It’s been a busy time and many plans for entries remain unrealized. Having delayed my Moby-Dick project until I can get back my access to the OED, I instead took up reading all of Western Literature, so as you can imagine I have some reports to post about that. Right now two, which is how many items of Western Literature I have thus far read. But they’re not done. Then there’s my very long and not-interesting enlistication of all the goofy live shows I saw in August – that’s taking forever to finish. Plus there’s an appendix to that, of the other stuff I read or saw in the past several months. Haven’t even started it. Also, that thing I wanted write about John Williams that’s been sitting here half-finished for a year. I have some new thoughts for that. And then the whole issue of the meme dictionary. You haven’t heard the last of that, but it’s complicated. I feel like there’s a lot to attend to on this site just to live up to my own meager-grand plans for getting out my thoughts. Getting out my thoughts takes forever!

So anyway, none of that stuff is ready to post. But it’s late and I feel like I can probably get this one thing out without too much trouble.

Most of my thinking about those various books and music and shows and things has been colored, since that last entry, by my “art thought,” which has now taken on the character of being a whole “theory of art.” Really it’s just a certain “angle on art” that I’m finding very valuable. In addition to All of Western Literature I’m also reading The New Penguin History of The World, and early on – which is where I am – he says that, while we don’t know for sure what it was for, clearly cave art was carrying some burden of communication in an era before writing. Then he goes on to say that it probably had ritual or magical significance as well. I don’t doubt it, but the first part is what my thoughts have been focussed on.

When I said last time that art is the projection of an individual’s mental model of the world – and that it thus allowed others to interpret the world on congruent models – I was speaking and thinking at the extremely analytic end of a spectrum that also includes very familiar ways of expressing the same thing. Things like “art expresses inner truths that we cannot put into words,” etc. are basically the same thought. But whenever I heard people saying things like this, I used to think they were talking about inner truths like “loss is a shadow crossing the soul” or whatever – essentially, inner experiences, and so probably emotional ones. Representation of the outer world can only be tied to this sort of “meaning” in art by being a figurative depiction of an emotional state, or as a stimulus meant to provoke a quasi-emotional state such as “the appreciation of beauty.”*

But what I didn’t see is that any knowledge of the outer world is an inner experience. I guess a related thing that I didn’t see is what Plato was going on about. All that talk about the real essence of perfect “horseness,” unattainable by flawed earthly horses, struck me as near-nonsense deriving from a simple confusion of word with thing. “Words are just useful tags!” I wanted to shout at Plato. “People made them up to get things done!” And to some degree I still feel that way. But the deeper issue managed to escape me: that even just to think of things as “things” is an interpretation, is something people made up to get things done. Plato writes about “forms” and puts them in some world other than the real world, but – as far as I know – he never says that the world of forms is, in fact, the mental mechanism. In fact, I think he goes the other way and says that the world of forms is some heaven-type place outside of us. I don’t really know. Gotta make sure Plato’s on the list of All Western Literature. Yup, there he is. So all in due time.

We only have the five senses, but in the brain they’re all plugged into one another via a central program – I generally don’t like computer analogies like this because they seem smug and nerdy, but right now I need it – via a central program that is doing all kinds of complicated “world-simulation.” Without that program, the five senses would have nothing to say to one another. Well, maybe smell and taste would get along. But sight and touch would have no idea. The central program is necessary, is the root of what we’re doing as minds, and is so incredibly accurate in its predictions that we generally forget about it. But it has nothing directly to do with the world. The world is apparently made of some kind of sticky stuff. The program in our brain deals in very different terms.

Verbal communication is one of the functions of the program; it deals in the program’s terms. It cannot, without fancy workarounds, reprogram the program itself. Art, however, is about program maintenance. The program, though it doesn’t quite know why, does its best to portray the nature of the program itself. Then other brains, running a complementary routine, try to determine what they can about the program portrayed and, if the signals of prestige, sanity and efficacy are positive enough, incorporate some of that program into their own.

A better metaphor than this is cross-pollination – art is like the pollen strewn by desperate plants. Sexual reproduction in general. How do brains reproduce? Not just ideas, which for their meanings are already dependent on certain cultural programs, but cultural programs themselves? All culture is by nature reproductive. In fact, isn’t the value of all culture exactly that it reinforces itself and thus maintains solidarity? In this way, art can be seen as functioning exactly like any other feature of culture – it represents and thus communicates/reinforces the mental programming of its participants. A definition of “art,” if we need one, could then be: “any aspect or artifact of culture that has no utility other than to communicate and reinforce the mental program.” Interestingly, this particular definition does not resolve the “What Is Art” debates over Duchamp and other nudniks**, but they are left open for more interesting reasons. To me this is a very promising feature of this definition of art. The problem with the urinal in the museum is not that it is not beautiful or that it is not made by the artist or any of that – under this definition, the problem is that it quite possibly communicates nothing about the mental life of the artist and can be incorporated in no way to the mental life of the audience. It is merely a prop, a word, in some other kind of very specific, “in-program” communication, about art culture and the definitions of art. Obviously, this is up for debate. But isn’t that a more valuable debate than the usual one?

Art is this, among other things. Clearly it has some ritual significance as well, just like J.M. Roberts said. And the cultural apparatus that has developed around art is as gnarled and turgid as they get, so I’m not claiming that this sort of explanation is the explanation for all art. Far from it. But it does feel, to me, like the “pure” “essential” side of art, the side to which I want to attend. Conversely, on my trip through some irritating exhibits at the Tate Modern, I found that it made a good litmus test for dismissing works.

Right, I made notes about that and wanted to put them here. That was the whole point of my writing this second entry on the same topic. But all I’ve managed to do is reiterate, at greater length and more loopily, what I wrote last time. I can hear them quietly starting to play me off the podium so I guess I’ll post those notes later. Ugh. Not even the sense of having accomplished one of my meaningless self-appointed tasks. I still have it all ahead of me.

* Yes, it took me a long time to find just the right image. Previous choice was this. This was also a strong contender but the artist ruined it.

** This year, for the first time, I saw real, non-prankish works of Duchamp, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and they were good. So all right, so maybe he’s not a nudnik.

A few years ago, while I was at the Museum of Natural History in New York, I had a thought about art. There’s some text on the wall next to one of the dioramas that talks about human evolution and development, and it says – in that slightly musty way – that the decisive step in human mental development was the ability to manipulate our environment in a non-reactive way. That is, to make plans and then execute them; to be able to envision something that did not yet exist and then bring it about. Basically, that humans acquired the ability to manipulate a mental model of the world that could then be used to guide actions in the real world. I don’t remember quite how they said it, and it’s possible that I’m overshooting their point in my paraphrase here. Anyway, this was meant to introduce the advent of tool-making. Then – at least as I recall it – right next to that was a display about the first artworks – those fat little blobby goddesses. Maybe I made this up or maybe they were explicit about it, but I seem to remember the museum telling me that these things date back as far as the first tools; that as soon as human beings were able to manipulate their environment in useful ways, they were also manipulating it in, shall we say, non-useful ways.

And it seemed suddenly clear to me that art was just the junk output of a useful but indiscriminate brain function. Primitive man thought about killing a tiger and then made a spear. The next day, primitive man thought about having sex and then carved a woman out of a rock. Not quite as useful.* But, evolutionarily speaking, the guy who can make a spear is going to win out, even if he does happen to waste his time spreading pigment on the wall in the shape of the animal he’s thinking about. Whatever he thought that was supposed to do, I assure you, it doesn’t do it.**

So basically I came away that day feeling like I’d seen the nature of all non-essential human culture – our brains developed a very useful tool-building mechanism based on manipulating the world to match what we see in our mind’s eye, but only about 5% of what gets poured into that mechanism produces useful output – the rest is just freaky nonsense. I mean, a PICTURE of a thing?

But today I was reading a little book about art that I picked up for free from a bin on the sidewalk outside a bookstore, and I had a different thought.

Culture both forms and reflects the way we see the world. This, in turn – our mental modeling of the world – is essentially unlike the world. Just as a map of how the body feels, based on how many nerve endings we have, is completely distorted compared to an actual body***, our maps of pretty much everything – the ways we think about them – are crucially distorted. I don’t know anything about neuroscience, but from being a human I do know that we process things by breaking them down into chunks and then identifying them, recognizing them. Once it’s gone through processing, the sloppy sensory truth has been torn apart and reordered. A tree encountering someone’s idea of a tree would never recognize itself. If you know what I mean.

A child’s drawing – or a caveman’s dolly – reveals the quality and tendencies of the artist’s attention to the world. The kid looks at the same people we look at, but there’s only so much that he’s aware of such that he can manipulate it mentally. He’s aware that people have legs – and, if he’s sharp, feet – but this big chunk called “legs” overwhelms any of the other things he might have noticed about the foldings of cloth, or the anatomy of the knee, or light and shadow, etc. If he could grasp those things in his mind the way primitive man could grasp the idea of a spear, you can be sure he’d draw them. After all, if he remembers the toes, he WILL draw them all. The world projects an image in the mind; art is the projection of this image back into the world. From it, by triangulation with what we know about the world, we can deduce a good deal about the mind that produced it. The experience of art appreciation is the experience of empathy with our recreated version of the mental life that the art implies. This is so profoundly basic an idea in art theory that it is rarely stated explicitly. It wasn’t stated in my book, incidentally.

And – so my thought goes – the projection of mental life is actually a vitally important tool, from an evolutionary standpoint, in the creation of a social system. Any cooperative endeavor and any coordinated society – or more basically, functional communication – depends on mental congruence among the members of the society. If two or more cavemen are going to cooperate on a plan of building spears, surrounding the tiger, taking him down, roasting him over a fire, and so on, they’re going to need to be chunking their worlds in very similar ways. The kid’s stick drawing of legs, arms, torso and smiley-face is acceptable to us because at a basic level, that is the endorsed chunking. If the kid drew knuckles, uvula, and navel inside a big circle, he wouldn’t be able to participate in society. Okay, that’s just silly. But if you go, like I did yesterday, to the British Museum, and look at the representations of people from one culture to another, you see that what is being agreed upon about what “seeing a person” consists of varies slightly and crucially. This one really struck me – those Assyrian winged man-horse doorframe statues all have five legs depicted: two for the front view, and four for the side view, with the corner leg appearing in both. Check out the image. Even though this viewing angle, where all five are simultaneously visible, is not only possible but in fact the most likely viewing angle, the artists – for many centuries – nonetheless felt that the visible inconsistency was less important than the symmetry and beauty of the two distinct views from the orthogonal angles. What does this say about Assyrian mindset? I’m not sure how to articulate it. But it certainly says something, and if I had grown up Assyrian, it would have taught me something, about what matters and what doesn’t in the realm of seeing, and, ultimately, in the realm of processing the world at all.

That the artistic representation of the world reveals the mental parsing of the world is in fact the underlying philosophy behind Auerbach’s Mimesis, which I am very much enjoying. The only part of this thought that is specific to today for me is the idea that the fact that art reveals mental parsing makes it a tool for disseminating a shared mental grammar. That, evolutionarily, it would be advantageous to be constantly projecting one’s mental processes for one’s peers by illustrating what the world looks like after it has been processed. And that maybe, as children are internally primed to listen to speech and acquire language, we are always primed to look to art and subconsciously acquire new ways of breaking down and recognizing our sensory experience and putting it to use.

This functional theory of art as a tool for mental conformity could feasibly also account for the long contemporary crisis of art, with an argument along the lines of Henry Pleasants’ The Agony of Modern Music. To wit: that the romantic emphasis on art as the expression of an individual was a nineteenth-century aberration of necessarily limited scope since it distorts the essential nature of art. This trend ran the hundred years it had in it, and now we have long since exhausted the technical possibilities arising from the idea of art by and about individuals, but have so profoundly poisoned our idea of what art is that we cannot find our way backward.

I don’t know if I believe that, or any of the rest of it, but it’s interesting to think about.

* We don’t know what those little figures were about; they’re pretty attentive about the sex organs but they still might have been religious symbols by way of the concept of “fertility.” But no matter how you cut it, they’re still not a well-thought-out way to bring about children or crops or anything else Monsieur Caveman may have had in mind.

** Beth: “but couldn’t the purpose of the drawing be communication?” Well, yes. Right. But isn’t there still a definite difference between functional communication and art? Maybe cave paintings are going back too far to make that distinction, but only because we know so little about them. Is there any way of construing the Venus sculptures as functional communication? There may be, but I can’t see one.

*** I’ve seen this sort of thing illustrated somewhere, but when I went searching for a picture just now I couldn’t find it.

I’ve just seen a bit of improvisational comedy.

Improv comedy purports to be something like on-the-spot writing – and maybe it is, in its way – but it feels like something else. Improv comedy tends to come off less like creative play than like the shuffling of pre-existing cultural molecules – what the kids today call “memes.”* Since the performers need to be in agreement during the unpremeditated performance, they’re forced to depend on strategies that they can be sure the others will “get” instantly – on concepts that are common property. Anyone watching improv is also there to appreciate the craft – the comedy itself is generally pretty pale when taken on its own merits – and for the most part that craft is the clever invocation and exchange of these existing notions. In this sense, memes, and the shared repository of memes that constitutes our common culture, are exposed in a particularly naked way during improv.

See, when I sat down to write this, all of the above felt like it would take about one sentence. But then I couldn’t figure out how to write that sentence and it turned into a whole paragraph. Very frustrating; the whole rhythm of my overall thought is thrown off; that was supposed to be the upswing but now it’s turned out to be the first movement, and I really don’t have the time to keep it up through what will apparently have to be a very long arc of speculation.** Let me try to just suggest the rest of what I wanted to say with a series of questions:

Is this (the shuffling of pre-existing cultural molecules) really any different from “real” creativity, or is it just a rougher-grained version of the same process? If these molecules (those that might be invoked during improv comedy) could be catalogued in a dictionary, approximately how many would there be? Do they really exist as discrete molecules in a way that such a dictionary is feasible, or are we tricked by our sense of recognition into thinking that they have Platonic existences outside of their specific usage, when in fact we are only recognizing rules of formulation (that is, recognizing individual snowflakes as being well-formed snowflakes and thinking this means we must have seen them before)?

If such a dictionary could be constructed – not only of comedic memes but of all dramatic (mimetic!) memes – could a grammar be specified to govern their usage? It certainly feels like such laws, or at least principles, exist – it is the elegance and charm with which these memes are deployed that we appreciate while watching improv… or reading a mystery… or taking in any form of art that does not attempt to disguise the fact that it is constructed from pre-existing molecules – and such judgments necessitate principles of taste, as well as underlying formal principles.

Listening to music, one often feels the same sense of continuously recognizing constituent gestures – “now he’s doing one of those; now he’s doing one of those, etc.” – but my efforts to isolate and catalogue these have failed instantly because the things are devilishly hard to disentangle from one another without them losing their essentials. Is that a case of the snowflake illusion, or is it just a difficulty arising from our poor ability to articulate the workings of music? Perhaps an attempt at isolating such things in spoken/dramatic culture is a more approachable precursor to determining the form of a musical equivalent.

Everybody likes concrete examples, so here’s a concrete example to finish. The other day an obscure movie that I haven’t seen was being described to me. In this movie, a man seeking to immigrate to the US tricks a woman into believing that he loves her so that he can marry her for his citizenship. Then, before they reach the border, events ensue such that he actually does fall in love with her. Then, at a crucial moment, while the man is elsewhere, a third party shocks the woman by revealing that he never loved her and was only using her – even though now he really does love her! When I was told this, I thought, “Well, sure, right. One of those.” The question is, one of what? Have I actually seen this snowflake before? My gut tells me I could make a lexicon of these and that such a lexicon is sitting in my brain right now. A commenter on this site once suggested starting a wiki of all memes, but before that process begins, a coherent theory of how they break down needs to be established.

* Long note on “meme”: I don’t like this word “meme” for what I’m talking about because the emphasis, as it was coined by Richard Dawkins, is on the fact that, in analogy with genetic information, such an idea propagates itself from person to person and is thus subject to principles of adaptation and evolution. What I want to talk about is the notion of a unitary cultural concept that is shared by many people, but without this emphasis on propagation, which is a limiting metaphor. After all, culture (and the molecules thereof) is not solely transmitted from person to person; concepts can, for example, lie dormant in books and films and whatever for years and then be picked up again by a new generation, now colored by all sorts of historical considerations. Or they can be disseminated to millions of people all at once on television, where in some ways they don’t really seem to their audience to have originated with humans at all. These kinds of events can no doubt find a place in a pseudo-genetic theory of human culture; my point is just that such theory shouldn’t provide the terminology for the culture itself. Meme essentially means “a unit of imitatable thought” when I want a word that means “a molecule of cultural convention.” Coin and suggest!

For your reference… Since my OED privileges have been wiped away, here’s the – ugh – American Heritage Dictionary on “meme”:
n.

A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

[Shortening (modeled on GENE) of mimeme, from Greek mimēma, something imitated, from mimeisthai, to imitate. See mimesis.]

** When I started, promising only to write one paragraph, Beth said, “You’re writing a one-paragraph entry on memes? That’s not possible!” And she was right.

I was just now looking at this page from Vertigo. This is when Jimmy Stewart is pulling Kim Novak out of the bay after her apparently ghost-induced apparent suicide attempt.

In the first two bars here, the strings and horns are trading off a little whiplash figure in sixteenth-notes while the rest of the orchestra plays nauseous chromatic scales. Then, at the double bar, the figure in sixteenth-notes becomes a figure in eighth-notes and is played by the strings and winds together. Herrmann’s idea, I think, is that the frantic moment is beginning to subside, so the rhythm is altered to be less wrenching. But to me this sort of switch – from sixteenth-notes to eighth-notes – is a little unnerving in its own right. The motif itself, as it passes from one rhythmic speed to another, is revealed in a disturbingly naked sort of way. I was put in mind of something similar in Janáček’s Sinfonietta (the only work by Janáček that I’ve heard enough times to hum – but my sense is that the basic technique is found in many of his other works as well). Janáček’s overall approach to composition seems to deal, like Herrmann’s, in discrete units of musical material: musical objects that one hears being altered, played with, and rearranged, but in a fabric where the seams are always turned outward. The patches of material do not melt into one another; they remain distinctly movable within the larger context. In Herrmann’s film music the short, repetitive packets are first of all useful for communicating to an audience listening with only “half an ear,”* but they have their own peculiar character, as well.

The particular strangeness that I find in Janáček and Herrmann has something to do with this foregrounding of musical figures as manipulable items. When individual musical items are so discrete and item-like (itemic?), they begin to be disturbing. The principle is the same as with Yves Tanguy:

Globe de glace (1934)

Because these smudges and blobs are portrayed as objects, we are confronted with all the uncomfortable ways in which they do not live up to their responsibilities as objects. “What sort of horrible fucked-up objects are these?”

If it’s handled a certain way, the substance of music begins to take on the same, queasily insufficient quality. If musical motifs are “figures” to be handled and altered – are, in essence, things – then what sort of terrible off-world do they come from? Of course, that response is never conscious or nearly so stark. In practice, something like this Vertigo moment, which bluntly exposes the “material” quality of the material (to my ear, anyway), would just create a mild sense of oddness. But that’s plenty.

Why ‘change of rhythmic scale’ is what sets me to hearing music this way, I’m not sure. A visual analogy is tempting: it’s like moving the camera, pulling back from or zooming in on an object. The features that remain coherent and undistorted are more readily identifiable as an object and not just as a feature of the background. A parallax sort of thing.

Well, anyway, all those discrete musical “cells” can get unnerving in Herrmann. The technique flirts with clumsiness but the end result is something much more ominous than clumsy. Bartók also sometimes strikes me as having given his music the power to disturb by veering toward clumsiness. “Rough” is probably a better word: not a roughness of sound but a roughness of manipulation.

I recall being transfixed by a not-very-good piece, David Del Tredici’s Tattoo (1986), because of how viscerally uncomfortable it was making me. The whole piece is a huge, much-too-elaborate fabric built out of spiraling iterations of a single rhythmic figure that’s a sort of spiral in itself. The little thing appears in constant juxtaposition with itself on various scales and at various speeds. This is Del Tredici’s big technique, or was in the 80s, and he used it to death in all his works, so far as I can tell. It’s sort of the shameless, aggressive version of what I’m trying to point out in Herrmann and Janáček, and in that particular piece it really made my skin crawl. Really, like nails on some existential blackboard, like the guy in Sartre’s Nausea. I’m not sure if that’s what Del Tredici was going for – my explorations into his other music turned up a lot of grotesque self-indulgence and some other distasteful qualities, so it’s hard to guess what he wanted to achieve – but I give him credit for it.

The gothic, morbid qualities of Vertigo and Tristan und Isolde before it seem to me related to this sense of being confronted with the uncanny “stuff” of music, but that’s a different thought for another time. But there, I said it anyway.

* This is someone’s line about film music but I forget who. Aaron Copland or someone like that.