Big Bill Broonzy, Martin Heidegger, and the blue note

OK. I guess I haven't stayed on task the way I would have liked to. It's been a while since the first real post--while I was reading Camus. But I have had a few thoughts that I might like to share.

This post idea came to me while I was running (about 5-miles) with earphones in, listening to Big Bill Broonzy. Broonzy played what we call country blues--if you know Taj Mahal's playing and singing, then you know Broonzy's influence. Broonzy was important in the 1950s as part of the folk and blues resurgance in the U.S., but his legacy has been overshadowed by Pete Seeger (with whom Broonzy played), Woody Guthrie, and, later, Bob Dylan. Broonzy had a wonderfully inventive blues picking style, and a clear and resonant voice--listen, for example, to his "Key to the Highway" or "When Things Go Wrong."

The song I want to comment on is called "Joe Turner Blues." This is a ballad of the post-Reconstruction years that tells about Joe Turner, a folk character who helped "all poor people, the white and the black," leaving them food, etc after a flood in the 1890s. It would have resonated for Broonzy's audiences who had a living memory of the Great Depression.

The song is a ballad with a rolling guitar part that just stays on the same groove and backs up a kind of narrative spoken part punctuated by a chorus--"Joe Turner been here and gone."

What is amazing musically about this very simple song is a part that introduces each chorus. Broonzy keeps the bass line going with his right hand, but uses his left hand to ACTUALLY TURN THE TUNING KEY to bend the high note on his guitar. Bending notes is a key part of blues playing, but usually players do this by bending the string with a finger on the fretboard. Tuning up and down during a song was amazingly inventive and bold.

I love this from two standpoints: as a guitar-player myself, but also as a literary/cultural critic who has read Martin Heidegger on technology. Broonzy's guitar playing is an example of the distinction Heidegger makes between technology and techne in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology." Here's a huge oversimplification of Heidegger: Technology is all the material, physical and mechanical parts of the invention of tools and man-made innovations. Techne is, we might say, the spirit of creativity and invention that goes into the human-technological relationship. The tuning pegs of a guitar are such a wonderful piece of machinery. Guitar players--especially those like me who are in their 40s and older and love guitar gear as much as guitar music--appreciate the way the simple gears and pegs work to tune the guitar. But few guitar players appreciate the spirit of the human-technological trapped within those tuning gears.

Broonzy, in a way, liberates the spirit of techne from the actuality of technology when he plays the blue note (the note that fluctuates between the separate tones that make up the Western European musical scale) by turning the tuning peg as part of the song itself.

So--read Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology," or, better yet, listen to Big Bill Broonzy.

Here's the album I've been listening to: _Trouble in Mind_. Reissued by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 2000.

Plague as Pathological Rationalism

So, I've been reading Albert Camus's The Plague. Not all my posts will be this "heavy," but, as promised, I'm writing about stuff that interests me now, and issues that relate to my research.

I'm currently interested in illness metaphors in modern Iranian literature, and Camus happens to be an important influence on many modern Iranian writers. Iranian intellectuals in the 20th century were, very often, Francophiles.

Now, The Plague takes place in the city of Oran, and centers on a few characters who have to deal with the physical but also emotional and, of course, existentialist challenges brought on by bubonic and pneumonic plague.

Towards the end of the novel, Jean Tarrou, one of these characters, has a heart to heart discussion with Rieux--the doctor who commits himself to the task of helping the town of Oran overcome the pestilence.

Tarrou's comments amount to the following: any rationalist approach to the world is like a plague. By rationalism I mean any worldview based on abstract ideals about things like justice, "Truth," and right. Tarrou, in his youth, witnesses his father condemn a criminal to the death penalty. After this, Tarrou becomes a revolutionary, doing everything in his power to oppose French and European society more generally because he believes the whole system is based around this kind of event--the society "rationalizing" murder under the heading of "justice." Tarrou tells Rieux: "To my mind the social order around me was based on the death sentence, and by fighting the established order I'd be fighting against murder" (p. 226, Modern Library Edition of 1948). This established order is like the plague because it spreads death through this "microbe" of rationalism--justifying what we do based on abstract ideals that we imagine to be the essence of humanity, but ends up justifying the murder of humanity.

But this is precisely where Tarrou's story becomes interesting. Once he joins the revolutionary movement against such rationalizing of murder, he finds that they do the same thing. He describes witnessing an execution by firing squad--meted out by the revolutionaries he has joined. After this, he begins to see that the revolutionary movement against the established order has become its own type of plague. He says: "I came to understand that I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years in which, paradoxically enough, I'd believed with all my soul that I was fighting it. I learned that I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people" (227).

From here on out, Tarrou decides that he won't fight for any ideals, but that he'll just try to fight against plague itself by focusing on the real--actual deaths. What I find interesting about Tarrou's last move is that he moves away from metaphor. Here he is in Oran joining forces with Rieux to fight "real" plague (within the world of the novel, at least) rather than pitting one ideal against another. This may be what is meant in that pithy definition of existentialism: existence precedes essence. It's not some idealized or abstract notion of "humanity" (that is, an essence of humanity) that Tarrou fights for; it is actual, real humans (existence) that he tries to protect (not even "fight" for).