The creative relationship

When I was in freshman lit -- a lot of years ago -- we were assigned to read and analyze Robert Frost's classic poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Mostly what I remember about the discussion that ensued was the professor telling us that when an interviewer asked Frost himself what the poem meant, Frost replied that it wasn't intended to be allegorical, or symbolic of anything; it was simply a recounting of a scene, a weary traveler pausing for a moment to appreciate the beauty of a snowy woodland.

"Of course," the professor went on, cheerfully confident, "we know that a poet of Frost's stature wouldn't produce anything that simplistic -- so let's see what symbolism we can find in his poem!"

I recall being kind of appalled, mostly at the professor's hubris in thinking that his own opinions about meaning overrode what the poet himself intended.  Since then, though, I've begun to wonder.  I still think the professor was a bit of a cocky bastard, don't get me wrong; but I've come to realize that creativity implies a relationship -- it's not as simple as writer (or artist or composer) creating, and reader (or observer or listener) consuming.

This topic comes up because a couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a video by Aldous Harding, a brilliant singer/songwriter from New Zealand, performing her song "The Barrel."

The song is weird, mesmerizing, strangely beautiful, and the video is somewhere in that gray area at the intersection of "evocative" and "fever dream."  The lyrics are downright bizarre in places:

The wave of love is a transient hut
The water's the shell and we are the nut
But I saw a hand arch out of the barrel

Look at all the peaches
How do you celebrate
I can't appearance out of nowhere

What does it mean?  Harding herself wants to leave that, at least in part, up to the listener.  In an interview with NPR, she said, “I realized that the video was a well-intended opinion of mine to just keep it loose.  I feel we’re expected to be able to explain ourselves...  But I don’t necessarily have that in me the way you might think."

It's wryly funny, especially in light of the long-ago pronouncements of my freshman lit professor, that a lot of people are weighing in on the song and interpreting it in a variety of mutually-exclusive ways.  One writer said that it's about female empowerment and escaping from abusive relationships.  Another suggests that it describes how "the scariest thing is looking in the mirror and not recognising what you see staring back at you."  A review in The Guardian lists other interpretations that have been suggested:

Depending on whose interpretation you plumped for, the video was either a homage to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal 1973 film The Holy Mountain, a nod to the national dress of Wales (where [Harding's album] Designer was partly recorded and where Harding currently resides), analogous to the faintly disturbing vision of pregnancy found in Sylvia Plath’s 1960 poem "Metaphors," inspired by postmodernist poet Susan Howe’s book Singularities, which surveys the 17th-century First Nation wars in New England, [or] somehow related to menstruation.

Watch it... and see what you think.

Like my lit professor, what gets me about a lot of these interpretations is how certain they sound.  My own reaction was that the lyrics fall into the realm of "nearly making sense," and that part of why they're fascinating -- and why I've watched the video several times -- is that there's a real art to using language that way, neither being too overt about what you mean nor devolving into complete nonsense.

Creativity, I think, implies a relationship between producer and consumer, and because of that, the producer can't always control where it goes.  Readers, listeners, and observers bring to that activity their own backgrounds, opinions, and knowledge, and that is going to shape what they pull out of the creative experience.  And, of course, this is why sometimes that relationship simply fails to form.  I love the music of Stravinsky, while it leaves my wife completely cold -- she thinks it's pointless cacophony.  A lot of people are moved to tears by Mozart, but I find much of his music inspires me to say nothing more than "it's nice, I guess."

It's part of why I have zero patience for genre snobs and self-appointed tastemakers.  If some piece of creative work inspires you, or evokes emotions in you, it's done its job, and no one has the slightest right to tell you that you're wrong for feeling that way.  Honestly, I'm delighted if Mozart grabs you by the heart and swings you around; that's what music is supposed to do.  Just because I'm more likely to have that experience listening to Firebird than Eine Kleine Nachtmusik doesn't mean I'm right and you're wrong; all it means is that human creativity is complex, intricate, and endlessly intriguing.

So don't take it all that seriously if someone tells you what a poem, lyric, or piece of art or music means, even if that person is a college professor.  Enjoy what you enjoy, and bring your own creativity to the relationship.  It may be that Robert Frost didn't mean "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to be anything more than a depiction of a scene; but that doesn't mean you can't bring more to the reading, and pull more out of the reading, yourself.

And isn't that what makes the creative experience magical?

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The advancement of technology has opened up ethical questions we've never had to face before, and one of the most difficult is how to handle our sudden ability to edit the genome.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a system for doing what amounts to cut-and-paste editing of DNA, and since its discovery by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the technique has been refined and given pinpoint precision.  (Charpentier and Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their role in developing CRISPR.)

Of course, it generates a host of questions that can be summed up by Ian Malcolm's quote in Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."  If it became possible, should CRISPR be used to treat devastating diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia?  Most people, I think, would say yes.  But what about disorders that are mere inconveniences -- like nearsightedness?  What about cosmetic traits like hair and eye color?

What about intelligence, behavior, personality?

None of that has been accomplished yet, but it bears keeping in mind that ten years ago, the whole CRISPR gene-editing protocol would have seemed like fringe-y science fiction.  We need to figure this stuff out now -- before it becomes reality.

This is the subject of bioethicist Henry Greely's new book, CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.  It considers the thorny questions surrounding not just what we can do, or what we might one day be able to do, but what we should do.

And given how fast science fiction has become reality, it's a book everyone should read... soon.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The language of music

Music is, in a lot of ways, the universal human language.  If there is a culture that does not have some form of music, I've never heard of it.  It speaks to us on a deep, primal level, which is why dance is as ubiquitous as music.

We hear the beat, we want to move our bodies, and for a lot of us, that experience is transformative, almost transcendent.

It's also undeniable that musical traditions differ.  I've been a musician since I was a teen, primarily on flute and piano (although I also play bagpipes, something I think accords me some bragging rights, although others may differ, such as my wife and my two dogs).  I've played primarily in three different musical traditions -- western European classical music, traditional Celtic music, and Balkan music.  It hardly bears mention that these idioms differ, as do (honestly) just about any two musical traditions you want to pick.  From the formal, cerebral intricacy of J. S. Bach, to the wild abandon of an Irish reel, to the insane asymmetrical time signatures of a Bulgarian kopanica, there's no doubt that there are tremendous differences in style, rhythm, melody, and structure.

Me and the amazing fiddler Deborah Rifkin performing some loony Macedonian tune in 11/16 at Folk College a few years ago

An interesting question, considering how universal music appears to be, is if there really is an underlying similarity between all of these traditions.  The differences are obvious; consider the different scales used in a lot of Jewish folk music that gives its distinctive sound, and even odder (to my ear) are the quarter-tone intervals used in Middle Eastern music from such ethnically distinct traditions as the music of the Arabs, Turks, and Persians.

To answer this question, a team led by Samuel Mehr of Harvard University did a structural analysis of 5,000 songs from 60 different cultures, and found that despite the differences there are fundamental similarities between music no matter where it's from or what purpose it serves.  The authors write:

Music is in fact universal: It exists in every society (both with and without words), varies more within than between societies, regularly supports certain types of behavior, and has acoustic features that are systematically related to the goals and responses of singers and listeners.  But music is not a fixed biological response with a single prototypical adaptive function: It is produced worldwide in diverse behavioral contexts that vary in formality, arousal, and religiosity.  Music does appear to be tied to specific perceptual, cognitive, and affective faculties, including language (all societies put words to their songs), motor control (people in all societies dance), auditory analysis (all musical systems have signatures of tonality), and aesthetics (their melodies and rhythms are balanced between monotony and chaos).

It's a fascinating result, and makes me wonder if we have some fundamental brain structure that is responsible for not only our universal response to music, but the commonalities that exist between songs from different cultures.   "In the way that all languages in the world have a set of phonemes – all words in the world are made up of small sets of speech sounds – so it is with melodies," said W. Tecumseh Fitch, of the University of Vienna, who co-authored the study.  "All melodies can be built up from a small set of notes.  This suggests there is a biological basis that is constant across all humans, but interpreted differently in different human cultures."

Which I think is amazingly cool.  We've already seen here at Skeptophilia that musical training enhances brain plasticity, and seen music's role in emotional catharsis, so it should come as no real surprise that there could be an underlying neurological reason why it affects us on so many different levels.

One limitation of the study that came to my mind, however, is that all they looked at were songs.  As versatile as the human voice is, this restricts the range (literally) of melodies they could consider.  Additionally, there are musical traditions that have traveled very far from the tonal centering the researchers found to be ubiquitous -- consider the twelve-tone system of the brilliant Arnold Schönberg, and the startlingly experimental music of people like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, just as three examples.  There's no denying that there are people who find their pieces emotionally moving, but they're about as far from a simple folk melody as you can get.

You have to wonder what Mehr et al.'s algorithm would do with them.

But enough of this.  I've been listening to some piano music by Claude Debussy while I'm writing this, and one of my favorite pieces -- La cathédral engloutie (The Drowned Cathedral) just came on.  I think I'm ready just to close my eyes and sink into it.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]