Leave it to science to transform dada into data. A new study suggests that the experience of nonsense, “may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large,” according to a recent article in the New York Times, How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect.
The article continues:
“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”
Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.
In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.
When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
That right there almost seems like a neurological explanation for the invention of religion (and art): The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.
“There’s more research to be done on the theory,” said Michael Inzlicht, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, because it may be that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance. But he added that the new theory was “plausible, and it certainly affirms my own meaning system; I think they’re onto something.”
Read the full article — it goes on to cite a study where a group of test subjects who first read “The Country Doctor” by Kafka performed a letter-string matching test 30 percent better than a control group that read a more linear non-Kafka story.
This latest quest by science is trying to show that “nonsense makes sense”, which, paradoxically, would make it non-nonsense, right?
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories [or religion -- a weeping Virgin Mary statue, anyone?], for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
That’s too bad — John Cage should be added to the school curriculum regardless of the prematurity of these findings.
Uh-oh, I feel the grip of the uncanny overcoming me as I type. Will the urge for odor satisfy itself with me?
Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking.
I’ll think to that, ye uncanny drinkers!
Chris King is a writer and musician living in St. Louis, a city born at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Chris has a thing for confluences, both literal and metaphoric — thus the theme of his blog, Confluence City. This fascination with confluences is something we have in common, as you’d probably guess by looking at my work, which at its most basic level is a confluence of word + image.
I don’t know Chris, have never met him. He just emailed me out of the blue a couple hours ago to introduce himself and to say that we share an affinity for Robert Walser. Another confluence. And an influence.
He and I also share a trait of writing things down in notebooks and any scrap of paper at hand, which, as professional musician, he used to do in between gigs in notebooks he dubbed “gigbooks”. In The Chatter of the Soul, he elaborates:
As long as I can remember, I have been writing down fetching things people say. My personal hell would be me clutching my pants pockets for eternity and finding no pen or paper, while fascinating folks are saying unforgettable things that all of us are bound to forget, if someone doesn’t write them down, now. In my crowds, that was always me.
…On my own time and dime, I rather like to drink carefully-made beer and wine, and fellowship with friends with amply-stocked minds and souls. When this was a rock and roll road show, we were forever traveling between gigs. The notebooks I kept in those days were known (in the beginning, officially, complete with roman-numeraled dog-latin names) as “gig books.”… And when [these days] I take the time to type up my notes after a night out, I still think of them as gigbook poems.
Gigbook poems are not for everyone. Often I have been told, “I guess you had to be there.” But I think they capture the chatter of the soul. They strike me like little luminescent winks of actual people enacting their lives, in the middle of it and making it all up as they go along.
Yes! There is often gold in the most seemingly trivial of overheard utterances, which have long formed one of the sources of the texts I develop in my work (see #4 on the About the Work page of my site). I think Chris, as a “real” writer and journalist (and judging by his comment above), is probably more reportorial and factual than I am, or, to put it a better way, more inclined toward narrative; I’m usually pulling paragraphs apart and looking for different ways to scramble meaning. My version of his gigbooks are the Snarkbooks, which are not so much “the chatter of the soul”, but just the chatter, period.
There’s a feeling in this kind of activity though, a feeling of being in the zone, of appreciating what’s happening in the moment, that I think we’ve both tuned into in our own ways. John Cage summed this feeling up beautifully in the closing paragraph of his 1957 lecture, “Experimental Music“:
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
Purposeful purposelessness is the best description I’ve ever heard for the function of an artist in society. And I love how Cage repeatedly in his writings throughout his life stressed the (curiosity) value of observing or creating situations and seeing what happens (getting “one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way”), as opposed to trying to impose a structure. I’ve always hated the phrase, “bringing order out of chaos”, as if the “ordered” system was inherently good and the “chaotic” system something to be avoided at all costs. If meaning is synonymous, or at least dependent upon, information, then a chaotic system, which has more potential, more possible outcomes, than an arbitrarily ordered system, must therefore be more “meaning-full“. Allowing an event to take place, to happen, does not mean, however, that it will always be 100% chaotic, and it’s much more interesting when a confluence of dynamic systems produces both chaotic and ordered eddies of information. How the “ordered” and the “chaotic” systems are arranged is, of course, a (by)product of uncertainty, so the beast feeds itself and the cycle continuously renews, like the water in a river you can never step in twice.
Yes, I’ve gone off on a tangent, and by now you’ve likely drowned in this river of metaphor, but isn’t a tangent but a confluence if you’re traveling in the opposite direction? Run the film of the tangent backwards, and you have a confluence.
A nice composite image of John Cage cooking, from the excellent blog of the greatly named J. Henry Chunko:
Mr. Chunko links to this post about a recording of John Cage: Empty Words Part IV (1973-78). But I especially like the Lichtensteiger.de blog that he turned me on to, which has several pages of John Cage material. The recorded Cage readings that strike me in this hearing as unexpected cousins of Kurtz’s monologues in Apocalypse Now, two characters I’ve never connected before.
NY Times review of a show at the Whitney of German artist Rudolf Stingel that sounds really great:
Mr. Stingel is also heir to the uses of chance and silence, or in his case emptiness, encouraged by the composer John Cage. This is perhaps clearest in an expanse of cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet that spent six months on the floor of Mr. Stingel’s studio accumulating footprints and splatters, flecks and stains of black paint. Covering an immense wall at the Whitney, it initially resembles a huge swath of ancient parchment. When you recognize it as carpet, the thick familiar texture and the random, delicacy of the marks can create an unusual spatial push-pull. Focus on the marks, and they float in a creamy space. Focus on the carpet, and you may feel that you are doing the floating, looking down on it from above.
…The implication is that artists in particular should do as little as possible. The sign of a successful artwork is its ability to derive the greatest effect from the least means. Another lesson to be extracted from this elegant show is the oxymoronic nature of the notion of “empty beauty” that has been bruited about extensively in the last decade. This show suggests that if art is empty, it is not beautiful and vice versa. If something is beautiful in any sustained way, it contains, at the least, an idea about beauty and usually much more. It is the result of something being worked on and worked out. Beauty is the state of operating at stunning efficiency, a triumph that can’t be empty. Mr. Stingel’s work makes this perfectly clear.
“Rudolf Stingel” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Oct. 14, 2007.
Here’s a great story out of Germany:
HALBERSTADT, Germany — A relative rush of activity broke out this week in the world’s slowest and longest lasting concert as two new notes sounded in a piece of music that is taking a total 639 years to perform in its entirety.
The mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992) is entitled “organ2/ASLSP” or “As SLow aS Possible”. The performance began nearly three years ago on September 5, 2001, and is scheduled to last until 2639.
The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord — G-sharp, B and G-sharp — not sounding until February 2, 2003.
But things really got going yesterday as two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded.
The could be the soundtrack for The Long Now Foundation.
indieWIRE has a good story and interview with Jorgen Leth about his new film with Lars von Trier, “The Five Obstructions.” Some excerpts:
Danish directors Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier have created the ultimate exercise in sado-masochistic filmmaking. And guess who’s the sadist? In “The Five Obstructions,” Lars von Trier subjects his predecessor Leth to a series of five filmmaking trials, each based on the remaking of Leth’s 1967 short film “The Perfect Human” according to different “obstructions.” Reminiscent of von Trier’s Dogme rules, the regulations include, among others, that every shot should be 12 frames in length, that one version had to be filmed in the most miserable place in the world, and one version had to be animated.
…
Leth also proves himself a worthy opponent to his young rival — always using von Trier’s mischievous limitations as springboards for creative solutions. (As von Trier whines, “The trouble is you’re so clever that whatever I say inspires you.”) In fact, all of Leth’s altered “Perfect Humans” are gems of innovative filmmaking. By the end of “The Five Obstructions,” it’s not easy to discern between obstructer and obstructed, victor and vanquished.
…
iW: You’re also a poet and I was wondering how you relate your poetry to your filmmaking, because poetry doesn’t seem to have any limits. And yet you say that limitations help to create art?
Leth: For me, poetry has a strong link to my filmmaking. My films learn from my poetry. In poetry, you’re free. You start in the corner and you don’t know where it leads you. I have no message, I have nothing I want to tell, I just start and I see where it leads, and it’s a big surprise and relief if it’s good. That’s the ideal state for filmmaking. I like the idea of chance coming into filmmaking, in shooting, in editing, and I do make space in my rules of game for chance. William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and John Cage are major influences for my work. Godard is the only cineastic influence.
Read the stories John Cage tells in Indeterminacy. Go on, you’ll enjoy them. And the Smithsonian Folkways recording accompanied by David Tudor is great great great:
The idea behind Indeterminacy was, like many Cagean ideas, essentially simple and audaciously original. Cage read 90 stories, his speed determined by the story’s length. In another room, beyond earshot of Cage, David Tudor, pianist and veteran Cage collaborator, performed miscellaneous selections from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and played pre-recorded tape from Cage’s Fontana Mix. The resulting collaboration is an astounding piece of “music,” and a fine introduction to the innovations of John Cage.
