ESSAY // FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER
Back to Life
From our skulls to tiptoes, we are idiosyncratic. Our art can be, too
by Walter Foley
images by Lisa Schaffer
Volume 4 // Issue 2 // Failure
From our skulls to tiptoes, we are idiosyncratic. Our art can be, too
“If the duration of a heartbeat and the tempo of a heartbeat was like a metronome, we would be in serious danger.”
This is an insight that moved free jazz drummer Milford Graves into a decades-long investigation into what the hell happened to the art form he loved: He’d noticed a tendency in the recording industry to smooth away the edges of performance, to aspire to something more clean and standardized. Upon learning that the heart requires variability in its rhythm—that a strictly regimented heartbeat would result in death—he spent the rest of his life investigating the hazards of viewing the human body as a machine.
Graves is seen in turns as a tinkerer, shaman, trickster, and explorer in the documentary Full Mantis, released three years before his passing in 2021. He himself and his friends into strange medical/musical computer programs to analyze and experiment with the sounds emanating from their bodies. In his attempts to counteract what he sees as a soul-sucking force of modernity, scenes from his home in Queens—lush garden, esoteric library, folk-instrument museum—are juxtaposed against nearby train rails.
The streamlining of musical production has likely accelerated since Graves’ epiphany: Pop songs are recorded at a narrower range of tempos, and music nerds will point out that there is much less variation in harmony, melody, and rhythm in popular music than there was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.
Pop songs seem to be stuck, in the sense that the Top 10 of 2022 doesn’t sound nearly as different from 2002 as 2002 sounded from 1982, compared to 1962, compared to 1942, compared to 1922.
Granted, a lot of great folkloric music also sounds the same for decades, or even centuries. But, if we had to choose a particular sound with which to rest for a few generations, we probably wouldn’t by our own volition settle for an era bookended by Christina Aguilera and Drake.
So, perhaps something strange has happened.
In a 2006 essay, “Digital Maoism,” computer scientist Jaron Lanier criticized his inner circle regarding the overly romanticized view Silicon Valley had taken toward the collective intelligence of Wikipedia and Google. He included a reminder that “when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.”
While the hivemind can indeed discover valuable things that individuals cannot, a system built on algorithmic aggregation can lead to lifeless conformity: “[T]he trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle.”
But there is a paradox: As musical conformity accelerated, we saw a pull in the opposite direction, in which people gained more freedom to explore their preferred sonic niches, discover new independent artists, and access previously rare works.
So, is there really a problem here? If we can still get all of the music that we want, should we even care if the pop music played over loudspeakers in Target isn’t to our taste? Can’t we just stick in some earbuds?
Divided attention
Research by the psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist seems to show that our minds require two very different but complementary modes of attention. One mode, prominent in the right hemisphere of the brain, experiences the Gestalt, the wholeness of an experience, which in its complexity can only be glimpsed through intuition, paradox, ambiguity, metaphor. The other mode, prominent in the left hemisphere, focuses on minutiae, and it experiences the world as abstracted parts to be analyzed and manipulated in isolation.
The right hemisphere is better at big-picture understanding, both in creative and scientific endeavors, McGilchrist argues. The left hemisphere is good at micromanaging and solving specific problems, but it can’t function well on its own. Medical patients with damage to their left hemisphere often have easier lives than those with damage to their right, despite the fact that left-hemisphere damage often results in more outwardly noticeable setbacks, such as loss of speech.
McGilchrist’s grand theory is that the modern world has adopted patterns of thought—now embedded in our institutions of learning, government, and the arts—that lean much too far toward the decontextualized, regimented thinking of the left hemisphere. The imbalance, he posits, has created a world that is overly analytical, hubristic, bureaucratized, unpoetic—one which is compelled to categorize and dissect phenomena and unable to appreciate the uniqueness of a moment or individual.
“[T]he left hemisphere is good at procedures,” he said in a lecture last year for the University of Oxford. “But what the procedures mean is another matter altogether. I think, probably, if you look around you in the modern world you can see this triumph of procedure over meaning everywhere that you look.”
McGilchrist references surveys in his own country of Scotland indicating that although a vast majority of people claim no affiliation with any religion, an even larger percentage also rejects the idea that life can be explained through scientific materialism.
People seem to be searching for meaning, but don’t quite know how to articulate what’s missing, or where to look for it.
In his long, meandering books he often turns to art as a corrective to this myopia, at one point referencing Susanne Langer, who wrote in her influential 1942 book, Philosophy in a New Key, “There are certain aspects of the so-called inner life, which have formal properties similar to those of music—patterns of motion and rest, of tension and release, of agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfillment, excitation, sudden change, etc.”
McGilchrist shares with Langer a belief that symbolism, music, poetry, and metaphor aren’t mere causes of emotions or symptoms of our desire to be entertained, but are a necessary conduit for grasping reality and shaping imagination. Music has the ability not only to recall emotions, but to reveal a previously unknown feeling: Two songs can be “sad” in very different ways that can’t be put into words.
“Music is as different from the separate notes seen on the score as life is from the language that aims to throw its net around it,” McGilchrist writes in The Matter With Things. Harmonic complexities demonstrate that life is best understood through the relationship between something and another.
The sentiment is similar to that of C.K. Ladzekpo, who has taught traditional African music at UC Berkeley since 1973. In a seminar demonstrating the drumming techniques of his Anlo-Ewe ancestry from Ghana, Ladzekpo once explained that the polyrhythmic juxtapositions of beats of two against beats of three are “the way that the Ewes try to make sense out of a very complex world that has very fast-changing moods, emotions, dynamics, events, and so forth. Sometimes things will be just going fine; sometimes they will not be going so fine. Human nature has a habit of trying to somehow make sense out of very, very complex stuff. So, they will use rhythmic structures to create those kinds of dynamics. Musically, the concept of hitting two against three is the cornerstone of that kind of journey...”1
Optimization: pro and con
For any of its other flaws, the hivemind has had a largely positive effect on musical instruction, which I believe is much better and more accessible than it was when I was learning drums and bass guitar in the early 2000s. Collaborative approaches to teaching musical concepts, specifically through YouTube, seem to be aided by the global network of artists sharing information over video. One can now, for example, get a solid introduction to the circle of fifths in under 20 minutes with written, auditory, and performance examples on the same screen. Knowledge of martial arts, woodworking, dancing, cooking, and drawing is similarly more accessible than it once was.
This is mostly a good thing, since technical proficiency really does matter for art, craft, and performance. But technical proficiency doesn’t necessarily correlate with creativity, and it’s possible there’s an inherent tension between the two.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks expresses concern about the over-professionalization of performance in his book Musicophilia: “This primal role of music is to some extent lost today, when we have a special class of composers and performers, with the rest of us often reduced to passive listening. We have to go to a concert, or a church, or a musical festival to reexperience music as a social activity, to recapture the collective excitement and bonding of music. In such a situation, music is a communal experience, and there seems to be, in some sense, an actual binding or ‘marriage’ of nervous systems...”
Athletic pursuits face a similar conundrum: Sports scientists know more than they ever have in terms of training for high-level competition, and professional teams are able to recruit from across the globe to select from a tiny number of extremely gifted people. They’ll break records at levels previously unimaginable, while solitary online scrolling and physical stagnation rise within the general population.
To be consistent, improvise
Culturally and linguistically, we tend to draw our analogies from our place in time, and so, following the Scientific Revolution and into the Industrial Revolution, it was common for people who studied physiology to speak of the body as a machine, as though a little homunculus were driving our corpse around from a separate location up in the skull. But in the 1920s in Moscow, neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein developed motion-tracking technology to run a number of experiments that would render that analogy defunct, and eventually change the study of motor learning within Western academia. (It took a while though, as Bernstein’s original papers were stuck behind the Iron Curtain until the 1960s).
The Soviet government had tasked him with assessing the techniques utilized by blacksmiths when swinging their hammers against a chisel to cut sheet metal. What were the movement principles that distinguished the highly skilled workers from the unskilled? As predicted, he found that those with poor performance had a lot of unintentional variability in how they swung a hammer; their movements were erratic and unfocused. But—counter to the body as machine framework of the time—Bernstein’s motion-tracking imagery showed that the movements of the experienced blacksmiths were also noticeably variable, but in a different way: Motion of their shoulder and elbow joints fluctuated, but the trajectory of the hammer was more consistent.
“Skilled performance did not involve one correct movement technique. Instead, it involved using a slightly different technique with every execution,” writes Rob Gray in How We Learn to Move, which draws from his research in human systems engineering at Arizona State University. “The key to becoming skillful was not strict repetition. Instead, it was repetition without repetition—learning to produce the same outcome by using different movements.”
Whereas a machine must operate uniformly, living organisms can and must adapt. The joints, tendons, and muscle fibers—over which we have some cognitive control—interact with our reflexes and the other autonomous systems in our body that are under constant change—for example, our heartbeat. Due to the complexity of any given task once all of these factors are taken into account—plus the fluctuating environment—it is never the case that a person truly repeats a movement. Experts within a physical practice learn (consciously and unconsciously) to make incremental adjustments as they go.
Practitioners in this line of research emphasize that a coach should instruct not through micromanagement but through cultivating self-guidance, steering an athlete to discover proper movements for themselves, enabling them to tune to the intricacies of their body and surroundings.
Most importantly, they emphasize training whenever possible with the most dynamic gym equipment: another person.
To succeed, fail
In martial arts, these concepts were demonstrated—very clearly and publicly—three decades ago with the formation of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the first large-scale tournament to pit practitioners of different martial arts against each other in something close to no-holds-barred combat.
Americans had been enraptured by kung fu and karate movies throughout the 1980s, and martial arts businesses experienced a boom in strip malls across the nation, where the training shifted toward repetitive, choreographed drilling, with less emphasis on external feedback from a resisting opponent. This was in part due to market pressures: Some instructors realized they could collect membership fees from as many students as possible by foregoing individualized and immersive training to instead line them up in front of a mirror to shout and punch at the air.2
Although the athletes who fought and lost in the original UFC were indeed still very good at fighting, and were trained in places more legitimate than a strip-mall dojo, the revelation of this moment was in how it was experienced by the audience, and how it would shape martial arts training from then till now.
Many viewers of the first UFC bouts had assumed that the victor would utilize something similar to the techniques seen in Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, perhaps even with some hokey mysticism thrown in. Instead, the person who won the first UFC (as well as the second and fourth) was Royce Gracie, the lightest and physically least-intimidating of the entire lineup, who rarely even hit people.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu instead emphasizes manipulation of an opponent’s body against gravity, taking the fight to the ground, and submission by strangleholds and armbars rather than attempted concussions.3
“I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, and we were always told punching and kicking was the soul of martial arts, and the toughest guys were the guys who punched and kicked best,” famed Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach John Danaher reflected in a 2018 interview. “And here you had this guy who looked like nothing, just tackling people, holding them down, and strangling them. And you couldn’t even believe it. Are you kidding me? I never even thought fighting would be like this.”
The very idea of “tapping out” is an innovation in and of itself, now heavily emphasized in training for mixed martial arts everywhere. Rather than spend most of their time repeating drills while standing in a row in front of a mirror, Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructors encourage students to jump into the chaos very early in the process: Stand or kneel in front of your (more experienced) training partner, try to pin them down (or try to do anything, really), and discover for yourself just how easily you will be tied into knots by someone much smaller and physically weaker than you, simply due to the difference in experience. Tap once you’re in trouble, and try again. As the student’s body and brain absorb new information in non-articulatable ways, they can—slowly, very slowly, with intervals of guidance along the way—learn to grapple effectively.
Having learned some aspects of Brazilian jiu-jitsu over the past year—very slowly, very staggeringly—I’m captivated by the similarities it shares with the best moments of my musical education. There are things that I can do now that I recently wasn’t able to, but how it happened is alluringly unclear. The mistakes take the shape of discrete little episodes, but the victories just seem to emerge.
Learning is never really about linking an unbroken series of successes. What would that even look like?
It makes no sense to demand perfection at every stage, even though there’s occasionally an implication in the air somewhere that it’s possible.
HAPPY ENDINGS
Skill is born through many hours of ineptitude—similar to the way that the scientific method relies on falsification over confirmation. Inherent to a mystery is that we don’t know exactly how to pursue it, and so we experiment, we improvise, and slowly we discover through a process of elimination.
This involves engaging in ways that will break us out of habit and show us what we need to see. Art and play are the tiny universes that allow us to feel around the edges of this big, mysterious thing, and they tend to reveal larger truths through paradox, irony, and incongruity.
It’s disorienting, and we’re sometimes tempted to push away or hide these paradoxes; to make everything neat and straightforward. But the paradoxes are life, and we should learn to love them if we don’t want to exist as machines.
Consider that for 150 years, the version of King Lear most commonly performed in theaters was a 1681 adaptation by Nahum Tate that added a romantic storyline and swapped the tragic ending for a happy one. This adaptation, Iain McGilchrist suggests in The Master and His Emissary, was an outgrowth of some of the more rigid thinking that surfaced post-Enlightenment, accompanied by a fixation on certainty. Art seems to have been pushed at times toward more idealized messaging, cutting back the subtlety, ambiguity, and gray area, and sharply dividing the lines between Good/Evil and Happiness/Sadness. Tate’s version notably omitted the character of the Fool, who serves as the unassuming voice of reason or conscience in the original.
C.K. Ladzekpo writes that the use of nested, contrasting rhythms within traditional West African music “embodies the lessons of establishing contact between two dissimilar states of being, or in particular, the right way to look at despair.” He summarizes an old Anlo-Ewe folk song: “Despair is not only useful, it is vital. Those in despair recognize the facts of their existence, rather like a drowning swimmer admitting the water is there. If you block off the despair, you block off the joy.”
The life of music, poetry, fable, and physicality hinges on their unknowable traits, their juxtapositions and peculiarities. Allow them to be whole and we are whole.
1 Percussive Arts Society lecture, 1994
2 Matt Thornton of Straight Blast Gym and Rafe Kelley of the Evolve Move Play podcast both frequently discuss this history in interviews with other practitioners.
3 Royce’s father, Hélio Gracie, developed the style by adapting Japanese judo to account for his small frame and recurring health problems. Another of Hélio’s sons, Rorion, co-founded the UFC as a way to demonstrate the effectiveness of this style.
4 “Developmental Techniques of Cross Rhythms,” 1995
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