Thomas Jefferson, defender of public knowledge.

Change, especially the kind that moves a civilization forward, requires easy access to knowledge and information.  The Founding Fathers understood this.  As exponents of the Enlightenment, they saw the availability of knowledge and information as a critical element of a thriving and prospering nation.  Jefferson famously remarked: “The field of knowledge is the common property of mankind.”  When considering the question of copyright law, Jefferson was against it at first, so great was his conviction that it was better to keep knowledge free and accessible.  Later he acquiesced to a limited copyright to provide incentives to authors and inventors.  A new book that argues against the increasing privatization of knowledge by examining the thoughts of the Founding Fathers on this subject has recently been published: Common as Air. Revolution, Art, and Ownership, by Lewis Hyde.  I have not yet read this (I hope to soon), but a review of this book in the New York Times got me thinking about this issue.

The trend in privatizing knowledge, walling it off from the public, has been going on for some time and does not bode well for us.  The music and movie industries continue to try to dictate to those who purchase their wares what they may or may not do with those items even after they own them.  Amazon’s highly popular Kindle reader took a major hit in my view when they deleted copies of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm without notice, claiming, ironically, problems with copyright issues.  It makes me wonder if they could replace one version of a book with an altered, “sanitized” copy? In the uproar that followed, Amazon promised not to do that again.  Yeah.  Right.  For that reason, even though I may buy a Kindle at some point, I will never trust it or Amazon, or any other reader on a cyber-leash to some major controlling entity.  Hold on to your hard copy books.

An even more disturbing trend, to my mind, is the increasing privatization of once-public schools and libraries.  In many towns, these public institutions are being systematically dismantled in favor of corporate-sponsored replacements, many of whom offer inferior substitutes or, in the case of some libraries, none at all.  Many of the government information resources that used to be free to the taxpayers who paid for them must be bought from private middlemen who have somehow managed to create lucrative monopolies for themselves by selling information that used to be in the public domain.  The privatization of public libraries is particularly disturbing to my way of thinking.  Libraries are the crown jewel of most civilizations.  They are also the heart of a thriving community and a place of resort and ideas when things are less than thriving.  In a related problem, I am dismayed at how it’s extremely difficult to find good scholarly articles on the web that don’t require an expensive membership in some service, or an exorbitant price in order to download it.  Since I can’t afford the fees (and would not be inclined to pay them if I could) ironically, the current incarnation of the Internet has sent me back to the print library, where many of these papers are available using library subscriptions to these databases, but only if you go to the library physically.

Yet another outrage is the quiet dismantling of public technical standards, particularly those of analog television.  The process of putting images on a screen was a public standard.  Anyone could use it, and they did.  Private inventors took advantage of this to give us things like home video recording, home computers that used televisions as a display, and early video games.  Today’s standards for HD are privately owned.  If anyone invents some nifty new gadget for today’s televisions, the owners of the standard will get their pound of flesh, or may even choose to quash the invention altogether.

There is an old slogan from the early days of the Internet: “Information wants to be free.”  I like this phrase, because it encompasses the truth that information should be as free of charge as possible, and that is should be liberated, i.e., free to circulate wherever and to whomever wants to see it.

Finally, consider the following wonderful insight by James Harvey Robinson which forms the introductory quote to the first chapter of Language in Thought and Action by S. I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa:

“One cannot but wonder at this constantly recurring phrase “getting something for nothing,” as if it were the peculiar and perverse ambition of disturbers of society.  Except for our animal outfit, practically all we have is handed to us gratis.  Can the most complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may derive from literature or the fine arts?  In short, civilization is little else than getting something for nothing.”

There are many good developments on this front, such as the Creative Commons License, and other mechanisms that are showing up to refute corporate hoarding of our common intellectual resources.  This is a fight that the corporations cannot be allowed to win.  As Robinson implies, to live in a world where once public knowledge is someone’s intellectual property would literally be uncivilized.

St. Thomas Aquinas.

The medieval memory went far beyond that.  The art of memory was not merely about holding information, but about processing it. As an example, the story is told (I am still looking among our hoarded books for the volume where I read this, as I don’t remember where I read it) about an Abbot at a monastery who wrote a letter in Latin (naturally) to his counterpart at another monastery.  In the letter, he made an insignificant but basic grammatical error.  His correspondent replied, and in his letter he chided the Abbot for making the mistake, whereupon the Abbot sat down and, off the top of his tonsured head dashed off a letter in which he quoted numerous instances where the great authors of Roman antiquity; Tacitus, Cicero, etc., had made the same kind of mistake.

Think about that for a moment.   To be able to quote these precise sections of these Roman authors meant that he had not merely memorized them, he understood the text as a very deep level.  Consider, too, that unless someone else had already done the research, he could not have compiled this body of information using Google, had it been available to him.

Another example concerns one of the most prodigious memories of his time, St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century theologian.  A powerful memory was considered a sign of moral rectitude and an indication of divine favor.  So the correspondence carried out by the Vatican regarding the possible beatification of Thomas makes many references to his mnemonic power.  For instance, you could ask him to start with a Psalm, say Psalm 14, and he would recite a “psalm” consisting of the first word of the first verse of Psalm 14, the second word of the second verse of Psalm 15, and so on.  Amazingly, the ability to do this was not all that uncommon, and was but one of the many things Aquinas could do with his remarkable mind.

Apparently it was possible to train the mind do this kind of thing.  We have one surviving text, Ad herenium, which is attributed to Cicero and goes into some detail about how to train the memory.  Carruthers gives other sources as well.  Many people believe that the advent of printing removed the need for super-memory, but I agree with Carruthers that this doesn’t make sense, since the monks who displayed the most remarkable feats of memory were the ones with access to all the books.

It seems more likely, then, that the book played a different role in medieval times than it did with the advent of the Renaissance.  The monks seemed to feel that knowledge in books was not so much preserved as embalmed.  The real life given to a certain body of knowledge was when it lived inside someone’s head and could be combined with other such knowledge to create new works. Moreover, knowing something at this level demands that you evaluate it, and decide whether it’s really worth saving.

I would love to see this kind of training revived, if possible, in our educational system.  Not that I have any illusions that our exponentially increasing knowledge could be stored in any number of human minds, and there is plenty of data that just isn’t usable without external tools.  But for the options it provides for processing and assaying what we know strike me as very exciting.  I have wondered for many years if a change in the way we think about our new ways of storing knowledge might give us a new means of using it, one St. Thomas and his colleagues could never have imagined.

Now as things stand now, it will not, as I mentioned, replace my previous employment.  In fact, it will get us into the black only inasmuch as I continue to use and cultivate the other smaller income streams I’ve developed to give our personal economy a slightly controlled ballistic trajectory.  Critics of US economic policy and practice have observed for some time that my situation is becoming the norm.  Good jobs go away, but the jobs that replace them are not quite so good.  What constitutes “job growth” can be deceptive.  Since a single person needs more than one job these days just to stay afloat, the number of new jobs created is going to be higher than the number of people who join or rejoin the ranks of the employed as a result.

The “cloud” is a term used to refer to a collection of applications and documents that reside on the web, available to the user wherever they go, independent of any given machine.  I have mixed feelings about this, but I think we can increasingly apply the concept of the cloud—with modifications—to employment.  My current panoply of income streams includes university teaching, gardening, handyman work, tutoring in Roman History, freelance writing, and a couple of other items.  This can make for a confusing situation that messes with one’s sense of identity.  It has the advantage that if one job goes wanting for a month or two, the others are still there.  It is not an ideal solution, frankly, even with my new job.  It is nominal, which I have not had since I was laid off.  No retirement, vacation, or health care, but that is the America we are evolving into, health care reform notwithstanding.  I am not yet convinced that it is either adequate or robust enough to withstand the reactionaries that would dismantle it.

We may be starting to see the decline of the specialist in the workplace. As a matter of evolutionary biology, the greatest cause of extinction is overspecialization.  This current economic depression has made mincemeat of the job market.  It is forcing a lot of people to adapt in ways they didn’t expect.   I do not expect that the jobs will recover very quickly, and many jobs are clearly gone for good.  We may even be headed for a dreaded “double-dip.”  This is the growing new reality: we are all generalists now.

Since we dropped our cable service a couple of years ago, I have made an effort to adopt a mindset that avoids these kinds of trivialities on the assumption that I have a finite amount of life to live, and only so much bandwidth at any given moment.  I read books, which are usually ad-free.  I no longer follow sports, having long ago realized what total soap opera sports reporting has become.  I choose my web sites carefully, and have trained myself to totally ignore all web ads.  And now, so help me, it looks as if I have avoided getting hosed by one of these pointless brouhahas.

I have learned just in the last couple of days that there is some guy named “LeBron” who is apparently some sports figure.  He is in the spotlight about something, probably having to do, directly or indirectly, with money.  At least one large ego may be involved.  Don’t know, don’t care.

From the odd headline I see, it looks like there are people who think this is a really big deal.  But I haven’t clicked any of those headlines to check.  As I said: don’t know, don’t care.

Here’s the rub: I have, without filtering for this particular story (because I didn’t know about it), dodged what is almost certainly yet another stupid, inane, pointless pseudo-story that would have only served to waste my time when I could be learning or doing something truly interesting.  They missed me.  All those gigawatts of media blather blasting away, trying to batter their way through, and they couldn’t touch me.  But other stories that actually mean a damn, did.

Do you have any idea how giddy with excitement that makes me?  It’s a taste of freedom from inanity.  It’s a proof of concept that one can create a circumstance that avoids the distractions that shave so many IQ points off hoi polloi.

All that effort to manage my information stream has created a small, delectable taste of freedom.  How sweet it is.

Wagner is sometimes viewed as something of a bombast and even a stereotype, but that stereotype is indirect evidence of what a defining presence he is in the world of opera.  Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) is the second of four operas of Wagner’s cycle Der Ring des Niebelungen (The Ring of the Niebelung), an extended recasting of German mythology and folklore woven into a remarkable story of power, greed, love, obligation, and consequences.  Myth is powerful.  It’s human, and it is something we tend to misunderstand and underestimate.

Also a huge “Thank you” to cousin Theodore for the tickets, and to all the other members of my extended family who were part of the meet-up before and during the show.  Most of these people I had either never met, or hadn’t seen in at least 20-30 years.  That’s way too long to have been out of touch with such great people.

So, it was with some sense of nervous anticipation that I accepted a complimentary pair of tickets for a performance this last Saturday (12 June) for the Redwood Symphony’s performance of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony at the Main Theater at Cañada College in Redwood City.

Alma Mahler, who started it all.

One cannot help but admire a local, volunteer symphony taking on such an ambitious work.  The task becomes more impressive when one learns that Mahler never finished his tenth symphony.  Only the first movement and about thirty measures of the third movement were complete when he died.  There were also some sketches, some of which did not come to light until many years after Mahler’s death.

Then there are the circumstances surrounding this storied work.  Mahler and his beloved wife, Alma, were on the outs.  In 1910 she had an affair with architect Walter Gropius (whom she married after Mahler’s death).  Mahler had sowed some of the seeds of estrangement earlier by demanding that Alma, herself a composer of some talent, give up composing on the rationale that there could be only one composer in the family.

Then there was the “cursed” nature of composing more than nine symphonies; Beethoven and Bruckner had both expired between symphonies nine and ten.  It is said that after composing his ninth symphony Mahler wrote his symphony “Das Lied von der Erde” without numeration in order to dodge the deadly double digit.  As one of Mahler’s contemporaries, Arnold Schoenberg famously remarked in 1912:

“It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if that something might be imparted to us in the Tenth, which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not yet ready. Those who have written a Ninth have stood too near to the hereafter. Perhaps the riddle of the world would be solved if one of those who knew them were to write the Tenth, and that is probably not to take place.”

As a side note, Schoenberg’s comment is interesting in light of the 41 symphonies of Mozart or Haydn’s 104.  Perhaps it is because even among the musical titans of the day, these two composers had long since passed into legend, seemingly immune from the boundaries that constrained later artistic minds.

But if this numerological peril meant anything to Mahler, there is little evidence of hesitation on his part. He plunged into the task of composition shortly after completing his ninth symphony, but died in May of 1911 before the work was completed.  The incomplete manuscript was kept secret by Alma for years. When it was finally released it was found to contain tortured notes and exclamations by Mahler, most of them to his beloved and increasingly distant Alma.  Several famous composers were approached about completing the symphony, and they wisely refused.  Others, such as Alma’s son-in-law Ernst Krenek, reconstructed parts of the symphony but were never quite comfortable with the daunting task of reconstructing the artistic mind of Mahler.  Over the years several versions have been published, each one providing ingenious solutions to this massive musical puzzle.

The version performed by the Redwood Symphony was reconstructed and orchestrated by Rudolf Barshai in 2000.  Barshai is both a musicologist and a conductor, which is the most appropriate perspective from which to undertake this intimidating exercise in musical necromancy.  I was told that this version was selected because it is one of the livelier and more vibrant of the versions, and the performance brought this out.

The first movement (Adagio) started with some disagreement among the violas as to the pitch in the opening bars.  But the group quickly found its voice and what followed was well played with an excellent sense of ensemble and dynamics.  Several quiet sections were played with skill and sensitivity.  This movement closed with a blaze of dissonance, resolving to a quiet, sublime finish.

The Scherzo was for me (and quite a few others) the highlight of the performance.  This movement starts out with a kind of meandering melodic voice, slowly building as it progressed.  I found myself thinking of a river, growing as it was fed by its tributaries, to a bold and striking conclusion, which elicited a smattering of well-deserved applause.

The third movement (Purgetorio: Allegretto moderato) theme at times reminded me distantly of a sort of danse macabre.  The movement seemed to alternate between playful and stern, even intimidating.

The fourth movement is designated “Allegro pesante. With greatest vehemence”, and in this performance it sounded vehement.  This did not, however, overpower some very poetic, lithe, even whimsical interludes as the piece built its way forward.  The movement found its anger in time to make its point before a nearly seamless transition into the Finale (”Slow, but not dragging”).  This transition is marked by the punctuation of a single drum beat, inspired by a funeral procession that passed the hotel where the Mahlers where staying in New York in 1908.  The Finale started slow, but grew to a beautiful, lyrical texture, eventually soaring to a climax before fading like a warm sunset.

Without the tortured marginalia found in the fragmentary manuscript of this work, it is hard to imagine that such beauty could have come from a mind as tormented as Mahler’s was at this time of this life.  But we have seen this before; Beethoven could not have been happy at not hearing a single note of his “Ode to Joy”, but it did not stop him from producing a benchmark for symphonic rapture.  The Redwood Symphony and Conductor/Director Eric Kujawsky are to be congratulated for taking on such a challenging and remarkable work and delivering a polished, moving performance.

The question remains open whether I can now say that I truly “get” Mahler.  I will not recklessly say that the aesthetic scales fell from my eyes due to this one performance.  But I have far more insight into this musical giant than I did before, and I look forward to other opportunities to explore his life and work. In the meantime, I encourage you to the Redwood Symphony and other examples of local artistic excellence.

References:

In preparing for this review, I consulted several items which I am pleased to recommend to the reader seeking further information:

Michael Steinberg, “Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler”. A downloadable version of this article is available at: http://www.mahlerarchives.net/archives/steinberg.pdf

Teng-Leong Chew. “Performing Versions of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. Naturlaut vol. 1, no. 2, 2002, pp. 7-10.   A downloadable .pdf version of this article is available at: http://mahlerarchives.net/archives/chewM10.pdf

It appears that some genius at the Denny’s Central Command decided that my dining experience would somehow be enhanced by a steady stream of television commercials.  I have two answers to this.  The first is that when I have some extra cash, I’m going to buy myself a TV-Be-Gone.  Everyone with an IQ higher than the body temperature of road kill should own one of these babies and use them regularly.

The second answer is something along the lines of, “Are you fucking kidding me?”  Is there any place one can go anymore and not find the local atmosphere saturated with some form of advertising? And not just a sign or a poster, but in the case cited the output of a whole studio’s worth of moving, talking, amplified content.  This stuff is going all the time.  Yes, there is a lot of repetition, but they have to keep adding more material.  Wouldn’t it be cheaper for Denny’s to just drop this nonsense and allow their patrons to enjoy their food in peace?

If you look at old ads, in print or broadcast, they appear quaint.  Even innocent.  The hooks are obvious, deployed in a way that seems almost demure.  Over the years the marketing business has become more sophisticated, but so also has a large fraction of the intended audience.  I see it as a kind of selection pressure that more and more (but not nearly enough) people seem to understand the explicit dishonesty and almost combative manipulation that goes on.  This is especially true of political advertising (Thanks, Lee Atwater!).

Full disclosure: I understand that marketing is the lubricant that keeps business moving.  It helps get the word out, and sells stuff.  I will also acknowledge that while I understand intellectually how marketing works, for the life of me I totally suck at self-promotion, or promoting what modest business ventures I’ve tried to undertake.  So you could chalk up my absinthian vehemence to plain jealousy.

But I also have lately begun wondering if part of the epidemic of mental depression that we see in the modern world is not at least partly the result of a multi-billion dollar industry whose sole purpose is to create industrial quantities of discontent.  Make someone unhappy, or touch that particular nerve, and then sell them the “solution” which they know in their heart of hearts won’t do a damned thing.  And when you are of limited means, as I am at the moment, the negative effect is multiplied all the more.

While I’m on the subject, I’ve also notice that advertising, especially on the web, tends to dilute, obscure, or drown actual information.  If you go looking for information on a topic that draws a lot of advertising, you will find that there is a tremendous quantity of bullshit out there masquerading as information, and much of that is advertising or supporting an ad campaign of one kind or another.  So it actually can make it harder to sift out the information you want from all the chaff.  By the way, you’re unlikely to  see that when you research something in a public library.

So let me propose an idea: Create an “ad-free zone” somewhere in your life.  In that zone, you have no electronic media that carries advertising.  No magazines with flashy ad spreads.  No windows looking out over billboards or the like.  TiVo is your friend.  So is canceling your cable subscription all together. Make your space quiet, if you like, or loaded with boisterous music–but no advertising.  If you try to create an ad-free zone, you will find that it can be (a) surprisingly difficult to do and (b) well worth the effort.  It’s not good to let someone tell you what to think when their salary depends on them succeeding.

Now, spend time there.  Read (ad-free) books, listen to music (your own or some ad-free alternative like public radio or satellite radio), or watch a DVD (you’ll have to decide whether product placement in a movie counts as an ad).  Make it an older movie if you want to be sure.

The fact is, as far as the advertising world and their paymasters are concerned, you are just a little cash container to be squeezed until there is nothing left.  The ad man is not concerned for your health, wealth, or sanity.  They will say whatever they think will sell, as loudly as they think they need to, until you cry uncle and fork over your dough.  So make yourself a space of freedom from their yammering.  Then make another, and expand them.  Seriously, consciously cutting one’s exposure to advertising can be one of the mentally healthiest things one can do in this world.

That didn’t work, and so the they have re-cast and repackaged the idea in different guise.  The current form is known as “Intelligent Design,” but it has met the same fate as previous incarnations, mostly because it was just another form of creationism and therefore, a form of religion rather than science.

The Creation of the World. Giusto de Menabuoi (14th century), c. 1376. Fresco. Baptistery of the Cathedral, Padua, Italy.

The landmark ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (download the decision here), established that ID is a form of religion and therefore violates the Constitutional separation clause.  But ID continues to pop up, most recently in the Texas textbook massacre fiasco, where a small group of conservatives have sought to insert creationism into school textbooks, which would then find their way to many schools outside of Texas, since the Texas market is so big is tends to drag the textbook market of other states along with it.  It is just the latest in a long, bitter struggle that goes all the way back to the Scopes Trial, and some ways prior to that.

But the more I observe the creationism/ID debate, the more curious I find it.  Allow me an extended tangent to try and explain what I mean.

In the ancient Near East, creation stories or cosmogonies served a very particular purpose.  That function was to establish political legitimacy.  So in ancient Mesopotamia, you have these great annual rites, called the Akitu festival, where the cosmos was symbolically renewed and a cosmogony was read or performed as part of the celebration.  But the Akitu was also about reaffirming the political power of the king and those who supported him.  The Babylonian Epic of Creation, the Enuma Elish, also elevated the god (in this case, Marduk) or gods associated with a particular ruling cadre, lending them legitimacy.

Likewise, a very short cosmogonic opening in the Epic of Atrahasis establishes the place of humankind in the greater scheme of things: humans were made by the gods to do the hard, dirty work of keeping the canals clear, making mud brick, and so on that the gods had grown tired of doing.  Humans were little more than worker drones.

You get the same thing in ancient Egypt, where the three major priestly centers of Memphis, Hermopolis, and Heliopolis, each had their own cosmogony by which they vied with each other for religious and political supremacy.

The Ancient of Days, by William Blake. Watercolor etching, 1794.

If we take a look at Genesis, we see similar hints but only if you get back to the original language.  Scholars have long known that the cosmogony in Genesis 1 and 2 is laced with references, wordplay, and so forth that assumes knowledge of Babylonian language and religion.  For instance, when God creates Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs, this employs a rather complex pun on the name Eve (”Life”), the Babylonian cuneiform sign for “Life” which also happens to mean “rib” and “woman.”  In other words, this creation story is in tension with Babylonian cosmogony and is asserting a different vision.  Another example is when Genesis asserts in highly forceful language that God created humanity in the divine image, this is, I believe a direct rebuke to the Babylonian vision of humans as made only for drudgery.

This goes some ways toward explaining why the Torah–a book of law, not science according to Judaism (and it is their book, after all)–starts with an account of the creation of the world.  Most biblical scholars agree that Genesis took its final form during and shortly after the Babylonian Captivity, and as such it had to assert itself from that influence.  In short, it had to establish itself politically before it could rightly be considered legitimate law.

To summarize, the ancient cosmogony was a political statement, designed to establish political legitimacy.

And now we have the creationists, who have fixated on the story of creation from Genesis, albeit buried under ever-deeper layers of prevarication, euphemism, and an increasing reluctance to actually invoke Genesis directly.  This particular flavor of Christianity has been struggling against the march of modernity for a long time, which at the end of the day is a political struggle, and they know this.

What I find so curious is that of all the positions they could use to assert themselves, they could embrace deliverance from sin, making the world better, fear of the eternal torment of hellfire, Jesus Christ as Savior of the World, and so on.  But in their effort to wrest back what they see as declining political influence, they turn to a creation story.

I am not certain why this is the case.  It could be driven by an intense fear and hatred of Darwin and evolution, but this answer does not quite satisfy me. I suspect that something more, something deeper is going on.  I am relatively certain that they would disagree with the idea that the ancient function of a cosmogony was political.  If I were fluent in Jungian psychology, I might wonder if they were tapping into some kind of archetypal image.  Some of the great scholars of cosmogony such as Mircea Eliade would probably think so.

I simply offer this as an observation that frankly fascinates the hell out of me.