At Seventeen … or Sixty-Seven
1. https://youtu.be/VMUz2TNMvL0
2. https://youtu.be/7oCTMcbQ1QE
3. https://youtu.be/lypR-Sw-UhQ
I can’t sleep for nights, three now at least. So, I came home after working this morning and crashed into bed. I slept for a few hours, regained some mental strength, but now it’s 1am of another night, and again my mind races. I have, for these last three days, glimpsed an idea that swims just beneath the conscious surface waters of my mind, but each time I reach down to grasp it, have it in my clutches, it wriggles away like a slippery trout.
I play Janis Ian on YouTube singing “At Seventeen” because that song suddenly came to mind and just now it’s my hook in this slippery fish. It is genius made momentarily tangible in a song and a haunting guitar. I lie abed, watch Janis, and listen. Her voice and music wash over me … but drenching turns into deluge and I nearly drown in the depth of its beauty and poignancy. But, as I write this later, the metaphor fizzles, turns banal … I am distracted ... and that colorful trout slips away once again and hides amongst the rocks below.
I watch several versions in succession. Janis sings “At Seventeen” as a woman in full blossom of radiant youth. Youth infused with transcendent insight. I ache because I could never express the idea so clearly. Then Janis sings it as a mature woman, her voice having lost only a smidgen of its timbre that has been supplanted by deepening wisdom earned through life’s sun and storms. Then, older still, she performs it with Tommy Emmanuel and their guitars trade notes that dance in counterpoint and harmony, never once failing to meet each other’s gesture with a perfect response.
I wonder why the inevitability of age, youth’s fleeting, ephemeral nature evidenced on Janis’s face and in her body’s form, as they change over time, saddens me. Why does my mind insist upon grasping for what cannot be held?
And all of this is tangential to the idea. It’s an idea that has been brewing since I read Yuval Noah Harari’s, Sapiens, a book on the history of humanity.
Our ancestors dwelled upon the Savannah of East Africa, their ancestors having abandoned life in the trees for one on the grasslands below. With succeeding generations their brains expanded. Their posture shifted vertically to elevate the eyes for easier viewing afar, lifting the hands and freeing them to fashion tools and brandish weapons. Their habitat could now be manipulated and molded to serve their needs. It was further shaped and exploited to suit whims and wills beyond survival, to satisfy discretionary desires - wants created by imagination, notions that emerge from consciousness no longer constrained by the innate, genetically programmed, patterned responses of instinct alone. Consciousness escaped the boundaries of mere awareness, and having flown that coop, looked down and back in self-reflection. It is the “Tree of Knowledge” transformation – depicted in Genesis by Adam and Eve, who, after eating an apple from that tree, are awakened to good and evil duality. They hide from God, ashamed by their nakedness. The apple not only expanded their consciousness, it made them self-conscious.
This is the crux of the cognitive revolution, a phenomenon revealed through anthropological discoveries that trace the emergence of art, sophisticated language, and the rapid spread of Homo sapiens out of East Africa. Seventy thousand years ago sapiens walked through a portal into a heretofore unimagined dimension. It could never have been imagined, for there was no mind-mechanism capable of such a feat. But then there was - a gifted sapiens was born whose DNA, through a mutation and some lucky combination of gametes, allowed that person to walk through the door of awareness into the realm of self-awareness. But even if this change conferred a survival advantage, other circumstances may have doomed her and prevented her from successfully passing this trait along. So this transformation might have occurred more than once before it “took”. Would one such enlightened sapiens have been lonely among unenlightened peers? Are the Janis Ians, those able to explore more deeply and broadly that realm of the imagination, lonely?
“It seems that it must be so,
That I think that I know that I know.
But what I want to see
Is the “I” who sees me
When I know that I know that I know”
The cognitive revolution unleashed a second “I”, a higher “I”. It is the “I” who laments when we say something like, “I just can’t live with myself anymore.”
That “I” is the consciousness that cooked all this up in the first place. It is what we are and always have been. One might presume that that “I” bided time for thousands of millennia to emerge upon our blue planet seventy thousand years ago. But time and space are illusions, mirages necessary to experience a material realm. We can’t help but apply past and future tenses because they are the only means we have of sorting our experiences. Our bodies, also figments of our imagination, are necessary for the same purpose. Time, space, and matter can be transcended, their illusory nature unmasked, through deep meditation ... or escaped through artistry such as that of Janis Ian singing and playing her guitar.
Here I lie, fifty years to the day beyond my seventeen. My only company is the higher “I” who speaks to me just now through Janis Ian’s music, and, for this moment at least, I am not lonely.
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