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Page history last edited by ShareRiff 9 years, 8 months ago

sing along

In his The Self-Aware Universe, physicist Amit Goswami brings the tenets of a "monist idealist" philosophy of science to bear on the (typically materialist) archetype of the scientific discovery and invention. In his concluding section, Goswami most succinctly sings his song, a remix of the "hero's journey." Here, he asks us to consider the magnitude and potential of the immeasurable commons bound by the mystical experience of joy, "beyond science, religion, and philosophy" (271). Coupled with the connectivity facilitated by communications technology, Goswami argues, this commons can initiate a "renaissance" of interconnectivity and collective enchantment on global scale. Integration of different planes.....integration is the trope, here: science/phy/religion (to this we add rhetoric (infodynamic rhetoric), here), spirit/mind/body.

 

"It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community – a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the earth" -Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Echoing Thich Nhat Hanh, Goswami tropes the "hero's journey" from the singular to the collective: the wiki becomes a world-teacher. "The Bhagavad Gita portrays such events of renaissance as the coming of an avatara, or world-teacher. In the past such avataras have sometimes been isolated, single individuals; at other times there have been collections of individuals. But the world is much bigger now and needs an unprecedented number of individuals to become avatars to lead the next renaissance" (The Self-Aware Universe 271) What's important to any next renaissance of wyrd will go and come from beyond the numbers, and must manifest between individuals. In the space of collective avatara imagined by Goswami, the dynamic and staccato nature of our interconnectivity (the rhythm) sets new envelopes for the author function. Classical and esoteric/embodied rhetorics, diverse traditions and pedagogies of music, and disciplines attuned to the sonic register of information provide templates and morphological vocabulary for describing, imagining, and focusing attention on these possibilities.

 

Hindustani musicians have always named this organic tempo of emergence and collective creative practice, or rhythm, laya. Laya measures a rate of succession, not of iterative units, but of activity between gestures. Perhaps more precisely: laya keeps track of both the "ongoing stream of time" and the repeated actions deigned to divide "musical time into individual units" (Rowell 189).

 

Time is experienced both in its parallel and serial forms.

 

Crucially, laya also means "rest," and is etymologically linked "with the phase of creation in which primal matter exists in an undifferentiated, amporphous state," and therefore, to sunyata, the Buddhist notion that has been too quickly characterized as "void". (202). In a sense, laya directs our attention to the thread-thin lacunae that generate musical time, according to these productive interstices' rate and sequence of unfoldment. The art of keeping time, then, seems to require that we \"beatmatch\" our sounding gestures and silent gestures while alternating and modulating our attention, an endeavor productive of different laya. These capacities depend on listening, which creates new ways of seeing. Best, then, to become a listener, and let the resonance do the composing.

 

SequentialArt

 

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