Okay. I give. I plead extreme stress as cause of my recent accident and my Mother's cancer. I cannot for the life of me imagine or think what "lk" is. Exactly *how* ignorant that is, I don't know yet. Some kind soul clue me in? Julie Krueger longing to swim laps ========Original Message======== Subj: [lit-ideas] Re: Inner Moral :Law Date: 8/4/05 10:41:49 P.M. Central Daylight Time From: _Ursula@xxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx) To: _lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx) Sent on: So that's what Mike wrote. I wrote a paper on Turnbull's book in some undergrad moment ages ago. I remember disagreeing with the person (not Turnbull himself) who wrote in the liner notes on the back cover that the Ik had lost their community because they stopped caring. I thought surely it was obvious that they'd stopped caring because they'd lost their community. It's a very depressing book ( The Mountain People) but worth the time and effort and anxiety. Ursula North Bay Mike Geary wrote: > Sorry about sending an empty message. It wasn't empty when I thought > I was sending it. Don't know what happened. Distracted. Life gets > complicated. It was a Senior moment. I'm am idiot, , etc. Anyway the > thing was a response to Yost's being surprised at civilized behavior. > I am too. I usually expect Ik behavior, which we're all familiar > with, either personally through the Republican Party or vicariously > through Public Television documentaries. For those daytime drunks > among us -- musicians mostly, though God knows, they don't seem to > know day from night, I send the following commentary about the Iks > and music to help reestablish a established point: > > http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi798.htm > Pathologist Lewis Thomas talks about the Ik. The Ik do not sing. The > Ik were nomad hunters in Northern Uganda. The government made their > hunting grounds into a national park and relocated them. They had to > take up farming. > > In 1972 anthropologist C.M. Turnbull wrote about the Ik in their new > life. They laugh only at one another's misfortunes. They teach their > children to steal food from the old. They are solitary and > ill-humored. "They breed without love," says Thomas, and "they > defecate on one another's doorsteps." > > The social roles of the Ik have been unthreaded. And with that, > they've lost all sense of community. Each Ik is now an isolated > one-man tribe unto himself. Interdependency is gone; and the Ik no > longer sing. > > So Thomas turns his attention to animal and insect music-making. What > does he find? He finds that music always accompanies community. At > first we hear only babble. It takes patience to sift out syntax and > sense. But syntax and sense is there. > > Termites constantly rap their heads against the floor. It sounds > random and senseless. Yet when biologists record the sound, and study > it, they find pattern, variety, even phrasing. > > Ask yourself how an alien might react to a Bartok quartet. I can > answer that one. I was alien to string quartets the first time I heard > one. I didn't hear music. I heard only the cacophony of termites > banging their heads. > > Bartok became clear to me in 1952 when I made a strange experiment. I > covered my ears for a moment and only watched the four players. > Suddenly I saw conversation. I saw a ballet. I saw the players trading > ideas. After that the music made sense. I've loved Bartok ever since. > > Now I know what I'd really seen in that instant. I'd seen what we all > crave -- what we cannot live without. I'd seen community. For the next > 40 years I constantly involved myself in music. Choirs, chamber > groups, opera -- always finding community in the intimacy of music-making > > Thomas takes a term from physics, the musical term ensemble. An > ensemble is a group of atoms whose individual action seems chaotic, > but whose aggregate action displays order and sense. > > That's what the Ik have lost. They have no ensemble. Their old roles > in one another's lives are gone. The threads of community have been > pulled out. Each Ik is what you or I might become if we let ourselves > be stripped of community. > > And the surest sign of that isolation is almost too terrifying to > think about. It is that the Ik no longer sing. > > I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're > interested in the way inventive minds work. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, > digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html > ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html