What you see, you know. At least, you know it’s there, you can identify the object–a pickup truck, a painting, a sky, a bowling ball falling out of the sky, onto your face… How about the other way around: what you know, you see. You can’t see it there, if you don’t know what it is. If you saw a refrigerator, and had never used one, never seen one before, say it’s standing all alone in a vast plain of virgin snow, you would see a box, not a refrigerator. A box for keeping things cold? Hell, everything’s cold here!<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
This is all a prelude to the observation that we say “I see\u201d when we mean “I understand.\u201d This usage is a bit more exaggerated in French. \u201cTu vois o\u00f9 c’est la maison de Mme. Riverenert ?\u201d<\/em> you say on the telephone, trying to tell your neighbor who is on a train to Besan\u00e7on, where you stepped in a pile of dog shit yesterday. They respond, \u201cOui,\u201d while looking out the window. They don\u2019t see Mme. Riverenert’s house–they’re passing a concrete factory, or a bicycle repair shop that’s gone out of business, or a shantytown–but they remember Mme. Riverenert’s house. They know what you’re talking about.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n But this little blog post is really more concerned with history. The history you know determines what you are able to see in the present.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n I recently saw a documentary called Rumble<\/em> about the contributions of American Indians to rock music. As a film, it was a bit scattered, containing loosely-connected portraits of Indigenous American musicians, but it had some interesting information and, best of all, great musical performances, but it completely changed my perception of rock music. Indian rhythms and harmonies are fundamental to early rock-n-roll. I didn’t realize how fundamental they were until seeing this movie, but the beats and pentatonic harmonies that form the basis of rock have their roots not only in African but Indigenous American music \u2014 specifically the pulsing heartbeat-like 4-on-the-floor beat. You hear it often in early rock music. Here\u2019s Little Richard\u2019s “Lucille” as an example.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n \r\n