One Hand
Clapping:
The Taoe of Music
WholeArts and
The Psychic Internet is proud to present the
"Preface" and "Part One" of this
remarkable book by Daniel d'Quincy. "One Hand
Clapping: The Tao of Music," originally published by
WholeArts in 1991, is a book-length essay on the
performance of music from the perspective of Eastern
philosophy and religion. Mr. d'Quincy is a noted
composer, musician, author, inventor, educator, speaker,
and photographer. Please visit his unique music sites at WholeArts: syNThony, and the WholeArts Online Music Conservatory.
Page 18
Even one’s
professional career has become a will o’ the wisp.
The defining lifetime job is also a thing of the past; we
assume professions like Imelda tries on shoes. How be
defined by a profession, when professions come and go in
step with the very short lifecycles of computer software
programs? It takes a lifetime to train a musician but
only ten minutes at the end of a running contract to
replace an orchestra with one man on a synthesizer. A man
is a musician until his last paid performance, after
which he may be, say, a computer programmer. Imagine
somebody saying to Mozart, destitute as he was, “You
could be a lawyer!” There was a time when a musician
had the freedom as well as the dignity to starve.
In actual fact,
individuality when really achieved has always been, and
continues to be, a suspect virtue for us. We are in the
pre-industrial and romantic habit of extolling the
originality of the artist, but today people wonder if the
last century didn’t take that notion just a little
too far. In fact, as much as we assert our individuality,
we also fear it and detest it. In the end, we treat it as
something that is subversively unpatriotic.[1] And since we have no real participation as
citizens in a larger community, we are besieged daily
with the tired silliness of nationalism. Especially in
America, at every turn, somebody is declaring that “Now
is the time for all of us to come together as a
nation.” Sadly, none but the ideologues know what it
means to be an American. This is the land of polls, but
polls are manipulated tendentiously for every nefarious
purpose of profit and plunder. Opinion is manufactured
along with taste according to the whims of corporate
capital, and so it is changeable in seemingly arbitrary
ways. Who knows really what the “silent
majority” is thinking? And if I don’t know what
they are thinking, do I know what I am
thinking? The nation’s leaders are stumped on that
one.
Meanwhile, the
“mass society” is in the saddle and rides
mankind. The abundance of individuals, and the power of
their inter-connective technologies, reduce people to
numbers and statistics. Our doctors treat us as
liabilities in an insurance pool. And their medicine is
designed accordingly. Consequently, we’ve lost all
sense of being “in” our bodies. In an era when
body parts are interchangeable, even in the case of the
heart itself, and when transplants are attempted even
between species, only the brain remains as something that
seems still essential to us with respect to our identity.
But the ruling scientific and medical paradigms invoke
mechanical explanations of the functioning of the body
and the brain alike, and now the computer model of
intelligence is nearly accepted as dogma. Otherwise
intelligent people speak about transferring human
identity to computers in a soon to be realized “Age
of Spiritual Machines.”[2] A
relatively recent anthology entitled “The
Mind’s Eye” reveals that many reputable
scientists see no need, and can find no basis, in
principle, to discriminate between a human and a machine.
These people do
not comprehend the meaning of irreducible obscurity
because they have defined it out of existence. The
mechanical reduction of biological organisms is a
particular instance of a general climate of opinion,
originating in but not now restricted to the West.
Metaphysical materialism recognizes “matter,”
which is all that matters, and which moves and changes
with respect only for the “laws” of quantum
“mechanics.” According to this general
orientation, and as already noted above, any form of
philosophical or metaphysical spiritualism is today
considered inherently suspect. It is not now
intellectually respectable to have a conception of
identity that possibly incorporates but also reliably
transcends all of the physical parts of the physical
organism, including the brain.
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