Fighting Tofu:

Never Breed or Buy. Always Adopt. Always Spay and Neuter.

The Goal: A 'No-Birth' Nation The only way to make our communities "no-kill" is to work toward a "no-birth" nation through legislative measures that mandate spaying or neutering unless a proper permit is purchased, with permit revenues used solely to subsidize sterilization surgeries for low-income families and citizens."

Holy shit. The way to save animal kind is to make sure that they don't reproduce?

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When we last left Johnny, he had just resolved a crisis involving his place in the world as a humanist. Since then, he has volunteered to help in the conduction of a summer preparatory program for some highschool students in his area. One day, a student approaches him and asks what the highest form of art is. Johnny ponders and answers, “The highest form of art is that which allows man to best express himself.”

“The art that best expresses a person’s humanity,” Johnny thinks to himself.

“Oh,” the student replies, “so it really is poetry”, and walks off.

As a musician, Johnny is taken aback by the statement stops and ponders upon what just happened. The conclusion drawn by the student is compelling. Basically, what he said was that poetry is the highest form of art and the argument is as follows:

Poetry is the art that allows man to best express his humanity.

The art that allows man to best express his humanity is the highest form of art.

Therefore, poetry is the highest form of art.

The basic assumption of this argument is the definition of art taken as a creative and beautiful human product done for its own sake that is an expression of the creator’s (with a small “c”) inner world with the receiver of the art. Contained in this definition are a number of basic components. First, art is the product of a process (as implied in the word “creative”).  Second, the piece has to be deliberate by virtue of its being the product of a human act. Finally, art is, by definition, an attempt at the expression of the artist’s inner world while at the same time making it understandable to others.

The bulk of this argument lies in the first premise and the assertion that poetry is the art that allow man to best express his humanity. Why, if you will, is poetry the art form that best fits the definition of art? If one can answer this question, it can be concluded that poetry is, in fact the art that allows man to best express his humanity.

The answer to this burning question is rooted in the human being’s rational nature. It is usually said that language is the highest expression of the human being’s rationality in that he or she is able to take an external reality and assign a verbal sign to signify it. Only human beings are able to process the world in this way. After this, what the human being is able to do is come up with a non verbal, that is, written symbol to signify the verbal. Man, for example, will experience the external reality of a green and brown thing that grows out of the ground when a seed is put in that spot. What follows is the word tree as spoken in that manner. Once this is established, the word tree is given a written form that is “tree” as spelled out. The outcome of this process is, if you will, the ammunition the poet uses in his poetry and because it is the highest form of the expression of man’s rationality, it should follow that it is the art that allows man best to express his humanity.

With regard to the expression of the artist’s inner world, because of its use of language as the raw material for the piece, poetry works brilliantly in this regard. Words are highly specific and offer a degree of clarity probably unparalleled by any other art form. Words, or groups of words put together are capable specifying one particular reality in space and time. For example, “the leftmost chair in the first row of the chairs in UA&P’s ACB 301 classroom is a red swivel chair 1.3 meters high at noontime today when sat on by Teddy”. At the same time, words are capable to giving an abstraction of this concept. For example, the word “chairs”. Furthermore, through the use of metaphor, the poet is able to express a non-physical reality such as “happiness” by likening it to a physical reality thus expressing his inner world better. “Happiness is two kinds of ice cream”, would serve as an example to this end.

Even if it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words it is theoretically possible to represent the ideas in a picture given a number of words. To further add to that, the mastery of language required in poetry ought to be able to express what is to be expressed in terms of terse language.

Johnny pauses and thinks to himself, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a musical excerpt is worth a thousand pictures”.

Given this statement, one ought to be able to intuitively conclude that is not poetry but rather music that is the highest form of art, that is to say, music is the form of art that best expresses a person’s humanity. Basically, the argument ought to read:

Music is the art that allows man to best express his humanity.

The art that allows man to best express his humanity is the highest form of art.

Therefore, music is the highest form of art.

Given the argument presented earlier, why should we consider music the highest form of art and not poetry? The answers lie in the expression of man’s inner world as part of the definition of art and the expression of the artist’s humanity as part of the art’s function.

First of all, how reliable is poetry as an expression of man’s inner world, really? Given the arsenal that is available in terms of vocabulary and the like, one might conclude that it is an excellent form of expression. To an extent, yes it is very good. However, it falls short in that it cannot truly express the most incommunicable of man’s inner world, that is, it does not adequately express man’s emotions. As much as it attempts to concretize an abstract by use of metaphor, it does not fully encapsulate the emotion intended to be expressed. “Playing the drums in your own school band,” for example, may be used to express a poet’s happiness. But really, what is the phrase saying? Basically, it is saying that playing the drums in a school band is an activity that resembles the abstract concept of happiness but does not truly represent it. The fact that it has to go through layers of interpretation before arriving at the concept “happiness” implies that there is something lost in the translation of this emotion from experience to paper. Furthermore, what is described is not happiness in itself but rather a description of something that one may or may not have experienced and stating that the emotion is something like that.

Music, on the other hand, is an excellent mode of expression in terms of the communication of the inner world in that it has to pass through less in terms of layers of decoding. When a person hears a piece of music, he or she doesn’t have to go through the process of connecting the physical reality to the abstract concept by deciphering the metaphor. When one hears a piece of sad music, one knows that the music is sad. One knows that the composer wanted to express a feeling of sadness when composing the piece. Other than that, one really cannot put to words the experience on gets when listening to a piece of music, and that is precisely the point. Music is able to communicate and express a facet of the inner world that all other forms of art have difficulty communicating and expressing. It is, therefore, not bound by external images as a means to communicating that which is most difficult to communicate.

In this case, no amount of rationality will be able to come close to sense of calm, finality, and rest one feels when hearing an octave played in unison. Music, in other words, is a better means by which man’s inner world is expressed.

Another problem with using language as the raw material for a piece of art is the fact that language draws from specific experiences of either an individual or the specific experiences of a culture. The example that comes to mind is the fact that the language of the Eskimo people have a multitude of words to describe types of snow while the Philippines has one word to describe an abstract concept that is outside of the experience of the average Filipino. In this sense, poetry really cannot be the art that best expresses the artist’s humanity. By talking about humanity, one is implying the presence of a nature that is common to all human beings. Using language as a means of expression, as is the case with poetry, one does not highlight the universality of human nature and experience but rather does the opposite. In fact, what the use of language does is highlight the differences in people and does not do very well as an expression of what it is to be human.

While it may be argued that integral to humanity is the variety experience, and music does very little to show this facet of humanity, non-Western musical traditions show otherwise. Indian and Chinese pitch collections, for example, are built quite differently from the 12 tone collection of the Western tradition. This does not, however, discount the basic, more universal aspects of music. For example, no matter where one goes, all pieces of music will inevitably have a melody in some way, shape, or form. In terms of expressing human emotion, the tempo of a celebratory piece, for example, is almost unequivocally fast whereas the tempo of a more sombre, brooding piece is almost unequivocally slow. Music, therefore manages to appeal to a universal human experience while at the same time call to mind the fact that there are differences among peoples separated by space and time.

Music, therefore, allows man to best express his humanity because it is the art form that directly highlights the similarity in human experience while at the same time acknowledging the variety associated with human experience.

And now we return to Johnny.

Convinced the student that approached him was wrong; Johnny chases the student up the stairs and into the classroom where they are to have their class on literature.

“The highest form of art is music,” Johnny says as he bursts into the room, breathless.

“Really?” the student asks. “But Sir Chris says its poetry.”

“He’s wrong,” Johnny replies. “And here’s why.”