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 29
Are you the one
that knows, or the one that knows that you know? Are you
both? Children play at this game almost instinctively as
if part of the essence of being human is to do so. In a
singsong voice, they say, “I know that you know that
I know that you know that…” A breakfast cereal
used to show on the box a picture of a little boy sitting
at a table with the very same box of cereal in his hand;
and on that box was the same picture, showing a little
boy sitting at a table with the box of cereal; and on
that box there was again the very same picture; and so
on. We search for the knowing subject, the Ego, in a hall
of mirrors. It appears like the elaborately carved ivory
boxes within boxes that are a specialty craft of China.
The Ego as a
verifiable knowing subject eludes us. This is a
substantial social problem, for our failure to locate the
Ego is a failure to locate the responsible human being.
As a result, we simply do not know how to assess blame
when somebody does something untoward.[1] Psychiatrists, and psychologists have
exercised their wits on the problem, and have for the
most part given it up, treating in a mechanical way the
overtly grossly external manifestations of the Ego. In
the place of understanding, they have settled on chemical
palliatives and symptomatic controls.
We should have
expected as much. Our real identity eluded us in the
dimensions of space and time, and now we are finding it
just as illusive in a less tangible psychological realm.
Our individual identity seems always to recede infinitely
in an inward direction when we try to locate it precisely
and nail it down. This avenue of approach therefore gives
us no easy prospect about which we can be fairly
optimistic. The Ego turns out to be just another word
that seems more to hide than disclose the precise nature
and location of our true identity.
There is in this
fact a great lesson to be had in the art of life. To put
it in grammatical terms, you cannot take your individual
identity, which is the “subject” (i.e. the
knowing subject) of your life’s figurative
“sentence,” and turn that “subject”
effectively into an “object.” In other words, you
cannot be objectified. This may come as an entirely
welcome revelation to people who have never yet realized
it, since anything that cannot be objectified cannot also
be objectionable.
We ought really
to consider if the elusiveness of the self is such a
terrible thing. After all, the game of elaborating more
and more levels is, in an important way, part of the
process of evolution itself. As ontology recapitulates
phylogeny in the development of the foetus, each
successive stage in evolution is incorporated into the
next stage. Thus, in the earliest phases of growth, the
human foetus looks almost identical to the tadpole. Later
it takes on reptilian characteristics, and before too
long after that, simian. Eventually it comes around,
thank heavens, to the required configuration for a
healthy and bubbling little bundle of joy.
But nothing is
ever really lost from the genetic memory of life. We
share the greater part of our spiraling DNA with the
other creatures of the world, just as our personal
identity shares in an inwardly spiraling series of
dimensions that encompass in sum the definition of our
being and existence. So-called critical or negative
philosophy reflects this through the tripartite division
of its logic into thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Ultimately, it can countenance no propositions that begin
ex nihilo. The structural pattern appears to be a
characteristic not only of the dialectical mode of
thought itself, but even of the organ of thinking, the
brain. Here, the synthesizing element, the cerebrum,
post-dates in its development, and also literally covers
or caps, the medulla and the cerebellum.
[1] This is but another aspect of the social
“identity crisis” referred to at the beginning
of this chapter. To assess the responsibility of
individuals for the actions they commit, we need to find
the knowing subject. But we search in vain, with
overbearing frustration. Consequently, society has gone
to war over personal responsibility and blame. Our prison
population has exploded and is growing, because there is
no consensus on responsibility. A sense of responsibility
must be internalized if it is to have any real effect,
but individuals feel less responsibility than
justification. Laws go forth and multiply because the
individual person feels unable to locate his own sense of
responsibility to a community that victimizes him.
Responsibility may not even be there in the case of
deranged criminal minds. What about children born to
crack and homelessness? Justice Louis Brandeis in his
courtroom searched for what he called “the truth
unto its innermost parts.” But it is doubtful that
he ever found it.
In a parallel
manner, one identity follows another in your own life,
taking its place in an endless sequence of internalizing
encapsulations. But seen in their deeper reality, these
individual manifestations may be but moments in the
unfolding of your true self. Regarded in this way, this
structural arrangement at least serves to give coherence
to the world’s many disparate elements, lending
character and quality to all things. But it also implies,
for example in the anatomical case, that only when these
two organs are brought into harmonic consonance through
the tuning instrument of the cerebrum, do they result in
something human. The medulla and the cerebellum, in
themselves, and by themselves, are nothing. That is to
say, no “thing” - certainly no human kind of
thing.
Have you ever
stopped to consider the word “thing”? (Next Page)
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