THE WORK OF THE DAY
For a few seconds when I first wake up, I think the world has burned, that the doctor gave me the deadly virus, and that the town has at last succeeded in killing all my cats. Then I come to my senses. These are monstrous things and they did not happen. Most people would try to make me stop thinking these things, to just stuff them back into my unconscious. In a minute, by themselves, they shrink and fade. They are a story, but only a possibility, threat rehearsals — just in case.
Stephen T. Asma, author of “The Evolution of Imagination”, can explain how to manage this sort of thing, which is a kind of preparation. How has he come to a new kind of thinking that would be totally discredited by traditional philosophers? How dare he include emotions?
The evolution of imagination, the title of Asma’s book, has three levels.
1. The growing ability of an individual to imagine and respond
2. Cultural dynamics as imagined activities grow more sophisticated or potent, more effective.
3. The real content and purpose of the book which is an account of the development of the human brain by evolution through many animals: reptile, mammal, primate, hominin.
The most beguiling aspect of this book is the use of jazz as the basic explanation of how — wordlessly — humans work together but with understanding and progress. For centuries the definition of intelligence has been words — logic, binary argument — and the smartest people are assumed to be philosophers and mathematicians, maybe physicists and chemists. All writing and publishing. Young PhD candidates must learn these books. Something like playing music with no sheet music was considered a contradiction, because writing — even if it were parallel lines inscribes with circles with tails — was more important than anything else. Even spoken words didn’t have that authority.
The last time I read about the known principles and agreements of music without paper was Bruno Neti writing about Native American pow-wow singing by men around a big drum, a combination of percussion and falsetto singing, patterned in a way all the players knew, though explaining it to a non-musician is difficult. Suffice it to say that the leader sings the basic sequence once, and the variations that follow are so predictable that everyone knows what they will be. The other aspect worth noting is that these “songs” were originally associated with serious and dreadful events, like war. I wish Bob Scriver were alive so I could talk to him about all this, as he knew both Blackfeet songs and jazz cornet.
Because of Cartesian valuing of strictness, rationality, and the elimination of insecurity, deviation, and emotion, the spontaneity and inventiveness of jazz, which evolved in America in the midst of a confined and oppressed people, has been considered as “low” and unintellectual. Primitive drum pounding and “blue” melodies. Yet it persists, inspires and even explains life.
Asma’s thesis that the human brain did not begin its evolution through learning how to say fancier versions of “ugh”, but rather because of what we call music in the context of work, like chanting together to coordinate something like a group pulling in a net heavy with fish or to energize the simultaneous lifting of something massive to build a wall. He sees this as combining with gestures in the way of signing to a hunting partner (“It’s over to the left” or “not yet”.) We all tend to grunt even when we are alone and do something difficult, or to make a groan or yelp when surprised.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ7aYQtIldg “Stomp” acts out the beginning of work that created the source of music and the origin of communication. Today in cities where people live on the sidewalk with nothing, they still use found buckets and objects to express themselves. Their work is that of staying alive, remembering who they are.
The evolution of a musician consists of experience, playing and listening as he or she absorbs the “grammar” of the sound sequences in the same way that children learn the grammar of speech as they grow. Two assumptions interfere with our understanding of evolution of species over millennia — even more than the child’s idea of God making the first people out of clay. First, every “rough draft” of a creature comes out of a preceding creature and preserves its former features inside the new version, leading to books like “Your Inner Fish” which traces the features of a fish in your present body.
Second, the 19th century craze for categories, names, boxes and pigeonholes depends upon the intellectual idea of unchanging existence but even the systems of sorting change as new knowledge evolves, like DNA telling us that parrots descended from hawks. Human knowledge disciplines and the names of things in them keep morphing and combining. Evolution continues in surprising ways.
The real kernel of this book is about the brain itself over time as it expanded, specialized, and converted previous parts into new uses, pushing the skull out to the limits imposed by the necessity of birth. Thinking about thinking now is that there are not little organelles for every function, but rather the brain works by internal connections and systems, its “grammar” which forms and reforms in the music of thinking.
Once I read an article about a search for new plants that would be hardier or more nutritious in the way that alfalfa has been. A tough North African plant was found and a farmer planted an acre of it. The problem arrived at harvest: this plant had intertwined and grown into a mass so thick that no deer could invade it and no machine could reap it. If the farmer grabbed hold of one side and — with effort — gave it a good shake, the whole acre of vegetation moved. That’s the way the brain grows, so thick that no part can be pulled out without serious cutting.
This is the ground of stories, narrative as a way of tracing how the tendrils grow in response to the sun and the ground. In this way we remember the past — sometimes underground/unconscious — so as to imagine a future open to the sun. Even the most rational plans and theories are powered by experience, the source of discovery. Development of Covid vaccine came in part from the development of HIV medicines and may still lead to an HIV vaccine.
If I let myself feel my dreads on waking, then I can imagine ways to resolve them. It is part of the day’s work and can be as joyful as reading this book.
