Greater than the sum of the parts

In truth, I write these pieces in order to discover what currents are stirring within me, by bringing them to conscious thought. I also do it to practise a craft. Any craft would do, but this one is the most convenient, and the one I know best. I have to go beyond the ephemeral notions flitting through my head like bats through a belfry, in and out, wheeling in the twilight sky. To change the simile abruptly, I’ve never panned for gold but my process resembles it. You stand in a swift mountain stream from which you have scooped watery mud in a wok-shaped pan. You swirl it around and pour off all but the heaviest sediment. If you’re lucky there’ll be some glittery grains. Then it gets different.. Gold is a universal medium of exchange, but these jottings have no quantifiable value. They’ll mean little, except to a few souls scattered across the globe. So let it be, for it leaves me less burdened, freer to prospect alone in mountains unmarked and unclaimed.

Now I pause, and yearn to be part of a team, notwithstanding a lifelong tendency to work the richest seams alone. I never chose a solitary path and I’m sure I wasn’t predestined for it either. Nature and nurture did not conspire, nor was it demonstrably written in the stars, despite the old horoscope I published the other day, which thrice mentioned “service to the community”. Circumstance and habit are enough to shape us, like the slant of a tree on a windy cliff, adapting as best it may.

In a given moment I can awake as if from slumber and declare that nothing need continue just because it was so before. Evolution works this way too, when it throws out mutations as an insurance against some unknown future barrenness, in case they might find a use one day. We are children of evolution, that inexplicable invention of nobody, which spawns albinos every so often, undaunted by the disadvantage they suffer in the wild. In some prehistoric climate change, the albinos, once disadvantaged and outcast, came into their own—as polar bear and arctic fox. All life hangs by twists of fate. Like Walt Whitman “I contain multitudes”—and so do you. When circumstances change we, find something within us. Parts which were once once raked by cliff-top gales can now flourish in the lee of kind shelter.

When you are awakened to something, you start seeing it everywhere. A word I keep noticing is “indeterminacy”. Nothing is predestined, nothing is ordained. Scientific law cannot dictate what happens. Evolution, whether Darwinian or cultural, can’t be confined within the age-old assurance “It is written . . .” whether in the Holy Book, the stars, or any pronouncement that “The science is settled on this matter.” And who better to explain it but Loren Eiseley: archaeologist, writer on evolution, gentle critic of science, mystic, magician-poet? I’m reading The Night Country at present. His thoughts fertilize mine. Though he died in 1977, I find in him an ally and friend. We are engaged in a kind of colloquy, just as I am with Hannah Arendt, who died in 1975.

We are all enriched by working together. I ran or was part of project teams for most of my professional life. But that wasn’t teamwork as I envisage it now. We were riven by individual agendas, lacking common purpose & vision. Our scattered energies were forced into a semblance of harmony by the superficial bond of plan, budget and deadline. Very rarely was our work directed by a shared vision. Commuting each day by Tube to the City of London I used to scribble in a series of notebooks, trying to design a new kind of methodology for software development. My vision for a shared vision got nowhere, perhaps because it was a solitary vision, paradoxically betraying its own ideals. In consequence it never found coherent expression. Meanwhile, similar ideas such as software prototyping became popular, doubtless produced by teams fired by one another’s inspiration.

Where do we find the paradigm for this way of working? Surely in music. Why do we talk of “shared vision” and not “shared soundscape”? I bet music and dance was the first way that members of a tribe of newly-evolved homo sapiens learned to “act in concert”.

My uncertain sense of heritage has has often led me to think of Africa as my true home, beyond its being the home of our original human ancestor. Today, its music is almost my only link. Can I be truly African, when I’ve never set foot on its shores, or landed at any of its airports? Still, I can claim to have been there. In 1946 I passed through the Suez Canal, which is part of Egypt. I didn’t step off the ship, but technically I was in Africa. I remember it vividly for two incidents. People threw pennies from the deck, and I did too. Little naked boys with dark skins dived for them, stored them in their mouths and clamoured for more. Some of them looked as young as I was. I envied them. Perhaps that was when I first considered being African as a desirable identity, though my skin was white and the ship was there on a short stop in transit, without even bothering to shut down its engines. (When we crossed the Equator, some time before the Canal, the engines were switched off. That was the strangest thing of all, though we had the King Neptune ceremony and played games on deck with the crew.) The other incident was when a little boat pulled up alongside the ship, offering handbags & other items of tooled camel skin. (We bought a pouffe, minus stuffing, and I think my mother bought a bag.) They were too low to be reached from our deck, but there was a boom and winch to collect the passengers’ money and hoist up the goods in return. Those are my sole memories of Africa as a geographical location.

But “Africa” means more. It encompasses a whole continent of attributes—people, culture, politics. Its music has become part of me. Can I now be part of its music? There’s a good Japanese word karaoke, where kara means empty and oke is short for okesutora which is their transliteration of “orchestra”. Though we may associate karaoke with the public mangling of popular songs, the “empty orchestra” is also a way to produce professional music, where vocal and background are recorded at separate times or locations. And just as I may read Eiseley and Arendt, and engage with them in posthumous colloquy, I can work with African musicians and be part of something bigger. How can I enhance this art they have exported so successfully already, cross-fertilizing with other music over the centuries? I don’t really know, but what I’ve done is a labour of love with no thought for where it might reach, and how it might get there—or how much time I had to spend on it. The research has been immensely rewarding, as has been the opportunity to play the songs again and again. The result is a YouTube compilation, “An African Sampler”. I gave one reader of this blog an earlier version on CD and DVD. She likes it very much. I don’t think anyone else has heard it; so I have no idea what you will think of it.

This is the video and here are the sleeve notes, both opening in separate tabs. I can’t give a rational explanation for having taken the trouble, except to say it was some kind of creative urge, the idea of adding value to something that’s already there by putting things together in a new arrangement. That’s exactly what music is; and since I don’t play any instrument properly, despite having owned several in my youth, mysteriously given to me (accordion, clarinet, piccolo, a National guitar, a large 5-string banjo), and can barely read music let alone compose it—and am certainly too old to learn—there remains in me the desire to be a member of the band. Metaphorically and literally too. As a way of expressing homage to that which has moved me. But also I recognize that I can’t give expression to the urge on my own. I want to be part of a whole which is greater than the some of its parts.

I went walking today in the spring sunshine, and brooded on the paradox of this desire. For I am already a part, and the whole is already the greatest it can possibly be, in a greatness no-one can grasp, whether or not they call it God, Nature, Earth or the Universe. Whatever it is, it’s full of parts, and each part is full of desire to unite, though we are unable to visualize (or imagine in soundscape) the complete form of that desire. Perhaps only in petty ways. It seems to me that the music I’ve chosen expresses, in different voices and moods, that desire.

I’ve republished another YouTube video as well, one with only two tracks from Africa. Maybe I’ll publish a post about it, maybe not. You can find it here: “Other Places, Other Times”.