Winter, Week 5: Forecasts and Unpredictable Song

​Katie Nordt LaRosa, 2014

v.
frigid tomorrow
upright pine
bristles with light

The Perils and Pleasures of Prediction
 
"[T]he inability of predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history (xxiv)….What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it….
     Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence (rather than naively try to predict them). There are many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know. Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans (of the positive kind) by maximizing your exposure to them. .... [A]lmost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning--they were just Black Swans."--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: Second Edition, xxv

“When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos. The subjective meaning that we encounter there is the reaction of our deepest being, our neurologically and evolutionarily grounded instinctive self, indicating that we are ensuring the stability but also the expansion of habitable, productive territory, of space that is personal, social and natural. It’s the right place to be, in every sense. You are there when—and where—it matters. That’s what music is telling you, too, when you’re listening—even more, perhaps, when you’re dancing—when its harmonious layered patterns of predictability and unpredictability make meaning itself well up from the most profound depths of your Being.” Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (pp. 42-43). Random House of Canada. Kindle Edition.

“Clarity and concision hamper the storyteller, for he makes his living from unpredictable leaps of transformation and an inexhaustible supply of breath.”—Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies, 1992, 63.

Our Own Unpredictable Song
 
“In a powerful meditation, the nineteenth-century Hasidic commentary Shem Mi-Shmuel asks how Moses and the Israelites managed spontaneously and simultaneously to sing the same words and melody. All sing Zeh Keli—'This is my God’—though the words are, in a sense, Moses’ singular idiom. In general, zeh—this—is considered his personal idiom, expressing the clarity of vision that characterizes him: ‘God’s presence speaks from out of his [Moses’] throat.’ But at this moment, all Israel shared his immediacy of vision—God within their vocal chords; even embryos in their mothers’ womb, says the Talmud, sing in the Sea—although, Shem Mi-Shmuel notes, their vocal chords were not yet developed! That is, the experience was of the song arising from deep within them, from some internal otherness. Essentially, it is the Shechinah—God’s presence—that sings. The song is theirs only in the sense that they intend, like Moses, to sing. But their song is not theirs, in the sense that some voice beyond the personal sings through them: It sings.
     This Hasidic teaching conveys a sense of the personal-impersonal sources of song. Unconscious desires and fears vibrate within the singing voice. A whole people here open themselves to the deep experience of an elsewhere. In a sense, they are not responsible for their own song. In that sense, it sings.” [emphases added]
     The psychoanalyst Donnel B. Stern writes: ‘The more fully an experience is our own—the more it comes from what we like to call “deep down within us”—the more it usually feels, oddly enough, as if it comes from elsewhere.’ Many poets and composers have described the experience of inspiration in similar terms: Coleridge, Blake, Mozart (‘Where and how they come I know not’), Keats (‘The poet does not know what he has to say till he has said it’), Rilke (‘Let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion quite in itself … beyond reach of one’s own understanding’), Valéry (‘A poem is a discourse that requires and sustains continuous connection between the voice that is and the voice that is coming and must come’), Tsvetaeva (‘The poet’s hand does not belong to her but to that which waits to exist through her’).
     ‘And He placed in my mouth a new song,’ the Psalmist writes (Ps. 40:4); and the midrash adds, ‘This refers to the Song of the Sea.’ Between the miry clay of Egypt and the firm foothold in the midst of the Sea, a new song is formed. Something unpredictable sings from Moses’ throat. What then can we say about Miriam’s song?”— Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Bewilderments (p. 101-103). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

​Charles Dana Gibson, “A Love Long,” Sketches and Cartoons (1900). Public domain.

Posted 18 January 2025. Please send comments to [email protected]