Godhood Is Boring

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

– Albert Einstein, physicist

"We live on an island of knowledge surrounded by a shore of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."

– John A. Wheeler, physicist

'All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly.'

– Neil Gaiman's Second Law

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

– Jellaludin Rumi

Perhaps within our lifetimes, humankind's coevolutionary dance with biomedical technology will extend the lifespan of our bodies to currently inconceivable lengths.  There are a lot of brilliant minds today waxing poetic about such a future, in which our newfound immortality makes existence an ongoing act of creative bliss where the medium is reality itself.

But these Singularity pundits almost entirely neglect the obvious psychological effects of such radical life extension, imagining that we would continue to trundle on as a species with similar needs and desires.  This is about as sophisticated as 19th Century lithographs of the year 2000, when everyone rides to their formal affairs in sleek dirigibles and flies masted ships to the Moon.

It also forgets the initial rush of power we all felt when taking our first steps, or shaking a rattle.  The thrill of control is the seed of the self, the earliest and most primitive emotional response to discovering our participation in reality.  This rush sustained the growth of modernity as it magnified and became dams, skyscrapers, and space shuttles.  But what sustains our awe into adulthood is not the continued magnification of the control thrill – for which we quickly develop a tolerance and require even more bombastic displays of control – but the deepening recognition of a world finally and utterly beyond our ability to rule.

Science is, in the final count, not about the increase of knowledge, but the increase of ignorance – if every question answered means two more questions asked, what we don't know is growing faster than what we do.  And so a mature science, grounded in the same wonder at mystery that impelled natural inquiry in the first place, welcomes this mystery.  It is not a program of rapturous domination, or prideful power en route to ultimate mastery of the matter, but the cultivation of wisdom through the exploration of nature as macrocosm and the self as microcosm, of the ego embedded in a world defined by interbeing.

This is the curve ignored by graph-happy Singulitarians when they give the hockey stick chart argument for our impending divinity.  We're spiraling increasingly out of control, not into it – evermore aware that control is actually the delusion of a not-actually-separate self, woven dynamically with uncountable feedback loops into the rest of the world.  We are participants, not lords – not creators, but co-creators.  We will learn to work with, not upon.

But even if we don't end up as the Lactobacillus in Google's intestinal tract, even if we become the genie we let out of this bottle, it'll undoubtedly disappoint us.  "Turning into gods" may seem exciting now, but eventually every new plateau becomes the norm, every age's fancy new garb goes out of fashion – and it seems pretty likely that one day, moving planets will be as prosaic as moving chairs is to us today.  When that age comes, will we still seek the awesome creative power of even greater deities?  Or will we finally accept the horizon of our knowledge and ability as an ever-receding target and, humbled to the transcendental mystery of life, find the transhuman here and now, deeper in the present?

After all, it only takes a cursory study of world mythology to realize that the gods are BORED.  Omnipotence is a dead-end street.  Once you have it all, the only way forward is to imagine yourself as a lesser and lesser being, like Alan Watts' lucid dreamer who eventually hides himself so deep he forgets he is dreaming...and here we are, imagining in a distinctly un-Copernican fashion that meaning and purpose exist only in the head, and ours is the first and un-simulated world.

2011 11 22, Orlando FL

Post-script:

"'Transhumanist' comes from 'transhuman,' a word that seems to have received its modern meaning in correspondence between Julian Huxley and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist and theologian. Teilhard distinguished the 'transhuman' from the 'ultrahuman,' with the latter meaning a kind of souped-up version of the human, and the former indicating an actual transformation – evolution – of who we are. The challenge of the transhuman is to actualize our unique individuality within the much larger planetary collective he saw emerging...he insisted that planetary 'communion' could only come about through the difficult work of individuation: In order to evolve, we each must become who we are, together.

"Now most recent usages of 'transhuman,' it seems to me, have forgotten most of this, and mistaken the 'transhuman' for the 'ultrahuman' – a kind of upgrade to the same basic model, still denying our connection to each other and the environment. Huxley, a biologist, very much intended 'transhumanism' to indicate a change in who and how we are, and this change centered on a recognize of our radical interconnection with the cosmos, a perception of unity. Now 'transhuman' etymologically suggests 'beyond the human,' and in my view much of what we call 'transhuman' these days – the technological enhancement of our already existing nature to cling to life and deny the role of death, for example – is, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, 'human, all too human.' It is an individual ego’s vision of evolution."

– Richard Doyle, information scientist

Sacred Activism - Video & Transcript

Watch this video in HD at Youtube or Vimeo

All of the media in this video was composed, produced, and performed by Michael Garfield under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License and can be downloaded and shared accordingly. (For more information on what the license allows, visit bit.ly/ccbyncsa - I highly recommend these licenses for the publication of your own creative work.)

While all of this is available for free, I do of course love your contributions...money and publicity are easier to transfer via internet than food or physical affection, but I'm open to receiving whatever you have to give. :)

Music - "Touring The Body Electric"
...improvised live cyber-acoustic guitar loopscapes:
bit.ly/​thebodyelectric

Narration - excerpted from "Meeting The Self You Aren't"
...talks on the "shadow" from last fall's evolver.net-sponsored speaking tour:

bit.ly/​meetingtheself
Artwork - timelapse video of "Stun Flower"
...which you can see in hi-res and read all about here:

bit.ly/​sonicbloomart

Sacred Activism

The goal, as I understand it, is to facilitate a really moving, meaningful conversation about the role of the repressed voices in the self and in the society, and to understand what we have to learn from these voices - or, possibly, engage them in a way that we can learn from them - so that we can ride the wave of this transformative crisis that I'm certain everyone in this room recognizes this country, and our species, is currently undergoing.

What I want to talk about is why the "shadow" even exists. To have some part of ourselves that we declare as "not me" is obviously a survival advantage. It keeps us safe from external threat. Or is it the other way around? Is it that we only perceive external threat because of "the other," that when we perceive something as other we are inherently afraid of it.

In a number of communities I've seen this, where people say, "Oh, that's somebody else's shadow...but when it comes time for me to explore my own shadow, I somehow never get around to it. Cuz I'm a pretty well-integrated guy, I mean, after all, I'm like, more in the know than most people, so...I don't really have to worry about it. I tend to be someone who likes to think of things in a positive way. Maybe my attitude alone is gonna change the world. All we gotta do is meditate and the world will be better!"

There's this "Maharishi Effect" that's been measured and demonstrated; you get a certain number of meditators together in a city and it lightens up the crime. Focused intention has this measurable, empirical effect, something that's been supported by research at Princeton and a number of different institutions: that there's something, there's a "Force," we can make disturbances in it...

There's a huge body of literature on this stuff, and it's valid. And that's great. But that doesn't somehow exempt you from actually putting your finger in the mud! That doesn't actually get us out of the duty of activism!

But there's this reasonable concern with activism, which is that it's extremely difficult for one person to bear the suffering of the entire world. How do we deal with that?

What I feel like I'm compelled to communicate is this balance to be found in something that Andrew Harvey calls "sacred activism": that we do our work in the world - I mean, after all, the tenth oxherding picture of Zen is this painting of the guy leading the oxen (which stand for enlightenment) back into the marketplace. Enlightened business is the deepest form of enlightenment, as recognized by Zen. The willingness to pull this eternal understanding into this chaotic, ever-blooming, ever-decaying mess and actually work with it.

Because what else do you have to do? I mean, if you are truly identified with everything, then you have a sense of humor about this stuff. And also, you can't not do this.

But that little bit of distance required for that kind of work really is required. It really does take zooming out. There's something about that film, "The Powers of Ten," that I feel defines our generation. Something about understanding the workings of the world at multiple levels of magnitude and how they all fit together, and how they all resemble one another.

And it's finding ourselves in this cosmic context that frees us from the conventional human dramas just enough - at least in my case, and I recognize that I'm one specific personality type among many - but in my case, understanding my place in the human superorganism, in the multidimensional co-causative matrix of temporal interactions, understanding the place of my species as a tissue in this ecological body and then what role our planet plays in these larger solar and galactic contexts -

(Come to think of it, it's actually kind of crazy that we as human beings have any insight into this whatsoever.)

- thinking about those things lifts me just enough out of my daily bullshit that I feel like I can get into this.

But then on the other end, hearing the tragic stories of the people who have been caught up in this system more than we have really puts it all in perspective. That we're suddenly the average point between these two poles. We recognize the existence of beings far greater than ourselves, beings in which we are participants, just a piece of the flesh of this greater thing. But also, we've got agency and we have choice over so much - so much that so many other people don't have. And I encourage you to linger with that bring-down for a minute: these people who, for no real reason that we can determine, have had their lives completely destroyed.

And so between those two things is the sacred activism. There's enough "face" there that we have a reason to change something. And there's enough distance and enough context and enough of the universal vastness of things that we're not destroyed, we're not completely burnt out by our striving. We're able to participate in these things in some way, being able to hold the sorry and the gravity of the work, and at the same time have a sense of humor about how little we're able to accomplish - because after all, these rocks are like, three billion years old, and I'm...twenty six?

We're pitiful, really. And yet we're so powerful.

Painting While Dancing, Part 5: Live Art Is Nonsense

Setting up an easel at concerts and inviting people to watch as you paint (or sculpt, or arrange flowers, or whatever art form you do that is more typically hidden from prospective audiences) is…different.
Most art forms are kept hidden in the studio until some dramatic Moment Of Unveiling. Instead, the transparency of performance makes this strange behavior distinct enough to deserve a name that will set it apart in people’s minds from the rituals and religions of conventional studio art. Process becomes an obvious, living part of the piece. Journey and destination take on new meanings. Since music, dance, and theater evolved in context as public entertainment or ritual, they belong in a separate category (especially those composed beforehand). In fact, it is the very change of context that makes something like performance painting strange in the first place.

People have taken to calling this kind of thing “live art.” It is probably better than nothing; but insofar as it is used to realistically distinguish one kind of creative expression from the rest, “live art” is nonsense.

For one thing, all artwork is part of what biologist Richard Dawkins calls “the extended phenotype.” Just as the spider’s web is as much an extension of its own genetic code as the spider itself, the artifacts and implements of art are part of the artist’s own breathing body. (It is, after all, called “a body of work.” If you think this kind of literalism is a stretch, try taking scissors to someone’s latest opus. They’ll act like you’re about to amputate a limb. As for tools, recent neurological research demonstrates that after just a few minutes using a hammer, our brains remap our bodies to include it as part of our arm. The brush or violin or laptop is, in some unutterably strange but natural way and in spite of modernist notions to the contrary, a cherished organ of the artist. Humans are cybernetic creatures, self-modification ubiquitous among us.

As linguistic beings, we are constantly in the game of renegotiating this self/other boundary. We supplement ourselves with expression-augmenting toys; hang names and titles on them like we are decorating a Christmas tree; plant flags in the ancient, wild terrain of the body and claim it for the egoic waking state (although clearly selves change over time…we hang onto our story of continuity in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

Take this other-as-self line of reasoning far enough, though, and you end up in a world that is entirely alive and looking back at you from everything. All perception is focused by history, all thought is woven of language, and we all only see mind in all directions, only feel mind in all directions. It isn’t the best argument for why “live art” is a nonsense term.

Therefore also consider that we are all witness to, and the declared actor responsible for, many of the things we do. Not even most, but many, and motivation is a very real dimension of any creative act. Who are we trying to talk to? In the act of art, especially in the flow states common to total participation, a deeper eye is watching. Audience feedback still informs the piece, because every work of art is a performance, even if it is for an audience of one. Even if we think we are only playing to satisfy the compulsions of our chattering minds, awareness itself is the substance of our perceptions and the basis of even our lowliest attempts.

Some people get religious about it, building churches and the like. Throughout history, it seems, the greatest works are those made from an awareness of the wider mind that watches. In that kind of harmonious duality, the uncharacterizable observer can not really be called “alive,” and so the job goes to the artwork.

Again, that kind of absolute statement gets us nowhere; so let’s add a dimension.

Every work of art – not just music and dance, but also architecture, painting, poetry, sushi – is created in and through time, something that grows and changes, moves and breathes on its journey to completion. No matter how well planned, all art has improvisation at its heart, and is thereby connected to the same creative force pulsing through the quivering leaves and darting fish. The product is inextricable from the process. Some art forms emphasize this; Zen calligraphy and expressionist paintings are especially transparent about it.

Among so-called “live artists,” however, the evolutionary nature of art is key. For those who make visual art a public performance, the focus is on reflecting, not necessarily capturing, the energies of a specific moment. Live painter Norton Wisdom, who has been in the game longer than anyone, works on a plastic sheet he wipes clean after every show. Others continually paint over the same canvases. Just like more conventionally-defined life forms, some paintings leave fossils and others vanish into the stream of time.

(Written for d/visible magazine.)

YOU'RE The Musician; YOU Make Some Noise!

(continued from part one)

I have been consumed by thoughts regarding the changing role of the artist in our culture. As I started to mention in my previous essay ("The 3-2-1 of Musical Performance"), there are – even in the narrow and unimaginative relationships between contemporary musicians and their audiences – at least three different depths of intimacy, three different lenses through which the rules of performance can be observed. The performer, in recognizing the audience as Impersonal Other (It), Personal Other (You), or Self (I), projects radically different characteristics on the concert environment.

This can be intentional, but usually artists naturally settle into one of these three perspectives and become known for it. (To give you a taste of what I mean, imagine the distinctions between playing to a room full of uninterested strangers, or friends, or family, or alone, or as worship...now imagine taking each of those various perspectives on the same group of people. It's a fantastic exercise in developing fluid perception.)

This is the kind of thing I rattle on about to whomever I can capture in my word-sphere, trying to coax from them new aspects I haven't recognized. I brought this stuff up with my girlfriend the morning after live painting at a huge rave outside of Phoenix. One of their MCs spent most of his airtime asking how many of us were fucked up, and how many of us were really fucked up, and complaining that we weren't making enough noise, and try again, make some fucking noise!

Never mind that as someone more immersed the jam band scene and its hippie-noveau mentality, I can't imagine actually volunteering to announce that I am on drugs. Never mind that I was questioning the musicality of the entire event when I found out that one of the headlining DJs, apparently by playing the same stuff I'd heard in a dubious Scottsdale nightclub the evening before, had been voted #4 in the US (our desiccated monoculture should be evidence enough for the dangers of democracy).

The real sticking point was this:

As a passionate defender of individual autonomy, someone who bristles up when a DJ's robotic vocal sample insists, "I – control you! I – control you!," I'd rather zip my lips in revolt when some obnoxious dude with a microphone tries to play audio-puppeteer. I believe it is the urgent duty of anyone blessed enough to be amplified before a crowd to at least attempt to express some understanding of our common identity. And this guy clearly didn't get it.

My girlfriend, once a symphonic violist for the Topeka Symphony and thus coming from a much more formal tradition of stage-theatre interaction, put it well:

"YOU'RE the musician; YOU make some noise!"

On the one hand, this is exactly the assumption that I as a songwriter would like to challenge. I don't want us all relinquishing our creative agency to whomever The Machine decides is going to be The Next Big Thing. In an age when we can all produce our own books/video/music/fine art/theater, I think it's time for us to reclaim our inspiration from centralized corporate governance.

At the same time, even as an artist I prefer to let the guy on stage take the reigns for a little while. Yelling at your audience for not giving you enough applause is a tragic misunderstanding of the postmodern argument that the critic co-creates the artwork. It's an abdication of your personal responsibility to melt our fucking faces off. And it's a waste of our time – we came to get down, not to coddle your bravado. Less talk, more rock.

Of course, there are awesome exceptions to these traditional polarities – like John Cage's piece 4'33", for which a blank score is placed on the stand and the pianist (or any other musicians) just sits there while the audience starts to squirm. After a minute or two, people are coughing, shifting in their seats, sighing...and all of these random noises make up the actual performance, by an unwitting orchestra.

Cage, a postmodern philosopher and mystic if there ever was one, was making a point: pulling the audience into the performance, 4'33", is not only an intense defiance of expectations, but points out how those expectations are part of the piece, that the audience is at least half-responsible for any perceived musicality.

Sure enough, some people "get it" and some people don't, depending on who can hear "noise" as "music" and the crowd's restless soundscape as John Cage's actual musical intent. Even as he demonstrates the participatory role of the so-called "observers," he denies their total sovereignty by playing them like instruments. And he manages this without demanding that people do anything, in what is widely considered the first "noise music" composition, blurring will and accident. It's a complex and nuanced deconstruction of classical music's rigid artist-audience dynamics.

I was born thirty-two years after 4'33" debuted. It's a part of my blood, my bearing. I grew up with the fourth wall trampled into dust. Still, I don't bring my guitar to concerts so I can jam along from the crowd. Nor do I try to rape participation out of my audiences when I can't seduce them with the music. After all, learning to see the arbitrariness of our social conventions doesn't make them go away. We still all have to stop at a red light, even if we know it could just as well be blue.

But oh, how I long for the day when I no longer hear people say, "I'm not an artist. I don't have a creative bone in my body." We're all more likely to "make some fucking noise" when we have reclaimed our creative selves and can appreciate what it's like to be up there on stage, when we understand the effort and can applaud from a sense of solidarity, rather than obligation. Until that day, it is all I can do to remind people at every opportunity that we're in this boat together, even as we take turns at the helm.

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)

The 3-2-1 of Musical Performance

For whatever reasons, our culture has decided that we are not all musicians. Instead, a few trained (or not-so trained) specialists are expected to get up on stage so we can live vicariously through them. There are musicians, and there are spectators. But I don't think the distinction is so clear cut; we're all participants in something larger called a "concert" that requires both artist and audience in the same way that fertilization requires both male and female.

To designate the female as the only creative member of that dyad is just as insane as saying that only the dudes on stage are creative...and yet this is exactly what we do. Beneath it all is a significant cultural pathology, an issue of misunderstood self-other boundaries writ large. In order to explain this, let me take a detour through a bit of my history in personal development...

In the fall of 2005, I attended a seminar on Integral Life Practice – a sort of practice-of-combining-practices that regards everything from weightlifting and Tai Chi to Gestalt therapy and Vipassana meditation as tools in a kit for people to exercise every dimension of their being. After all, there are a lot of ways to grow in "self, culture, and nature," innumerable different lines of development, and should one care to cultivate them, each has its appropriate program of possible activities, both ancient and postmodern.

Needless to say, I learned a lot that weekend about the various ways to be more intentional about my life, about how to organize my self-development activities so that they support each other, and of course how the ultimate end of all of this isn't bragging rights but a greater capacity to usher forth more truth, beauty, and goodness in the world.

But out of all of the practices and meta-practices I learned that weekend, only a few really stuck with me, percolated through my mind and become fundamental aspects of how I understand and relate to the world. One of these was the so-called "3-2-1 Process," a way to uncover and deal with troublesome material in one's psychological shadow (the part of yourself you aren't willing to admit and so can only see in "the world out there," in other people and things). The 3-2-1 Process is almost a theatre exercise:

- First, you notice an intense emotional reaction to something;
- Then, you describe it in as much detail as you can (the "3" of third-person analysis);
- Then, you imagine yourself in conversation with that thing, asking it what it might have to teach you, and whatever other questions you have for it (the "2" of second-person relationship);
- Then, you speak AS that thing, recognizing it as a facet of who you are and not some absolute other (the "1" of first-person identity).

This can be done with pleasant or unpleasant emotional reactions; you might unwind your fear of some monster in a recurring nightmare, or find within yourself the beauty of someone you envy and admire. It takes practice – and vigilance – but is one of the quickest ways I know to turn anger or fear or hatred into understanding and love.

What more, as it became clear to me in the years since, this same structure is recapitulated not just in moments of intentional shadow work but also in the entire saga of human development. We begin identifying with nothing at all, not even aware of a self. Slowly we become more aware of the world, and begin to engage it relationally. It is through these relationships that we eventually learn how the world is us and we are the world.

And here's where the music comes in.

As a performing singer-songwriter, I can identify this trajectory in the way I understand what is going on while I'm on stage. The 3, 2, and 1 of the process are three different kinds of relationships I have with the audience, three different states of being.

When I first started playing music at open mics, I would be looking out at the audience and noticing things about them ("That is obviously a wig," "Holy shit, look at that hottie," "What a bunch of drunks"), but not really doing anything useful with that information. More than helping me, it was often a distraction from what I was TRYING to do, which is "just play" – but of course, I wasn't just playing, I was PLAYING AT, trying to FORGET about the audience and pretend I'm alone in the room, playing to an insentient empty space. Even today, this sometimes happens when I'm especially nervous.

At some point, after getting used to being the center of attention (and that this is not always by their choice – especially with bar crowds, where it's pretty unlikely anyone is actually there specifically to hear me), I realized that there's a certain amount of trust and reciprocity involved in the musician-audience dynamic and I have to meet the crowd halfway in order to really entertain them. It's a relationship, and relationships require mutuality. That means if I want them to listen to me, I have to listen to them. I have to be able to read the crowd like the face of a single person – sometimes the crowd is sleepy and belligerent and trying to watch TV, and sometimes she's totally rapt and playing with her hair and trying to get you ask her to come home with you. Each person in the crowd is like a little voice in the head of that one person, and so in conversation, I can PLAY TO certain voices and draw the attention of the entire crowd by sparking something in only a few of them. (People, after all, are social-mirroring animals. If you see someone else enjoying themselves, you're more likely to join suit. And in that way it really is almost like playing to one person, like trying to persuade someone by finding out what matters to them and planting hooks in it.)

This is a more engaged, more personal, warmer way of playing. If I'm talking on the mic in "3 mode," I'm usually talking to myself. If I'm on the mic in "2 mode," I'm asking questions, looking people in the eyes, cracking jokes, keeping the energy between me and the audience lively and dynamic.

From time to time, however, even this melts away into something much deeper, something in which "2 mode" seems like the desperate manipulative bid that it often is. Because sometimes, I BECOME the audience – or, more accurately, I stop playing the music and the music just happens, and in the flow of things (if I were to stop and try to describe what is happening) the concert is revealed for what it really is: artist and audience as two facets of one event, one creative moment happening all together, one thing in its wholeness. NOT playing AT a crowd, and not playing TO a crowd, but just PLAYING.

This kind of thing, this "1 mode," doesn't happen when I am playing a song for the first time, when it's still awkward and unfamiliar in my hands and throat. And it doesn't happen when I'm trying to impress somebody in the audience – that's me not owning up to something, projecting it "out there," and trying to work some kind of voodoo to control it at a distance. (Try cutting off your hand, throwing it across the room, and willing it to pick up the phone. Good luck.) It happened first in front of friends, with old songs I knew...well, "like the back of my hand." And with practice, learning more about myself as a performer, learning more about the technical minutia that can so easily distract (microphones, monitors, tuning), learning the patterns of crowds in different venues, it happens more frequently these days.

I've found that keeping my eyes open while playing makes a big difference; otherwise I might never be able to engage and relate to the audience, much less transcend that relationship. Certainly, thinking about it helps. I enjoy making it explicit in my own mind that this is a moment of mutuality and co-creation, that I'm shaping their experience while they're shaping mine, so we exist within each other like the dots on a yin yang. Just sitting there listening (or not listening), the audience is in this sense as much a part of the music as I am, because they are the content of my experience – and what better definition of self do we really have? ("You are what you eat.")

Talking about it helps if I'm in the right crowd, one willing to be drawn into deeper awareness of themselves and their environments. Otherwise, it's more likely to alienate the audience than entrain them. I typically keep it to myself at bars.

Perhaps the most useful practice is to exercise simple, general mindfulness both on- and off-stage. The more aware we are, the more likely we are to notice that there isn't really anyone BEING aware, so much as there is an awareNESS that frequently gets lazy and divides into "self" and "other"...or artist and audience.

(continued in part two)

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)

Playing The Body Electric, Part One

I believe that we as a species are currently witnessing the evolution of a new relationship between the inner and outer worlds, renegotiating that tricky self/other boundary...and in the process we might ultimately reach a new platform of musical development at which the individual has internalized not just the other players, but the instruments themselves.

But first, a bit of necessary exposition in the field of developmental psychology, so bear with me, here...

I went to grad school for Integral Theory, which meant studying the intricacies of human mind/body development. One of the recurring themes of "growing up" (which of course extends into ongoing adult development, although most adults seem unwilling to admit that such a thing exists – as if someone with their own job and car has reached the goal posts of maturity) is that we all rely on our environment to take care of things we eventually learn to do ourselves. As we grow more accustomed to assuming personal responsibility for some psychological or physiological function, we go from not even noticing that we're being taken care of, to seeking sources in the external world that will satisfy that need, to satisfying it ourselves.

One example would be how newborns don't even know they need to eat; but eventually learn to inform their parents when they're hungry, and finally manage to feed themselves. Again: young children are unaware of "the rules;" older kids learn to follow them (but don't know how or why they are in place); and adults can not only obey or disobey, but explain why certain rules are necessary for a functioning society.

(Quick check: If you think that the statement "Murder is wrong" is true "because God said so," I love you but you don't qualify as an adult in the modern world. You're still relying on external support for your moral system. If this concerns you, go read Robert Kegan's book In Over Our Heads and then find a few more literate friends.)

So what does this all mean for music? Well, it means we were born right in the middle of a revolution.

Archeologically speaking, instruments appeared first as more or less extensions of the natural environment...hollow reeds, rocks, sticks, and animal gut strung across a bent frame. The earliest instruments emerged from human experimentation with accidental noises and animal calls...what po-mo sophisticates such as you and I would call "found sounds." Ethnomusicologists observe a trend from these earlier instruments, capable of a limited expressive range (typically only a handful of notes, and only one at a time) toward more intricate devices capable of producing complex polyphony. (Think about the difference between relatively ancient intruments like a shaker or hand drum and relatively contemporary instruments like a guitar or piano...or even more contemporary instruments like the laptop.) In other words, the history of human musical instrumentation follows that same developmental curve: first, a symphony of natural sounds; then, a symphony of humans playing simple instruments; then, one human playing an entire array of chords, with remarkable tonal variety, on one instrument. Like so:

These trends seem likely to continue even further as we continue to deepen our relationship with technology. Groundbreaking child psychologist Lev Vygotsky built his developmental model on observations that use of tools within a cultural substrate are often the means to new levels of development (that a child learns to write letters exactly as taught before developing his own handwriting, for example...take it one step further and eventually the child learns to write with any marking object or create his own). From a different field, but with a similar understanding of the flow of things, technology writer Kevin Kelly says that we don't really live in "The Age" of something until it's so much a part of the background of our experience that we don't even notice it until it breaks. We don't live in The Age of Computers...yet. But we will, as soon as computers shrink to invisibility and are embedded in everything.

Likewise, I think we don't live in an Age of Instruments...but we're about to. We're coming up on a new world in which playing music by crude manipulation of some boxy device will be left to the retro-ers and traditionalists. An era when we can speak symphonies as easily as we can form sentences.

This may sound somewhat akin to claiming that soon we'll be able to give up scissors and cut paper with our bare hands. But what I mean is that we may learn to exercise not only conscious control over our hands and voices, but over the subtler biological circuitry of our bodies - those systems responsible for our breath, heartbeats, and brainwaves - in order to make music that is directly translated from tiny electrical potentials through novel electronic interfaces into sound. Not only are people already rigging electroencephalograms to synthesizers, but some are developing full-body suits that communicate musical dimensions of dance in a much more intricate and expressive way than any keyboard-and-pedal control surface ever could.

As a compulsive futurist, I have little doubt that this would bring the evolution of instrumentation to the logical conclusion of a trajectory along which the means of music are increasingly internalized. And of course, music itself grows in complexity at every step along this path - of course, the music made by a group of people all playing polyphonic instruments is potentially much more complex than one guy trying to imitate bird calls by blowing across a blade of grass. There isn't an end point; each new development opens up an entirely new realm of musical expressive possibility, in which each person becomes the entire orchestra of the previous realm. So what will this mean when we have polyphonic synths hooked up to each of a person's once-autonomous bodily functions, have trained that person to operate each "instrument" independently of the others, and throw him in a room with forty other people similarly prepared?

What kind of music can we expect to grow out of early experiments, such as these...

Phil Stearns has bent circuit boards through a biofeedback unit and uses his body as a variable-resistance conductor to make experimental noise music.

Daito Manabe has attached myoelectric sensors that turn the electrical impulses of his muscles into sampling, trigger, and loop controls.

And THIS guy is processing an EEG (electroencephalogram) signal through mediating algorithms to turn raw brainwave data into an intelligible composition (although the guy with the helmet is certainly able to use his info of the device to "compose Beethoven-like music, and make it fast and loud!"

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)

The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, Part II: Putting Death In A Box

Adowa funeral celebration

Since I started to write about DJing one's own going away party, the bark has peeled back from the tree to reveal a world much more fascinated with this subject than I knew. My first clue came casually: "Oh, like in High Fidelity!" I saw High Fidelity, andloved it - but that was a few years ago, long enough to totally forget that Rob Gordon, Nick Hornsby's playlist-obsessed protagonist, had already popularized the funeral mixtape game. Then, I discovered that a mysterious British organization, the Bereavement Register, polled U.K. citizens about this very question, as well - to discover that 79 percent of them were already thinking about it. Apparently James Blunt is well-regarded as a deliverer of dirges; he topped the pre-funeral charts (which is funny, because Brits also voted him one of the most annoying things about their country - insert bagpipe analogy here):

01. "Goodbye My Lover" - James Blunt
02. "Angels" - Robbie Williams
03. "I've Had the Time of My Life" - Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medley
04. "Wind Beneath My Wings" - Bette Midler
05. "Pie Jesu" - Requiem
06. "Candle in the Wind" - Elton John
07. "With or Without You" - U2
08. "Tears in Heaven" - Eric Clapton
09. "Every Breath You Take" - The Police
10. "Unchained Melody" - Righteous Brothers

Wow. "Unchained Melody" is only number ten? What an outrage. Actually, I'm pretty aghast at most of these. (Speaking of aghast: Interestingly but trivially, both Hornsby and this poll came from the U.K., a decidedly morbid patch of land.)

People have been playing music for as long as they've been burying their dead, and so I'm sure that people - for as long as we have understood our mortality and could be called people - have been requesting certain songs be played at their graveside. While I can't find any recorded history of the funeral mix, I think it's safe to assume that we started requesting recorded music at our funerals as soon as it was available. Compared to the modesty of flowers and dirt that they used to be, most modern funerals are technological spectacles. We take every opportunity to upgrade even our most ancient ceremonies. We are accomplices to a universal current of crystallizing self-reflexion, embracing every novelty, jumping on every chance to compensate for Death by replicating and disseminating our favorite ideas.

We make a religion of anything that will outlive us. Since there are no carry-ons or checked luggage allowed on that particular flight (the weight limit is zero), we have to cash in at the gates of eternity by ceding eternal life to the living. We hand down the right to endure to someone or something else - our children and our stories, an ideal, or a joke, or a song. We finally find immortality by investing our living and dying breaths in the worship of those things we consider to be beautiful, or good, or true.

To put it another way, we know we end, and so we are obsessed with legacy. And whenever something increases our capacity to leave our legacy - when we invent writing, or the printing press, or genetic engineering, or the internet - we feed it as much as it can eat. Even ourselves.

And so we began investing in fossils, identifying with particular recordings, and not the living music to which they referred - the abstract and elusive, nimble and ephemeral music that characterized being human before the Age of Recording, never the same twice, mischievous and seductive. In a way, we have paved the way for Death by even agreeing to recorded music, by unemploying the spontaneous expression of grief we find only in the music of the bereaved. Postmodern composer John Cage:

"A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection."

If playing recorded music at a funeral does in fact squelch some balance of living response, then we end up not just dead but having managed to pull the funeral down with us, as well. What, then, is the point of coming up with a funeral mix? I think so many people delight at the prospect because making playlists is the fashionable modern way for us to to contain the tremendous, terrifying mystery of the unknown.

A UCLA study led by Matthew Lieberman recently concluded that identifying emotions allows people a degree of immunity from them. By even recognizing and naming our anger, sadness, or fear, we move ourselves to a safe and impassive distance. (Of course, the same is true for pleasurable emotions, as should be obvious to anyone who has ever watched a joke die by dissection.) Not only did they finally find a physiological basis for the benefits of mindfulness meditation - evidence that learning to watch the mind does actually lift people over the thunder and lightning of the limbic system - but they also unwittingly explained why it's so useful for us to write or sing or paint out our troubling experiences.

The emerging model is one of subject-object relations, where describing grief allows us to loosen our identification with it. By speaking about "the" grief, or even "my" grief, we move our pain into the third person - where we have it, rather than it having us. By codifying our lives and deaths, we remove ourselves from them, and no longer suffer total immersion in an unconquerable wash of feeling.

We benefit from funeral playlists because they pin down the most salient metaphors so we can study them, because "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Like good naturalists, we capture our experiences and embalm them behind a glass case, the boundless fury of Nature Red In Tooth And Claw miniaturized and mediated by a guided audio-tour. Our playlists reflect the edges of a giant, hidden shape. They allow us to tame Death by conceiving of it, by relating to it in a way our minds can manage (although, looking through the cage bars into this tiger exhibit, we forget that the tiger is actually still loose in the zoo).

It is precisely because having a funeral playlist somehow kills the living expression of grief - because recorded music offers, in its death, the illusion of persistence and of fathomability - that it is so popular. And the luxury of capturing our whole holographic experience in a single posthumous album is that we can close the books on a truth more grand and intricate than any of us can bear.

But that may also be why, as consoling as they may be, funeral mixes offer no ultimate solace - because keeping Death at arm's length doesn't allow the intimacy of direct experience. Sooner or later, each of us will have to move into Death, instead of away from it, and practicing one won't ready us for the other.

On the other hand, all technology seems capable of supporting both our desperate illusions of security and enabling our unflinching self-transcendence. Could a funeral playlist prepare people for Death, rather than merely offering us distractions and false promises? I certainly think so. In the next installment, I'll discuss the funeral playlist as not just a coping mechanism, but a tool for skillful compassion, and I'll continue to explore the songs on the soundtrack to my funeral.

In the meantime, here's an hors d'ouevre, Stuart Davis' spectacularly irreverent and lucid song, "Practice Dying." If any song can capture the subtlest essence of why to make a funeral playlist, this is it:


Get high on ether when there's no one in the house
Pretend it's the big one at the moment you pass out
That's just rehearsal, but it's comforting somehow
To practice dying now

Hang out in funeral homes and make an honest bid
Lay in your casket, let them close the lid
Abra cadaver, roll your eyes back in your head
Practice being dead

Don't feel stupid; we're all scared
No one wants to go to hell
There's still time to get prepared
Start out now and finish well

Try painting tunnels on the ceiling in your room
Imagine your birth backwards with a bigger, better womb
Take little trips out of your body now and then
And if the rapture comes, maybe you'll ascend
You know the saying, "Once you learn to ride a bike..."
Well, that's what dying's like

Get high on ether when there's no one in the house
Pretend it's the big one at the moment you pass out
It's just rehearsal, 'cause that's all that life allows
So practice dying
Cuz you're almost dead
Practice dying now

(Written for iggli.com.)