Gamelon and On

How does this trucking company know me so well? Although shouldn't that be "Putzmistress"?

Here is what T gave me for my birthday. It's a necklace. Isn't it lovely? It's Capricorn the Mergoat, or as I said in a previous post, the same thing as a Chi'wara. That's how I prefer to think of myself: Capricorn the Chi'wara!

Last night on the community radio station (the one where all women are represented unless they are prolife), I heard the weirdest thing: a solo violin playing with a gamelon. Talk about opposites! A solo violinist shows off his skill, while a gamelon is a bunch of people playing together in unison. To add to their insignificance, there are usually dancers during a gamelon concert, but I watch the gamelon players. As if the music weren't hypnotic enough, they move together in a mesmerizing synchronicity as they play. The gamelon is way cool, but is it an instrument or an orchestra? Perhaps the closest Western analogy is a handbell concert, where the individual members must work together as a system.

Stephen Jay Gould once wrote a fantastic essay on the question of when a system becomes an individual, using the Portuguese Man O' War as an example. Some consider it a colony of individual animals, but each animal has a function, such as protection, flotation, digestion, or reproduction, so in a sense they act like organs. Like a single gamelon player or a single handbell player, they could not function alone. That got me thinking: at what point does a society cease to be a collection of individuals and start to become a single system in which no individual member can exist alone? One bacteria cell exists on its own, like a person who grows her own food; but I only take care of one function in society, just like my cells only perform one function. I don't know how to produce my own food, although at this point I still could learn how. In a few centuries, will we become so differentiated that society will be a giant Portuguese Man O' War?

Famous Hat