Todorov and Jazz

What's the problem with listening to jazz or folk records? The problem is, one of the cornerstones of both jazz and folk is that they are played differently every time, adapting to the precise moment in time when they are played. If you've heard a recording of the Count Basie Orchestra playing "April in Paris," you have only heard a recording of the Count Basie Orchestra playing "April in Paris." In a real way, you have not heard the music, nor can you yet understand it. What's the solution? Well, the Count is dead, so that takes being there out of it. But you can listen to more recordings. You can begin to get a feel for the essence of the music. Still, though, there is a real way in which none of us ever have heard and ever will hear the Count's "April in Paris."

There is a fundamental level on which we can never completely understand anyone but ourselves. Even an individual mind puts up mental blocks to things that it cannot reconcile with its own person. We can, however, get a good approximation of another person's though processes by observing their environment and history and we may even be able to predict to a fair degree an individual's personal actions.

To me, this is what Columbus comes down to. My point in mentioning this is not to say that Columbus is unknowable. Quite to the contrary, we can reconstruct a lot of Columbus from his legacy. My main point in bringing this back up is that, as I said in class, Columbus may have had other options that seemed obvious and equally likely to him that we cannot even envision. In the ultimate form of hindsight bias, we can only see what happened as what could have happened. Unfortunately, we would need more than a few hundred pages of Todorov to even imagine the alternatives.

By that same token, I do not believe that Columbus was schizophrenic or particularly deluding himself. I do believe that he encountered some sort of cognitive dissonance when he swore his crew to claiming that Cuba was the mainland, but I do not believe his position toward the natives would have seemed crazy to Columbus or any of his crew.

I keep bringing up that for both The Sparrow and The Conquest of America, I felt the characters and situations to be farcical. That is, they present improbable but eminently possible situations. Of course, in the case of Todorov, we know that the events could actually happen because they did. But being in Columbus's position, with Columbus's dispositions that are so foreign - alien - to us, I do not imagine that he saw two irreconcilable world views fighting for attention. Rather, his different set of pretensions led him to a wholly different understanding of the other.

Thanks to ST:TNG's "Darmok," I've been toying around with the linguistic idea that we do not have a distinction between alien and alien, principally because we have not met any of the extraterrestrial variety. The word alien comes from Latin and is closely related to alias - of or belong to another. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (the other OED, I guess...), the term was first applied to foreigners around 1330 and was first used to mean "from another planet" in 1944.

Eh, whatever. I don't see where this is going. In any case, I'm looking forward to Children of God to see what He hath wrought upon Rakhat. Buncha amateurs. Why the hell did you land? ... Farce.

Oh, forgot one thing - I'm glad that I'm not the only one who believes that the best way to hate someone is to know them really well. There's also a third category that we didn't bring up - people we admire, even idolize, find out more about them, hate them, but still idolize them. The Pattons or MacArthurs of the world. Or the ancient Greek war heroes. Douchebags, but idols nevertheless.