HEADED FOR . . . WHAT?

Jennifer Granick

Stand back!  Here come those four horses again!  This time their names are:   "Centralization, regulation, and globalization," Granick said, have wrought havoc on a space once thought of as "a world that would leave behind the shackles of age, of race, of gender, of class, even of law."

Wait!  That’s only three horses.  Read this story to figure out what the fourth horse’s name is.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/08/06/dream-internet-freedom-dying-warns-top-civil-liberties-attorney

Already this morning people are finding they are blocked from this blog.  I’m glad they tell me.  But worse is the plague of people who know what’s wrong, which to their minds is either due to my deficiencies (user error) or a lamentable lack of knowledge and superior judgement that they happen to have.  

Helpers, like the people who want to “help” me by coming over and getting all my property in shape: mowing the lawn, getting rid of the cats and books, and forcing me to buy a new wardrobe.  They never realize that conformity is a source of violence, unless they’re asked to put in a water meter or wear seat belts or stop driving drunk or make sure their kids are vaccinated.

So the people who wish me well set out to “fix” my problem with the Internet.  Except for the techies at 3Rivers who are employed on the premise that they will do this, if they can spare time from telling me how much 3Rivers appreciates me and advising me to “have a nice day.”  They tell me lots of irrelevant things in jargon I don’t understand.

If I wrote what I know about kittens, people would scream, because they haven’t known what happens to kittens and cats, how much they are metaphors for both that which is cute (but expendable) and that which is malevolent.  Terrible, daily, blood-soaked fates for many animals.  Cuteness and hiding are not very effective defenses.  The most vicious people on the planet are those who insist that human babies be conceived, carried to term and born.  At that point, they are abandoned: no help for food, shelter, and education.  Controllable. Commodities.

Medium.com is another place where I post.  It’s in a state of becoming, always adding and subtracting features, which is what the techies love, but I can never anticipate which feature will work when, so I just write my posts on iPages (which cannot be upgraded in the US -- I suppose it’s a legal loose end from when Apple bought it) or on Blogger (prairiemary.blogspot.com)  and then cut and paste.  Don’t tell anyone, because if they figure that out, they’ll block it.

They don’t understand why I write.  On Medium.com this post will appear as a “response” to one of Tim’s raving rippers which is classified as a “response” to some nice perky little high school assignment about why you should write short stories, even if they don’t sell.  I think that eventually Medium will have to begin censoring content.  I hope they censor the stupid.  Maybe they could start a parallel stream for the darker folks.  Maybe they could put a little black bat on those posts as a warning.

Tim writes from his gut, explosive and vulgar -- but real.  He says his alternative is to go crazy.  I don’t care why he writes -- I just love the energy and surrealism.  I write because I love the act of writing and I don’t care whether it sells or anyone reads it or I get praise.  People usually praise the wrong thing anyway.  They read as voyeurs and force readers into their fetish life.  You don’t think perky naive little females have a fetish life?  They ARE fetishes.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-give-a-mouse-a-xanax-1438978022  Last night I read this snarky little review of LeDoux’s new book, “Anxious”.  The reviewer missed the point.  The book is a sort of summary of what we know so far,  that addresses our unbalanced neglect of our pre-existing mammal processes.  The standing order of scholarship is based on writing, logic, and other white male European priorities. In that context, all is words and that’s our entitlement and superiority as humans, so why consider anything else? 

But LeDoux is a musician -- he can think in sound patterns and emotional valences.  Without words.  This is exactly what I’ve been working on in terms of the meaningful experiences we call “worship, ritual, ceremony, liturgy” in order to get beyond all the verbiage, which someone always wants to copyright.

LeDoux is a major scientist making genuine breakthroughs about how brains work.  He sent me a response worthy of Wittgenstein, who famously said that sometimes words are useless to convey a concept and all you can do is point.  I sent LeDoux an email to nudge him about Stephen Toulmin, who was a good pointer.  So LeDoux, who knows this, was happy to be reminded of Toulmin, and knows that I have a vague idea of Wittgenstein, so he sends me a single emoticon.  A smiley face.

My father used to sign letters with a little drawn smiley.  When I was starting out in Browning, I drew one with a scribble of curly hair and round glasses.  I did that so much that Bob made a rubber stamp of it.  He thought it was cute and funny, though rather childlike, but I was much younger than he and did what he told me, like a rubber stamper, so his assumed concepts came through in that act, a gift.

It was education in theatre and thought that revealed this invisible subtext, and that eventually ended the relationship.  Because though he was older and admired by many, I could not explain this to him -- he didn’t want to hear it.  So much of helping and generosity is a cover for control.  So much of control is a matter of denying reality, reducing it to little cartoons, using white-out to deny suffering.  I wanted a little control.  I stopped drawing that face and threw away the rubber stamp.

The irony and tragedy is that Bob was also a musician, a jazz musician at that.  But what I saw was a man wearing himself out, shrinking his brain through age, self-abuse, bad nutrition, heart attacks, little strokes, suspicion of doctors, efforts to control.  All because he needed to be famous.  And what I saw after his death was hyenas parting him out for profit, dispersing his lifework to suit their own importance, denying and distorting him for politics.  It happens to everyone, including Charlie Russell.  So why create a body of work?

Why is Joe LeDoux doing much much more than offering Xanax to mice?  If you don’t know, just go buy an anthology of short stories instead, the ones written by perky little girls who shone in high school and still think that going to a bookstore to read her writing to an audience of three, one of whom is stone deaf, means anything at all.  After all, she’s wearing pink feather handcuffs like Helen Mirren in that movie -- what was it called?  Oh, yeah:  “Love Ranch,” about a Nevada brothel.

The fourth horse is called “Who’s on Top?”

EMBODIMENT IN SONG

Version by Nathan Fillion

The third function of the brain -- after accepting and filtering the sensorium and converting it into concepts -- is bodily action: moving muscles, both the big ones like running and the little ones like licking your lips.  As the structure of the body evolved, so that we stood up and held our arms out to the sides in that da Vinci wheel of the human being, a small/large set of evolving abilities began to interact.  This synthesis allowed the emergence of the human voice as a musical instrument, a kind of bagpipe with living lungs (from standing upright) and the ability to interrupt the column of air in various subtle ways.

When you take a class in singing or speaking, one of the exercises is to repeat and repeat thetipofthetonguethelipsandtheteeth thetipofthetonguethelipsandtheteeth thetipofthetongue
thelipsandtheteeth thetipofthetonguethelipsandtheteeth, because it is an exercise that makes you move those very structures.  

More properly, it should go: 

the column of air

the larynx

the pharynx

the bony sinuses

the tongue

the teeth

the lips

They are all involved in making the music of singing, which draws in spoken words, because once sounds are flexible and controllable, they are available to be metaphorical and the sounds in combination can stand for meanings of things perceived by the sensorium and also the viscera (emotion).

Fingers can also act on the environment to make sounds: percussion, vibration, narrow apertures, plucked strings, struck keys, drawn bows.  Those sounds can be put into concatenation with the voice sounds and their meanings.  Maybe it was the fingers on instruments that taught the fingers to write, to take that set of oral spoken meanings and re-metaphor them as marks -- chiseling, carving, imprints on a receiving surface with a stylus, using a small instrument to make an ink trail.  Voice sounds were easier to symbolize and line up -- left to right or the reverse or top to bottom -- than were the instrument sounds, which were devised as symbols a little later after people thought about the scale, the chord, treble, base, the staff lines.  The science of controlling fingers and breath to make a flute noise could be figured out by a child, but it took more accumulation of patterns to write symphonies.

Human accomplishments managed by the brain arrive through capacities offered by the body and then learned by the brain, inscribed on the Jello cerebral cortex, neuron by neuron, which can then be synthesized into something emergent.  Emergence is the product of mutation (new opportunities) developing into a new synthesized skill.

As much as we love wordlessly humming a tune and whistling while we work all alone, the capacity to sing, to metaphorize speaking and writing, meant being able to do it in a group as an art form of coordination among people, both to be in tune and to harmonize, to organize the form into stanza and refrain and chorus.  It was not just speaking but also singing that was one doorway to the fourth brain, the communicating community communing, not just understanding information but becoming in tune, both as an aesthetic entity, a chorus, and also as a group that shares meaning.

Often today I’m frustrated when dealing with young people because they talk without moving their lips, as though the tipofthetongueandtheteeth were the only structures involved.  They do not produce the plosives, fricatives, or hum of closed lips that are consonants.  I can’t tell what the hell they’re saying.  When I ask for a repeat, they give me the same flickering moan as before, except louder.  

Someone else can figure out why they do that -- whether they are ashamed of their words, hiding, or think it is too much effort.  Maybe it’s part of the whole backlash against “doing the right thing well” that is part of the emergence we call culture.  Instead of “read my lips,” they seem to be doing “read my mind.”  It would be easier to do the latter if they would meet my eyes with theirs.  This is the era of the hidden.  Maybe it’s a deeper code that I haven’t learned.

Jessye Norman

Maybe we’ve let the whole thing about drawing up codes, laws, regulations, and prescribed consequences go too far, so that the “paper” is overwritten and annotated to the point of becoming a big rubbed-out blur.  Perhaps our brains are scarred by an assaulted sensorium; maybe we’re not getting enough time for the cells to form the tokens of concept; maybe our game board has no squares to land on that reward clear speech and beautiful sound.  Will there be no more Jessye Normans?

On Sunday mornings some Methodist congregations begin before the formal liturgy with singing.  It is an emotional denomination -- at an extreme, speaking in tongues in a way that breaks the words but keeps thetipofthetonguethelipsandtheteeth interrupting the column of air, resonating in the chambers of the bones under the face, not just standing for feelings but more primarily becoming the feelings, because it is the lungs, the diaphragm, and the other blood-flow-dependent parts of the body that amount to emotion.  Each person with the simultaneous whole, gathering the congregation into a resounding chorus until the sanctuary shakes with it, a concerto for human voices "in concert."

Does anyone sing with their computers?  I keep meaning to use voice more, learning to see music, not in notation but in the tracings of the vibrations on the screen.  

Singing in the congregation draws the people together into that Fourth Brain so that its meaning is clear and can feed back into the Second Level, the processing done by interacting parts -- the inscribing of memory tokens and, Third, the path actions should take.  It is the synthesizing, the synergy, of all the four stages of the brain’s work that gives rise in the end to identity, the whole thinking, feeling, acting person.

This quote comes from the announcement of a “psychoanalytic educational forum” in Boston led by Neal Kass, MD, and called “Body Music: Getting Next to Deep Emotional Experience."  Kass says,  “Felt experience, especially traumatic emotional experience, is held by people in their bodies.  If one listens, there is a music to this bodily configuration.  For two people to experience together, there is a visceral, musical, bodily connection that allows often dissociated felt experience to emerge into a mutual play-space. . .  Clinical material from the analyses of two adolescents in which music was literally involved will be explored in detail.  Music can help two people live together in a shared place, a play space, and in turn this transforms the shape of held emotion.  The musical play modality will help us explore the overall dilemma of joining another in felt bodily experience.”    

UUMA Service of the Living Tradition

Where two or three gather and sing, one might recover sanity (or maintain it) and if the chorus grows, if the tokens of indignation, sorrow, desire, brokenness and aspiration accumulate enough, a new board game -- a new culture -- can emerge.  That’s why nations have anthems, that’s why labor unions have blues, that’s why denominations have hymnals.  The best moment in a whole year of ministry was always going to the General Assembly, attending the Service of the Living Tradition for the ministers, and pealing out:

Rank by rank again we stand,
from the four winds gathered hither.

Loud the hallowed walls demand

whence we come and how, and whither.

That's why Blackfeet have drums.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Pr1LVdwSw  And the wind was there with them.

POST-EVERYTHING

I’m developing a meta-theology which has to be either a philosophy or a cosmology since I don’t accept a theos. Not even one defined in abstract terms. God is dead. There is no such category in my thinking. All you people who think that since I’m a “nice lady” -- whatever that is (I suspect it means that you think I’m like you and would approve of you) -- I must deep down believe that god is love or the ground of being or some other abstract thing. Some master principle that unifies everything.

Why do we need a master principle? Why isn’t everything simply itself? Whatever it is. If no one can really conceive of it whole, why should we trouble ourselves? A recent correspondent was worried about the idea that there is no reality, but it has long been established that each of us takes from the universe what we can perceive and then -- with a little guidance from the culture and our genetic endowment -- maybe a little cultural input -- we set up our categories. Some will never vary over a lifetime, preferring to ignore any evidence that contradicts their favorite ideas, esp. those that put a crimp in our egos.

I’ve entirely missed some ideas that come from the language of popular cosmology, taking the “felt” issues to music. The U of Chicago Div School’s Monday essay was about “Death Gospel.” There has been some debate over the religious relevance of the genre's title. In February of 2012, “Professor M. Cooper Harriss of Virginia Tech published an article about the genre and its connection to modern culture. In it, he concludes that "‘Death Gospel’ offers an interesting rejoinder to a culture that denies death and decay, insisting instead that particular individualities require a universal point of convergence; it addresses a generation of young adults (and their elders) who, despite their spirituality and electronic connections, feel alienated from their traditions (religious or otherwise), from their humanity, and from one another. "

Surely we all see the world collapsing around us, the young more sharply than those of us who have already survived a lot. But these guys seem to have a craving for the end days, a “Jones” for apocalypse which they see as a kind of cleansing that will let them live. In the meantime, they are energized by the excitement of all those explosions, all that suffering, death everywhere, the skulls and swastikas that have so symbolized the holocaust and Pol Pot’s killing fields. If that’s what it takes to get our attention, they’re up for it.

The roots of this seems to come from the South, from country Western gospel, and Bob Dylan whom Harriss claims once said the message of his songs is “Good luck, I hope you make it.” And you should spend your last time and energy in a consuming, tragic, super-intimate, fusion of love. I’m handicapped by not knowing pop music, but isn’t there a Japanese tradition of melancholy and ill-fated love: the archetype for the “Blue Willow” plates off which I ate my childhood meals in the Forties?

I’ve said again and again that sin is a human construct (“dark matter” in space is neither good nor sinful) and pop genres do not shy away from that. The music analysts claim that rap music is the most moral of genres, demanding accountability by reporting in the snapshot way of smart phones, not extended reflection. In an essay called “Cultural Approaches to the rhetorical analysis of selected music videos” by Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, the claim is made that music videos are not seen for the commercials they are. (“The world economy has been shaken -- quick! So shopping!”) “With nary a reference to cash or commodities, music videos cross the consumer’s gaze as a series of mood states. They trigger nostalgia, regret, anxiety, confusion, dread, envy, admiration, pity, titillation -- attitudes at one remove from the primal expression such as passion, ecstasy and rage. The moods often express a lack, an incompletion, an instability, a searching for location.” Too often that location is either the mall or the dangerous urban streets, “using any number of techniques in order to appear exotic, powerful, tough, sexy, cool, unique.”

But now the tide seems to be changing. A call for papers for the Modern Language Association in January, 2013, asks for “Environments in Science Fiction: Beyond Dystopias.” Science fiction, a genre of writing that thrives among roughly the same demographic as rock music, is asking for what amounts to a religious vision of sustainable life on the planet, a melding of desiderata and the world as cleansed by fire, brimstone and horseback angels.

Harder than you might think, when one takes a viewpoint that includes the whole continent, the planet, the solar system, all possible conceivabilities. One begins to think that the only hope is just to wipe the board clean and start from scratch. We cannot destroy the world. But we can eliminate ourselves by failing to adapt to new conditions, even the ones we’ve caused ourselves.

We may have to give up our conviction that all this is for us or about us. I’m convinced that the next religious step has got to be leaving anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. It is not about us. Everything is in play, including all our behavior, and we certainly have ideas about how we want it all to turn out, but on the scale of eternity we cannot persist. To survive is to transform. Too much transformation and we don’t recognize ourselves anymore (do we recognize ourselves now?) and that’s the same thing as death, which is only physical, only means that this specific arrangement of molecular community that supports my identity is going other places for other reasons.

It’s unthinkable, insupportable for many people. Maybe most of all for the generation just a little older than myself that has had the idea that they could earn the future, if not for themselves then for their children, their nation, their kind of people. It took a long time for the UU’s to find new hymns that weren’t all about God or Jesus taking us for a walk in a garden of love. I’m not sure what music expresses surrender to the inevitability of change that is felt as loss. For me, it’s neither “Death Gospel” nor rap. “Space music?”

AUBADE

Now the night doesn’t want to leave the cooling land, even when day’s long red incense-smoky fingers thread through the leafy boudoirs of the robins and feel along the eaves of houses, then down into tangled grass. Dreams, ardent silver, linger in shadows, wanting time to finish just one more chapter -- memory and storylines still wreathing pillows.

The night cat, who sleeps in the window by my computer so as to monitor moon traffic through the yard, thumps down to the floor. The day cat, who spends her nights stretched along my back, tenses slightly to see if I woke up. I try to stay loose, stay warm, stay with the dreams. I open one eye to check the alarm clock but if I turn my head, the day cat will also be up and both cats will wreath my feet, asking for breakfast while I scratch my head.

When I got up this morning, my head was full of one of the first poems I read in the modern poetry unit as a high school student: “Jane, Jane, tall as a crane...” The title was “Aubade.”

“The morning light creaks down again;
Comb your cockcomb-ragged hair,
Jane, Jane come down the stair.”
Where does it go from there? It’s Edith Sitwell. Was the name of her estate “Aubade?” Might it be an old family name? Or the name of the maid? “Aubade, where’s my tea?”

When the cats are fed, the night cat goes out to check the perimeter and the day cat goes back to bed for another hour, hoping I’ll come back, too, and bring my body heat. But I settle at the computer to see what the English and the East Coasters have to say. This time of year the sun comes up red between my back garage and my neighbor’s tree, the sky stained red with faraway fires. Get online. Find search engine. Google. Hmmm. Wikipedia. I’m still yawning.

Surprise! “Aubade” is the formal name for a particular kind of poem or song when lovers must separate at dawn but don’t want to. What a great name for a blog! Here’s a famous aubade in a play:

“Will thou be gone? It is not yet near day;
it was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierc’d the fearful hollow of thine ear!”
Romeo and Juliet. I knew you’d recognize it! The Zefferelli version, surely!

Some resourceful poets slipped the meaning from the romantic to the metaphysical:

“I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.”
Philip Larkin, always the cheerful one.
I like the line that says:
“Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.”

Two others are mentioned in the Wikipedia article, one by Carl Phillips about peaches knocked off the trees by a storm in the night and one by William Empson in 1937 that claims

“Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.
My house was on a cliff. The thing could take
Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row.
Then the long pause and then the bigger shake.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.”

The last line becomes a refrain, alternating at the end of each stanza with “The heart of standing is you cannot fly.” Double-meanings, ambiguity, maybe even oxymoronic contradiction. (Wait! Go back! Those peaches -- flesh?) This aubade is timely for SoCal, but written in 1937 might also be about war. My big discovery my sophomore year of high school was metaphor, trope, letting one thing stand for another, all roads and rivers are about the journey of life, all dawns are about awakenings, all days lead to partings. Somewhere in there all the Unitarians stopped singing vespers songs and turned to the morning songs: “morning has broken,” “the morning hangs a signal,” “morning so fair to see,” “the morning, noiseless, flings its gold.” Did that mean a turn to optimism? Or a call for renewal?

The aubade wiki mentions song, as well as poetry, and lists a Francois Poulenc concerto (1929) and Maurice Ravel (“Alboarado del Gracioso”) in a piano suite called Miroirs (1906). Then points out, rather playfully, “Eagle-Eye Cherry’s” 1997 single called “Save Tonight.” I didn’t look for the Poulenc or Ravel recorded online, but it was easy to find Eagle-Eye Cherry’s song with accompanying video which is narrative with Eagle-Eye becoming whomever he met.

Now you have enough stuff to do a little school-starting unit as the academic year begins to wake up with crayon sales and spiral notebooks. What new ingenious version of 3-ring binders? What scramble is the superintendent making to find one last teacher who had handle one-fourth French, one-half remedial English and one-fourth PE as well as coaching volleyball? What smoky and mysterious memories of summer?

Once when I was very small, I woke up before anyone else in the house woke up and slipped quietly down the stairs. The back door lock had always been a puzzle -- it was an ordinary skeleton key but had a little device shaped like a question mark to keep it from being turned -- but on this morning I figured it out. I even had enough strength to unhook the screen door. There was the backyard, made strange with shadow and dew. I crept out like the night cat, all alert, then padded silently back to my bed like the day cat. I wasn’t sure I didn’t dream it until my mother exclaimed over the door standing open when she got up. I’ve always had a weak boundary between fact and dream. Ever since I’ve known the earliest hours are the sweetest ones, even with the tang of chill and the risk of night critters not quite departed.

Here’s another aubade from the Unitarian hymn book:

“This land of bursting sunrise, all lavendar and blue, its cloud-strewn, light-swept day skies flow, and every day renew. To east the glow of dawning, to west the blaze of night, ‘round all the long horizon’s rim, the everlasting light. This land of open vistas, life rooted deep and free, thy canyoned plains, thy mountains vast, plumb earth’s immensity.” John Haynes Holmes wrote the words. The tune is “Andujar.” I Googled that and found a whole other world, rather like opening a door. It IS a place -- and a name.