Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
> Ray E. Harrell wrote:
> [snip]
> > Mothers are not ready for the virtual world.
> [snip]
>
> Neither is the virtual world ready for
> mothers. Donald Winnicott's enormous contributions
> to understanding (to borrow the title
> of one of his books: "The Maturational Processes
> and the Facilitating Environment" (International Universities
> Press, 1965) have not been metabolized by our so-called
> society (i.e., what calls itself such without earning the
> honorific).
I agree about "so-called" especially in the over-simplifiedmass
production anti-creative models of the past 100
years or so. They break their arms patting themselves
on the back about how they have developed technology
but most science is pretty simple and relativity is something
that has been in the arts and languages for at least three
hundred years. I believe history will not tie the advances
of cultural anthropology to science and psychology but
to the arts and languages which have done it first and
with fewer genocidal wars. Even the scientists at the
old Einstein "Think-Tank" in Princeton have trouble with
Clifford Geertz because he just isn't linear (Darwinian?)
enough and grounds his work in observation and language.
Even Murray Gell-Mann's seminal study was as a linguist
before he decided that he couldn't make a living at it and
chose physics instead. But his basic impulse and
understanding is still linguistic and pedagogical as well as
talmudic.
In music we call relativity "style analysis". And if
you want to see real complexity then analyze a late
romantic chromatic symphony on the computer or
better still, compare the memory necessary to simply
write it down. Of course the dull simplicities of
mathematics which do just fine on the computer.
Language is another matter. I suspect that the
science of the future will consider "higher" Mathematics
much as we consider the use of leeches in medicine.
I suspect physics is crucial but it will be
forced to join the complexities of language and the
abstract expressions (the arts) in a grand "unified theory"
because Math will be to the understanding
of the universe as "Country Western Music" is to
Schumann or Debussy.
Or as Debussy said over 70 years ago about Sousa's
marches:
"These cakewalks are the best that America
has to offer the world of art? This military music is to
music as military justice is to the world of jurisprudence!"
Meanwhile America's over-simplified economics
complains about the bureaucratic complexities of
socialism while creating corporations larger than
most socialist countries. What do we call them?
Monarchies? Marauding armies? I can't give you
the name of the executive officer who said that IBM
was a "socialist" system, because he asked me not
to, but he preferred the description "socialist" to
"marauding army", feudalism, or monarchy. What
he couldn't call it was democratic. I tend to think of
these companies as "Hunter/Gatherers".
It is interesting that these totally inaccurate
descriptions of indigenous people's politics and
culture have arisen with the rise of the great corporations.
Hunter/Gatherer was included in the dictionary only
in the publication of American Heritage II.
The Sioux, a late horse culture, are closer to the
meaning of "virtual" than they are to Hunter/Gatherer
according today's social sciences. And the H/G
term is totally inaccurate to the agricultural populations
of all but the plains cultures prior to contact. It isn't
even an accurate description of the rain forest peoples.
The term came out of the simple-minded thought of
19th century economically oriented social scientists.
So Brad this is not a dualistic answer. There are not
simply demons and angels but a whole universe of
ideas and paths that see the world in ways that
Winnicott and the others have only begun to explore
from their own cultural context. They remind me a bit
of the Jacobin Era's attitude about the universality
of all art and their being the only one's practicing it.
The French were the first to break this provincial idea
with the word "Musics." It is also interesting that
the first founders of the baby science in France were
artists and writers. Men familiar with the multiplicity of
things. Even the great Beaumarchais was an expert
in Time. But science was practical while art and language
was theoretical. Today the science and simplicities
of economics, math and the social sciences demand
that art justify itself practically by being simple and giving
up its history (birthright) to science. Shades of the
first Jacob and Esau. Most artists have been exiled to
the mountain when they sold out!
> Both the basic nurturance of the
> infant and the nurturance of creativity at any age
> "require" a "holding environment": a safe space in which
> the individual can explore, and, if things go wrong,
> count on it to come to his or her aid.
How very Iroquoian of him. This doesn't come fromEurope or the Middle
East, they treated their children as
little adults. Their handling of the current gun situation is
a reflex back to the old "hang the kid" legal system of
the European past.
> I put "require" in
> quote marks, because we know that humans are remarkably
> resilient, and that infants can survive manipulative
> and even mutilative childrearing, and that artists can
> [at least sometimes] produce art in the time and with
> the energy left over after they earn their
> living as they [don't] please.
Sounds like the atmosphere that Beethoven and Wagnerendured and
prevailed in.
> Ray presents a sanguine view of Chasrles Ives' biography,
> of Ives "marrying" a highly productive life in the
> insurance business with musical creation.
Actually I ain't that simple. Where the Russian composerreceived a
stipend once he had proven his expertise and
never had to write another note. (In fact if he did and the
cultural authorities disagreed then it was suppressed.)
The American composer was suppressed by tying creativity
to the ability to sell the product. An idea that worked to
some degree for graphics artists since they had the ability
to define their product as an object in space.
On the other hand the performing arts happened in "time" and
the idea of the necessary constant repetition (for economies
of scale, mass production) is the very antithesis of Western
complex art. Only the avante garde "minimalist" art has been
able to meet the problem to a degree. This meditational art
however, goes against the grain of most Western spiritual,
cultural and work practices.
So Ives chose creativity and made a living at something else.
He agree with both you and Darwin by suggesting that
neither of you were truly creative.(Do not mistake that as
a judgment that I share).
For his judgment and his lifestyle he had a nervous
breakdown (called a heart attack in the inadequate
medicine of the day) which stopped his composition
in his early forties. He lived into his eighties.
The latter half of his life was spent in a rage so powerful
against his music that to even hear it caused a loud ringing
in his ears.
> Somehow
> I always thought the effect of his insurance career
> was less salubrious, but I have not studied the subject to
> be able to have an informed judgment.
It depends upon the curative value you give to wealth.he was the
intelligence behind most of the insurance
business practices into the 1970s. Made millions of
dollars and considered insurance to be a public service
for the free and able American citizens. His expertise
in music like Frank Lloyd Wright's in architecture, made
him outside the lives of the people that he venerated.
They wouldn't have gone to his concerts because of their
lack of abstract aural sophistication. In musical terms
they were tied to the primal overtone series of basic
harmony. Unlike the peasants of the Balkans or the
people performing the Deer Dance in New Mexico who
are perfectly at home with atonal and micro-tonal
complexity. These later New England primitives equated
nobility and honor with hunting horn and war drum
simplicities. Of course it is still even more complicated
then I am saying here.
> Maybe work does
> make you free, and I am a wimp for thinking that
> freedom makes [facilitates] works.
It depends upon how you define work and howconsciously aware and
mentally free the individual
happens to be. Education and and evolved
consciousness is the highest freedom IMHO. Many
of the world's greatest thinkers have evolved in
situations of servitude where they were not free but
also not starving or freezing to death. Their minds
were free to evolve in a very inhibited physical
space. Like Millireppa's cave or Jesus', Wagner's
or Lenin's prison.
> I readily admit
> *I* do not have what it takes to earn a living *and*
> to create (which, from what I've read, Darwin
> didn't have either). [I do seem to rermmber Ray once
> posting something about the old Communist societies'
> supporting artists to work *in their art* having merit,
> in contrast to the freedom of the artist to find
> some way to eek out a living doing something
> else (waitering?) on our side of The Iron
> Curtain -- but maybe I mis-remember.]
You didn't mis-remember. I think that experts shouldbe paid for their
expertise when the society benefits
from it whether it can be put in a retail model or not.
The problem of these primitive economic societies
that cannot imagine anything more advanced or
valuable than retail commodities is that they live off
of the bodies of everything that doesn't have them
immediately by the throat and demanding payment.
> Well, happy Labor Day to all -- holidays being the
> exception and labor days the rule.
I'm laboring today with an auditioner coming in at3:30. Unions have
me by the throat and even
though I create work for them I have none of the
benefits their simple souls enjoy. You should have
heard the orchestra member's reasoning for not
paying the singers on the stage a living wage while
he got his.
"They get the applause, I make the living."
Happy labor day!
REH
