Just some more ramblings from my wandering mind, and given how I can go on I've divided this exploratory exposition into parts...
If you know me then you may already know that I spent (probably) entirely too many years studying philosophy (and if you don't, you can check my info since I'm not in the mood for tooting that academic horn now). And in the western-anglo-analytic tradition that I spent most of my studying time, the focus was ever, in some form, of disembody-ishly finding - or arguing for a failure to find - truth. The body factored in when you needed to articulate things or your fingers in writing or typing them out, but these sorts of factors were relatively incidental.
That's all I have to say about that for the time being, as a backdrop for how peculiar it is in this current phase of my life to be working more on embodied knowing. I know it's not the right words, but I don't know any better: it's a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around. I mean: it's quite cool and rocking, but it's like my brain keeps wanting to consciously jump in and play a cognitive part, and I'm in the midst of now a process of training it to pipe down, sit back, and enjoy the ride.
So, whassat mean? Well, to put it in more everyday terms, I think of guitar playing with the NASA bluegrass group. Sometimes, someone will introduce a song without any sheet music, but by explaining that it's in the key of A, or G, or C (or whatever), and that it's got the usual 1-4-5 chord structure (so that if you're playing in A, for instance, the chords for the song are A, D and E). And then, off you go, and when - for me - it's like the body over mind is working, then when I feel a chord change coming up, it's as though my fingers feel and reach for where they need to be on the fretboard. That's as opposed to >thinking< as I anticipate a chord change for this new song, that we're moving up a fourth or a fifth and so I need to play a D or an E. Yanno?
I've posted before in note that I don't really know beans about music theory (maybe I will someday, but I don't know it now), so thinking it through in terms of intervals like fourths and fifths or thirds or whatever just isn't part of my mental architecture. It doesn't always work! Sometimes a song doesn't change chords the way one might expect or maybe my fingers just guess wrong sometimes. But sometimes, when the planets are lined up right or something, the body just knows it's supposed to play a D and before I have a chance to think about it, there it goes. It's quite cool, really. And when the whole group seems to be feeling it and jams it out all impromptu-like, well, I don't know what words really work to describe what it feels like to me outside of "awesome."
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