Friday random Oracle and why I love Opera


 


Three observations, of which I'm going to talk about one:

1) I now realize why I like the Friday random Ten thing (beyond the fact that it's easy), and why I've modified it the way I have.
It's the I Ching, 21st century Apple Computer version.
Instead of casting the yarrow stalks or the three subway-token-like Chinese coins, you press the 'next' button. And, just as each hexagram has moving lines, I examine my cast, and see which entry is significant.
I'm not the first with the iPod-as-divination idea. My contribution (maybe) is that what we're (I'm) doing is already divination.

2) Listening to The Marriage of Figaro (again), I realize just why I've grown to love Opera so much. It struck me that this us how I could listen to it:
a) listen to the voices
b) listen to the music
c) listen to the story
d) listen to the language
e) listen to the words
f) listen to the performance
g) listen to the orchestra
h) listen to the recording
i) listen to the opera

3) And the Marriage itself has seemed to me something of a wonderful cultural node.
It's a story
about a Spaniard
written by a Frenchman
composed by an Austrian:

of course it's in Italian!

but back to oracles;
I've always been fascinated, drawn even in my earliest days, to systems: alphabets. calendars. languages. pantheons. codes. I should have known i wasn't cut out to be a mathematician in that I didn't try to get interesting atuff out of them: I just liked contemplating their ordering of things. I used to keep notes using both the Mayan calendar and the French Revolutionary calendar; I fixated on hieroglyphs for a number of years, carrying around a Dover Press copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead until it fell apart; I broke down the English alphabet into its component parts and filled notebooks with all the different letters I could make out of them; and as I delved into higher mathematics, part of me felt a twinge of joy every time a strange new symbol was introduced.
It's why I've always had a thing for reference books: knowledge (which i sucked up like a sponge) laid over with an ordering system was an irresistible combination.
It's also why I've been drawn to astrology and divination--specifically, the tarot and I Ching.For me, the lure of them is entirely independent of whether they explain anything: it's that they are classification systems that divide up human experience in interesting ways. Astrology is especially wonderful, because once you get beyond the elementary popular Sun Sign layer, you have as much complexity as you could poosibly ask for: the positions of all the planets, the angles between them, the placing of the houses--and the wonders of progressions (three different systems) and transits--and that doesn't even get into ascending and descending nodes off the ecliptic. It's such a wonderful machine, it's scarcely relevant whether it does anything.

Is this simply a confession of proto-obsessive-compulsive disorder? Maybe. It could be a despairing hunger for something to bring order to a meaningless and chaotic world. (But I didn't think that way when I was 8.)
Maybe, though, It's the fact that the only way we know things is through language. Ferdinand de Saussure, in helping set out the basis of linguistics, showed that phonetics was a big network of sounds, and that the only way things were distinguished was by differentials. This principle's been abused by many self-described semioticians, but the principle is a good one. I don't believe (to use the textbook Platonist example) that we have a concept of 'chair': we know what a 'chair' is by the distictions we make between a 'chair' and a 'couch', a chair and a stool, a chair and a saddle, a chair and a stump, a chair and a pillow. (Is a bean-bag chair a chair? Is a bosun's chair a chair? Is an airplane seat a chair? Is a wheelchair a chair? Is a riding mower a chair? Is the seat of a riding mower a chair? These are all real questions that are part of the process of knowing what 'chair' means.)
Language is perhaps the main way we know things, and language is a grid laid on that strange thing called the world.Learning another languages is a tremendously enriching process, in that it gives you another grid. Different differentials arise (like the difference, both translated by "I must", in French between je dois and il faut que je; like startling search in Latin for a word like 'yes'; like the amazing numbers of tenses in Russian; and learning that English seems to be the sole home of the word(meme) 'fun.') and you start to learn things about the way you think--about the way you used to think.
Astrology did two great things for me: 1) it celebrated time in a way that made the clock and the calendar seem deaf and blind; and 2) it gave me a grid to start thinking about human personality. Not to explain it or predict it--merely describing it was a big, bewildering task, and while the meshing escarpments of planetary 'energies' and house 'receptacles' is no more true or accurate than the four humors or Freudian structures, whether distinctions made are real or useful or whatever, it's a net that catches things. Similarly, the Great Trumps of the Tarot don't explain the human journey, or the fate and purpose of the human soul, but it's a vocabulary to talk about it, as are the I Ching hexagrams.
I'd deserve to be beaten up by Penn & Teller if I cast horoscopes to figure out whether to take on that project or whether that woman is right for me. But I've never even felt lucky enough to go gambling. But when, once in a while, I lay the dream-images out in an architecture, or draw a line from star to star, what I get is a picture of the universe, from center to circumference and from birth to ultimate fate, painted with a certain palette and with certain strokes. For me, that painting is something worth looking at.

And that's why the Friday Random Ten works for me as an oracle. Ten instead of six; and instead of simple unbroken lines, it's a ridiculously complex framework. What does John Fahey preceded by the early Kinks and followed by Big Mama Thornton mean? Is Metallica a good thing in the fifth or ninth place. I have, of course, not the vaguest idea. That's not the point. And fortunately I don't have Nancy Reagan to please.

It is, as we say in one of the great mysteries of English, fun.

Posted: Sunday - February 18, 2007 at 07:02 PM        

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