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An
online discussion between polythinkers recently prompted this question:
whom among us liked or disliked having a body? It may be a silly question,
but it’s a germaine one among a certain type of intellectual, who
often talks about the annoyance of The Body – its tendency to get
ill, its incessant needs – sleep, food, sex – which distract
The Mind from getting the intellectual work done.
I replied:
I think the hypothetical question is contradictory and irrelevant. What
I mean is that all recent science of the mind has pretty much refuted
Cartesian dualism. The growth of the mind is intimately bound to the growth
of the body, and the senses five (ten? twenty?) are constantly feeding
new ideas to the mind. I think one of the problems with our culture right
now, though, is that in general we have stopped trying to interpret what
our senses experience – how they relate to other elements of our
past, other thoughts we have had, other relations between ideas and people.
For example: one learns the use of punctuation via a textbook that speaks
to the lowest common denominator – it's written like an instruction
manual for putting together a car. When you want to ask a question use
a question mark. When you want to make a point strongly, use an exclamation
point.
Which is of course an utterly lousy way to teach the stuff. That's why,
in the '70s, Schoolhouse Rock shorts constantly taught the connection
between music and language. Drilled it into your head. Something that
we've lost, and it's contributed to the lack of communication between
cultures. Because music communicates in a slightly different way than
strict meaning. That's how you're able to have a layering of languages
in a single phrase. Rhythm and melody are the waves traveling with the
particles of meaning we call words. Just as electromagnetic radiation,
beamed from the stars, arrives in waves and photons simultaneously.
I recalled Mozart. I realized that one of the reasons why he's so great
is that, especially in something like the piano concertos, he's actually
got a sentence in his head: he's imagining himself, for example, walking
along a street, saying hello to the people he passes by, until suddenly
he passes straight by someone he knew but didn't recognize until they'd
passed. “Oh! Hey! Well, how about that! God, I haven't seen you
in... well, it's been ages! So –“ (he pauses to remember the
last time he saw his friend) “how's the wife and kids?” (Thinking
about his friend's wife with red hair, and how much he appreciated its
fiery color, though really he really oughtn't to have been thinking of
it because he's got his own little 'Stanza at home). What? She's got the
'pox? Oh, how terrible” (thinking at the same time how glad he isn't
in this friend's situation).
And you can see these things, because Mozart is taking the base metal
of dull beastly sense experience and transmuting it into gold filament.[B]
DAVID SCHNEIDER
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