I have been teaching myself, thus far, out of a book. I think it’s called Fiddle For Beginners. A few months ago I bought two song books as well: Essential Rock (containing Brown Eyed Girl, Low Rider, White Wedding, Freebird, and a bunch of other random rock songs), and the soundtrack to Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

It’s the Pirates of the Caribbean book that I’ve been focusing on today. Specifically, One Last Shot. Very specifically, the section around :32-:52 (which is where the fiddle part essentially starts, in this book). I spent ten minutes listening to the song on Youtube before starting to play, and periodically took a moment to replay that section to see if it was still “sounding right” in my head.

I can’t play that fast while learning a song, obviously. I’m not very good yet, and so things come together very slowly. But this song seems pretty simple, and most of it is played on the A string (where I’m currently most comfortable), so I think I’ll be able to pull it off sooner or later.

When learning new things, or practicing new skills, or composing/creating new works… I always hit a wall. There’s a point where things always look futile to me, and it’s often fairly early on. It’s that point where the investment & dedication required keeps growing, and the results have slowed to a crawl. Its that point where the gap between your expectations and your results are widening, and seem like they’ll only keep widening the harder you work.

When trying to learn a song, it specifically translates to “this doesn’t sound anything like the real song”, and it seems like the harder you work the more you “lose” the right tune. And I spent about twenty minutes getting more and more frustrated by my inability to make a few eight notes and quarter notes resemble the way I knew they were supposed to come out.

Wall perhaps isn’t the best description, because you can’t just get around it and keep going. Rather, it’s a valley. The Valley of Dwindling Rewards. It takes a lot to climb out of that godforsaken valley, and the hardest part is trusting yourself. But, I managed to climb my way out of the valley with One Last Shot.

And the funny thing is… when you get out of that valley, up onto that mountaintop… even the simplest rewards feel huge. I’m rejoicing that what I am playing sounds remotely like the song, because that’s leaps and bounds ahead of where I was five minutes ago. Every few minutes, it sounds better. I get closer to the right timing, hitting the notes more cleanly, feeling proud about it.

With most projects, especially creative ones, you get less confident before you get more. My experience with writing poetry is that I am always ready to tear up the page, moments before I write something that feels true and beautiful and right. With storytelling, with performing, you’re always trembling with doubt moments before applause.

So, I wanted to share that success. That voyage into and out of the Valley of Dwindling Rewards. Back into the realm of joy and excitement.

Oh, and tangentially related: I bought a banjo. I can pretty definitively say that this song was what tipped a decision that I’ve been hemming and hawing over for a while.

Let’s pretend, for a second, that every type/genre of music can be reduced to a question about life, the universe and intentionality. For the moment, we’ll just treat this as a game, an exercise. I think rap music could be paraphrased as “How do we emerge from hardship?” You see a lot of songs about enduring and surviving (Talib Kweli’s Gotta Get By, Eminem’s Lose Yourself), a lot of songs about conflict, and then an explosion of songs about having made it. Maybe it’s more complicated than a single question, but certainly the culture of rap music could be well described in a few short questions: “how do we deal with hardship?”, “how do we overcome hardship?”, “what will we do with our power, once we gain it?” These questions are ultra-prevalent in rap, but to try to ground the body of pop music, or indie rock, in them would be a difficult exercise.

Ask me four years ago what I listened to, and I would have answered: punk. I might have then added “ska and indie rock”, but my answer was that I was a firm proponent of punk. Let’s give the unifying-question treatment to punk. “Are you willing to fight back?” “Who is to blame?” “How should we die?” Correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ve recently rejected the importance of those questions. I don’t see fighting a system as the best way to affect a system, and I don’t see confrontation as the best means for deep-rooted change. Thus, “Are you willing to fight back?” is like asking “Are you willing to break the hammer on the screw?” for me. I don’t see blame as a necessary or useful component of problem solving or conflict resolution, so “Who is to blame?” is problematic and unhelpful to me. And finally, I’ve moved away from the hometown I despised, and in doing so abandoned a lot of the fatalism that I carried with me, leaving the “How should we die?” question one that could only be answered prematurely and rashly.

Punk’s burning questions are no longer burning. They sit as nice signposts to remind me of my adolescence, but my mind has turned to new ones: “Where do we find beauty?” “How shall we live?” “Where do we go from here?” “What can we learn from the past as we explore new ground?”

And coincidentally, I have been drifting away from punk and toward some pretty surprising alternatives. Bluegrass, folk, alt.country, accoustic indie rock, folk-punk. Bands like Twilight Hotel, songs like Santa Fe by June Madrona… these captivate me, because they speak directly to the questions that I find myself fixated on. And at first I told myself, “Well, I can like folk without admitting to liking country”. And then it was, “Well, I can like the fiddle because Ghost Mice and other folk-punk bands use it, so it’s clearly still punk. But the evidence was mounting, mounting, constantly mounting. I was beginning to like country (of course, not the Garth Brooks, Dolly Parton kind of country, but certainly I found something beautiful in Cash, in hearing a fiddle, in every singer/songrwriter with a crooner’s voice and a story about finding himself in his travels). And I was almost ashamed of this, I felt like I was betraying my values and coming to resemble the home town I’d convinced myself I would forever hate.

When  I started to think less about the things that genres represented (punk = social activism, country = conservative rednecks) and more about the questions that genres asked, this transition clicked and made sense. Further, it informed me of the ways in which I could best explore these questions I had.

To take this idea of pervasive questions a step further, different genres are busy holding different conversations. If I look at all the folk and bluegrass that I listen to, I see a dialogue taking place about finding comfort. There are stories about finding it on the open road, stories about finding it at home, in the arms of a loved one, in times of peace, in times of conflict. I get to be a part of that conversation,  I get to feel situated in a culture.

One thing I pretty much take for granted in my own thinking is that we construct the world around us through our interests and our activities. My world is one where people are engaged in social creativity (story games, poetry slams, constant arts & crafts, teaching one another) and where people think about how communication works (story games theorism, exploring nonviolent communication, creating programming for our interest groups). In going back to school this month, and being exposed to a population of first-year students, I see that most people roughly my age aren’t living in that world at all. Entertainment is disseminated, that video games are the most participatory that people get. Communication isn’t an intentional and explored element of their lives (in Interpersonal Communications, we actually had a whole lecture devoted to explaining the idea that communication skills could be workshopped. WTF). I see regular evidence, and an abundance of evidence recently, that we live in worlds that we construct out of our interests and immediate situations.

But thinking about this idea that genres of music present us with pervasive questions, I am now reaching a new concept: we construct our worlds in order to challenge us in meaningful ways. Punk music asks “Are you willing to fight back?” Back when I was a firm supporter of punk, my world was shaped somewhat by this question. And I started to see forces that needed to be fought against - oppression, inequity, injustice, corporate monopolization, privatization, the exercise of priviledge. These were dominant challenges that populated my world with alarming frequency. In framing my world around certain questions (like those that punk asks), and engaging in certain dialogues (like those punk explores), I constructed a world plagued by certain dilemmas.

While I don’t discount those forces/challenges now, they aren’t the things that haunt me. I’m now framing my world around different questions (like “How shall we live?”), and engaging in different dialogues (like ones of self-reliance, rural living, being close to the earth), and as a result constructing the world in terms of different challenges (like urban expansionism, environmental decimation, feeling socially disconnected, sustainability and existential confusion). This is reflected, mirrored and at times propelled by the music I’m listening to.

I’m finally starting to listen for the questions, not the answers. And I’m pretty surprised by what I find myself nodding along to.

I don’t think there’s a universally-established code of conduct for moshes. I certainly haven’t heard of one. Some people go in looking for a friendly, physical release; others go in looking for a fight. Some people will be really upset (in the “dude, wtf, that’s not cool” way) if you throw a punch at them. What’s even more disparate than the assumed conduct of a mosh is the assumed point. I’ve definitely collided with people who I could tell were going into it with something very different in mind. At a Mindless Self Indulgence concert two years ago, the guy next to me whispered to his friend, “next song, I’m totally going to hurt someone.” At the start of the next song, he ran, jumped into the air, and planted both of his feet squarely in the small of someone’s back. She hit the ground hard. I still have no idea what the hell was going through his head.

Moshing is a discourse that takes place with no meaning. It could be argued that there is some hidden language to moshing, some collective consciousness that we are exploring. I refute these arguments. What goes on when someone moshes? I’d argue that the only universal constant is release. Release does not equate meaning. There is no significance to the interactions that take place during moshing.

Evidence to support this claim, that these interactions take place without meaing:
1.) “I thought you were about to punch me.” “No. I was only going to shove you.” “Yeah, okay.”
2.) The same evening, there was a guy who I was moshing with. He’d hit me really hard, attempting to knock me off my feet, and then extend an arm to help me stabilize so I wouldn’t fall and get trampled. He was straight-up attempting to knock me over, but then was counter-balancing that by keeping me upright. Knocking me over solely for the sake of knocking me over.

I’d like to suggest that release can be a goal, and achieving meaning can be a goal, and that expressing meaning can be a goal. And I’d like to suggest that even when goals work in tandem, the more goals that you have, the less energy you are able to devote to each. In order to achieve the strongest release, you need to isolate and remove meaning (at least as a goal, preferably also as an in-the-moment side-effect).

Where do we see this happening? Moshing, as I’ve argued. As far as musical genres, breakcore and extreme noise. In movies, some avant-garde surrealist work. I’d argue Eraserhead. Certain drugs. What does these things have in common?

Discord.

Let’s use games as a lens for analyzing discord and the reduction of meaning. Sociologist Roger Caillois identifies, as one kind of play, ilinx. Ilinx is defined as play “…based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist[s] of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.”

In addition to prioritizing release (over meaning and other goals), ilinx offers us instability of perception. How is this a useful tool? Instability of perception gives us two things: a moment without our preconceived notions running on autopilot; and, a chance to form new notions about how the world operates.

Moshing disrupts my notions of violence. The people slamming into me, shoving me, pulling me over, these people suddenly become my friends in addition to my assailants. A movie by David Lynch disrupts my notions of character and sequence. Suddenly we cannot use an actor as a marker for consistent character. We cannot use time as an indicator of chronology. We are forced to work to tie together the movie ourselves. When I play a game that favours ilinx, my sense of story and identity are often jumbled.

This forces me to do one of two things: adapt, as rapidly as possible, to an experience that is fundamentally alien to my sensibilities; deduce, as rapidly as possibly, the underlying reality of the situation. One forces me to react without my preconceived notions as a safetly blanket. One forces me to construct new notions, accurate to a new situation. Both of these things are vital in training us for survival, as well as reminding us that the stories we tell ourselves are only stories. They are not the moon; the moon is unreachable.

When you spin around a room really quickly, the result is that you get dizzy, you feel sick, you can’t tell how the room is supposed to level out, and you can’t walk. Why is this an almost universal mode of play for children? Perhaps because at some point, we knew that not all interactions were founded on meaning. And we still knew what the meaningless ones could provide us.