For five straight months, four years in a row, for a total of 600 days, the Japanese artist Yu Yamauchi lived in a hut near the summit of Mt. Fuji. Every morning at dawn he took photographs of the rising sun, sky and clouds. If you ask me, that’s a cool project.
And the photographs are magnificent.
Yamauchi describes his vantage point at 10,000 feet above sea level as “the threshold between Earth and outer space.” The view, he says in a statement accompanying the photographs, is
“Constantly shifting,
the clouds look like a membrane encapsulating the Earth.
When the Sun rises behind a cloud-forming horizon,
the world that was painted in blue just a moment before
suddenly looks completely different.
I witnessed this magical transformation many times.”
What I find interesting about Yamauchi’s work–notwithstanding the breathtaking photographs themselves–is how it uses repetition as a generative tool. The art maintains a single vantage point and lets the weather of the passing days shape the content of what’s captured in Yamauchi’s lens. The photographer didn’t wait for the perfect day to shoot. Rather, each day he went to see what the rising sun, sky and clouds had to offer. The repetition and variations that mark time’s passing were their own kind of filter–stage one of a process.
“Practice, repetition, and repetition of the repeated with ever increasing intensity are its distinctive features for long stretches of the way.”
– Eugen Herrigal, Zen in the Art of Archery
Reduced to its essentials, drumming is fundamentally about repetition.
Imagine for a moment that you’re a drummer. You stand in front of a snare drum (snares off), sticks in hands, poised and ready to play. You raise your right stick about twelve inches above the drum and make a single downwards stroke: waack. Nice. It’s a full and resonant sound and you bask in it for the brief moment of its sharp attack and fast decay. But as a musical event, this single snare drum stroke is cruelly evanescent in that it has disappeared almost as soon as it has sounded. So what do you do?
You strike the drum again of course! But this time you follow your right hand stroke with a left hand one, its mirror image: waack, waack. Using your two hands you have cloned that initial drum stroke, turning one beat into two. Two beats convey more musical sense that does one in that the interval between your right-and left-hand waacks suggests some kind of timing or pulsation. But your left hand following your right was only a one-off occurrence. The whole waack-waack sequence of sound is still quite brief. You want to extend this moment somehow, if only because playing the drum and hearing it sounding is so enjoyable.
You begin striking the drum again and this time you keep your hands moving steady in a right hand-left hand alternation: waack, waack, waack, waack…over and over again. Now something is happening: the repeated waacks suggest a regular pulsation and tempo. They also create their own kind of flow. This feels good. You don’t want to stop playing, for why would you want to destroy your own flow and enjoyment of the drum sound?
So you keep repeating—keeping you hands moving at a steady tempo. As you repeat you notice things that weren’t apparent when you played just a single snare drum waack or two. First, you notice the shape of the sound you’re making. Repetition affords you the opportunity to aurally observe your sound in motion, each waack like a specimen offered for your inspection. Each waack sounds similar, but subtly different too. You notice that your right and left hands don’t make exactly the same sound, and that the waacks change depending on where your sticks land on the drumhead. It’s something to pay attention to simply because it has your attention. Second, as you listen to the drum strokes and the shapes of their resonance, you notice the spaces between the strokes as a kind of negative space created in the brief absence of sound. You never noticed these spaces before, probably because you thought more about the moment of striking the drum. Finally, you notice that the space between your strokes has some relationship to the movement of your hands and arms. Specifically, the spaces align themselves with the upward movement of your hands and arms as they ready the sticks for the next stroke. In a shift of perception, you realize that what you thought was a simple right hand-left hand waack, waack, waack, waack alternation actually has more depth to it and the hand and arm movements required of you to play repeating strokes contain within themselves a way of subdividing the pulsation of your playing. Paying attention to the spaces between the notes and the upward as well the downward movements of your hands you now hear something different: waack (and) waack (and) waack (and) waack (and) . . . Your waacks now feel like a kind of breathing. Through repetition, you are not simply striking the snare drum; you’re keeping time.
Thus, when I speak of drumming as being fundamentally about repetition I mean to say that it only begins to offer its perceptual lessons when we allow ourselves to make a percussive gesture and then repeat it. A single stroke on a snare drum is one thing (and in great hands can be an awesomely beautiful thing). But repeating it, and then repeating that repetition for long stretches allows for an interesting series of transformations in our attention to take place.
I have a secret: over the past few weeks while riding the subway with headphones on I’ve been listening to the Grateful Dead. And maybe not coincidentally, I haven’t shaved in about two weeks. So as I write this I’m wondering–Are these twin facts somehow related? Do they point to a strange metamorphosis taking place in me through an alchemy of music and listening?
***
Formed in 1965 in San Francisco, The Grateful Dead was a peculiar kind of rock band that blended blues, folk, psychedelic-rock, bluegrass, jazz, reggae, country, and free improvisation into a trippy whole that sometimes achieved very musical results. Though they sold some 30 million albums over their 30-year career, what they really liked to do was play live, and in that regard the band seemed to have singlehandedly initiated the “jam band” scene.
I was never a Grateful Dead fan and my lack of fandom, is, I guess, altogether unfair since I never even once listened to the group’s music while growing up. Maybe I was a dormant fan who just didn’t know it yet, but I had a sense that their social-sonic world was something you had to be a believer in to truly appreciate; the music didn’t enculturate you, you had to join its cause–such followers of the group are called Deadhead, by the way–almost with a pre-knowledge of what its makers and its scene were all about. Also, Deadheads seemed to hang with other Deadheads and I didn’t know any in the first place. All this to say that for one reason or another the Grateful Dead never entered my musical orbit.
I began thinking about and listening to the Dead recently after reading a very fine article about them by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker. Without being sentimental, the article traces and celebrates the author’s own fandom as he recalls his first experience seeing the Dead perform, describes trading and scrutinizing fan bootleg recordings (or audience tapes) with friends, and hangs out with an archivist who is in charge of the Dead’s vast recorded legacy. Along the way, Paumgarten unpacks the sound and structures of the Dead’s music and explains how, for its devoted fans at least, it has had such enduring appeal. The article raises a question: How does a music become resilient to time’s passing? In the case of the Grateful Dead, their music has lived on mainly through a vast number of live recordings.
Even though I didn’t listen to the Dead, I had long heard that their recordings really don’t do justice to the band anyway; their music was all about a magic conjured in performance. You just had to be there. The Dead had lots of songs to draw on, but what they were famous for was improvising new versions of their material at every concert. Ironically enough, as Paumgarten points out, this group that apparently could only be understood through its performances is best known today for its astonishingly large archive of recorded music which is stored in a climate controlled vault in California. Indeed, having played over 2,300 concerts between 1965 and 1995 “the Dead have more recorded music in circulation than any performing group in history” and there are more than 8,000 Dead recordings on archive.org alone. Many of these recordings are audience tapes–the work of fans who meticulously recorded Dead shows. (The Dead encouraged audience taping as a way to spread the good word.) This “immense body of work”, notes Paumgarten, “invites and sustains obsession, and its variability is in some respects the draw.” Obsessive listening invites new perspectives too. Reflecting on his getting to know the musical details of particular recordings of Dead concerts, Paumgarten says that “the music, on repetition, began to feel like something composed, rather than improvised. It took on a life of its own…”
Another irony of the Dead is that it played a “ragged, improvisational amalgam of old-timey American music” amplified through a most sophisticated sound system known as the Wall Of Sound: 600 speakers with an output of over 25,000 watts. Thus, between its thousands of recordings and its famed sound system, the Dead is as good a locus as any for thinking through the story of technology’s impact on our consumption of music over the last fifty years. Even though they looked like hippies, they were postmoderns who were all about the improvised remix–or what Kevin Kelly calls “recombinant” culture–years before this became a guiding idea of contemporary music.
***
One of the Grateful Dead’s most famous songs–or platform for acoustic recombinant remixing/improvisation–is “Darkstar.” Released in 1968, the song eventually became the Dead’s most anticipated and hallowed live numbers. There was an aura about this song that fans simply referred to as “It”–perhaps due to the fact that Dead stopped playing the piece for many years and then, in the late 1970s, suddenly resumed playing it again. Structurally, “Dark Star” is, as Paumgarten accurately dissects it, just “a modal vamp based on the A mixolydian scale, with two short verses and no bridge.” The original studio recording of the song clocks in under three minutes. But like the “head” of a jazz tune, the brief song is just a skeleton for the group’s variations. Thus, various live versions of “Dark Star” range anywhere from 11 to 48 minutes (!) If nothing else, “Dark Star” demonstrates a kind of musical minimalism–or a maximal use of minimal materials.
I’ve spent some time listening to two versions of “Dark Star” on Spotify and YouTube. On Spotify I found a 20-minute recording from the 1972 Bickershaw festival in the UK; and on YouTube I found a 10-minute video of a show in Oregon from that same year. On both versions you can hear endlessly melodic bass wandering and rhythm guitar comping, bits on twinkling piano, tumbling and syncopated drumming, and at times soaring lead guitar. Only on the Bickershaw version does the group’s lead singer and guitarist, Jerry Garcia, get around to actually singing those verses!
Listening to this piece and watching the video I find the music has an interesting sense of active stasis that appeals to me. This stasis is perhaps mostly a function of the guitars and bass staying in that A mixolydian mode. (Detractors might call this kind of thing modal “noodling.”) Also, the medium slow tempo (about 70 bpm) remains constant and its languid pace contributes to the feeling that no one–neither the band nor its thousands of fans swaying out in the Oregon fields beyond the stage–is in any big hurry to go anywhere soon. While a lot of popular music has a goal-oriented teleology–verses bring us inexorably towards the choruses, and so on–”Dark Star” is definitely a different, more patient animal. Maybe that’s one of the reasons it’s so famous?
To their credit, the musicians manage to keep things fairly (though not always) interesting by constantly varying their parts. Most obvious is Garcia’s endless lead guitar soloing. But listen also to the bass which often stays in an unusually high register, almost dovetailing with Garcia’s guitar. (This is contrary to the bass guitar’s customary role of playing mostly low-pitched notes and thus build a solid “foundation” for the song.) Similarly, the rhythm guitar keeps changing its jazz comping-like riffs, and the drummer Bill Kreutzmann never ever plays any kind of steady back beat on beats 2 and 4; instead, he plays a kind of swinging rhythm. In sum, this kind of group level improvisation is almost jazz-like: it has a constant pulse, it swings, and remains resolutely modal.
Listening to different performances of “Dark Star” I heard a number of beautiful if brief moments of group synchrony and groovy musical thinking. In the clip below, you can hear such a moment from 5:59-6:35. For a mere half-minute, a deep space opens up. Maybe that’s because the bass guitar finally stays still for a moment and lets some nice low A notes ring long. Or maybe the reason is something else altogether. Whatever it is, it’s worth listening to.
Haruki Murakami, master novelist and enthusiast of long distance running, makes this observation about the repetition of writing, and the experience of repetition itself as a perceptual tool for tweaking the senses:
“The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism.
I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
Just as I was beginning to think I might know something about repetition, I watched a film that made me rethink that notion. The film is David Gelb’s documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi (2011) which follows around 85-year-old sushi master Jiro Ono as he works in his tiny Tokyo restaurant with his son, Yoshikazu. Jiro loves what he does and has been doing it for a very, very long time.
What is fascinating about this movie is how simple and repetitious Jiro’s work appears to be, while at the same time how resonant it is–for him and for his customers who eat what is widely considered to be the best sushi in the world. Every day, for the past seventy years or so, Jiro comes to the restaurant and makes sushi: pressing a small piece of fish on top of some rice gently shaped in his fingers, painting on a little special glaze, and then plating the finished food for immediate consumption. Like a musician playing onstage, it’s an evanescent performance that comes and goes in mere (delicious) moments. But Jiro extends this moment, coming to work seven days a week, year after year, decade after decade, in constant pursuit of the elusive “perfect” piece of sushi. Moreover, the chef claims that he uses no secret techniques or ingredients in his work (besides the freshest fish, and what is that special glaze anyway?) and that he’s not trying to be special or unique. So how is Jiro’s food so tasty (earning the restaurant 3 Michelin stars) and how does the chef remain so engaged and driven? In short, what makes him tick?
In part, the answer seems to lie in transformative power of repetition itself. Through the film we learn about Jiro’s notion that “ultimate simplicity leads to purity” and the importance of repeating the same routine every day in pursuit of perfection. We also learn about the Japanese concept of shokunin which describes someone along the lines of a craftsman or an artisan, but with a spiritual/ethical dimension added in that requires that one’s work be approached conscientiously, with commitment, and for the betterment of humanity. While shokunin may seem like a step beyond sushi making, it nevertheless encapsulates Jiro’s approach. Thoughtful repetition affords him an ongoing opportunity to transform his outwardly simple work into something very special. Just as ultimate simplicity leads to purity, so too perhaps can purity achieved through simplicity become a form of deep complexity.
***
Jiro Dreams Of Sushi has a repetitious soundtrack too, using as it does a fair amount of music by the contemporary classical composers Philip Glass and Max Richter (plus some Tchaikovsky, Bach and Mozart). The music adds a layer of insistence of the film, but I wonder if all this was necessary? I say this because there were a few moments in the film when the music distracted me and got me thinking: how quickly some forms of musical minimalism have become shorthand for conveying, in a contemporary language, the sensation of urgent constant forward motion tinged with a kind of wistfulness at the very fact of time’s passing. Do we need this kind of musical meta-commentary on Jiro’s life? The film could have used traditional Japanese music, or maybe jettisoned the soundtrack altogether.
In this clip from the film, a food critic who is sitting at the end of the sushi bar watching others eat describes how the unfolding of a Jiro sushi meal is similar to a performance of classical music:
At first glance, ultrarunner Scott Jurek is an odd bird: he enjoys running astonishingly long and punishing distances like 100+ miles. But at a second, longer glance by way of his lucid autobiography Eat and Run, Jurek seems to be motivated less by extremes as ends in themselves and more as means to help him achieve altered states of consciousness. Okay, maybe that’s still unusual, but it’s interesting too. The athlete as seeker: Jurek is a runner in search of something more.
Eat and Run explores a number of themes that pertain to this something more–this quest to explore the contours of consciousness and depths of perception through physical activity. These themes include discipline, training and physical limits, instinct and intuition, egolessness, meditation and mindfulness, tuning in, and transcendence. What follows are some passages that illustrate these themes.
In a passage on discipline, Jurek touches on Bushido, the culture of ancient Japanese samurai warriors that espoused an empty mindset, “letting go of the past and the future and focusing on the moment.”
Here is Jurek discussing limits: “I wanted to know more about that space between exhaustion and breaking.”
On intuition:
“The more I measured and adjusted, the more I trusted my instincts.”
Here is Jurek on egolessness and mindfulness: “I wanted to lose myself, to connect with something larger.” And this: “I did want to find that place of egolessness and mindfulness that only the monotony of a 24-hour race can produce.” And also this: “running had turned into something other than training. It had turned into a kind of meditation…” And finally, this: “I stayed plugged in.”
In one passage, Jurek recounts a conversation with a seasoned ultrarunner who spoke in almost musical terms about connecting with the resonances of the natural world through running: ”he spoke of vibrations and wavelengths and signs from the hidden world, and while I knew what he meant–the sensation of losing oneself, of entering a zone at once connected to the earth and separated from earthly concerns–I wasn’t sure how to achieve it on a regular, predictable basis.”
And finally, Jurek touches on transcendence by discussing the need to run “with abandon and animal freedom…if I wanted to lose myself, to break into another dimension”; by quoting the Greek Spartathalon champion Yiannis Kouros who says that ultra running is a “test of ‘metaphysical characteristics’”; and describing the great native Mexican runners, the Tarahumara: “while the Tarahumara run to get from point to point, in the process they travel into a zone beyond geography and beyond even the five senses.”
***
As a distance sports enthusiast myself as well as a musician, I have an interest in activities that go on for a while and in so doing change my perceptions. In sport or in music making, this is not a state of mind one goes after deliberately–at least initially–but rather something revealed in the course of expending energy and exercising attention over a chunk of time. So, generally speaking, Energy spent over Time = Cool Perceptual Changes.
But the conditions need to be right too. In sport, a steady-state pace, repeated mile after mile is a must. In music, a steady groove, repeated over and over can certainly help. It’s with these similarities in mind that I think about how sport is a physical workout while music is a virtual one. One of the only analytical accounts of musical activity that describes it as a virtual workout is musicologist David Burrows’ work on music and dynamical systems theory. (See his articles “Music and the Biology of Time” (1972), “A Dynamical Systems Perspective of Music” (1997), and his book Time and the Warm Body (2007). Proceeding by analogy, Burrows proposes that pieces of music model our experiences as living beings–constantly maintaining a steady-state, dynamic equilibrium through constant change. (“Music takes place in its own almost total sonic absence.”) Burrows’ view of music addresses the old question of what music is actually for: Is it for self-expression? Mobilizing large groups of people in coordinated behavior? Is it for the mind or the body, or both? If music’s primary purpose is in fact as a kind of technology for reflecting back to us the experience of being alive and sensate and time-bound, then that helps explain why there are such a staggering variety of musical styles floating around: there are, after all, a lot of different ways of being in the world.
Similarly, distance sports are distinctive ways of being in the world. And as the excerpts from Jurek’s book illustrate, the experience of long distance running is not unlike the experience of making and listening to certain kinds of repetition-heavy music in that in altering our perceptions it paves the way for new ways of experiencing the world. This, most of all, is the reason why some of us keep listening and keep moving.
Among the joys of Adharanand Finn’s Running With The Kenyans, a succinct and engaging tale of the author’s experiences long distance running training at high altitude in the East African countryside, is the realization that there aren’t really any secrets to East African running prowess besides constant training, continuous pushing of body boundaries, as well as what I imagine is some kind of awesome capacity to endure the pains that comes with this kind of excruciating endurance exertion. As I read I found myself thinking of that phrase “there’s no there there.” For the runners–no special shoes, no special eating regimen, and even no special precision practice routines and post-run analyses. Just run, rest, eat, and run some more, over and over again. A repetitive monastic running groove, you could call it, powered by a desire for international athletic success.
Finn’s trajectory as the visiting runner is predictable but also insightful. Over the course of his several month stay in Kenya, he gets fitter and faster through his training with a running club and eventually runs an impressive sub 3-hour marathon. Along the way, he observes his Kenyan colleagues as they train and realizes that their method revolves around a minimal and simple approach to training that works to effectively bypass over-thinking it. In one of the most fascinating passages, Finn compares Western and African approaches to using a watch while running. It turns out that the watch, that enduring symbol of the Western conception of time, can be used in ways other than just quantifying experience. Finn observes:
“while in the West we time everything so that we can measure and analyze it afterward, or keep track of our running pace so we can calculate whether we need to slow down or speed up, Kenyans use their watches in a completely different way. By running their intervals according to the regimented beeps of their watches, Kenyans are actually taking the thinking out of their running. When the watch beeps, they speed up. When it beeps again, they slow down.[...] Each session is forgotten as soon as it is done. The timing is just a way of structuring the training, of telling them when to start and when to stop.”
What struck me about this passage was how it conjures a kind of empty mind mindset of those Kenyan runners with their beeping watches which they mostly ignore except as a sonic cue. Without regular recourse to the numbers of pace timings, the runners often use only a sensed bio-feedback from the feeling of what happens (to borrow a phrase from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s book) to their moving bodies as guidance. In this sense, the runners seem like really good listeners to the feeling of what they’re doing as they’re doing it.
***
I found this really interesting, both because I sometimes like to measure and time and document things (running included, of course) and because I just as often “zone out” and really have no idea of what I’m doing (while running, obviously, and in many other activities!). In other words, I like precision as a self-imposed game, but often just go by feel.
And as per usual with things I read, I found myself thinking analogically, trying to find links between running and musical practices. One memory that came to mind upon reading about the beeping watches was my once upon a time endless practicing with metronomes, letting the machine take care of the steady quarter note pulse–click, click, click, click–while I busied myself with playing different subdivisions of those clicks: 123-123-123-123 (a triplet), or 12345-12345-12345-12345 (a quintuplet), and so on. (If you’re wondering: yes, percussionists and drummers can find this kind of activity fun…) Thinking about it now, the metronome, like the watch, took the conscious thinking of out of the activity, turning it into a game for the hands to try to fit their subdivisions into the allotted space of those steady quarter note clicks. (Sidebar question: Does playing with a metronome ever really improve one’s sense of time? Isn’t time sense–like running pacing, maybe–a more internalized, body-generated mechanism?)
This non-conscious thinking while doing also reminded me of a conversation I had with a composer schoolmate years ago. He had just listened to my performance of a piece I had written for vibraphone and said: “It sounds like you really like the Dorian mode.” I was puzzled because in his question was an assumption that I had consciously known what I was doing when I put the music together, thinking about scales and Dorian modes and whatnot. From my perspective though, I didn’t know what I was doing, but my hands did manage to find things that sounded right, working with the constraints posed by the layout of the vibraphone to narrow down possibilities and then structure the piece around these constraints. Thinking about it now, the layout of the instrument, like the beeping watch for the runners, took the conscious thinking of out the composing process, turning it into a game for the hands.
But back to the lessons of running. In sum, I took away from Finn’s book a sense that we might do well to structure some of our activities so that we can take out conscious thinking to better get on with the flow.
“Order is repetition of units. Chaos is multiplicity without rhythm.”
“My work is a game, a very serious game.”
“Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?”
– M.C. Escher
I’ve long been curious about M.C. Escher’s (1898-1972) drawings and woodcuts because of their precision, their order and symmetry, their use of repetition and optical illusions, and the way they seem to point towards what could be called the infinite. Lately I’ve been thinking about what these qualities in Escher’s art have to offer those of us working in music (whether making it or writing about it). Let’s take a look.
First, Escher incorporated tessellations into his work, a technique he picked up in his study of tile mosaics while visiting Alhambra, a Moorish palace in Spain in the early 1920s. (Which reminds me of an article on the advanced geometry of 12-century Islamic art.) Seeing the tile mosaics inspired Escher to use geometric grids as the basis for his art as a way of gaining precision. Tessellations, by the way, are the composite result of geometric shapes that are repeated without overlaps or gaps. Honeycombs and interlocking pavement tiles are examples of tessellations. We see tessellations in Escher works such as these:
Second, Escher depicted in his work transformation/transmutations where we see one shape becoming another. These transformations appear most clearly in Escher’s tessellation pieces. In his woodcut Sky and Water, for example, we see birds becoming fish/fish becoming birds.
Or in this piece, Day and Night, a whole landscape shifting:
Third, Escher was fascinated by so-called “impossible constructions” or visual illusions such as the Necker cube and the Penrose triangle that take advantage of quirks of perception and perspective. You can see impossible constructions depicted in Escher’s famous “Relativity” piece that depicts people simultaneously ascending and descending stairs in an infinite loop. Are the figures moving up or down, sideways this way or that way? I like to rotate this piece onto its different sides to see how it holds up. Miraculously, Escher makes the work cohere no matter what viewing perspective we try to bring to it:
Fourth, and speaking of infinite loops, Escher’s works illustrate the idea of recursiveness—that is, something feeding back upon itself in a never-ending cycle. Relativity, above, depicts such infinite loops, as does the work Drawing Hands:
And this one that depicts lizards crawling to life/becoming tessellations:
These works and others present the viewer with a visual chicken/egg dilemma: Where does it all start and end? I like that.
Fifth, it’s been said that Escher’s art demonstrated an “intuitive” understanding of mathematical order and symmetry and perhaps this is the reason why his works are so pleasing to look at? What’s remarkable is that this intuitive understanding was so accurate that in the late 1950s the Canadian mathematician H.S.M. Coxeter said of Escher’s hyperbolic tessellations (regular tilings of a hyperbolic plane): “Escher got it absolutely right to the millimeter.” Here is his Circle Limit III:
This notion of Escher’s intuitive mathematical understanding reminds me of a quote from the philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Lebniz (1646-1716) that always made intuitive sense to me: “Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.”
Finally, there’s an intangible quality to Escher’s work that some critics have described as an interest in exploring infinity. The repetition, the tessellations depicting nature’s transformations and evolution, the impossible constructions playing with our perceptions, the infinite loops feeding back upon themselves—all of these characteristics of Escher’s art suggest an artist trying to represent that which can’t be represented, a reality beyond, a time-space outside our everyday experience of space-time. You even see it in tiny details, like when Escher draws a reflection of himself. In his work The Eye, for example, the reflection is twofold: there’s the mirror-image close up of his face where we see the folds around his eye, and there’s also that next level reflection deep in his eye’s pupil where we see Escher post-Escher–he’s already a corpse! It’s these kinds of little details that suggest that Escher was always somehow thinking beyond the Now even as he had intricate, and serious fun (“My work is a game, a very serious game”) constructing its beguiling representations:
***
For me, Escher’s work has musical resonances and looking at his pieces reminds me of the work of various composers, especially that of the American minimalists such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Over the years I’ve spent much time thinking through their work (you can read more about their work here; and you can view a Ventrilo-Dialogue with Reich here). Escher’s tessellations remind me of minimalist music that is similarly built out of small repeating units of sound strung together to make long rhythmic tapestries. (Now that I think of it, a lot of electronic dance music fits this bill as well.) Escher’s transformations/transmutations remind me of how minimalist music changes over time through subtle additive or subtractive procedures—adding or taking away a note here and there to transform one motive into another before our ears. (Ditto for electronic dance music.) And Escher’s impossible constructions remind me of minimal music’s perceptual artifacts—where as a listener you’re not sure if you’re listening to three groups of four beats or four groups of three beats, for example. Like Escher’s Relativity, a piece like Reich’s Drumming allows the listener to hear both perspectives at once. As for recursiveness, a lot of classic minimal music really does have an endless quality about it: a sense that it could, and just might, go on forever—or at least long enough for the listener to stop worrying about where it’s “going.” (It’s not going anywhere, just being something for a time.) Finally, to return to Escher’s intuitive understanding of math: Aren’t composers kinds of mathematicians too in that in one way or another they’re concerned with numbers and quantity, structure, space, and change? Like Escher, most composers frame what they do not in clinical terms (“I spend a lot of time exploring e-minor…” or “I do most of my compositional work in 5/4 time…”) but in intuitive and emotional terms (“In this song I was trying to capture the sadness of my break-up with a girlfriend…”) And isn’t music a good example of a kind of equation in sound that presents not an argument or a “proof” but rather shares the results of a procedure, solving itself and bringing us along for the ride?
It is not down in any map; true places never are. – Herman Melville
At the core of Robin Harvie’s The Lure Of Long Distances: Why We Run (2011) is a disturbing yet intoxicating idea: that you’re not really free in any endeavor until you no longer feel the gravitational pull of wanting to return to the safety of “home”–however you may define it. In this page-turning, literary memoir, Harvie, a fluid writer and adept runner of ultra-long distances, explores the experience of endurance exercise, its pains, and its transcendences. Along the way he learns about himself, his family’s histories, and the appeal of long distance running.
The book is powered by a simple question: Why do we run? If you’re a runner of considerable distances you probably have your reasons: maybe to stay trim and license generous eating habits, to escape, or to generate those feel-good endorphins. But there are other, slightly more intangible–and for me, more important–reasons to run too. There’s the joy of motion, of turning your body into a playful vehicle of kinetic energy. There’s also the mystery of what happens to your mind as you run–all those little (endorphin-induced?) perceptual shifts, how your thinking moves into another gear as if in an exercise-induced critical trance. If you go long enough and conditions outside and in are just right, you can lose yourself through motion. Running, like good repetitive music, affects all kinds of cognitive changes. As you get lost in an ergonomic flow, your body, your mind, and the landscape around you all fuse into one.
Harvie explores the sources of long distance runners’ “deep visceral need” (146) to do what they do and experience “the power of liberation through movement” (168). He comes by his subject matter honestly too. He ran his first marathon in 2000 and then spent years training to race faster only to find that his times weren’t improving. The solution? Run further. Harvie entered the extreme sporting world of ultra running, running races more than twice the length of the 26 mile marathon. The Lure Of Long Distances chronicles his preparation for the biggest race of them all: The Spartathlon, a 152-mile race in Greece, from Athens to Sparta. Harvie doesn’t quite finish the run, quitting at the 85 mile mark. But the story he tells about his journey reveals much about the human condition.
Throughout his narrative, Harvie returns often the subject of mapping, topologies, and cartographies. Running allows us to explore physical landscapes, sure, but what it really does is tell us about ourselves–the geography of our psychologies, our thoughts, our imaginations, our strengths and frailties. In the course of revisiting the place of his childhood summer cottage on the coast of Denmark or running along the river Thames, Harvie excavates a web of memories and life stories.
Yet as much as running triggers thoughts, Harvie is equally interested in its tendency towards autonomy, its capacity to represent nothing but itself–a one step at a time, rhythmic locomotion. We need to “rid ourselves of all the symbolism and metaphor” he says, “to become pure kinetic energy” (77). Harvie is interested in motion. Motion, he notes, ” has a meditative quality, an ability to slow down the rhythm of our lives” (187), sometimes gracing us with what feels like an awareness “of the world right down to the atomic level” (198). In running great distances, ultra runners are graced with a transformation of awareness that “involves a merging of consciousness and landscape” (198). What transforms them is the motion of running itself.
Part of this transformation is really a breaking down of body and mind and this fact leads Harvie to discuss creativity. He compares running ultras and the disintegration they wreak on body and mind where “the mind empties itself of all habits” (223) to the creative process as described by Arthur Koestler in his 1964 book The Act Of Creation. Koestler coined the term “bisociation” to describe how the mind links disparate ideas to create new hybrid forms. Out of the creative act–or running long distances, as Harvie argues–”is generated a new topography of the individual, and, by extension, the world” (223). This is an elaborate way of explaining how new ideas frequently appear to us while running.
But what, you ask, has all this running business to do with music? (This is after all a music blog.) Harvie draws on sound and silence to describe the experience of running, noting how “there would always be a gap between what it sounded like and what it felt like” (224). Interestingly for me, running has no outer soundtrack, unless you count the sound of shuffling feet over pavement.* But this relative outer silence masks a rich inner world of triggered thoughts, memories, and affect. And the way to access these sensations is through silence. As Harvie notes, the key is “to learn to be silent in a world of noise, and to discover that silence has no narrative. Silence intensifies sensation–by turning the body inward” (227).
Where running really resembles music though, is in how difficult it is to actually talk about it. Not about what it means, but about the elements of its unfolding–its processes, its presence, and its capacity to seemingly be a world unto itself. So it is in this book that running remains an invisible presence: where are those thousands of evanescent miles Harvie ran in training? And this is precisely the point: like musical experience, running is something you can only “get” by throwing yourself into its unfolding over time. No “theory” of running or music ever adequately renders their energized lives as energized “affecting presences” (to quote anthropologist Robert Plant Armstrong). To experience affect–whether in running or musicking–you have to participate in real-time in their presences.
In sum, The Lure Of Long Distances is an absorbing study of perception. It’s about the feeling of consciousness and what it means to go further physically than you thought you ever could. Through his Spartathlon effort, Harvie manages to exceed all his prior limits of endurance, and his hope was that this colossal, running-induced state of “self-obliteration” would remain with him permanently, lifting him “above the grubby banalities of everyday life. That didn’t happen” (252). Harvie may or may not have become truly free. But lucky for us, he’s written a narrative that renders his transformation into a Runner through repeated, perpetual motion.
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*Equally interesting is how the tempo marked by my shuffling feet will occasionally trigger phantom playback of music in my mind’s ear. The rhythm of my feet, in other words, becomes a metronome that sets the tempo for the imagined music. Sometimes the running tempo is a tad too fast and I notice that the music has sped up to match my stride. Who needs an iPod when you have such seamless body-synced music playback!
