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 35
Now it
mustn’t be supposed that we will make a case here
for relativism. We are only pursuing an inquiry by
entertaining all of the possible ideas that arise from
it. We are not getting to any conclusions yet, not trying
to sell a philosophical or religious position. Nor are we
trying to deny the obvious. Surely, intelligent and
mature people are quite right to make ordinary
distinctions between things for purely practical reasons,
and only a shallow and frivolous mind can object to that.
After all, “One has to draw the line
somewhere.” We have been discovering, however, that
trouble arises when we focus on the foreground of a
picture to the exclusion of the background. And
this kind of trouble can actually be seen in all phases
of our life.
We see it most
clearly in our human relationship with our planetary
environment. Preoccupation with the foreground means very
substantial trouble, for example, when pesticides are
spread wholesale over the land to control some specific
pest, with the result that workers in the fields get
sick, and the region’s wild birds can’t hatch
viable eggs. We seem always to be caught up in our own
special interests, with various agendas vying for the
regulatory foreground. A debate now rages in the nation
over the encroachment of human development on the fate of
endangered species. The row over the spotted-owl presents
the emblematic case. It is understandable that people
whose lives are dependent on the lumber industry would
tend to look askance at that peculiar little bird. But,
in truth, it is not the little bird that they are putting
in the background here, but the forest itself. If the
spotted-owl could speak, she would say not that we are
saving the forest for her, but that her cause is saving
the forest for us, and for all the other creatures on
this planet. She would remind us that a tree is not only
a source of lumber, a mere background to human desire and
greed. Walt Whitman once asked, "Why are there trees
I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts
descend upon me?"
There is one
typical way that we in the west create trouble through
our attitude to backgrounds: in short, ignorance and
denial. Thus, for example, during the heyday of
segregation in America, a so-called black, but really
just dark, human being could think of himself, and write
a book entitled, “The Invisible Man.”[1] And today, in America, a great many of us
are still invisible: the poor, the homeless, the mentally
ill, etc.
Just to
demonstrate how deeply averse we are to seeing beyond the
foreground in our image of things, consider the primary
conceptual basis of our social and political system.
Today in America, a completely baseless ideology posits
unlimited opportunity for every citizen. The idea is that
every good person can be, and will be, if left to their
natural devices, rich. We seem to suppose that each and
every one of us can be brought into the foreground of the
“American Dream,” and this notion is in the
foreground of our view of things generally. Nobody,
anywhere, or at any time, is willing to acknowledge our
actual and very practical obeisance to the implicitly
contradictory principal of monetary exchange by which we
actually live – a principle that is kept strictly in
the background and out of sight, to wit: the money in my
pocket is valued in inverse relation to the money in
everybody else’s pocket.[2] There is
no value in what everybody has. Only when I have
something that is rare and hard to come by is it worth
anything at all. That you see is the background of our
monetary system. It seems almost too elementary to point
this out, except that most people simply do not
understand that our own national wealth depends directly
and necessarily on the unparalleled poverty in which most
of the world now languishes without a hope or prayer.
These are things that we dare not think about. Instead,
squarely in our sights is the glittering success of the
wealthy. This alone may be seen in the public eye of the
media. Thus, during the most prosperous decade in our
history, millions of homeless children on our
cities’ streets are as invisible as we can make
them. They are not regularly featured on our greatly
admired evening news magazine, “Nightlying.”[3]
[1] Ralph Elison
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