point; the relationships created during a musical performance of any kind are more the ideal, as imagined by the participants, than the present reality.
So if the community of the rock or even the folk concert is nothing more than a carefully orchestrated set of theatrical tricks played in collusion by performers, their handlers and the audience together, we cannot blame them if the participants feel that counterfeit community is better than none at all. In any case, people are on the whole not so silly as not to recognize the gap between desire and reality. What we need to keep in mind is that those taking part in performances of different kinds are looking for different kinds of relationships, and we should not project the ideals of one kind of performance onto another. Any performance, and that includes a symphony concert, should be judged finally on its success in bringing into existence for as long as it lasts a set of relationships that those taking part feel to be ideal and in enabling those taking part to explore, affirm, and celebrate those relationships. Only those taking part will know for sure what is their nature.
Interlude 1
The Language of Gesture
Before we go further into this description of the musical ceremony called a symphony concert, I need to make the first of my digressions in order to establish a simple theoretical foundation for understanding what is going on there.
If, as I have suggested, musicking is an activity by means of which we bring into existence a set of relationships that model the relationships of our world, not as they are but as we would wish them to be, and if through musicking we learn about and explore those relationships, we affirm them to ourselves and anyone else who may be paying attention, and we celebrate them, then musicking is in fact a way of knowing our world—not that pre-given physical world, divorced from human experience, that modern science claims to know but the experiential world of relationships in all its complexity—and in knowing it, we learn how to live well in it.
The first clues I received to this way of thinking came in the 1970s from reading the works of the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson, whose death in 1980 at the age of seventy ended a life given over to evolving a way of knowing that would unite the scientists’ impersonal way of knowing the world with the human knowledge of ethics, values and the sacred. The purpose of this way of knowing is not to dominate the world, as is that of scientific knowledge, but to live well in it. My own subsequent readings in neurobiology and the study of mind have made me realize that a great leap in knowledge in these fields has been made in the years since Bateson’s death, but nonetheless I still feel the power of his ideas; those later writers have served to confirm for me the essential rightness of his intuitions and of his enterprise.
One of Bateson’s recurring themes is the double nature of all philosophical questions. He takes Warren McCulloch’s (1965) version of the psalmist’s question, “Lord, what is man that thou shouldst be mindful of him?” and extends it into his own investigations. McCulloch asks not only “What is a number that a man may know it?” but also the reciprocal question, “What is a man that he may know a number?” and he points out that the answer to one depends on the answer to the other. Bateson returns repeatedly to this form of double reciprocal questioning, pointing out that to ask questions in this way is a little like binocular vision, in that it gives a greater depth than either question asked individually. He says that “two descriptions are better than one,” and I have found, similarly, that if I would ask the question What is musicking that human beings should like to practice it? I need also to ask the complementary question, What are human beings that they should like to practice musicking? It is in order to propose an answer to the latter that I need to make what appears like a long detour before I can propose an answer to the former; and in the course of my doing so, the discussion of musicking itself will necessarily recede into the background. I can only ask the reader to trust me eventually to make its relevance plain.
One of Bateson’s fundamental intuitions is a denial of what is known as Cartesian dualism, the idea that the world is made up of two different and even incompatible kinds of substance: matter, which is divisible, has mass, dimensions, and a location in space; and mind, which is indivisible, has no mass or dimensions and is located nowhere and everywhere. This mode of thought is very old in Western thinking and in fact, in the form of the concept of an immortal soul that is distinct from the body and survives its death, is part of our society’s religious orthodoxy.
It was first made explicit in a systematic way in the seventeenth century by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. Through Descartes it has not only come to form one of the foundations of modern science but has also become so ingrained in the thinking of members of modern scientific-industrial societies (by that I mean not just scientists but everyone, whether trained or not in the practice of science) that it hardly seems like a mode of thinking at all but more like simple commonsensical reality.
How, in this divided Cartesian universe, matter and mind can act on each other is a seemingly insoluble problem that Descartes bequeathed to succeeding generations. In particular, it makes a human being a divided creature, consisting of a corporeal body that is extended in space and subject to the laws of physics and chemistry and an incorporeal mind that in some mysterious way is lodged within it, yet is not part of it, and appears not to be subject to any discoverable scientific laws. Even some of the great neurophysiologists of the twentieth century have been so defeated by this problem that they have found themselves postulating a “suprabiological” mind, a “ghost in the machine,” that in some mysterious way that is inaccessible to the methods of science watches over the chemical and physiological workings of the body, including the nervous system. The nervous system, with the brain at the center, appears to be the site of the mind, but what might be the nature of that mind they could only speculate. Others, the so-called behaviorists, tried to solve the problem by denying that mind exists at all; they said it was only an epiphenomenon, the illusion of a phenomenon, whose apparent existence is the outcome of a hugely complex system of automatic actions of the body, like a shadow cast on a wall.
Part of the Cartesian legacy to Western thinking is the assumption that the body plays no part in such operations of the mind, apart perhaps from presenting through the senses the material on which the mind operates (and in some of the weirder manifestations of the mind-body split even that has been called into question). Knowledge exists “out there,” independently of who knows it, preexisting any possible knower of it, and continuing after any knower has ceased to exist. Similarly with reasoning; premises lead inexorably to conclusions, regardless of who, if anyone, is doing the reasoning. This idea, that the operations of the mind work independently of the body, is all the more pervasive for being unrecognized for what it is: an assumption, by no means to be accepted without scrutiny.
Bateson has not, of course been the only twentieth-century thinker to call into question these and other assumptions of Cartesian dualism, and over the past two or three decades this questioning has found ample experimental support in the works of neurologists and neurobiologists such as Oliver Sacks, Gerald Edelman, and Francis Crick. It is becoming clearer and clearer that mind is not substance at all but process, one of the processes of life, which is explicable by the organization and working of the brain and the rest of the nervous system, with their billions of intricately interconnected and reinterconnected nerve cells (Edelman [1992] calls the human brain “the most complex object in the entire universe”), and is thus inseparable from the living matter of whose operation it is the outcome. That may sound like the behaviorists’ position, but in fact it differs from it fundamentally, since the behaviorist, even as he or she denies the existence of the substance mind, remains caught in the absurdity of the Cartesian split, whereas to understand that mind is part of the functioning of living matter, as much as, say, digestion and reproduction, makes it unnecessary either to affirm or deny its existence as substance. Once that is understood, the Cartesian split between body
