persiflage

In my previous posting I announced that I would be talking about Freud in this one, but I have to renege on that promise. Partly this is because I am finding “The Interpretation of Dreams” quite tough going and partly for a more important reason. This is to be my last posting. In addition to this blog, I have, for the last couple of years, been intermittently writing a film script and I have decided to concentrate on the script and let the blog go. It’s a question of priorities. The principal purpose of this blog is simply to sign off.

Before I finish, I think I should say something conclusive about art. This is the topic that has been the concerning this blog for quite some time. Over the last six months, I have been luring you on with hints that I have some definitive answers to the questions I have been raising, that I knew where I was going, and in a sense I did. So I thought I would finish up by making some positive assertions about the nature and purpose of art. Naturally, because this is my farewell, I shall present my ideas briefly.

In large measure, I believe the purpose of art (and by this term I am referring to visual art, literature, music and even television) is consolation. The world is chaotic and arbitrary: one only need look at the front page of the paper to learn that people often die ‘tragically’, ‘before their time’. When these accidents occur people look for ‘answers’ (implying that such random events are considered questions). They seek someone or something to hold responsible. To put it baldly, events in the world are very often meaningless but, despite this, people want to see life as meaningful. One does not have to look hard for evidence of this fact. From the American fundamentalists who viewed Hurricane Katrina as a disaster sent by God to punish the sinners in New Orleans, to my aunt who sees her difficulty in buying a house as a sign that she should move out of Auckland, it seems everyone wants to interpret their lives in terms of narratives, to see causal relationships that do not exist. I myself read my horoscope daily, largely because the horoscope promises implicitly that the random experiences of the day will fit into a higher plan. It is people’s desire for meaning that art satisfies.

Art satisfies this desire by creating structures of meaning. A fundamental idea in literary theory is that a good work is an organic unity; every element in, for instance, a novel should ideally relate to every other element, causally, as steps in an argument, as metaphoric elaboration of another idea, in some or other way. The important aspect of this structural intraconnectedness is that the world a novel presents is meaningful, that our understanding of a work can pass from one element to another in such a way that everything fits together. Of course this idea raises questions. One such question is where the process of interpretation stops. Othello kills Desdemona because he has a fatal flaw, jealousy, that Iago exploits. But why should Othello possess this fatal flaw? Because (the play is saying) everyone possesses a fatal flaw. Interpretation, I think, can only finish when it is arrives at a statement of maximum generality.

(I might note in passing that the reason I find read Freud so tiring to read is that the process of dream interpretation he invented moves from dream-text not to universal truth but to inconsequential details in the patients’ lives. Over and over again, in dream after dream. Freud advances one simple proposition, that dreams can be interpreted, a proof that is repetitive and, in the end, quite wearying.)

When I started writing about art I referred to Stendhal’s idea that novels reflect life. However, as I said at the time, this idea is incorrect, for two reasons. The first is that novels, as I said above, form meaningful wholes in a way that lived experiences do not. The second is that art can be condensed to propositions about life, propositions that oftentimes, when revealed, seem ridiculous. ‘Universal truths’ are seldom universal. Art is, in my view, based on artifice.

This is the last paragraph. When I have finished writing it, I will have finished writing my blog. I have enjoyed writing it, and obviously would continue if I thought there was any future to it. But I feel that that my time is better spent completing my film script. So au revoir.

In this posting, I am taking a break from writing about aesthetics to discuss another subject that is quite close to my heart. Although I hear voices only infrequently now (usually when I am in a hypnagogic state, just before sleep) I am still a member of a Hearing Voices network. The local ‘chapter head’ sent the following research synopsis to everyone on her mailing list.

Here is the link to the study online here
http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/68/2/128

“Long-term Antipsychotic Treatment and Brain Volumes
A Longitudinal Study of First-Episode Schizophrenia
Beng-Choon Ho, MRCPsych; Nancy C. Andreasen, MD, PhD; Steven Ziebell, BS; Ronald Pierson, MS; Vincent Magnotta, PhD
Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2011;68(2):128-137. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2010.199

Context Progressive brain volume changes in schizophrenia are thought to be due principally to the disease. However, recent animal studies indicate that antipsychotics, the mainstay of treatment for schizophrenia patients, may also contribute to brain tissue volume decrement. Because antipsychotics are prescribed for long periods for schizophrenia patients and have increasingly widespread use in other psychiatric disorders, it is imperative to determine their long-term effects on the human brain.

Objective To evaluate relative contributions of 4 potential predictors (illness duration, antipsychotic treatment, illness severity, and substance abuse) of brain volume change.

Design Predictors of brain volume changes were assessed prospectively based on multiple informants.

Setting Data from the Iowa Longitudinal Study.

Patients Two hundred eleven patients with schizophrenia who underwent repeated neuroimaging beginning soon after illness onset, yielding a total of 674 high-resolution magnetic resonance scans. On average, each patient had 3 scans (2 and as many as 5) over 7.2 years (up to 14 years).

Main Outcome Measure Brain volumes.

Results During longitudinal follow-up, antipsychotic treatment reflected national prescribing practices in 1991 through 2009. Longer follow-up correlated with smaller brain tissue volumes and larger cerebrospinal fluid volumes. Greater intensity of antipsychotic treatment was associated with indicators of generalized and specific brain tissue reduction after controlling for effects of the other 3 predictors. More antipsychotic treatment was associated with smaller gray matter volumes. Progressive decrement in white matter volume was most evident among patients who received more antipsychotic treatment. Illness severity had relatively modest correlations with tissue volume reduction, and alcohol/illicit drug misuse had no significant associations when effects of the other variables were adjusted.

Conclusions Viewed together with data from animal studies, our study suggests that antipsychotics have a subtle but measurable influence on brain tissue loss over time, suggesting the importance of careful risk-benefit review of dosage and duration of treatment as well as their off-label use.


Author Affiliations: Departments of Psychiatry (Drs Ho and Andreasen and Messrs Ziebell and Pierson) and Radiology (Dr Magnotta), University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, Iowa City.”

This article is, for me, deeply worrying. I have been on different sorts of antipsychotics for more than four years now and this study has forced me to consider (again) that I might be stupider now than I was when I was younger. A reduced frontal cortex and augmented ventricles might explain why I perform so poorly at my weekly pub-quiz. And why my last posting, while not being wrong, gives me the impression on re-reading it, of being somewhat dumb.

Anyway, this posting may provide a bridge to the next instalment, in which I shall be considering the animosity between modern neuroscientists and Freudian psychotherapists. And relating this, of course, to literature.

I do not often buy books by New Zealand writers. This irresponsibility is probably due to misplaced priorities and lack of time. But when I was in the bookshop recently, I made a decision to find and buy a new New Zealand novel, walking away with “Settlers’ Creek” by Carl Nixon, a ‘young’ contemporary writer who has received high praise from Owen Marshal and others.

“Settlers’ Creek” is the subject of this book report. I should warn you straightaway that this is not a book review; I shall not coyly avoid talking about what actually happens in the novel. If you want to read “Settlers’ Creek” and be surprised by its major plot development, you should read no further. As with my earlier book reports, I intend to talk about the whole novel and this involves revealing the major plot twist.

The protagonist of “Settlers’ Creek” is Box Saxton, a Pakeha ex-real estate developer put out of the job by the global recession and, at the beginning of the novel, working as a chippy putting up classrooms. He is married and has a daughter as well as a step-son that he loves as if the boy were his own flesh and blood. At the beginning of the novel, the son, Mark, commits suicide and the early part of the novel describes Box’s reaction to this death. Box arranges for Mark to buried at the Saxton family plot in the small sea-side town in which he grew up; before he can be buried however Mark biological father, a Maori called Tipene, (who has changed his name from Peter sometime in the intervening years) shows up. Tipene manages a successful tourism business in the town of Kaipuna. Shortly before Mark can be buried, Tipene and other members of his iwi remove Mark’s body from the mortuary and transport it north from Christchurch to Kaipuna (modelled presumably on Kaikoura) where he can be buried with his whanau. “With no plan and little hope,” Box drives to Kaipuna and then (this is the plot twist that the blurb leaves unrevealed) steals the body from the Marae and journeys back with it to Christchurch to bury the boy where his heart belongs.

As can be seen from this brief synopsis, Settler’s Creek is a novel not only set in New Zealand but also concerned with what it means to be a New Zealander. It attempts (as the blurb says) to explore “the claims both indigenous people and more recent settlers have to a spiritual link to the land.” Its premise is quite topical and could have been picked straight from the newspaper – indeed, it is really an imaginative extrapolation of some events that took place just a couple of years ago. Apparently nobody owns a corpse so when a burial is contested, it must be settled through the courts. To some extent, the story can also be read as allegory. Mark’s body can be understood as a symbol for New Zealand itself: although Box is not linked to Mark through blood, he loves the boy like his own son. Of course, we cannot push the allegorical aspect too far. If we do so, the story would seem to justify Pakeha claims to ownership of New Zealand by implying that Maori abandoned it, and this is something that Nixon cannot intend.

Creative New Zealand’s guiding principle is to support writers who tell ‘our’ stories, and if this is taken as a general prescription for New Zealand writers, Nixon succeeds admirably. The story is full of references to such totemic cultural institutions as the All Blacks, pig-hunting, orchard growing, roadside fish-and-chip shops. Personally, I find the self-conscious kiwi-ness of much New Zealand writing claustrophobic, and I can well understand why a writer like Elizabeth Knox might want to escape a narrow nationalistic literature by setting “The Vinter’s Luck” in France. The narrow definition of New Zealand identity advanced by much New Zealand writing, to my mind, does a disservice to the complexity of real New Zealanders’ experiences.

However, “Settlers’ Creek” does at least avoid one major pitfall of modern New Zealand writing: the trap of excessive political correctness. If anything it goes too far in the opposite direction. At one point, Box has a conversation with a Pakeha crayfish salesman who launches a harangue against upstart Maori: “everyone’s always kissing their brown arses.[…] Fucking treaty settlements–nothing but handouts. Round here they’ve bought up everything. There’s nothing left for ordinary people like us.” In vain does Box argue that his actions are part of nothing bigger, that it is “personal”: we know exactly what Nixon is doing. His story is channelling Pakeha grievance against Maori for their perceived success.

And ‘grievance’ is precisely the right word. At its deepest level, the novel inverts the narrative of Maori loss and restoration, making it a Pakeha story instead. It is Box, not Tipene, who has trauma in his past. It is Box who has lost his parents and elder brother at a young age (the brother’s body, tellingly, was lost at sea) and more recently his successful business. Box is the one with a grievance, the one who lacks control of his own destiny. It is Box who is forced to undertake an act of civil disobedience.

Although I have said that self-consciously New Zealand writing can be claustrophobic, I believe that “Settlers’ Creek” could have been a great New Zealand novel. Studies of New Zealand identity have their place and its premise is great. However, I believe the novel falls short. It is not complex enough, does not fully develop the themes it introduces (such as suicide) and does not do justice to the Maori side of the story. I think (and this is just my opinion) that the novel is one of the great might-have-been’s of New Zealand literature.

In the last several postings I have been discussing music and have presented a theory of musical taste. I shall be modifying this theory but first let me restate its central thesis. Music appreciation is, I believe, comparative: when we encounter a ‘new’ song, we compare it to the songs that we already know, that we have stored in our mental repertory, and evaluate it on that basis. Because everyone has different experiences of music and different preferences, this encounter varies from person to person. For everyone however, a new song combines qualities of the familiar and the strange.

The idea that when we listen to music we listen for the patterns we recognise from other songs might seem odd. The reason why it seems odd is that this process is largely unconscious. Only occasionally do I, for instance, hear echoes of a tune of other tunes– although I do do so from time to time. For me, the second movement of Beethoven’s Concerto No. 8 in C minor sounds very similar to the signature tune in “An American Tail”; Clementi’s Sonata No. 5 closely resembles “A Groovy Kind of Love”. I believe that the musically gifted hear allusions and echoes everywhere in the music that they listen to. One reason why ordinary listeners do not hear such plagiarism is because most melodic constructions are so common that they cannot be associated with any particular song.

If we accept that musical appreciation necessarily involves a comparison between the song we are listening to and the others we know, however, it can resolve some puzzles. For instance, I used to perplexed as to the reason why a composer should choose one key and not another for the song he has written. Why should Mozart’s Fantasia in D Minor be in D Minor and not A minor? The patterns of tonic, subdominant, dominant etc. would be the same. My confusion resulted from a faulty understanding of music: I thought a piece should be understood in isolation from the rest. But if we suppose that we ‘hear’ a piece against a background of other songs, this puzzle is easily resolved. Consider guitar-based music. In this music, the keys most usually chosen are A, E, C and G, probably in that order, because these keys involve chords with open strings. Consequently, when we hear a song like Radiohead’s “Exit Music” which is in B minor, we compare it to songs in other keys. The plaintive and jarring emotional quality of this song can be partially explained by recognising that the Em chord occurs in this song, not as the dominant or tonic, but as the subdominant.

I would now like to turn to another aspect of the theory. In my previous postings I have implied that listeners prefer the familiar to the strange. This is what I should like to modify. I think it more probably that we like a new song when it combines aspects that we are familiar with and like, a lack of aspects that we are familiar with but do not like, and something novel. It is the novel aspect that makes the song sound fresh and original to us; and we prize this quality. ‘Good taste’ is not objective, but I think we can distinguish between conservative and progressive taste. Those with conservative taste prefer songs to be only a little odd; those with progressive taste can tolerate a great deal more eccentricity.

I would like to make another observation on the relationship between the familiar and the novel. Generally, in popular songs, the ‘familiar’ repetitive aspect of music is usually the chord progression and choice of instruments; blues songs, for instance, always utilize the same chord patterns. Novelty occurs through such aspects as vocal quality or rhythm. For instance, a reason that I like “My Oh My” that I neglected to mention in the previous posting is that David Gray’s voice is quite distinctive, having a world-weary rasp that perfectly suits the song. When I hear a John Lennon song and recognise John Lennon’s voice, I immediately like the song, partly because I am conditioned to like Lennon’s music and partly because I compare it (albeit unconsciously) to all the Beatles’ songs I like. Vocal quality is an example of a ‘salient feature’ that one commits to memory and uses in later appraisals of songs.

On a final ‘note’- I have been reading some philosophy of music lately. On one hand, my reading suggests that perhaps I haven’t gone quite deeply enough into why people like music. On the other hand, I noticed that the philosophy of music seldom delves into musical theory. None of the philosophers I’ve read have come close to presenting the ideas I have in this blog. My theory, although not comprehensive, may very well be original. Perhaps I should copywrite it?

I ended my last post on rather a cowardly note, by saying that the expressive power of music “remains a mystery”. In fact I believe music susceptible to some analysis. To fine-tune my understanding of literature, I often interpret literary works; in the same spirit I intend, in this posting, to analyse a piece of popular music. The song I have chosen is “My Oh My” by David Gray and I have chosen this song because it resonates deeply with me. I am not profoundly familiar with the nomenclature of musical analysis so forgive me any impression of imprecision. My analysis combines formal description with personal impression and is strictly in the first person.

“My Oh My” involves four ‘instruments’ – rhythm guitar, vocals, drums and some stringed instrument, probably a cello or bass. The verses alternate between two chords: Em/Bb and Dm4/A (the first letter in these titles indicates the main chord, the second the lowest note in the chord). These chords are arranged differently than they are normally in other pop songs: this means that for many listeners the song immediately sounds different to others in their experience. The emotional tone of the verses sounds to me melancholic but not funereal; and the rhythms of the strumming suggest urgency.

At the end of the first verse the song changes key, shifting from E minor to G major, E minor’s natural partner, and the drums kick in. When I first heard the song, this key change at once surprised and satisfied me. It surprised me because my experience of music was such that I expected songs in a minor key to remain in that key. In fact, a little disappointment mixed in with my other emotions: my taste in music at that time was such that I preferred the sublimated anguish of a minor key. At another level the chord change elicited a feeling of satisfaction because the verse chords had intimated at this G chord through harmonics while the vocal melody, playing around the E chord had emphasized the G note. So when this transition took place (and takes place) I feel a sense of release. I admit this is a strangely mixed reaction, but I think it fair to say that all good art provokes mixed feelings as a matter of course.

In fact the first chord of the chorus is not G but Gmaj7, which soon modulates to Gm7. These chords, as any amateur musicologist (such as myself) knows, ‘want’ the resolution of a C chord. I have said the song is in E minor (in the verses) and G major (in the chorus); it might be fairer though to say that the song is in A minor and C major. If so, it is a song, which never introduces its tonic chord, A minor. Perhaps this is why the song has a quality suggestive of unfulfilled desire.

It does though turn from Gm7 to C major (or more precisely C/E) halfway through the chorus, carrying out the movement that is so deeply embedded, and so beloved, in our musical memory. At the same time, Gray’s voice lifts to near the top of his range “It takes a lot of love…” – this, as the composition makes clear, is the point of the song. Gray repeats the line, “it takes a lot of love my friend” while the key of the song changes key again, modulating to the Eb6/9 chord. A new idea is to be introduced. The song switches between Eb6/9 and Bsus while Gray completes the stanza: “…to keep your heart from freezing, to push on ‘til the end.” The guitar touches on F6/9 before returning to Gmaj7 and then to the chord structure of the verses.

On one level “My Oh My” is a simple song: it consists mainly of strummed chords and vocal melody. On another level the chord progression is complex enough that it is difficult to tell what key it is in; the effect of this chord progression is highly emotive because the song hints at simpler melodic lines without directly expressing them. I contend that our perception “My Oh My” is founded largely on our knowledge of other music. The song references musical tradition, not by utilizing the dominant melodic constructions of other tunes but by bringing to the foreground the more subtle patterns that other songs only hint at. I should mention also that the lyrics of the song perfectly fit its musical content; lyrics and music form an organic whole.

Lyrics are vital to popular music. The emotions that music expresses are vague; lyrics contribute to the emotional effect of a song by articulating the emotions in a song, by relating the feelings evoked musically to a concrete situation. The circular verse chorus verse chorus design of a pop song also means that it is through the lyrics that a song gives an impression of development. The relationship between lyrics and melody can even be ironical. For instance, in the song “All Apologies” by Nirvana when Corbain delivers the line that he is “married” and “buried” the song sounds triumphant, suggesting that Corbain is really happy to be married.

“My Oh My” is no run-of-the-mill song but I liked it the first time I heard it. It may seem that I contradict myself in saying this because, in my previous instalment, I argued that novelty in music requires time to appreciate. The reason why it is possible to like “My Oh My” straightaway is because, under the complex chord structure, beats a simple melodic heart. “My Oh My” is steeped in the tradition of the folk song, a tradition that underlies the best of popular music. To put it a little simplistically, Gray has simply taken the best bits from a number of different songs and organised them into something new.

Music is an incredibly complex topic, and deserves not one but several instalments. In this posting, I shall revisit the theory of musical taste that I proposed in the previous posting and hopefully present it in a more cogent form.

In essence, I am proposing that musical discernment is, mostly, an acquired ability. By discernment I am conflating two different mental processes: the act of interpretation whereby we recognise the emotions the music conveys; and the act of evaluation whereby we decide whether we like a piece or not. These two processes interact in a complex way and so discernment is somewhat paradoxical. I say that musical discernment is ‘mostly’ an acquired ability because, in order to explain musical discernment, we must posit some kind of innate musical faculty.

To back up the idea of an innate musical understanding, we might consider the converse scenario. Suppose musical discernment was entirely learnt? Someone with no musical experience and no musical understanding whatsoever would be unable to tell a happy tune from a sad one, would fail to appreciate the suspense of a suspended chord and would be unable to tell when a tune has ended (because he would be unable to recognise the different tonalities of the dominant and tonic chords). In order to learn, such a musical naïf would require extra-musical cues. We could imagine someone telling the naïf, for instance, “This is a sad song!” enabling the naïf to recognise sad songs in the future by comparing them to this template.

Of course, such a process of explicit instruction does not occur in the real life. Perhaps then the extra-musical prompting is more subtle? Perhaps music is mimetic and we learn to recognise musical qualities by comparing musical patterns to our perceptions of real people. This is more or less the idea argued by Kivy (and discussed in the previous instalment). In Kivy’s view musical qualities that cannot be explained by his ‘contour theory’ must arise out of convention. But this begs the question of how such conventions arise.

The emotional difference between a major and minor chord, it seems to me, cannot be explained either through mimesis or convention. All in all, I think we must conclude that people possess some innate understanding of the rules of music. This innate musical understanding is analogous to Chomsky’s idea of a Universal Grammar, the genetic predisposition to learn language. Certainly, the way children learn the rules of music, almost by osmosis, is similar to the way they learn to speak. I cannot even speculate as to why people should possess such an innate understanding of music but I believe it must exist.

I should emphasize however that this innate musical faculty is, in all likelihood, highly rudimentary; it is only the foundation on which musical discernment is based. Taste in music develops when we decide to like particular works of music, and our liking for particular works conditions our appreciation of newly encountered works. Good taste in music is not uniform; there are connoisseurs of jazz, hip-hop, indie rock, Baroque music, reggae, opera, eighties heavy-metal… the list is endless. In all cases however, the taste of the person is determined by their decisions to like particular works during a formative phase in their life.

The decisions that inform a person’s initial taste in music are complex and individual. However, I believe, as I put it in the previous posting, that once a listener decides to like particular bands or composers, he or she perceives all music through a filter formed by memories of the underlying patterns and salient features of their first musical preferences. This means a person’s taste in music can be very narrow. In Auckland, we have, for instance, The Rock radio station, which only plays guitar rock from the eighties and nineties; the listeners to this station prefer the familiar to the novel. Modern pop music seems (to this listener at least) formulaic and predictable – but this is precisely why it appeals to its fans: it always sounds almost exactly like a song they already know and like. By contrast, we have bFM, which specialises in a fast-turnover of new song; unfortunately the listener may never hears a song often enough to overcome an initial resistance to the new. To develop one’s taste in music one must expose oneself to music that one does not immediately like and take the time to integrate its patterns into one’s mental library.

Incidentally, I would like to make the following observation. People often think that classical music is superior to popular music because it is more complex. I believe that, in fact, the musical discernment of a classical listener is often no more sophisticated than that of other music fans. The language of classical music is simply different to that of popular music. Although “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead is a rock song, it is far more complex, musically, than Puccini’s “Nessum Dorma”. (This is not to disparage Puccini but rather to say that people like “Nessum Dorma” for reasons other than its complexity.)

I seem to have avoided, again, talking about how emotions actually get into music! I would just like to say, in this respect, that musical taste is not simply a matter of pattern recognition. We like a song because we like the feelings it expresses. How a song expresses feelings remains a mystery to me.

It sometimes seems that, through science, humankind has conquered the entire world: we have mapped the globe and the human genome and are bent on discovering whether there is life on Mars. What mysteries are left (such as, for instance, the reason the wave-form of a particle collapses when it is detected) seem so esoteric as to leave ordinary people quite untouched. It can come as a surprise, then, to realize that there are mysteries right under out noses that science has so far completely failed to explain. One such question is the reason why we dream; nobody has come up with a convincing explanation for this. Another great mystery is to do with music. Why do we find major chords happy and minor chords sad?

To clarify why this last question is such a puzzle, it is useful to put it in context. Theories of musical appreciation (I refer here to my Routledge Companion to Aesthetics) fall into a number of different camps. Expressionists hold that we value music because it expresses emotions. Arousalism, a type of Espressionism, holds that the emotions ‘in the music’ arouse corresponding emotions in the listener. Referentialism holds that music refers to emotions, ideas and situations present in the “extramusical world” (enabling us to perceive the sadness of a particular work without become sad ourselves).

Formalism is the antithesis of Referentialism. The Formalist believes that music does not relate to anything in the outside world; music is abstract, mathematical, apart from physical reality. It may stimulate emotions but these emotions are typically little more than feelings of anticipation and satisfaction, such as the feeling of release when a dominant chord returns to the tonic,

The problem with these perspectives is that, on a whole, they do not explain WHY we might hear emotions in music. The extreme Formalist holds that ‘pure’ music does not express emotion at all (although the weight of opinion is against him); the Expressionist, while arguing music can express quite complicated states of mind, has been unable to show how rhythmic patterns of aural frequencies can communicate these feelings. In 1989, P.Kivey stepped into the breach with a theory he termed the “contour theory”. In this view, music is not so much referential as mimetic. Happy music imitates the vocal inflections and body language of happy people, and sad music carries out the converse. In this way Kivy presents an empirical theory of music; our understanding of music is based on our observations of other people.

I read Kivy’s essay some years ago and the thing I remember particularly about it was its tentativeness. I think Kivy was right to be tentative: the theory seems to me quite implausible. For instance, his theory cannot explain why a minor chord should sound sad. However Kivy should be applauded for at least attempting to grapple with this mystery; few others have even tried.

Rather than confront the question of emotions in music head on, I thought I would take this opportunity to present an original theory on musical taste. To put it in context, I should say that it is a Formalist theory but treats taste as an acquired faculty rather than something innate.

We are surrounded by music from infancy. However, most people do not establish a personal taste in music until adolescence. As a teenager, one seeks to imitate one’s peers by liking the same genres of music that they like– I remember when I was about thirteen I made a conscious decision to like Nirvana, Soundgarden and other grunge groups because these bands seemed to appropriate to how I view myself. (Although I cold never like the Smashing Pumpkins because I disliked Billy Corgan’s voice.) Simply put, one forms one’s sense of taste first by emulating those whom we admire, those whom we believe themselves possess ‘good taste’.

Once we have established a ‘taste’ in music, this conditions our every encounter with a new song. We unconsciously compare new songs to the ones we know and like, looking for similarities and differences. In effect, we have memorized every song we like (and a good few we don’t), and have integrated their underlying patterns and salient features into out musical perceptions. It is these features that we look for in new music. Is this song, we ask ourselves, one that we can like? Is it novel and surprising and yet a natural extension of the kind of music I ordinarily enjoy? A resemblance to music one already likes can motivate one to pay attention to a new song for long enough for it to one to absorb it, assimilating it into ones internal database, altering how we hear music afterwards. For example, when I first hear Coldplay’s debut album, all I could hear was that they were influenced by Radiohead and Jeff Buckley and thought Coldplay a pale imitation; later on I came to appreciate their sound as something distinctive and original.

The theory I have sketched out above is only a partial theory. Musical taste is not entirely learned: I think there is some kind of innate component to musical appreciation as well, some rudimentary musical understanding which can be cultivated as we grow older. Has a cultural anthropologist ever played Beethoven to an isolated Papua New Guinea tribe to see what they think of it? Perhaps we are hardwired to hear major chords as happy and minor chords as sad. Perhaps human beings once communicated in music and the musical part of our brain has survived as a vestigial organ like the appendix. This is a pretty silly theory but not much more silly than Kivy’s.

A final note. I have been criticized for my use of the term ‘aesthetic’. Am I using it incorrectly? In my dictionary the adjective ‘aesthetic’ is defined as “concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, especially in art”. As a noun, “aesthetic” is defined as “a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty”. However, the term ‘aesthetics’ is also used to describe “the branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty, and artistic taste.”

In her essay on “Taste”, Carolyn Kosmeyer says that, today, the term ‘aesthetic’ is “directed toward the experience of beauty and the unique experiences of emotive insight art can afford”. In his essay on “The Aesthetic” Alan Goldman suggests the broadness of the modern conception of “Aesthetic”; in his view, “it now qualifies not only judgements and evaluations, but properties, attitudes, experience and pleasure or value as well, and its application is no longer restricted to beauty alone.”

By using the term ‘aesthetic’ I am trying to talk about the experiences we have that are provoked exlusively by our encounters with art and literature. I assume that aesthetic experiences are qualitatively different from our experiences of the rest of the world. (One such difference being, for instance, that when we engage with stories we treat them as fictions rather than facts, suspending our disbelief.) This is one way of defining the aesthetic realm. To be honest, I am unsure if aesthetic experiences can in fact be easily separated from our more worldly experiences, but the assumption is useful to the kind of analysis I am performing.

Thanks for your feedback, by the way.

First, let me say a big thank you to my contributor! As you say, in your comment on my posting on Crane, this blog probably does not receive much attention. I’m just pleased to just have the three readers I currently have- and I’m including you in this number. (I hope that you are reading this posting at least to see if I reply to your comment.)

First, let me say that your response was hardly rude at all, except for its general tone of impatience. I do resent the implication that I am some fresh-faced sophomore; in fact, I am old as the hills – or at least I feel that way sometimes. The truth of the matter is that I took a long break from reading poetry, or anything at all for that matter, and am in the process of re-entering the literary world and so appreciate anything I can get in terms of reading tips or alternative ways of viewing the issues that interest me. I will be sure to glance through Louis MacNiece and Roethke, who I have so far overlooked.

About Crane himself – our dispute about his ‘value’ could only be settled by an external arbiter who would assess our respective arguments and choose the most rhetorically persuasive. I agree that there is no such thing as an objective science of aesthetics; my use of the term ‘science’ in my posting on Crane was perhaps ill-advised. What I am trying to do is more a study of the psychology of aesthetic appreciation. My posting “On Epistemic Hunger” comes closest, at the moment, to articulating what I want to say.

Having conceded that there is no objective way to determine how good Crane is, I cannot resist the lure of rhetoric. The most persuasive form of literary criticism, when it comes to poetry, is the close reading. Consider the poem “At Melville’s Tomb”:

Often beneath the wave, wide from the ledge
The dice of dead men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in the corridors of shell.

Then in the circuit of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides… High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

When I first read this poem I interpreted the figure “dice of dead men’s bones” in almost a literal fashion, that is, I imagined bones broken into fragments as small as dice. Since then, I have re-evaluated my understanding of the poem. It is indeed mystical, as you rightly pointed out. The first half of the poem describes a world that is pre-Melville, pre-religious, ruled by chance and dominated by death. However the second half of the poem presents a world that has discovered religion. It is perhaps Moby Dick that is “the circuit of one vast coil”. Melville, in his work, provides a kind of spiritual answer to death– though not one that is soothing and anodyne (the eyes are “frosted” and the answers “silent”). It is a kind of answer nevertheless. Mere map-making, Crane suggests, can go no farther in explaining the world than Melville’s work.

I admit that this interpretation came to me just now, while I sit tapping away in the middle of the night. It is a strange interpretation but it makes sense to me. Perhaps Crane is not wholly incoherent – I still believe he is flawed though: the word “dice” occurs, not as part of an image or image-complex, but because it connotes chance; the word “calyx” occurs (I think) because it suggests cornucopia; and “livid” occurs because it is near homonym of “lived”. Crane’s approach to language imparts a kind of opacity to his verse; it gives one the feeling that there is a kind of confusion at the level of sentence construction, simple grammar. Dylan Thomas has in fact been criticised for similar reasons.

However I admit that I like Crane more now than I did. As Blake says, “The man of fixed opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind”.

In the last couple of instalments, I have been discussing poetry that, for one reason or another, can be considered difficult. Poetry, like all the arts, is concerned with the ‘interesting’ – by this I mean to say that the reader should feel interested in the subject of the poem. However a feature of difficult poetry is that its subject is often not readily apparent. This raises a question: why should we invest mental effort in trying to understand something in which we have no immediate interest?

I believe that to answer this question, we need, first, to be careful about the term ‘understand’. When one first reads a poem, one forms an impression of it that is emotional and intuitive rather than rational. Then, when we interpret the poem, we in effect analyse our own subconscious reaction, trying to make explicit an implicit content. Conscious analysis can then feed back into our subconscious understanding, affecting the pleasure we derive from the text. To paraphrase Kant, aesthetic pleasure is derived from the play of mental faculties. I would like to say that successful, difficult poetry indeed communicates its meaning immediately – but in such a way that it bypasses the conscious mind. (We might in this connection think of TS Eliot’s concept of the “objective correlative”.) In this way a poem can be interesting even if we cannot immediately paraphrase it.

There is another reason why we might want to persevere with a difficult poet. We do so because she wins over our confidence. Our first impressions lead us to believe that the poet has something to say, something important or at least interesting (as well as the means to say it) even if on first reading one is unsure what that ‘something’ is. It is as though the reader and the writer enter into a contract in which the writer implicitly guarantees a return on the reader’s investment. The way in which a poet wins the reader’s confidence is by demonstrating that she understands and has assimilated the rules of poetic discourse, that she reads poetry as well as writing it.

The poet I intend to focus on in this posting is Kate Camp. My reasons for choosing her are not altogether arbitrary. Camp is a contemporary New Zealand poet and by talking about her I am supporting my local community. Moreover, Camp is also very good. When I picked up her book in the bookshop, I immediately felt that this was a poet I would like to know better. Camp understands how to write poetry. She might not employ rhyme and metre, but her poems are nevertheless highly structured, each one a series of striking images that follow each other like clauses in a well-ordered sentence. Her poems possess the unity of a single coherent statement.

The poem that made the strongest impression on me when I picked up her book is the “The Tired Atheist”. I shall quote and then interpret it.

The Tired Atheist

In my hand I hold a mouse
a golden labrador
and a cat, all the same size.

Yes I assume the mythical plenty of a god
where my eyes look become green hills
red houses, skies necessarily blue.

In Cordoba the smell of shit and orange blossom
TV’s await the pope, that puff of smoke
who knows what they burn to make it black or white.

Of course I don’t want to live apart from God’s grace.
What kind of idiot would force air from their lungs
or retch up water?

No, behold the mismade agonies
of those attempt to hear with the tongue
or eat with the eyes, forcing crusts of bread under the lids.

Behold the quiet substance of their rooms
the hollow air in the cavities of their bodies
the finity of their lives, tasting like morning

now you tell me, if one knows everything
and one knows nothing
what the fuck are they going to talk about?

The poem is difficult but not too difficult. Its central idea is that God, being infinite, is too large a being for a mere human to relate to in any kind of meaningful way– the scale is wrong. However this is not the only idea in the poem. Structurally, the poem can be described as dialectical: each stanza break represents an ellipsis in an argument Camp is having with someone else. In the first two stanzas Camp pretends (for the sake of her argument) to be God, but in the third, she abruptly alters her perspective, suggesting rather the remoteness (epistemological and otherwise) of God from ordinary people. In the fourth, Camp leaps again, replying to an unheard interlocutor that “of course” she doesn’t want to live apart from God’s grace. To do so, as she suggests in the fifth, would be unnatural. However, in the sixth stanza, she describes the existence of atheists (who are hollow because they do not believe in souls) in such a way as to suggest that it is non-believers who possess a form of grace, perhaps because the problem of God does not trouble them. Camp thus destabilizes the concept of grace. Grace, she implies, is possessed by those who are not bothered by the problem of God; and these people are to be envied. Camp, though, is indeed bothered by the problem of God (or perhaps by God-botherers) and in the last stanza she returns to her central argument and states it with some force.

The poem is thus a logical sequence of ideas, and the structure of the poem underscores its logic. Camp’s use of ellipsis reduces the argument to its bones, while her use of imagery brings each step vividly to life. This is a poem that can appeal directly to its reader’s unconscious mind. It helps, though, if we are familiar with the tradition of which the poem is a part. “The Tired Atheist” is highly reminiscent, particularly in its second stanza, of another major New Zealand poet, Alan Curnow, who in his later poetry often ‘assumed the mythical plenty of a god’, in “A Touch of the Hand” for instance, using solipsism as a way to explore questions of agnosticism and mortality. Camp’s poem can be considered a kind of gloss on late Curnow. (I like this because it suggests that there may be more subtle ways for a poet to advertise his or her New Zealand heritage than by talking about the toi-toi.)

Camp’s brilliance lies partly in her vivid use of imagery and partly in the way she presents a complex, nuanced perspective in a structured form. And her perspective is interesting – it reflects the kinds of conflicts that we face in everyday life. This is why I enjoy her poetry so much.

Before I start talking about Hart Crane, I need to clear something up. What is the desideratum of this rambling, inconsistent and potentially endless treatise? There are two ways of writing about art and literature, a subjective approach or an objective approach. One writes a subjective aesthetic theory when one describes the art that one likes or dislikes and then formalizes one’s judgements into an organised system (or, alternative, seeks to justify one’s own artistic output). I am aiming at something else. I want to write an objective science of aesthetics. True, artistic appreciation is necessarily subjective, varying from person to person, but the cognitive processes that underlie artistic appreciation are, I believe, universal and susceptible to analysis. I could waste my time arguing that “Home and Away” is banal or that “American Idol” is stupid but this would ignore the fact that millions love these programs. A scientific theory of aesthetics should simultaneously explain why some people love Thomas Pynchon and others love Star Wars. Perhaps a better term than “objective” would be “inter-subjective”. On the one hand, the theory requires that one understand and analyse one’s own response to cultural texts; on the other it requires that one project oneself into the minds of others to determine their reasons for liking some particular cultural text.

The reason why I have taken some pains to set out my methodology is that I am about to break my own rules. Hart Crane has been a major influence on many twentieth century poets and this suggests perhaps that he has some ‘objective’ value. But I must admit that I don’t like him very much. The following, then, is an entirely subjective appraisal, although in the fashion of all belles-lettres I shall try to defend my stance.

Hart Crane was born in 1899 and died at the age of 32 by committing suicide (as so many great writers have). During his lifetime, living mostly in New York, he published two volumes of poetry “White Towers” and “The Bridge”. Like John Ashbery, Crane was gay, and (also like Ashbery) Crane wrote highly difficult poetry. There is a connection here. Neither poet was a public homosexual, and it may be that alienation and habits of self-concealment informed their poetry and even their decisions to write verse in the first place.

Although Crane is difficult, this is not the reason why I have a problem with his poetry. Difficulty alone is not a fault. “The Waste Land” is (apparently) a difficult poem but this does not stop critics from hailing it at as the greatest of the twentieth century. In Crane’s case, though, what seems like difficulty may simply be sloppiness. Consider the following passage from “The Tunnel”.

And why do I often meet your visage here,
Your eyes like agate lanterns–on and on
Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?
–And did their riding eyes right through your side,
And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?
And Death, aloft, –gigantically down
Probing through you– toward me, O evermore!
And when they dragged your retching flesh,
Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore–
That last night on the ballot rounds, did you
Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?

In this extract, Crane imagines encountering Edgar Allan Poe on the subway and alludes to the circumstances of Poe’s death, the morning after he was found wandering Baltimore in a delirious state. The figure to which I would particularly like to draw your attention is “their eyes like unwashed platters”. Presumably the “they” referred to are the witnesses to Poe’s last day; by comparing their eyes to platters Crane evokes the anxiety of being an object of others unsympathetic attention (of being a cynosure, perhaps?) But why does he use the adjective “unwashed”? It adds nothing to the image. It is as if Crane needed a trochee to complete the line and simply plucked one out of the air.

It occurs to me as I write this that perhaps “their eyes” are unwashed because they are not crying, although they should be. This does not undermine the point that I am making however. The simile is incoherent. “And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride” seems to imply that unwashed platters often ride. “The Waste Land’ may be difficult but the images it contains are always crisp and definite. This image is not.

In case it is suspected that I am simply choosing a weak line, let me say that fuzziness pervades much of Crane’s writing. He seems to choose words more for their sound than for their sense. Perhaps this musicality is the reason why he is considered a ‘poet’s poet’ (he was highly admired by figures as diverse as Robert Lowell, John Berryman and James K. Baxter): perhaps other poets learned from Crane the all-important skill of how to put a line together. In other words, perhaps they admired his craft rather than his poetry. I don’t know.

If someone who likes Crane wants to put me in my place, they can post a cogent defence of him as a comment on this blog.