In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on December 3, 2008

The past couple of months have been insanely busy, and the pace will keep up for the next month at least.  Part of this comes from the “usual” things (teaching, writing, consulting, etc.), but a lot of it, for the past couple of weeks and the next two weeks, comes from a hectic concert schedule (November 20th at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, November 28th in Ottawa, December 4-9th in Mexico, and December 17th back in Ottawa).  All of this, when added to conferences, papers and the usual yetchety of scholarly life has, unfortunately, meant that I have had little time for blogging and other activities (including housework!).  Now, I’m not raising this as an “excuse” or “looking for pity”, I’m bringing it up because I think that there is an interesting observation to be made about what different activities can act as a “ground” for people when life gets away from them.  For me, that “ground” is in performing Baroque music.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how our culture operates as what Charlie Laughlin calls a “monophasic” society.  Put simply, that means that the social structures in place support a limited conceptualization of consciousness and, in our case, tend towards the “material world” as the absolute “ground of being” (i.e. the only “real” world).  Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m a great believer in the idea that people need to act in the “real world” (it’s one of the reasons why I like consulting).  At the same time, I have never bought the reductionist Marxian idea that the sum total of “reality” is in the material world: Man does not live by bread (or widgets) alone.

What is, perhaps, more germane, is the stance we take towards whatever we perceive, however vaguely, as being our “ground of being”.  Is it a refuge we “escape” to?  Is it a guide to how we should act in the “real” world?  Is it something that is separate from us as individuals, created by us as groups, or flowing from “outside”? Does it flow through us or is it something we only vaguely perceive that is wholly outside of us?

If this sounds like mysticism, that’s because it is.  One of the greatest problems we in the West have is that we have tended towards separating the study of “reality” into component parts created by our own cultural taxonomies.  “Mysticism”, if anyone bothers to read the classics in the field (especially Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill), involves three, general components: a “perception” of a ground of being, a discipline and/or vehicle to experience that ground of being, and a set of interpretive schemas for comprehending that experience.

Now, this really isn’t any different from how monophasic cultures handle the “real world”.  For example, think about how we handle the issue of looking for a job: a perception of a ground of being (“employed”), a discipline or vehicle to experience it (Job search techniques, resumes, credentials, etc.), and interpretive schemas (“narratives”) for comprehending the experience (employed = “good”, unemployment = “bad”; see also here and here).  The process is the same, but the focus is different (we are, after all, an evolutionarily parsimonious species).

Let me return, for a minute, to the questions I asked earlier about the stance we take to our ground(s) of being.  If we use the process outlined above as an analytic guide, a pattern which stays the same even as the content changes, all the possibilities I mentioned are potentially valid perceptions (“valid” in the sense of potentiality).  Indeed, the potentiality ranges from massively life reinforcing to the operation of death cults (for one interesting example, see Tarek Fatah’s Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic lllusion of an Islamic State).  “Mysticism” is not simply the study of a bunch of “visionaries” – it is part of the study of how humans make “sense” of reality and, to quote Geertz, “cloth[e] these conceptions with such an aura of factuality” that they become “real”.

Now, there are a couple of observations I want to make.

First, regardless of the content of the process, it does appear as if humans wither and die (sometimes emotionally / psychologically, sometimes physically) when we are blocked from our grounds of being, however we perceive them.  Think of the phrase “going postal” or the high death rate amongst male retirees in North America when “the Job” is one’s ground of being.

Second, we as a species have a tendency to construct our individual identity around a ground-focused symbol – “I am a(n) ____”.  This act of naming places us within a semantic web of both meaning and obligation, acting as a focus, a structure and a set of self / group imposed limitations on action.  In most cases, and this I personally find tragic, the “name” is static – a state of “being” – rather than dynamic – a state of becoming.  Even when it contains dynamic elements, they are almost always linear – “I am becoming a(n) ____” – as if there is only a finite potential inside each human; our “names” become our Wyrd.

Which brings me back to mysticism.  Mystics and Shamans see “behind the veil” (if you know this reference, I don’t have to explain it and, if you don’t, I can’t explain it so that you will really understand it).  In their perceptions, they leave the world of “names” and perceive part of the “back stage” of “reality”; an experienced location (?) that is the essence of the dynamic and potential (cf Eliade’s Shamanism), in an initiatory process that is often likened to dying and being reborn.  They return to this “world” using a discipline / vehicle – “ritualized” activities that they have constructed / adopted, that allow them to re-enter this world of dynamism and potential (cf Duerr’s Dreamtime); an action that allows them to “renew” themselves.

Or, perhaps, I should say “an action that allows us to renew ourselves” since “mystic” is a as much a “name” as any other one, and the process is species wide.  We all practice a form of “mysticism”, at least we do if we wish to live our lives to the fullest of our potentials, whether that is the mysticism of baseball, scholarship, an academic discipline or, in my case, of Baroque music.

Indeed, as I started to write this entry, I was listening to Christ Lag in Todes Banden on my Choir’s recently released CD (okay, shameless plug – it should be available online soon).  If you have never heard the piece, it is worth listening to since much of what I am trying to say in this entry is captured in the first choral movement in the music and regardless of the words.  I put up the version below (not by my choir) to illustrate this.

And on that note, it is time to finish up my comments on the forthcoming CTLab Symposium of Antoine Bousquet’s The Scientific Way of War and pack for a 5:30 am departure tomorrow for Mexico.

Category: Music
Tags: Ground of being, Mysticism