Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called To-day, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work.
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
(First off: I’m going to be making some big claims here. I don’t have documentation. These are just the ramblings of a bedridden 60-year-old man. Perhaps if I had grad students to send out in search of footnotes things would be different. But I don’t. Everyone clear? OK. Play ball!)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately of the relationship between music, language, and memory.
These things are all intertwined. Consider Socrates’ objections to books.
“The story goes that Thamus said much to Theuth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” (Phaedrus, Pp. 551-552 in Compete Works, edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis IN: Hackett.)
Socrates (or Plato) is on to something here. To use contemporary phrasing, writing is a way to outsource memory. And this applies to all media. Illich talked about how he was of the generation that moved from in-person, unamplified speaking and musical performance, to not only amplification, but recording. Someone could have the voice of Churchill, or Caruso, in their library, in addition to their books.
Our time has taken this yet further. I am in my bed after a stroke. My room, while comfortable enough, has very few things of mine. But through my iPad tablet, I have access to my Kindle library (and others), my Spotify music (and others), my Paramount+ videos (and others).
Which is how this all started. Paramount+ has (or had) a series on the making of the movie The Godfather I enjoy a great deal, The Offer. Being recent, and their own production, I assumed it would be available for years. I outsourced my memory Paramount.
Then, one day, Paramount took it away. I don’t know when. I just know I went to Paramount+ and The Offer wasn’t there anymore. In the implicit contract between Paramount and myself to be my memory, Paramount proved to be an unreliable partner. So I have canceled my subscription.
I now have my own copy of The Offer, technically pirated. Which goes to show how piracy is an archival project. But it reminded me of why I buy so many of my books, at great cost, and don’t use the library as often as I might. When I was a boy in California I used libraries a great deal. Then along came Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13. Libraries largely lost their funding. I could no longer trust libraries to have the books I wanted. So I hung out at used bookstores the way others would lurk at pool halls. (To use Joseph Epstein’s image.) My bookshelves began a lifetime of groaning.
But roll back to Socrates, above. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were epic poems. How did Homer remember them, at such length? Or the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Vedas, the Icelandic sagas, or any other oral work of great length?
Why, they were sung, of course.
What were Homer’s melodies? I really wish I knew. But here is someone’s version of Gilgamesh.
Here is the Hurrian Hymn #6, the oldest song where we have both the lyrics and what we believe are the original notes:
Pound talks about how great poetry should not stray too far from the dance. But this, too, implies melody.
Music. Memory. How many of us have songs we remember and recognize as soon as the first chord plays? What else is Name That Tune but a memory game? How many songs do we remember from the crib?
This came up through an internet meme (of all things):
The point, that women need to know (or at least, greatly want to know) when the blood will come is a strong reason for inventing a calendar. So is the snow. Or the baby. Or the migratory birds, or animals.
Does it make sense such a calendar would be sung?
How did h. sap. come up with music in the first place? What music touches us most deeply?
A woman needing to calm a baby, and so a lullaby.
A man seeing his partner die in childbirth, and so a dirge.
A group wanting to express joy, and so the dance.
Music evokes memory. Language evokes memory. Writing evokes memory. Recording evokes memory.
It’s a long march from the general (birth/death) to the specific (your favorite singer, doing your favorite song, during your favorite performance).
I currently believe language evolved to fill in that specificity. To increase the bandwidth. How do you keep that baby alive? Where do we go to follow the beasts and sun? Which mushrooms do we avoid?
Maybe this is all rehashed Jean Auel. I’ve never read her, so cannot say.
But I still think it’s all been to remember more and more, in greater detail, across generations.
I seem to have originally written this in 2018, as a review for Goodreads. I think it holds up, and is worthwhile.
So. War and Peace. Voina i Mir (Война и мир) Got that done.
First, I prefer Dunnigan’s translation because she translates the swathes of French, as well as the Russian. Pevear & Volokhonsky don’t translate the French in line with the text, but force you to endnotes (paper) or popup footnotes (Kindle). They argue this is to illustrate how the French would seem to a middle class Russian of the 1860s, but me, I just want to read the book, and this decision gets in my way. I understand it, but it’s annoying. Dunnigan is much more fluid.
Tolstoy’s main accomplishment, to me, is he obviously knows where each and every character is at all times, and there are a lot of characters. I’m even willing to give him the usually derided history lecture in Part 2 of the Epilogue, because I see it primarily as an Apologia in the old sense — ie, how and why he wrote the book.
I am not as persuaded he keeps the voices of all those characters distinct. If you want to see someone do an amazing job with narrative voices (Tolstoy writes in 3rd person omniscient), I recommend A.S. Byatt’s Possession.
If you like chess, or go, this is the book for you. So many pieces, moving so many different ways.
But… Well, I see Natasha Rostova as the ur-template for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. Her flightiness for the sake of flightiness doesn’t always seem driven by the character herself, but because Tolstoy wanted to portray her that way. In fact, I’d say that’s my largest critique — too often you see the puppetmaster, moving the marionettes the way he needs to for mechanical reasons.
I fully appreciate the accomplishment here. Still, to adapt Auda abu Tayi’s line from Lawrence of Arabia, it is not perfect.
Lexicon.
About a week before Bloom County went on a substantial sub-plot about Bill the Cat being a Russian spy, there was this glorious 3-day sequence. It has even been quoted in academic papers.
“Foreshadowing” — Your clue to quality literature.
Here, have a link to the very first Bloom County strip, December 8, 1980. Then, you can read through the whole thing. If you want.
A great piece on Perry Mason and Erle Stanley Gardner, that I’m making an entry for good old linkblogging. Maybe I can find it in the future.
Lexicon. Used in many situations where cleaning down to the floor, or clearing a desktop, as appropriate. Originally from Doonesbury, obviously.
My mom and I were watching a procedural murder mystery on TV, just the two of us, back in the early 1980s.
“Who do you think did it?” I asked.
”Olivia de Havilland,” my mom said, very confidently.
”Oh?”
”Well, why else do you get Olivia de Havilland?”
Sticking to that principle — who is the most prominent actor who isn’t the lead? — solves the mystery most of the time. Not always. But usually.
From a long-time favorite novel, Steven Minkin’s A No Doubt Mad Idea:
“On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer’s Salons, call them, franchise chain.”
It looks like I’ve deleted the original of this post. I’m going to try to reconstruct it.
I was very surprised to find out the main way opponents win sumo bouts isn’t by pinning, as in Greco-Roman wrestling. While that can happen, much more frequently someone pushes their opponent out of the ring.
What occurred to me was that often, in disputes today (especially political), we see the same thing — not persuasion by merit, but tarring one’s adversary with beliefs “all reasonable people” must abhor. Famously, portraying someone as a Nazi is known to work, even though in recent years that runs afoul of Godwin’s Law. Sexism, racism, socialism (at least in the US), communism… all of these accusations are meant to shortcut real argument (“…a connected series of statements, intended to establish a definite proposition.”), and just throw the other person outside the ring.
I am aware of the irony that in writing this, and explaining what I mean if I characterize someone’s speech as a “sumo move,” I am recursively doing the very same thing. But sometimes, that’s how it goes.
EDITED TO ADD: My wife Ulrika, a former graduate student of philosophy, notes the following. I think it’s worth adding.
Except that it is neither recursive nor ironic to point out a sumo move.
What a true sumo move (and it isn’t argumentation, it’s propaganda — re-setting the Overton window so that a particular subject won’t be subject to argument in the first place) does is leverage social pressure and people’s sense of decency/shame to make an entire subject unavailable for discussion by casting that subject as taboo in some way. Sumo moves attack the character of anyone who broaches the subject, thus kick the entire topic outside the ring.
Conversely, observing that a sumo move has been used does nothing to prevent the topic it’s applied to from being discussed. Noting a sumo move is meta-analytic. It talks about the way that a subject is being discussed and, rightly, moves the discussion back to the actual subject, rather than the character, motives, and mental state of the people discussing it. Now, it may be true that an honest broker may experience some shame once they admit to themselves that they have been using an illicit tactic, but eliciting shame isn’t the point of pointing out a sumo move. It absolutely is the point of using one.