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 28
In the Bible, the
division of light from darkness comes soon enough in the
fourth verse of Genesis, after the creation of light in
the third verse. Could not the interval have been
extended just a little while longer? Does not the human
soul yearn to linger and gaze on the marvel of chaos
– this being perhaps an aspect of that irreducible
waywardness referred to above? Chaos has perchance a
beauty all its own. But the western God will have none of
that. The lines in His Universe are drawn from the
absolute beginning, once and for all. Our job is simply
to live with it, now and forever. We dare not dawdle in
childish scorn for established verities.
No sooner had
Adam been created than he met with his first assignment.
He was required to name every one of the other creatures
that were ordained by God to share with him in the
delights of the Garden of Eden. Imagine the enormity of
the task. What more could a serpent do to spoil the fun?
Think of it! Scarcely a day old, and already Adam had to
name each and every one of the earth’s creatures.
“All things bright and beautiful. All creatures
great and small. All things wise and wonderful. The Lord
God made them all.” Creation was the easy part. Try
naming them one by one!
But isn’t
that exactly what you actually had to do very soon
after you were born? The individual human consciousness
(and also human consciousness as a species phenomenon)
dawns in a world that is formally undefined – a kind
of void. Every baby is born into a world that is, from a
subjective point of view, completely featureless –
colors without shapes and shapes without colors.[1] The baby has to learn who is mommy, and who
is daddy. More importantly, it must learn that this is
mine and that is yours, which more than anything else
helps to condition the understanding regarding the
distinction between “you and me.”
The individual
(and collective) human consciousness fills the void with
names and categories. It’s called drawing the line.
Making definitions is the quintessential human faculty -
our share, as it were, in the act of Creation. This is
the clear implication of the self-flattering verse that
says, “Let us make man in our image.” We share
in Diving Good Judgment and so, presumably, can be relied
on to contrive the “right” names.
Moreover, both
with the advent of the human being in nature, and with
the newborn baby in the world, knowledge begins to be
more conscious. And this is vital for us to consider in
this inquiry, for when knowledge becomes fully conscious,
it becomes knowledge for the one that knows. Then,
not only do I know, but also I know that I
know. And in this way, in psychological terms, the
so-called “Ego” is formed. “Ego is a Latin
word for “I.”
Is it the Ego
that we have been looking for all along? Will the Ego
answer to our search for identity? It is the Ego that is
conscious of, and for, itself. But the concept of a
knowing subject poses a peculiar difficulty. Socrates
says “Know thyself,” and this actually tends to
disrupt the psychological orientation of the Ego in a
unique and disconcerting way. For in attempting to know
itself as the knowing subject, the Ego gets lost in an
endlessly receding pattern of identities within
identities within identities. Thus:
There was a young man who said,
"Though,
It seems that I know that I know,
What I would like to see,
Is the eye that sees me,
When I know that I know that I know."
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