To the list:
This post stopped me dead in my tracks. I have rarely been so moved by
anything that I have read. I want to thank John for his willingness to
get to the core and stay with it. Our bodies are our instruments and yet
this frontier is lost in machines and charts that are supposed to give us
time to explore but simply end up distracting us and making us less
holistically intelligent. Ignorance and sloth are dangerous things.
Sloth is the name given to work that distracts us from the vision given to
us about the meaning of our lives. John's post speaks for itself although
I wish to add, I hope that the addition will truly add without taking away
from the sweetness of the original spirit.
John Zavacki wrote:
> There are a couple of points that Ray makes here which strike home with
> me. I am a multi-modality, multi-threaded responder to input. I can
> listen to a fugue, pick off the highlights from the television, carry on a
> phone conversation, and write a response to an email message with little
> effort. No brag, just fact.
If it will make you feel better, Hispanics cultivate these same uses of
time that you acknowledge. Edward T. Hall in his classic "The Dance of
Life" was very helpful to me when I thought myself strange for being able
to do the same. Hall trained government diplomats and businessmen so they
would not lose face or money when confronting other cultures perceptual
styles. He said it took 25 years for the diplomat corps to read and
understand what he meant by the use of the word mono-chronic. Considering
the influx of poly-chronic life styles into American life it seems logical
that we would consider someone like yourself who is not from that cultural
perspective a gift or translator, maybe even a peacemaker in a diverse
environment.
> To a lot of people, that makes me a scatter brain. My nine year old
> daughter can do the same. At first it annoyed me. As I read her a story,
> she'd be combing a doll's hair, or drawing, or making notes in her spy
> journal and I'd come off with one of those parental "If you don't want me
> to read, you can go to bed now" responses. Abby, however, would then
> repeat the last sentence verbatim and go on to explain the relationship of
> the sentence to where we'd been thus far. I don't question here anymore,
> but her teachers still do. She gets the same responses today that I got
> forty years ago: daydreamer, troublemaker, etc.
Your own initial annoyance with her should help you understand other
people's misreading of your own gifts. My daughter has taught me many of
those same lessons.
> Today they call various manifestations of this ability Attention Deficit
> Disorder and claim Einstein, Beethoven, and many others to have been
> "sufferers". What I see is no attention deficit, but a psychological
> fugue, an ability to transpose, invert, combine, and decompose multiple
> input streams. It makes for a rich psychological reality.
Last night when the Mar's buggy was wandering around Mars for the first
time, people on Politically Incorrect, the late night funny farm, were
complaining about the money being spent. Maher(rhymes with Mars) who
hosts the show and is a Cornell grad either didn't understand Frederick
Jackson Turner(or didn't read him), on the importance of the frontier in
the minds of Americans. According to this "Maher's" type of thought, rich
physical and psychological realities are only important if they can be
justified by the bottom line. We call this inability to listen to your
own "instrument" anesthetization and the way you do it is to over
constrict the muscles. 1) it hurts and 2) it makes you believe that you
are doing something and that gives you a vigorous image of yourself.
Unfortunately it is like loading a fine race horse down with handicaps
until it eventually breaks him down. If we would only listen to our
"instrument."
My teachers on the reservation and in the Arts simply said if there is a
problem, don't fix it, consider it a gift to be developed in the service
of the vision given to you by the Creator. Complexity is only complex
when you don't know the answer. As for the shrinks, they are a baby
profession trying to prove that their Father (the Arts and Religion) was
crazy. I have a collection of books that tell various versions of the
myth of the "wounded soul" that is necessary for true creativity, thus
artists who are creative have to be neurotic at least and suffer greatly
in order to be creative. Nonsense! The truth is in the context. The
work is hard enough and provides its own suffering.
I've often thought that van Gogh became so frustrated that he gave his
mistress his ear because no one could hear or see what he perceived. There
is a book that I gave away many years ago called "Sensitive Chaos" that
was written by a protigi of Rudolf Steiner. The book was filled with
pictures of every kind of wave form that was found in nature. One of the
pictures was of the wave forms of light from the stars in the sky.
Naturally it looked like the van Gogh painting but was a real photograph.
How did he know before cameras? and what did it mean that he knew and no
one else did? You know the story. You've experienced the story yourself.
> The deficit, in many cases (and in particular, my own) is on the output
> side. The single stream required to satisfy the expectations of the
> socio-economic order is boring and most often without humor. But this
> output is the result of multiple inputs, social, economic, technical,
> emotional, physical. By reducing it to one dimensionality, we lose the
> wonderful effects that occur at the art-science interface (snip)
Right! You are your instrument. (One of my old students TMd this phrase
when I taught it to her and now it is the name of her teaching method,
well, my old teacher told me that ideas cannot be owned and if she uses it
well then it is a compliment to all of us.) Technology is a tool. Art is
also a tool as is Science. Art develops perception and combines pleasure
with the development of complex performances. Science explains and adds
other views on the result.
This list has made me study and learn. It has also effected my art and
pedagogy and now I can better use the power of my argument to strengthen
the psycho/physical instruments of my student artists. The human
instrument is meant to be developed. What John is doing is natural and
wonderful as is the same for his daughter. I feel that we must remember
that. If all of the machines and learning systems that we have developed
were combined together they would not equal the potential of one human
body with all of its systems. After all, those devices sprang FROM the
body. Big Blue will make all chess players better, that is his only
purpose in the scheme of things. As for output, give yourself music
lessons as a gift and put all of that ability to a test. Channel that
input into your hands on a musical instrument and create abstract
pleasurable systems made of excited air. Your hands were the beginning of
becoming human, they will give you much more to do as they continue to
wire your brain. The same is true of that most expressive of instruments,
the voice. Thank you again John for both the honesty and beauty of what
you had to say.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York, Inc.
mcore@idt.net
--Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>