The Embodied Will.

A few days ago, archeologists announced that they have found a flute in a German cave.  This flute is approximately 35,000 years old.  The significance of such a find is that it is from the prehistoric era.  It blows my mind that in a time where basic survival was the daily goal, people found a reason to create things that would aid in expression.  Or in other words, people sought to create an aesthetic means in order to reach the sublime.  Now of course, art (as we understand and experience it today) and language weren’t as dichotomized back then.  Art was not seen as “art” but rather an expression of what is.  People drew in order to record their stories/histories, not because they wanted to hang it in some gallery.

The profundity, then, of this archeological find is that it hints at something I’ve been feeling for a while.  That art, or creative expression, is just as necessary as the basic necessities of survival: food, water, etc.  I can imagine the guy/girl who made that flute going off to gather some food, maybe hunt down a swine.  Then come back, roast it and eat with fellow tribesman.  After they’re all full and merry, I imagine some dancing to happen, some percussive instruments laying down a groove, and this guy to get up and just play.  Maybe he’ll express something happy, maybe something sad.  I mean, just take a listen to the clip of someone playing a reconstructed model of the flute.  It sounds beautiful and sophisticated.  I was nearly brought to tears just listening to it.

The point is: we humans aren’t just about survival, we are about creation.

To see this early in the archeological record suggests it might be a fundamental aspect of human nature… It does at least hint that music lies close to our foundation of common humanity.

What is it about this incessant need we have to express?  And what is it about our insatiable drive to constantly create new means that enable us to do so?

Now I’ll be honest with you… the fact that it’s a flute excites me.  I’m a musician, so the bias is obvious.  Personally, music profoundly embodies the human will more so than other art forms.  My reasoning you ask?  Sound most resembles spirit.  After all, sound is nothing more than compressed air.  When it is projected at you, it quite literally passes through you.  And perhaps the most amazing thing of all, it dissipates thereafter.  It comes and it goes.  It is felt, but also invisible.

So to realize that music was and still is that powerful, even to a prehistoric man, elates me.  Actually, it’s sublime.  Luckily enough, I read a beautiful passage from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy that helped contextualize this whole discovery for me.  Hope you enjoy:

Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as these are related to the particular things.  Its universality, however, is by no means the empty universality of abstraction, but is of quite a different kind, and is united with thorough and distinct definiteness.  In this respect it resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all a priori, and yet are not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly determinate.  All possible efforts, excitements and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere form, without the material; always according to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon – of which melodies reproduce the very soul and essence as it were, without the body.

This deep relation which music bears to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any event or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it; as also the fact that whoever gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony seems to see all the possible events of life and the world take place in himself.

. . . .

We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will: and this is the reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real life and the of the world, at once appear with higher significance; all the more so, to be sure, in proportion as its melody is analagous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon.  It rests upon this that we are able to set a poem to music as a song, or a perceptible representation as a pantomime, or both as an opera.

. . . .

Music . . . gives the inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Learn How to Laugh!

Lift up your hearts, my fellows, higher and higher!
And the legs – you mustn’t forget those!
Lift up your legs too, accomplished dancers;
or, to top it all, stand on your heads!

This crown of the man who knows laughter,
this rose-chaplet crown: I have placed it on my head,
I have consecrated laughter.
But not a single soul have I found strong enough to join me.

Zarathustra the dancer, the fleet Zarathustra,
waving his wings, beckoning with his wings to all birds around him,
poised for flight, casual and cavalier-

Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the laughing truthsayer,
never out of sorts, never insisting, lover of leaps and tangents:
I myself have put on this crown!

This crown of the laughter-loving, this rose-chaplet crown:
to you, my fellows, do I fling this crown!  Laughter I declare to be blessed;
you who aspire to greatness, learn how to laugh!

Zarathustra
Part IV, “Of Greater Men”