self-indulgence ahead! It is sometimes difficult to draw the line between normal observations on life and the icky stuff of confessional prose. Toeing that line once again is this post on loving music and landscapes, effectively several paragraphs of metaphysical cotton candy.
Anyway, this began because a friend of mine said she found landscapes and music much easier to love than people, possibly because one can never completely possess either of them.
1. My first reaction was to think about what it means to love music/landscapes. My relationship with music I'm pretty clear on, the idea of loving a landscape had never occurred to me. And now, writing this, I wonder instead about this business of possessing another person. I think she actually used the word "own" but that word has strong overtones and I think is best left to the domains of consumerism and pets. I'd like to think that possession is an outdated concept pre-dating even our cavepeople days when you, the male cave dweller, kept your mate safely stowed away from other predatory males. So perhaps we're to some degree programmed to feel possessive about our mates, and maybe possession is an emotion that helps keep humans pair-bonded. (obviously pair-bonding either conferred survival benefit or was a secondary effect of some other habit that kept our hides attached to our bodies. No time for this dull topic here.) Humans are just such squirmy things that 'possession' in love is hard for me to conceptualize. Is there subservience involved? Accountability? How much control is inherent in possession? Disturbing territory.
But maybe that's just me.
2.How do you deeply love a landscape? By which I mean a living landscape, not a painting. What I like about them is that, counterintuitively, it’s not perspective that changes how you take it in—you can walk around it all you want, but that won’t make you fall in or out of love with what you see. It’s somehow a greater composite that immediately grabs your attention. But, to me, the moments of visual arrest pale in comparison to the most powerful moments of solitary engagement. Feeling the wind on one's face while standing on a sand dune. Or sitting on a rock and dangling one's feet in clear, shallow water. I guess I wonder how it can be love; to me a landscape is too ephemeral an experience to be a candidate for love. Can you love a landscape and not love a place? I suppose I'm not convinced that this experience is more than pleasure.
3. Music to me is rarely about emotion. Or, rather, I resent that music is quite often about emotion. When it is, listening becomes a form of torture, and the associations can end up so over-powering that the music itself becomes a secondary component of the listening experience. Except for Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa, which in my opinion is as pure as emotion gets. (and why I almost never listen to it.)
I guess what I’m saying is there’s a point where deriving pleasure in music for music’s sake is overrun by the scenes/memories/possibilities that lyrics and chord progressions trigger, and I find it hard to lose myself in music the way that you can almost lose yourself in fiction. And this is why I love John Cage. I love that he tried to be about music in its least emotionally clogged form. Music to create delight. Every musician/composer shouldn’t be Cage, but Cage at least created one end of a spectrum on which we can consciously choose to slide as we gauge our emotional investment in music.
[side note: the biggest problem I have with music is that it’ll trigger some pleasurable reaction and I’ll forget to wonder whether it's anything I actually like. And then some day I’ll listen again, realize it was terrible, and get upset at myself for being slow to notice. It’s hard work to consciously listen, but it’s like eating canned soup rather than homemade. Still good, but ultimately eh.]
[I’ve also been eating a lot of canned (albeit organic) soups lately. So spinstery! Ick.]
More on the part of loving a landscape once I've got it figured out. It's not intuitive to me.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
malddebokkwah syndrome
Scrambled thoughts ahead...
Reviewing my notes from an interview yesterday, I tried to decipher what I meant to type when I pounded out 'malddebokkwah syndrome'. I'm guessing it's some French term. Mal de boquois? Mal de bas quoi? Here's another French ambiguity. Let's say you're at a restaurant in France, how would you order fried apple?
Other things gleaned from a day of web browsing and sitting in long meetings: Tinnitis is exaccerbated by caffeine, regardless of how the tinnitis came about. So if one's ears are ringing from loud music, don't drink coffee. I guess it increases blood flow to the ears, causing blood vessels to constrict and... that's where my knowledge of ear function breaks down. Oh the senses. Ears do so much more than just hear things. I'm kind of surprised now that balance is not considered a sixth sense. The ability to determine uprightness given all these confusing stimuli like standing on squishy or uneven surfaces is sort of remarkable. Bending over doesn't make us topple. This should be surprising! All of this is maintained by the vestibular system, which consists basically of the inner ears and some piping. And since a damaged inner ear doesn't necessarily impact conventional hearing, I think it deserves its own honorary sense number.
To follow up on recent thoughts on how we adapt to new roles, here's Don DeLillo on executives playing at being executives:
“There’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing.”
I thought of this yesterday as I sat in a “state of the institute” meeting and several document manager-types gave speeches that were straight out of Dilbert. Except that there was no farce! How can that be? For contrast, when Spectrum staffers gave presentations, they wore tiaras and sashes. I was telling someone the other day about how I felt I was playing at being an adult by dressing too nicely. At what point does play cease to be play and just becomes reality? I am an adult, so in theory I can only excel at playing at being an adult. Playing at being something is the product of stereotype, which then legitimizes and propogates the stereotype itself. Children play at being children, too--for example, baby voice phenomena well past toddlerhood--but not to the exclusion of all other zany games. So is the antedote to becoming your worst nightmare (in this case a mid-level corporate paper shuffler) to play at being other things, too? Children don't stay children forever, eventually the teenager game wins out, and then the college kid game, and so on.
So, well beyond the world of College Self, I empathize with DeLillo's hypothesized panicking executive. We've forgotten how to pretend to be anything else. At this point, is it even possible to revisit a former game? If I walk home to my apartment on the prosaic upper west side thinking I'm a squirrel detective about to snuff out evil forces, will that make me more real? Whatever malddebokkwah syndrome is, this hall-of-mirrors tail-chasing makes a good candidate.
oh yeah, I forgot to mention this marks the rebirth of this blog.
Reviewing my notes from an interview yesterday, I tried to decipher what I meant to type when I pounded out 'malddebokkwah syndrome'. I'm guessing it's some French term. Mal de boquois? Mal de bas quoi? Here's another French ambiguity. Let's say you're at a restaurant in France, how would you order fried apple?
Other things gleaned from a day of web browsing and sitting in long meetings: Tinnitis is exaccerbated by caffeine, regardless of how the tinnitis came about. So if one's ears are ringing from loud music, don't drink coffee. I guess it increases blood flow to the ears, causing blood vessels to constrict and... that's where my knowledge of ear function breaks down. Oh the senses. Ears do so much more than just hear things. I'm kind of surprised now that balance is not considered a sixth sense. The ability to determine uprightness given all these confusing stimuli like standing on squishy or uneven surfaces is sort of remarkable. Bending over doesn't make us topple. This should be surprising! All of this is maintained by the vestibular system, which consists basically of the inner ears and some piping. And since a damaged inner ear doesn't necessarily impact conventional hearing, I think it deserves its own honorary sense number.
To follow up on recent thoughts on how we adapt to new roles, here's Don DeLillo on executives playing at being executives:
“There’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing.”
I thought of this yesterday as I sat in a “state of the institute” meeting and several document manager-types gave speeches that were straight out of Dilbert. Except that there was no farce! How can that be? For contrast, when Spectrum staffers gave presentations, they wore tiaras and sashes. I was telling someone the other day about how I felt I was playing at being an adult by dressing too nicely. At what point does play cease to be play and just becomes reality? I am an adult, so in theory I can only excel at playing at being an adult. Playing at being something is the product of stereotype, which then legitimizes and propogates the stereotype itself. Children play at being children, too--for example, baby voice phenomena well past toddlerhood--but not to the exclusion of all other zany games. So is the antedote to becoming your worst nightmare (in this case a mid-level corporate paper shuffler) to play at being other things, too? Children don't stay children forever, eventually the teenager game wins out, and then the college kid game, and so on.
So, well beyond the world of College Self, I empathize with DeLillo's hypothesized panicking executive. We've forgotten how to pretend to be anything else. At this point, is it even possible to revisit a former game? If I walk home to my apartment on the prosaic upper west side thinking I'm a squirrel detective about to snuff out evil forces, will that make me more real? Whatever malddebokkwah syndrome is, this hall-of-mirrors tail-chasing makes a good candidate.
oh yeah, I forgot to mention this marks the rebirth of this blog.
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