An Interchapter – The Mind as a River

Sunday, October 17^th, 2009

I’m sitting in my comfy leather chair trying to write part VII. I gaze across the room to an end table which has some books standing on it: “Equations of Motion”, which is really an autobiography, “Art Techniques”, everything you wanted to know about the different art media, “Watercolor Techniques”, everything you wanted etc., etc., and Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher and Bach”. The last, a book I’ve tried to read many times, but….

And I think about the one part I did understand which has to do with Johan Sebastian Bach and his phenomenal ability to improvise, invent and write Canons. The author talks about four part, six part and even eight part canons. A canon reduced to its simplest terms is like a round, you know, like “Row, row, row your boat”, except that each part doesn’t sing the same lines. In a canon each part is different, and the author explains how different and how inventive the composer can be. But, no matter how inventive, how musically complicated, each part must work with the others; they must be in harmony. Well, this is much too complicated for me, so, reducio ad absurdum, I go back to “Row your boat” to see how this actually works

The second line: “Gently down the stream,” must work with the first line: “Row, row, row your boat,” – Row with Gently, the second row with down and your boat with stream. Add the third line and you see that Row, Gently and Merrily must work together. They must harmonize.

It was then that I was struck by the words.                                           

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream – gently.

Gently down the stream.

The song tells us to go with the flow, not to go against the current.

Gently and merrily – merrily is sung four times – it’s that important.

So we should row gently and merrily down the stream of life because:

Life is but a dream.

So row gently, my friends.

Row gently, but above all merrily,

For life

Is

But a dream.

Rudy the Dreamer