Last post opened up a black hole that I will never escape. Here, I send more blather into the atmosphere of non-academic cyberspace.
Thinking and re-hashing about previous rant and wondering…what kind of words can I use to further explain?
I’ve been reading a lot lately about left brain vs. right brain and the left brain has come to dominate Western culture. We value a linear sense of continuity and success. The holistic is not logical. I see this as our desire to interpret every gift or talent as a competition. Games have points, art gets awards, elected officers get the majority, time rules world, etc. In other words, a lot of worth is measured by quantity which is actually pretty abstract but we’ve come to understand quality as abstract because we can’t find a universal way to quantify it or WRITE it into a standard.
Creative endeavors are not naturally quantifiable, though we may try to make them so. Popularity is usually the means and even then, numbers can be determined by so many ways and influences…well, you could say the same for politics.
I guess what I’m saying is, since our youth, we are raised to seek high grades, most points, most votes to prom court, blah blah blah. I’m not saying this is necessarily bad, but it infers that anything else is not necessarily good. I think that this is what I was trying to say when we should return making music to a communal activity again. Just like sports scores, it’s another language, but perhaps not as competitive. A different kind of alphabet, grammar, syntax, etc.
So, ironically, I’m saying it’s the value we place on these things. An abstract value calculated into education funds, most often. Because, dammit, we just don’t know how else to think about these things. Part patriarchy, part consumerism, part whatever. This is Part II.