So I relapsed.
Taken by Surprise
After going through this routine once or twice (three times now if anyone's counting), I imagined that I could easily spot a relapse and dispatch it judiciously. This was not the case. In retrospect it might seem obvious that something was amiss. As I had begun to feel progressively better, I had an undoubted confidence that I was making incremental progress each week. The tasks which I could perform but previously couldn't were easy to enumerate. I had been practicing the saxophone religiously, writing here faithfully, even if not eloquently. Just more than a month ago, that quickly changed.
In reading Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For The Hat, I was amused to read a passage in which he relates that when a man loses a leg or an arm, he is aware of it, but when he loses a part of his 'self' he often cannot recognize it, for that part of the 'self' is not there to recognize its own absence. While this might be an overly simplistic abstraction of he physical processes governing the cognition in a sense of identity, my own situation aligns with this observation startlingly well.
When I had relapsed, just as when I initially fell ill (and when I relapsed the first time), it was only when I could point to some obvious fact or measurement that I knew for certain that I was not myself. When I could point to blurry vision and say, I know I could see this clearly yesterday, then I knew I had relapsed. But as for the sense of being: even though the actual sensation of being alive and thinking has changed so much, shockingly swiftly in response to steroids, as I decline, I cannot tell that it is slipping away.
Why is it that it is so easy to notice when suddenly I am endowed with cognitive powers that I had lacked for months, but so difficult to tell when I am being stripped of cognitive powers which I have had for two decades? Why am I taken by surprise every time my condition defies the imperatives of my army of anti-immune-system biochemical weapons.
A Great Progress
One notable thing was different this time. Empirical findings confirmed objectively the dysfunction that I had probably been reluctant to admit to myself, in part out of some vestige of paranoia that it truly could somehow be merely psychological and not neurological. The knowledge that my progress can be gauged, if crudely, and that a relapse can be detected with instruments serves the dual functions of emboldening me to be more candid with myself in considering the possibility of a relapse as well as providing a way to circumvent the pitfalls of relying exclusively on my necessarily subjective assessment of my own neurological well-being.
Although I desired to keep posts on this section of the site from reading like journal entries, perhaps that is an unreasonable goal when discussing the matter of my recovery and evolving mental state. Nearly a month has elapsed since I last wrote here, perhaps the break was necessary. The month has been turbulent, characterized by leaps forward and steps backwards.
After several months in which I somewhat despondently attempted to regain some form of technique musically, I finally reached a point physically where I am able to play with sufficient stamina, both physically and mentally that I can work seriously towards musical goals. Still my attention span, mental quickness and memory are shadows of former years, but progressing steadily.
An interesting cycle has emerged. On the way down (as my disease progressed), I would lose ability, then work harder to accomplish the same tasks. I continued performing the same sorts of tasks but with far greater difficulty. Now, on the way up, as my mental faculties reemerge, I re-calibrate my expectations, performing the same tasks but shifting my expectations regarding the degree of ease with which these tasks can be performed. The fascinating feature of this pattern, to me, is that overall the level I demand of myself exists mostly independently of my ability at any moment.
This idea, that changing mental abilities and the level of activities – what books I read, which music I listen to, the food I attempt to cook – are largely independent raises an important question. What determines them if not who I actually am and of what I am actually capable at the moment?
I believe this sense of what I can and should do flows not from my actual abilities at any given moment but instead from a deeply ingrained sense of self. Upon further investigation, this idea makes fantastic amounts of sense. Perhaps my personal fluctuations in mental ability are extremely rare in any person of my age, and most of those who do experience a rapid deterioration of mental capacity probably never experience any recovery that would allow them to talk (or think) about it. But, on a much smaller scale, every individual has substantial shifts in capacity from day to day. It then must be necessary for pragmatic reasons for each person to have a sense self that exists independently of the actual 'self of the moment'. How else could someone decide at any moment what long-term responsibilities to take on? People require a sense of self that is considerably more stable than the self itself,
When I reached my deepest trough of cognitive decline and still forced myself to read, I didn't revert to the books on which I learned to read as a young boy, even though they would probably have been better suited for my level of comprehension at the time. Instead, I attempted to read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, continuing with the last book I had been reading before my sickness began to rage in January. Only much later, weeks into my recovery and after considerable conscious deliberation did I recognize that I had to read books more suitable to who I was at the moment and not who 'I really was'.
What then is the nature of this more permanent self-image? How quickly does it evolve? Can it be altered? Does it settle in at a certain age, condemning all of us to spend the rest of our lives as whatever we have determined ourselves to be as of a certain age?
As I reclaim my brain, gradually bringing old activities back from the brink and into the possible, even easy, I aspire to re-calibrate my sense of what I can and ought to be doing to more fully use all of my mental capabilities than I did before embarking on this flirtation with dementia.
Where have I been?
What happened to me?
What am I?
Where am I?
How long will I be here?
In my experience, most people are anxious, primarily, about what will come after this life.
My existential angst concerns my existence, not its loss.
Descartes in the absence of religion?
The evil demon has already presented itself.
Religion and Rationality.
While clearly religion can be shown to oppose rationality, no proof can show a strict adherence to only rational beliefs to be in anyone's best interest. The two greatest logical minds that our civilization ever produced found ways to be miserable and off themselves.
Perhaps any answers to my questions, even if baseless, would be better than none. However, I know not how one might go about fooling oneself.
Excerpted from Newsweek interview of Woody Allen:
So why go on? "I can't really come up with a good argument to choose life over death," he says. "Except that I'm too scared." Making films offers no reward beyond distracting him from his plight. He claims the payoff is in the process—"I need to be focused on something so I don't see the big picture"
Music as distraction:
Is the value of great art simply its ability to lure us away from morbid thoughts? To temporarily put off consideration of the 'meaningless flicker' of life?
I wish that I could conceive of life as a game. At various points I have. Becoming the best musician, earning the most money, these sorts of things offered a metric by which success could be measured. Thus flattened, life was easier to take, comprehensible.
Is honesty to be found only in uncertainty?
Since Thursday I have had a headache that afflicts pain as a function of the angle formed between my body and the floor. Lying down, I can function on a high level. Upright, my temples throb and the smell of food induces nausea. Fortunately, this ought to be a short phase in my life. Still, in the absence of relief, I have given some thought to how I might cope were my condition to be permanent.
Probably the most difficult function to reproduce would be transportation. In the absence of some sort of periscope, it would be impossible to drive a car while on my back. But it might be possible to drive while lying flat on my stomach. This would require the back seat behind the driver to be removed as well as the back of the driver's seat. Some stretcher-like apparatus would have to be constructed extending into the back seat such that I could lie comfortably belly-down and face the windshield without being so close as to jeopardize my life. To accommodate this unusual driving posture, the pedals would need to be placed against the back wall of the car so that my feet could operate them.
Naturally, this strategy would require an unprecedented set of safety considerations. I am not sure where the airbag would go, but after a considerable thought I doubt one would be of any real usefulness. If hit from behind or in front, my inertia would carry me forward, head-first in a straight line towards the front of the car. Any airbag in my path would probably snap my neck before the steering wheel or windshield could. I think safety would most likely be accomplished by super-strong shoulder straps, binding me to the apparatus on which I was perched.
Another consideration is how best to eat while in this precarious state. So far, I have sat up for brief moments, enduring the headache in exchange for the aid of gravity in digestion. Surely, if this condition were to be permanent, I could do better. One possibility might be to magnetize all of my food. Then, by placing a sufficiently strong magnet of opposite polarity near my feet I could reproduce the effects of gravity but only as concerns my digestion.
A number of other considerations would require similar attention if this condition were really to be permanent. Some activities, like reading, merely present inconveniences. Others, like practicing and performing on the saxophone might require the sorts of revolutions in engineering that keep Thomas Friedman awake at night. Fortunately, I do not expect to be in this situation long enough to solve any problem more complex than how to eat scrambled eggs and post a poorly conceived reflection on this topic.
About four years ago, my friend Joshua Herman introduced me to the idea that we only consider things that do not work as they should. Take computers for instance. A typical computer user with modest computing needs seldom considers the inner workings of a computer in the absence of some sort of technological bugaboo. In the presence of such a snag, however, such a user suddenly develops an unprecedented interest in memory, networking etc. On the other hand, consider gravity. We know of no reason why gravity should exist, but it operates so flawlessly and consistently that most of us waste relatively little time considering what its nature might be.
This idea isn't a hard and fast rule. My own mother expressed to me how intriguing she finds even technology that always works as it ought. That opens up just one class of exceptions to this idea. Things that consistently work as they should but came into being partly through someone's life. Still, its an idea that I find myself returning to periodically over the years.
In light of my recent experiences, the idea is prominent in my thoughts. The world that our conscious mind sees, interacts with, is the perceived world, not the 'real world'. For all we know, the world is simply a sufficiently competent set of computer generated stimuli. These thoughts are nothing new - anyone who has seen The Matrix has encountered them - but they inform the point I am trying to make. Having my experience altered by these recent cognitive malfunctions, in a sense, from my perspective, it is as if the entire world became broken.
For most of my life, I took for granted that the world worked in a sort of equilibrium. Bureaucracies manage, if somewhat incompetently, to regulate most human activity. The very existence of an economy that can achieve employment well over ninety percent is an astonishing fact that seemed unremarkable when, from my perspective, it had always been. When all of reality went haywire for me, however, I gained a new appreciation for just how precarious our situation on this planet is.
We are ants, crawling around a moldy piece of cheese that is orbiting a fireball in the middle of nowhere at a speed of 3.0x10^4m/s (relative to the fireball). There is nothing more than physics keeping our minds from decaying into thoughtless balls of mulch. Our memories, thoughts, identities, hold on by a thread, and even then, only temporarily. Still, as I recover, I am consistently amazed at how well things that I convinced myself while sick are impossible really do exist. When I became sufficiently weak that I could not take care of myself, I became convinced that no one would. I was unable to conceive of being able to take care of anyone, so it seemed impossible that anyone should be able to take care of me. Miraculously, however, that was not the case. Often, now, I find myself working to reestablish the sorts of faith in the world's workings that will allow me to get on with life. Perhaps I am more religious, in an abstract sense, than I care to admit.
Bart:
"You make some interesting observations and points, some I agree with, some I don't. I don't want to know what Trane studied 10 hours a day. I don't think the creative process must be laid bare for all to see. I think he who wants to know should work for the information, like students centuries ago going to monasteries to seek wisdom. Another thing is that I don't want to know everything about how things are made. It's a bit like the extras on a dvd. Knowing to much about how a movie is made can distract you (me) from what that movie is about. The problem is you don't know what information is helpful, and what info isn't."
Doug Wamble:
"Hard to get past the first paragraph, really. Your entire premise is kind of false. I think artists have been at the forefront of utilizing the internet. Where is the evidence for this "stiff resistance?""
"Besides all that, you're making these grand proclamations that aren't really based in anything specific. What is art music? What is boldness of concept? What is confrontational honesty? Do you just know it when you see it?"
Response:
First of all. Thanks for taking the time to attack my half-formed ideas. As I'm still not quite all together, I hope you'll forgive my approach of being somewhat deliberately provocative even when my arguments are not well-formed enough to support the conclusions.
Bart, concerning your idea that the extra information detracts from the whole, that's a very good argument and I have no great answer for it. In fact, I don't think that I want all art to become open in the way I'm suggesting. I think what I'm putting forth is more of a crude first stab at one particular view that I think will become more prominent as a consequence of the way technology is affecting the experience both of art and of life in general.
Secondly, Doug. I don't think that artists have been at the forefront of using the internet. I think if anyone, software developers, computer scientists are way ahead, granted they have an unfair advantage. The things happening in the open source movement are pretty remarkable. That said, I think you guys here (www.mydamnforum.net) are probably among the best examples of artists really taking advantage of technology. Perhaps not as portals for the public to access your individual art, but in the sense of information sharing.
Concerning confrontational honesty, boldness of concept, you are right, I have been horribly vague. These ideas need to be fleshed out. I should point out that they do not come from music. Rather, they come from what I perceive as general characteristics of communication through the internet.
People seem to be captivated by the quality of being exposed. Look at some of the blogs that have commanded millions of hits solely on the basis of the bareness with which people lay out their lives. I think this is one of the defining characteristics of our times and that it will necessarily in some ways become manifest in art. The way in which I envision the manifestation is the loss of the pretension that art springs forth fully formed, the separation of artifact from process. I see people accepting humanness even in higher art in a way that is, in my opinion, new.
Thanks to Bart and Doug Wamble for their thoughts and challenges.
The internet is the new media. This may seem obvious, but for most it has yet to sink in. Surely, for encyclopedic content, the internet's primacy is unchallenged by even the most philistine. But for art, particularly music, the internet and its culture of information sharing have been met with stiff resistance. Among more serious artists, at best the internet has been used to moderate effect as a marketing tool. Only among kitschier musicians is the internet seriously contemplated, engaged.
I should clarify that I am referring in this essay to the mechanisms of distributing and communicating about art, not the intrinsic properties of the art itself. I do not suggest that the future consists of technologically driven concept art produced through artists' dynamic interactions with an audience in cyberspace. I do, however, assert that the internet is the new media. It is not simply a marketing tool; it is the product.
The Business Model is Dead
I will not attempt to hazard a guess at the exact ratio of mp3s that are obtained illegally as compared to those uploaded from CDs or purchased legally on the internet. But I do not feel squeamish about assuming that it is a lot to a little. Still, despite the overwhelming proportion of distribution occurring on the internet, the majority of revenue is still captured in the conventional ways. Record sales. The music industry finds itself in the same position as AOL found itself at the end of the twentieth century. Rather than capture the traffic by distributing the music themselves, artists cede influence over their audience to peer-to-peer file sharing services. It is holding on to dying product, preferring to die slowly rather than quickly. In this essay, I will not address the future business model for music; I believe that the business model and the direction of art, while related, are determined by different sets of factors. Here I will focus on what the growing convergence of technology and art means for art, specifically music, irrespective of the business model.
For a long time, technology facilitated the dominance of music as commodity. Specialization of labor, mass media in the form of television and radio supported the model. Find a niche product for a niche market. Put it in a clearly labeled box. Sell it through the appropriate channels. The pressure on artists has been to define themselves as narrowly as possible. What television and radio did to make us stupider, however, the internet is beginning to reverse, allowing us at least the option of choosing a more intelligent course. With access to billions of sources of content, rather than a few tailored to the lowest common dominator, the discriminating audience, however small, can find the deeper good. Additionally, from the artists' perspective, the internet provides an unprecedented opportunity for growth through more robust communication.
Sure, one can point to the videos of pandas making hand-farts while playing the flute that dominate Youtube as an indicator of the 'internet culture.' But these are distractions. The existence of inanity on the web has no bearing on its potential as a medium for art. Plenty of people wrote stupid things down on paper in the past. This would never be taken seriously as a condemnation of books. The internet has brought the world information sharing, both in and out of academia, in a way that has never been seen before. It spawned the open source movement: collectives of software developers collaborating with no profit motive to accomplish some of the greatest feats in software engineering. Think of the Linux operating system, which is dominant in the cloud, powering the majority of most people's computing experience, whether they realize it or not.
Myspace is not the Answer
Musicians suffer from a variation on Stockholm Syndrome. They've been liberated. The record companies are dead. And while the internet has yet to produce a great business model to replace them, the channels of distribution, the capacity to share knowledge, method, process, and product are all there. What is our response?
“Well, it's comfortable in the box.”
“We've learned how to market ourselves, this is how it's done.”
In the presence of a technology that allows us to share everything, the entire creative process, where do we go? MySpace. We express who we are as artists through a short, self-congratulatory bio, a list of influences, and who our “Top Friends” are. Some are so enthralled with MySpace that they forego the luxury of an independent website.
Other musicians flock to the Dynamod web portal. Here the information from a MySpace page is thrown into a Flash application. In a world driven by text and search, musicians post unsearchable content. This is not only a failure to realize the internet's power in exposing the artistic process, it is also bad marketing.
Open Source Art
What is the alternative? Now I stumble onto more nuanced ground. Some people are instrumentalists and that is all they want to be. They make records, polish them, sell them. They do not like to talk about what they do, share the process by which they do it, or explore where it is that they are heading. From the internet they seek only a means to advertise where they play, what they are selling and a way to let prospective employers know how to contact them. In these cases, MySpace is fine, forget everything I said.
Select others have sufficient fame that they share more than records and dates even if not through their own channels. Interviews are published on journalistic web sites. For them the need to embrace the new order is not as urgent, but still beneficial.
For the rest of us, the internet presents the opportunity to be artists in the way that we, as musicians, have always understood it, not the way record labels and the business model have shaped us. Coltrane's music, Bird's music, Miles's music, were always about the process. The artifact was secondary. It was a glimpse, a snapshot. To Columbia records, Kind of Blue was Miles' crowning achievement, Bitches Brew another milestone. To Impulse, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was his defining achievement, Crescent another burst of creativity. To those of us who know better, these were gems along a bigger path. We love the records, but we care about the path. Who, in possession of a bootlegged Bird record prizes it less than its official counterpart? We cherish the raw. The development of the idea. The snapshots along the way are great, but the path captivates us.
Our moment has arrived. The internet is the new media. Radio was great for selling records. Television was great for selling records. The internet is great for sharing everything. The process can now be exposed. Imagine having access to John Coltrane's mind when he was practicing ten hours per day. Imagine knowing exactly what he was practicing, what he was reaching for.
For some, this proposition might seem scary. Not having to explain what it is that we do makes it easy not to have anything to explain. How can one pass off mindless harmonic super-impositions in the absence of a deeper concept as intellectual art if expected to explain what it is that they are doing.
Still, any resistance to the new media is futile. The old media is disappearing. The live concert is not going anywhere, but the mass audience is in the cloud. The CD is done. It will probably not be sufficient in this world to share nothing besides a business card with several attached mp3s. An artist must also be a thinker, a writer.
Great art is always of its time. Bach, Dostoevsky, Picasso, Miles. I believe that in this time, the creative process must be laid bare. How else can we reflect the times in which we live? Jazz, without the trite attempts to commercialize, has been perfectly suited to benefit from this paradigm shift for at least sixty years. Instead, the territory is ceded to Indie rock musicians who have managed to be more savvy and demonstrate themselves more literate in spite of the intellectualism associated with jazz. Art music will become the dominion of ideas again. The highest art in this age will be characterized not by the illusion of perfection or the air of intellectualism but by boldness of concept and an almost confrontational honesty.
Separation of Craft and Art
Classical musicians break up the acts of acquiring instrumental technique and preparing music for performance. The separation between means and ends is clear. Patterns are dealt with, but not with the idea that they are to be applied verbatim in concert. Hanon, Czerny, Klosé, are but a few of the celebrated methods devoted to the development of technique. The goal is to make technique transparent in the same way that, ideally, the instrument itself is transparent when not malfunctioning.
Jazz musicians, burdened by the necessity of dealing not only with technique and repertoire but also with harmony, improvisation, and composition often lose sight of this separation, combining the acts of practicing the instrument and practicing the music. This conflation of craft and art does neither justice, yielding half-formed technique and technical-sounding music. Generally, it is not possible to do everything at once. A pop singer selected for a combination of sex appeal, vocal talent, and dance skill will seldom be sexy enough to model, talented enough to impress a professional singer, or skilled enough to cut it as a dancer alone. I advocated choosing practice methods with specific priorities in mind.
Thanks to Branford Marsalis from whom I learned this concept.
Consistency, Evenness throughout Range
One problem that plagues jazz musicians is an inconsistency in range. Specifically, saxophone players have a tendency to develop one vocabulary that is employed through most of the range; another, less extensive vocabulary for the altissimo range; and a third, equally limited vocabulary, which is applied in the lower register.
It's easy to understand why this might happen. The middle register is worked substantially more than any other range of the instrument. If scales are practiced starting and ending on the tonic, all the middle notes are played substantially more than the lowest or highest notes. Imagine a saxophonist, whose range is from low B-flat to high F, practicing major scales. The high F is only played on one scale. The High E and E-flat are each played in only two scales, etc. The same logic applies to 'licks'. The highest and lowest notes are seldom reached.
Separating technique from the act of playing, this problem is easy to isolate. Modify all exercises to traverse the entire range of the instrument equally. This way the altissimo, middle range, and lower register are not practiced separately. Further, playing through all three ranges with the same air, a unification of the ranges is possible.
An Outline of the Method
In this way, the entire range of the instrument is traversed twice. For example, given a G Major scale and a range from low B-Flat to high F, one would start the scale on either G, as usual. Then one would ascend to high E (F is not contained in the G Major scale), descend to low B (B-Flat is not contained in the G Major scale), and return to G. In a subsequent lesson I will post a more comprehensive exploration of this concept with many applications and accompanying sheet music.
Thanks to Jan Vinci, whose flute lessons inspired my development of this heuristic.
Everything is a Sound Exercise
The final, but perhaps most important heuristic that I will include in this article is the treatment of all practice as a sound exercise. This stems from two observations.
I personally played with awful technique for many years, dropping my jaw on low notes and pinching high notes. Subsequently, most of the technique that I acquired at the time is now useless as I seek to redevelop my entire sound concept. If ever anything doesn't sound controlled enough to be a sound exercise, I should probably be doing sound exercises instead.
Zachary Lipton - Tenor Saxophone
Tobin Chodos - Piano
Phil Rowan - Bass
Craig Weinrib - Drums
