Touchdown

Today we witnessed the touchdown of NASA's rover Curiosity on Mars. It has already sent back its first pictures.

How exciting to glimpse other lands, other stones! I often thought as a deeply star-gazing child upon whom gravity worked harder than most, such that I dragged myself and later rolled and tumbled across the floor, that I would be the first to sign up to leave this planet, a first colonist.

Yet, as I age, I realize that am deeply attached to the earth, as echoed in Caetano Veloso's love song to Earth, "Terra."

Eu sou um leão de fogo                        [I am a lion of fire
Sem ti me consumiria                           without you I would consume myself
A mim mesmo eternamente                  myself eternally
E de nada valeria                                 and it would matter nothing
Acontecer de eu ser gente                   that I happen to be a person,
E gente é outra alegria                         and a person is another joy
Diferente das estrelas...                       different from the stars...]

 

This attachment goes beyond humanity. Anthropologist and primatologist Dawn Prince-Hughes, in her memoir Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism (which I recommend; see a good "non-review" here), writes of her experience of walking and standing, of pulling her body upright, as a painful separation:

Physically, I thought about how standing up on two feet leaves you exposed. One's naked belly and chest and genitals are all uncovered and laid bare, as if standing has lifted a great warm cover made of the sacred space between body and ground. Like a plant uprooted, with the last of its anchor and succor falling in abandoning clods, we stretch up to the sky and let the close and nourishing earth fall away. This standing had often been too much for me to bear, and when it was, I would go and curl up somewhere, nursing the raw wound that my upright front had sustained in the million-year tearing away that my ancestors had undertaken. (p. 121).

In explaining her affinity with the gorillas she studied and worked with and loved, she explained:

What I found I had always had with the gorillas was such vulnerability and ferocity and love. Our similarities were beyond perseveration, a need for space and a space for hiding; we were always drawing inward and exploding outward, sharing laughter out of fear and sharing a ferocious sense of justice, beyond mere caring. Our similarities also went beyond a difficulty dealing with the human race, sensitivities to the world around us and to the stereotyping in the face of the soullessness all around. Our affinity met in being filled with archaic darkness and persisting memories of a time when all things were one. (p. 122)

Sacred Rock. Machu Picchu, Peru.

We are earth beings. Now, perhaps always, as New York Times contributor Adam Frank somewhat sadly pointed out in his piece, "Alone in the Void."

Since time immemorial, the earth stones have been watching our growth. Do we not caress them and spill our tears and blood into this great rock? And our waste, too, and our bombs of rage? What better than the earth to serve as witness to all promises, all covenants made between living beings? Who better to know when we have forgotten ourselves?

Image found here.

Come now, let us make a covenant, you and I. And let it be a witness between you and me.” So Jacob took a stone and set it up as a pillar. And Jacob said to his kinsmen, “Gather stones.” And they took stones and made a heap, and they ate there by the heap. Laban called it Jegar-sahadutha, but Jacob called it Galeed. Laban said, “This heap is a witness between you and me today.” (Genesis 31, 44-48)

For all it has seen, the stone, the earth, like a stillness we can create in our own spirited flesh, offers the relief of an energetic, living silence:

Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion. He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues. Whatever that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty. To Aquinas’s wisdom I’d add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge, the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground. (from Stirring the Mud by Barbara Hurd, © 2001 by Barbara Hurd, from Tricycle)

I do not think that have ever felt the earth so keenly, so close, as when I lived in Mexico. There, in Cholula, at the foot of the great volcano Popcatepetl, artifacts of tiny clay faces, rain gods and jaguar-men, surfaced around the edges of ancient dusty roads. When the volcano erupted, the ground would rock slowly, like being rocked in the arms of someone who has forgotten just how little you really are.

Cholula with an erupting Popocatepetl. From A Gringo in Rural Mexico

Here is a poem of mine about the land of Cholula. The title, Huellas, has several meanings, including footprints, fingerprints, traces, and tracks. (The story of Footprints was one of my favorites as a child, and I carry a hint of this into the poem as well.) (Trigger warning)

Huellas

I

Five hundred years ago, a burned white man broke

ground for Catholic rites, the pyramid cradling

gold-spun idols. Today, a child crawls underneath mud

stone upon stone in small doorways, ancient

stories painted on the walls where her ancestors knew

one day she would laugh, remembering how

everyone always leaves a trace of what was, even

if it was not worth it. Even if we are lost in the end.

II

She is a cherub, round and brown

like the angel cheeks: they cried wax tears

where her mother knelt in a copal cathedral.

That whole month her knees were bloody

and she kept those flowers she picked

dried and thirsty among the saints

the day the youngest of her dozen

came home, defiled and married, but home.

III

At the market on Wednesdays, downy

chestnut-skinned fruit is split open to seduce

buyers who will suck out the burnt orange

dripping mamey, only to say it is not

yet ripe, let me try another, because

the uncut ones always taste best

and cherubs who do not run home fast

will most certainly get eaten alive.

IV 

The golden hour thickens in vapor,

lightening pouring red through woven cloth

windows. Just about any two bodies here

know each other to be sacred and hold

like a cross against the salted earth,

against the stumbling gait of those damned

by ancient pictures and buried ash. Volcanoes

boom and the ground, it breaks, it trembles. 

© 2010 J. Aaron

The unexpected and the brain

In an article based on a study entitled "Unsupervised statistical learning underpins computational, behavioural, and neural manifestations of musical expectation", forthcoming in Neuroimage, ScienceDaily notes:

Music has a grammar, which, like language, consists of rules that specify which notes can follow which other notes in a piece of music. According to Pearce: "the question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others."

The researchers asked 40 people to listen to hymn melodies (without lyrics) and state how expected or unexpected they found particular notes. They simulated a human mind listening to music with two computational models. The first model uses hard-wired rules to predict the next note in a melody. The second model learns through experience of real music which notes tend to follow others, statistically speaking, and uses this knowledge to predict the next note.

The results showed that the statistical model predicts the listeners' expectations better than the rule-based model. It also turned out that expectations were higher for musicians than for non-musicians and for familiar melodies -- which also suggests that experience has a strong effect on musical predictions.

 Read more here.

One song that makes my brain feel a little tweaked by unexpectedness is "Conversations in Silence I":

Conversations In Silence I - Nashville Chamber Orchestra

Another piece that does this by (in my amateurish opinion) using the "end" note as a "beginning" is Schumann's "5 Stücke im Volkston, Op.102: 2. Langsam" (which starts at 3:20 in the video below). This one is much subtler than the one above in its unexpectedness. But it is enough to move me repeatedly.



If the "rules" of music are not "rules" at all, but rather the consolidation of experience, the nature of language, as sister to music ("Double dissociation between rules and memory in music"), seems clear: it is an accumulation of experience, not an imperfect activation of inherent rules. Linguists Joan Bybee and James McClelland argued for an experience-based model for language in their article, "Alternatives to the combinatorial paradigm of linguistic theory based on domain general principles of human cognition."

I wonder, then, if what "moves" us in music is also what "moves" us in language. Proust wrote of the breaking of habit, the intrusion of the unexpected, as the ticket to the richest memories, a cognitive flowering of the senses. Beckett viewed language as "a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it," and he wrote of wanting to bore holes in the language, to create something new (or new nothingness) (see Disjecta). And in Beckett's pitted and hole-filled texts, deep within the nothingness, lies a melancholy hopeless hope. It is like trying to think of what might be outside our universe, beyond where the big bang has expanded space.

Sometimes we encode concepts like unexpectedness into our grammars. See Leonard Talmy's work on the notion of "force dynamics" in language, and an article in Cognitive Linguistics on the grammatical marking of social unexpectedness in Spanish, "Quantitative measures of subjectification."

Our (at times perverse?) pleasure in the unexpected, despite our everyday hunger for structural predictability, gives us new eyes, new ears, and yes, over the centuries, new tongues.

Memory

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees. --Marcel Proust

A part of what was lost nearly a century ago now, along with my Cousin Benjamin (see previous post), in my family's migration to the New World (new only for some, of course), was the little language of Yiddish. My grandmother (pictured on right) grew up with this language, but like nearly all first-generation US-born children, taught only English to my mother and her other children. She has told me that this loss was not an easy one: rocks were thrown at her as she walked to primary school, the funny Jewish girl with the even funnier tongue.

The origins of Yiddish are the subject of some debate,and speakers struggle to maintain the language itself.

Let me come close to the joy of the Yiddish word
Give me whole days and nights of it
Weave me, bind me into it
Feed me crumbs, with the crows
I’ll sleep on a hard bed
Under a leaky roof
Just don’t let me forget the Yiddish word
For a single Moment

-Jacob Glatstein, 1961

Click here to listen to excerpts of Yiddish read out loud. Yiddish-speakers, of course, are not the only ones fighting to maintain their language. (image above found here)

Why preserve a language that is dying? Wouldn't it be easier if we all spoke in the same way?

National Poet of Wales Gwyneth Lewis addresses this point nicely:




You can read more of her work here. Our languages, like our bodies, are richly diverse. It is only through memory that we may hope to avoid the mistakes of our ancestors, and in language and body, memory is held.