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... 

Absence

One of the important concepts which remains with me from Roy Bhaskar's philosophy is that of absence, and that "absence is causal". Perhaps it's not a surprise: who 'isn't there' is something that we tend to dwell on. I find myself dwelling on absent sleep these days too... The dwelling on things in itself is also interesting. Isn't it a form of redundancy? A repetition, a representation of the same thing in multiple ways. Every experience carries an echo of what is missing. 

It's difficult to talk about this because it means that you have to talk about "nothing". My book "Uncertain education" (which I must revise and publish properly!) was originally intended as a book about absence in education. It was too hard to write a book about nothing, so I ended up doing it in a different way. A friend of mine is also writing a book about nothing, and it has been a never-ending saga. We're always missing something, you see...

Absence can be quite practical. The gas bill that doesn't get paid is like this. But it can also be metaphorical - like the dead body of the wife's lover that gets ever larger in Ionesco's play "Medée" until it pushes everything else out of the apartment. Ionesco's joke is really expressing a deep truth about absence. But it is absence that drives the drama. Everything in this way is about nothing. The drama has to unfold to acknowledge the absence at its heart. Just as music has to unfold to acknowledge the silence from which it came and to which it will end. And life itself is an unfolding from one zygote until the next. It's all about missing something...

Structure

The one central idea which has dominated my thinking recently, concerns the relationship between time and structure. In posher academese, it's "diachronic" (time) and "synchronic" (structure). But even that is problematic. There are really no words, because words themselves exist in time, and there's little one can do to express timelessness in time. Except perhaps in music, we might get a passing glimpse. Even when one wishes for something or expects something to happen, one knows that the anticipated event lies latent in the origin of things. That ought to give us hope - which itself is a surrender to the unity of things. 

First there were bacteria, now there's Manchester... In what way was Manchester in the bacteria? In some way it was, alongside all the other places, events, minds, and lives. Just as the ending of Beethoven 9 is in the first note. Why do we have to wait an hour and a bit to get to the end? Because the music must unfold and enfold. Why does it have to unfold and enfold if it's all one? Because we cannot perceive the higher order of  structure within which everything is one. We have to invent the unfolding of time to apprehend oneness. 

History is unfolding in the same way. Events are strategies invented by thought for dealing with the imbalance between thought and nature. All our unfolding is about the next strategy - the next move in an unfolded field. The journey of unfolding - the dynamics - is about resolving the unfolding process to nothing. At the end of an hour, we get the final chord. 

Perhaps I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't think there was a practical and empirical way of demonstrating it. But I suspect there now is. It's not that the AI nonsense is going to revolutionise the world in the ways the zealots claim (it will probably make things worse), but its structural principles are a mystery, and may well provide an alternative glimpse on the oneness of everything. After all,  Manchester may be in the bacterium, but War and Peace is in an AI model. We haven't got there yet, but we may be moving towards a correction to our perceptual apparatus which helps us to see the deeper order in the structure of nature.