Activity, Clean and Alive

"But there is also hope in this: music invents itself through musicians working on behalf of music, rather than themselves. This is healthy music, and can be experienced as such. After listening, or playing, one feels stronger and cleaner. No elaborate metamusics is needed to demonstrate this, for it can be simply experienced. The question for the musician is this: do I become alive playing this? For the audience, it is: do I become alive listening to this?" - Robert Fripp, "The Act of Music." Via 10 (1990), p. 88.


I finished my workout last night, feeling pleasantly drained as usual. Nothing much - pushups, pullups, Hindu squats, and so on - I'm clawing my way out of sedentary life, you see. As I cycled home from the playground, the word bubbled up: clean. That's how I felt, and there was no other way to put it.

Clean is the way I feel after a good workout, when it's not too hard but still challenging. It's always been that way, even back when I was practicing tae kwon do, though I never used that word. But there it was last night, and it reminded me of the article by Robert Fripp; you can see he uses the same adjective to describe the experience of playing music. Or listening to it.

Looking back on other moments, I become aware of other times when the idea of clean has come to the fore. And its opposite. Whenever I saw Natural Born Killers, I felt dirty. That is a movie that shouldn't have been made. It's not the violence; I've seen equivalent levels of that in films, but it doesn't register the same way. No, something else in its treatment of violence strikes me as unsavory and - well, let's just say it - wrong. The soundtrack is enough to bring on the feeling of being soiled.

Of course when we act in a way that is wrong, we often say we feel dirty, and want make a clean breast of it. This is such a commonplace, there's no need to hunt for citations. Rituals of purification work on this notion of cleaning - inwardly, outwardly or both. Sometimes that takes on the form of going through the dirt as part of the cleansing, purging. Catharsis.

Having an interest in logic, I can't help considering cleanness in terms of consistency. There's an element of it there too: if we consider Mary Douglas's definition of dirt as "matter out of place", the notion of coherence is unmistakable. Things have their place in relation to one another, and so a misplaced item runs against the order of things.

Which brings me to another, connected sensation - the sensation of conflict. This takes on several forms, depending on the degree and nature of conflict. A paradox piques by its apparent self-opposition, but we don't feel it to be painful; rather, the pique is exciting, stirs us to action. There is dissonance, to be sure, but somewhere at bottom there is a coexistence of the two notes; the dissonance isn't absolute. Contradiction, however, presents us with a dissonance that is absolute, hence intolerable. "Stand there! - no, don't stand there!" Oh, make up your mind! It hurts to be pulled this way and that. We've all been there.

Before I veer too far from the topic at hand, let me just say I'd like to go deeper into the matter. That I'm not alone in noticing the sensation of cleanness in relation to action suggests that there's something important to it in our experience. The phenomenology of cleanness and dirtiness needs to be addressed, if it hasn't been already. If anybody out there knows of studies in this matter, let me know. I'd be very grateful.