The Aesthetic Dilemma
Aug. 19th, 2004 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowIn response to my post on Petula Clark, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sunlizzard raised a question:
"I'd be willing to bet that you have also trained your ear to intentionally not listen at that particular level as well, making it an option you consciously choose or not, as your listening needs (or wants) change...but.... what if you couldn't turn it OFF, or didn't know how to 'throw the switch'... or even that there was a switch?
I've had this discussion with Guidz, who discovered (and not pleasantly) that once she had learned aural analysis, she couldn't listen to anything without that 'running commentary' existing side by side with the music itself. I could relate to that; when I was first learning some of the basic mechanics of writing, I found the (largely unwanted) Inner Editor perching on my shoulder, distracting and interfering, when all I wanted to do was enjoy the dang story. However, I did eventually learn to throw the switch--bug off, IE!--or at least reduce it to a concurrent whisper, rarely all that annoying. I think Guido will learn the same thing. Just takes time and practice.
What say you?"
On one level, the answer is easy. My critical abilities as regards music are undoubtedly far inferior to Guidz'; the last time I took a music class, I was in 6th grade. What I know, I've learned from (a few) books and from (much) listening, and I'm nowhere near the point she's reached. The same applies to my appreciation of literature; I can - more or less - follow, say, Wayne Booth's theoretical discussions, but it wouldn't occur to me to apply his methods unprompted. To analyze a work of art requires me to make a conscious effort, and I can lapse into - in fact, I default to - uncritical enjoyment without any effort.
On another level, your own experience suggests that, to some extent, it's possible to gain control over one's critical faculties - to "throw the switch", as you say. Not completely - works that you once enjoyed can fall down the rathole, never to be appreciated again - but well enough to regain something like the old appreciation, transposed to a higher level. That particular crisis, in these areas, I don't know whether I've passed.
What I do know is mathematics. The analogy isn't going to be perfect, because, though mathematics has a strong aesthetic component, it has other elements as well; but I think it's close enough.
Consider the following mathematical puzzle:
Write down a number with two or more digits, but make sure the first and last digits are different. Now write it down backwards. Take the difference. Now, add up the digits of the difference. If the sum has more than one digit, add them up. Keep going until you get a single digit. Then that digit is 9.
Now, the first time I saw that, I was impressed, and I spent a fair amount of time playing with it - constructing other, similar tricks, and playing with the underlying ideas. Now, though, it doesn't elicit more than a smile, if that much, from me. It's too simple, from my present vantage.
On the other hand, a few years back, another professor showed me this:
Let A and B be two positive whole numbers - for simplicity, let's say A=5 and B=7. Now double B, over and over. Sooner or later, you'll get a number that begins with the digits of A. In this example, you get 7, 14, 28, 56 - aha! That's the one. But it would work if you chose A=723 and B=1125, or any numbers you please. (It might take a lot of doublings; there's no way to predict how many.)
He challenged me to explain why this happens. When I confessed failure, he showed me why. The proof came out of left field, using techniques from topology, of all things, but it was so simple and so beautiful that all I could do was shake my head and say, "That is slick!" And I still think so; the years since haven't jaded me on it.
And so the question becomes: would I sacrifice the ability to appreciate that proof to regain the pleasure I took in that first trick, so many years ago? Not on your life! The benefit far outweighs the cost.
Is the analogy close enough?
sunlizzard raised a question:"I'd be willing to bet that you have also trained your ear to intentionally not listen at that particular level as well, making it an option you consciously choose or not, as your listening needs (or wants) change...but.... what if you couldn't turn it OFF, or didn't know how to 'throw the switch'... or even that there was a switch?
I've had this discussion with Guidz, who discovered (and not pleasantly) that once she had learned aural analysis, she couldn't listen to anything without that 'running commentary' existing side by side with the music itself. I could relate to that; when I was first learning some of the basic mechanics of writing, I found the (largely unwanted) Inner Editor perching on my shoulder, distracting and interfering, when all I wanted to do was enjoy the dang story. However, I did eventually learn to throw the switch--bug off, IE!--or at least reduce it to a concurrent whisper, rarely all that annoying. I think Guido will learn the same thing. Just takes time and practice.
What say you?"
On one level, the answer is easy. My critical abilities as regards music are undoubtedly far inferior to Guidz'; the last time I took a music class, I was in 6th grade. What I know, I've learned from (a few) books and from (much) listening, and I'm nowhere near the point she's reached. The same applies to my appreciation of literature; I can - more or less - follow, say, Wayne Booth's theoretical discussions, but it wouldn't occur to me to apply his methods unprompted. To analyze a work of art requires me to make a conscious effort, and I can lapse into - in fact, I default to - uncritical enjoyment without any effort.
On another level, your own experience suggests that, to some extent, it's possible to gain control over one's critical faculties - to "throw the switch", as you say. Not completely - works that you once enjoyed can fall down the rathole, never to be appreciated again - but well enough to regain something like the old appreciation, transposed to a higher level. That particular crisis, in these areas, I don't know whether I've passed.
What I do know is mathematics. The analogy isn't going to be perfect, because, though mathematics has a strong aesthetic component, it has other elements as well; but I think it's close enough.
Consider the following mathematical puzzle:
Write down a number with two or more digits, but make sure the first and last digits are different. Now write it down backwards. Take the difference. Now, add up the digits of the difference. If the sum has more than one digit, add them up. Keep going until you get a single digit. Then that digit is 9.
Now, the first time I saw that, I was impressed, and I spent a fair amount of time playing with it - constructing other, similar tricks, and playing with the underlying ideas. Now, though, it doesn't elicit more than a smile, if that much, from me. It's too simple, from my present vantage.
On the other hand, a few years back, another professor showed me this:
Let A and B be two positive whole numbers - for simplicity, let's say A=5 and B=7. Now double B, over and over. Sooner or later, you'll get a number that begins with the digits of A. In this example, you get 7, 14, 28, 56 - aha! That's the one. But it would work if you chose A=723 and B=1125, or any numbers you please. (It might take a lot of doublings; there's no way to predict how many.)
He challenged me to explain why this happens. When I confessed failure, he showed me why. The proof came out of left field, using techniques from topology, of all things, but it was so simple and so beautiful that all I could do was shake my head and say, "That is slick!" And I still think so; the years since haven't jaded me on it.
And so the question becomes: would I sacrifice the ability to appreciate that proof to regain the pleasure I took in that first trick, so many years ago? Not on your life! The benefit far outweighs the cost.
Is the analogy close enough?
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Nine!
Date: 2004-08-19 10:32 pm (UTC)Anyway, back to the subject.
> To analyze a work of art requires me to make a conscious effort, and I can lapse into - in fact, I default to - uncritical enjoyment without any effort. <
I think the dividing line comes about when one is actively studying something, making the effort to train one's mind to absorb the knowledge to the point of it becoming second nature. The inability to "throw the switch" lies somewhere between the active study and the full absorption: One is too aware of the new knowledge, and thus tends to mentally trip over it. Eventually, one can dampen down that effect to a simple awareness, tucked in the background--the concurrent whisper.
With me, what drove me highest up the wall was viewpoint. I found it relatively easy to grasp in principle, but struggled mightily with the smooth execution of it. However, once I'd worked with it long enough myself (grumbling all the way, early on), I actually began to see it in all its glorious nuance--and usages, and advantages, and, and, and...! Wonderful bit of mechanics, viewpoint. But....
Then I could not escape noticing it, painfully so. VP errors threw me "out of the story" so hard I felt for bruises. Even just awkward shifts--not true error, but merely not well done--disconnected me from what I read. I actually complained to my friend/editor/writing-coach that this had "ruined" my enjoyment of reading! She, wisely, assured me that this, too, would pass. And it did, as did the over-processed, over-awareness of most of the other writing mechanics I learned at that time. A blatant typo or technical flaw will still make me twitch; it just no longer stops me dead. Well, usually, anyway.
Learning some of this foundational stuff (I emphasize some!) did give me a deeper regard for good work, with the ability to notice particularly well done turns, though. Knowing why something is really, really good is a kick and a half; the flip-side of cringing at error is the appreciative gasp at the exceptional.
> What I know [of music analysis], I've learned from (a few) books and from (much) listening, <
Self-guided study is probably easier to back away from than formal technical study, I would think. The ability to "default to uncritical enjoyment" may be more likely, IOW, when the point of heightened awareness is a search for enhanced enjoyment as an end in and of itself. You choose to focus more intently on listening at times, and it's simply a matter of choosing (again) at other times to relax the intensity, soften the focus, and return to a lighter level of listening.
> And so the question becomes: would I sacrifice the ability to appreciate that proof to regain the pleasure I took in that first trick, so many years ago? <
I'm in complete agreement with you--Not on your life! I say that, though, from the perspective of having learned how to choose, and therefore control, the level at which I read. Had I been unable to gag-order the Inner Editor, I'd have been one highly unhappy student of the craft of writing.
Before I had sufficient knowledge of technique and craft and such, I do think I had a good instinct, a decent radar for quality--and certainly, a driving curiosity for the why and how of it, which is why I pursued the further understanding. It's not as if I now can somehow "un-know" what I learned; I do still know it. Perhaps it's akin to just choosing not to allow it to demand the forefront of the focus, when I'm reading with the "switch" OFF. The awareness is still there, it's simply relegated to secondary notice, and not primary.
Re: Nine!
Date: 2004-08-20 12:39 pm (UTC)"Casting out nines". Yeah, it's a very old technique; I'd be willing to bet it appeared in Fibonacci's Liber Abaci, which was the first extended discussion of decimal notation to appear in Europe, in 1202. I give that a good bit of attention in my history of math class; the possibility of simple error-checking techniques was one of the major benefits of the switchover to decimal notation.