Boyz from the Deep

-- By Tom Phillips

Years ago, as a graduate student in psychology, I took a course called Memory and Attention, from which I remember only one basic proposition:  memory is a function of attention.   We remember what we pay attention to. 

I thought of Memory and Attention recently as I read Volume Three of Karl-Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” the story of a middle-aged man remembering his experience as an adolescent boy.  And because Knausgaard is often compared to Marcel Proust, who wrote a hundred years ago, I went back and re-read the first part of “Swann’s Way,” the beginning of that earlier six-volume epic, drawn from Proust’s memories from the same time of life.   

What's striking in both is the quality of their attention, the amount of experience they can extract and retain from a moment – Proust watching the twin spires of the church shift their perspective in the waning sunlight, as he walks “Swann’s Way” in the little town where he apparently spent just a few weeks of his young life.  And of course the most famous extraction of them all – the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea, the subsequent descents into the subconscious, and finally the awakening of the whole remembered scene, the town and its environs, all the feelings that were bursting the heart of a proto-poet at a tender age. The past becomes present, memory and attention are one.

Feeling Beauty

--  By Tom Phillips

What is art for?  Does it have any use at all?  Does it give us anything beyond pleasure, or a momentary release from the cares of life? 

These questions have been around for thousands of years.  Today, there is a burst of renewed interest in them, because they have moved from the realm of philosophical speculation to the solider ground of scientific research.   Here the answers are confirmed not just by experience, but by pictures of brain activity.   And these pictures show us that the experience of beauty is central not just to human pleasure, but to human growth. 

In Feeling Beauty -- The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience,  G. Gabrielle Starr weaves together the language of neuroscience with a deep understanding of the arts, and makes a convincing case that by taking us out of ordinary experience, the arts offer us a window into ourselves – what we are, and what we can become. 

Heart and Spleen: Confessions of a Strike-breaker

Serenade

-- By Tom Phillips

Three years ago, mad as hell about New York City Ballet’s plan to triple and quadruple ticket prices, I and a few other balletomanes declared an audience strike against our long-time beloved ballet company.  We hoped a boycott would shake up the management, and force a return to popular prices.            

           

Three years later, they win.   Drawn by rave reviews and gorgeous pictures in the paper, I finally slunk back across my invisible picket line yesterday.  I paid 62 dollars for a seat in Row G on the side in the fourth ring – three times what I would have paid just a few years ago.  The reward was a brilliant triple bill of Balanchine classics – Serenade, Agon, and Symphony in C – from a company dancing better than it has in years.  Is this the effect of prosperity?  If so, you can’t argue with success. 

A Day of Anger

I knew I wasn’t going to be comfortable with all phases of the demonstration, but I went anyway, to the “Millions March” from Washington Square, winding up at police headquarters in New York.  

I went with a group from Broadway Presbyterian Church, a mostly white, peaceful lot devoted to the idea of reconciliation.   But the black organizers of the event were calling it a “Day of Anger,” over the latest wave of police killings of unarmed black men, and the impunity granted to the police by the justice system.   In the park, one swarthy black man carried a sign with a clenched black fist and the words “Fuck with me at your peril.” 

As we marched up Fifth Avenue, we came abreast of a group of young people, mocking the cops with a chant borrowed from the Vietnam War era.  Then it began “Hey, hey, LBJ..”   Now it was “NYPD, KKK, how many kids have you killed today?”   This was aimed at the police who lined the avenue, looking on impassively from behind the barricades. 

Democracy in Dance

-  By Tom Phillips

In his mischievous mode, Mark Morris is a serious comedian.  He doesn't take his dancers seriously, but he has them act as if they’re taking themselves seriously – and in the distance between these points of view is the genius of his gentle wit. 

Morris’s new work, “Words,” is set to Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words” for violin and piano, and it reminds me of another comic masterpiece with music by Mendelssohn – Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  “What fools these mortals be!” says Puck, but we love their foolishness as we do our own. 

Laurel Lynch and Billy Smith -- Mark Morris Dance Group 

Following the Ark: The People's Climate March

-- By Tom Phillips   



Photos: Brandon Johnson

The day began for me with an interfaith prayer service -- the first I've ever been to that seemed to be all in a common spirit.  People gathered on 58th Street under the banners of their various faiths, but I made my way through the crowd, trying to get close enough to the stage to hear the prayers and songs.  Starting with a friendly bunch of Congregationalists from Vermont, I made my way up through Unitarians, Pagans, Quakers, Buddhists and Ethical Humanists, until I wound up on a ragged border between Jews and Catholics, only about 100 feet from the action. 

For once, all the prayers and invocations pointed in the same direction.  We all have a common interest in survival, and the lives of those who come after us.  And there's no disagreement on the who our opponents are -- global corporations, artificial persons created by law for the purpose of doing business, which by their nature put profits first -- even at the risk of civilization.   

Between the two sides lies the institution of government, which has the power to regulate business, but which has largely abdicated its role.  The purpose of the march, on the eve of a U-N conference, was to challenge the idea that governments can't decide in favor of humanity.  Yes, they can.  

The interfaith crowd filled the entire block of 58th Street from Eighth to Ninth Avenue, and hundreds of other groups gathered in other streets surrounding Columbus Circle.  We had to wait while other groups got the march underway, but the band was rocking -- the cellist Michael Fitzpatrick with his intense vibrato, improvising behind gospel singer Roosevelt Credit, and Peter Yarrow, bent and shaky but still singing with conviction, making us sing along.

Finally we stepped out, cheering, behind a replica of Noah's Ark, a float festooned with all kinds of people.  One guy had a T-shirt that said "Don't panic, I'm Islamic."  Another's sign said he was "An Atheist on the Ark."

The march stretched as far as the eye could see, in front and behind, and went on for hours.  I came home and saw a report that said "tens of thousands," but it was hundreds of thousands, without a doubt.  The mood was entirely festive.  This was a celebration of human life and community, the very things at risk.  

The Walking Cure

 -- by Tom Phillips

                       “Sometimes I wonder what I’m a-gonna do,

                        But there ain’t no cure for the Summertime Blues.”

                                                                                    -- Eddie Cochran 

Ever since I was a teenager I have suffered from the Summertime Blues – the aimlessless, hopelessness, boredom and loneliness that result from long days of humid heat, and the collapse of the structures of ordinary time.  What are you going to do? 

This summer I stumbled on an answer.   Browsing in my favorite bookstore, the Labyrinth on 112^th Street, I came across a new work by a French philosopher, Frederic Gros, called “A Philosophy of Walking.”   I’ve always been a walker – for transportation, exercise, and mental hygiene – but I never thought of this humble activity as a way of life, as a meaningful act in itself. 

Gros treats it that way. “Walking is not a sport,” he begins.  He writes about famous thinkers and writers for whom it was the essential activity:  Rousseau walked to recover his original, uncorrupted humanity;  Rimbaud walked to escape, to move on, to exhaust his body and mind.  Wordsworth walked to feel the natural rhythms of poetry.  Thoreau walked through the woods to simplify his existence, Nietzsche climbed mountains to drive his thought to its peaks.  Kant walked for discipline, and to relieve his constipation.  Gandhi walked for independence, for peace and freedom.    

Inspired, I tried organizing my life around walking.  And I found that three walks a day can relieve aimlessness, hopelessness, boredom and loneliness, and yield great benefits beyond.