zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron ]
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Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, Penguin, $29.95

Dropping silence into a concert turns things upside down: it brings the solo performer or group of performers into the position of audience, makes listeners of them – and makes keener listeners of the audience — perhaps with a touch of unease or self-consciousness, but with an unusual attentiveness, too.

Dropping John Cage‘s piece of silent music into a book right around the beginning… well, it has a similar impact. And that’s what Kay Larson‘s book Where the Heart Beats does, on the page numbered xiii so you’ll know the book hasn’t even started properly yet. Larsen points you, without giving you the URL, to YouTube, where you can find Cage’s most shocking, and thus his most famous piece, 4’33”, performed by the London Symphony at the Barbican, in three movements, all silent as demanded by the composer’s score – with breaks in between the movements for the usual coughing and fidgeting.

And how to say this? During the silence, you could have heard a pin drop? Or you could hear, as Tom Service said on the BBC, the “very distinct high hum” of the Barbican’s electrical system, and the occasional cough too – “you could cut the atmosphere with a knife, and every cough, every tiny noise was absolutely amplified, made into a massive musical event”.

Listen:

You can tell the audience was delighted – self-satisfied perhaps, too? – from the hearty applause, and they had listened, had presumably taken onboard the idea that pauses – silences – are as much a part of music as sounds.

But what if I said that wine was just as much a part of drinking as glasses, and poured wine for my guests with no glasses to contain it?

The thing about John Cage’s 4’33” is that it straddles the line between the emperor having and not having clothes, between group assent and dissent, between “either” and “or” -– if it turns us from self-obsessed self-expressives into attentive listeners, it has reached into us musicically and carried us beyond the limits of music. And if it’s a bunch of boring minutes while an orchestra gets paid to SFU, it’s plain idiotic.

Which means that John Cage composed it right at the tipping point between the stupid and the profound.

I want to express it that way, and not tell you that Cage composes where the mind is fresh and inspiration flows, because it is stupid as well as fresh and profound.

As Hitler might have said, if he’d been asked…

And we haven’t really begun the book yet.

**

There are three stories here:

There’s the rigorous thread of western classical music, from its origins in the mist via Jewish cantillation and Gregorian chant into Polyphony and the Baroque, Classicism proper, Romanticism and the Modern. The music of Cage is the culmination, here, of this theme.

There’s the circling yet nonexistent circle, drawn as it were on glass with an ink brush dipped in water, of Zen, a “rebirth with neither beginning nor end”…

And there’s the world of the contemporary arts, centering in New York, with Cage a leading light.

They comes together when various characters have what Larson calls “life altering moments” — Larson herself, John Cage, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac in the first few pages alone, with the two Suzukis, DT Suzuki and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and their experiences hovering in the background.

Zen is the pond, the emptiness, the silence, the stillness waiting into which like so many varied pebbles, the themes are character off the book will drop, in which their ripples will intersect…

Or to put that another way: silence, the stillness, is the pond into which Cage’s life and influence is dipped, and music and the arts the shingle on the beach from which the pebbles are dropped.

**

And Cage played in that shingle, sent notes from “prepared piano” and other instruments… formal and informal… skipping across the silence.

Cage not only invited silence into the concert hall, he also theorized it at length. I’d like to quote here a celebrated passage from his book, aptly named Silence: Lectures and Writings:

What happens to a piece of music when it is purposelessly made? What happens, for instance to silence? That is, how does the mind’s perception of it change?… Silence becomes something else — not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds… Where ears are in connection with a mind that has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound as it is, not as a phenomenon more or less approximating a preconception.

**

Zen is the simplest thing, it’s human nature. It is also the most difficult — it’s what we instinctively shy away from. And it can take all our resources, as those who “sit while going round in circles” well know — to break from the “boredom” of silence into listening, to dip into the sound stream, to hear the stillness.

Somehow, I’m hoping to nudge you into that kind of awareness, so that you can understand from within the taste of silence, the importance of Cage’s life, and of Kay Larson’s book.

Here’s another nudge, from a different angle — the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan‘s poem in homage to one of John Cage’s sayings:

Opening the Cage: 14 Variations on 14 Words
“I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.” — John Cage

I have to say poetry and is that nothing and am I saying it
I am and I have poetry to say and is that nothing saying it
I am nothing and I have poetry to say and that is saying it
I that am saying poetry have nothing and it is I and to say
And I say that I am to have poetry and saying it is nothing
I am poetry and nothing and saying it is to say that I have
To have nothing is poetry and I am saying that and I say it
Poetry is saying I have nothing and I am to say that and it
Saying nothing I am poetry and I have to say that and it is
It is and I am and I have poetry saying say that to nothing
It is saying poetry to nothing and I say I have and am that
Poetry is saying I have it and I am nothing and to say that
And that nothing is poetry I am saying and I have to say it
Saying poetry is nothing and to that I say I am and have it

— Edwin Morgan, The Second Life
Edinburgh University Press, 1968

**

In a follow up post on Monday or Tuesday, I shall describe Larson’s book in more conventional terms, and offer you some details from Cage’s intricate life and extraordinary network of friends..

For now, I just want to give you again that taste of silence from which this whole endeavor springs. Here is the pianist David Tudor, for whom the piece was written, playing 4’33”:

Top Billing! Grand Blog Tarkin (Jon Jeckell) – The Jedi Way of War

….While it seems the Jedi would be the only institution competent in warfare after thousands of years of peace, they were the worst possible choice on many levels. What institution within the Republic retained any practical knowledge of warfare? Some private institutions and individual planetary governments, such as Naboo, had their own modest security forces, but the Republic seemed to lack any other institution capable of employing coercion on behalf of the state. This study will elide the political, policy and civil society aspects and focus on explaining why the Jedi Order were a uniquely poor choice to lead the Grand Army of the Republic. Although it superficially appears the Jedi are the only ones capable of taking on this burden, they suffered from numerous institutional biases and a philosophy that impeded their ability to understand what was happening or adapt to realities of their new role. Leading a massive Army was not a linear extension of the skills the Jedi possessed, and they lacked the ability to gain those skills.

Although the Jedi were renowned diplomats and keepers of the peace, they were not politicians or strategists, and never critically examined the Separatist’s grievances to identify the root causes of the conflict. Without understanding the causes of conflict, they failed to develop a theory of victory. Without this, they merely continued to pursue of the Separatist leaders and the destruction of their army after the first engagement. They failed to reframe from their roles as individual combatants to leaders of an Army for a multitude of reasons explored below.

The much talked about post of the week where science fiction meets strategic analysis.

Diane Ravitch –Rahm and Other People’s Children 

One of the themes of the corporate reform movement is this:

“We know what’s best for other people’s children but it is not what’s best for mine.”

Many of the leading corporate reformers went to elite prep schools and/or send their children to them.

Schools like Exeter, Andover, Deerfield Academy, Sidwell Friends, the University of Chicago Lab School, Lakeside Academy (Seattle), Maumee Country Day School (Toledo). At these schools there are beautiful facilities, small classes, experienced teachers, well-stocked libraries, science laboratories, and a curriculum rich in the arts, sciences, languages, and other studies.

I hope you read this post about Chicago billionaire and school board member Penny Pritzker. She sends her children to the University of Chicago Lab School, which has the best of everything, but feels no embarrassment that the children of Chicago who attend public schools that she oversees do not have the same advantages.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children to this school. Arne Duncan is a graduate of it.

Remember that theme: Other People’s Children.

This reader thought about what Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants for his own children. Why doesn’t he want the same for all Chicago’s children? 

Good charter schools tend to be based upon delivering a different, innovative, curriculum well or serving a specific, generally disadvantaged, student population (the original, largely forgotten and abandoned, justification for charter schools). The founder is usually there on site, putting in long hours, leading by example, working with children, because their educational vision is a mission and labor of love. Their own kids are usually their first students.

Unfortunately, that has little or nothing to do with the Corporate Ed Reform pushed by both President Obama and Governor Romney, which rides on the reputation of the mom & pop charters but frequently fails to live up to it because their mission is a profit-maximizing business model devised by and lobbied for by hedge funds and private equities firms to divert public tax dollars to investors at the lowest delivery cost possible.  That model is not compatible with quality education and isn’t intended to be. If it were, the owners and investors would be enrolling their own children in the highly regimented, rote-learning script, worksheet based schools and “virtual charter” scams they are pushing on states, cities and school districts.

Conspicuously, they don’t.

WPR (Steve Metz )- A Necessary Evolution: U.S. Military Strategy Goes Invisible 

….It also became clear that the belief that removing Saddam Hussein or the Taliban from power would strike a mortal blow against al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations was unfounded. If anything, the war in Iraq added to the terrorism problem by radicalizing thousands more terrorists and giving them an opportunity to acquire training and experience. Even the demise of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, though it forced al-Qaida to relocate and reorganize, was not the body blow to terrorism that the Bush administration hoped. Rather than deterring extremists, it motivated new ones. 

Terrorism, it turned out, was not a nail after all. 

But a strange thing happened along the way to this simple discovery: The United States developed a different form of offensive military action — reliance on invisible or less-visible actions such as strikes by special operations forces and unmanned aerial vehicles — which held more promise. While they might not have led to a decisive and unambiguous victory over terrorism, these approaches certainly degraded the extremists’ capabilities. 

Google lends it’s analytical heft and cool graphics in a not so subtle effort to aid supporters of the UN Small Arms Treaty. Some of the stats for third world nations, or major arms exporters like Russia, appear impossibly small or are absent. For example, somehow, I think Afghanistan has imported some weaponry in the past twenty years. Click through and see if you agree.

John Robb – How Do You Attract Resilient People? Give Them Room to Grow 

Fred Leland –Check out My Latest P1 Column: Patterns of behavior, officer safety, and ‘the rule of opposites’

SWJ Blog –Why There’s Nothing Illegal about CIA Drone Pilots  

Eide Neurolearning Blog –The Steps of Creativity – Early Crowd sourcing and Prototyping 

Gunnar Peterson – Security > 140 Conversation with Jason Chan 

Abu Muqawama – Guest Post: The Last Argument of Tyrants 

Feral Jundi –California: Sacramento International Airport Dropping TSA

Shloky.com – VIDEO: THE WORLD THAT SCVNGR/FOURSQUARE/ETC WANT

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

The Diplomad 2.0 – The UN Arms Treaty, AKA The Lawyer Full Employment Act 

….Articles 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 comprise the core of the treaty. These articles would provide endless employment activity for “activists’ and their lawyers. They establish obligations on the “State Parties” that would, in essence, kill the trade in small arms. The language about weapons “being diverted to the illicit market,” or “used to commit or facilitate gender-based violence or violence against children” means endless lawsuits against exporting and importing states, manufacturers, and sellers.  While the ostensible purpose is international trade, that would quickly become a domestic legal issue in the US.  Say, for example, that a Glock, either one made in Austria or in a Glock factory in the US, were used for “illicit” purposes or was involved in an incident of “gender-based violence” in the US, the lawsuits would be ferocious. The threat of constant legal action effectively would halt the export and import of small arms–at least from and to those countries that take laws and treaty obligations seriously.  The treaty would provide the basis for additional US domestic legislation that would incorporate the UN language and ideas into our laws. Private firm gun manufacturing and sales would be halted by the constant threat of lawsuits.

Pundita -Upcoming ‘make or break’ meeting between CIA and ISI chiefs 

….So it seems Washington’s ball on Pakistan is now in Gen. Petraeus’s court; after consistently flubbing, it looks as if State, Defense, and the White House want to make him responsible for persuading the Pakistani military/ISI that they shouldn’t keep fighting a proxy war against NATO in Afghanistan. 

As to the request for drone technology, I think that has been floated every time a ranking member of the Pak military/ISI has met with an American counterpart. The Pakistanis have their own drone technology but they want weaponized drones from the USA. What they want most of all, however, is for the U.S. to share all its intelligence on terrorist activity with the Pakistani military.

HG’s World – Battleships: America’s Symbol of Becoming a Great Power, This week, the “Transit of the USS Iowa”, matched the “Transit of Venus”, for a once in a lifetime event, USS Iowa: Progress Report and A Love Affair 

A naval appraisal of some of the most powerful warships in the history of Earth by ZP amigo HistoryGuy99

Walter Russell Mead– Our President the WASP 

In his own way, however, President Obama is one of the neo-Waspiest men in the country. He is not a product of Kenyan villages or third world socialism. He was educated at the Hawaiian equivalent of a New England prep school, and spent his formative years in the Ivies. He has much more in common with Harvard-educated technocrats like McGeorge Bundy than with African freedom fighters and third world socialists of the 1970s.

President Obama’s vision of a strong central government leading the people along the paths of truth and righteousness has “New England” stamped all over it. Puritan Boston believed in a powerful government whose duty was to promote moral behavior and punish the immoral; by 1800 many of the Puritan descendants were turning Unitarian and modernist, but while they lost their love of Christian doctrine they never abandoned their faith in the Godly Commonwealth and the duty of the virtuous to make the rest of the world behave.

Gene Expression – We are all Anglo-Saxons now 

Razib delivers a brutal beatdown fisking of Max Fisher of  The Atlantic (hat tip TDAXP, PhD)

Fast Transients-Positioning for the melee 

Venkatesh Rao has another thought provoking post up at his Tempo blog. Go take a look and then come back here … Play close attention to his distinction between “planning” and “positioning” near the bottom of the piece.

Rao’s concept of positioning & melee moves seems similar to the military’s concepts of operational and tactical levels of war. Even more interesting for business — where these concepts of levels apply only by analogy — they appear to be closely related toshih, Sun Tzu’s framework for employing force or energy.  For those of you not familiar with shih, it’s the title of the fifth chapter of The Art of War and encompasses a variety of concepts including zheng / qi (cheng / ch’i). For an excellent intro, see David Lai’s paper “Learning from the Stones,” available from the Federation of American Scientists.

 The concept of positioning moves is inherent in shih, in creating configurations of great potential. Or, as Gimian and Boyce (The Rules of Victory) explain:

In employing shih, each action is one step in a process that changes the ground, reorients the relationship among things, and creates different possibilities. (p. 121)

A lot of this activity is zheng — according with the opponents’ expectations in order to set them up for decisive strikes. At other times, we may just be developing the situation, trying to create ambiguity and anxiety, and probing opponents to force them to tell us something about their intentions and capabilities (As Gimian and Boyce put it, “if you can’t get destination, go for direction.” p. 126)

If these activities don’t cause the opponent to give up or panic or otherwise quit providing effective opposition (and this is Sun Tzu’s ideal, of course), then we look for opportunities to release the potential energy we have built up in as short, abrupt, “fast transient” a manner as possible, as “when strike of a hawk breaks the back of its prey.” (Griffith trans., 92)

Wise advice from uber-diplomat, Ambassador Ryan Crocker.  No one will listen.

iRevolution –Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge 

CTOVision (Alex Olesker) –General Alexander’s Vision, the New DARPA Director, and More 

Russia blog –Congress Is Getting Ready for the Wrong Move, The Magnitsky Act and Magnitsky Act as a Test for American Democracy 

99.9% of the American public and I wager 90% of their MoC don’t know who Sergei Magnitsky was, why there is a bill in his memory or how it’s passage into law would shape US-Russian relations or that the State Department can already deny foreign officials suspected of human rights abuses entry into the United States. That probably includes some of the bill’s sponsors.

Look, neither Russia nor Putin merit any special favors from the USG,  but there’s large factions of Beltway political activists on the Hill who are on retainer for the government of Georgia (including the Podesta Group of Democratic Party bigwig John Podesta) or from their domestic opposition, as registered foreign agents, who would like to poison relations with Moscow as much as possible in the interest of their clients with little regard to American interests.

It is only slightly less shady than the long list of  boomer generation DC VIPs lining up, hat in hand, to take money from the MeK.

That’s it.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The Twilight War, The Secret History of America’s Thirty-year Conflict with Iran, by David Crist

When President Obama made a heartfelt opening, a smug Iranian leadership viewed it as a ruse or the gesture of a weak leader. Iran spurned him. Obama fell back on sanctions and CENTCOM; Iran fell back into its comfortable bed of terrorism and warmongering. Soon it may no longer be twilight; the light is dimming, and night may well be approaching at long last. [emphasis added]

Thus concludes senior government historian David Crist’s The Twilight War, and be assured Crist’s language is not hyperbole. Crist masterfully details the tumult of U.S.-Iranian relations from the Carter administration to present day. Using recently released and unclassified archived data from principals directly involved in shaping and making American foreign policy, Crist provides the reader an up-front view of “how the sausage is made;” and, as with sausage, the view often isn’t pretty for either side. Crist’s access wasn’t limited to U.S. policy makers, as he conducted interviews with principles on the other side as well, for instance, he had secret meetings/interviews with pro-Iranian Lebanese officials in south Beirut. In all, Crist estimated he interviewed over “four hundred individuals in the United States and overseas.”

Crist begins his story with the Shah of Iran in the last days of his leadership, as popular sentiment was turning against both his regime, as well as his American enablers. He reveals the Carter administration’s fleeting notion of military intervention following the fall of the Shah, and includes details how the clerics reigned in professional Iranian military members, purging the “unreconstructed royalists.” From the start, the U.S. learned how difficult, if indeed impossible, relations were going to be with the new Iranian leadership. One State Department report summed up the situation:

It is clear that we are dealing with an outlook that differs fundamentally from our own, and a chaotic internal situation. Our character, our society are based on optimism—a long history of strength and success, the possibility of equality, the protection of institutions, enshrined in a constitution, the belief in our ability to control our own destiny. Iran, on the other hand has a long and painful history of foreign invasions, occupations, and domination. Their outlook is a function of this history and the solace most Iranians have found in Shi’a Islam. They place a premium on survival. They are manipulative, fatalistic, suspicious, and xenophobic.

While I am certain the writer of this report was not intending to be prophetic, as it turns out this paragraph captures the essence of our conflict. Each American president has thought himself equal to the challenge and each has thus far failed.

The Twilight War includes the birth of Hezbollah, accounts of the Marine barracks bombing in 1983 (from the men who were there), and the details of the Kuwaiti request for American protection of their tanker fleet from the Iranians. From this decision, the U.S. committed military force to protect Middle East oil—a difficult and at times, contentious decision. This decision resulted in continued sporadic confrontations between the U.S. and Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf.

Crist’s book is an illustration writ-large of a book previously reviewed here at Zenpundit.com; Derek Leebaert’s Magic and Mayhem, The Delusions of American Foreign Policy—as both “magic” and “mayhem” figure large in our on-going relationship with Iran. Most U.S. administrations when dealing with Iran came to rely on the “magic, ” and often divorced, or worse, ignored the realities.

At 572 pages, the fast paced narrative is a must read for anyone wanting insight into the origins and issues that remain in the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict. The Twilight War is exhaustively sourced.  Crist says in the Notes his book was twenty-years in the making and it shows. Further, this book comes with excellent maps, so keeping up with the geography is made easier.

Tom Ricks said, “this is the foreign policy book of the year, perhaps many years,” and Ricks may be right. The Twilight War is an important and timely book on a vital topic, and comes with my strongest recommendation.

Postscript:

A copy of The Twilight War was provided to this reviewer by the publisher.

[ by Charles Cameron — of the Naked Breasts of Justice and the Verse of the Sword ]
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Two more quick notes on the Gunpowder & Lead / Bernard Finel discussion:

The first concerns similarities between a figure — not in this case, Rick Santorum — on the American Christian right and his Iranian counterparts:

These two instances — which if I recall correctly, were reported within a month of one another between Dec 2001 and Feb 2002 — can be used as indicators to illuminate both the similarity and the difference between religiously-influenced thinking as between two nations and two religions. The similarity — a common Puritanism, to give it a name — is immediately apparent: but the difference — that the Christian Ashcroft merely veils the statue, whereas the Iranians grind off the figure’s breasts — surely speaks to a deeper intensity on the part of the Iranian authorities.

**

My second point is by way of counterpoint to my discussion of RJ Rushdoony in Recommended Reading: salad.

A recent COMOPS paper, How Islamic Extremists Quote the Qur’an [.pdf], explores a substantial body of jihadist materials:

Islamist extremists make heavy use of the Qur’an (Islam’s most sacred text) in their strategic communication. This study analyzed the most frequently cited or quoted verses in the Center for Strategic Communication’s database of over 2,000 extremist texts. The texts date from the years 1998 to 2011, and originate primarily from the Middle East and North Africa. Taking this data as a starting point, we provide a qualitative analysis of the historical contexts and core narrative components of the cited passages.

and notes:

The most surprising is the near absence of the well-known “Verse of the Sword” (9:5) from the extremist texts. Widely regarded as the most militant or violent passage of the Qur’an, it is treated as a divine call for offensive warfare on a global scale. It is also regarded as a verse which supersedes over one hundred other verses of the Qur’an that counsel patience, tolerance, and forgiveness.

We conclude that verses extremists cite from the Qur’an do not suggest an aggressive offensive foe seeking domination and conquest of unbelievers, as is commonly assumed. Instead they deal with themes of victimization, dishonor, and retribution. This shows close integration with the rhetorical vision of Islamist extremists.

Based on this analysis we recommend that the West abandon claims that Islamist extremists seek world domination, focus on counteracting or addressing claims of victimage, emphasize alternative means of deliverance, and work to undermine the “champion” image sought by extremists.

That’s a significant insight to chew on. And since we are still in “recommended reading” mode, let me also point you to the COMOPS Qur’an Verses Study: A Response to Our Critics. Different people — as the discussion between Mark Jacobsen and Tim Mathews illustrates — will have different reasons for and levels of interest in these documents, but it is good to have serious scholarship challenging some of our easy (and dubious) assumptions.