This edition is overdue, but I must confess I’m feeling a bit stumped for a theme. Spring has come early to Berlin — rather, we kind of skipped the second half of winter and went to spring sometime in the last week of January, and while everyone’s been holding their breath, waiting for the hammer to fall, I must say, I’m convinced we’re going to get off without more cold weather. For the first time in I don’t know how long, this week finds me free of late-winter depletion. Even in Los Angeles, the second week of March 2019, I recall feeling shot, not just by virtue of professional exertion but from the weather. When I’d arrived, the previous August, southern California was in the seventh year of a drought, and mature pines that had survived a number of yearslong droughts could be seen lodging, their roots lifted out of the dry earth. But that winter brought heavy rain — I recall driving I-10, the Santa Monica Freeway, east from the 110 junction to meet a friend in Culver City in a typhoon that all but idled drivers accustomed to desert weather.
And this brings me back to RiffRaff, the forty-eight-year-old galah who takes CBD oil for late-stage pancreatic cancer. Here, for the uninitiated, is RiffRaff at medicine time. RiffRaff’s caretaker, Leah Jigalin, interprets RiffRaff’s foot tapping as an expression of joy, and this seems reasonable. Birds of the order Psittaciformes — parrots and cockatoos — exhibit a tendency to rhythmic entrainment to a beat similar to our own, and, as in our own case, when birds groove it seems to represent both an expression and a source of pleasure. Grooving, in turn, appears to coöccur with a constellation of superficially unrelated tendencies: altriciality, for one, the tendency, common to humans and cockatoos, to experience a prolonged postgestational period of development — to be physically immature, and unable to take care of themselves, at birth. Other elements of the complex include object play, social play, and tool use.
Playfulness could figure in the development pathway for tool use by encouraging object exploration and the acquisition of a repertoire of flexible motor sequences adaptable to the different kinds of objects — proto-stuff, in the technical usage of this newsletter — that come to hand. As for why grooving should coöccur with an elongated developmental pathway tuned for the acquisition of tool-using skills, there we must be more speculative. But there’s no question that in humans grooving functions as a kind of episodic social glue, facilitating joint attention and coordinate action, as in the acoustic “taskscapes” that musicologist Gary Tomlinson, building on the work of evolutionary anthropologist Clive Gamble, has imagined for scenes of hominin butchery and tool making c. 1 Ma (million years ago). In an elegant study of ten years ago, my colleague Melissa Ellamil asked which factors, in a dance club setting, conduced to social grooving in a dance club setting. This was just one study, of course, and there’s a reason — multiple reasons — you don’t see more efforts at “cognitive ethology”, taking the methods of functional imaging science out of the scanner and into the world: it is difficult to do it well. But for what it’s worth: Melissa found that the strongest predictor of “group synchrony” was how well known the track was (her proxy for track reputation was number of scrobbles on Last.fm). And the strongest signal of group synchrony was reciprocating movement through the z-axis (i.e., forward and backward along a fixed sagittal plane).
Of course, a hundred twelve years ago Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, proposed that spontaneous social grooving — “collective effervescence”, as he put it — served more than an episodic function: that it was the basis for a longer-lived sense of group membership. But back to RiffRaff, and late-winter depletion.
The joy you observe in RiffRaff’s foot tapping as the eyedropper approaches evokes in me, not for the first time, the conviction that animal life is a quest for bodily security — for relief from cold, pain, hunger, fatigue, etc, and, in some animals, certainly cockatoos and humans — even a raving tonseisha (遁世者, “throw-away-the-world person”) such as myself — the absence of touch. This is a shallow insight, if it warrants the term insight at all, and what I have described is no different in substance from what contemporary virtue ethicists, notably Christine Korsgaard building on the work of Philippa Foot, would call the functional good that an animal seeks out in the world.
In comparison say, with the strategy exhibited by vascular plants, there is something distinctly wanting in the animal strategy of holding the Second Law of Thermodynamics at bay. If you had your choice of design strategies for an entropy pump, a way of excluding the inexorable tendency of matter to decay to a less informative state from some more or less well-defined envelope, be it body-like or colony-like, the animal would not be your first choice. Motility offers the possibility of escape from extrinsic risk — predators, cold, fire, absence of food. This is something a forest or a grassland can only do over the horizon of vegetative propagation. But from the standpoint of lineage continuity, is that such a deficiency? The disadvantages of motility, not to say the single-cell bottleneck and obligatory sexual reproduction that characterize the life cycles of animals as divergent as molluscs, insects, and vertebrates, are immense: higher energetic costs, both to serve locomotion itself and to serve the nervous systems that evolved to coordinate locomotion with central-pattern-generated activity such as breathing and peristalsis. The joy of grooving is small compensation.
Perhaps next time I’ll take the other fork and talk about tooling.
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