From the improv-and-the-brain essay I mentioned a few days ago:
When we move from talking about 'altered consciousness,' with its implicit therapeutic goal of returning to 'normal,' or even 'expanded consciousness' with its naive emphasis on thinking one's way to correctness (it's a political/religious term, alas), and come around to acknowledging the possibility of alternate consciousnesses - different frameworks for understanding the world and (literally) different mechanisms for processing relationships between things - we break away from the zero-sum parochialism and protectionism of religious/spiritual dogma. 'Learning' might be defined, if perhaps a little glibly, as 'non-zero-sum thinking.' Walter Murch tells the startling story of his two weeks listening to nothing but Gregorian Chant at work, at the end of which he was driven out of his skull by a blast of incoherent, unparseable noise - which turned out to be Bach's Passion of St Matthew. One is tempted to think Murch constrained his consciousness through this experiment, but it's more evenhanded to say he simply reprogrammed his listening apparatus as a survival mechanism, acclimated himself to the environment in which he was working - adapted to the flow of aural information around him. He relearned soon enough how to comprehend Baroque music and modern music alike, and - here's the crucial point - the experience of radical circumscription altered his sense of the place and possibility of sound. (Among other things, Murch is responsible for the astonishing soundscapes in George Lucas's THX-1138.)
The point of which is just this: just as immersion in water causes certain survival mechanisms to kick in, and immersion in a foreign-speaking culture revitalizes our language-acquisition apparatus (witness the profanity on Deadwood, or spend two months in Spain), musical immersion makes available to us certain forms of consciousness - and long-form improvisatory music is an ideal tool for producing these alternate states. Its open-endedness lifts certain expectations of closure and precision/unity (just as Modernist literary abstraction/formalism prepared readers for the deferral or denial of satisfaction). Its seemingly arbitrary complication can open us up to a kind of simultaneous experience of melody and harmony, as for instance when John Coltrane would play a simple five note melody with each pair of notes separated by a complex cascading arpeggio, which functioned as colour and texture rather than traditional melodic content - see his Interstellar Space for the purest examples of this kind of musical storytelling. The different tempos and rhythms of in-the-moment personal expression in jazz and other improvised musics free the audience from the bang-bang-bang rhythm of traditional music, allowing listeners to comprehend the music at their own speed according to their own free-floating focus - which is in turn more likely to correspond directly to the human-scale shifts in attention and intention of improvised performance than to the preordained formal shifts of through-composed music. Improvisatory forms allow the musicians to testify to their experiences as musicians more directly than do written forms, which first and foremost testify to their writers' experiences as writers - all live musical performance liberates the music to a degree, but jazz and its sister forms privilege something like faith-based expression, in (this always needs saying) forms and fashions reflective of a particular black American experience.
Looking over the novel manuscript I wrote last fall, I see repeated references to something I only recently began to put a name to: improvisatory consciousness (which is the subject of the essay from which the foregoing is excerpted). The manuscript also contains an offhand mention of something called The Weave - a word stolen from the Forgotten Realms campaign supplement to D&D, referring to the source of all magic in that world. The concept has changed shape a little. (That's what they're for.) Today I worked up some new material for the novel's second draft.
Ever take multivariable calculus? Div grad curl and all that? In second-term calc classes you learn about vector fields, mathematical constructions in which at each point a certain motive force or intention expresses itself. The way to know a vector field in practice is to pass through it, along a given vector until buffeted by all the other forces in your vicinity - picture a satellite in a slingshot orbit around a planet, affected at each turn by some sum of gravitational pulls. The (approximate) point sources of gravitational force sum to a vector field; at each point you're pushed/pulled in one or another direction, and that force, plus whatever momentum you brought with you, sends you skidding through space. Your path is a function of the field and some initial conditions (position, velocity, etc.).
The point being: you know the field by the curve you trace. You feel that sum of forces in motion, gliding - as a tanguero treats a given step not as an object with substance and span (e.g. 'I wish to sidestep so I initiate the step by bearing down on what will be my trailing foot, then press it outward to propel me sideways, stepping, and in collecting my trailing foot I complete the sidestep') but as a kind of improvisatory logical progression: 'I've gathered my feet here, sway a bit sideways, which affords me the chance to respond to the impulse to sidestep.' The action (the sidestep) comes as an expression of the improvisatory impulse, a now-unmediated experience of flow rather than a block of being. The edges of the step dissolve; everything is consequence (literally 'following with,' right?).
Time's arrow can only point, but the Weave undulates and pools, fluid, looping, force and time in knots. Another dimension asserting itself. There is no map of the Weave, only the experience of submission, of travel...
'Following with' is why the roles of 'leader' and 'follower' in tango are not so simple as their names might lead you to believe. Each point specifies a unique vector, each point connects to another. Zen for beginners I guess. Rhythms don't consist of beats and silence; their meaning is motion.
('The world moves on a woman's hips / The world moves and it swivels and bops')
'What's water?'
It was a good day's work and I look forward to picking it up tomorrow. Best of luck and good evening, Reader(s).