The wizards read it. They read it again. They had a huge argument, but there was nothing unusual about that.
'It's an astonishin' play, in the circumstances,' said Ridcully, eventually. 'And some of it is a bit familiar!'
'Yes,' said Rincewind. And I think that's because he'll write it after listening to you. We need him to. This is a man who can tell the audience, tell the audience that they're watching a bunch of actors on a tiny stage and then make them see a huge battle, right there in front of their eyes.'
'Did I miss that bit?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, leafing hurriedly through the pages.
'That's in another play, Runes,' said Ridcully. 'Do try to keep up. Well, Rincewind? Let's assume, shall we, that we're going along with your plan? We have to make sure this man exists here and writes this play in this world, do we? Why?'
'Can I leave that to Stage Two, sir? It will become obvious, I hope, but you never know if there are elves listening.'
The wizards were automatically impressed by the idea that this was a two-stage plan, but Ridcully persisted: 'I put it to you, Rincewind, that this is exactly the kind of play elves would want him to write.'
'Yes, sir. That's because they're stupid. Not like you, sir.'
'We have Hex's computational power,' said Ponder. 'It should be possible to make sure he turns up in this world, I think.'
'Um ... yes,' said Rincewind. 'But first we have to make the world the kind he can turn up in. This may take a bit of work. Some travelling may be involved. Back in time ... for thousands of years…'
Firelight glowed off the cave walls. The wizards sat on one side of the fire, on the big rock ledge overlooking the scrubland. The Stinky Cave People sat on the other.
The cave people watched the wizards with something like awe, but only because they'd never seen people eat like that. It was Ridcully who'd suggested that people bearing huge amounts of food are welcome practically anywhere, but the other wizards considered that this was just an excuse for him to make a crude but serviceable bow and go and happily slaughter quite a lot of wildlife.
The wildlife was mostly leftovers now. The wizards moaned about the lack of onions, salt, pepper, garlic and, in Rincewind's case, potatoes, but there was certainly no lack of meat.
They'd spent two weeks doing this, in caves across the continent. They were getting used to it, although bowel movements were becoming a problem.
Rincewind, however, was sitting some way from the fire with Burnt Stick Man.
Being good at languages was, here, not such an important skill as simply making yourself understood. But Burnt Stick Man was a quick study, and Rincewind already had several weeks of practice. While the dialogue took place in inflections and emphasis based upon the syllable
'grunt' aided by gestures, the translation went like this:
'Okay, so you've mastered the idea of charcoal, but may I draw your attention to these pigments I have here? They're Whiiite, very simple, Redddd, like blood, and Yell-low, like, er, egg yolks.
Cluck cluck aaargh cackle? And this fourth colour is some sickly brown ochre I found which we'll call for the moment "baby poo".'
'With you so far, Pointy Hat Man.' This was conveyed by an enthusiastic nod.
'So here's the big tip. Not many people know this,' said Rincewind. 'You take your animals, right, which you've already been trying to draw, well done, but you what we call "colour" them. You have to work hard on this bit. A chewed piece of wood will be your friend here. See how by a careful mixture of tints I'm giving it a certain, oh, je ne sais quoi…'
'Hey, that looks like a real buffalo! Scary stuff!' 'It gets better. May I have the charcoal? Thank you. What's this?' Rincewind carefully drew another figure. 'Man with big [expressive gesture]?'
said Burnt Stick Man. 'What? Oh. Sorry, I got that wrong ... I mean this ...' 'Man with spear! Hey, he's throwing it at the buffalo!' Rincewind smiled. There had been a few false starts over the last couple of weeks, but Burnt Stick Man had exactly the right sort of mind. He was impressively simple, and people with truly simple minds were very rare.
'I knew there was something intelligent about you the moment I saw you,' he lied. 'Maybe it was the way your brow ridge came around the corner only two seconds before the rest of you did.'
Burnt Stick Man beamed. Rincewind went on: 'And the question you've got to ask yourself now is: how real is this picture, really? And where was the picture before I drew it? What is going to happen now it's on the wall?' The wizards watched from the circle of firelight. 'Why's the man poking at the picture?' said the Dean. 'I think he's learnin' about the power of symbols,' said Ridcully. 'Hey, if anyone doesn't want any more ribs I'll finish 'em.'
'No barbecue sauce,' moaned the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'How long before there's an agricultural revolution?'
'Could be a hundred thousand years, sir,' said Ponder. 'Perhaps a lot more.' The Lecturer in Recent Runes groaned and put his head in his hands.
Rincewind came and sat down. The rest of Burnt Stick Man's clan, greasy to the eyebrows with free food, watched him cautiously.
'That seemed to go well,' he said. 'He's definitely working out the link between pictures in his head and real life. Any potatoes yet?'
'Not for thousands of years,' groaned the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
'Damn. I mean, here's meat. There should be potatoes. How hard is that for a world to understand? Vegetables are less complicated than meat!' He sighed, and then stared.
Burnt Stick Man, who had been staring motionless at the drawing for a while, ambled to another rock wall and picked up a spear. He squinted at the buffalo drawing, which did indeed seem to move as the firelight flickered, paused, and then hurled the spear at it and ducked behind a rock.
'Gentlemen, we've found our genius and we're on our way,' said Rincewind. 'Ponder, can Hex move some buffaloes to right outside this cave at dawn tomorrow?'
'That shouldn't be hard, yes.'
'Good.' Rincewind looked around. 'And there's quite a few tall trees here, too. Which is just as well.'
It was dawn, and the tree was full of wizards.
The ground below was full of buffalo. Hex had moved an entire herd, which was now more or less penned in amongst the rocks and trees.
And, on the rocky ledge in front of the bewildered, panicking creatures, Burnt Stick Man and the other hunters stared down in disbelief.
But only for a moment. They had spears, after all. They got two of the creatures before the rest thundered away. And, afterwards, people were certainly showing Burnt Stick Man a bit of respect.
'All right, I think I see what you're getting at,' said Ridcully, as the wizards very carefully climbed down.
'Well, I don't,' said the Dean. 'You're teaching them basic magic. And that doesn't work here!'
'They think it does,' said Rincewind.
'But that was only because we helped them! What're they going to do tomorrow when he does another painting and no buffaloes turn up?'
'They'll think it's experimental error,' said Rincewind. 'Because it's so sensible, isn't it? You draw a magic picture, and the real thing turns up! It's so sensible that they'll take a lot of convincing that it doesn't work. Besides ... '
'Besides what?' said Ponder.
'Oh, I was thinking that if Burnt Stick Man is really sensible he'll keep an eye on the movements of the local animals and make sure he paints his pictures at the right time.'
Some more weeks went by. There were lots of men like Burnt Stick Man.
And even Red Hands Man ...
'... so,' said Rincewind, as he sat by the river, squeezing the clay, 'it's quite easy to make other things out of it than snakes.'
'Snakes are easy,' said Red Hands Man, stained with ochre to the armpits.
'And there's lots of snakes around here, is there?' said Rincewind. It looked like prime snake country.
'Lots of them.'
'Ever wondered why? You play around rolling snakes out of clay, and snakes turn up?'
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'I'm making the snakes?' said Red Hands Man. 'How can that be? I was only doing it because of the enjoyable tactile sensations!'
'It's an intriguing thought, isn't it?' said Rincewind. 'But it's okay, I won't tell anyone else.'
Red Hands Man stared at his hands as if examining two lethal instruments. He seemed a little less bright than Burnt Stick Man.
'Ever thought about making something else?' said Rincewind. Something more edible?'
'Fish are good to eat,' Red Hands Man conceded.
'Why not try making a clay fish?' said Rincewind, with a sincere smile.
Next morning, it rained trout.
In the afternoon a very happy Red Hands Man, now hailed as the saviour of the clan that lived among the reeds, made a model of a big fat woman out of clay.
The wizards discussed the moral implications of allowing Hex to rain enormous women over a wide area. The debate took a long time, with many pauses for inward reflection, but at last the Dean was voted down. It was agreed that if you gave a man a fat woman, he'd just have a fat woman for a day, but if you helped a man become a very important man because he had the secret of buffaloes or fish, he could get himself as many fat women as he wanted.
Next morning they went forward a thousand years in time. There was hardly an unadorned cave on the continent, and quite a lot of fat women.
They went further ...
In a forest clearing, a man was making a god out of wood. Either it wasn't a very good carving, or it was a good carving but an ugly god. The wizards watched.
And the Queen of the Elves appeared, with a couple of elves in attendance. They were male or, at least, appeared male. The queen was angry.
'What are you doing, wizards?' she snapped.
Ridcully gave her a nod of annoying friendliness. 'Oh, just a little ... what are we calling it, Stibbons?'
'A sociological experiment, Archchancellor,' said Ponder. 'But you've been teaching them art!
And sculpture!' 'And music,' said Ridcully happily. 'The Lecturer in Recent Runes is rather good with a lute, it turns out.'
'Only in a very amateur way, I'm afraid,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, blushing.
'Dashed easy to make, a lute,' said Ridcully. 'You just need a tortoise shell and some sinews and you're well away. I myself have been renewing my acquaintance with the penny whistle of my boyhood, although I fear that the Dean's expertise with the comb-and-paper leaves something to be desired.'
'And why are you doing all this?' the queen demanded. 'Are you angry? We thought you'd be pleased,' said Ridcully. 'We thought you wanted them this way. You know - imaginative.'
'He created music?' said the Queen, glaring at the Lecturer in Recent Runes, who gave her an embarrassed wave.
'Oh, no, I assure you,' he said. 'Er, they'd worked up to, you know, basic percussion, the conch shell and so on, but it was all rather dull. We just helped them along a bit.'
'Gave them a few tips,' said Ridcully, jovially.
The Queen's eyes narrowed. 'Then you are planning something!' she said.
'Aren't they doing well?' said Ridcully. 'Look at that chap over there. Visualisin' a god. One with woodworm and knotholes, but pretty good all the same. Quite complex mental processes, really.
We thought that if you want people with wild imaginations, then we'd help them to be really good at it. They'll fill the world with dragons and gods and monsters for you. You want that.'
The Queen gave him another look, and it was the look of a person with no sense of humour who nevertheless suspects that there's some joke somewhere that is on them.
'Why should you help us?' she said. 'You told me to consume your underthings!'
'Well, it's not as though this world is important enough to fight over,' said Ridcully.
'One of you isn't here,' said the Queen. 'Where is the stupid one?'
'Rincewind?' said the Archchancellor, with an innocent air that would not have fooled any human for a moment. 'Oh, he's doing pretty much the same thing, you know. Helping people imagine things. Which, I think, is what you want.'
24. THE EXTENDED PRESENT
Art? It looks superfluous. Few of the stories we tell about human evolution, the Homo sapiens bit, see music or art as being integral to the process. Oh, it often comes in as a kind of epiphenomenon, as evidence of how far we'd got: 'Just look at those wonderful cave paintings, statuettes, polished jewellery and ornaments! That shows that our brain was bigger/better/more loving/nearer to that of the Lecturer in Recent Runes ...' But art has not been portrayed as a necessary part of the evolution that made us what we are; nor has music.
So why are Burnt Stick Man and Red Hands Man dabbling in art, and why does Rincewind want to encourage them?
We've been told the story of The Naked Ape doing sex, we've had Gossiping Apes and Privileged Apes, various kinds of apes becoming intelligent on the seashore or running down gazelles on the savannah. We've had lots of development-of-intelligence stories culminating in Einstein; we have given you the privilege/puberty ritual/selection story that culminates in Eichmann and Obedience to Authority; but we have not presented a version of our evolution whose culmination is Fats Waller, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or even Richard Feynman on the bongo drums.
Well, now we will.
Music is an important part of most people's lives, and this is continually reinforced by film and television. Background music is constantly informing us of imminent screen events, of tension and release, of characters' thoughts and, particularly, of their emotional states. It is very difficult for anyone brought up in the muzak environment of the twentieth century to imagine what the
'primitive' state of human musical sense can have been.
When we listen to the music of far peoples, of 'primitive' tribes, we have to appreciate that their music has had as long to develop as Beethoven, and much longer than jazz. Like the amoeba or the chimpanzee, their music is contemporary with us, not ancestral, though it sounds primitive, just as they look primitive. And we wonder whether we are listening for the right things in the right way. It is tempting to think that popular music, going for instant appeal, might illuminate whatever inner structure of our brains 'fits', and is satisfied by, a musical theme. If we were orthodox geneticists, we might have said 'genes for music' there. But we didn't.
In recent years, neuroscientists have developed techniques that allow us to look at what brains do when we carry out various actions. In particular, they reveal which bits of brain are active when we enjoy music. At the moment, with the terribly poor spatial and temporal resolution that we get from MRI and PET scans, all we can see is that music excites the right side of the brain. If we are familiar with the music, then the brain's memory-regions turn on, and if we analyse it or try to pick up the lyrics, then the verbal-analysis parts light up. And opera picks up both of them, which could be why Jack likes it: he enjoys having his brain put through a blender.
Our affinity with music starts early. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that if we hear music in the womb, then it can affect our later musical preferences. Psychologists play music to babies as soon as they start kicking, and have discovered that they can categorise it, like we adults do, and into the same categories. If we play them Mozart, they stop kicking for a bit, about fifteen minutes; then they start kicking again, perhaps with some relation to the rhythm. The evidence is claimed, but it isn't very persuasive. If we then continue with a different bit of Mozart, or Haydn or Beethoven, then the kicking pauses, but it resumes after a minute or so. The Beatles, Stravinsky, sacred chants, or New Orleans jazz, make them pause for much longer, ten minutes or so.
Playing the same pieces months later reveals that the baby has some memory of the style as well as of the instruments. Apparently, a quartet by Mozart triggers recognition of the 'Mozart' style just as effectively as a Mozart symphony. Our brains have sophisticated music-recognition modules, and we can use them before we speak, indeed before we are born. Why?
We're looking fo
r the essence of music -as if we knew what the essence of sex was for the Naked Ape, or the essence of obedience for Eichmann -or come to that, what it means to be the most intelligent/extelligent creature on Roundworld. What we want is a story that puts the arts, and music, into an explanation of How We Got Here, and why we waste all that money on the arts faculties of universities. Why is Rincewind so keen to bring art and music to our ancestors?
It was very common in the early years of the twentieth century to copy the music of 'primitive'
tribes. Examples include Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Manuel de Falla's Fire Dance, where the musical style was thought to give a primitive authenticity. People thought that Bronislaw Malinowski's tales of the Trobriand Islanders, with their amazing lack of the civilised sexual repressions so publicised by Freud in Viennese society, showed that Natural Humans were happier and less corrupt, and that their music -for flutes and drums -conveyed their state of innocence more effectively than classical symphonies. Jazz, invented by supposedly 'primitive'
black musicians down in New Orleans, had resonances that seemed natural, animal (and, for certain Christians, evil). It was almost as if music were a language, parallel to the words, developed in different societies with different emphases, and more revealing of the nature of the people than other aspects of their culture.
This is the way the media have played it, and like the Flintstones and Stone Age society, we have an overlay of this outlook that it's very difficult to get away from. Margaret Mead, who was taken for a ride by her native girl friend and told the resulting story in Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, romanticised their music and dances in exactly this way.
When Hollywood needs to show the primitive-but-spiritual nature of Indian braves, cannibal tribes in Borneo, or Hawaiian indigenes, it shows us the rain dance, the marriage music, and the hula girls. When we go to these places, the locals put on these dances for us because it brings in tourist money. The complicity between muzak, hula dances, opera and background music in Hollywood films has completely buried our abilities to sort out what constitutes 'natural' art or music.
The Science of Discworld II - The Globe tsod-2 Page 27
