The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [62]
This is a chapter about “It.” I don’t mean the “it” in “it’s raining” or “it’s too hot,” and this is not just one of the words the Knights of Ni cannot hear. I’m talking about the what-ness and the that-ness of the It in “he has It” or, in the case of The Stones, “they have It.” What It is, in no uncertain terms, is a path to ground for whatever floats in the atmosphere as potential energy, and then suddenly finds a circuit completed, when the right components are hooked up and tied down in the right order. This is musical metaphysics, and we can’t rest until we find the very bottom of the being of the beat.
There was this dude named Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), and he spent a lot of time and energy thinking about, well, time and energy. He was part of an earlier British invasion, when Harvard stole him from his London gig in 1925, and he came over the pond and started writing awesome books about how the whole cosmos is really sort of rocking and rolling. It was called “process philosophy.” It hovers on the edge of being well understood, because it’s very difficult and pretty radical, but every time you thinks it’s done for, it keeps coming back for another US tour. Consider this the advance billing. Google the dude. Or just keep reading.
Musical Metaphysics
One idea Whitehead hit upon pretty early was that experience is made of little bursts of energy. Energy vibrates, and when it comes into more or less regular repeating patterns, we have “rhythm.” Things that appear to be solid are really patterns of vibrations. Back then (1925 or so), most people thought things were made of “atoms,” little indivisible bits of matter, arranged in “molecules,” but Whitehead thought they were wrong. There really aren’t any “things,” like atoms and molecules, there are dances that just look like stones and guitars and people. Everything that exists in time is a repeating rhythm of some sort, so molecules just are shakings and rattlings in patterns, like little rock bands of Being. So molecules aren’t “things” made of “stuff,” they’re more like performances; little Stones concerts in tiny stadiums having a huge party. Whitehead even talked about The Stones themselves (before they were born), and said there was more “Rolling” than “Stones” in the rock-’n’roll of existing. Check out what the dude says when he was using the example of a stone:
The [mistaken] molecular theory has robbed the [rolling] stone of its continuity, of its unity, and of its passiveness. The [rolling] stone is now [in that very uncool theory] conceived as a society of separate molecules in violent agitation. But the metaphysical concepts, which had their origin in a mistake about the [rolling] stone[s], were now applied to the individual molecules. Each atom was still [wrongly supposed to be some] stuff which retained its self-identity and its essential attributes in any portion of time–however short and however long, provided that it did not perish. (Process and Reality, p. 78—I’ve helped the dude say what he meant to say with the stuff in the brackets.)
But you’ll never rock’n’roll that way, Whitehead says. Each member of the band just being his own individual self, bringing to the stage whatever he already has, all by his lonesome. When you see a band that doesn’t have “It,