The Myth of Control
Every day it feels as though we edge closer to the brink. Change comes faster and faster, leaving scarcely a moment to breathe. The polycrisis exposes tremendous vulnerabilities in all aspects of our lives, environmental, economic, political, epidemiological, technological, and so on. Things are unravelling, and no one will be untouched.
It should come as no surprise, then, that questions of control, agency, and sovereignty are so present in our societal discourse. Faced with disasters and threats which far exceed the comprehension and emotional capacity of the individual, we clamber onto any island, no matter how small, upon which we can plant our flag and exercise our power. Imagine a roiling, angry ocean, belching foul gases, and billions of tiny islands as far as the eye can see, each populated by a lonely, withering figure, doomed to utter isolation and eventual oblivion. These islands represent the myth of control.
Myths are a vital component of all societies and communities, whose ‘function is to provide present-day people with models and paradigms for values and behavior’ (Small, 1998, p. 89). As attitudes about values and behaviour vary across time and place, myths are similarly multihued and in a state of constant flux. Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta draws on Aboriginal wisdom in identifying the distinction between ‘right story’ and ‘wrong story’:
‘Right story is not about objective truth, but the metaphors and relations and narratives of interconnected communities, living in complex contexts of knowledge and economy, aligned with the patterns of land and creation. Right story never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land. Wrong story, wrong way—this means unilateral or unbalanced ritual, word and thought.’ (Yunkaporta, 2023, The Wrong Canoe chapter)
Although story is perhaps somewhat broader than myth, the principle holds true for both. Barbara Sproul describes the mechanisms through which myth may be embodied and acted upon, for better or worse, without conscious awareness:
‘…because of the way in which domestic myths are transmitted, people often never learn that they are myths; people become submerged in their view-points, prisoners of their own traditions. They readily confuse attitudes toward reality (proclamations of value) with reality itself (statements of fact). Failing to see their own myths, they consider all other myths false. They do not understand that the truth of all myths is existential and not necessarily theoretical. That is, they forget that myths are true to the extent they are effective. (In a sense, myths are self-fulfilling prophecies: they create facts out of the values they propound…)’ (B. Sproul quoted in Marmolejo, 2024, p. 38)
The present-day US-Led Global North Military Bloc (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 2024) is in the grip of a slew of myths established over centuries of colonialism and extractive capitalism, built upon ideals of domination, heroic individualism, and divine right. Suffice it to say that control has occupied, and continues to occupy, a considerable portion of the Western psyche. As the very fabric of our modern civilisation falls to pieces before our eyes—always inevitable given its reliance on violence and inequality—we begin to recognise the mythic underpinning of our modern history and how weak it truly is. Nowhere is this more evident than the myth of control.
In June 2016, British citizens voted in a referendum to leave the EU, the only member state to have ever done so (Brexit, n.d.). The Vote Leave campaign, spearheaded by Dominic Cummings, took as its slogan ‘take back control’ (Take back control, n.d.), a rallying cry for national sovereignty, capitalising on decades of economic and social disenfranchisement, frequently channelled by politicians and legacy media towards immigration, diversity/integration, and globalised bureaucracy. The referendum was presented by Brexiteers as a straightforward binary: vote remain if you like being a doormat; vote leave and reclaim your power. Similar narratives are at work in all current populist movements, from Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’, to the German far-right party Alternative for Germany’s ‘Mut zu Deutschland’ (courage for Germany).
A common thread within this paradigm is the effort to answer fear with the promise of control, perhaps the oldest promise of eurocentric ideologies. It is increasingly clear that countries like the US and Israel, founded in relatively recent times in appalling circumstances, exist in a constant state of fear, subsequently directed outwards through brutal militarism, political imperialism, and financial violence (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, 2024).
This pathological fear which gnaws at the Western subject is incubated in isolation, an isolation which has, in many respects, been considerably exacerbated by the arrival of recent mass media technologies, in that ‘their messages have become the communications that people receive more often than any other. Rather than speaking with one another, we are spoken to’ (Brennan, How Music Dies (Or Lives): Field Recording and the Battle for Democracy in the Arts, 2016, p. 37). Not only is this isolation a critical factor in the perpetuation of our immiseration, but, according to Buddhist philosophy, it is itself the root cause of our fear. In clinging desperately to the idea of an enduring self, we alienate and distance ourselves from everything understood as other. In his treatise on Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way, His Holiness The Dalai Lama summarises the phenomenon thusly:
‘…all afflictions involve, in their mode of apprehension, an element of grasping at intrinsic existence. Whether attachment, aversion, pride, or some other mental state, what makes them afflictions is not their distinct character but this common denominator of grasping at self-existence when apprehending its object.’ (Gyatso, 2009, p. 98)
The quest to hold on to this ‘self-existence’ being ultimately doomed, ‘[t]he [egoic] self becomes enslaved in suffering at the hands of its vision of the world’ (Cohen, 2020, p. 103), creating a cycle of fear and misery: we buy into the idea of a separate self; we feel this self threatened by various forces (all representing the final fear of death/annihilation); we exhaust all of our energies in attempts to seize control whenever and wherever possible, protecting our self; thus consolidating our enslavement to that self and renewing the cycle. When this fundamental misapprehension becomes institutionalised and enshrined in state machinery, we distort ‘the very field of critical understanding… [promulgating] an entire range of assumptions and value judgments (aesthetic, cultural, sociopolitical) about matters as important as nationhood, identity, history, difference, and taste’ (Fischlin, Heble, & Lipsitz, 2013, p. 52).
In what he refers to as ‘the Stockholm syndrome of capitalism’, Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan calls attention to the peculiar situation in which those who suffer under capitalism often perpetuate the conditions of their suffering, becoming capitalism’s ‘most ardent defenders’ (Brennan, Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth, 2019, chapter 33). The same can be argued about the commitment to the self: the more energy is invested in the endless effort to confirm the self, the more is felt to be at stake, the more aggressively will people defend their ontological fortress. This vulnerability is frequently weaponised, not least in the aforementioned examples of modern populism.
The need for a great awakening is more urgent than ever:
‘The more that we claim the Anthropocene for ourselves, as both creators and destroyers, the more those practices that challenge notions of agency and control are necessary… in an age where the dominant narratives emanating from all sides, political, scientific, and religious, have to do with control, there is a central role for those whose practice centres around ceding control, around openness to the transversal, to the more than human.’ (Schrei, 2023, 33’46”)
Thankfully, the drive for absolute control and domination is a relatively recent phenomenon in the story of humankind, and we have no shortage of teachings from which to draw, offering time-tested alternatives, if only we are willing ‘to go beyond [our] way of thinking… as well as cultural boundaries and enculturation’ (Deschênes, World Music: Appropriation or Transpropriation, 2022, p. 73) in a spirit of humility and reciprocity.
In describing the Bodhisattva (an enlightened being committed to the liberation of all sentient beings), Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh gives one such alternative which radically transforms our relationship with suffering and with others:
‘Bodhisattvas suffer like the rest of us, but in a bodhisattva, feelings do not give rise to craving or aversion. They give rise to concern, the desire and the willingness to stay in the midst of suffering and confusion, and to act… The feeling that we have when we see people oppressed or starving can give rise in us to concern, compassion, and the willingness to act with equanimity, not with attachment.’ (Hanh, 2008, chapter 27)
While suffering has been pathologised in the Western mind, it is not the only way in which we can relate to it. In refusing to accept the unavoidable reality of suffering, the negativity is compounded. Not only do we experience the cause at its root, but we also construct a narrative web of fear and anxiety, directing our energies towards aversion at all costs. The simple idea that perhaps we don’t need to run from suffering, that we can make wise decisions in the midst of suffering, can have a profound and lasting impact on our daily lives. What’s more, this shift alters our understanding of the suffering of others, leading us into more compassionate relation, counteracting the hyper-individualisation which is crippling society.
As we begin to ‘relax, open, and surrender to the fire of larger experience’ (Ray, 2008, chapter 15), as we come slowly to recognise and befriend the ego ‘by not acting out or repressing all the feelings that [we] feel’ (Chödrön, 2005, p. 65), the need for control becomes less intense, ‘[b]ecause the illusory nature of control becomes clear to [us]’ (williams, Owens, & Syedullah, 2016, p. 50).
Let us turn now to ways in which music can help impart these lessons.
In considering Schrei’s earlier assertion that we must embrace practices which centre around ‘ceding control’, one immediately apparent example is that of learning, in which we acknowledge, and yield to, the wisdom of others (or wisdom as embodied in acts themselves). Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan posited that ‘the greatness and perfection of the great ones who have come from time to time to this world, was in their being pupils and not in teaching’ (Khan, 2012, chapter 14). To be a student is to be humble, porous, in communion with mysteries beyond the boundaries of the self. Johnson describes religion as ‘less a quest after agency as usually construed than a series of contexts and situations designed to be at least temporarily relieved of it’, also an apt description of learning at its most transformative, concluding that ‘[p]aradoxically, that may make it the most radical kind of agency of all’ (Johnson, 2021, p. 4). In a similar sense, Harney characterises study as ‘where you allow yourself to be possessed by others as they do something. That also is a kind of dispossession of what you might otherwise have been holding onto’ (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 109). As when relinquishing the desire to flee from suffering we begin to see the world without fear, in learning we relinquish, if only for a time, our sense of bodily and psychic autonomy, sovereignty, and agency, instead opening to the reality of codependent, distributed being.
In musical learning, we are immersed in a broad field of intersecting approaches, disciplines, and considerations, from the basic coordination necessary to draw sound from an instrument to interpersonal communication in rehearsal; from the emotional qualities of timbre, rhythm, melody, and harmony to the analytical study of systems of tonal organisation; from the development of aural discrimination to the embodied internalisation of groove. If we are to make any headway in these hugely demanding spheres, we must be prepared to entrust ourselves to the guidance of others; to accept that any sense of control will arrive only if we ‘practice for its own sake, and let progress take care of itself’ (Brooks, 2000, p. 59); and to hold open space in our being so that we might be changed ‘through shared experience and meaning’ (Deschênes, Bi-musicality or Transmusicality: The Viewpoint of a Non-Japanese Shakuhachi Player, 2018, pp. 284-285).
It is easy to overlook the fact that learning an acoustic instrument is an inherently physical activity in which we bring an extraordinary level of awareness to the body, developing magnified sensitivity and remarkable facility. Where it is often assumed that this process involves building up a certain degree of facility in order to achieve technically challenging feats, concert pianist and teacher George Kochevitsky, in his book ‘The Art of Piano Playing: A Scientific Approach’, views learning rather more as a process of stripping back, allowing the body to exhibit its natural grace: ‘[w]e gradually rid ourselves of superfluous movements and unnecessary muscle contractions, achieve freer and more natural, smoother movements, finally performing them automatically. Physiologically, this means that the nervous act is now localized in the proper area’ (Kochevitsky, 1995, p. 27). Instrumental fluency eventually comes not through a conscious effort to actively manipulate the mechanics of a tool, but through the gradual discarding of clunky movements. Mastery represents a non-dualistic symbiosis with the instrument in which there is no separation between intention and execution—playing becomes as natural as speaking. Echoing the ancient Chinese idea of Wu Wei (loosely translated as ‘effortless effort’), we could perhaps call this mastery ‘non-controlling control’.
By embracing the wisdom of the body through instrumental training, Buddhist teacher Reginald Ray offers the possibility that our relationship with the ego may change in kind:
‘Ego is a process of somatic holding on. This is something that’s well known in Zen tradition. Holding on is an ego process. Letting go is a somatic process. When we let go of our ego, we let go of our body. When we hold on to our ego, we hold on to our body. So in working with the body, we’re actually getting at the very roots of the ego process.’ (Ray, 2008, chapter 58)
There is a paradox here in that our efforts to learn an instrument, to achieve technical control, lead to a situation in which we transcend both the need for, and the thought of, control. We are reintegrated, not in a way that confirms the ego, but in a way in which the ego has no place. When a master is at play, there is no separation between subject and object. There is only musicking.
In improvisation, too, at the highest level the foundations are laid by ‘emptying oneself of all preset ideas’ (Parker & Budhill, 2007, p. 100). This is a leap of faith which asks us to let go of internalised ideas of perfectionism, ‘which [limit] our capacity to be with, enjoy, learn from, and have gratitude for what is, because we get stuck on some idealized notion of what should be’ (Majied, 2024, chapter 2, final section). Such notions have a long pedigree, not just in Buddhism. Consider this from an anonymous 14th century Christian monk: ‘[b]e willing to be blind, and give up all longing to know the why and how, for knowing will be more of a hindrance than a help’ (Wolters, 1978, p. 101). Double bass maestro and legendary free improviser William Parker further connects this attitude of acceptance to one’s musical identity as a whole:
‘I learned the concept that finding one’s own sound is like finding one’s nose. If you look for it, you will never find it. If you relax, you will soon discover that you don’t have to look for it. All that is needed is to realize your musical individuality is always present. We all have our own musical DNA. The big question is whether or not we can accept it in our lives at that moment.’ (Parker & Budhill, 2007, p. 36)
Far from industry-generated expectations of spectacle and commodification, the real promise of transformation in music lies in a growing readiness to reside in the present moment, to express in its unalloyed essence the truth of one’s being exactly as it is, right here, right now. If we hold tight to plans and intentions in improvisation, we erect walls around ourselves, sabotaging the opportunity to step beyond our usual dualistic frame of reference.
This way of playing is, of course, not without risks. Nisenson recalls a particularly disappointing performance at the Keystone Korner by the phenomenal jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins:
‘…on that Saturday night Sonny was terrible. It was, by far, the worst I have ever heard him play, either in live performance or on record. He would start a tune, attempt a solo, and simply hit a stone wall. After a few bars he would shake his head in discouragement and sit on a stool facing the audience, his face mournful, as the rhythm section played on. I am certain that he was neither high or [Sic] ill; it simply wasn’t happening for him that night.’ (Nisenson, 2015, introduction)
To witness such a low from one of the undisputed greats is an abject lesson in humility. Only by being prepared to endure such dissatisfaction is Rollins able to leave space to soar on other occasions to ecstatic, transcendent highs, ‘through a dedication to music… like that of a mystic or a monk’ (Nisenson, 2015, chapter 1). To put it another way, Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa tells us that ‘[w]e must allow ourselves to be disappointed, which means the surrendering of me-ness, my achievement… Treading the spiritual path is painful. It is a constant unmasking, peeling off of layer after layer of masks. It involves insult after insult’ (Trungpa, 1976, pp. 5-6). We can, however, remain equanimous through the highs and the lows, the joys and the insults.
When we begin to surrender this ‘me-ness’, we become more sensitive to the centrality of community:
‘Community is vital and not in opposition to freedom. Far from seeing it as a constraint that needs to be overcome it is listening within and beyond the safety of the community that provides the nourishment and inspiration so many musicians experience in free improvisation.’ (Reardon-Smith, Denson, & Tomlinson, 2020, p. 20)
Through this experience of something more than the self, we come intuitively to see that ‘identity is not something that one can own or control; it is constructed and negotiated minute by minute through shared experience and meaning’ (Deschênes, Bi-musicality or Transmusicality: The Viewpoint of a Non-Japanese Shakuhachi Player, 2018, p. 205), thus presenting a potent refutation of capitalism’s core message of individualism and competition (often established on the promise of control, if we only fulfil our role as the good consumer). Indeed, musical performance in all its forms is a living example of a way of being that extends, and can only exist, far beyond the individual, in which ‘… the essential elements… are in fact spread across the minds of the individual participants…’ (Borgo, 2007, pp. 71-72). Rather than grasping for individual power and control, we instead find empowerment in community (Boggs & Kurashige, 2012, p. 41).
As we loosen our grip on the self and move beyond externally derived expectations of perfection, our grounding in the present moment deepens: ‘[t]he focus is on the present moment without predetermination, with awareness of and attentiveness to happenings and the connective tissue between sounds and soundmakers’ (Reardon-Smith, Denson, & Tomlinson, 2020, p. 20). In this way, we begin to taste ‘true freedom [which] lies in moving with, not against; in completely accepting what is here and not pursuing anything else. We move in harmony with this dance of life. Everything is transitory, empty; there's no need to cling to passing forms’ (Chayat, 1996, p. 34). We ‘take back control’ not of any elusive ability to mould a situation to our liking, but of the wisdom to remain in equanimity regardless of circumstances.
It is, perhaps, for reasons such as these that music persists in exerting an irresistible pull on people across the ages. Where today in so many areas of our lives we have been conditioned to operate according to control, materialism, competition, hyper-individualisation, and so on, music opens a space in which we can examine these normalised pathologies, patiently and with mutual support and encouragement, existing for a time in a more primordial reality not beholden to the whims of a frightened ego, one in which we penetrate through the delusion of self and other, through the myth of control, accessing wisdom beyond the dichotomous, ‘knowing and being in one’ (Chang, 1963, p. 103).
In a society in which we are daily driven further and further apart by cynical actors seeking to weaponise and monetise fear, it is vital that we honour and preserve ways of being that problematise the modern obsession with individual agency, power, and control. Let us put our faith in music as one such radical alternative, a shared space in which we return together to a time in which we weren’t afraid to experience identity as co-created, in which our strength was derived from the threads that connect us, and in which we could move freely through the world in the face of all things, safe in the embodied myth of our fundamental oneness.
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