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BRAIN TUBA: There Are Seven Levels!
by Jesse Jarnow - jesse.jarnow@oberlin.eduAs the story goes, the first time Paul McCartney got high, he discovered something very deep and mystic. He wrote it down on a piece of paper and folded it up, entrusting it to Mal Evans, the Beatles' road manager. The next day Mal asked Paul if he wanted to see what was written on the paper. Paul said "yes". He opened it up. Scrawled across it, in the excited handwriting of a burgeoning dope fiend, was the phrase "there are seven levels". Paul nodded... maybe.
I've spent the past several weeks reading a collection of essays and articles modestly entitled "the Penguin Book of Rock and Roll Writing". Contained within it are, as the title suggests, shloads of pieces about rock music written by critics, journalists, and occasionally musicians themselves. Somewhere in the middle of the umpteenth piece about how and why the impact of the pop culture shifted during the 1970s, I asked a question that I don't often ask: why read? It was just a question -- more to get an answer out of myself than to seriously weigh the merits of not reading. Nonetheless, as I read another interpretation of the same facts, the following thought struck me: reading an author's opinion is surrogate thinking, having the writer do the brainwork for the reader.The thought - and it was only an impulse, mind you - stemmed out of some thoughts I've been having about television lately. In the past several years, I've come to hate television as something all too passive. That is, one sits down in front of it, it spins around and flashes colors and dances two-steps and shoots off fireworks (if you're lucky) and the viewer doesn't have to do jack shit... just absorb what's there. Any original thoughts had by the viewer are replaced with those provided by the tube. It's a negative appraisal of the situation, but isn't everything? How, ultimately, is reading any different from this? Information is not knowledge, of course... or, to quote the whole thing:
Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
And music is the BEST. (1)No shit. Zappa was onto something. I guess that's pretty easy to figure out. This quote - from Zappa's song Packard Goose - is a rather popular one. It has been propagated throughout the scene on the back of "Chunga's Revenge" tee-shirts and in .sig files, quoted in many Usenet and listserv arguments, and generally summoned quite often. Everything about it makes sense, breaking it down. How does it fit together as a whole, though? Answering my question about reading with "information is not knowledge" is almost a negative affirmation about the topic. Why bother reading? Seriously.
Anything that one takes in, straight, is information. Only very rarely is it pure, especially in the media. Everything has a spin to it somehow. Even graphs and charts on CNN that purport to be cold, hard numbers presented humbly to the viewer for home crunching had to have been picked by someone to make it to the air. The facts themselves are likely excerpted from some larger survey which, when presented a whole, will likely resolve into quite a different picture than they do when isolated. Usually, items are presented in some context. This context is provided by other relevant facts.
This information, the plain facts of history, are used to support the author's thesis. The author's thesis itself is knowledge. Or, at the very least, it's an attempt at the transference of knowledge. This knowledge can then be absorbed by the reader. Until then, however, it remains no better than facts. The point at which knowledge can become wisdom is when the reader - or the viewer, the listener, or general absorber - puts two and seven together to get thirteen. Wisdom, even in the factual sense of understanding scientific formulas and relations, is what happens when the absorber begins to make connections in his head between bits of knowledge. Wisdom is the understanding of knowledge, at least in the mental sense.
The next step, at least in FZ's hierarchy, is truth. Yay! Now I get to pompously define what I think truth is and join the ranks of poets and philosophers who have done gloriously convoluted battle through the ages! Yeah, knowledge is murkier than information, wisdom is blurrier than knowledge, and truth is the grayest area yet. The entire process is one of moving from the cold and sterile (unadorned facts) to purely emotional. As the list of FZ's words moves on down the line, the concepts they are describing become less and less tangible, harder to understand and describe. Truth, then, is a step back. It's the process of digging one's head out of, well, his own head and taking a look around
If wisdom is what happens when the reader can relate to knowledge in the mental and internal sense, then truth is what happens when the reader can relate to wisdom in the tangible, physical sense. Since it's where this list will ultimately end up, I'll use music - or an element of it - as an example to get this up to truth level. There is air. Sound exists by vibrating air in certain waves and shapes. This is information. By striking strings, strung at given tensions, one can emit safely predetermined notes. This is knowledge. A certain combination of notes - namely two As, two Es (each an octave apart), and a C sharp - when played together on a guitar will create an open A chord. Reading this on paper and understanding the relation between notes and why they will create a harmonically pleasing sound is wisdom. Hearing the chord itself - or, better yet, playing it (preferably with a huge Pete Townshend-like windmill wind-up) - would be truth.
And it's on to beauty. The room goes hush and air is pretension filled.
Like most things I write, this column began life as a journal entry. By the time I'd gotten done with truth - four items down, three to go - I was looking at the whole thing like a puzzle. This, perhaps, isn't the best attitude to use when going about interpreting lyrics as it implies that there is one correct answer. Whatever. By the time I got to beauty, I was stumped silly. This happens in general, too, but - in specific - when I'm writing about something in my journal that's boggling the hell out of me, I'll rephrase it in the form of an email and send it off to a friend to see what kind of answer I'll get back. A hard and fast rule is that the replies I get are never, in a million years, what I expect to hear.
It's all potential fodder, these truths. I can write about them, the way they relate to my life in real ways. That's one way of realizing them, and that's how they become truth. They don't necessarily become beauty until they begin to relate to someone else. Information is a one dimensional plane. Knowledge adds more, ditto for wisdom and truth. It's another level. They're all other levels. Paul was right, there are seven levels: information, knowledge, wisdom, truth, beauty, love, music. Bringing another person into the equation turns it into beauty. Tom Marshall once said, in regards to the songwriting process he shares with Trey Anastasio, "turning a poem into a song is a type of creative rebirth, like transforming a two-dimensional picture into a three-dimensional object" (2).
That's the thing I'm looking for. That's what beauty is -- when something goes from being related to one person to a thought shared by two people. Beauty, by this definition, is something definable and tangible. It still exists in words, though they twist around and turn on each other, coiling. This, of course, provides the answer to the initial question that sent me down this path. Why read? Because it's fodder. It's a base and will build into something else and then be refined. Information builds on itself and becomes streamlined into knowledge. Addition, transformation, and reduction occurs all the way up the line. While information is a part of beauty, it has been so integrated that one just can't tell anymore. It's like looking at an extremely blown up digitized image. At first, only big splotches of perfectly round color exist. Move back and everything makes sense.
Question answered, that's the end right? Hell, no. That still leaves the two most intriguing items of all: love and music. My instinct says, though I'm not sure if this is correct (a duh), that love is when this beauty becomes intangible -- it becomes unspoken. The beauty becomes so true to life that it need not be declared anymore. This, of course, is hopelessly optimistic, but it goes along with the logical progression of things (as if logic had anything to do with the subject matter). Everything adds up into small statements. Shloads of information are added together and become one piece of knowledge. Knowledge builds on itself and becomes a chunk of wisdom. All the wisdom in the world might only add up to one truth. That truth is inconsequential as it becomes indeterminate in the face of beauty. And all of that senseless beauty disappears at the moment of its first possible escape.
Now, there's a void. Is that what love is? A void? Maybe so and maybe not. There can be silence, comfortable silence. And rising from that... music. The translation of that quiet into its own form communication. Music is the language of silence.
(1) Frank Zappa, Packard Goose, (c) 1979
(2) Richard Gehr and Phish; The Phish Book; Villard, 1998; p. 71
Jesse Jarnow went to market, this little piggy stayed home, and this little piggy listen to Ozzy records... all the way home.
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