My two previous articles dealt with the interesting subjects of Retrograde Motion and Form. Today we’ll go one step further by integrating these two concepts into the Big Picture.
Retrograde, or course, doesn’t exist without the forward motion from which it comes. While some of his contemporaries said using the retrograde technique was cheating—that it wasn’t real composing—composer Arnold Schoenberg insisted that retrograde motion is fully part of the big compositional picture. He likened it to looking at a hat: no matter from what angle you view the hat, it still looks like a hat. That’s because it is a hat.
If you break a holographic plate, each segment recreates the entire image. Just like viewing the hat, where any perspective of the hat retains the form of the hat even though it is topographically changing. (By the way, both David Bohm and Karl Pribram held that we live in a holographic reality.)
We could say a hologram uses a sort of retrograde motion, because an interference pattern has to be created “on top” of the source pattern in order for the light waves to be recorded and a seemingly 3-dimensional image to be generated. It’s all about light. Light=illumination. Seeing the light. Something is illuminated to our consciousness. It’s all about the light.
But it’s also all about the darkness–that which is hidden from the light but is nevertheless part of reality.
Keeping in mind, of course, that a hologram is an illusion…but wait…don’t the Buddhists say everything is an illusion?
Oh Lordy. Let me steady myself…grab onto something…how about a song? That’s it. [singing] Gimme that old, time, religion, Gimme that old, time, religion…
A segment from the Johnny Cash show. Though I must say, I do object to clapping on 1 & 3. As one of my mentors once said: “If you clap your hands on 1 & 3, where you gonna stomp your foot?”
The human brain recognizes forms regardless of alterations due to changes in perspective.
Except when it doesn’t.
The optical illusion presented by a well-composed trompe l’oeil artwork, for instance, makes the brain short circuit. Imagine walking (or driving!) along and all of a sudden there’s a gargantuan hole in the road right in front of you, and at the bottom is a pit of alligators and some are climbing up the side, where they will surely eat you whether you fell in the hole or not.
Or perhaps you’ve seen stereograms, where a shift in your perception reveals a hidden picture-within-a-picture.
In the above stereogram, shifting your focus reveals a hidden image of a gymnast on a balance beam.
So even if the conscious mind doesn’t recognize a retrograde line as being a variant of a melody you’ve already heard, it seems that some part of the brain does recognize it. Regardless of whether a melody is forwards or backwards, on some level it is the same, just as each cell in a body contains the DNA that is a holographic representation of the entire body.
Oliver Sacks, who is mentioned frequently in the previous article, wrote so compellingly about neurological patients emerging from catatonic states through music and movement that his book Awakenings was made into a film.
One of the many abilities music possesses is bypassing the usual mental gatekeepers who guard its entryways like a horde of nasty trolls. Remember, even Cerberus was lulled to sleep upon hearing Orpheus play his lyre! Otherwise Orpheus would not have been able to bring Eurydice back from the land of Hades. And does not the mind get so wound up in convolutions that it seems like hell itself? Fetch my lyre and my saxophone, squire, that I may vanquish the heathen thoughts that besiege my mental land!
Sorry. Got carried away for a sec. Must’ve been the trolls.
Music is like water. It seeps in through the cracks in your psyche. So be careful what you listen to!
When a composition, painting or novel is edited down to its essence, when nothing can possibly be added or subtracted, then the work is finished, because each of its elements is so integrated into the whole that they individually reflect the whole.
Again, this is not a perception we can have consciously. It is a subjective impression received by our entire being. It just feels right.
Visually, an artwork such as Smaller and Smaller by M.C. Escher demonstrates the idea of art’s holographic nature. And now we can approach the true meaning of form. As Ernst Toch says in The Shaping Forces of Music, p. 154:
"A piece may be written in any one of the classified forms to its minutest detail and still may exhibit a pitifully poor FORM. And a piece may reveal not the slightest affiliation to any of the traditional forms, and yet may be a prodigious masterpiece of FORM."
Smaller and Smaller, a woodcut by M.C. Escher
Perceiving form means joining the individual elements comprising the form. One no longer needs to separate things in order to understand them. Rather, an instinctive, intuitive knowledge of the elements allows them to be re-absorbed into consciousness and perceived as a whole.
Why separate things in the first place, then? Because until you separate elements you won’t really understand them. To understand a song we have to dissect it. To understand a biological form, such as a frog, we have to dissect it. To understand a machine, we have to dissect it. Then we (hopefully) put everything back together.
Think of the character Truman in the movie The Truman Show. He knew there was something wrong with his reality but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Then when he escapes the island on a little boat and runs smack dab into the canvas sky, he realizes the reality that had been presented to him was actually part of a larger reality.
And so might it be with all of us….
In any case, it seems evident that we are expressing only the minutest percentage of our potential capabilities. Which would also explain anomalies such as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), where the alternate personalities of a person also have different physical traits.
Physiologic differences across alter personality states in MPD include differences in dominant handedness, response to the same medication, allergic sensitivities, autonomic and endocrine function, EEG, VEP, and regional cerebral blood flow. Differences in visual function include variability in visual acuity, refraction, oculomotor status, visual field, color vision, corneal curvature, pupil size, and intraocular pressure in the various personality states of MPD subjects as compared to single personality controls.
Also, the larger reality is never just the sum of all the parts. The joining of all parts into a unified whole, like 100 voices singing in a choir, creates a new energy that didn’t exist before.
When we know intuitively that we, and everything, are part of a dimensional network that includes space and time as well as other enfolded elements, then we also know Form is not static. It is moving through time. Therefore form, motion and time are joined.
Art that joins form, motion and time is art that will last.
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Somewhere out there is a kid in her/his bedroom reading these articles, printing them out, studying them. Then the kid starts to make connections between what’s been read and studied, and other things they’ve read and studied, plus other things from direct experience. (I know this because I was once that kid.)
If you know that kid, be a mensch and gift them a subscription so they can access the entire archive of nearly 100 articles. (They probably won’t say thank you until they’re at least 34. That’s why you have to be a mensch.)
"It's turtles all the way down."
When I was 6 yrs. old, I dissected an alarm clock and never could get it back together. Since that day, I've rarely attempted to repair anything that required taking it apart.
If you clap on 1&3, you can also stomp your feet on 1&3. It's the basis of Christian worship in white folks churches.