Purity (or why Woody Guthrie refused to eat at the kitchen table)

I've been reading along a couple of divergent lines recently. I'm taking a class on conservation biology, so I'm reading a lot about species diversity and disruption and how landscapes change in response to human activities. On the flipside, I also just finished reading "It Still Moves" (by Amanda Petrusich), a book about finding the roots of Roots music, or Americana, told mostly through a road trip to a splattering of important American music cities and filled with vignettes about local business shacks, Cracker Barrel meals, and hours on the highway. Despite the differences in content, however, there is a theme blaring out from the pages of these two readings, and that theme is purity.

I'm not sure I really have anything particularly profound to say about this subject, but it just struck as odd that what lies at the heart of so many different arenas of life is ultimately the search for purity of some kind (usually paired with a not-so-glancing blow at the evils of modern life which are continuously spoiling the pure and lovely past).

In music, and especially in American "folk" music, there is a wide following for finding, documenting, and preserving the purest, most unadulterated American music. This is more or less explicitly why lots of the old folkorists and archivers would go to jails to make field recordings, because these were presumably little time capsules where artists that learned to play before they were put into jail remained untouched by modern music. Although this is certainly not true of all folklorists, and certainly not all folk musicians, there is undeniably a strong tendency within folk and roots music to have a bias towards the past as pure and the modern as almost viral.

Conservation Biology is just bathed in the same kind of contradiction. There is some inherent value in untouched wilderness and areas that have not been altered for long periods of time, whereas anything that has been tainted by modern man loses something automatically. In some ways, I find this kind of backwards. There's no inherent reason why a "pristine" wilderness is any different than one that has been affected by human activity, and it seems rather that change and adaptation are quite the norm in the natural world, seeing as 99% of species that lived in the "pure" past just didn't make the grade and went extinct. Ultimately, I just wonder why there seems to such a universal psychological drive to maintain the past as pure and valuable.

Possibly my favorite story about this subject is about that legend of cowboy and american music, woody guthrie. Guthrie is often turned to as a potent symbol of the rambling singer/songwriter, outlaw, drunkard, romantic, dabbler, and just about every other sign you can tack onto him. He provided source material and inspiration for a whole generation, including the likes of Dylan, Seeger, later Wilco, etc. Guthrie was also seen by many as the living proof of an otherwise theoretical construct in the minds of lots of folklorists of the wandering dust-bowl refugee, the working man's hero. My favorite deflationary story about this myth is when he was at the house of the famous folklorist Alan Lomax. Guthrie was often welcomed into the Lomax home, and they offered him lots of basic comforts, which he would often refuse. He refused to sleep on the bed offered to him, and instead slept on the floor covered in a jacket, just like a hobo. Instead of eating at the dining room table, Guthrie would only eat at the sink. Bess Lomax found his antics "annoying," and complained that he was only pretending to be a hobo. For this, Guthrie is one of the great enigmatic symbols of American history, I think. Maybe he was only comfortable in the wayfaring life he had indeed lead, and didn't know how to exist in the comforts of modern society. Maybe he was just trying to inflate his own personal mythology. Maybe he did it because it annoyed the Lomaxes. Maybe all of these, who knows. Either way though, it was very american.

Rhythm and synchronicity

This excellent TED lecture by Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz has really gotten me thinking about the role of rhythm in life, biological, human, and otherwise, and I highly recommend it. The lecture covers some really interesting examples of how rhythms, or what he calls examples of "sync" arise spontaneously in everyday situations.

One familiar example from the biological world is schooling (in fish and birds, etc), where are all of the movements of tons of individuals are coordinated to give the impression of choreographed action. As it turns out, schooling works on some pretty straightforward principles. He shows a mathematical model of schooling each individual's behavior is determined by some exceptionally simple rules: each individual is only aware of those nearest to it, all individuals tend to line up in the same direction, and that all of the individuals are attracted to each other, but keep a set distance between them.

Strogatz also goes over some less animate examples of spontaneous sync. He shows that two metronomes will sync up if you give them a way of "communicating" with each other mechanically, which in this case was a mobile platform that he put both on. Also pretty cool was the example of how people's footsteps tended to get into rhythm at the opening of the Millenium Bridge in London in 2000, which caused the entire massive bridge to start wobbling and had to be temporarily shut down.

Pretty cool examples of how rhythms can arise between individuals spontanteouly, and they all seem to really interesting example of the larger idea of emergence. Since watching the lecture I've been thinking about the pervasive rhythms are in life that I don't really notice most of the time (traffic patterns, cadence of conversation, moods, everything seems to have its own rhythm on some scale).

More than anything though, it reminded me of all of the old church, gospel, country, and other "americana" music I've bene listening. Especially in the old gospel stuff (especially Goodbye, Babylon and Classic Southern Gospel), there's some really energetic in so many of the songs that's hard to put my finger on, and I can't help connecting it in my mind to this sort of spontaneous development of alignment and rhythm between people. Many of the recordings are field recordings, so the recording quality is often poor, but the blistering energy and rhythms come through clear, and it's kind of amazing that people would so frequently and so universally get together to make music. I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but why does it make so much sense for people who are thinking something (about God, or poverty, or teen angst, or love, or whatever) to get together and make sounds in rhythm together, from the church choir to the transcendent drum circle to the dance club? It would make a lot of sense to me that people are expressing something really fundamental and instinctive that comes out in music, something that stretches way beyond human life into the rest of the living and even non-living world. Well, in addition to it just being fun...