by Charlie Huenemann

(Image from “AhtheMacabre” on Etsy)

As I'm closer to death than birth, I think from time to time about what to do with my dead body. Of course, in the main I don't really care. I'll be done with it, and it will be nothing other than Other People's Problem, in the deepest existential sense of those words. But sometimes I try to imagine what would be most meaningful to my surviving friends and family. For the most part, I come up empty.

My own parents are buried alongside their relatives far away in a country churchyard – and that sounds nice! – but the fact is that none of their descendants visit it with any regularity. I do think often of my parents, whom I loved and miss. But I don't know what further emotional or spiritual charge I would get by looking at a stone with their names on it and reflecting on the fact that, six feet down, there are some organic materials that once constituted their bodies. My father-in-law's ashes are in a simple wooden box which I see from time to time, and when I see them I say to myself, “Alas, poor Gerald! I knew him!” – but the experience doesn't amount to much. At best the box serves as a momento mori, and at worst it poses the problem of who's going to care for this box for the rest of time. So I don't have any good examples to follow.

I could donate my body to medical science, and I see clearly the virtue of doing so. Let the dead teach the living! But I can't quite commit myself to the idea. This raggedy donkey has been my good and true companion, for the most part, and I feel like I owe it some respect. I know it's irrational, but the thought of giving it over to medical students to cut open and explore strikes me as ingratitude. (I lived with a med student many years ago, and wasn't much reassured by the experience.)

What I would like best, of course, is for my body to be laid out on a wooden Viking ship and sent into the middle of the lake as a flaming arrow arcs overhead into the sky and delivers the fire to the pyre. But goodness knows what health and safety officers would have to say about this, and I'd hate to bequeath to my children the labors of such paperwork and legal expense – let alone the trouble of finding a builder of Viking ships. The myriad hassles and expenses would suck all the meaning and fun out of it.

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by Brooks Riley

Remember the winter scarf? A long strip of knitted wool, the two ends knotted, crossed, or wrapped around the neck. I’ve worn them all my life, struggling to keep the ends from unwinding in a cold wind, or retrieving a loose end from my latte as I reach across a table to shake someone’s hand. A shroud would be an improvement, long and fulsome, but it too comes with loose ends, to be saved for later.

Loose ends, the obvious metaphor for a life in limbo, is simplistic. And just what are those ends anyway? Bookends to the main event, the Alpha and Omega of existence, birth and death—useless but inevitable.

Recently, in search of a new scarf, I came across a woolen loop, slightly elasticized so that it could be wrapped twice around my neck. Look, Ma, no ends! It’s nothing special these days, but for me it was a revelation: I was liberated from the struggle to make ends meet or stay put. Now I felt safe, in more ways than one: A woven furnace caressing my carotid arteries, I was wrapped in a security blanket without issues, clearing the way for worries of the endogenous sort, the kind that don’t come bundled with small physical irritations.

Delighted with this new-millennial improvement on age-old warmers, I shopped for another one. My second scarf went the first one even better: a brilliant woolen Möbius strip that didn’t even have to be doubled—a fat Möbius which sits firmly on the shoulders, its twist neatly snuggled at the nape of the neck, allowing the fullness of the rest to fortify the shoulders and throat. While others might be drooling over the latest wearable tech, my needs were answered by a 5 € purchase, made possible by two 19^th century mathematicians, August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing, who came to the same conclusion simultaneously in 1858 in their land of Zeitgeist or the zeitgleich. (Poor Herr Doktor Listing: Möbius won the posterity game.)

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Fundamental Misunderstanding
…. — thoughts on Charlie Hebdo, etc.

everything ever written or said
everything drawn or played or sung
every headline that cried or bled
every fresco, every poem
everything wrung from our cranial sponge
every inky insult flung
every instrument ever made
every expletive blasted from lungs
every face on a canvas hung
every righteous canto prayed
…. that pounded the planks of heaven’s floor
every school Kalashnikov-sprayed
every smartass quote with bite
every thought of rich or poor
every Icarus grasping at height
…. whose waxy wings soon came apart
every joke and laugh and snort
every misbegotten poison dart
every sentiment or thing
…. that burst from brain’s well-tensioned spring
every surah, gospel or verse
every prayer that followed a hearse
every love, lost or won
every song and every hum

every murmuring merciful must
that reached the sky or bit the dust
are not of a glad or angry God
……………….but of life that thrusts
from inner to outer the stuff of us
.

by Jim Culleny
1/16/14

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

It's 2015. The year has begun clandestinely, as have I. The days suddenly feel lighter, and full of possibility. Even as I say this, I feel performative. After all, how can the beginning of a year be anything but full of possibility? Beginnings are where we take a measure of ourselves, and our world, and speak aloud of all the things we will accomplish in the year and the ways in which we will not end December on a note of things we could have done, a list of 'almosts'.

I almost wrote a book once, I might say.

I almost saw a leopard once. This was at Yala National Park. We had been driving around for a few hours on a late December afternoon. The sun was going down. Much like other urban tourists, we were there in the hope of our big prize, a leopard sighting. Under the watchful eyes of a guide whose last name was Don, we scoured the grounds seeking signs of the famed park dweller. The sun went down, and we were almost ready to leave disappointed when Mr.Don signaled to indicate that all hope was not lost yet. We veered away from the other vehicles and turned onto a long stretch of road by a swamp to wait by a tree. Somewhere across the pond, we could hear the cries of deer. The cries came intermittently, growing louder, and then fainter. The guide, the driver, and my companion and I sat quietly as we were gradually enveloped by darkness. The quality of that waiting is difficult to capture. The leopard was at its prey, a few metres away even as we waited for it to emerge. Things were so quiet. Every now and then, a faint cry broke through dusk. We sat in silence, sharing the same hope, and I suppose, the same sorrow. A deer might be killed. The leopard might go hungry. Only one of two things would happen.

Of course, while everyone comes to Yala to see leopards, I had also wanted to come to see where the tsunami had swept away people. Having read Sonali Deraniyagala's incredibly brave memoir of loss and pain, “Wave”, I was drawn to this remote outpost that had witnessed the events she speaks so poignantly about. Many years ago, my graduate class and I survived an earthquake but had been far enough to feel its effects only perfunctorily. To this day, the only memory I have of this event is of feeling like perhaps the dog had hidden under my bed. That, and a faint visual memory of the earth heaving like waves.

So at the place that still bore signs of the giant wave, we waited for the leopard to show. I meditated on that uncanny quiet evening upon loss, and fear, and darkness. No leopard came. I'd like to think that the deer got away.

As I looked through my notes on Yala to remember the details of a year ago, I squinted at my diary and at my faint notes. I remember being at a hotel room outside Yala later that night playing with a black and white kitten that pulled at my hand as I tried unsuccessfully to write. Swatting it with one hand, I had grabbed a blunt pencil with the other and jotted down as much as I could recall from the day. This was why the notes were faint; first the kitten, and then the pencil.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

A strange idea has taken over the social conscience so entirely that it is a taboo even to say what it is. Children have come to be seen as more valuable than adults not despite but because of their psychological immaturity, the thing that makes persons objectively valuable.

Consider the appearance of “baby on board” placards from the mid-1980s.

Nobody would have placed such a sign on a car if it were not already understood by society that the life of a human achieves its peak value at birth and declines thereafter. A toddler is almost as precious as a baby, but a teenager less so, and by the time that baby turns fifty, it seems that nobody cares much anymore if someone crashes into her car. You don't see a lot of vehicles with placards that read, “Middle-aged accountant on board.” (Danielle and Astro Teller)

We are the victims of a collective confusion.

I

Children are special in one particular, their extreme neediness. They have quite specific often urgent needs that only suitably motivated adults can meet, and the younger they are, the greater their neediness. That makes children's care and protection a moral priority in any civilised society – there are lots of things that aren't as important and should give rightly way to meeting children's needs. As a result, children create multiple obligations upon their care-givers, as well second-order obligations on society in general, to ensure those needs are met.

Yet the fact that you should give way to an ambulance attending an emergency doesn't mean that the person in the ambulance is more important than you; only that her needs right now are more important than you getting to work on time. Likewise, the immanence of children's neediness should often determine how we rank the priorities of actions we want to do, such as interrupting a movie to attend to a baby's cries. But such an action ranking is not a guide to the relative worth of children and adults, or of babies and teenagers. There will surely be times when something even more urgent occurs – such as someone having a heart-attack in front of you – that requires a baby's cries be neglected for the moment.

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by Gautam Pemmaraju

Auron par hasney ka anjaam jo hoga so hoga;

Lekin voh qaum nahin miththi jo apney aap par hansti hai.

The consequences of laughing at others will be what they are.

But the people who laugh at themselves will never be erased.

Last week, at a screening of my documentary film (a work in progress) on the humour-satire performance poetry traditions of Dakhani, the spoken vernacular Urdu of the Deccan region, one of the first to arrive was the eighty-six year old bright-eyed, warm and charming Ghouse Mohiuddin 'Khamakha'. The above couplet of his has remained with me over the years, and its current relevance is but obvious as we see the unfolding of several disturbing things.

As fleeting relief I offer some fine examples of Dakhani Mizahiya Shayri (humour-satire poetry) here. The richness of the vernacular, drawing largely from folk traditions and situated as it is further down the interrupted path of the glorious rise of the language till 1700 CE, is expressed amply in the humour-satire poetry in the Deccan. Stricken though it may be by the vicissitudes of time, the triumph of conquests, and the contempt of the elite, the tongue still remains spoken today across the Deccan plateau.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

It's hard to spot new birds during Massachusetts winters (I don't own a house with a yard or a bird feeder, which makes it doubly hard). The hundreds of species that make their home or pass through here are more easily observed in spring, summer and early fall. But last Tuesday – a bone chillingly cold but sunny day in Amherst – I ran into four species all at once. I had come out for a walk in a quiet part of town, a dead end street where an unpaved hiking trail leads to a pond. The unusually high levels of noise in the trees suggested that a lot of birds were active. The repeated deep thuds I was hearing indicated that woodpeckers were around, hammering on tree trunks.

So here are the species that I spotted, from left to right (picture assembled from Wikipedia images): the eastern blue bird; the black capped chickadee; the female downy woodpecker (the male has slight red marks on the head); the misleadingly named red-bellied woodpecker because the prominent red or orange patch is actually on the bird's curved head. The chickadee is the smallest of the four, and the red-bellied woodpecker the largest. Overall, nothing really surprising here – these are all common winter birds. But as an amateur bird watcher, I felt a special joy stumbling upon them; it felt, at least in those few moments, as if some special secret of nature had been unexpectedly revealed.

Some other things I've noticed this winter: (1) starlings, dozens of them somersaulting gracefully in the air in unison, literally a dance to avoid death, an attempt to disorient hawks that are hunting them (something similar to what's happening in this video. On a different note, the 150 million starlings in North America today are descended from the 60 odd European starlings that were deliberately introduced to New York's Central Park in 1890 by “a small group of people with a passion to introduce all of the animals mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare” — talk about literature influencing ecology!); (2) young wild turkey, moving black specks from a distance, foraging in a snow covered meadow (here's a previous piece on wild turkey); and (3) a few weeks ago, at twilight, the mysterious, round faced barred owl, the only owl I've ever seen, well camouflaged against the bark of a tree, very similar to this picture.

That will be it – a short post this time. A very happy new year to all at 3QD! My ten essays from last year are all collected here.

by Mara Naselli

Rembrandt in America, an exhibition shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts a couple years ago, displayed several portraits by Rembrandt as well as works painted by Rembrandt's students and contemporaries. Curators had posted labels that highlighted the provenance of the paintings, many of which have been collected in the United States over the last century or so by the super rich. One painting, Man with Arms Akimbo, is still for sale, for $45M by Otto Naumann, Ltd., though it isn't one of the better ones. When it comes to the art market, questions of authenticity dominate, and with Rembrandt, whose style was so wide ranging, it is hard to tell what was Rembrandt’s and what was painted in his studio. Early he mastered what they call a smooth style. Later he painted in a rough style, more impressionistic, long before Impressionism became a movement. But the style of technique is not always an obvious indicator. Was the painting by Rembrandt's hand? Was the painting painted in his workshop? If so, by whom? Was it supervised or corrected by Rembrandt? Was the painting painted by Rembrandt and overpainted by his students? Was the face painted by Rembrandt, the ruff painted by someone who specialized in collars, and the black cloak painted by someone who specialized in black fabric? These are the questions that occupy an appraiser or the auction house or the billionaire looking for a place to park $45M. The art economy is fascinating in its own way, in fact it was so preoccupying that I had to come back, on the last afternoon of the exhibit, to get a good look at the paintings themselves.

I scanned the galleries. Each room was full of people and I could see the tops of some of the larger pictures—all portraits, their heads gazing out from their frames just above the crowd. They seemed to look over us, we mere viewers. As if the sitters, the subjects of these portraits, were fixed with some higher purpose. How had I not seen this the first time? Some seemed almost alive. I don't mean to be facile about this—people spend entire careers assessing what was done by Rembrandt and what wasn't, using sophisticated instruments and technology—but certain portraits were simply arresting. Their faces glowed. The expression, the depth of field, the particular countenance of each portrait. The details were neither muted nor exaggerated. They expressed the distinctiveness of the sitter: creases around the eyes, the ridge in the brow, the gaze fixed or far off, the position of the shoulders, the shape of the mouth, the curve of the spine, the turn of the head, the color in the skin. These were traces of lives lived.

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by Carl Pierer

After having presented Clark and Chalmers' extended cognition hypothesis as well as two lines of argument against the hypothesis, the last article at this place ended with an intuitive, bad gut-feeling and a promise to develop this feeling into a full blown argument. Before making good on that promise, this article will start with a brief recap of the arguments presented so far.

*

Clark and Chalmers' argue in their famous “the extended mind” paper that when a person uses tools or the environment to facilitate a particular cognitive process, this person and her tool constitute a coupled system. Indeed, Clark and Chalmers suggest that in such a coupled system the cognition extends, i.e. it is not confined to the brain/skull-boundary. The argument works as follows: suppose the cognitive process in question is to decide whether a certain shape that appears on the screen will fit into a given slot (as in the classic Tetris game). The person can use a computer to rotate the shape and decide whether it will fit or not. Now, this is clearly an external process. But imagine that in the not so far future, a person will have a neural implant with exactly the same functional structure as the computer and she can use the implant to rotate the shape and check whether it will fit (or she can use the traditional method of rotating it mentally). Clark and Chalmers think that as there is no difference between the computer and the neural implant. Further, whether the person in the near future choses the implant or the traditional method does not matter for the process to count as cognitive. Therefore, the only thing that distinguishes the computer-scenario from the neural-implant-one is that the former involves the use of a tool external to the brain/skull-boundary. But since precisely this is at question, this difference cannot be invoked to support the claim that using the computer is non-cognitive. Thus, using the computer is cognitive and so cognition extends.

Clark and Chalmers' argument relies on the parity principle:

If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process.

This seems to follow directly from the basic functionalist idea that what it takes for a process to count as cognitive is its functional structure, rather than its physical instantiation.

In the previous article, two lines of argument against this view were presented. The first is taken by Adams and Aizawa. They suggest that any process that is to count as a cognitive process has to bear the “mark of the cognitive”. They think that it is not theoretically impossible for cognition to extend, but as a contingent matter of fact there is no process involving the external world that bears the mark of the cognitive. It was mentioned in passing that their suggested “mark” is closely modelled on human cognition. The second line is taken by Sprevak, who argues that the hypothesis of extended cognition provides a counterargument to the view from which it is derived, i.e. functionalism. He attacks Adams and Aizawa's argument on the grounds that their “mark of the cognitive” is too closely modelled on human cognition and deny processes to be cognitive on the grounds of being instantiated differently – a violation of the basic functionalist idea. At the same time, he suggests that functionalism entails extended cognition and further that a moderate (Clark and Chalmers') version of extended cognition is impossible. Instead, if functionalism is accepted the conclusion that any process is cognitive follows.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

“The people who came to kill us–they are fanatics & assassins–but above all, they are people who lack a sense of humor.”–Renald Luzier, Charlie Hebdo staffer

I never really understood the expression, “drank the Kool-Aid” –until I went to Jerusalem. It happened at the Western Wall, where I found myself standing in a very long line to the ladies' restroom. The young woman ahead of me turned around to look intently into my eyes as she spoke of her love of Jesus Christ. Talking blissfully of her savior, she told me a bit about the evangelic church tour she was on. Those tours don't spend all that much time in Jerusalem, she explained, for their focus is up in the north, where Jesus had his ministry along the Sea of Galilee. Rarely stopping in churches either; they don't acknowledge their Orthodox and Catholic counterparts as co-brethren.

I was not so surprised by what she said, since the Via Dolorosa had been filled that week with Orthodox pilgrims from Russia; along with Catholics from Africa and southern India and Indonesia. It was a more eastern Christian church along the stations and in the Sepulchre. It was an unfamilar Christianity for an American in many ways, in fact.

What I found disturbing was not what she was saying but by the strange look she had in her shining eyes. So deeply committed to the point of tearing up as she spoke–she appeared almost alngelic in her religious certainty. It scared the hell out of me…

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by Aditya Dev Sood

It’s been three days and our eight teams are already up, pitching for their lives. Watching them from the front row is a series of mentors we’ve curated, from areas like branding, user interface design, product development, technology, business and investing. There’s a tug between the mentors and the startups underway — criticism and backtalk, kicking the tires and trash-talking the car, defending its value and selling its golden possibilities.

Startup mentoring is a lot like teaching, supervising, consulting, parenting — plus maybe running a cult retreat. It can’t happen without a deep and personal bond between the mentor and mentee. That relationship usually arises accidentally, through life circumstances, working relationships and chance meetings. Here we were engineering that relationship into existence, several entities and multiple individuals at a time.

In the run up to our first day, my main goal was to ensure that I made a personal connection with each cofounder. Without this central relationship gelling, the whole thing would fall apart, fall away. In the weeks leading up to the launch of Startup Tunnel I’d been taking long winter walks, doing yoga and actively working on clearing my thoughts to make space for this set of startups and their many needs. I also designed a series of exercises that would allow startup founders to see in one another and in our mentor group a useful set of resources that they could draw from as they developed their business. I scripted every aspect of our initial interactions in detail. There would be a ball to play with, a registration desk, thirty chairs set up against the demodeck, startup names posted along their workstations. There would be self-introductions, peer-feedback sessions, a seminar and workshop on understanding end users.

This way of working is not very old. It brings together three distinct kinds of expertise: entrepreneurial insight, technology capacity and financial investing. It was Y-Combinator, beginning in the summer of 2005, that began putting batches of young entrepreneurs through a common program of enrichment, trying to learn through that process what would work and what wouldn’t, thereby iteratively improving their program and reinforcing observed insights. Y-Combinator has enjoyed extraordinary success over the past nine years, having seeded numerous successful startups, in which the group’s equity holdings now exceed a billion dollars USD. But the scope of their success is even more unfathomable when one considers that they have also brought into existence a significant new business model that inverts everything that most people thought they knew about business: that entrepreneurial success cannot be predicted, that the charisma of the entrepreneur cannot be taught or improved, that entrepreneurship cannot be any better organized or routinized.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

“Every night God takes his glittering
merchandise out of his showcase–
holy chariots, tables of law, fancy beads,
crosses and bells–
and puts them back into dark boxes
inside and pulls down the shutters: “Again,
not one prophet has come to buy.”
–Yehuda Amichai

Jerusalem: utterly obssessed by the place, I even love finding copies of the holy city– both imaginal and real. There are, for example, William Blake's rural England of his imagination (Ah, Jerusalem) and the Puritan's “city upon a hill” in America. There are also the real Jerusalems built of brick and stone.

Such real-life copies can be found mainly in European cities, from Cambridge to Bologna. My own favorite “new Jerusalem” is the holy city of Lalibela in Ethiopia, however, where it is believed that pilgrims receive the same blessing visiting that city as they would if they had visited Jerusalem itself. It is a place I long to see someday.

Despite knowing that copies of Jerusalem can be found dotted around Europe, I never really expected to find one so far north as in the Flemish city of Bruges.

In Bruges.

Belgium's greatest poet Guido Gezelle referred to the city as a “copy of the holy land.” But, in the movie In Bruges, the mob boss Harry calls the town a “fucking fairy tale.”

(Ray, however disagrees).

In any event, my astronomer and I were visiting the city on a van Eyck pilgrimage. Starting in Paris, we looked at van Eyck pictures in the Louvre, in Ghent and then in Bruges –and I was struck over and over again by the way time was conflated in the paintings. Like a wormhole connecting discrete and distant points in time, these late Medieval and early Renaissance pictures were stunningly transportive in terms of time and space so that, for example, Mary and the baby or the Lamb were depicted side-by-side with contemporary figures. Contemporary donors appeared in the paintings accompanied by their patron saints, who thereby formed a link between these two worlds. The church authorities not surprisingly clamped down on this practice and the early Renaissance donor portraits disappeared –but it was in Bruges that I realized how wonderful it would be to see oneself in a picture like that. If I lived back then, I certainly would have desired a picture of myself like that, depicted alongside saints, pilgrims and God. Is it not the ultimate selfie?

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Xu Bing’s Phoenixes at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

standing under Phoenix and his lofted bride
both newly risen in the nave of a church
at a quarter of the height from floor to vault
I am small and still beneath their static glide

a cross in the distance where they might have perched
is centered on choirs set on either side
as simple as the nexus of sinners' faults
at the crux of the moment their songs might rise

these ninety foot creatures made of sweat and steel
and of light and of industry and touch and feel
and of hoses and spades and of wire and sight
and of chain and of pipes and of silent nights
and of canisters pulleys ducts and vents
and of reason for rebirth to where innocence went
and of hope and contrition and of blood and bone
all Phoenixes together here un-alone
.

by Jim Culleny
1/4/15

The Phoenixes

by Matt McKenna

Even without seeing the film, you probably already know if you like Peter Jackson's final installment of the Hobbit trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies. If you saw any of the previous Hobbit or Lord of the Rings films and got a kick out of elves and wizards and epic, bloodless battles in which thousands of sentient beings perish, Five Armies won't disappoint. However, if you saw any of the previous Hobbit or Lord of the Rings films and thought they were supremely boring, well, this latest one isn't going to do much to improve your opinion of the series. But presuming you're in the first camp, you must be pleased that Jackson has gifted the world one more Hobbit adventure. Likewise, if you're a college football fan, you must be pleased that the NCAA has gifted the world one more game this season as part of the inaugural college football playoff. Though I can't say which team Peter Jackson is pulling for, it is clear he crafted Five Armies to critique the college football playoffs and the institution that created it.

At some point during the climactic battle sequence in The Battle of the Five Armies, you're likely to wonder what collection of entities constitute the armies referenced in the title. Are the dwarves one army or two? Are the men of Laketown an army even though there are so few of them? Do the massive eagles that receive a miniscule amount of screen time count as one of these five armies? Unfortunately, I don't have definitive answers to these questions, but my best guess is that the five armies include 1) the unruly dwarves, 2) the completely irrelevant men of Laketown, 3) the snooty quasi-immortal elves, 4) the convocation of enormous eagles, and, of course, 5) the horde of evil orcs/goblins/computer generated nightmares. Having established the identifies of the five armies in the world of The Hobbit, the next step to reading the film is to understand what these armies represent in the real world.

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by Eric Byrd

Fitzroy Maclean, over Yugoslavia, in Eastern Approaches:

“With a jerk my parachute opened and I found myself dangling, as it were at the end of a string, high above a silent mountain valley, greenish-grey and misty in the light of the moon. It looked, I thought, invitingly cool and refreshing after the sand and glare of North Africa. Somewhere above me the aircraft, having completed its mission, was headed for home. The noise of its engines grew gradually fainter in the distance. A long way below me and some distance away I could see a number of fires burning. I hoped they were the right ones, for the Germans also lit fires at night at different points in the Balkans in the hope of diverting supplies and parachutists from their proper destinations. As I swung lower, I could hear a faint noise of shouting coming from the direction of the fires. I could still not see the ground immediately beneath me. We must, I reflected, have been dropped from a considerable height to take so long coming down. Then, without further warning, there was a jolt and I was lying in a field of wet grass. There was no one in sight.”

Patrick Leigh Fermor, over Crete, in Abducting a General:

“The sierras of occupied Crete, familiar from nearly two years of clandestine sojourn and hundreds of exacting marches, looked quite different through the aperture in the converted bomber's floor and the gaps in the clouds below: a chaos of snow-covered, aloof and enormous spikes glittering as white as a glacier in the February moonlight. Then, suddenly, on a tiny plateau among the peaks, were the three signal fires twinkling. A few moments later they began expanding fast: freed at last from the noise inside the Liberator the parachute sailed gently down towards the heart of the triangle. Small figures were running in the firelight and in another few moments, snow muffled the impact of landing. There was a scrum of whiskery embracing, a score of Cretan voices, one English one. A perfect landing!”

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by Bill Benzon

This essay argues that Western culture is an ideological fiction. There is no such thing as Western culture if by that you mean a coherent and internally unified cultural entity that started back in ancient Greece and the Jewish Levant, took hold in and flourished in Europe, from which it eventually set sail for the Americas and there took root, almost completely destroying the societies of native peoples and their cultures with them. That thing, whatever it is, is not a single entity, internally coherent and different from all other such entities. The idea that it is such an entity is an ideological fiction, as are the entities to which Western culture is often said to be opposed, Eastern culture, Oriental culture, African culture, non-Western culture, and the like. Ideological fictions, all of them.

Some Say African-American Music is Western

The notion of Western culture began to unravel for me I decided to write about the impact of African-American musical cultures on American music. That work forced me to think hard and long about just what we mean when we talk use such phrases as “X culture” where X can be “Western”, “American”, “French”, “European”, “Muslim”, “Japanese”, “Eastern”, and so forth. With this is mind, let’s use music as a test case and see where it leads.

It is clear that African-American music owes a substantial debt to Africa. It is also clear that African-American music has had a strong influence on American music in general. By applying a familiar syllogistic mechanism to those propositions one can see that American music must therefore be indebted to Africa. That it American music is in some measure African. So far so good.

Now let’s look at a passage from Music of the Common Tongue (1987) where Christopher Small (p. 4) asserts that

…the Afro-American tradition is the major music of the west in the twentieth century, of far greater significance than those remnants of the great European classical tradition that are to be heard today in the concert halls and opera houses of the industrial world, east and west.

Small will go on to argue that African-American music carries values which are at odds with the dehumanizing industrial cast of European and American society and that those values are good and important. More recently, and from a more conservative location in the political universe, Marsha Bayles has also claimed Afro-American music for the West (Hole in Our Soul, 1994 p.22):

I realize that a great many musicians and writers will reject the proposition that Afro-American music is an idiom of Western music, on the grounds that it is, root and branch, totally “black,” meaning African. This attitude is usually called “cultural nationalism,” but I prefer to call it “cultural separatism,” because, instead of affirming Afro-American music by sharing it with the world, it takes a jealously proprietary stance.

Bayles will go on to argue that the virtues which African-American music has brought to the world are being threatened by decadence which began at the turn of the 20th century and has become frightfully pervasive in our own time. Both recognize that African-American music is quite different from classical music and European folk musics in its devices and emotional tenor. But neither of them sees this as a reason for thinking the music is not Western.

I Say It’s Not

I find this situation most curious. For it seems to me that if Western music is defined in such a way that it is home to both Ludwig van Beethoven (19th C. European classical) and Charlie Parker (African-American, bebop jazz), to J. S. Bach (18th C. European classical) and Bessie Smith (African-American, blues), then it is not entirely clear to me whether or not Western music should not also encompass the sitar playing of Ravi Shankar (North Indian classical) and the singing of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Sufi devotional song from Pakistan) as well. And if we admit them into the fold, can any music reasonably be excluded? But what purpose (beyond that old devil, cultural imperialism) could possibly be served by a conceptual scheme which sees much, perhaps most, possibly even all, of the world's music as Western?

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