The Divide

from my flickr

Just read Iain McGilchrist's book on the divided brain. There is also a documentary video that summarizes the 1000 or so pages, which is difficult if not impossible. McGilchrist has a career spanning literature and neuro-psychiatry at the highest level. His thesis, formulated over 20 years is that our thinking and perception evolves from a confrontation between the verbal analytic side of our nature and the integrative perceptual side, and ideally should flow back and forth in a sort of collaboration to achieve good things.

His book has to err on the side of denotation to prevent attacks from the scientific culture which he criticises, and that is both its strength and weakness, it has to live in a left hemisphere world, defending the right, a bit like the opponents of our current demagogues, who need to use their tactics to get though a message. It is a losing game, but one that must be played for the long term.

I want to highlight the relationship to Jane Jacobs' ideas from her book on Systems of Survival where she makes a case for the healthy confrontation between cultural guardians and commercial facilitators. This work complements and consolidates her arguments across the history of the humanities and of the sciences.

Implicitly, the book links Dewey's (and Pirsig's) ideas on Quality and morals to the continental existentialists (finally!), but there is much more work to be done bridging the philosophies of the positivists with that of the continentals, especially in our English speaking cultures. There are glints of hope, for example Lakoff and Johnson's work, but too little uptake from what I can see.

Kahneman and Pinker are also present as critics in the background of McGilchrist's arguments, against thinking fast and favoring thinking slow, and arguing for the primacy of language over music. McGilchrist forcefully responds to Pinker's attack on his web site. I am also not sure how this relates to Chomsky's embedded linguistics, but we shall see. Chomsky can be quite defensive, as Tom Wolfe writes.

Existence precedes essence is so well presented, with forceful cultural, scientific and artistic evidence by someone raised in the positivist tradition. We (the West) need to budge away from Platonism. This key to our success, our domination of the environment, may no longer work now that we are on the downside of the arc of sustainability. This crisis may be a touchpoint, who knows.

I am listening to Joni Mitchell who understood that we were heading this way, back in the late sixties.

Zen, lobotomies and music

Copyright A. Barake, 2015, all rights reserved

Zen can be an overloaded word. Even Robert Pirsig admits in his famous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that he may not altogether be that accurate about Zen.

One of Zen's objectives is to reduce suffering. To do so via a philosophy or religion means to address suffering's causes, through strictures and practices. I would like to talk about how Zen addresses suffering that comes from within, since suffering from without can become a political topic.

Zen teaches that some thoughts and emotions can cause suffering. The practice of meditation can attenuate this source of suffering by training the mind to see such thoughts and emotions as fleeting, to minimize engagement with them, to see them "fly by", rather than to dwell on them.

This method of disengagement attempts to train the mind to detach from the emotional content of thoughts, in other words, to understand the thought, to perceive and process it, but not to let it cause suffering.

An example would be a reminiscence of an event that could be said to be humiliating, or sad, say a scolding, or a quarrel. The mind may, the morning after say, remember the circumstances and the words that were said, but through Zen meditation, these thoughts would stop short of emotion, they would be like reading an account of the event happening to someone else, or to oneself a long time ago. A distance is placed between the thoughts that may cause suffering and the mind's areas that feel emotions.

It is a willful and gentle lobotomy.

This is not to say that the event or memory does not register, or is not processed. This is not avoidance, this is detachment.

Zen serenity, interpreted in the light of this approach, is a form of emotional control. Another way to keep a stiff upper lip, without repression of emotion, since emotion is not allowed to be invoked.

It is a difficult concept, for me at least, since often my emotions can rise up spontaneously and fast. If meditation can help delay the rise, or at least slow it down through the feedback mechanism of "seeing them fly by", then possibly they can be "pre-processed" and attenuated before they cause suffering or bad actions to occur.

My closing comment on this topic is in relation to music. Music is almost by definition associated with an emotional response. One Zen retreat in my area recommends silence during one's stay, no music, little talk. I think this is because music can be a powerful emotional trigger or catalyst. But what about chanting?

This makes me think that there many kinds of music, since some chants and certain instrumental accompaniments are common in Buddhist temples since they promote a state of meditation, or even trance. Maybe the distinction to make is between song and music, and even within that categorization, between romantic and non-romantic music.

We can continue to categorize, but I think to no useful purpose. Music can invoke memory, and dealing with memory is what Zen meditation practice teaches. So music is OK if you can deal with it, and some music is easier to deal that other kinds. I think Bach is easier to handle during meditation that Ligetti, or the Stones, but that is just me.

Dylan and Drake - Ego spectra

(Picture copyright A. Barake, 2007)

Have been reading a book of interviews with Dylan. I also mentioned here that I read and recommend Joe Boyd's memoirs. I "discovered" Nick Drake through these, and subsequently listened to some of his music. The stuff I like most is him singing to his own guitar accompaniment, sparse but deeply moving. It is full of melancholy. the ego struggling to emerge but battling emotion. Drake committed suicide.

Dylan's interviews and songs reveal a different type of ego, one that is dominant, defining of a reality. The person is re-invented with every appearance, and is making us consider adopting some of this vision.

This spectrum of ego - from the struggling and disappearing one to the inventive, playful and somewhat monstrous one is particularly interesting given that these are solo artists, both very original, defining themselves in the difficult music business. The support of others is limited, until you break through. Your belief system is mostly held near your heart.

In Dylan's case, the media circus and controversy tried to take hold, and he built a humorous shield to deflect the ego distorting forces and to maintain his creative force.

Drake was trying to break through and seems to have been struggling against his handlers as well as himself. He was more alone, in a sense, than Dylan, or at least not ego maniacal enough.

As ego is questioned, depression sets in. An argument can be made that depression in a loss of ego, a flattening of it that leads to inability to make the future for oneself. A strong ego influences destiny (character is destiny) by changing the perceptual environment. Management types would call it "selling yourself", missing the underlying irony.

It is easy to sell a template ego, for example the "MBA persona", or the jock persona, but in the arts, individuality and novelty are the goal, so the frame of reference gets pretty narrow, the market too. Success means enlarging that frame, creating the market. Dylan did it through force of character, strong confident performances, new poetic lyrical modes, and hubris. Drake did it too, but with his music and style. It took longer.

For most of us, the ego is sustained by our family, our friends and to some extent our peers at work. We adapt to these micro-cultures (or not) when we interact. Depression can occur when there is indifference or forced adaptation that violates beliefs and upbringing.

It is therefore important not to let any erosion of the ego occur through lack of self-respect. Unfortunately, our ape behaviour is all about climbing the ego ladder, and this erosion is all too common in groups.

Solitary artists, like writers and the afore-mentioned performers sustain the ego through their art. The songs are externalizations of the ego, and provide a hedge against the erosion. Criticism of the songs can be destructive for that reason. I think Drake was very susceptible to this (from my reading of Boyd's memoir of him). Dylan would be too, but then the songs are held up by all the fans and many have become classics - he is immunized.

Smile like a veil

from my flickr

I found a site that has lyrics to songs that are not normally posted to the Web - obscure some would say, whereas I would call them almost forgotten.

Here's a sample of Smoke by the great-but-defunct Crash Vegas:

You say that I'm your eyes
and I whisper that I've gone blind
you wear a smile like a veil
your clothes smell of last night's smoke and you just drink to stay afloat
and I swim by and pull the plug

Colin Cripps, the guitarist is still active. I saw him perform recently with Jim Cuddy in Ottawa. Not sure about the clear-voiced Michelle McAdorey. The connection with Blue Rodeo seems to run deep.

Road songs

from my flickr

The sense of longing that travel gives is wonderful. A new place to sleep every day, not owning a space, just passing through. Is this a North American thing, a railroad country thing, or does it date back to the troubadours who were reflecting their lives in their songs?

Music for Cats

As I was doodling with a new riff on the acoustic guitar the cat was eyeing me suspiciously as he half-dozed, squinting in the sun. Was I going to play loudly and disturb him? I was careful not to, and then the idea of calling a set of tracks "music for cats" came along. Checking for precedent, I did the quick Google search, and here is what comes up:

• MusicForCatsRecords - sounds like a label I can get to like
• Music for Cats and People Too, a record for pets and their owners, the cover art fits Kliban's definition of "brother-in-law-art"
• Another Music for Cats CD, but not for cats, maybe I'll order it

So, the title may hold, or not, we'll see if anything better emerges once the music is settled.

Joni Mitchell

Her recent honours in Canada triggered many retrospectives and biographical media events. The arc of her songwriting career is an interesting case study in what seems to work and what does not. She was recently approached by a ballet company, Calgary I think, to collaborate on a work based on her music and her life. She accepted but then convinced them to change the terms of reference of the project. It became a ballet on her views on the environment and the world, war etc. She wrote a bunch of new (bad) songs for it. I would have much preferred to see the original idea fulfilled. The personal often makes better art than the general when it is resonant enough. The general often ends up being generic, through the law of averages, since it must apply to many and thus it averages out emotions. Many of her best songs are about her loves and griefs, like Carey and River. I guess I am saying that writing about self can be good but it needs to be edited. The subtext is the seed, but is not necessary to know it to resonate with us. The public only found out about her decision to give up her daughter for adoption late in her career, but the imprint and the references to this in her lyrics resonate throughout many of her best songs. We did not need to know this, but I don't know if the songs would have been so powerful without that emotion behind them. Hemingway wrote that you must hold something back. That is a technique, a trick of sorts, but ultimately, there has to be something there, something personal that can become universal. The emotional load must transcend the petty somehow, and sublimate into an artistic release.

Another interpretation can be that at the start of a career arc there is a drive to push one's ego out there, a necessity in fact, so the songs about self and experience happen and the good ones survive and make it big. With time and maturity, the quality goes up, one gets better at the game of universality and the experiences accumulate and become more interesting. At the waning end, there must be a sense of overexposure, for those artists that don't get addicted to fame, and then there is the recluse phase, where universal themes become more tempting since they allow expression without self-revelation. Unfortunately, I think that unless you are Brian Eno and are interested in weird but cool stuff, the general world issue kind of stuff can be boring (not always to be fair..) and only established artists like Joni Mitchell can get it to be heard. Dunno, this is an anecdotal generalization. Must test against more data.

Bad moments

Went to see a performance of the Magic Flute and was awed by the level of the music and performance. It transcends a lot of everyday achievement - as it should. The piece lasts about two hours, and is consistent throughout. Some thoughts, there are conventions used, understandings between the audience and the composer and performers, and these help set constraints for Mozart to play within or to push out. I had heard on Radio Canada about 30 years ago (Beaux Dimanches) a concert pianist say that pop music was really totally different than classical, and I know what she means, I keep getting reminded when I see live classical performances. The pianist at yesterday's performance was doing everything, had a synthesizer on the side that she used to do flute and glockenspiel while playing the main parts on the piano with an an extraordinary dynamic range. Too much - but somehow totally inspiring.

Then later at home I heard Dead Flowers interpreted by Steve Earle, and the words and music are powerful and fit extraordinarily well together although it is a parody of hillbilly music by the Sone's own admission. There is an element of truth that just comes out. And that can be as powerful as Mozart's stylized perfection.

About inspiration

Inspiration?
Don't know if this is useful or not - worth a look I guess: Sources of inspiration

Songs about Thetans
There is a song here somewhere - this rings familiar - I once met a woman on a bus who tried this on me, then went on to 'help' some teenage girls who were sitting behind me, it quite cringe inducing.

Songs about pictures

There have been albums themed around sets of pictures, or purported to be: "The Six Wives of Henry the Eighth" by Rick Wakeman was inspired by the portraits at the National Gallery, "Pictures at an Exhibition" by the Rod - not so sure there... and some of Laurie Anderson's work has been themed around visual structures I think. Was thinking that some pictures could be good starting points for lyrics, i.e. to take an inspiring or evocative picture and to write a caption or story about it and then to make a song. It is a sort of second-order experience, but it may lead to something different at least.

Jasper Johns

Was interviewed for the New Yorker. He talks about his friendship with Rauschenberg and how their discussions fed their creativity, and he talks about inspiration and work methods. In the end, it is clear that he cannot explain the source or the inspiration, which is the way it often is.

'Asked about the worth of his art, Johns once stated: "To be plain, the best critic of a picture is another picture. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. The final suggestion... has to be, not a deliberate statement, but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying." '

Perez-Gomez in his latest book comes closest to finding a key, in my opinion. He makes the link to eros, the old idea of bridging the desire gap, creating beauty so as to desire it. The spark is part of this sublimation of the drive. It (kind of) drives a nail through the whole conceptual art thing, unless you really get off on abstraction. The argument is in favour of sensuality, all the senses. Conceptualism is about the ideals - somehow abstracted from the world of senses. Math can be beautiful, but geometry is the basis of much of it. I still struggle with this when I think of music, which is abstract visually but can trigger emotions as strongly as anything else, maybe through memory, but also maybe through other means, resonance, sympathy, who knows. How do minor chords work? The chill in the spine is a goal...

Joe Boyd is retired

Didn't realize it until recently, but Joe Boyd is one of my favorite record producers. A lot of albums I like have his name on them, and some don't, but he was involved, e.g.: Mary Margaret O'Hara's Miss America - which took 5 years (Boyd was involved in the first takes, and when he saw how difficult she was, he let someone else take over) - she went on to do other stuff, but never topped that one . Notable successes include the McGarrigles' first album, lots of famous folkies like Doc Watson, and R.E.M, amongst many many others, not all folk- since his real love is Muddy Waters and other roots guitar blues, in a career that spans the 60's to the 90's. His style is to make a studio album sound "alive" - which I guess means sort of like "live" but more polished. On a recent CBC interview, he said that he though that his biggest contribution was to make the recording artists feel that they could do anything, have freedom, and he would make it work, go with it, which was a radical thing in the 60's when producers had more power than today, since they were generally not hired by the artists but by the label. Things have changed, and he indicated that there was much self-indulgence today. I think I'll get the book.

Capt. Beefheart

Rules for guitarists - the first time I heard his name I thought it was B-Fart.

e.g. Rule_ 4. WALK WITH THE DEVIL Old delta blues players referred to amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts demons and devils. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.