) Indeed, if, with Clottes, we "consider" the "spirituality" evoked here "as an awakening of a consciousness that goes beyond day-to-day life contingencies, beyond 'simple' adaptation to material necessities in order to get food, to reproduce, and to survive"; if we discern that, through this "spirituality," our ancestors "began to question the world around them, and in it they tried to find a reality different from the one perceived by their senses, the one to which - like other animals - they always reacted instinctively" (133), it nevertheless remains the case that the labored care imaged in the cave exhibits how, for the spirit to climb above, to transcend, materiality, it must hearken to and draw upon the vigor in the stone wall that it has gone to such lengths to meet. Transcendence and immanence thus become co-equals with respect to value: to mount high, the enfleshed spirit must go down, into the earth, and these valued co-equalities, of sound/image, spirit/matter, human/animal, should reflect on the selfhoods committed to their visual enactment. There is a moment in Herzog's film in which Clottes muses on how our painterly forerunners may have understood what we would term the self. Outside, the limestone cliff atop Chauvet Cave high above his head, Clottes theorizes that the pictures in the earth represent their makers' envisioning the "fluidity and permeability" of human selves, seeing that those panels depicting long trains of associated animals, along with the occasional image of a lone bear, an owl, emanate from charcoal-carrying hands palpating stone in order to elicit the life anchored there, the distinctions between maker and made, between one species and another, liquefied by the forces flooding all together. This emphasis on the out-thrust, on what overspreads our now customary boundaries, remains especially pointed in the cave's end-chamber. On a hanging rock perpendicular to the Lion Panel, we discover that the single representation of our kind is a hybrid figure, half bison for the upper part, half human for the lower, where two legs are coupled by an inverted, pubic triangle, the vulva well-indicated. Its hybridity appears to say: here, the human is never in isolation; it does not transcend the species among which it lives but shares in, partakes of, their powers. Yet Herzog's postscript to his film shows us, behind where Clottes stands, just twenty miles away, that the managers of a nuclear plant have constructed a habitat for alligators, their albinism caused by the run-off of contaminated waters, which, embanked, have been made their home. The camera's final shot reveals a pair of them, their white, globulous eyes, the pitted opalescence of their skin. Abiding in toxic pools, they swim, isolated, possessed, patterned by our conception of them. Herzog's parting image ought to school us in the dangers of this shift over millennia, this veering from the liquidity of the self-in-the-cave and its collaborative qualities to our contemporary species (often) recognizing the human according to its capacity for possession, mistaking itself for being ceaselessly in the role of a claimant with respect to other entities. We encounter the peril of that view, for example, in John Searle's discussion of Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, by Antonio Damasio, in which Searle asserts that "we need to explain how our conscious states are experienced, not just as a sequence of isolated qualitative subjective events, but as 'my experiences'" (52), since "whenever I have a conscious experience I always experience it as mine" (50). The force of that possessive pronoun spreads over "experiences" themselves and includes the creatures who perform inside them, meaning that the self equals the compulsion to stake off ownership, to usurp what must be connectible to it, the whole ensemble of concepts transcendent with regard to anything that might impeach its accuracy or rectitude, elevated, eternally, like the soul that many believe outlasts the fragilities of flesh, which fails us - because it dies. I do not ask for a sentimental return to nesting in the caves of our precursors. I ask that more of us remember the potency of questioning what we have been taught or come to value, recall the verity that no creature is precisely identical with the conceptions professed to order it. Patterns and pattern-makers change, so long as the latter combat becoming the slaves of their own "creations," enslaving others in that unchallenged process. Any artwork supporting this resistance can be called worthy: it causes us to think again, to reconsider what merits the time necessary for rethinking. And that, our texts counsel us, is a lesson ripe, always, for the relearning. Bruce Bromley is Senior Lecturer in Expository Writing at New York University, where he won the 2006 Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence. He has performed his poetry and music at the John Drew Theatre (East Hampton); the Berklee Performance Center (Boston); Shakespeare and Company (Paris); The Village Voice (Paris); and at the 1986 Edinburgh Theatre Festival, where the Oxford Theatre Troupe performed his play, Sound for Three Voices. His poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine; his essays and fiction in Out Magazine; the Journal of Speculative Philosophy; BlazeVox Magazine; Environmental Philosophy; Word Riot; Women and Performance; Monkey Puzzle Magazine; The Battered Suitcase; Fringe Magazine; and in Fogged Clarity, among other journals.
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