By The Landlord
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'“ – Isaac Asimov
“Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment.” – Lao Tzu
“Enlightenment or awakening is not the creation of a new state of affairs but the recognition of what already is.” – Alan Watts
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” – Immanuel Kant
“Awakening is possible only for those who seek it and want it, for those who are ready to struggle with themselves and work on themselves for a very long time and very persistently in order to attain it.” – G.I. Gurdjieff
Eureka moments? In their own way, they happen right here, at the Bar, every week. They start with thinking up a topic, ways to unlock and present it, and then in a magical rush of collective energy, hundreds of songs spark up and rise to match it. For anyone in this place, especially on a Thursday, it's a tangibly electric process, synapses firing and filtering through so many memories, experiences and musical collections through ears and eyes and fingers, running around the brain like firecrackers, linking thousands of moments of sparky recognition, discovery, realisation, revelation and pleasure. Well at least, that's the hope, after the initial scratching of head …
So those moments of connecting the musical and lyrical dots in turn join up with what this week's topic is all about, not merely for songwriters, but what is essentially a creative process of realisation in many spheres, from the highly analytical and scientific to the practical, the physical, but also the emotional, philosophical or spiritual, and in all of them something clicks, something profound occurs. It all counts in songs this week. It might happen suddenly but comes out of a sort form of effort, stress, focus, and ideally consecutive thought.
In song it can be expressed in one lyrical line, one musical rush, but it could also build slowly up towards this, or with a surprise twist. Whether sudden or slow, the eventual flash usually comes after a gradual turning of subconscious cogs, a whirr of information, perhaps exhaustion, time limit and emotion, all suddenly and unexpectedly coming into focus.
It's hard to separate spiritual or religious type enlightenment and realisation from the scientific, or the musical from the personal, because they all seem to come about via the same process. So to start with some background, connecting at least two of these, much of our western culture comes from that broad swath of history known as the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical movement that particularly dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, at least for those with the resources to discover.
Archimedes. The best ideas sometimes come in the bath.
Everything is connected of course, because that particular age owes much to work in the preceding centuries – Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution and the work of Francis Bacon, among others. Some date the beginning of the Enlightenment to René Descartes' 1637 philosophy of Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), or Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) to spark the beginning of the Enlightenment.
Scientific method and reductionism and a questioning of religious orthodox particularly marked this period, in particular Immanuel Kant's essay Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment, where the phrase Sapere aude (Dare to know) derives, as well as assorted key works by other bright sparks such as Cesare Beccaria, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire.
The Song Bar as a 17th century coffeehouse where eureka moments happen all the time
Imagine all of them in a room together. It would be deafening, the sum total of their very considerable intellects all pumped up on caffeine! But in many ways our very own Song Bar is musical form of 17th- or 18th-century coffeehouse, where, as the modern Greek American engineer, physician, and entrepreneur Peter Diamandis puts it: "Three hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, the coffee house became the centre of innovation." We can but try. Espresso anyone?
History’s most famous eureka moments have perhaps been in the science field. Could they also be captured in song? Quite likely. Earliest and best known is is the legendary tale of Archimedes Law of Buoyancy, apparently discovered as he climbed into his bath to precisely measure the volume of irregular objects. Did he then dance around the house naked with a wet floor. Is that what geniuses do?
Then there’s Newton’s apple from a tree, not in Cambridge where the university had closed due to the plague outbreak, but strolling around his family’s farm estate in Lincolnshire, leading to the development of the theory of universal gravitation. Proof then, that lockdown can lead to enlightenment.
Whether or not those famous moments of discovery are apocryphal, there is surely some truth in the method by which they come about. As the Canadian journalist Carl Honoré and author of The Power Of Slow puts it: "Your best ideas, those eureka moments that turn the world upside down, seldom come when you're juggling emails, rushing to meet the 5 P.M. deadline or straining to make your voice heard in a high-stress meeting. They come when you're walking the dog, soaking in the bath or swinging in a hammock.”
Another bright spark to whom we owe tangibly even more is Nikola Tesla, the great genius behind electrical current. One day he went for a walk, and the breakthrough just hit him. He used his walking stick in drawing a picture to explain how alternating current (AC) would work to his walking partner. Since then, Tesla is widely credited for the AC generation system which is comprised of a motor and a transformer. I also went for an inspirational walk before writing this piece, but I knew there was something missing. I must get a stick.
Tesla. Bright spark.
As Tesla put it: “It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.”
So it is often when the mind relaxes that eureka moments happen, whether that is Paul McCartney rolling out of bed one morning to play Yesterday on the piano, Syd Barrett coming out an acid trip to turn Pink Floyd from just another blues band to something entirely new, or David Bowie using any number of ideas borne out of dreams or also, most likely, hallucinatory drugs.
Syd Barrett. Inspirational trip.
Albert Einstein wasn’t so much at leisure then he had his apparent eureka moment. He was working in his patent office in Bern, Switzerland. When he was supposed to be putting all his effort on patents, his mind wandered on the idea of a man who is falling who would not feel any weight, and so became obsessed with the idea proving links between motion and gravity. He began work in the general theory of relativity and finished through its mathematical details, with enormous help from his wife in a span of eight years.
Eureka ‘moments’ are rarely sudden light bulbs illuminating. They almost always come after years of effort, and no doubt failure, not to mention the invisible work of others, including, as mentioned, Einstein’s wife, the Serbian physicist and mathematician Mileva Marić-Einstein. Was she the real brains, or at least the inspiration behind the theory?
While history is full of famous moments of discovery, they don’t always come from lone geniuses, or really happen as described. There is such a phenomenon known as The Matthew Effect accumulated advantage, deriving from the phrase about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, a term was coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968 inspired by the parable of the talents or minas in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. It pertains to where the famous or most prominent person takes the credit, while often the real inspiration comes from persons unknown. Pythagoras’s theorem, for example, probably came from one of his students.
Rosalind Franklin and Photo 51, which sparked a eureka moment about DNA’s structure. But who got the credit?
And then there’s the so-called Matilda Effect, first described by suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–98) in her essay, Woman as Inventor, in which history has particularly glossed over and been prejudiced against women who have been the real source of the eureka moment. A prime example of this is the English chemist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, for which Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 but she got no credit. However the inspirational image in question, “Photograph 51”, was possibly taken by one of her PhD students, creating a combination of the Matthew and Matilda effects.
So eureka moments are also a moveable feast, not always credited correctly. But the overall picture is that people are connected, often thinking of the same ideas at the same time, whether that is in science, music, art or anything else. Isaac Newton’s famous 1675 quote, used by Oasis for an album title, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” wasn’t even originally coined by the mathematician, but came iin turn from the 12-century French philosopher Bernard of Chartres, who in turn took that image idea from a Greek legend about a hunter who had a dwarf on their shoulders to see case they were blinded.
Isaac Newton’s apple inspiration anecdote may well be apocryphal
In the book by ‘M’, The Meaning(s) of Life: A Human's Guide to the Biology of Souls, it’s summarised that: “We tend to think of imagination and foresight like we are prone to think of life (sometimes) -- as an inscrutable flash of something from the outside that magically takes us over some large boundary in one atomic step. We even call it a flash (of insight), a eureka moment, a light bulb in our heads that suddenly turns on. But if you reflect on this phenomenon for a moment, you know you don't go suddenly from a blank mind to a fully formed solution. You were already thinking about the problem, and other near solutions that don't work, when suddenly you see a new connection that enables you to reuse familiar things on a novel way. Insight comes in small increments, leveraging what was already there.”
And as that Native American saying puts it: ‘The greatest illusion in this world is the illusion of separation.”
Paul McCartney. Rolled out of bed to write Yesterday.
So as usual there are many guest in the Bar with something more to say about this topic. Film composer John Williams admits that while most of his creations came from hard work, “there are occasionally eureka moments - off the top of my head, maybe Darth Vader's theme, you know, the imperial march.”
Nick Cave is also here, striding over to the piano, but says, “I don’t know about inspiration. I just go to the office every day.”
The artist Anish Kapoor is in the perspirations-before-inspiration camp, telling us: "Work grows out of other work, and there are very few eureka moments.”
The science writer Roger Penrose is of similar thought. “People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.”
Joey Ramone is here too. “When I was a kid growing up in the 60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it's just like a big business.”
Elon Musk, who no doubt has many eureka moments, or at least ones that make shedloads of money and big business, reckons: “Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.”
But not everyone is convinced by enlightenment as a movement or an idea. “The Enlightenment view of mankind is a complete myth. It leads us into thinking we're sane and rational creatures most of the time, and we're not,” says J. G. Ballard.
“I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really,” says David Hockney.
But then there are others that are grateful for this part of our history, and feel it should be protected.
Enlightenment and religion are clearly not the same.
“The Enlightenment attacked religion – Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppression, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance,” says Tariq Ali.
“By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified,” says E. O. Wilson.
Richard Dawkins is a fierce critic of religion and a defender of science and the Enlightenment. “The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.”
Science is certainly not under threat from Wu-Tang Clan’s Gza: “Hip-hop is my vehicle for scientific enlightenment. It wasn't until my music career matured where I was exposed to science as an intellectual pursuit.”
Wu-Tang’s GZA playing chess with friend Masta Killa
But how do you marry all these ideas? “When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed,” says Kurt Vonnegut quite mischievously.
Perhaps, as we began with it as a metaphor, via Tesla and others we should end with light. The artist James Turrell makes his own link. “In a way, light unites the spiritual world and the ephemeral, physical world. People frequently talk about spiritual experiences using the vocabulary of light: Saul on the road to Damascus, near-death experiences, samadhi or the light-filled void of Buddhist enlightenment.”
And finally, in a rather nice inverse to end this vigorous bar discussion, here’s Carl Jung: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
So then, it’s time to turn over your eureka moments of inspiration, enlightenment and discovery to this week’s king of connections, the excellent ajostu! Place your songs on this subject in comments below, for deadline last orders at 11pm GMT on Monday, for playlists published on Wednesday. Any great discoveries?
New to comment? It is quick and easy. You just need to login to Disqus once. All is explained in About/FAQs ...
Fancy a turn behind the pumps at The Song Bar? Care to choose a playlist from songs nominated and write something about it? Then feel free to contact The Song Bar here, or try the usual email address. Also please follow us social media: Song Bar Twitter, Song Bar Facebook. Song Bar YouTube. Subscribe, follow and share.
Please make any donation to help keep Song Bar running: