The importance of talk for social beings [if we can’t verbalize it, it doesn’t exist]

And we are social beings. If we can’t talk about it, then, in a sense, a very important sense, it doesn’t exist.

Let me give you a simple example from my youth. I started taking trumpet lessons when I was ten years old. After about two or three years I was beginning to be moderately skilled. In particular, I was beginning to develop some strength in the upper register, which is difficult to do.

However, something would happen to me every now that bothered me. I’d be playing some high notes, and I’d get light-headed and dizzy. What’s going on? I didn’t know. Is something wrong? Am I getting sick? I even think I was worried that I might be getting cancer.

Well, after a while the dizziness stopped, but I still didn’t know what was going on. For some reason or another it didn’t occur to me to talk to my trumpet teacher about it. That was a private experience, and we don’t talk about such things. Anyhow, I eventually found out that that kind of thing was fairly normal for trumpet players. It’s a consequence of the way we play the trumpet.

Playing the trumpet is an unnatural act, very. It involves high tension (and release) in the face muscles, especially those supporting the lips. Those muscles weren’t “designed” for high tension. They were designed for the skillful and precision manipulation of food and drink. That kind of manipulation is certainly part of trumpet playing (tonguing), but so is high tension over sustained periods of time. That tension extends to the muscles of the neck, which may constrict arteries and veins in the neck in a way that slows blood flow to the brain. THAT’s what causes the lightheadedness.

[If you search YouTube for “trumpeters fainting” you’ll get a number of clips showing it happen.]

Now, that’s perhaps a relatively minor example. Still, if I had know about that when I was young, if I’d felt comfortable talking about it, it would have saved me some anxiety. Generalizing, there are lots of things that happen when we perform music, and when we listen to, important phenomena that are not adequately talked about and understood. Over the years I’ve been collecting anecdotes about such experiences and assembling them into a single document, which is currently 41 pages long: Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance. Someone ought to be systematically collecting such anecdotes so that we can study these phenomena in a systematic way.

But this phenomenon – if we don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist – is hardly confined to music. I suspect that it’s all over the place. In particular, it certainly exists with respect to sexual experience. That’s a thread running through some recent posts:

• Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?
• Notes on the erotic: Pole dancing, ballet, Fifty Shades of Grey & a conversation with Claude 3.7
• Aurora, exploring & extending the limits of the erotic in dance
• Nina Paley on sex and life
• Confabulation, Dylan’s epistemic stance, and progress in the arts: “I’ll let you be in my dreams of I can be in yours.”
• What is it about depicting sex in writing? From shared knowledge to common knowledge.
• In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans