Philosophical notes…
Morricone with the ACO
Every few months the Australian Chamber Orchestra makes its way to Newcastle’s Civic Hall. Last night, the second score performed was Ennio Morricone’s Esercizi for 10 Strings No. 1. It begins in seemingly monist unity, all musicians playing the same notes precisely together. Eventually, one by one, each pauses before playing their own fragmented versions of a passage from Verdi’s La Traviata. They play very similar scaling lines, but independently of each other in what eventually amounts to chaos. As Morricone puts it:
“I wanted to show that by taking a sequence of sounds (a melody), on the one hand respecting their original source, yet on the other hand distorting their original durations, altering the intervals and re-working the dynamics, the basic melody thereby loses its recognizability, and its original connotations are replaced by something new and very different.”
Then just as surprisingly, one by one, each musician pauses, before beginning to play long slow notes again, this time in harmony with each other. Utter sameness breaks into cacophony as each goes their own way, only for them all to come back together again in harmony.
The performance is as much seen as heard, as the fiddlers performed standing up, their bows sliding through the air together, utterly apart, and, then more subtly together again. I couldn’t help but think of it as a metaphor for other dramas I’ve seen played out. Maybe, Hegelian dialectic, which splits the divine in-itself into a for-itself only to sublate an in-and-for-itself. Or, the plot of a romantic comedy where initial attraction devolves into broken hearts, only to resolve itself again in a more honest love at the end.
In Manchester, there used to be a dingy cafe with £2 grease-bomb breakfasts and gigantic windows perfect for people watching the world of passers by on Oxford Road. Most people sleep and wake up with much the same routine, I suppose. But by the time they head out into public, they’re at odds with one another. It appears to be a chaotic menagerie of dress, movement, posture, as people step off buses or navigate pedestrian walkways. But every so often, a couple, unknown to each other, leap a puddle synchronously, as if performing a ballet. Or, noticing they’d chosen the same bit of fashion from Zara or H&M, two girls fight back an embarrassed grin.
I wondered if Morricone had such a people watching breakfast as he wrote the Esercizi. In any case, it reminded me of how out of unities and chaos, life’s subtle harmonies emerge.
A Tale of Metaphysics and Mystery
“Still, all of the philosophers I spoke with made a point of emphasizing how much they admire the spirit behind A.M. Monius’s attempt to help revive metaphysics. They applaud his intellectual commitment, not just his financial one. Zimmerman notes that modern philosophers have rarely had patrons in the way that thinkers like Gottfried Leibniz once did. And though it’s true that Roderick Chisholm was for a short time supported financially by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, wealthy inventor of the medicine Argyrol, in few such cases does the apparent benefactor also serve, as A.M. Monius does, as the chief philosophical instigator and problem poser.”
“Would that there were more nonprofessionals who got jazzed about philosophy!” Zimmerman exclaims. With palpable excitement, he ponders the possibility that the institute might back “slightly broader projects, like a research center”—or better yet, he adds in jest, “support the Mayhem!”
- James Ryerson, “Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician,” Slate, (Republished from Lingua Franca) - http://slate.me/wdtUnQ
On Habits of Mind
“You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts or habits; for the art of expression, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time; for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and mental soberness.”
- Erwin Griswold, Dean of Harvard Law School, cited in, “The Liberal Arts as Guideposts in the 21st Century,” The Chronicle, http://bit.ly/xsx2OC
On Legal Definitions of Religion
A comment on “The Church,” as defined in the recent US Supreme Court case, Hosanna-Tabor:
Most significantly, though, in the current moment, is that there is arguably no analogy to “the church” in its mystical sense outside Christianity. While other religious communities speak of the body of the faithful in various ways, the Court’s opinion would seem to suggest that its doctrine is tightly and very specifically bound to a history of the Christian church and its assertions of its rights in the context of a particular reading of English history.
- Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Immanent Frame Blog, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=28788
Commandments for Writing
- Work on one thing at a time until finished.
- Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."
- Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
- Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
- When you can't create you can work.
- Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
- Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
- Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
- Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
- Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
- Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
Henry Miller, a Writer’s 11 Commandments - http://bit.ly/wn5mN7
On Work
“If you are unhappy with your writing process, sure, go ahead, make an effort to change it. Give yourself intermittent deadlines and take them seriously. Do whatever you need to do to meet them, whether it’s by having a friend check up on you or by rewarding yourself with a tasty treat when you finish something. Try it for three months. See if it makes your life better. If it doesn’t, then I would say there isn’t a problem. Accept that you are a last-minute person and realize this: Writing is hard, no matter when you do it. Thinking that there’s a better, easier way is just silly.”
Accepting the way you work: http://bit.ly/yEW1O3
Torturer's Apprentice
“The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘waterboarding’ all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.”
- “Torturer’s Apprentice” by Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic: http://bit.ly/AbAKcW
Google's Book Search Disaster
“That makes for a steep learning curve, all the more so because of Google’s haste to complete the project so that potential competitors would be confronted with a fait accompli. But whether or not the needs of scholars are a priority, the company doesn’t want Google’s book search to become a running scholarly joke. And it may be responsive to pressure from its university library partners—who weren’t particularly attentive to questions of quality when they signed on with Google—particularly if they are urged (or if necessary, prodded) to make noise about shoddy metadata by the scholars whose interests they represent. If recent history teaches us anything, it’s that Google is a very quick study.”