Whenever I publish a new article at 3 Quarks Daily I also publish a somewhat shorter post here at New Savanna. That post links to the 3QD post and comments on it, or perhaps adds some further thinking. But that doesn’t always happen. I’ve missed giving notice for my 3QD articles in July, August, and September.
The articles for July and August continue the series on Affective Technology that I began in June. That first article was about Poems and Stories. In July I published Emotion Recollected in Tranquility. The phrase is from Wordsworth: “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” That is, there is an emotion that we experience at some moment in time. Then, at a later time, when we’re doing something else, or perhaps nothing beyond lazing about as we let our mind wander as it will, that emotion calls to us. We hear it, take hold of it in words, and bring it back, creating a poem in the process. But before that I talk about state-dependent memory, the idea that our ability to remember something depends, in part, on our mental state at the time of remembering. Remembrance works best is there our current mental state resonates with our mental state during the original experience; this resonance is (hypothesized to be) a function of neurochemistry. But what if you can’t establish that resonance? Does that mean that your memory of that experience is gone, at least until you can establish resonance? I conclude by discussing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The Expense of Spirit.”
That sets us up for the third article in the series, Coherence in the Self, which I published in August. If our memories are neurochemically sensitive, that implies that our ability to remember the events of our lives depends, in part, on establishing neurochemical resonance with past states of mind and the events that engendered. If we can’t establish that resonance, then those events are lost. Our autobiographical self is shattered, a topic I take up with a discussion of dissociated identity disorder (DID), aka “split personality.” I then go on to argue that, by presenting us with a wide range of emotions, literary texts (and, by implication, other expressive culture) help us to construct neurochemical “scaffolding” that helps us keep in touch with our past. This strikes me as more fundamental than the (moral) improvement folks are forever attributing to (good) literature, though there may be a bit of that as well. Who knows? After discussing play I conclude considering Kenneth Burke on how we use literary texts to make sense of our lives.
September’s post is a bit different. I discuss five recordings of “Georgia on My Mind”: the original by Hoagy Carmichael, Ray Charles’s 1960 version, a harmonically-dense version by Jacob Collier, a beautiful jazz rendition by Dexter Gordon (tenor sax), and I conclude by another jazz version, this one by trumpeter Lew Soloff. That video is why I wrote this post. Notice that he begins with an a cappella trumpet line he took from the intro to the Ray Charles version.
Soloff’s style is interesting. It’s not swing, bebop, hard bop or cool, but it’s not modal or free either. In a way, it’s a kind of 1960s mainstream, but extended and opened-up (such as Soloff’s passage with only his mouthpiece or his use of the plunger mute) with a freedom that hardly existed before free jazz. That’s what makes it so interesting, that and Soloff’s soulfulness.
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