Moon of Alabama

So many memories walking through the park...

A beautiful picture and Kurt Weill's hauntingly bitter song...

Technology of Enchantment

My investigation of 19th century psychology and its relation to romantic art and music on the one hand, and modern AI on the other, is raising a particular issue to do with 20th century art and society. In contrast to the 19th century, the 20th century was marked by a desperate disenchantment with the world, marked out by conflict, and rationalistic scientism that gave us many wonders of modern technology, but also the atom bomb and the knowledge that we could destroy ourselves. 

The love triangle that connects Clara Schumann, Brahms and Robert Schumann stands as one of the great examples of the opposite of this disenchanting tendency. Its not that the world wasn't a miserable place in the 19th century - for many in the world, it clearly was - but that for the leaders of art and music, beauty remained an ideal deeply connected to love, and that love and the human spirit was a guide deeply connected to scientific advance. Music, particularly, is (and certainly was then) a language of love.

This connection was partly lost in the 20th century. Of course this is not to say that 20th century music is deficient. Quite the opposite - some of the greatest art and music belongs to that tortured century, just as the greatest drama belongs to Shakespeare's police state England. But the 19th century had something different that was lost when the dreams went sour in the 20th. Put simply, it was the possibility of enchantment, and a tangible awareness of a "higher power" - whatever that is. 

Occasionally we ourselves glimpse this. When people fall in love, or you hold a new baby, we see it briefly. We also glimpse it in music. There is a power beyond the day to day which reveals itself. In our rationalistic modern mindset we trivialise this. The reason why we trivialise it is connected to why we don't take music seriously in the first place. But the 19th century romantics understood something deeper. What did the 19th century psychologists make of it? Perhaps the question might be what they made of it before Freud came along and (to some extent) debunked it all.

Schumann and Covid

I got over Covid, although it's been quite unpleasant. In my Covidness I found some comfort in the music of the Schumanns - Robert and Clara. As a musical couple they are fascinating me at the moment because Clara's stepmother was the sister of Gustav Fechner, a leading 19th century psychologist.

Fechner coined the term "psychophysics" as the science of perception of differences, and it is Fechner's work which has been central to my commercial activity with AI and medical diagnostics. Fechner was interested in many things and wrote about aesthetics, animism and spiritualism. We don't make scientists like that any more! Clara Schumann knew Fechner and it's hard to believe that she wasn't interested in the potential implications of psychophysics on the science of music.

I like to imagine the conversations they might have had - and listening to Clara's music which is full of unusual modulations, it's fascinating to think what she might have absorbed. Robert died quite early on so would not be necessarily influenced, but his music too is full of fascinating differences. I'm doing a presentation in a couple of weeks on his "Bird as Prophet" from Waldsczenen. What a magical piece that is. Brahms of course was also in the Schumann circle, and there are further resonances there - and he certainly was interested in the science.

I find that Robert Schumann's music is particularly interesting because it so heartfelt. I find that even among those who don't listen so much to classical music, Schumann resonates as magical. Why is that? There is a particular sensitivity there. A sentivity to difference perhaps...

Sausages and Hostages

Keir Starmer's sausage slip was so weird and revealing about this strange man. It wasn't so much the slip in the first place, but the way he then corrected himself saying "hostages" very deliberately, without even acknowledging the ridiculous nature of the slip. It's as if it's just words - just sounds - no meaning. 

Is all politics now like that? - a stupid game where we can replace hostages with sausages and nobody really cares (and they don't care that others laugh), because in the end it's about money, not human beings. Trump plays this all the time. Covfefe anyone?

Imagine if real life was like that. Imagine getting a phone call from a deeply loved sausage being held to ransom... We've become like H.G. Wells's Eloi.

At such a distressing time in the world, we've lost sight of what is absurd and ridiculous. When Israeli actions seem disturbingly similar to Russian actions, and when the actions of both are determined by market movements that only a few control, it's almost as if anything goes. And where the hell is education? Well, it's playing the market game too.

I don't know how we get out of this. But as a friend reminded me, the 1980s nuclear catastrophe movie Threads is being re-shown. That should tell us something. 

Man Flu

Bugger. I'm sick. Sniffle, sniffle, oh dread,
Achy bones, and an even achier head.
It’s not just a cold, no, don't misconstrue,
This, my dear friends, is a full-on man flu!

My nose is a tap, my throat’s made of sand,
How will I ever survive or even stand?
The world seems darker, the end feels nigh,
For man flu’s upon me, I’m barely alive!

The tissues pile up, a soft paper mountain,
I’ve drunk enough tea to drain a fountain.
Wrapped in blankets, my heroic plight,

You’d think I was scaling Everest tonight.
But fear not, dear loved ones, I’ll battle through,
Though this man flu feels like it’s splitting me in two.

With remote in hand and soup by my side,
I’ll recover—just after this dramatic ride!

ChatGPT asks for sympathy...