On Slowness

In 1987, John Cage wrote a piece for organ called "As Slow as Possible." The idea is that the performer should take the title literally--that while the relationships between the notes should never change, only the performer's notion of what "slow" means would determine the final length of the piece. (In other words, a whole note is still a whole note, an eighth note still an eighth note--but how long they last is up to the artist.) Performances generally run from 20 to 70 minutes--but on February 5th, Diane Luchese gave a performance at Towson University that ran for just under 15 hours.

I love what the Baltimore Sun's music critic, Tim Johnson, had to say about this particular form of musical insanity. He "stopped by" in the tenth hour of the performance, noting that there were only a dozen audience members when he arrived, and four by the time he left. But he went on to say this:

Sustained low notes on the organ's pedals created a visceral, fundamental rumble that suggested the drone of some cosmic machinery. Dissonant chords appeared and disappeared unpredictably above that pulsating foundation--chance encounters with sonority. Almost each change in notes or tone colors seemed positively cataclysmic in this glacial context.

I've written about "deep time" before, and it seems to me this Cage piece is the musical equivalent of it. Something that shifts your perspective right round, taking you out of the go-go now and drops you into something larger and stranger and richer.

Slowness is anathema to we modern-folk, but it has much to be said for it. Just today I had to drive during a pretty horrible rainstorm, and I fast became a fan of slowness. (It had something to do with not dying.) But I find the virtues of slowness in more and more places, lately: I have become a slow reader, so that it takes months to get through a book sometimes, but your experience of a book is definitely different when you linger, and let the words work on you; and exercise is most definitely a more valuable experience when done slowly. (There's a chain of fitness clubs in L.A. called SuperSlow that operates on exactly this principle. Try it, try any exercise you do regularly, and do it at half-speed. You'll notice the difference in a big way.)

But Ms. Luchese's fifteen-hour marathon of "As Slow as Possible" is nothing compared to the one going on, right now, at the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany.

The total length of this performance of Mr. Cage's composition? Six hundred thirty-nine years.

There is a very entertaining reason for why this specific span of time was chosen, and you can read about it on the page linked above. But suffice it to say that at the church, right this very moment, a single chord is being played, on and on, and it won't change at all until July 5, 2010. And it seems to me that, aside from this endeavor being sheerest insanity, it is also madly inspiring: it takes a certain resolute optimism to believe that such a thing is even possible. It makes me want to save the world, just so that organ can continue playing for the next 600-plus years.

It occurred to me, when I first heard this story, that it would make for a fascinating documentary. So I was a little disappointed to discover recently that someone named Scott Smith has already made one. But as I was looking at his website, I clicked for a page and got the following result, which so delighted me that, without further comment, I now present it for you. Go ahead, click on it, it's worth it, I promise.

The Big One

Very early in the morning, two weeks ago. I woke up fast, hearing a sound: my window was rattling, and it sounded like someone was trying to get in. The sort of thing that will in fact wake up anybody mighty damn fast. But there was just enough vibration working its way through the mattress that I realized: Oh, okay. Nobody's trying to get in. It's just an earthquake. Contented, I went back to bed.

The occasion was a 4.6 seismic event, 3 miles north-northwest of Chatsworth, which is to say, pretty close to where I live. (The U.S. Geological Survey's report on the event is here.) A 4.6 earthquake is a solid earthquake, but even so, not much happened. No deaths, no injuries to speak of, no real property damage. All that happened in my apartment is that an unlit candle, stuffed in a closet, tipped over. But a few days later, a friend of mine (hi, Sarah!) happened to ask me what I thought about our chances of The Big One hitting.

The Big One is a favorite topic amongst Californians, for obvious reasons. As John McPhee details in his wonderful book Assembling California (collected with two other books in the wonderful Annals of the Former World--and by the way, I think McPhee is an incredible writer, and I would happily read his writing on any subject under the sun), the state of California was put together in pieces over millions of years. (The great central valley, for instance, is a huge hinge--two gigantic slabs of earth at angles, forming a huge V, into which sediment has slowly filled and filled the V and thus created that massive flat plain between two mountain ridges.) You've got the Pacific Plate over here, pushing against the continental plate over here, plus a smaller plate (the Juan de Fuca) to the north, and it's all inherently unstable. Big earthquakes are, in a word, inevitable.

But precisely because of my reading of Mr. McPhee, I have a remarkably casual outlook toward The Big One. Yes, it's gonna happen. Will it happen in my lifetime? No, probably not. So I just don't worry about it. This is because of an idea called "deep time."

We could call it geologic time as well. For a geologist, a million years is the smallest unit of time s/he cares about. That's how long it takes for any geologic change to happen. And once you start thinking in terms of deep time, your perspective starts to shift like crazy. Here's an example of why: look at a ruler. At the far left you have the first black marking, the Zero line. If you consider the ruler as a timeline of earth's entire geologic history, the entire span of human history wouldn't get past the Zero line. It's that small.

So if you then consider my individual lifetime against the entire span of human history, well, that's so small it simply doesn't show up on that ruler at all. That's deep time. Which means that yeah, a gigantic earthquake in my neighborhood is inevitable; these faults will one day rupture and California will one day break apart just as it formed, in pieces, separating and then drifting away toward future collisions and reconfigurations. But the chance of the first part of that chain, a major event on the San Andreas fault, happening in my lifetime is so small that I just don't see any point in worrying about it.

Think about it this way: there are no guarantees in life. None. There's no guarantee that the sun will rise in the morning tomorrow--there's only the probability that it will. Based on what we have observed in the past, there is an extremely high probability that in the morning, there it will be, the sun, shining forth as usual. We all go to sleep at night perfectly content that the odds are in our favor on this one. Well, I have the same attitude toward The Big One.

Then again--there was a small earthquake maybe two years ago, when I was at work, in Santa Monica. At the time I happened to be on my lunch break, sitting in the lobby of the building with a book in my hand. I felt the ground jump a little and then looked up--to realize that I was sitting in a glass-roofed extension of the lobby, and that these gigantic panes of glass were shivering above me.

And yeah, I'm not crazy--that made me a little nervous.