Sophie Levine- Dance 360 Reading Response 1: Donald Duck and String Theory

            The concept that most struck me in The Organization of Energies is the author’s concept of rhythm in life. It was in many ways a confirmation of some of the issues I am deling with as an artist and a person and—though I found its presentation a tad dense—seems to me to have cosmic applications.

            Throughout the essay I was reminded of my favorite scene from Fantasia in which an omniscient voice takes us behind the scenes of the cartoon to look at the orchestra. In it, Donald Duck finds himself confronted with the string of a double bass depicted as a purple vibrating line. The voice describes to Donald how it is the vibration of the string that creates the noise and the shortening of the string with the bassist’s fingers that creates different pitches.

            I know very little about music, but I see this string as a very useful metaphor that speaks to the themes which the author addresses. The string that never vibrates, never creates sound; we can see this as a metaphor for too much order or too much control. Whereas the string that vibrates too much or too loudly can create a very unpleasant or chaotic sensation. But we don’t want the string to vibrate constantly within the pleasant threshold either: that would just be drab. It is only through a combination and balance of dynamics and “not quites” that the listener experiences a satisfying and juicy vibration in his inner ear and entire body

            I see our lives as compositions of these strings that vibrate at different frequencies and intervals as we move through “space-time”. And in that way our experience is completely a product of movement (of metaphorical strings).  And if we assume the Big Bang Theory then all that is is a product of movement too. That’s cosmic.