Boy did I ever miss that call about the BCS Championship! Not only did I not celebrate a victory, I didn’t even see most of the last half. That roughing the kicker penalty in the first drive of the second half was all I could stand. Ah well, as a northern Ohio football fan through and through, I’m not stranger to these words: next season.
I just got back from dropping off a neighbor girl who was hanging out with my daughters tonight. On the way there, the opening notes of Stairway to Heaven caught my ears as I scanned the local radio stations. I don’t know if it’s because I recently read the Rolling Stone article about the band’s London reunion/fundraiser and that planted some kind of seed or if it’s because my LPs have been in a box for about 15 years, but I was compelled to drive around the block a couple of times to hear the whole song, gradually turning up the volume until we pulled in the driveway just in time to hear Robert Plant’s final pleading cry.
I haven’t WANTED to listen to a Led Zeppelin song in a long time, but for some reason, it sounded pretty darned good tonight. In fact, I might dig out the one Zep CD I have just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.
For a long time I’ve pulled a random CD off the rack and tossed it in my truck just to listen to something I haven’t heard in a while, but the closest to classic rock I’ve listened to was maybe The Clash or The Kinks. The desire to grab something like Aerosmith or AC DC just went away like my childhood love of macaroni and cheese after living on it through the college years.
Now that I think about it, the mac and cheese jones came back for a while too after my kids started liking it… peanut butter and jelly kind of worked that way too. Until I’d made both for my kids, I probably went close to a decade without even considering eating either of those two delicacies. I wonder if that’s why fashion trends always come back around too. One of the surest signs that something will come back is when some expert says it won’t.
When it comes to my musical likes and dislikes, I suppose I’m the expert, and I know classic rock suffered some dark days (in the case of my taste) after its resurgence on FM radio throughout my high school and college days. By then, most of my friends and I had just about had our fill and were really waiting for the next big thing to happen in rock music. About the time the radio stations decided for us that there was no new rock music worth listening to, we had grown weary of the 1000th playing of Freebird, Stairway and Light My Fire. I’m sure we weren’t alone, but the radio offered little in the way of hope, until, alas, musicians forced their hand, but radio, in its hubris, couldn’t admit that rock lived on and had to call the latest wave of new rock, “alternative,” and at that moment true rock and roll finally belched forth its death rattle.
Sure the hair bands gave it their all. Techno-punk like Akron’s own Devo and a few other strange oddities of the 80’s didn’t exactly force radio to admit they might have been wrong about forcing 20 year old songs down our ears rather than rolling with the changes, but that was pretty much it for the evolution of rock and roll. If any new rock music existed, from that moment forward it had to call itself alternative.
I’m not sure why this is pouring out of me tonight… I guess I just had to share the Stairway story ‘cuz it really did sound good. And not in some longing for the old days way, but just good, like rain on the roof as you lay in bed or a harmonica crying through a valley. No memory was necessarily associated with it. It was just a cool song again… after years of switching to the CD player or hitting search on the tuner when one of those classic songs came on in the past.
As I type this it occurs to me that this is somehow twisted up in a recurring thought I’ve been coming back to lately. It’s the result of the many debates, discussions and even arguments I had while a graduate student of rhetoric: where does knowledge come from? The specific version of this for students of rhetoric is, are words the source of/creators of knowledge, or do words form later out of necessity to describe a pre-existing truth that’s just “out there?”
Fashion trends obviously are influenced by culture and society, but I don’t know if I can buy that about my musical tastes. I mean, I’m sure culture and society are a small factor, but can that really explain why a song I used to like, but grew tired of suddenly catches me in the right moment? The station that played it has probably played it another thousand times since I stopped listening to it habitually. I’ll tune in to it every now and then to see what’s on, but generally skip past after hearing one of the same hundred or so songs.
So how does this get back to the epistemological question? I’m not sure exactly, but I can’t help but think it does. Do the words that describe fashion trends cause those trends to come back? I think they do in some ways. Maybe not just the words, but talking about the trend more surely must. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point covers some tangent of this by describing the “cool” people who started wearing Hush Puppies again just as the company considered calling it quits, but unless the rest of us started talking about those cool people, their choice in footwear would have had little effect on the rest of us and no effect on the company or foot fashion trends.
I also can’t help but think this concept fits squarely with the previous few posts… ok, maybe not squarely, but tangentially. When it comes to religious faith, the source of knowledge is clearly at the root of the issue. I’ll contend that our socio-cultural-political climate of late wouldn’t even allow me to discuss this with anyone outside of a college lounge, not classroom. Even academia’s quest to go overboard about being objective has them backpedaling from their previously infamous criticism of religion in the classroom. (much like modern media and its former liberal bias) But in the context of my last posts, I’ll risk saying it here: I believe man is the source of the knowledge we take from the Bible. The fact that man has written it and translated it through several languages over the last thousand or so years is beyond question, but where man got those ideas seems to be the real issue. So there we are again back at do words create knowledge or do we create words to describe knowledge that exists on its own?
In my quest to find answers that satisfy me to questions like this, I wandered through a few other books that some think need a capital B. Lao Tzu’s The Way, English versions of the Koran, a number of books on variations of Eastern philosophy (I still dig those) and various stages of Bible study from the traditional K-8 indoctrination leading to confirmation in a United Church of Christ to courses on the Bible as Literature as an undergrad, and studies of a handful of saints and other Christian figures as rhetoricians. The one thing the religions I’ve glanced at have in common is that they all claim the source of knowledge was divine. It was “out there.” We only use words to describe and discuss it, not create it.
Obviously, my current thinking about that is beyond skepticism, but as I sit back and take an inventory, I’m even more convinced, but maybe for a different reason. After all, is there really a difference between saying man (through his words) creates knowledge vs. knowledge was given to man by God, but then that knowledge had to be shared with his fellow man through man’s word? Either way, man creates, alters, adjusts, tweeks and otherwise makes what he wants out of that knowledge. Maybe that’s why so many people think rhetoricians are strange, because what we argue about doesn’t really matter.
But that only solves the problem for folks who believe God is the source of all knowledge. There are plenty of folks out there who disagree and thus still struggle with epistemology. I think I’m joining them because when it comes to what form that knowledge takes, and, more importantly, which God created it, the books just don’t jive. I mean, if Allah (pbuh) is the source, then Christians have really strayed from that path, and of course, like the Christian path, Allah’s (pbuh) was divinely delivered so there’s no questioning it. In fact, the Bible foreshadows Mohamed and the Koran refers back to the Bible. Somewhere in there some signals must have gotten crossed… then again, we only have man’s interpretations of both.
That’s about all I can take right now and I’ve got a new Chuck Palahniuk book I can’t wait to dig in to, so that’s it for now.
Luth
Out
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