To Neanderthal or not?

[Magic Circ Op Rep Ens]

To the List I watched a show on the Discovery channel about the Neanderthals and art the other day.  It seems that they were perfectly fine with tools but couldn't "get" what art was about.  The Cro Magnons used art to carry information across space.  Today we are again in that place where so much of the world is about the tool of technology while the creative is assumed to be an accident and therefore meaningless unless it furthers technology. In the entertainment industry , Fine Art is the R & D that entertainment follows and feeds on for its continued evolution.   The movie industry is the most productive industry in America and is America's greatest export with a huge balance of payments surplus   The movie industry also rips off, with impunity, America's and the world's greatest creative people with nary a nod in their direction.  The only thing Hollywood pays for are technological tools and performers.   They seem to understand the tool use of art but not its meaning and hence it is valueless.    A kind of 20th century hunter/gatherer. The other thing about the Neanderthals was that they seemed to be following the "Hero's Journey" (only able to exist in small groups) while the Cro-Magnons were able to cooperate and function in civil situations.    Will the "heroic" simplicities of the modern market myths built around a shallow  use of "fad" language translation be the flaw that some future "Cro-Magnons" are bound to exploit and use to defeat our system and prosperity?     In spite of the fact that we like large events and have huge religious organizations  we are still threatened by the idea of large groups, armies and the like.  Today's pscho-spiritual youth oriented culture is involved in a struggle to separate from what they consider a parent-like authority function of the society.   They seem to believe that they have to struggle to be alone.    In Education, after the child learns the habits of a teacher by rote and imitation, it is true that they must then learn to analyze, make the information conscious and apply it through practice to new situations.   They often come to believe that the problem was rote learning and imitation itself instead of just the anxiety provoked by struggling to make experience conscious.    This is a pedagogical error since rote and imitation learning is holistic and involves the entire life and perception of the student while intellectual learning is linear.    Intellectual learning without imitation and experience is like learning Italian only in a grammar book instead of going to Italy to learn it in the street.    In education, books are aids to making conscious that which has already been experienced and catalogued in the unconscious.   Cherokee teachers say that books are the way we remember what we know.     In pedagogical theory, learning to be an individual is just that second conscious, intellectual part of the learning process.    It does not really mean that I must separate from my actual parent, teacher or society.    In fact the support that I gained and continue to gain from them gives me the encouragement to tear the "coat" of unconscious experience apart and put it together again in new and creative ways.    The third element of learning comes not from being alone but in the act of communication with others.    In music we call it ensemble if it is a group act and performance if it is dialogue with an audience.     That was and continues to be the most difficult part for me.   I know that I am alone.    It is the dialogue of family, community and business that I find the most difficult.   It has been through the helping of other young adults to bring their talents to conscious practice that I have learned the most.   Performing the "Teacher Function" seals my learning while making me aware that the issue was never to be or not to be individual.    I came into the world experiencing the trauma of birth alone.   I will do the same with death.   To worry about not being an individual or being overwhelmed by the group is to lose focus in my work.    That without the life of the audience, my work is mute.    Without the warmth of my wife, my life is cold.    Without the joy of my daughter, my life is small and without my connection to Creativity and the Great Mystery my life is lacks energy.      I now know that I can exist in almost any society.    That cultures are a great smorgasbord of life that only enrich my existence.    That as long as I have the necessities of life, I can make my work rich and deep and that being tied to simply obtaining the necessities is the greatest slavery of all for I have no time to accomplish the complexities of my work.    America's first great composer Charles Ives, was so harassed by the tastes of the day that he earned a million dollars in insurance.    That freed him to write what he wanted and hire who he wanted to play it.    Unfortunately trying to do both, compose on the highest level, and develop the insurance business killed the composer in a rush or rage and high blood pressure.   He worked all day in business and composed so furiously at night that he tossed the pages over his head on the floor where his wife gathered and filed them the next day.    Upon his death many of his scores were never sorted never having been corrected, revised or even looked at because he didn't have the time.    I knew the musical historian who sat with his wife figuring out those scores.   He said they were a  mess.     After the first heart attack in his forties Ives lived into his eighties but he could never hear his music without a loud ringing in his ears.    I suspect that all of the exploration into Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals is really a struggle to bring the two sides of modern human existence together.    The way that communism (not socialism) and capitalism seems to need each other to stimulate each other's drive to accomplish their genius, says to me that neither are a very good ideal for humanity.    Integration and integrity seems to demand that we get beyond this very brutal and unequal time in our history.  Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED]