Santa Caterina II

Santa Caterina II, black ink 19x24, by zoe blue

“Leap, and the net will appear.” --variously attributed to American naturalist John Burroughs, Gaelyn Foley, Julia Cameron, and also an “unknown” Zen source.

Fly

come on
uncling
unwrap
your wing

confuse
the gravity
with your
lovely personality

don’t feed
the fear
not even
with a bite
just fly baby
enjoy the flight

--Vesna

In the Church of Corpus Domini, Bologna, Santa Caterina de Vigri sits upright on view, her flesh ranging from a brick-red to black and still cleaving to her bones, though she died in 1463. She is the only such saint to sit upright, and her shrine miraculously survived the bombing raids of 1943 which destroyed the building in which she sits. Next to her sits her violetta, created by Andrea Amati (1413-63), which is the oldest known surviving stringed instrument. So, the saint, uncorrupted, remains with her instrument, a fellow-survivor. She sits across the nave from the tomb of Luigi Galvani, famous for his attempts to show electricity as the ‘spark’ of life with his seizing frogs, experiments which led later to tales like Frankenstein and the reality of electroshock therapy and cardiac paddles. His life gave meaning to the word galvanize, which means not only to give life to the moribund but also to protect from corrosion. The elements of this nave scene led me to consider the connections between electricity, music, and incorruptibility.

The mysterious creative power of music has been expressed visually in several of my favorite Remedios Varo paintings: for example the mother-of-pearl-faced musician creating a structure from the sounds of his clarinet, or the musician freeing birds from crystal cages by playing her bow across beams of sunlight. Might music itself be the life-spark that Galvani was looking for? The source of the rhythm and melody that synchronize us into being, harmonize into personality and memory, the whole cloth of our existence?

In This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin explains:

"Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain. Through studies of people with brain damage, we’ve seen patients who have lost the ability to read a newspaper but can still read music, or individuals who can play the piano but lack the motor coordination to button their own sweater. Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem. Could this fact account for claims that music listening exercises other parts of our minds; that listening to Mozart twenty minutes a day will make us smarter?"

Could it even be that the music itself is the method by which the pieces of our brain communicate with each other? If each neuron gives off a spark, like electricity, wouldn’t that electricity have its own beat and lyricism, just like all the other currents of electricity that surround us invisibly in our world, which Kubisch gave voice to with her headphones? And if so, then it would be important to keep those elements in sync with each other, in rhythm. To have concordance between the left brain and the right, between the amygdala and the cerebellum, between the serotonin and the dopamine. Perhaps this is why pharmaceuticals have had such a large failure rate with emotional and mental illnesses--it’s not a matter of a certain number of neurons or interactions; it’s a matter of harmony. Even with just an octave’s worth of notes, Levitin tells us, there are endless possibilities for a melodic line and its harmonizations, and when you add in tempo, rhythm and timbre, the possible variances multiply exponentially. It makes sense that each of us would have a unique balance; it makes sense that each of us would be our own song. Now, studies show that Alzheimer’s patients and parkinsonian patients as well as patients with the inability to form new memories can miraculously function under particular musical circumstances. In his Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks describes the 

“extraordinary powers of music with our post-encephalitic patients--its power to ‘awaken them at every level: to alertness when they were lethargic, to normal movements when they were frozen, and, most uncannily, to vivid emotions and memories, fantasies, whole identities which were, for the most part, unavailable to them....[And] It is music that the parkinsonian needs, for only music, which is rigorous yet spacious, sinuous and alive, can evoke responses that are equally so. And he needs not only the metrical structure of rhythm and the free movement of melody--its contours and trajectories, its ups and downs, its tensions and relaxations--but the ‘will’ and intentionality of music, to allow him to regain the freedom of his own kinetic melody.”

Stepping off the edge of the universe, Caterina II by zoe blue

And what about the expansion of perception? Levitin tells us:

“[Miles] Davis famously described his improvisational technique as parallel to the way that Picasso described his use of a canvas: The most critical aspect of the work, both artists said, was not the objects themselves, but the space between objects. In Miles’s case, he described the most important part of his solos as the empty space between notes, the “air” that he placed between one note and the next. Knowing precisely when to hit the next note, and allowing the listener time to anticipate it, is a hallmark of Davis’s genius. This is particularly apparent in his album Kind of Blue.”

It’s as if that’s the way they create a new path in the world, because the spaces between the notes or the objects is where your expectations are formed. Those spaces, instead of just handing you something, are rather training your mind to expect that thing, and then reinforcing that expectation. They change your perceptual reality by changing your expectations--then you look away from the paintings or step away from the speakers, and all of your brain, which was involved in that experience of listening, as stated above, has been nudged in a new direction, which has repercussions: symbolic, perhaps, but you are now operating with a new broadness of rhythmic or tonic possibility. The electricity of your mind, your being’s music, now opens to more than it did before. 

For the drawing, I was focusing on the idea of music being the animating electricity that Galvani was talking about, because it’s what gives us the ‘spark.’ If electricity is how a person’s billions of neurons communicate, and the rhythmic coherence of all their firings is what holds a body together; if Christina Kubisch has shown that electricity always has sound, its own music even though outside our limited range of hearing; then couldn’t you see music as the juice giving life to the body--or even see the body, or the less tangible ‘person,’ as an expression of a particular music? And that music is how we communicate with the entire universe (even a black hole is a low B flat), being in sync or out, discordant or concordant, and how well our lives “go” probably has a lot to do with that.   The idea of the ink is the connectedness, in both negative and positive space, of all of it: the birds singing, the man conducting even as he leaps into the void, the girl sailing out of the void--perhaps because of the motion of his arms or the sound of the violin, or the rhythm of the swirling birds, or some mixture of all of that together with whatever the tree’s input happens to be --but she's not just falling in a terrifying swoop. That electricity slowly rises, through granite, through roots, through the biped, through the birds, and into the universe as pure song.

If we do understand music to be our essence, how can we consent to live without harmony, to bludgeon our own internal rhythm and spark with the mechanized drumbeat of unchosen routine? An awareness of our lives as a symphony with the universe must surely persuade us to take the chance, to expand the harmonies and concordant possibilities in our own contribution to its music.

from Caterina II by zoe blue

The idea is to stop. Listen to the birds, to your heartbeat, to your own breath. Listen to the pull your whole being has towards something. Ignore the part of you that’s focused on what you want to escape, and pay attention to the part of you that has a magnetic pull, a pulse, a compulsion, however senseless, towards. Play that tune. Dance. Leap.

James Rhodes, who is performing at the Soho Theater this summer was the first classical pianist to be signed to Warner Bros records--the world’s largest rock label, and under their label put out ‘Bullets and Lullabies’, a number one iTunes album, in 2010. He wrote an editorial for the April 26, 2013 issue of the Guardian which he titled with the great words of Charles Bukowski: ‘Find what you love and let it kill you,’ where he exhorts us to : 

“Do the maths. We can function - sometimes quite brilliantly - on six hours' sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can't even smoke?”…“What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece - these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you're very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.”…“What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of "I love you" until you realised that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack? I didn't play the piano for 10 years. A decade of slow death by greed working in the City, chasing something that never existed in the first place (security, self-worth, Don Draper albeit a few inches shorter and a few women fewer). And only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by since the age of seven – to be a concert pianist. Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is not perhaps the Disney ending I'd envisaged as I lay in bed aged 10 listening to Horowitz devouring Rachmaninov at Carnegie Hall.”

And yet, it gives him more than the years of greed in the city; it gives him so much, he would never turn back. It gives him so much, he’s hollering for the rest of us to come join him--not on his path, but on our own. It’s worth it, he says.   

Do not miss his video here--either the introduction or the playing.

Leap, and the net will appear.

Again, from Vesna:

The awareness of your existence

draws

a smile after smile on my face

Feeling filthy rich

like an arabian princess

Smile is a new currency

It is all mixed up

The economy and the fantasy

I am almost sure

we are not crazy

Vesna ©

16-05-2011

*PS

The elm flowers are also there for a reason, but I will stop now. If you use this image for any sort of meditation of your own, please let me know your results!!

Santa Caterina and her Violetta

"Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution."--Novalis

Santa Caterina de Vigri and her Violetta

In the Church of Corpus Domini, Bologna, Santa Caterina de Vigri sits upright on view, her flesh-color ranging from a brick-red to black and still cleaving to her bones though she died in 1463. She is the only such saint to sit upright, and her shrine miraculously survived the same bombing raids of 1943 which destroyed all the surrounding decorations and building. Next to her sits her violetta, created by Andrea Amati (1413-63), which is the oldest known surviving stringed instrument. So, the saint, uncorrupted, and her instrument, also able to out-survive its contemporaries.

According to Marina Warner, in her well-packed and fascinating book Phantasmagoria, "The word 'galvanize' has at least two meanings: applied to metals, it means coating iron or steel with zinc through an electrolytic process in order to protect it from corrosion [italics mine]; figuratively, it means something closer to [Luigi] Galvani's work, the revitalization of a moribund or torpid organism: 'I was galvanized into action.'" These two meanings, both relating quite well to the hope presented by the incorrupt body of a saint that waits its resurrection with its bones still holding it together, and also both relating to her violetta in a manner we will attend to momentarily, are especially interesting here because Mr. Luigi Galvani himself is entombed right across the nave from her.

Luigi Galvani (1737-98) was a physiologist and professor of medicine, the one who first introduced an electric shock into a frog’s corpse and beheld that it caused the animal to kick its legs. This opened up a variety of excited questions about a possibly attainable source of life-force, leading to all sorts of other experiments, and tales like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Luigi’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, tried this same electrification on human corpses, bringing their limbs to jump and their faces to become quite expressive, and then moved the process to the living via the mentally-ill, thus beginning electroshock therapy in an attempt to bring life back to a frozen (terrified, confused, overwhelmed) mind.

Christopher Turner gives a fantastic description of the famous hypnotist Franz Mesmer’s ‘galvanizing’ use of electricity in the Spring 2006 Issue of Cabinet Magazine:

“In a medical museum in Lyon there is a strange tub-like object constructed of oak and decorated with lengths of ornately woven rope. About six inches in from the rim, eight evenly spaced iron rods sprout up from a highly polished lid. In the eighteenth century, a group of patients would sit or stand around this device in such a way as to press the afflicted areas of their bodies against these moveable metal wishbones and, bound to the instrument by the ropes, would link fingers to complete an "electric" circuit. The atmosphere in which these sessions took place was heavy with incense and séance-like; the music of a glass harmonica (invented by Benjamin Franklin) provided a haunting soundtrack, and thick drapes, mirrors, and astrological symbols decorated the opulent, half-lit room.

Franz Anton Mesmer, the legendary Viennese healer, hypnotist, and showman, would enter this baroque salon of his own invention wearing flamboyant gold slippers and a lilac silk robe. He would prowl around the expectant, highly charged circle, sending clients into trances with his enthralling brown-eyed stare. By slowly passing his hands over patients' bodies, or with a simple flick of his magnetized wand, Mesmer would provoke screams, fits of contagious hysterical laughter, vomiting, and dramatic convulsions. These effects were considered cathartic and curative. When a patient's seizures became so exaggerated as to be dangerous or disruptive, Mesmer's valet, Antoine, would carry him or her to the sanctuary of a mattress-lined "crisis room" where the screams would be muffled.

The baquet, as Mesmer named his vessel, parodied the contemporary craze for medical electricity. Pharmacists and apothecaries frequently prescribed shock treatment, especially in attempts to cure paralysis, and often exposed the sick to a more general "electrical aura" as a healing agent. Benjamin Franklin, then American ambassador to France, was fond of demonstrating the power that could be harnessed in a Leyden jar, the prototype of the modern battery, by using one to send a bolt of electricity through a chain of people. (One medical electrician claimed not only to have shot a charge through 150 guardsmen, but to have made a kilometer-long line of monks simultaneously jump into the air.)”

Mesmer’s baquet was much like Franklin’s battery, a huge reservoir to take in and save Mesmer’s own magnetic-electric inner fire and spread it amongst the members of his rather large groups of patients, all at once.

“In England, such [medical] applications were encouraged by Newton’s suggestions, thrown out in a number of queries at the end of the 1713 edition of his Optics, that the animal spirits or nervous fluid which communicated impulses from the brain to the muscles might be related to a subtle ethereal or electrical fluid that constituted a kind of universal medium in the universe. Hints such as these, combined with the strong inherited tendency to think of electricity as a vapor or effluvium, made it easy to see electricity as a mediator between microcosm and macrocosm, and as the principle of life itself. In America, where electrotherapies formed a strong field of what has been called “electrical humanitarianism,” Dr. T. Gale wrote in his Electricity, Or Etherial Fire, Considered (1802) that electricity was a kind of universal atmosphere, which all living creatures inhabited and respired.” --Steven Connor

Now, it is still true that we use electric paddles to try to revive a (very recently deceased) corpse even today, and very often with success. The question is mainly how to navigate that shadowy, sometimes grisly space between life-saving techniques and Frankenstein, while also somehow sidestepping the messier areas of mass-hysteria and public fainting-spells. But inside that space is a fascinating realm involving the electric impulses that communicate information between synapses in your brain and, again, music. Oliver Sacks thoroughly explores this realm in his book Musicophilia.  

He describes, for example, a man who discovered his first interest and immense talent in his late forties, directly after being struck by lightning.  But there are less far-flung examples of the intense connection between electricity, life, and music in the stories of some epileptic patients:

-"Jon S., a robust man of forty-five, had been in perfect health until January of 2006. His working week had just started; he was in the office on a Monday morning, and went to get something from the closet. Once he entered the closet, he suddenly heard music--'classical, melodic, quite nice, soothing...vaguely familiar...It was a string instrument, a solo violin.'
He immediately thought, 'Where the hell is that music coming from?' There was an old, discarded electronic device in the closet, but this, though it had knobs, had no speakers. Confusedly, in a state of what he later called 'suspended animation,' he groped for the controls of the device to turn the music off. 'Then,' he says, 'I went out.' A colleague in the office who saw all this described Mr. S. as 'slumped over, unresponsive,' in the closet, though not convulsing.
Mr.S's next memory was of an emergency medical technician leaning over him, questioning him."
Sacks asked him about this music, but he could not sing it himself and didn't know what it was, though he felt it familiar.
"I told him that if he ever did hear this music--on the radio, perhaps--he should note what it was and let me know. Mr. S. Said that he would keep his ears open, but as we talked about it, he could not help wondering whether there was just a feeling, perhaps an illusion, of familiarity attached to the music, rather than an actual recollection of something he had once heard. There was something evocative about it, but elusive, like the music heard in dreams."

And then, as I was saving the information I’m working on about the saint, I came across the quote from Hugh Jackson via Oliver Sacks about a ‘doubling of consciousness’ that occurs during the seizures such as the one her violin is creating. What was once her and some paper dolls is now her and dancers--real, alive--, her as part of the show, the musician for the dancers, the one giving them their rhythm, storyline, electricity. She is part of something, something that matters. That’s the other consciousness, the one outside of the four sides of her box.

So, electricity is everywhere. Trees make a little bit, running it through their bark. Your heart works via electricity it generates from potassium, sodium and calcium. Communication is run between the synapses in your brain via electricity. There’s of course lightning. And humans are making more and more electricity even outside of their bodies using a variety of tools. And all of this has a music to it.

Christina Kubisch is an artist who explores this connection between electricity and music from a completely different direction than Galvani, Sacks, Shelley, or even Santa Caterina. She has had a certain type of headphones created which a user takes along with a map of an area (meant only as an inspiration and a guide, but in no way a limiting force) in order to hear the music created by all the electric fields surrounding us every day. She explained how she taps into these ‘Invisible Cities’ of sound in an interview with Cabinet Magazine:

“--How do the headphones actually work?
--Every current in an electrical conductor—for example a wire or a cable—generates an electromagnetic field. These currents can be “musical,” like the signals running through loudspeaker cables; or they can come from electrical activity in the infrastructures of buildings or cities. The magnetic component of these fields is picked up by the sensor coils in the headphones. And, after amplification, these signals are made audible by the little speaker systems in the headphones. So if there’s an electromagnetic field (say, an underground cable) and another one nearby (say, the headphones), the fields pick up each other. The sound jumps through the air from one to the other.”

“--I’m struck by the similarity between some of these sounds and minimalist techno: PanSonic or Alva Noto, for example.
--Yes. There are some sounds that, when I listen to them for half an hour, sound to me like LaMonte Young. The tram in Bratislava, for example, is almost like a choir: a chord, three sounds together that are changing, but each at a different level... Subways, buses, and trains are especially musical, maybe because they depend upon a constant flow of electricity. There’s a wonderful subway in China that sounds to me like electronic music of the 70s... Airplanes, though, sound really ugly: very high, thin, and noisy.”
...
This summer I put on my headphones during a very strong thunderstorm. There was no electricity, because all the power had gone out. But, when I recorded, I got the sounds of natural electricity, which was wonderful. The recording is so strange: very low, but very clear... At two points, you hear voices. You can’t understand the words, but you can tell that they are voices. I knew that electricity could transport voices, but I had never heard it before. It’s quite breathtaking when you hear things like that. This is nature, too—electrical nature!”



Somehow, electricity is there in the force of life, and somehow, music is involved. Think about shamanic, hypnotic drumming, about the heights of ecstasy some reach at jam sessions of their favorite bands--such heights that they are willing to drop everything and follow the band around. Think about the chanters in ancient masses, about techno-music, about binaural beats. And that makes the quote at the top of the post make more sense: problems occur when the rhythm of your life gets out of whack--somehow, the vibrations are off, the energy isn’t there, the organs falter and the synapses sleep late because the alarm never went off.

In an interview with Steve Silberman of Wired Magazine about the studies that went into Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks stated : "The therapeutic power of music hit me dramatically in 1966, when I started working with the Awakenings patients at Beth Abraham in the Bronx. I saw post-encephalitics who seemed frozen, transfixed, unable to take a step. But with music to give them a flow, they could sing, dance, and be active again. For Parkinsonian patients, the ability to perform actions in sequence is impaired. They need temporal structure and organization, and the rhythm of music can be crucial. For people with Alzheimer's, music incites recall, bringing the past back like nothing else."

There it is again, that image of re-infusing a corpse with life, and this time the electricity is created with music--its flow (like electricity) and its rhythmic pulse. It is the first step those post-encephalitics were unable to take; once the music gave them that first step and a current to follow, they were able to ride it.

There was another thought I was chewing on here, with the saint and her violin:
There is a difference between skill and possession. And what you want (even, I would argue, as a doctor) is possession, because if a person is ill, it is from not following the logic (rites, rituals, rules, rhythms) of the reigning forces or melodies (‘gods’) of existence. Only that force understands its own logic, or those in choreography with it. And everything you see is a symbolic aspect of that logic (recall the post on Eidetic Images), including illness. Music historically has much to do with trance, both as a result of possession or not. That trance is the opportunity for something higher and more general than your ego to take over your body. That is the electricity created. In the painting above, St. Catherine is possessed. She is an electric force, radiating. And she is bringing that electricity into the forms, making them alive through her music, infusing the air and their limbs with the tango of their love, that “fire that consumes without leaving ashes” (Vannoccio Biringuccio, 1540).

[Please note: the skirt was inspired by the one worn by the model in this Ryan Muirhead photo. The idea of a chaotic waters filled with spirits that she brought to the surface and to life appealed to me.]