Your cue, Mr. Gould
Glenn Gould recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations
twice, in 1955 at the beginning of his career, and in 1981, just months before he died. The two versions are as different as, well, day and night. Start with the
length. The 1955 version takes 44 minutes. The 1981 version takes 51 minutes. All the same
notes are struck the same number of times but to vastly different effect.One is spring, the other, fall. One is yang, the other, yin. One is youth, the other, age. Energy and rest. Light and dark. Action and rest. You get the idea. One day I was listening to the 1981 recording and noticing the strongly palliative effect the music had. I was struck by how, with age, Gould had hugely slowed down his performance of Bach. One thought led to another, and another... I found myself thinking about thinking, mucking about in the dim region of pre-history when thought began. A mental leap, and the idea behind this book came: Could it be that the very rate of human thinking has accelerated slowly and more or less continuously over the millennia? Could it be that our first thought patterns, thousands of years ago, were much slower (and simpler) than now? You’d expect that when we started, our thinking would be much more attuned to the very rhythms of the body which gave rise to thinking. As time passed, as language developed, as we became more and more skilled in manipulating abstract symbols (words and numbers), our mental processing rate increased steadily (Moore’s Law applied to humans?). And now, with computers as extensions of these mental processes, we are sailing along at a pretty fast clip. What, I wondered, if you made a conscious, controlled, extended effort to slow your thinking down again? Not to stop it. Just slow it down. Return to a kind of thinking which was possibly more resonant with the rhythms of the physical world in which we still have our roots. As Gould had slowed his performance to plumb new depths of musical revelation. And that, my friends, was the origin of Saltlick. |