You’re listening to “Farewell to Stromness” by Peter Maxwell Davies.  Written for piano, I came across this version on a classical guitar CD I picked up for inspiration.  I’ve ordered the sheet music so that I can put it under my pillow for the homeopathy method of music instruction.

   Stromness, counting some 1500 residents, is the second largest town on what’s called ‘Mainland’ of the Orkney archipelago off the north coast of Scotland.  In the seventies significant uranium deposits were discovered nearby and Margaret Thatcher was in favor of their development.  Locals were not. 

  From the photos above we can see that mining of the stuff would have had devastating impact.  Davies wrote the music as part of his ‘Yellowcake Review’ in protest*.  It’s an achingly emotional recapitulation of a cerebral journey over and around the island. 

  With the first few notes, one is enjoined, soon nearly overwhelmed at the realization of what could come to pass, and then hesitates briefly to gather strength.  How could such a thing be contemplated?  Then onward with determination to experience it all in case the philistines hold sway. 

  The Orcadians’ campaign was successful and the uranium lies undisturbed.  Hurrah! Now, each time I listen to the short piece, I’m pervaded with the fragile good fortune of our place on our planet. I’d be fascinated to hear if any MPs or Thatcher heard this music during consideration of the issue.  Wonder if a savage beast was thereby soothed.  Wouldn’t have been the first time that art inflected political discourse.

  All of that having had transpired, it is, uhm, interesting to note that some years later a string arrangement of “Farewell to Stromness” was performed at the blessing of the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla.  With all of the myriad back stories behind that event, I think I’d have chosen differently.  Music is a language, and maybe it’s me, but somehow something seems to have been lost in that translation. 

*We became familiar with the term ‘yellowcake’ during the Valerie Plame affair.  It is an ironic trivialization of both the substance as well as the proposed excavation in the Orkney Islands.

  Like De Tocqueville, the fact that director Peter Weir hails from another land gives him objectivity toward our county that one born in the USA would not have.  His take, in the film “Witness”, has the sacred and profane of America revolving around each other like a binary star system.  Violence and purity orbit around their common center of gravity like a black hole and bright star.  When gas spins off from one to the other bad shit happens.

  Early in the film a young wide-eyed Amish boy witnesses a horrific murder in the restroom of Philadelphia’s 30^th Street Station.  With his assistance, Detective John Book uncovers sordid high level police corruption and gets seriously wounded in the process.  Their escape from urban grit takes them to an Amish community in rural Lancaster County.

  At the edge of death, Book recovers under the care of the wary Amish and is soon asked to work off his debt.  He puts on a tool belt and enters a stream of men and women flowing toward a barn raising for a newly married couple.

  Weir once said that his goal in filmmaking was to evoke as deep an emotional response as can great music.  In this segment, the music and motion combine to far far more than the sum of the parts.  They conjure up the image (in this mind anyway) of peasants raising Chartres from the fields of France up toward heaven, souls all aflutter. 

  Indeed, this part of the film could even be read as the last stage of Book’s recovery – a near death experience.  Under an incredibly beautiful soft white light men work serenely together, knowingly pass hammer or beam or refreshment on to the next, unasked.  Women draw from the bounty of the communal acreage to create a sumptuous shared repast. 

  Unfortunately (for Book), the music stops, dirty cops appear, Satan gets his due, and Book falls off his cloud back to earth.  It’s not his time yet and he has to leave.  We’re dang pleased he got to visit though and will forever be moved by the memory.*

*Amazing, isn’t it that the language spoken in the clip doesn’t  really affect its impact?  (Though I’ll admit if I can find it in English, I’ll switch…)

  At about dusk one night not long ago, I was closing the gate at my office and had a hallucination that took over my consciousness completely – if only for a moment.  It was of my wife at home in the kitchen.

  She was wrestling a rarely used vessel and an associated implement from the dusty far reaches of a deep cupboard.  It had been a wedding present and I don’t think it’d seen the light of day since the birth of our first child nearly thirty years ago.  It soon dissolved, I secured the gate, and drove home.

  Just inside the back door of our house, I gasped when I saw that wife was using the vessel from my vision and had to have gone through those exact motions at the moment I saw them.  I asked what in the world had induced her to procure that setup to which she responded that she had been looking for something else, came upon it, and decided to use it instead. 

  Holy dogs, it wasn’t like I’d flashed a winning lottery number or been visited by divine guidance (or retribution for that matter) but, whatever, it was beyond coincidence.  Tha occurrence and others similar came to mind when reading the “Best Ideas of the Year” bit in the last issue of the New York Times Magazine that year.  It was about a forthcoming book entitled Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer.

  Ms. Mayer was a psychologist and professor at UC Berkley.  Her eleven year old daughter’s harp had been stolen and they were desperate for its return.  Weeks went by with no leads when a friend suggested they avail themselves of the services of a dowser.

  Skeptical, but, “well why not?”, she contacted the American Society of Dowsers who referred her to one in Arkansas.  She called and after a pause the gentlemen told her that the harp was still in the area and asked her to send him a map of it.  The map was soon returned with a location marked upon it.  “Not good enough for a search warrant” said the police so Ms. Mayer decided to post photos of the harp on telephone poles around that neighborhood.

  Days later a phone call led to the return of the instrument and a changed Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer.  She began an exploration of the “inexplicable powers of the human mind” and first found, to her amazement, that several eminent colleagues at Berkeley had had related experiences, but were loathe to discuss for fear of possible harm to their professional reputations.

  Her investigation is filled with fascinating anecdotes, history, psychology, neuroscience, and quantum physics.  She suggests that extraordinary intuition is “quintessentially characterized by its random non repeatable quality and its absolute dependence on its highly idiosyncratic deeply personal capacities and dispositions of the knower…”. 

  An adept told her that: “Our minds resist intuitive knowing.  Once you learn to relax that resistance, you can start to reclaim intuition from its suppression by the rational mind.  The more you work with it, the more remarkable your knowing becomes.  You free the receptive state from it armoring by the ego.  You learn to live closer to receptivity.”

  If there was ever a reason to clear up neuroses, this had got to be it.  Could maybe tune into something really cool.

  I like all of the seasons and especially look forward to the points of transitions in between.  As one approaches, unformed ideas for new adventure well up in profusion.  As the nature of the new season manifests itself so do new plans.

  In the spring of 1689 Japanese poet Basho set out on a five month journey across north central Honshu to visit to visit landmarks of nature and civilization as well as to spread the form of verse that he transformed from an antiphonal game into something more sophisticated.

  His recording of that journey in prose and poetry is regarded as among the most important in Japanese literature.  The Narrow Road to the Interior begins: “The sun and the moon are eternal travelers.  Even the years wander on.  A lifetime adrift in a boat or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey and the journey itself is home.”

  The travel narrative is articulated by a form of linked verse called renga.  There are three syllabic units: 5-7-5; 7-7; 5-7-5.  Two of the units must relate to each other in sequence, but three cannot – thus regular shifts in flow. 

  The opening unit is called a hokku and sets the tone and place usually invoking some aspect of nature denoting the season.  (Stand alone hokku came to be called haiku.)

  This is probably Basho’s best known haiku:

  What really interests me in all this is that some think that Basho was a ninja.  From a low samurai family, he was raised in an area where ninja were recruited and trained.  The funding of the journey remains a mystery and he traveled the considerable distance of this journey so efficiently that secret techniques were suspected.  Finally, at the time of his travels, there was turmoil in the shogunate and such discreet services would likely have been procured.

  The powers of observation and perspicacity of a great poet might have served a spy well.  An artist’s personality would have allowed him to move through a populace with syncopation and quietly productive conviviality.  As opposed to Karate and a Walther PPK.

  Probably this is all fantasy.  Basho had become a Zen monk and the title of the work would have one consider the interinextricability of his inner and outer journeys.  But still…

  That’s Jyoti Raj in a series of youtube videos gone viral.  It’s an incredible display of bold athleticism performed upon an interesting bit of topography.  From this point of remove, it is impossible to judge the size of the holds or texture of the stone so as to develop a sense of the difficulty, but the ground would come up pretty fast regardless.

  I’d seen the video some months ago and have thought of the fellow occasionally since.  I wrote an essay in high school about the motivational question behind alpinism and am always interested in new inflections.  “Because it is there” never did much for me.

  I was thus thrilled to find in the January 2010 issue of Climbing Magazine* that someone had tracked the climber down and asked a few questions.  Turns out that the footage was shot at sixteenth century Chitradurga Fort in southern India.

  Mr. Raj was a wild child and ran away from home at age 7 after having been kicked out of school.  He somehow made his way to a larger metro area more than 500 miles away where he found work at a ‘sweet shop’ which he left after five years of abuse. 

  Thence to Chitradurga where a family took him in and for whom he ran errands in turn for his keep.  At about age eighteen he was accused of theft and decided to leap to his death from atop a large cliff.  He made it to a perch about fifty feet up, but decided  to get more air to ensure that impact would do more than break bones.

  To his astonishment, as he continued up, people began to gather and cheer.  Heartened, he also found that he enjoyed the vertiginous kinesthetics and returned the next day to begin his exploration of the  seven story fort walls nearby.

  Had he taken the stairs, his would have been the only and last hurrah.  But just as important as his first applause, the concentration necessary to make the upward progress extirpated the negative cerebrations long enough for his mind to clear and absorb the new view.

  That was three years ago.  Now a local celebrity, he has become reacquainted (if not reunited) with his family and teaches climbing to young people.  Why climbing?

  “It gives meaning to my life.  It’s the only thing I’ve ever enjoyed, because life has otherwise been full of hardship.”  Funny how things sometimes turn out…

*Article on page 28 by Dev. S. Sukumar

  In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine there was an article by Daniel Smith entitled “Is there an Ecological Unconscious?” which addressed the stress and discomfort visited upon the psyche of those subjected to forced dislocation (eg Trail of Tears) or environmental degradation (eg exploitation of newly discovered nearby coal deposits).

  Researcher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to describe this condition of “place pathology” leading to the diminution of “one’s heart’s ease”.  The article reminds us that Freud attributed just about everything to sex and how modern psychology is primarily concerned with urban interpersonal interaction, largely ignoring the primal bond between humankind and the rest of nature.

  The premise of echopsychology is that “an imperiled environment creates an imperiled mind” and that there might be a relationship between a resilient environment and a resilient mind.  Research shows that natural settings are far more effective than urban for the enhancement of cognition.  Researcher Peter Kahn calls for a ‘rewilding’ of the psyche.

   Well, yippee ki-yay, I quite agree.  “More and more”, he writes, “the human experience of nature will be mediated by technological systems.  We will, as a matter of mere survival adapt to these changes.  The question is whether our new, nature-reduced lives will be impoverished from the standpoint of human functioning and flourishing.”

  How much of a stretch is it then to ask about the degree to which TV, digital social networking, video games, etc are responsible for global warming?   Well a lot I guess, but you get my point.  How can one have a meaningful sense of self and surroundings without a vigorous dose of the environment from time to time?

  Paradoxically, it dawned on me that an emerging departure from rectiliniarity in architecture enabled by technology might be relatedly salubrious.  I have long been interested in the emotional generosity inherent in good design and wonder if this will prove to be an unexpected and fecund vector.

  Japanese architect Toyo Ito has said that: “I sometimes feel that we are losing an intuitive sense of our own bodies.  Children don’t run around outside as much as they did.  They sit in front of computer games.  Some architects have been trying to find a language for this new generation, with very minimalist spaces.  I am looking for something more primitive, a kind of abstraction that still has a sense of the body.”     

  I have only read about and seen photos of Ito’s built work and am eager to one day experience a product of his line of thinking.  New York Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff calls him an “urban poet”, “someone who has been able to crystallize, through architecture, the tensions that lie buried in the heart of contemporary society.”*

  No two of his projects are alike, maybe not even remotely similar.  Ouroussoff: “By embracing ambiguity, his work forces us to look a the world through a wider lens.  It asks us to choose the slowly unfolding narrative over the instant fix…  A building that seems to have been frozen in a state of metamorphosis”

  The photos are of his stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.  Ouroussoff tells us that it is “a space that manages to maintain the intensity and focus of a grand stadium without that intensity becoming oppressive.”  As opposed to other stadiums, “it seeks to maximize our awareness of (the outside world) while still creating a sense of enclosure.”

  Might such places help relieve solastalgia?  Help rewild a psyche, even?

*NYT 6 12 09

  Similarly, I’ve learned how to play B, C, and D on the second string and G and A on the third.  It is very helpful when the particular bit of music under assault is recognizable.  So far I can conjure up stuff that sounds like Jingle Bells, Au Clair de la Lune, and Love Me Tender.  It’s fun.

  However, last week I started to try and learn a ‘cord’ and it has been frustrating.  To (try to) play a cord you strum several strings in quick succession with the pick while (usually I think) holding down one or more of them with your left hand.  It has proven difficult because I have a tough time positioning one finger to hold down a string without touching those around it. 

  It sounds awful if you don’t get it right.  Terrible.  It’s  like when you’re splitting wood, overshoot, and the axe handle thuds the log. First time in this process for which profanity was required.  Dog got up and hid.  Another beloved (but long departed) canine member of the family was smart and learned to hide whenever I touched my tool belt – confident that f-bombs were sure to follow.  I promise not to Pavlov the guitar.

  Saving grace might be Beethoven.  A few measures (lines) of The ‘Ode to Joy’ from his 9^th Symphony was the first music I confronted with this new (to me obviously) technique.  Was reminded of what brought me here in the first place.  What is it in this simple arrangement of a handful of notes that this fat fingered near sexagenarian can work out well enough that his spirits lift and soul rises?

  Ludwig Van was fifty-four when he wrote it and had been deaf for ten years.  At its premier, thus unable to direct, he sat by the stage facing the orchestra counting time.  Upon conclusion of the performance contralto Caroline Unger had to step forward and turn him around so that he could see and accept the wild acclaim.

  What is it about music?  In what dimension can one, unable to hear, strum a heartstring with such pervasive and profound reverberation?

   A while back (cf 7/24/09) I mentioned a bit about a tooth extraction.  Even though the gap was unobtrusive enough that wife didn’t fit about my place in daughter’s wedding photos, dentist said that it had to be filled.  Otherwise other teeth would slowly shift and faults would form. Mandibular plate tectonics.

  Both dentist and MD with the pliers said that an implant was the way to go.  Research confirmed their recommendations.  “A Dental Shift: Implants Instead of Bridges” wrote Jane Brody in the NYT 11/17/09.  I read about the procedure and asked my dentist friend what was the longest I could wait before setting something up.

  He told me and I added another month and made the appointment.  Yesterday was the day.  Began with the same daunting consent form.  “Swelling, bruising, and pain can occur…Jaw fracture is quite rare… etc.” At least I still didn’t have to worry about the effects of antibiotics on the potency of any birth control.

  This operating room was much bigger than last time.  “Need more stuff for implants” said nurse.  “And room to move”.  I noticed the defibrillator on the wall as she took my blood pressure.  “Let me cover you up and Doctor will be right in.”  She did a pretty good job, but I had worn a red sweater just in case.

  Doc came in, put the same hockey puck back in the left side of my mouth, numbed me up, and unrolled his tool pouch.  “Just like the ‘surgeon’ at the end of Braveheart” he chuckled. I tried to find something on the ceiling to count.

  “First gotta drill me a hole.  You ready?”  Sounded just like a hammer drill going through a wall.  Only louder.  He drilled and drilled.  I began to worry about an inadvertent trephination.  He withdrew the bit just in time and screwed the implant in finger tight which wasn’t very far.  Could feel the sharp threads with my tongue.

  He fastened a lever onto it and leaned forward.  It was a ratchet.  OMPH clinkity, OMPH clinkity, OMPH clinkity.  “Ok let’s see how we did.”  Put one of those cardboardy bits of film in mouth and took x-ray.   “Dang”.  Ratchet in reverse he backed it out and drilled some more.

  Final tightening underway, all I could think about was the countless number of times I have stripped threads while undertaking some mechanical or home repair.  Just this side of that sort of mess with neck at ninety degrees and all cervical vertebrae in subluxation, he stopped, threw a few stitches with racquet string and “voila”.

  “Uh, that doesn’t feel much like a tooth” I said.  “Won’t celery fibers and stuff get hung up around it?”

  He laughed.  “Don’t worry, we have to wait a few weeks to make sure it’s snug and not infected. Then we’ll spin on a nice new tooth and you’ll be good to go.  Nurse here will tell you what to do to stay out of trouble.  Soft foods for a week…”

  Jeesh.  I wrote the big check, stepped outside, sighed, and took a deep breath.  The way negative wind chill frosted the thing up like a finial on a fencepost in the Gulag.

  The only thing I remember, well the first thing that comes to mind I guess, about Mrs. Nichol’s sixth grade music class is the way she’d draw a circle on the blackboard and make me stand there with my nose in it for most of the period.  I mean who cared about Saint Saens, whole notes, or the fact that Anton Dvorak had actually been in Iowa?

  The only interesting thing I recall was listening to her describe her husband’s malaria.  He’d been in the Navy during WWII.  I never’d heard of anything you couldn’t shake. Anyway, I didn’t like music, the circle didn’t work, and I became intimately familiar with every corner of the principal’s office. 

  The sounds of the sixties perked up my ears, but being a-political and an emotional nitwit nothing found more than passing resonance.  I began to wake up in college – I’m probably not alone in having had an epiphany in front of Disney’s Fantasia.  The Beethoven’s Sixth segment was to my mind what Kool-Aid was for the Dead. 

  All of a sudden I had an incredibly eclectic taste in music and an incipient thirst for understanding.  What is it?  It’s got to be more than epiphenomenal…  Everybody has at least a little rhythm.  Why is it so great to hear Gene Kelly “Singing in the Rain” by the produce at the grocery store when the mini-sprinklers go on?  Wasn’t that a wonderful movie?  Can’t you just see him twirling about the lamppost, drenched?

  Long determined to launch a serious investigation, I didn’t have a clue about how to begin until wife fixed me up with guitar lessons recently.  Month into it now and I’m fascinated.  I can read a few notes, make annoyingly recognizable sounds, and am amazed at the mind state that’s induced.

  The first lessons were a bit awkward for sure.  I’m easily three times as old as most of the students in the facility.  Years older than most of the parents reading People Magazine in the lobby as a matter of fact.  But after practicing a little bit every day I have begun to feel like I did the first time fiddling with buttons on a shirt that was not my own…

   What’s up with the elephants?  In February of 2007 on the radio program “Speaking of Faith” was a segment with acoustic biologist Katy Payne.  It is going to be rebroadcast Sunday.  You should listen.  Or visit the site: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/  Her descriptions of whales composing complex songs are incredible.  Her stories of emotional networks maintained between and among elephants miles apart are enthralling. 

  She’s a Quaker working at the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell.  “I see my responsibility as being to listen.  My church is outdoors.  And I must say that if I could ask these animals that I like so much if there’s anything equivalent to what we speak of as being faith, I would love to do that.  We just don’t know.”

  “Many animals make sounds, everything from crickets to humans to whales.  Birds, of course.  Frogs.  And these sounds, in the case of animals, are thought of in relation to reproduction and courtship.  In humans, although they may serve exactly the same function, they’re thought of in relation to aesthetics.  And one of the aspects of my work has been to say, ‘Look, we don’t have to have two languages for this.’

  In the highly esteemed journal Nature this week was a report of recent research indicating that men have evolved more rapidly than women*.  The study compared the Y chromosomes (the bit that makes a man male, (you know XY instead of XX) of chimps and humans. 

  Chimps are our nearest living relatives and over the last six million years our genetic codes have only diverged about two percent.  Except the Y chromosome which is some thirty percent different.  That’s a big change in a relatively short period of time.

  There are several possible explanations for the Y being “such an evolutionary powerhouse”.  One is that since the Y is a loner and not part of a pair like all of the rest and thus can mutate more easily.  Another has to do with the randy attitude of female chimps in heat.  Since they seek out many partners, there is huge evolutionary pressure on the males to produce the most and best sperm…

  I probably should support my own team and heckle the laggard other, but while reading the piece a George Carlin routine came to mind.  “Know how stupid the average guy is?  Just think – half of them are stupider!”  For proof, just check out the Darwin awards which are given annually to the nuttiest manner by which people have removed themselves from the gene pool during the previous twelve months.

  A woman has only won first prize once.  A random perusal of the site** turned up the story of a drunk twenty year old Californian dude who caught a rattlesnake.  Snake slithered its tongue to whiff the environment and get its bearings. (Snakes’ tongues are involved in their olfactory process)  Genius stuck out his tongue in response into which snake sunk its fangs.  Tongue swelled up choking the poor dumb guy to death***.

  Or take the first words the masterpiece of the great French poet Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil):

  Now, I certainly don’t feel that way all of the time and am dang glad I don’t have to go to hen parties, but will admit that I am an easy and logical target for regular self deprecation.  Wife agrees.

*http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08700.html

**http://www.darwinawards.com/

***If this reminds you of anything you’ve previously read in this space, please don’t tell anyone.  (7/7/09)

****cf post of October 9, 2009