Stephen Nachmanovitch

The Visceral Connection of Body to Music

Rubbing: Gregory Bateson and the Remarkable Sensation of Connecting Patterns

Posted 8/25/20

The Art of Is

One of the most eye-opening things anthropologist Gregory Bateson ever told me was how he felt when he was writing a draft of Mind and Nature in a cabin in British Columbia while listening to a cassette tape of Bach's Goldberg Variations.

He realized there was an alignment between the structure of the music and the structure of his own body. At that moment he was thinking of his sequence of twenty-four articulated vertebrae, each vertebra different from the others but each a modulation of an underlying pattern. And there was Bach, presenting a theme, then creating a sequence of thirty variations on the theme, then restating the theme at the end. Each variation different yet each related to the underlying pattern.

Bateson proposed that what you recognize in art is that you are a living organism with all the structure and patterning of a living organism. You are, as it were, rubbing the patterning of your organism alongside what you're seeing out there. This is the nature of aesthetics: comparing one form with another, when one of the forms is us. When we feel a visceral connection of body to music, this is it. Walking, dancing, sitting still, our body has patterns, and music has patterns. When they connect, the sensation is remarkable.

The Violin

Violin The violin is a sculpted form crafted by a woodworker's hand to complement, be the partner of, a musician's hand. At the same time, that form is made to complement other patterns, the waveforms that arise when you pluck or bow a stretched string.

I rub my fingers up and down one string of the violin. I easily feel small distances and angles — the difference between the part of my fingertip on the string and the part on the fingerboard.

I learn things by rubbing that I wouldn't learn otherwise. The sound of a stringed instrument is the rubbing of the strings by the bow hairs, moving at an angle to each other, pushing and pulling on a thin wooden bridge, which vibrates the belly and back of the instrument, pushing and pulling on the surrounding air.

Violin playing is made of simple, elemental touch-actions. Playing music, on any instrument, is an art of feeling — you feel an object with your fingers and with all the muscles up and down your body.

This is obvious when you say it out loud, but it is not trivial. Singing and speaking, you feel your lungs and throat, back and belly muscles, as you push air out and shape sound — moving-touching-sensing-acting-on, all in one gesture. We feel the feedback of vibrations returning to us, back into fingers, back into skin; a continuous loop. The simplest sensorimotor activity. Protozoa do it.

Rubbing isn't simply physical adjacency, but tactile exploration. It exposes details to our senses that might otherwise go unnoticed. It's the massive gulf between something looking slimy and something feeling slimy. Movement is essential. Rubbing back and forth, up and down, new parts of each surface come into contact with one another. This action can be seen as a talismanic gesture for engagement with art because it can never occur in a vacuum. One thing must be rubbed against another.

There is a mutuality in the rubbing of an object not necessarily present in the contemplation of an object. People are said to have mannerisms that rub off on one another. A hand rubbing a tree will leave dead skin cells on the trunk and bark particulate on the flesh of the palm. Rubbing is not a one-way street; it is inherently an exchange of information, a cross-pollination: not addition but multiplication.

We see things at a distance, but in effect we are rubbing our eyes over the world. If our eyes do not move, the unchanging pattern of light causes our retinal pigments to blanch out in a matter of seconds, and the image disappears. The eyes constantly vibrate in saccadic movement so that the contours of the image keep sliding back and forth across the sensitive rods and cones. Vision is not a passive perception but active engagement.

We are interested in dynamic physical contact, discovering comparison and analogy through body movement and direct sensation. As we handle something and know it, the sensations we experience come from actively moving in relation to it.

Form Secreted from Process

Whether it is Jackson Pollock's drippings — the dynamic trace of a man crouching and jumping around a canvas on the floor with a can of paint in his hand — or a rap song or a handmade table, art is, as Bateson put it, form secreted from process.

The bodies of living beings, the sounds we make, the artworks we make, are secreted from a process of movement, touch, and interplay, which is life. That is what we're doing, whether we're receiving the art or making the art. Of course creating and receiving are inseparable arcs of the same feedback loop.

Stephen Nachmanovitch is the author of The Art of Is and Free Play. He performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist and lecturer. more

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