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abaya:
i dunno--i cant really fill in that blank for other folk.
christianity has this whole self-mortification option for example.
why people indulge it is kind of mysterious to me---all the more so because i find that i still do it myself sometimes (as a function of my residual good little catholic boy, which hasnt existed in any other way for many many years).
i assume that the investments are multiple--one set (not a good word here) would obtain in relation to the structure itself (or would have obtained before it was integrated into a psychological repertoire), and a whole riot of others would obtain for how you use it once it's in place.
the way the thread has gone shaped alot of the post above: most of it is about ways of parsing levels of activity that cannot be jammed back into linguistic-based patterns. there is a pretty wide range of these ways of parsing---so i read off the basis for my argument from that.
which happened to cross with stuff i have been thinking about, which is also motivated by the same kind of aesthetic considerations.
side note: alot of this comes from conversations i have had over a long period with folk about collective improvisation: why it happens to work so often, how it is possible that a group of people who do not know each other can sometimes stop and start and change direction (often quite radically) as a unit (at the same time). alot of folk (including my younger self) try to understand this via the language of mysticism.
i think that is a default language: we operate in a cultural space that does not value the capabilities that i think we all have (and use all the time in communicative situations) and which therefore has no coherent way to talk about what i see as a basic human capability--so mysticism is the space where it is confined.
i think we that we are basically oscillators and that collective improvisation works because it repeats the nature and operation of coupled oscillators. if you put two oscillators near each other and just let them run, they'll couple. when they couple, they'll generate a new wave form that is not the sum of the parts and which is remarkably stable. i think this explains what happens in a collective improvisation--particularly the strange sense that i at least often get that what i am playing is in some ways not my choice so much as what is required situationally. so practicing the piano is simply making the widest range of options available technically. and going blank is just a device for being open.
the biological systems account i have been working with is complex dynamical systems. if you know that stuff, you'll see how it dovetails with the above. if not, check out some of fransisco varela's work, like 'the embodied mind'....except for the tibetan buddhist elements (these worked for varela as a function of his personal predelections and so you dont have to follow him in that direction--you can adapt it to other purposes)...beyond varela, there is a ton of material out there about this way of understanding embodied cognition (and its neurological substructures). its very interesting stuff.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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