Coming to Louisville has given me the chance to look back at Oz from the Kansas side of the rainbow. (Although Louisville is a gracious, almost Old World, city--quite different from Liberal, Kansas where Dorothy's House is. Not to knock Kansas, which has it's own charms.)Joshua is fifteen years old. He decided to play the viola when he was seven, even though he had never before heard of the viola. But now, as a tenth grader, he has learned to love it and often says things like “Playing music did something to me” and “Music made me smarter.”But I can see that reasonable, rational, practical people would think Nick and I are nuts. We will have to make the vision real before most people will believe in it half as fervently as we do.
One more way music is an essential element of life. Not just for humans, but for other entities in the universe.Over the years, I’ve come to think that animal sounds share more characteristics with music than with human language. Each phrase sung by birds, wolves, cicadas, or dolphins must be performed correctly to convey its message, but we humans can never translate exactly what is said. This has led me to believe that music might be a useful way to communicate with animals, and thus extend human art into the natural world, hoping for a connection, a response. I started testing this theory by playing with birds, and now I’m ready to try it with the most intricate musicians of the wild world: whales. Because they live underwater, there are additional challenges—such as how to do it without getting my clarinet all wet.
The greatest art offers us images by which to imagine our lives. And once the imagination has been awakened, it is procreative: through it we can give more than we were given, say more than we had to say.--Lewis Hyde, The Gift
that applies to Scrollworks in particular.The thing germinated and bred itself. It proceeded according to its own logic. What did I do? I followed the indications, I kept a sharp eye on the clues. . .
There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gift to those one loves most . . . The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.
by Lewis Hyde:Perfect gift is like the blood pumped through its vessels by the heart. Our blood is a thing that distributes the breath throughout the body, a liquid that flows when it carries the inner air and hardens when it meets the outer air, a substance that moves freely to every part but is nonetheless contained, a healer that goes without restraint to any needy place in the body. It moves under pressure--the "obligation to return" that fascinated Marcel Mauss--and inside its vessels the blood, the gift, is neither bought nor sold and it comes back forever.
On the University of Louisville Belknap campus, about 70 students moved to other residence halls, their homes or hotels while windows in the Bettie Johnson Hall dormitory are replaced. About 100 windows were damaged when part of the roof of a neighboring building flew off and into the dormitory, said Cindy Hess, a university spokeswoman.
- Buddha in the Dhammapada
