Piano and Cello

I lived in Philadelphia for about a year, when I was five or six, with my parents studying as graduate students. It was then that certain pieces of American culture were forever stamped on my memory, not necessarily as something foreign, but rather as part of my own childhood--cream cheese, George Michael (my mom's favorite) and Steve Wonder, Seven Eleven slurpee, Toys R Us and transformer toys, Sesame Street, and so on.

Probably Halloween, but I'm not sure. But look at those super inspired drawings. I must say, my country's art education didn't do well in recognizing and fostering my potential (lol).

And there was a huge (at least it was for this little boy) underground arcade where my mom did part-times. One of those Christmas seasons, obviously.

So, my favorites. Things I remember. One of them was Disney animations, and particularly the "Silly Symphony" series (I learned the title of it only recently). I loved it so much that my parents asked the video rental shop guy to make a copy of it (it was still the VCR era). I must have watched it some dozens of times. You know how kids are.

And, the number 1 -- Silly Symphony, Music Land.

I still enjoy watching this. So very much.


Horn people (Trombone? Tuba? I'm not sure), Cello people, just fascinating.

But let's say people are really like that. That the world is populated with musical instrument people. And imagine there's a historian who looks and thinks just like Foucault. And let's say he's a Viola. Foucault the violan. I'm already excited.

So, this Violan Foucau (the ancients didn't want the superfluous 'lt' dangling at the end) studies, of course, a certain kind of genealogy. He writes in one of his books, titled Piano and Cello: the History of Sound. Since this is the world of People of Music, of people who sound-speak, "sound" means, from our point of view, language, or more precisely, the ways in which people articulate their thoughts.

In the history of this world, the relationship between the Pianos and the Cellos is similar to the relationship between the Romans and the Greeks, in the sense the latter exited before the former, and the former overwrote the latter in many ways, including, most importantly, the fundamental nature of language.

What happened? According to our renowned Violan historian, the transition from the Cellos to the Pianos resulted in the compartmentalization of sound. The Pianos preferred precision. They desired a sound standard, the universal notes, so that anyone within the boundaries of the Great Piano Empire would hear the exact same notes when the same music is played. Now there were Tuners, working at the Universal Keys Institutes all over the empire.

The Universal Keys Institutes. Foucau emphasizes the significance of the word "keys", making a critical note here: now the Pianos virtually replaced, at least in the official realm, the notion of sound with notes. Before, sound was continuous. Also, the Cellos music was predominantly oral. The notion of writing down notes and keeping scores didn't exist then. But now, with the advent of the Pianos, the continuous scale of sound began to be compartementalized; sound was divided into notes, and then assigned to individual keys.

It was, of course, a relatively gradual change. Chronologically speaking, in the earlier period it was enough to differentiate each note from others (compartmentalization); then, the Institutes began to established throughout the empire, standarizing notes.

Another interesting, and quite fascinating. point Foucau makes is that the development of orchestra during the Pianos era does not signify the development in our thinking. It has been a common belief that the invention of orchestra marked the monumental leap in the history of our mental faculty, on the account that orchestra made it possible to create more complex ideas by playing multiple streams of sound simultaneously and harmoniously. However, Foucau argues that orchestra was in fact an effort to reclaim the polivocality and the free association of sounds the Cellos had, while maintaining the Pianos control over sound. While Foucau doesn't manifestly advocate the Cellos ways, he makes it clear that the our current civilization built upon the Pianos civilization is actually in many ways a detour, a perpetual pursuit of the lost sound between the keys.

Poetry written as a question

I knew that poetry, like any other forms of literature, would ask questions. But I didn't know that it could actually written in the form of question. Toi Derricotte's poems invited, no, dragged me into them, which doesn't happen to me all that often.



"For Black Women Who Are Afraid."

A black woman comes up to me at break in the writing
workshop and reads me her poem, but she says she
can't read it out loud because
there's a woman in a car on her way
to work and her hair is blowing in the breeze
and, since her hair is blowing, the woman must be
white, and she shouldn't write about a white woman
whose hair is blowing, because
maybe the black poets will think she wants to be
that woman and be mad at her and say she hates herself,
and maybe they won't let her explain
that she grew up in a white neighborhood
and it's not her fault, it's just what she sees.
But she has to be so careful. I tell her to write
the poem about being afraid to write,
and we stand for a long time like that,
respecting each other's silence.



The speaker, a teacher at the writing workshop, who is supposedly more experienced and probably older, understands the younger woman's concern. But at the same time, she doesn't seem to completely agree with the latter's 'excuse', that "it's just what she sees," as she, the teacher, is aware of the politics of poetry writing, or representation in general.

What is interesting to me is that both women seem to represent the poet's stance; or rather, that the poem as a whole as a question represents where Derricotte is standing regarding the issue raised by her own poem. It is about a conversation that has been going on inside her mind.

The poem ends in silence. A kind of silence what I call loud and disordered silence. For instance: you have to write a paper, so you've been reading a bunch of articles, and now you're sitting on a chair, maybe with a notepad or a computer ready at your hand, trying to make certain shapes out of hundreds of stars. You just wait, in silence, but you know your brain is working like mad, as if doing massive amount of calculation but it's so fast that you consciousness can't recognize all the numbers appearing just briefly in front of your eyes. But there comes those moments when you suddenly stop the machine, and start to write down the combination like mad, because the letters are visible only while they are still hot.

So, both the speaker's and Derricotte's suggestion, that we should first of all lay down the question in order to proceed, are very wise ones, and probably the only viable option, because we will be able to come back to this point, because we won't loose sight of our original question, the reason why we started to write at all.


And another poem of hers.


"Passing"

A professor invites me to his "Black Lit" class; they're
reading Larson's Passing. One of the black
students says, "Sometimes light-skinned blacks
think they can fool other blacks,
but I can always tell," looking
right through me.
After I tell them I am black,
I ask the class, "Was I passing
when I was just sitting here,
before I told you?" A white woman
shakes her head desperately, as if
I had deliberately deceived her.
She keeps examining my face,
then turning away
as if she hopes I'll disappear. Why presume
"passing" is based on what I leave out
and not what she fills in?
In one scene in the book, in a restaurant,
she's "passing,"
though no one checked her at the door--
"Hey, you black?"
My father, who looked white,
told me this story: every year
when he'd go to get his driver's license,
the man at the window filling
out the form would ask,
"White or black?" pencil poised, without looking up.
My father wouldn't pass, but he might
use silence to trap a devil.
When he didn't speak, the man
would look up at my father's face.
"What did he write?"
my father quizzed me.


"My father quizzed me." That's how the poem ends. A question, no doubt about that. 

And look at how Derricotte plays with the expression, "to fill in". In the first instance, where the speaker talks about passing in terms of what one leaves out and fills in, the act of filling in is tied with active lying, the act of deliberately providing someone with a false information. Then, in the second and last instance, filling in is associated with the act of defining, categorizing, 'pinning down', by means of writing down in an official document. An interesting paring, isn't it? The eye that scrutinizes and discriminates, and the pencil that fills in, both of them are in the last lines of the poem. Of course, the implied argument is that black is not just a color.

But, all the readings aside, "What did he write?" I'm curious to death.

light vs darkness, or creation vs destruction?

It occurred to me, while I was washing dishes:

'Is it light vs darkness, or creation vs destruction?'

Good ol' dichotomies.

I was doubtlessly still under the spell of Heidegger's way of thinking, or in my words, 'the way he moves', in "The Question Regarding Technology." There, he digs into the everyday usage of the word "technology," to dig past the Roman adaptation of the word, and finally to rediscover its Greek root.

So, Creation vs Destruction, let's begin from there.

There are, in many religions or myths, gods of creation and gods of destruction, by definition more original, archaic, or primordial, in the sense they exist before and over other more derivative and more humanized gods, such as gods of art.

There are also gods of light and gods of darkness. Or rather, forces of light, and forces of darkness. We see in numerous cultural products, including fiction and video games, the battle between light and darkness, most notably realized in the form of the battle between angels and devils.

Now, I started to ponder, aimlessly at first. Then this question suddenly came to me:

" Is Creation and Light the same thing in that context ? "

No. Maybe not.

What I suspect is this: That it is probable that the whole notion of light vs. darkness was coined by Christianity; and that the relationship between Christianity and other religions with the notion of creation vs. destruction are similar to the relationship between the Romans and the Greeks, in the sense the former, in each case, replaced or 'overwrote' the latter at a certain juncture of history, thereby changing the whole way of thinking in the eras to come.

Why is that so? In what sense is Creation different from Light?
In order to answer that, we have to think about the respective counterparts, Destruction and Darkness.

Destruction means, there won't be anything anymore. After destruction, there's nothing. Destruction removes, eliminates. From the Living's point of view, it is death, in the sense Destruction turns everything back to before-existance.

Darkness, on the other hand, does NOT mean nothingness. It rather means the evil, wicked, ignorant, blind, unsaved, fallen. It is, from the beginning, a very much anthropological and moralistic notion. Thus, in the realm of darkness, there are distorted forms of life, like the undead represented in numerous zombie-themed movies and games. Satan and devils underneath the ground, or aliens from the un-lit, un-charted, un-known space. In the Darkness, there is always something, and whatever there is is regarded as threatening to the children of Light.

The genius of Christianity is, then, that it identifies, in its Genesis, Creation with Light. "Let there be light." That was the very beginning of the whole universe. The moment of Original Creation is defined as the moment of Enlightening. To Create is to Light up. Such displacement of Creation with Enlightening coincides with the fact that the Christian Genesis puts human beings at the very beginning of the universe. As Light vs. Darkness is, as I already mentioned, fundamentally anthropological, it is only natural that man is born not long after the universe itself is created. There's no reason to wait some millions of years.

But according to the understanding of modern science, the history of any kind of life form on Earth, let alone that of man, takes just a tiny portion of the whole history of the universe. Before the birth of any kind of life form, however primordial, there were stars, and before that, bits of what is to become stars, and all kinds of matter and energy, yet to be settled and linked more forcefully to another. We see numerous occasions of Creation and Destruction during this 'non-life' era, but we don't see any Light or Darkness as Christianity understands it.

Then think about how Deleuze and Gattari in Anti-Oedipus describes the way desire, the flow of life, or even more generally, the flow of energy. It works and it breaks down. It flows and stops. It links and unlinks. One and the same thing simultaneously flows and cuts a flow, or alternates between flowing and stopping. And all this is not just about Light and Darkness. Light is rather, I would say, oedipalization, the defining of the 'right' channel through which the life flow is from now on dictated to flow.

One last thing to note: the status of the Sun. Many religions revere the Sun. They have various versions of Sun Gods. Now, that's a concept somewhere between Creation and Light. It's not as 'cosmological' as Creation, but not exclusively anthropological either. Because what the Sun represents is the light that is the ultimate source of energy necessary to nurture Life. Still, that light is not moralizing and moralistic Light. It is light as energy, just like gravity that is responsible for the birth of countless stars. The Sun and its light is, most of all, not a Word.

My army years.

I don't usually talk about my army years, because a) I don't like 'men talks' (in South Korea, a two-year service is mandatory for men, while women can choose to be officers, which is still quite rare), and b) I don't consider it something to boast about (no matter what they actually do, the bottom line is that military exists to kill). But, still, there's no doubt that it was a very peculiar experience.

When the time comes, men who 'failed to meet' the conditions of exemption are conscripted, and they have some choices: the regular army, navy, air force, conscripted policemen (including the riot police), etc. The most peculiar one is called the KATUSA, Korean Augmentation Troops to the United States Army. Basically, they are Korean soldiers doing their service at U.S. Army camps in Korea, and I was one of them.

The KATUSA soldiers are under two chains of command, obviously. They are almost the same with the U.S. soldiers in terms of whose orders they follow, with whom they do most of their work, the kind of uniform they wear, the rules they have to obey such as curfew, etc., except they get promoted, paid, and discharged by the army of their own country.

So, some interesting bits of those days:

* There are American holidays and Korean holidays. On the former, we got days off. But on the latter, it sometimes got a bit 'political'. As I belonged to a support battalion, and our job was to maintain, to keep the machine running, it was almost always busy around the year. So, if we went too aggressive about getting our leaves on Korean holidays, although it was our legitimate right, it could always lead to situations where Korean soldiers as a whole loose their favor with their American bosses, so to speak. Of course there were good ones, too. But the thing was that, every one of us had to keep us as a group look good.

* On weekends, I would wake up at about 4:30 in the morning (one can be so diligent when he is off duty), dress up as quickly as possible, and embark on my way home, which took about two hours, I think. The gate opened at 5, and in winter, it was darn cold. The worst part was when I got to the subway station, after about 20-minute bus ride from my camp. The way the metropolitan subway lines were built in and around Seoul was that the outer part of the lines (in areas not as densely populated as the central city zone) were built on the ground level, and the same goes for the respective stations. The station where I took my train was just like that, and as it was the very first   station of the line, the doors of the train would left open until it finally started to move (the wait took about five minutes), and all the while freezing wind would blow into the train. What made it even worse was that, for an unconceivable reason, the city decided to replace the old seats covered with cloths with metal seats.

* Since the U.S. soliders changed their station every year or so, and officers were often transferred to other units even during one year, while I with other KATUSA soldiers stayed in the same positions for two years, I worked for about four or five officers during my time. All captains, one African American woman, one African American man, two white men, and one Puerto Rican man. I think I spent the longest time with the last one, the Puerto Rican, who would order pizza for two of us every time we had to work late (like I said, we were always busy, and it was especially so for me and my captain). My English was just enough to make everyday conversations sound fluent, including the usual work talks, but not enough to discuss, say, politics, which was a shame, as a chance to have serious conversations with the U.S. Army officers would probably never come again in my life. Still, it was then I learned a little bit about the peculiar relationship between the U.S. and his country, and he was the only one, including soldiers in my own rank, that I took to the city and did a little tour together; old palaces, traditional markets, Korean restaurants, those kind of usual suspects.

More on tomorrow.

Parallel Universes Studies, Case #1: The Asari and gender

Egalia's Daughters was an interesting read, for an undergraduate student who had been recently introduced to the whole discussion surrounding the issue of gender and sexuality. Interesting, but not quite great.

Then, Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness in the first semester of my MA program. Today, as I leafed through the first few pages, I found it quite belatedly--"Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, daughter of a. L. Krober (anthropologist) ...." Ah... yes, of course. That explains a lot.

Let's take a look at page 90, or  if you happen to have a different edition, well, just listen. This is about the protagonist's study of the sexual physiology of the Gethenians.

"The sexual cycle averages 26 to 28 days (they tend to speak of it as 26 days, approximating it to the lunar cycle). For 21 or 22 days the individual is somer, sexually inactive, latent. On about the 18th day hormonal changes are initiated by the pituitary control and on the 22nd or 23rd day the individual enters kemmer, estrus. In this first phase of kemmer (Karh, secher) he remains completely androgynous. Gender, and potency, are not attained in isolation. ... When the individual finds a partner in kemmer, hormonal secretion is further stimulated (most importantly by touch--secretion? scent?) until in one partner either a male or female hormonal dominance is established. ... Normal individuals have no predisposition to either sexual role in kemmer; they do not know whether they will be the male or the female, and have no choice in the matter."

It is very much unfortunate and regrettable that the androgynous individual should be gendered. With all neologisms, still no gender neutral pronouns. But at any rate, a very interesting notion of sex, although my kinky excitement was much turned off by the fact that there is fixed estrus.

And most recently, the Asari race, from the Mass Effect universe. (It's one of the most successful video game franchises, for your information. Its genre is futuristic(sci-fi) space-exploration roleplaying game, I would say.)

(From Mass Effect Wiki:)
/// Though they resemble females, at least to humans, asari are non-gender specific, with no concept of gender differences. Liara [an Asari character] says her species is "mono-gendered—male and female have no real meaning for us." ... Although asari have one gender, they are not asexual. An asari provides two copies of her own genes to her offspring, which—regardless of the species or sex of the 'father'—is always an asari, and in the case that the offspring is of two asari, the father is the one who does not give birth. The second set is altered in a unique process called melding, also known as the joining.

During melding, an asari consciously attunes her nervous system to her partner's, sending and receiving electrical impulses directly through the skin. ... Effectively, the asari and her partner briefly become one unified nervous system. ... The partner can be another asari, or an alien of any gender. However, since the asari began encountering other sentient species, non-asari mates have become preferred for the diversity they provide. This reproductive process can lead to some confusion among non-asari, who might expect offspring with "mixed" genes. However, the offspring is always 100% asari as no DNA is taken from the partner, but is rather used as a "map" to randomize the genes of the offspring.

An asari's melding ability extends to a mental connection as well, which Liara describes as being the true union between an asari and her partner. It allows the asari to explore her partner's genetic heritage and pass desirable traits on to any offspring. During mating an asari and her partner share memories, thoughts, and feelings. It is also possible for an asari to meld with another for the sole purpose of transferring thoughts, without reproduction. ///

Quite fascinating, isn't it? It is obvious that the writers behind this lore were obviously taking to the extreme a) the concept of mental/psychological/emotional side of sexual intercourse, and b) the intermingling of histories through that of 'blood'. The result is the ultimate form of, at least from human's perspective, matriarchal society.