"Nourishment For The Spirit" #2

by hillary_step 19 Replies latest jw friends

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  Prisca

  Great positive thread hilary_step!!

  I would also have to go with the others here, and say that music is what can transcend me out of this world. Beethoven is a fav of mine, his music seems to touch the intellectual in me.

  Can we also mention architecture? As I mentioned on another thread, I would have to say that visiting the St Peters Basillica was a religious experience that I have never experienced as a JW. I first went there as a JW, and typically viewed it as part of Babylon the Great, yet I realised once I was in there how much reverence the artists who designed, built and decorated the church.

  When I went there a few yrs ago, I was well on my way out of the Borg, so I viewed it in different eyes. I still marvelled at the beauty of the art, but appreciated it differently.
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  Maximus

  HS, a most interesting topic!

  I started to reply earlier and I found myself getting so complex I abandoned it. Will drop you a personal note about a couple of items that otherwise are perhaps too abstruse for this setting.

  Music, poetry and art are essential elements in my JW recovery toolkit.

  As a very young man, I embraced huge sound like Tchaikovsky, then widened through the years. (Loved the Tallis recommendation; do you like Duruffle?) I would read a treatise on, say, the Pathetique in analysis of Life but the experience was purely cerebral.

  Not long ago I was driving home, saw a concert was about to begin and went to the box office on a wild impulse--never had done that before in my life, had no idea who or what was to be presented. The well dressed lady behind the glass stroked her keyboard and announced I was in luck, there was a special seat for me for $25. I envisioned aquiring a nosebleed, of course.

  Inside, I found my seat to be center orchestra third row back although the ticket stub said $100. Stranger yet, a world-class orchestra walked on stage and presented the Pathetique!

  The experience was not cerebral, I will not try to analyze the Meaning of Life, but the experiential sensation left me profoundly moved. One word tells it all:

  Acceptance.

  Warmly,
  Max
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  bboyneko

  The viewing of the extraordinary film, Poke-a-hot-ass in a hotel in Baltimore left me profoundly moved, it's take on the children's Disney film Pocahontes was truly a work of genius and furthermore...

  Okay seriously my inspirational work of art was ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell. It is about the JW's to me. The way the pigs (governing body) at the end become indistinguishable from the very ones they condemned at the beginning of their conflict (Governing body becomeing just like any other religion they condem) is right on target.

  -Dan
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  RationalWitness

  HS,

  It didn't exactly change my thinking, but on making the mental and emotional break from The Society, it greatly helped to soothe and calm my soul to listen to The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams. For those who have never submersed themselves in this piece's richly romantic violin solo, I recommend it. Try to find a version with Sarah Chang or Anne Akiko Meyers on violin. It will bring tears to your eyes and hope to your heart as it rises, flutters, dips and reascends in what is, to me, a perfect musical metaphor for life.

  Rational
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  hillary_step

  RationalWitness

  Thank you for your comments

  It didn't exactly change my thinking, but on making the mental and emotional break from The Society, it greatly helped to soothe and calm my soul to listen to The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams

  Yes, a sublime piece of music. Williams music is the English Countryside and the 'Lark Ascending' is indeed a very moving piece. The 'Sea Symphony' is a little bit more difficult as a listen but also very stirring. Aslo worth tracking down is 'Job - A MAsque For Dancing' by Williams, very dramatic stuff.

  Any jazz fans, try John Handy - 'New View', a 1968 live recording long out of print but recently re-issued in CD format. God bless technology and all who sail on her!

  Maximus Looking forward to your note.

  The reason I asked this question, agreeably a difficult one, is that it is always this sticking point that I have with a close friend who is an atheist.

  Do humans need poetry, art and music to survive? If not why is mankinds natural inclination towards the arts? What purpose do they serve in the instinct to survive

  Thank you all for your comments -- HS
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  Utopian Reformist

  Thanks to Maximus and everyone else for reminding me of a true treasure we can inadvertently ignore in this short life. Music. I was raised on Classical Italian Opera and my father was a staunch VERDI fanatic.

  Max, do you remember what VERDI's last name was an acronym for during the Italian Risorgimento?

  V.E.R.D.I. ?

  Anyway, I used to feel guilty playing opera CD's in the kingdom hall parking lot or out in service in the background of boring and pretentious hypocritical pioneer conversations. It is truly a relief to listen to one's favorite musical therapies for the soul!

  I will never again place my freedom to thrive and nourish my soul with the creative gifts that talented humans have made available!
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  bboyneko

  Do humans need poetry, art and music to survive? If not why is mankinds natural inclination towards the arts? What purpose do they serve in the instinct to survive

  I submitted a question to a veterenarian about animals and their response to music and this is what she said:
  .. http://www.catchow.com/search_mentor.asp?combinedID=20901

  My cat of 4 years has a very strange habit...She reacts euphorically to whistling…anytime someone whistles, it has to be on-key, pleasant whistling, she starts acting as if she is high on some drug, she just gets taken over as if by an invisible force. She is normally a very grumpy cat who is not at all affectionate but when she hears whistling she acts like an adorable cat and begins to purr and cuddle. Why does she do this?
  
  Answer:
  The feline sense of hearing is incredibly acute, and certain tones and sounds trigger behavioral reactions in the “primitive” brain level. In fact, the scent of catnip does the same thing—acts on one section of the brain to prompt a feline “high” in susceptible cats. Sound can stimulate the same odd reactions in certain felines. Music especially seems to impact the kitty emotions. I’ve known of cats that drooled and rolled about at the sound of stringed instruments like violins, or high-pitched women’s singing. It appears that whistling has quite literally struck a happy chord with your kitty.

  Primitive brain. Our reponse to music and its pleasant feelings are it tugging at our primitive brain. Seems more of an argument for atheism than against, especially if animals with no soul can enjoy music.

  When a person self-stimulates their anterior amygdala (brain site) through music or other forms of sensory experiences, this turns on dormant frontal lobe neurocircuits. That person begins to automatically and spontaneously experience extended and intensified pleasure or a euphoric high.

  The reason the brain provides this extra reward for those in the know is simple: Any activity that enhances individual or species survival is encouraged by built-in brain reward circuits. More long lasting pleasure is the result of advanced behaviors and thinking. Nature wants you to survive better- and so it automatically rewards frontal lobes behaviors with indisputable increased feel good sensations.

  Humpack whales use many of the same rhythms and patterns as human composers in their songs, tempting some scientists to speculate that a universal music awaits discovery.

  In addition to using similar rhythms, humpbacks keep musical phrases to a few seconds, creating themes out of several phrases before singing the next one. Whale songs in general are no shorter than human ballads and no longer than symphony movements, perhaps because they have a similar attention span. Even though they can sing over a range of seven octaves, the whales typically sing in key, spreading adjacent notes no farther apart than a scale. They mix percussive and pure tones in pretty much the same ratios as human composers—and follow their ABA form, in which a theme is presented, elaborated on and then revisited in a slightly modified form.

  Perhaps most amazing, humpback whale songs include repeating refrains that rhyme. Gray and her colleagues say that whales might use rhymes for exactly the same reasons we do: as devices to help them remember. As a recent study showed, whale songs are often rather catchy. When a few humpbacks from the Indian Ocean strayed into the Pacific, some of the whales they met there quickly changed their tunes—singing the new whales' songs within three short years.

  Humans love order, to us 'beauty' is symetry. Human face with one eye bigger than the other, with a giant nose disprortiant to the rest of the face, a giant belly etc is 'ugly'. Our enjoyment for art is our enjoyment of 'making sense' out of disorder. The same reason we can stare at the 'snow' on a television channel that dosent work for hours (at least I can) or why ocean waves, landscapes and clouds are so 'pretty.'

  music conveys an advantage through stimulating our primitive timing mechanisms.

  Most interesting, he suggests that music stimulates our drive to find patterns in the environment. "Our brain is constantly trying to make order out of disorder, and music is a fantastic pattern game for our higher cognitive centers," he writes. "From our culture, we learn (even if unconsciously) about musical structures, tones and other ways of understanding music as it unfolds over time; and our brains are exercised by extracting different patterns and groupings from music's performance." It is this very kind of pattern recognition—which is extremely important for making sense of the world around us—that Keith Devlin suggests in his book The Math Gene gave rise to language and stands behind mathematical ability as well. To be certain, researchers won't agree on the purpose of music anytime soon—which fortunately shouldn't stop any of us from enjoying it

  A facinating book, Understanding Comics by Scott Mcloud gives an insight into our primitive brain and why we enjoy sensory stimulus through visual and auditory art and especially a combination. A highyl reccomnded read.

  

  -Dan the musical bard
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  hillary_step

  bboyneko

  Thank you for your thought-provoking post, a very interesting perspective and exactly the tone of discussion that I was hoping to inspire. Can this thinking be applied to poetry and art, or other non-auditory art forms?

  I will carefully read your post and return over the next couple of days.

  Thank you - HS
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  Englishman

  Hilary_Step,

  I think that music in general meant more to me as soon as I left the JW,s in '72.

  For a while I was heavily into the folk scene, songs that meant a lot to me then were Paxtons Rambling Boy, Kristoffersons Me and Bobbie McGee and -if you have never heard this one, download via audio galaxy.com - Harvey Andrews The Soldier.

  I can bash out a couple of 3 chord Dylan songs when well oiled, I think it was my new found freedom that made me look at this sort of music.

  Lately I have become keen on opera, there is nothing so emotional as Verdis Va Pensiero or Amami Alfredo, I saw Madame Butterfly recently, One Fine day is stunning heard live.

  And isn't Leslie Garret a honey?

  Englishman.

  ..... fanaticism masquerading beneath a cloak of reasoned logic.
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  Utopian Reformist

  Sarah Brightman is quite the Diva in every sense! I also admire Kathleen Battle, Charlotte Church, Cecilia Bartoli, Leontyne Price, and the list goes on............