Sometimes the media stay the same and the change is in YOU

18 August 2007 | Cognitive Funding, Culture, Media, Personal | Comments

Fair warning, y’all, this here is a post that combines the personal and the theoretical.

Recently, I bought the new Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) album, “An Other Cup.”  If you liked his old stuff, you’ll like this.  Since he left the world stage in the 1970s, Yusuf Islam has had four children, and recently that’s made me wonder how his persepective on one of his most famous songs might have changed.  That song is called “Father and Son.” (If you don’t know it, you can find the lyrics here.)  When he wrote the song, Islam/Stevens both spoke and sang most convincingly from the perspective of the son.  The father, like Polonius when he’s giving cliched advice to his son Laertes in “Hamlet,” is sealed off, providing unasked-for counsel with affection but no emotion, no interiority. In contrast, the son is agonized and you feel with and for him.

How, I wonder, would Yusuf Islam rewrite that song today? Or, would he simply perform the original with different inflection?

Looking at my bizarre career trajectory (academia, Hollywood, internet writing and marketer, marketing journalist) it seems like I’ve zigged and zagged quite a bit, and I like the claim I can make to variety. However, there’s another perspective in which I’m pretty much interested in the same thing–how the mind does things with the narratives it consumes–over and over again.

As I’ve mentioned previously, right now I’m deep in the revision of a novel called “Redcrosse” that I’ve been working on for years.  When my son started moving on his, progress on my novel stopped moving for about a year and half, and now I’m getting it to move again. One of the interesting things for me has been to return to the book after a long hiatus, to reread it and think, “Huh, what’s going to happen next… waitaminute you WROTE this!”

If you live long enough and keep returning to the same stories, you can chart your changes by how your take on them alters with time.  Sometimes this is simply a matter of growing into or out of things.  And when it comes to long-running fictions, sometimes those things change too.  I was one of the first people ever to watch Sesame Street, and it was a lot more urban, citified and had fewer Muppets back in the 1960s than it is today.  Today, the street itself could be in Connecticut. Back then, it was pure New York.  I’ve written elsewhere another another example of this: my inability to watch “E.R.” after I became a dad.

Most of this post is about how personal meanings change over the course of time, but that phenomenon also happens at the cultural level. Here is one of my favorite perspective’s on it; it’s a passage from Wilhelm von Humbolt that Heidegger quoted in “On the Way to Language”–

“Without altering the language as regards its sounds and even less its forms and laws, time–by a growing development of ideas, increased capacity for sustained thinking, and a more penetrating sensibility–will often introduce into language what it did not possess before.  Then the old shell is filled with a new meaning, the old coinage conveys something different, the old laws of syntax are used to hint at a differently graduated sequence of ideas.  All this is a lasting fruit of a people’s literature, and within literature especially of poetry and philosophy.”

And with that, I should get back to writing.