Carol Clonan
11/26/13
Before I get in to my presentation I want to take a moment to let my past possess your present. So bear with me and close your eyes for a few minutes while I describe something to you. Try to imagine it as vividly as possible.
You’re six years old. It’s a school night and you’ve already gone through most of your normal bed time routine. There was ice cream for a snack, a hot bath (which you whined about), and now your cuddled in bed wearing your favorite pajamas. Your parents come in to kiss you good night and tuck you in. One of them is holding a large, brightly colored book and lingers afterwards. Sitting down on the bed next to you, your parent opens the book and begins to read.
Tonight the book is a children’s collection of Greek myths. As the words are read off the page they seem to dance around your head, creating an entire world. Gods and Goddesses run rampant, horses fly through the sky dragging the sun in a chariot, evil monsters are slain by great heroes, a woman is transformed in to a spider, and a boy flies too close to the sun. This world seems to have endless possibilities and through it you explore more than any six year old could in the hour before bedtime. Eventually, despite your protests, the book is put away, the world fades from view, and the lights are shut off leaving you alone to dream.
You can open your eyes now. So what I was describing is hopefully something that you could all relate to. This description in particular is based off my own life. My dad would read to
Katie and I every night before bed, and one of the many books we heard was indeed a collection of Greek myths. Though this memory is a personal one to me, I think it shows something more universal about humanity: We teach our children through stories.
Every culture has stories. From the beginning of time to modern day, humanity has used stories to teach our children about who they are, how they got here, and what they are supposed to do in this world (The Cultural Function of Stories). Originally these stories were not written down, but performed orally to the people, normally by an elder, bard, shaman, or other designated person of power. Though the method of storytelling has changed in modern society, its function has not. In class Dr. Sexson said to us “Stories of your culture make you who you are. If you don’t read, you don’t live. Read books” (Sexson Lecture). What was once told around a fire with dances, drums, music, or costumes, is now for modern cultures written in books, preformed on a stage, or even acted out in movies. The human race continues to tell our stories, even though nearly everything else about how we live has changed.
One medium of storytelling in today’s society is of course literature. Though, to many, the word literature has the connotation of something only stuffy, boring, old professors would read, we know it is something else entirely. Northrop Fry says, “Literature is ‘displaced’ mythology” (Dubois 2) and Dr. Sexson explains mythology as “the precedent behind every action” (Sexson Lecture). Mircea Eliade explains further by saying “a myth is a true history or what came to pass at the beginning of time, and one which provides the pattern for human behavior” (Eliade). Thus, literature is a displacement of the core stories that reside universally in all cultures, which are played out in human lives. These stories, more specifically archetypal myths, are the overarching tales of our lives. Whether we are aware of it or not, we live the same stories that the generations before us did.
This sheds an interesting light on the debate in our culture over the value of the arts and the sciences. In the United States our educational system emphasizes the sciences. In her article, Paula Allen-Meares says “A great deal of attention recently has focused on an issue of real importance to the future of our nation – the need to train more undergraduates… in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields” (Allen-Meares). She goes on to discuss how these fields are important to “sustained U.S. economic recovery in our increasingly competitive world” (Allen-Meares). The U.S. wants students to study these fields because they stimulate the economy. Though profitable, what these fields lack is introspection. While the sciences look at the world, the arts look at humanity.
It is not a coincidence that the arts are sometimes referred to as the humanities. They attempt to understand the human element through the mediums of literature, art, music, theater, film, ect. In the beginning of this course Dr. Sexson told us that “the act of writing is the act of understanding.” Throughout my life I have found this to be not only true, but key to my own mental stability in rough times. Though what I write is rarely excellent or even read by others, it helps me to understand what I am thinking, feeling, saying, and experiencing. It is my method of introspection. There is a process that occurs between the thoughts in my head and the words on the page, and it is during this process that I begin to understand my own ideas and clarify them. A better expression of why this process occurs is the quote that says, “Literature is the human compulsion to create in the face of chaos” (Sexson). When humanity looks out on the insanity of the world we feel something unsettling; to deal with this feeling some of us write.
Yet it is not only creating literature that humanity turns to when faced with chaos; we also turn to music. Music is the one medium of the arts that rises above all others because it is both introspective and extrospective; it looks at the world and humanity. It speaks in a language with no words so is not limited by the imprecision of normal languages. It has the mathematical calculations and structure of the sciences, with the intense emotional reactions that the arts produce. It is two supposed opposites, science and the arts, melded together to tell unconscious stories of humanity and the world. It is the language of Yung’s universal unconscious.
Think about it for a moment. Yung described an unconscious that existed within all humanity and connected us to the myths that are continually being played out in our lives. This unconscious is, by his description, universal, meaning that all of human kind has access to it. Yet all of humanity speaks different languages, except of course in the case of music. Think back to the oral storytelling I discussed earlier. Many of these stories were accompanied by beats or melodies. As humanity developed and introduced language, it held on to the expression through music. Music expresses ideas and emotions without the barrier of language. It is pure emotion, pure thought, and pure knowledge.
It was said that “knowledge is not something you discover, it is something you invent” (Sexson). I would argue that not only do we invent knowledge, but that one of the ways we invent knowledge is through writing, both in language and in music. Writing in language forces us to imperfectly describe experiences or things with stories and metaphors. Friedrich Nietzche said, “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors” (Nietzche) which is a perfect description of how we create knowledge, through language, in writing. Just as two objects can technically never touch because of the vast amount of space in each atom, so the word for an object (the sound) can never perfectly describe the object in real life. Writing in music skips this step because it does not need the imprecise words of language.
To someone from a more technical background this idea might be confusing, especially if applied to things other than writing and music, but the logic of how there is a disconnect, is still sound. For example the disconnect in history. History is a series of observations from people who were there, taken and combined with other personal accounts by a third party. This third party must then metaphorically connect the dots between personal accounts to create a story of what happened. This story is then called history, but it is not what truly happened. It is a metaphor for what happened and might be very close but it is not absolute. Just as Calder discussed in his presentation, history can be interpreted to say many different things. We call it truth though it is made of metaphors.
This same logic can be applied to science. For example look at a scientist who is performing a series of experiments. Following scientific method, the scientist must first ask a question. Then, he must come up with a theory that can answer the question and test it. During the test the scientist gathers data. The final, and most interesting, step is to interpret the data. Like the personal accounts in history, the data are merely points of information and must be connected to explain what is occurring. In this way the scientist fills in the gaps, creating an explanation of outlying data and coming to a conclusion. I would say that “this isn’t science, its storytelling” (Sexson Lecture). The scientist tells a story about how he believes the world works and most likely someone else will come along and write a story that fits better than the first.
The debate between science and the arts is really not a debate at all. Science is the arts. Both tell stories, but the arts focus on humanity while science focuses on the world. Though many people will argue that these two areas of study are too opposite to coexist, from this class we know that sometimes seemingly opposite concepts need to exist together. When these two fields of study come together they are music. As was said in class “It’s all music” (Sexson).
So with this information I shall pose Annie Dillard’s question: “Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?” (Dillard). My answer to this question is this: do what you want to do, be it the sciences or the arts, but acknowledge that they are overlapping and connected. If you want to create art, create art, for life will imitate your work. If you want to write literature, write literature, for you are retelling human kind’s myths. If you want to study history, study history, for you will be able to see how the “truths” were formed out of metaphors. If you want to study science, then study science, for if you do it right, you are telling stories as well. And lastly, if you want to study music, don’t let anyone stop you, for music is the universal invention of knowledge that both sides strive for but fall short of- a perfect expression of both humanity and the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment