![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Rhythmic Entrainment: Juggling & Memorization
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu talks about how a Sage handles things when they are still small so that he never has to deal with big issues. I guess you could say that is an aspect of what I have been doing lately: training myself to master various small skills and tasks. And I have found, through doing this, that they quickly begin to sync up together to unlock larger and larger insights into how the physical world works, as well as your body and mind’s relationship to them.
I can drill down to two simple examples here: juggling and memorization.
Living with “circus folk” for a month out of this year caused me to learn the basic three ball juggling pattern. Later this summer, as I got into left-right integration exercises, I pulled out the juggling balls I ganked on my way out of town and began practicing with them again. Thanks to my new attempts at self-mastery, I found that I was able to slow down my thought processes, and break apart new skills into component sections. I initially tried teaching myself a four-ball pattern, which eventually was successful, if not optimal for juggling that amount of balls. The point is not that I am a juggling master, because I am still nothing special. But that when you are able to consciously break through the wall of frustration which keeps you from learning new tasks, it eventually disappears entirely. And you achieve the mental clarity required to think through complex spatial and other problems. And then from there it is all simply a matter of building up muscle memory. And the way you do this, as I said, is breaking down complex movements into constituent parts, practicing each sub-movement individually, and then linking them together into sequences.
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that this approach to learning new skills spanned also into things which were much less physical. That is, I began memorizing the Gettysburg Address. Not sure how I got that idea in my head, but I know that in ages past people would memorize vast amounts of literature, poetry, etc. It was a fundamental aspect of classical education, it seems. So why don’t we do it now? Because it is boring? Because we do not “need” it thanks to changes in media? I could make several convincing arguments about why this skill fell out of favor, but none of them would probably convince the skeptic as to the value of this practice in modern life.
I personally found it to be tremendously useful, and plan to begin memorizing other classic texts now that I have a little bit of a system working for me. I am still pretty slow with it, but the way that I approached it was basically the same as I approached teaching myself to juggle four balls. In fact, I often performed both activities at the same time. (I’m sure that paints a hilarious picture of me as a human being: juggling and reciting the Gettysburg Address in my bedroom at all hours, but oh well.) The reason these two activities are compatible though is that you are using rhythm to assist you in the learning and encoding of new skills. With juggling rhythmic importance is fairly obvious. With language, a little bit less so. But to be very simple about it, try reading this out loud to yourself, and just break it into rhythmically repeating word clusters where you voice goes up and down in predictable patterns. Nod your head to help you get into the feel of it. Some pieces of writing are obviously better for this than others: this is where meter in poetry comes into importance. It’s not just for making pleasant rhymes, but for assisting people to get into rhythmic trances as listeners, and aiding the memorization of enormously long texts.
Once you can get into breaking texts into rhythmic chunks, you can do the same thing I did with the juggling. I would break long sentences in halves or in threes, or into however many pieces make sense based upon the punctuation and meaning. Each of these pieces you recite in rhythmic patterns. I’ve found that repeating each piece three times, and then moving onto the next works well. And don’t overwhelm yourself all at once, or you will get frustrated and stop. Start with only one paragraph. Once you master all the sections of one sentence, then go back and rhythmically repeat the entire sentence (another three times), stringing together all the chunks you mastered previous to this.
It works, but it’s difficult. I put solid time into the GA for several days before I mastered the entire thing. But now I have it pretty much down. The other thing I learned from it is how good writing is structured. You learn so much more from a text by actively memorizing it than from simply reading it once. The GA is an extremely compact piece of writing. It is composed in such a way that each new line logically evolves out of the ones which came before it. And there are many word and image motifs which repeat and build on one another as you go. It’s quite amazing actually, both how simple and strong it is at once. And you really get to see how stirring a piece of writing can be when you commit it to heart as well. Anybody have other good suggestions for classic short texts or maybe poems to memorize? Bible passages would work too. The whole exercise has made me woefully aware of just how poorly my own writing is structured. I can’t even begin to imagine having to go through and memorize this or any other pieces which I have written. So much wasted value, but that’s the kind of thing you have to right gradually daily, I guess.
PS. Yesterday I also blotted out all the logos and brand names in my immediate visual field with black electrical tape. It’s not really an ideological act so much as it is an attempt to become aware of hidden assumptions and how things which are continually in your field of perception eventually vanish from your awareness. But more about that later, hopefully.
August 14th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
The emphasis on rote memorization in education is so often criticized - I myself am generally critical of it - because it doesn’t equate to understanding what is being memorized. So it’s interesting you’re placing it in a positive light here.
It does remind me that just because something has been overused as a blanket approach even when it isn’t the most valuable approach, doesn’t mean it’s never the most valuable approach. It hasn’t occurred to me, for example, that memorizing really good pieces of writing might give me a much better understanding of what good writing is, and cause my own writing to improve, than just reading a bunch of different pieces of writing might.
The rhythmic method for memorization I’m familiar with and have used. I’ve memorized things by putting them to music, with great success. This has been of course used in advertising forever. I remember more jingles word for word than I would ever care to count. I can recite the Fresh Prince of Bell Air theme song by heart at will - and not only the words but every little tonal inflection - with disturbing precision. But your mnemonic-juggling technique, that’s original. : )
It’s true though, how many of us actually make use of this for our own purposes? How many of us actually make use of most good ideas for our own purposes, for any length of time or with any consistency? Others, not so concerned with our best interests, are using these things on us all the time. We have these amazing mental abilities, all of which can be put to better use. That’s a lot of what self-mastery is, I believe.
I’ll be thinking about what else might be worth memorizing. I just had a look at the G.A. and I can see why you chose it. It’s pretty powerful. Being from Canada I wasn’t familiar with it, though parts I recognized from movies and what not.
I’m thinking certain Emerson essays would be great to memorize. I already have bits and pieces committed to memory because they were just that awesome.
August 14th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
At the end of Fahrenheit 451, I think it’s “Guy Montag” who meets up with a group of men who have memorized all the old forgotten texts and it’s from them that the hope for a new beginning springs. Gotta read that again, apparently.
This is precisely what you’re doing when you learn, memorize and perform a cover song as well. It’s enormously useful and you’re obviously good at it. Emerson is a great idea.
August 15th, 2007 at 3:56 am
> This has been of course used in advertising forever.
Yeah. Stuff like that really sticks. As a teenager I can remember trying to memorise pop songs word for word, inflection for inflection. They’d become common subcultural reference points. Rap was completely new to the UK at the time and stuff like LL cool J, Run DMC, the Beastie Boys was fascinating. (Shit I’m showing my age.) And then the House scene happened and we had all sorts of samples to learn. I KNOW you’re gonna dig this… don’t touch that dial.
At Uni it was cool for a while to get drunk and then be able to entertain the crowd with a recital of something - preferably absurdly intellectual (yeah, I know, I hung around with English majors). ‘I met a traveller from an antique land who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert…’ I learnt Tom Lehrer’s version of the chemical elements to the tune of A Modern Major General (but my mate could do almost anything by Flanders and Swann, barstard
). Also all the words to American Pie. With hindsight it was cool because it was a kind of lost skill - no music, just fireside stories and songs - and it also turned out that /everyone could do it/, be they sad geeks like me or otherwise. Seems it’s some innate human thing, to be able to internalise whole a cultural reference point of personal significance.
Rote learning has its place in school. Kids these days don’t know their times tables. And honestly, it IS useful to know that x is minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c all over 2 a.
August 15th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
The other thing I meant to include explicitly (I think I only implied it) was that memorization of text is almost exactly the same thing as building muscle memory in the performance of a complex task sequence.
http://www.google.com/search?q=muscle+...:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
August 16th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
I achieving enlightenment with ganked juggling balls bad karma?
August 16th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Half of them were technically mine, the rest was spite. I’m putting them to good use though. And I have a karmic balancer in the works.
August 16th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
[…] What happens the more you practice these kinds of things (see also: juggling) the more you become able to deal with that edge of frustration though as you develop body awareness in new areas and learn new skills (which are nothing but formalized sets of body movements, usually). I think of it as “conscious pain.” The only way to beat it is to do it habitually. You can think of a habit as being like a callous. If you play guitar a lot, your fingers get tired of registering the sensation of slightly sheared off skins from constantly sliding across the metal fretboard and strings. The way your brain tunes that sensation out is not by damaging the nerves themselves, but by gradually adapting. The skin in your fingertips gets calloused. It gets thicker. More padding between proprioception and perception. Or something like that. I may be using those terms wrong. This is all fairly new to me. […]
December 17th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
[…] Drums are the conscious human linking of one’s existence to the cycles and patterns of the natural world {see also: rhythmic entrainment}: the rhythms of the tides, of waves crashing onto the beach, of blood pumping through our hearts and veins, the cycle of the seasons, stars & planets, the rhythmic penetration of animals fucking - perpetuating the very rhythms of life itself across generations, encoded in the written Word of God, DNA. […]