This first post of a blog I've been thinking about for years, and actually created in April of 2011, wants to start with an explanation. Why the "Great (un) Learning"?
I'm referring to the Great Learning of course, that essential text of Confucius. But also of the Cornelius Cardew piece of the same title, using a translation of the Confucian text by Ezra Pound, one of the great (and troubling) poets of the last century. And when I recently typed into Google, "the great unlearning" to see what already existed, I found, in addition to some interesting connections with alternative spiritualities and philosophies, references to Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's apparently is often called "the great unlearning." And since one of the closest people in my life, my father, is suffering from this illness I realized that the parenthetical (un) is a necessity in order to address what I'm after here. Not a negation of intellect, or the gradual destruction of it, but instead a way to seeing learning as something that can go both ways. To learn not only as a way of accumulating information and material but also as a process of purging, equally essential (to my mind at least) as a way to open up creativity in an increasingly circumscribed world that wants us to simply consume. I learn in order to find the limits of learning, of knowledge, and am ceaselessly engaged in the process of the attempt. And at any given point, when I feel as if I've reach that limit--that edge of the circle Emerson writes about--I instead find myself inside a new circle.
But ...
At the beginning of that newness it is sometimes possible to find a creatively nothing-like place where my unfamiliarity of everything I experience makes for an opening. And in that place I sometimes find it possible to create something: be that music, poetry, whatever.
I plan to use this blog as a way of documenting that journey. All those experiences. Probably just for myself in all likelihood. But in this world of too much of everything, I will try to document in such a way that, rather like a diary, gives a sense of what I did and maybe even points to why. The latter I'll leave others to decide. But in this initial post, that wants to establish the purposes and conditions of the former, I thought it somehow important to say so at the outset. And now,
Let the journey begin:
Chris - I am looking forward to your postings of this blog. As you know I have walked this journey with my father. Funny at times and heart breaking sad on others. It takes a huge toll on the love ones who care for the person and the helplessness of knowing that nothing can be done to reverse the " unlearning " I am glad you are bloging your account of this jouney, and also pass along my love to your Mom and Dad also !
ReplyDeleteI have thought often about this unlearning of musical information. In learning how to improvise (or compose) one has the inclination to compile as many patterns and melodies and ideas in as she can. Unfortunately, then it is difficult to not play all these things that he has learned.
ReplyDeleteI've come to the conclusion that, as I believe you're saying, it is better to learn and unlearn than to have never learned. There is an important imprint that knowledge leaves that makes for the most fertile creativity.
Yes Rob, I agree. I would replace knowledge with experience and then when you work toward forgetting as a way of not repeating that imprint stays as a context of what "not" to do.
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