writes >A centipede was happy quite >until a toad, in fun >said "Pray, which leg comes after which?" >This raised his doubts to such a pitch >he fell exhausted in a ditch >forgetting how to run. > >I think there is a moral there somewhere.
I too think there is a moral there. And before anyone decides to flame us for thread-drift :) it is a natural part of any discussion, including Usenet. All things are inter-related and sometimes you have to wander pretty far away from the precise topic in order to bring in related ideas to inform the main debate.
So.
This is all going to sound a bit strange coming from a Marxist, but then most people haven't a clue what a "Marxist" actually is, anyway.
There is phenomenon in the modern world which I find highly amusing as it has its root in ancient superstition. That is the desire to "name" everything, to define and categorise all external phenomena and label them in order to "understand" them better. This is useful practise until the label replaces in our consciousness that which it is describing and itself becomes the most important feature. When I say this is rooted in ancient superstition, what I mean is that it is the modern form of the belief that objects, and words, have powers and that if we can give names to these objects we can neutralise their power to harm us or we can take their power for our own use. Recurring theme in much of our ballad tradition.
The danger inherent in this is that we can become so obsessed with definition that we can lose the creative, organic relationship with that which we are defining. The subjective then takes precedence over the objective - but this is denied because we describe our efforts to define as being "scientific" and that word in itself carries power ie it carries the assumption of objectivity and the undefined is consequently classed as "unscientific", ie subjective. Defining a word to describe a method of description to exclude that which does not fit in to that particular method until the word itself has "power", ie, "scientific" is the rational, "unscientific" is the irrational. Maybe I'll write a book called "The Irrationality of the Rational" :)
Back to the centipede. I don't remember exactly who it was, Mingus or Davis perhaps, who answered the question, "Can you read music?" with the statement "Not enough to harm my playing". And before anyone makes any assumptions, I can read music and can write an orchestral score, with all required transpositions, so do not assume.
An overdose of education with an underdose of humility is one of the most dangerous trends in the world today. Some things are so intangible that to place an existing definition on them using techniques developed for use elsewhere frequently only serves to further obscure them.
A tradition is like a river, constantly flowing and changing. To take a bucketful of water from that river and then claim that you can use it to construct a comprehensive and accurate description of rivers is absurd. The best we can claim is that it is representative of one particular part of one particular river at the precise moment when we dipped in the bucket and that we can only use it to construct a useful *theory* of rivers which must be kept open to change as more evidence becomes available. *That* is scientific.
The story of all creative advances is that of people doing things constantly confounding those who said it was against the rules. Whatever any individual, or group of individuals, decides to define "the tradition" as, it will continue to develop in its own merry way and may or may not develop in accordance with our theories.
All that is then required is an open mind and a willingness not to take ourselves, or our wonderful theories, too seriously.