New Day – let’s try again…
So this morning I learnt the haka – well an approximation of the haka – in preparation for chloe’s play. I can’t imagine what her tutor is gonna think but it’s novel at least and fits really well... boldly ushers in the darkness and violence of the crucifixion to the tale.
So this morning was a fun experience, and fascinating: sparking off thoughts this afternoon on what we understand by male and female aggression… the posture so definitely masculine, the moving body hunched forward and over, almost gorilla like, and the grunts pulled up from low in the body… this is a dance with balls… come on if you think you’re hard enough… we’re gonna slaughter you and smash your infants upon the rocks… I didn’t think I was much of a girly-girl ‘til this morning I tried to imitate a 16 stone rugby player. Even in stomper boots, the body held with too great poise, posture too straight and balletic… movements too flowing, where the limbs should be jabbing, stabbing, punching… we need goliath bulk, not Davidic grace… our throats lower and roughen, our faces scowl to threaten… words spat from a growling throat…
With black masks covering our faces we are hitching our skirts mimicking an oldtime act of female aggression (apparently this was once upon a time in our own culture considered frightening enough to ward off intruders… look what I have under here – it’ll bite if you come any closer, trespassers will be prosecuted)… bending spread knees to stamp and grunt…the mob baying for blood… welcoming death and violence… demanding sacrafice. There is nothing in this story for the tender hearted… they whipped and they stripped and they strung him
Cleansed the soul… invigorated and channelled out that which was choking the throat yesterday… an enemy without or within, I don’t quite know, but all that shouting and stamping this morning was cathartic in a primal way…
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Oddly appropriate advent listening
Listening to the Prefuse73 T5 soul sessions Vol 1.
At 14mins48secs a familiar strain comes, and the mind fills in the invisible lyrics
God rest you merry gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay
For Jesus Christ our Saviour
Was born upon this day
And then a voice joins to sing a latin american sounding variation on the old classic,
They killed someone else in the hot sun of a Christmas day…
I have no idea what that’s about… but it’s something about something…
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Enclosed and Exposed
Been working this past few days on the themes of family and our visible and hidden selves within family, in the initial stages of a collaborative project with Jayne… trying to get my own thoughts down on paper… starting as I always do with words and thoughts, word play and association, trying to get my own take on what we might do before working out how we might combine our individual perspectives into some kind of coherent vision that still gives each of us voice. Needless to say, my own is gonna be a lot darker I’m certain… but it’s all provisional and even if I end up shifting into a whole different direction of how I see it I really enjoy this process… as with helping out Chloe on her project, and reminiscent of planning ikon gatherings, it’s all about letting words float about and ideas rise to the surface… watching as they shape and conversing with them in doodles and mind maps… what is all this mess here? How do I make sense of this, what are the questions needing answered?
I love the joining of the dots, flowing from word to word to word, sometimes smooth, sometimes leaping… a kind of map making… not just of a vision but of the self… linking the personal to the social, and trying to find the universals in between…
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And something makes me want to link that thought with this from Dillard, although at present I can best think that’s got something to do with language…
“…somewhere around 11,000 yrs ago, some clever hunting human primates – who made stone spears, drew pictures, and talked – had another idea. they knocked ripe seeds from transplanted wild barley or einkorn wheat and stored the seeds dry at their campsite in the Zagros Mountains. Since eating ground seeds kept the families alive when hunting failed, they settled there, planted more seed, hunkered down to wait its sprouting, and, what with one thing and another, shucks, here we be, I at my laptop computer, you with a book in your hands. We are just like squirrels, really, or, well, more like gibbons, but we happen to use tools, speak, and write; we blundered into art and science. We are one of those animals. The ones whose neocortexes swelled, who just happen to write encyclopaedias and fly to the moon. Can anyone believe this?
Yes, because cultural evolution happens fast; it accelerates exponentially and, to put it less precisely, explodes. Biological evolution takes time, because it requires biological generations; the unit of reproduction is the mortal and replicating creature. Once the naked ape starts talking, however, “the unit of reproduction becomes” – in the words of anthropologist Gary Clevidence – “the mouth”. Information and complexity burgeon and replicate so fast that the printing press arrives as almost an afterthought of our 10 billion brain neurons and their 60 trillion connections. Positivist science can, theoretically, account for the whole human show, even our 5.9 billion unique shades of consciousness, and our love for one another and for books.
Science could, I say, if it possessed all the data, describe the purely physical workings that have enabled our species to build and fly jets, write poems, encode data on silicon, and photograph Jupiter. But science has other fish to fry. Science (like philosophy) has bypassed this vast and abyssal fish of consciousness and culture. The data are tighter in other areas. Still, let us grant that our human world is a quirk of materials. Let us ignore the staggering truth that you hold in your hands an object of culture, one of many your gaze meets all around you. If, then, the human layer in which we spend our lives is an epiphenomenon in nature’s mechanical doings, if science devotes scant attention to human culture, and if science has scrutinized human consciousness only recently and leaves other disciplines, if any, to study human thought – then science, which is, God knows, correct, nevertheless cannot address what interests us most: what are we doing here?”
- Annie Dillard, For The Timebeing, 1999, pp 93-95
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Listening again for first time in a many a month to Denison Witmer’s album Are you a dreamer?, arguably my favourite album of last winter (but who’d want to argue about such a thing)… too cozy for warmer months… no less beautiful this year. If I found it hard not to weep every time I heard this last year, it is testament to the improvement in my broader emotional states, it now makes me smile wistfully. The magic that music does to us, speaking each passing year with evolving voice never ceases to amaze me.
Perhaps faithfulness rewards us with unfolding returns. At least, it feels like it ought to… maybe that’s why music feels like magic…
LB,x
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