Irish Stand-Down

I’m not a Deist. With sincere and heartfelt respect to the many people of faith in my acquaintance, the image of an omniscient, omnipotent Old Guy in the Sky (or Whomever Wherever) does not resonate with me.

But what my spiritual tradition does teach me (a very imperfect student), among other wisdoms, is that the Universe does have intentions: that somehow, through this cosmic accident of physics and electricity, a million billion chance operations have combined to provide sentient beings at least the capacity to Wake the Hell Up.

So, if what this time through this Universe is intending to teach me on this iteration is to survive a bout of Irish Stand-down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare-knuckle_boxing#Irish_stand_down)—to stand up, maybe for decades and in many contexts, and take a punch, over and over and over again, and keep standing—until the day that it’s the right moment to throw a punch, in a good cause and with right intentions,

Then I guess I’ll take that Lesson, and live it out.

Aging and art

It is hard to be an artist in this post-industrial late-stage-imperial society (maybe in almost every society—because every society has imposed some kind of stipulation, restriction, or hierarchical criterion on who gets to call themselves “an artist”). It is hard to age in this society, just as it is hard to be a POC, a woman, LGBTQ, poor, or indeed anyone other than a white male. Societal and classist “norms” impose unconstitutional restrictions and unacceptable burdens.

It’s thus hard to be an aging artist. Not only cognitive and physiological capacities erode, but so too do mental stamina and acquisition capacities; the obvious parallel here is to language-acquisition skills, which begin to erode precisely when cognitive skills begin to expand.

But to be an artist, you also need time.

If you’ve been a consciously-self-identified artist for some, most of, or nearly all your life, and have developed even a modicum of self-reflection, you think about the number of hours required to mastery, and the number of hours available—or remaining—in which to acquire that mastery.

How many hours, not constrained by day-to-day financial, professional, and personal obligations—many freely and gratefully assumed—are left, for the development of new artistry? New dexterity? New aesthetic zones and frames?

Answer: At my age--not many.                   

So if you’re thinking in these terms, you might think about “husbanding” your hours. Seeing their total number diminish—seeing the light, or the darkness, at the end of the tunnel increasing—you think about how you are going to use those remaining available hours.

Pat Metheny’s great drummer Paul Wertico had a wonderful reply, when asked what he’d do if he knew beyond doubt that the bombs had been dropped; he said “I know what I’d do—I’d practice.” This points to a perception of “practice” as more than simply a means to an end—to an acquisition of dexterity or interpretative command. It links musical “practice” and spiritual “Practice”—an insight, such as it is, that has shaped the interplay of my own musical and spiritual practices for the past 35 years at least.

And so to the diatonique: the diatonic 2.5-row accordion used in a wide variety of the world’s musics, but particularly in the cluster of European & related dance idioms called “Balfolk.” Over the decades, I’ve been smitten by many musics, and often a major factor that drove that obsessions was the unique, complex, and beautiful sound of an instrument: the Irish bouzouki, the Appalachian 5-string banjo, the Delta blues steel guitar, the Sudanese oud, the medieval European lute, and so on. The diatonique operates well outside the manual/physical choreographies of this cluster of stringed instruments—as a result, I find it probably the most counter-intuitive instrument I have actually tried to learn.

It is also probably the last instrument I will try to “master”—a desirable goal because “mastery,” defined for my purposes as “the ability of hear appropriate ideas in response to musical opportunities and execute them in musical real-time,” provides access to much more expansive and enjoyable expressive, participatory, and collaborative spaces.

But, though Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” is a chimera and yet another example of the pop-sociology that leads to NYT bestsellers, incel obsessions, and authorial egocentricity, there is no escaping the reality that developing this level of cognitive/aural/manual capacity takes thousands of hours—which loops us back to language-acquisition and the simplicity and resulting one-pointed attention possible in a healthy and supported childhood or adolescence.

It’s different at sixty.

How many hours are left? How will we use them?

“[The] effort is to conserve a cultural environment within which it might be possible for questions to arise and personal commitment to root and collective order to flower.” Henry Glassie. 963 (below)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2081435?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents 

A distinguished and admired musical colleague and friend--an Aussie of Irish ancestry who plays Irish traditional music on Hindustani sarod--has made a central career goal his reclamation of the word “mongrel” from its connotations of the “debased” and “impure”: vile adjectives, these, derived from late nineteenth century empiricism, and now permanently stained by their associations with racism, ethnocentrism, and genocide (cultural or physical).[1] To his credit, Matthew wears the label “mongrel” proudly, reclaiming its vitality, adaptability, and capacity for empowering cross-fertilization, recognizing that words themselves, like city streets or artistic idioms, can be the battle-space within which to wrest subaltern identity away from the dominant-culture forces which would seek to silence, erase, or steal it. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and privilege are an inextricable and not-to-be-avoided part of the history of culture in the west, and appropriation and caricature, by the privileged of the outward appearance of the subaltern, have given us blackface, yellowface, and the dominant-culture masking which borrows the externalities—the feathers, costume, makeup, and/or cultural expressions—of the subaltern, as plumage for a kind of privileged cosplay.

This is never okay. If those, like myself, whose experience is grounded in white, male, CIS, or middle-class privilege (or all of these), engage in any way with subaltern cultural expression, even if, or especially if, we do it from love and respect, than we will and should have to grapple with the very history which has permitted us to perform such appropriation. If I have to hold my tongue under accusations of appropriation, carpet-bagging, white-boyism, or any of the other suite of exploitation which for over 500 years has taken from the subaltern and given to people like me, then I should consider that to be my most miniscule start at reparations that recognize the colonial history which, however reluctantly, we inherit.

That said:

Like my friend Matthew, I also seek to contest a word: the “tribal”: a word whose historical usage has too often connoted, on the one hand, the “primitive” and “picturesque,” and, on the other, the “instinctive” and “intuitive,” implicitly lacking intention, intellect, or agency. Those adjectives carry, and should be recognized to carry, equivalently problematic connotations. Too often, people from my kind of social/racial/economic/gender background have used words like “tribal” as conveniently-appropriative costuming—a way of “playing at” the more picturesque and evocative elements of subaltern identity, absent the disenfranchisement and suffering inherent within that identity and out of which the cultural expressions arise. It’s why, esteemed dance and music friends’ usages to the contrary, I should not and will not describe a music, or a dance expression, as “tribal”—because of the injustice inherent in just such locutions.

On the other hand:

Like my friend Matthew, I seek to reclaim the word: “tribal.” Following in an intellectual heritage of respect, engagement, and willingness to learn from subaltern cultures, which I found inherent for example in works like Gary Snyder’s “Why Tribe?”, Nanao Sakaki’s The Tribe, and Henry Glassie’s work with indigenous-artist teachers worldwide, I want, for myself and my students, the experience of opening to learning from the tribal.[2] I want us to approach these indigenous expressions, emerging from the thoughtful wisdom of people who live close to the earth, to the cycle of the seasons, and to one another’s shared needs, goals, and art forms, with the humility of a pupil: a receptivity and openness to what these peoples, their traditions, and their cultural expressions can teach us about how to live. There are modes of wisdom, sanity, and sustainable values inherent in such subaltern and marginalized societies—acceptance, tolerance, a sense of place and time, respect for living beings of all genus and species—which, I believe, we privileged classes in the global post-industrial West desperately need to recover, if it is not already too late. And, given the 500- (or 1500-) year history of the west’s colonialization, exploitation, appropriation, and dehumanization of subaltern, indigenous, and/or marginalized peoples and cultures, we ought to do it with some humility. We need what the tribes can teach us. We should pay our respects, acknowledge our sins, shut up, and learn.

But for me it also can’t stop there: as a scholar and a creative artist, and a teacher of these skills to young people, I have an ethical (and practical) obligation to situate such recovery, such openness to learning from the subaltern, within the wider patterns of history and discourse that lead to subalternity in the first place. I have to impart to my students and audience, not only a sense of humility and receptivity to subaltern wisdom, but also an active and activist response to the injustices that have made such marginalization happen. I therefore have a responsibility to contest recurrent patterns of exploitation and appropriation, most particularly—though by no means exclusively—when I and my students and people like us have directly benefited from them. To “interrogate one’s own privilege,” in the world of scholarship and creative artistry, it seems to me, means as well to contest injustice, even at the risk of discomfort, opposition, or penalty. We privileged types need to have some skin the game.

So, when I say, of my ensembles and Institute and circle of scholarly and creative comrades,

“It’s kind of a tribe: that’s kind of the point,”

I mean, less aphoristically,

“We aspire to the wisdom, integrity, rootedness, placedness, kindness, courage, compassion, willingness that the best of many wisdom traditions have found in common. We aspire to shut up and learn.”

That is my own, lifelong response to the question, “Why ‘Tribe’?”


[1] https://www.matthewnoone.com/introduction

[2]See Gary Snyder (1969) "Why Tribe?," in Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions); Snyder’s discussion of Sakaki’s intentional communities, in The Gary Snyder Reader (1999) (Counterpoint); Henry Glassie, "The Practice and Purpose of History," The Journal of American History 81/3 The Practice of American History: A Special issue (Dec 1994), 961-68.