I took the day off work today so I could do a few errands and have some time to myself to just be in the world. I got up late, which in itself is a luxury I rarely manage, dressed in a quiet house (well, as quiet as it gets with three cats and a dog), then got in my car to drive across town for the first errand.

It’s been raining for several days, and was bucketing during the night and early this morning (could hear it through my open bedroom window as I was lying, listening, in the dark), but by the time I left the house the rain had stopped, the wind had picked up and the clouds were starting to be blown apart. As I got in my car there was a blue patch to the north.

The drive is pleasant in the middle of the morning. The traffic is as light as it gets for this region and the wind had cleared the roads of standing water so I could zip right along. I don’t always listen to music as I drive. Most of the time I prefer the relative silence that the car’s space offers. Today, however, I punched the button, and out poured Stravinsky. Normally Stravinsky is not really accessible to me. I like Rite of Spring but mostly I just don’t have enough in common with the music to be able to see through it to the world Stravinsky was creating with the sounds and rhythms. This piece that was playing is from Petrushka and I have to say I was about 20 seconds away from either changing the channel or turning off the radio when I came out of the curve and onto the bridge approach.

The bridge is a graceful, curved neck of concrete that spans a small industrial island and the split Fraser River as it nears the sea. As I came up the bridge the day was such that the light coming in from the blue break in the grey sky suffused the industrial district with a diamantine brilliance it almost never enjoys. The smells of logging, salmon and other local industries were there, but light enough to be enjoyable. Just as Stravinsky hit a bit of a joyful frenetic crescendo, I hit the rise of the bridge and just for a moment, the combination of the light, industry, wind and the music made me understand Stravinsky in a way I have never been able to do before.

Mushrooms grow in a thin layer underground long before the fruit is visible on top of the ground. It’s like a fine web of life normally invisible. I understood industry, in fact this tool maker’s mind part of what it means to be human as normally invisible to me (perhaps because of little interest on my part?), yet as something compelling to Stravinsky. The music fit so well with the harmony of boats, lights, patterns of logs on the river, the smells moving over the island, the blood and bones of the human tool user in action, that it formed a kind of composite rhythmic melody that flashed across the surface of the land much like the perfectly formed white lace network of mycelium flashes underneath it. I gained a new appreciation for his music in the few moments it took me to cross the bridge and leave the industry behind.

The most interesting thing about the experience for me is what it taught me about my own habitual point of view.  Using more spatial metaphor, I tend to think about the earth from a much more localized and in a much more deeply rooted way than Stravinsky’s music and the thin sparkly of human industry suggests to me. I’m more the reach down into the earth up to the shoulder and then stretch the fingers to reach a bit more kind of person. When I move into an area I spend quite a bit of time learning about what kind of rock rests under me, how it got to be here, where it came from, and where, in the far future, it is likely to end up. I also get to know the names of the local plants, find out what critters nest near by and that sort of thing.  I move around a lot but wherever I end up for more than a few days, I want to know the “name” of the place I live, and for me the name of the earth on which I walk is its history and current occupants.

So normally when I cross that bridge, my knowledge of where the river has come from, where the soil that is under the industry on Annacis Island has eroded from, the life cycle of salmon, the origin and destination of the trees that are now logs, those things are the conceptual bedrock that underly whatever music I listen to, whatever thoughts I am thinking. This is a point of view not at all like that which informs Stravinsky.

How much is gender? I really don’t know but it’s there I think. Of course part of it is almost certainly cultural, but there are a set of assumptions about what is important in the world that seem to me to make the recent human layer on the earth disproportionately important – and even more parochial, the part of that layer which I have called the tool makers mind in action. It’s as if human industry is assumed to define what it is to be human and that tendency is, I think, most definitely a gender thing. But here I am beginning to stray into what must be another post so I will stop.