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Jun. 14th, 2013 10:15 amSkilled labor as a tool of imagination has been insufficiently considered when it comes to folk or vernacular art. I have recently written an essay about this with regard to Thornton Dial.*
Menial labor, on the other hand, is generally proof that the slogan that “work is ennobling” is as false as the “Arbeit macht frei” signs over the doorways of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. It more often brutalizes, and this is one reason for the invention of practical ways of keeping the mind occupied during such stretches of what is rightly called “mind-numbing” routine. (In this sense, as we know, so-called semiskilled jobs are menially repetitive—data entry as the planting or harvest of the crops of advanced industrial society.)
A few traditions in Buddhism and Eastern Orthodoxy and elsewhere have developed methods for maintaining creative mental focus during the long periods of repetitive labor that are part of maintaining a self-sustaining institution such as a monastery. Since such places also function as informal psychological clinics for the laity, some of the methods have been adapted for daily life, and the accounts of such interactions in present-day Cyprus are among the most instructive pleasures in Kyriacos C. Markides’ autobiographical narratives of the adventures of a Cypriot-American sociologist among the Orthodox fathers. (His earlier sojourns with less orthodox Cypriot healers left me with the sense of having fallen down the rabbit hole.)
This is where I would normally go on for 1500 words or so, but I have belatedly realized that no one reads past the first three paragraphs. There is a reason why the traditions break up the lessons into easily remembered stories that are designed to link with one another through the mind’s associative capacities—and to modify those capacities in productive ways. The process of associative linking is so necessary for psychological and physical survival that I can understand as more than youthful romanticism Mircea Eliade’s outburst (in volume two of his published journal) that it is essential to find meaningful patterns “even when they aren’t there. ” We live by fictions, and our task is to restrain or refrain from our more destructive fictions and cultivate our more health-giving ones.
I cannot end this note, however, without observing that I misconstrued the downhome anecdote that originally sparked this particular reflection. If the line workers thought Grady Harris was speaking in tongues while he murmured the foreign-language vocabulary he was memorizing—a quite different use of repetition to maintain mental focus—it may very well mean that they engaged in glossolalia as their very own version of the repeated prayers of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Pentecostalism has spontaneously rediscovered, or sometimes imported via the very sources it dismisses as the work of the devil, a good many techniques that would be recognized in Tibet or the Amazonian rain forest or parts of West Africa, not to mention Mount Athos. The same borderline paranormal results also appear in such contexts, but again, it is the differences that make all the difference. Monks and shamans and ecstatics are not all doing the same thing, any more than the fact that an epileptic seizure energizes the same parts of the brain as meditation or concentration during a golf game means that all three activities are identical. Anti-reductionist neuroscientists emphasize that the activation of the same sets of neurons does not imply identity any more than the use of the same arm muscles (and external implement) to peel potatoes and to carve a peach-seed monkey means that the two activities are the same thing. (I take the peach-seed monkey, which I have never seen anyone carve, from Sam Keen’s own downhome anecdote about his father in “Reflections on a Peach-Seed Monkey: Storytelling and the Death of God,” an essay that in retrospect foreshadowed some of Keen’s sillier later preoccupations....)
But there, I’m off on a deeply related but completely different topic again, by way of the commonality of working-class Southern belief in the primacy of language and narrative—cf. Wallace Stevens’ “It is a world of words to the end of it.” (I had to suppress yet another parenthetical observation in the preceding paragraph that would have led into an entire separate essay, and should.)
One idea at a time, please. One joke and one punch-line at a time—although Tahir Shah’s recent replication in Scorpion Soup of the concatenation of interlinked stories that characterize such works as The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night suggests that he has inherited from his father a perception of the usefulness of telling many stories at the same time. John Barth burlesqued this usefulness of multiple stories for maintaining and expanding the focus of attention, in his short story “Menelaiad”—but there, I’m off on exactly the same type of successive stories stacked up like Russian nesting dolls, set within my own frame tale about folk art.
And I am more than halfway into my usual 1500 words. So everyone has stopped reading long before reaching the preceding paragraph, or the footnote that follows:
**The Dial essay was written for an exhibition that changed its topic en route, and thus may never be published. I sometimes post such things on my Counterforces journal—where they are more accessible than in limited-edition catalogues, in any case.
Menial labor, on the other hand, is generally proof that the slogan that “work is ennobling” is as false as the “Arbeit macht frei” signs over the doorways of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. It more often brutalizes, and this is one reason for the invention of practical ways of keeping the mind occupied during such stretches of what is rightly called “mind-numbing” routine. (In this sense, as we know, so-called semiskilled jobs are menially repetitive—data entry as the planting or harvest of the crops of advanced industrial society.)
A few traditions in Buddhism and Eastern Orthodoxy and elsewhere have developed methods for maintaining creative mental focus during the long periods of repetitive labor that are part of maintaining a self-sustaining institution such as a monastery. Since such places also function as informal psychological clinics for the laity, some of the methods have been adapted for daily life, and the accounts of such interactions in present-day Cyprus are among the most instructive pleasures in Kyriacos C. Markides’ autobiographical narratives of the adventures of a Cypriot-American sociologist among the Orthodox fathers. (His earlier sojourns with less orthodox Cypriot healers left me with the sense of having fallen down the rabbit hole.)
This is where I would normally go on for 1500 words or so, but I have belatedly realized that no one reads past the first three paragraphs. There is a reason why the traditions break up the lessons into easily remembered stories that are designed to link with one another through the mind’s associative capacities—and to modify those capacities in productive ways. The process of associative linking is so necessary for psychological and physical survival that I can understand as more than youthful romanticism Mircea Eliade’s outburst (in volume two of his published journal) that it is essential to find meaningful patterns “even when they aren’t there. ” We live by fictions, and our task is to restrain or refrain from our more destructive fictions and cultivate our more health-giving ones.
I cannot end this note, however, without observing that I misconstrued the downhome anecdote that originally sparked this particular reflection. If the line workers thought Grady Harris was speaking in tongues while he murmured the foreign-language vocabulary he was memorizing—a quite different use of repetition to maintain mental focus—it may very well mean that they engaged in glossolalia as their very own version of the repeated prayers of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Pentecostalism has spontaneously rediscovered, or sometimes imported via the very sources it dismisses as the work of the devil, a good many techniques that would be recognized in Tibet or the Amazonian rain forest or parts of West Africa, not to mention Mount Athos. The same borderline paranormal results also appear in such contexts, but again, it is the differences that make all the difference. Monks and shamans and ecstatics are not all doing the same thing, any more than the fact that an epileptic seizure energizes the same parts of the brain as meditation or concentration during a golf game means that all three activities are identical. Anti-reductionist neuroscientists emphasize that the activation of the same sets of neurons does not imply identity any more than the use of the same arm muscles (and external implement) to peel potatoes and to carve a peach-seed monkey means that the two activities are the same thing. (I take the peach-seed monkey, which I have never seen anyone carve, from Sam Keen’s own downhome anecdote about his father in “Reflections on a Peach-Seed Monkey: Storytelling and the Death of God,” an essay that in retrospect foreshadowed some of Keen’s sillier later preoccupations....)
But there, I’m off on a deeply related but completely different topic again, by way of the commonality of working-class Southern belief in the primacy of language and narrative—cf. Wallace Stevens’ “It is a world of words to the end of it.” (I had to suppress yet another parenthetical observation in the preceding paragraph that would have led into an entire separate essay, and should.)
One idea at a time, please. One joke and one punch-line at a time—although Tahir Shah’s recent replication in Scorpion Soup of the concatenation of interlinked stories that characterize such works as The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night suggests that he has inherited from his father a perception of the usefulness of telling many stories at the same time. John Barth burlesqued this usefulness of multiple stories for maintaining and expanding the focus of attention, in his short story “Menelaiad”—but there, I’m off on exactly the same type of successive stories stacked up like Russian nesting dolls, set within my own frame tale about folk art.
And I am more than halfway into my usual 1500 words. So everyone has stopped reading long before reaching the preceding paragraph, or the footnote that follows:
**The Dial essay was written for an exhibition that changed its topic en route, and thus may never be published. I sometimes post such things on my Counterforces journal—where they are more accessible than in limited-edition catalogues, in any case.
