Field Recording No.1

With all my fascination in birds and their sounds, I can only match about 3 different species of bird to their calls. Last night while I was riding my bike home at about 11:30pm, I heard a single bird blocks away. When the city is relatively quiet, it is surprising to hear a bird, of all things, carrying over such a long distance. (I've heard that city birds may be adapting to sing at night so to avoid competition with hustle and bustle). By the time I passed by the tree where it perched, I had already heard an incredible spectrum of sounds and phrases. I grabbed my recently purchased field recorder and made it back in time to hear the last few minutes of calling out - before flying away to another tree further away (I think the sound of my velcro pack scared him).

It sounds to me that this bird is one that mimics the sounds of its environment. He manages to sing some distinct calls I'm familiar with, but many of the others I think sound more like car alarms and locking/unlocking tweets. During the last third of the recording he sings a first inversion major chord, repeated about 3 times in perfect tuning. After all the complex timbres, it sounds out of place - a little too human.

After spending so much time living with fantastic opera singers, I would often dream of singing great tenor lines. Of course in real life I have, in the words of Messiaen a "composers voice." But in my dreaming, I felt the unique physical sensations of a singing that resonates through my whole body and head. Somehow, I can also imagine on some level the sensation of making some of those bird calls - tight vibrations of air passing through stretched vocal muscles...

Anyway, this is an awesome bird. I named him Fitzwater Thrushraillien - after the street I found him on, Fitzwater St., Philadelphia.

Bergson for Fun - Part 1

It is difficult to categorize Henri Bergson’s role in philosophic history. On one hand his enormous presence included profound intellectual relationships with the 20th centuries greatest minds: Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russel, T.S. Eliot, William James, Gilles Deleuze, to name only a few. On the other hand, his work resembles a western re-articulation of much older ideas found in Zen Buddhism among other eastern intellectual and spiritual philosophies/practices.

Bergson's theories of time, consciousness, and evolution were celebrated by the masses for their life-affirming nature yet condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for recognition of the impenetrable continuity of reality - they called Bergson a pantheist. His political influence was hardly indirect - meetings with Woodrow Wilson helped to sculpt the League of Nations which was later replaced by the United Nations. His publications garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928 (recognized by some as the only philosopher to win in Literature). And perhaps most amazingly, despite the complexity of his philosophies, his prose and lecturing style resonated with the public at large throughout all of Europe and even America; he was a true populist icon. Amidst the folklore is the story where his 1913 lecture at Columbia University generated enough popularity to cause the first traffic jam in the history of Broadway.

Some view Bergson as anti-scientific, despite his academically recognized mathematical and biological accomplishments. Although his once highly publicized critiques of Einstein’s General Relativity and his elaborate contextualizing of Darwin's Theory of Evolution have more or less faded into the collective forget, even today they offer more than enough stimulation to ponder wild new possibilities to accepted notions.

Perhaps the most basic distillation of Bergson's philosophy deals with intuition and its elusive yet very real role in the pursuit of any conscious thing to truly "know" anything at all. All science and reason - human understanding at large - seems to sense an elephant in the room. Yet, as Bergson explains, our very survival largely depends on ignoring this elephant. This elephant has no name, and even if it had a name it would be a nameless one. Enter the world of Zen Buddhism - name that nameless elephant:

All things are one and have no life apart from it; the One is all things and is incomplete without the least of them. Yet the parts are parts within the whole, not merged in it; they are interfused with Reality while retaining the full identity of the part, and the One is no less One for the fact that it is a million-million parts.

= JIJIMUGE doctrine of the Kegon School of Japanese Buddhism.

OOOOOOMMMMMMMM.
It would almost seem that human consciousness is designed to ignore the completeness of things, yet derive it all the same. Hmmm.

Mind and matter are divergent tendencies; they point to an original and necessary dichotomy; they are opposite in direction; but they are mutually complementary and imply the unity of an original impulse. The new concept therefore is of a reality with which life and consciousness are identical, as distinct from the concept of a reality independent of life and conditioning it, and upon which it depends. This new concept in its turn suggests a new working principle in the biological and psychological sciences. The principle is that the great factor in evolution is a kind of unconsciousness. Such unconsciousness, however, is not a primitive self-sufficient principle. It is not an Absolute, as some metaphysicians have held. It is, on the contrary, a restriction of consciousness which life possesses in right, a restriction contrived by life in order to fashion the instrumentality of efficient action. So that while the philosophical problem of the past has been to define the nature of consciousness, explain its genesis, and determine its relation to the external reality inferred as conditioning it, the philosophical problem before us today, if we accept the new concept, is to explain the nature and genesis of unconsciousness.

= W. Wildon Carr in his Preface to Mind-Energy, H. Bergson.

More later.

Kecak

This is Kecak or "the monkey chant" as captured by cinematographer Ron Fricke in his succulent cinematic film Baraka. My subconscious is erupting with Balinese dreams as I begin to prepare myself for the two month gamelan submersion in Ubud, Bali. People say that Bali is the Bayreuth for surfers - ok people don't say that but I just had some Wagner for dinner and it's on my mind. Anyway, I think I will give the surfing a shot between temple visits and practicing those incredible rhythmic palindromes on the gamelan. I just need to get out of my mind that my surfing sweat elicits the essence of fresh seal blood - yes I know I am more likely to be hit by a car than the mouth of a hammerhead shark, but I've always had a rich imagination for improbable disaster.

This Ron Fricke clip is pretty beautiful. The lead chanter has a spirit and presence on film that suddenly makes Clooney seem not quite the sexiest man alive.

Watts Reflecting

I carry from childhood the vague but persistent impression of being exposed to hints of an archaic and underground culture whose values were lost to the Protestant religion and the industrial bourgeoisie, indeed to the modern West in general. This may be nothing but fantasy, but I seem to have been in touch with lingering links to a world both magical and mystical that was still understood among birds, trees, and flowers and was known - just a little - to my mother and perhaps to one or two of my nursemaids. Or was it just I who carried in my genes or in my "collective unconscious" the apprehension of whole worlds of experience which official culture repressed or ignored? the disciplinum arcanum of this culture, so easily mistaken in the child for idle reverie, was that intense contemplative watching of the eternal now, which is sometimes revived by the use of psychedelic drugs, but which came to me through flowers, jewels, reflected light in glass, and expanses of clear sky. I get it also from music that is not mechanical and does not march, as from the music of India which I loved at first hearing and which continues, like a lost name on the tip of the tongue, to put me in mind of a long-forgotten afternoon in a sunlit room where magicians were playing on the heartstrings of the universe.

= Alan Watts, autobiography In My Own Way

loops so go

Out-take from one of this year's theater projects. Thawing of winter time into spring and the like.