Folk Music: Something To Do
The other night I watched a show on Public TV after midnight, when they apparently present educational presentations for schools. I think the idea is that teachers can record them at night and play them during the day. Either that or tots stay up WAY later than I ever did.
The program was a sort of overview of the taxonomy of all living things, so as you might imagine it was scattershot. But it was really well done, particularly in one respect: It had a large WOW factor. I think I was in a real philosophical mood too, because I was absolutely transfixed, and gazed for a good solid half hour (with my mouth open no doubt), as micro things floated about with their hearts reversing direction every few beats, or morphed from freely swimming tadpole things to barrel shaped living tubes glued forever to rocks. There was a crab that they showed doing his project: Making SAND BALLS with his front limbs and passing them back to his back limbs which shoved them behind him where there lay a whole vista of sand balls. The announcer said something like "Why do they do this? Nobody knows." (How does the announcer know nobody knows? Nobody knows.)
At this and other spots in the show I found myself saying (out loud) "What's the point?" I was in that sort of mood. Other nights I would have asked other questions. This night, for this question, the answer I came up with was, well, LIFE is the point!
Life is the point. Now, that statement has conservative overtones when you think about abortion, and liberal overtones when you think about death row. It sounds vegetarian at least; more like vegan or the diet of milk and honey that doesn't need to kill anything, even plants. It sounds obvious and maybe even touchy-feely. But at the time it occurred to me, it just came across as a matter-of-fact statement, like blue is the sky. Flu is the pits. Paul is the Walrus. Life is the point.
In another mood, or if you watched the thing looking UPWARD through the food chain instead of DOWNWARD, you might even come to the conclusion that death is the point. But I wasn't in that sort of mood. In my mood, and in the mood of the video, death was just a component of life, not even worth talking about too much. And this idea that LIFE is the POINT is one of those big thumping ideas that I love to have hit me in the face like a pie. Corny, I know. NOTHING could be more corny, I would say. But there you go.
As happens, soon there was a follow-up question: But why sand balling? Why scrapbooking? Why bowling? Then I remembered reading somewhere that a behaviorist had come to the conclusion that what animals really want is Something To Do. Wouldn't it be interesting if a need for Something To Do (beyond just surviving) could be traced back via DNA? Maybe this sand ball crab (Sand Bubbler Crab, technically, which indicates Wisconsin roots) had a highly particular grasp of the concept of Something To Do (I'd use the acronym but it's spoken for). I suppose, if you have your food, and your shelter, and your offspring, and suddenly time on your hands, and you're a crab in the sand, there could be survival-of-the-fittest reasons for finding Something To Do, even if it were nothing more than keeping yourself in shape or alert or something.
Wanting Something To Do is why people buy model kits when they could buy finished models; cookbooks instead of eatbooks; sewing machines despite being able to afford clothes; and not only iPods but tubas and ukes. It's why there are Home Depots and Michael's Crafts, fabric stores, bait shops, camera stores and scrapbooking supply stores. It's one reason there's difficulty talking people into using public transportation: Driving is Something To Do, but riding isn't, really.
Now a huge Something To Do when you don't have anything you HAVE to do, especially when you're a kid, is PLAY. There's a big rambling cover story on PLAY in this week's New York Times Magazine*. It's very much an overview and contains mention of many conflicting studies and opinions on why there is such a thing as play, and how such a strange seemingly pointless activity could have developed through evolution. In contrast with the TV show, there wasn't much of a wow factor in this article, but there were interesting suggestions. For example, some seem to think that play is a form of preparing for the unexpected; learning how to deal with surprises; developing flexibility. I love that hypothesis. A further observation is that this is often accomplished through pretending, which is a large component of play, particularly in humans.
Now, if there's anything that extends pretending into the adult world, it is art in general, and for the sake of this column anyway, folk music in particular. What better way is there for a 2008 Wisconsin geezer to pretend for a few minutes that he is a drunk cotton weaver in 1900s Glasgow than to sing "Nancy Whiskey?" Or to pretend, for a few minutes, to be someone of the opposite sex, or a different race, or age, or occupation, or preoccupation, without being looked at like someone gone bonkers? Not only that, when you just think of the music and not the lyrics, listening to and especially playing (note the word: playing) music can have you pretending to be in a completely different mood than your real one of the moment.
So that was this episode's somewhat self-serving train of thought: What's the point? Life is the point. So you take care of the survival biz, then what? Something To Do! Preferably, something that continues to aid in survival. How about preparing for the unexpected? Great! Pretending is one of the best way to do this. And a great way to pretend? Put yourself in others' shoes via folk songs! So THAT's why I do what I do. That and my eventual boredom with the sand ball thing.
*Why Do We Play? by Robin Marantz Henig, NY Times mag, Feb 17