With Zapffe we could maybe also add the bi0logical dimension as a part of the problem. What is the human being? A drive, a desire and glutton for the metaphysical All (Remember Marx: a commodity is polished with metaphysical luster)? Not just that; With Zapffe humanity is also a simultaneous excess and lack of intelligence, an evolutionary freak, clever enough to build great systems and worlds, but stupid enough to forget the transcendental condition that sustains it; the ecology. So the triad is sorta like our 200.000 BC and our 1789 put together. It might destroy us, or we might outlive it, coming out of it totally changed.

So I continue my zazen practice every day, and that’s still good. I think it has some affinities to the abovementioned point, though as always; it’s to early for me to say something definite on this.  I know there is supposed to be no point behind zazen, but that major issue aside: there is a way of displacing yourself, manipulating yourself by doing nothing. You can still manipulate yourself without a clear end in sight, right? Some weeks ago, I saw this one program about a quite new-agey swedish tibetean buddhist woman. She talked about how meditation is all about practicing towards your own death. Now there are alot of different things to be said about that, but it made me think about the ways meditation-practices might be like active manipulations of a freudian death drive. So that while some might believe that meditation is all about regulating the pleasure principle and the Eros (and it is), why not see it the other way around? As a way of regulating self-destructive tendencies by actively acting inorganic and thus luring the death drive into a new field where it is less…destructive? Just a thought.

Oh, and Misfits is a cool band. Plenty of Thanatos going down there, I guess. But I just love how they combine these horror lyrics with sweet, fifties (almost doowop) melodies. “Last Caress” being the ultimate example. It adds to the lyrics intensity.

Here is the parody:

“One could imagine an alien species that does not have ears, or that doesn’t have the same internal experience of hearing that we do. But it would be difficult to imagine an advanced species that had no ability whatsoever to sense vibrating objects. Where there is atmosphere there are molecules that vibrate in response to movement  [in more ordinary language: sound or the cause of sound, not exactly sure how to put it]. And knowing whether something is generating noise or moving towards us or away from us….has a great survival value.

Because most physical objects cause molecules to vibrate in several modes at once, and because for many, many objects the modes bear simple integer relations to one another, the overtone series is a fact-of-the-world that we expect to find everywhere we look: in North America, in Fiji, on Mars, and on the planets orbiting Anatares. Any organism that evolved in a world with vibrating objects is likely – given enough evolutionary time – to have evolved a processing unit in the brain [or some central unit that plays the same functional role, I assume] that incorporated these regularities in the world. Because pitch is a fundamental cue to an object’s identity, we would expect to find tonotopic mappings as we do in human auditory cortex..”

It is very comforting to read passages like this one, cause it (for me at least) serves as a reminder of all the aspects of music that a too narrow focus on all the “humanist” aspects of music and sound in general often forgets. Humanism of music would focus on the composing/composer-couple, the “meaning” of music, musical styles and conventions, culture and history of music and (maybe) the phenomenology of musical experience. Couple this with the commonsensical notions of music as entertainment and the connotations of music with warm and fuzzy feelings and you basically have something close to the humanist musical paradigm. While music definitely is something we humans make to entertain ourselves while walking around on this planet, it is important not to forget the utterly non-human basis for all of it, and in a way the passage above succeeds in reminding us of just this.

Too bad Levitin doesn’t want to give a ”realist” account of music itself, I assume it is because he finds that what we call music (I want to say “musical object” here”!)  is close to a gestalt grouping of several musical elements carried out by different parts of our brain, and that it would thus only make sense to speak of ”music” in relation to the common way of grouping these elements together as found in the human brain. But there is plenty of good research presented in the book: owls brains connected to amps through electrodes, their brains “playing” back the removed fundamental frequency of Strauss’ ”The Blue Danube” when you play them a version that lacks this fundamental frequency! The owl identifies the root note of the piece when it is gone! I dig owls (though I was terrified by them when I was a kid) and now I just love them even more! 

Addendum: Just to add a few remarks: one of the things that makes Levitin’s words “SR-ish” in my opinion is the way that the encounter with vibrating objects (what causes sound) is generously distributed to all spheres of animate life, even species without a sense of “hearing” as commonly found in species on this planet. So that even if the qualia of the human-air molecules encounter would be experienced in a different way for humans compared to the encounter between say an ant and air molecules, the realness of the phenomenon makes impossible a really metaphysical anti-realist and correlationist account of sound (and as I claim further down: music). There is a way in which common notions about the senses (like for instance hearing) too easily leads down the metaphysical anti-realist and correlationist path.
One more thing, Levitin’s way of claiming that musical objects are just found in “the head” of a human listener short-circuits the really interesting ontological dimensions of these questions: the mind cannot group or gestalt in whatever fashion it feels like, it cannot extend a one second sound into a two-hour piece and it cannot make the timbre of a guitar change into a piccolo flute. Even if one admits to a certain degree of gestalt and grouping of sounds into a integrated musical experience, this would work just because 1. ) something is there in the first place, 2.) the relation between the different parts of the music is already fixed (what is composition if not the fixing of relations between auditory elements?). Another way of putting this is to say that subjective synthesis is possible because the material of the synthesis admits to this. Adorno in one of his more SR-ish moments says something like this, he even uses this point in an attack on idealism and anti-realism: Kant’s synthesis is a phantasm or an illusion caused by human hubris, where you claim to be the creator of something that is already worked on through and through, the thing is already there (“The interesting thing is that, in the end, things just are what they are” if I remember correctly from Negative Dialectics). To hear is not to cause or create the music. Gestalt or not: A correct ontological account of music would be to say that the musical piece is the local manifestation of the virtual proper being (to put it with Levi Bryant) of the vibrating air molecules.

Besides from that, things are good with plenty of zazen in the morning and the evening. It’s boring, it’s good. It feels a bit different than last time I practiced zazen because there is not much buddhist ideology going down in my head while doing it these days. No hopes and big words about satori or what not (and in a way, that’s the whole point about Zen, but it’s hard not to dream about those things if you started with Zen by reading some old sutras or Dogen or whatever).

Even more, a too narrow focus on personal stories totally destroys the intention of the interview and it’s value as “news”; to come through with a point, idea or message that has a general relevance. To speak in hegelian terms, “the general in the particular” will not be found if you dwell to deep into the personal details. This is old news of course, but I got reminded about it a couple of minutes ago, watching Johansen giving a hard time to a woman who was not given a chance to come through with her general message. Instead, she was bombarded with questions about her life story and so and so.