Wunderkammer Nr. 2

I love this idea. The idea (as I alluded to in my previous post of curiosity) that people are in too much of a hurry. That the appreciation for time well spent, and patience toward refinement is a value rapidly decaying in the age of light speed technology. Of course, I am sitting in front of my computer, typing this blog and feeling rather proud that I can do so and in an instant have it posted and sent away for anyone who may stumble across it. It reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes strip, focused entirely around Calvin's dad as he sits in front of the computer griping about how in the old days a "rush job" meant the client would be lucky to get it in a week, and how computers in their ability to deliver have only made our lives less convenient by heightening expectations for instantaneous deliveries. Then, in the background little Calvin is reading the instructions on a microwavable dinner and exclaims "Five minutes?! Who's got that kind of time?!"

I agree with Calvin's dad, and while I use my computer a great deal for creating scores, I spend just as much time behind the mouse as I do behind my pencil and while having a digital score certainly makes life easier when changes need to be made, I am proud to say it takes me just as long if not longer to create a perfect score in the computer as it does on paper (my process involves both). What's the point? The computer, of course, as I preach to the younger generations of composers entering music school "now", is merely a tool and should not dictate how something should be notated or executed. In this age, so many people are in such a hurry, whipped by the self impressed assumption that because a computer is involved that must mean it will be easier to execute or happen somehow faster than "normal" that they allow their creativity to be dictated by what the computer seems to be able to do, rather than guide the computer to do what one needs it to do. The best example I can think of to illustrate the absurdity of the situation would be to imagine a carpenter trying to build a house and laying a hammer on the ground in the midst of a pile of lumber, nails, shingles and dry wall and saying "BUILD!" I'll tell you something, the hammer isn't going to leap off the ground and start hammering, it needs direction, bearing, heading, vector, force, intuition and even creativity to drive a nail. To illustrate deeper, do you think the carpenter lets the hammer tell him how to build the house?

Okay, so why did I put "now" in quotes? The curiosity in today's lesson comes to us from the Long Now Project, something I whole heartedly support! Check out these two diagrams of the passage of time and see if it inspires any critical thinking:



Or to better illustrate their philosophy:



These same folks have engineered a clock which keeps track of time based upon the "big picture" and distorts any understanding of what an increment of time is and what it means as it passes. The clock ticks once a year, chimes once a century and the "cuckoo" comes out every millennium. Time, after all, is only a system of measurement, utterly abstract in its reasoning, invented by the human mind to mark the length of the incomprehensible and intangible. It is all relative to our own life-span for as we began to observe life and death our mortality was only supported by history and looking ahead to the future. But where is the past and future? Where or when? What's the difference? Though it seems as people start to survive longer than they have, they are certainly living a lot less. Their website better explains everything, visit it here.