[lit-ideas] Re: Inner Moral :Law
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 05:12:31 EDT
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.
>
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