From my days as a blonde boy in the wild of mid-twentieth century Illinois to my nights as a grey beard in California, I—as have you with reference to your psychic progenitor—have changed.
Musically, I still feel my roots in the soils of rhythm stout and durable in my body, beyond the reach of time, the thief; roots sprouting from magic beans dropped fatefully on the ground by sparrows crossing the sky. Instruments as creative tools—similar to typewriters and dictionaries as communicative tools—how to approach these tools as a learner, how to use these tools in performance, these aspects have been remodeled and refined through cultural participation as blonde turned to grey.
The sole late comer is my recent addiction, since detoxified, to the blues harp. I have several covers of Little Walter on my SoundCloud account. Lacking a tether to the blonde boy, ‘tis a pitiful harp I play. Yes, there could be other reasons, but one could argue that human development in existential domains like music depends on early alignments of stars.
Jeanne Chall, an aficionado par excellence of human development, cast her magic spell my way in the early 1980s with her book on the “six stages of reading development.” My curiosity about how words, fixed in text and context, can possibly do what they do knew no boundaries even as a child. Chall opened a theoretical door to literacy, and I walked through it directly to Helen Bacon, coordinator of a reading specialist credential program at UC Davis. “Instead of cutting the leather to make a shoe to fit the child’s foot,” Helen taught me, “we cut the child’s foot to fit the standard size shoe. Who is Dick and Jane to a child? Let them find what they enjoy and go from there.”
According to Chall, this creature called homo sapien crawls on all fours at first, learning to hear and identify the affordances of spoken words; later seeing links between scrawls on surfaces, in sand, on paper, and spoken words (putting two and two together); finally mastering the invisible operating system that runs in the background of the computer of text, in the case of English, the alphabet, which usually demands sustained face-to-face time in a supportive micro-level zone of proximal development.
Frederick Lewis Douglass, like almost all children, needed a zpd to learn to decode print; when he smashed into a legal wall of white supremacy forbidding him from the schoolyard in Baltimore in 1845, he searched in the shadows for child criminals who unwittingly collaborated with him against the white man’s law. Shutting off instruction in the technology of print for a child of eight years old is child abuse in my book because it closes doors to development along global dimensions of significant existential domains.
Once mastered, as Douglass achieved with flying colors, print technology programs the brain to enlist the speech musculature and permits children to render print into speech fluently and effortlessly. As adolescents, children learn to read silently and to comprehend texts from multiple points of view, acquiring enormous quantities of vocabulary stored visually and linked to semantic centers as knowledge schemas are built in long term memory. Mature readers reach a higher stage—synoptic reading, understanding not only what to read, but what to skip.
I know of no empirically derived framework of developmental levels of music, but I’m sure they must exist. If you google ‘stages of moral development,’ you’ll come away with the impression that Lawrence Kohlberg captured the market decades ago, but hidden under layers in the folds of your browser will be serious critiques. Despite flaws, Kohlberg’s framework, like Chall’s, crystallized a useful comprehension of a developmental trajectory for me decades ago and have become glued to my identity.
Grossly oversimplified, Kohlberg discovered that first, humans make moral decisions based on avoiding punishment—it’s ok as long as I don’t get caught. During stage two, your more advanced human will decide on an action based on whether it wins the approval of valued others and later out of a commitment to the rule of law—it’s ok because it will please my friends and family or because I won’t go to jail for it. The highest level crowd, according to Kohlberg, reached by precious few of the species, make decisions based on conscious and reasoned ethical principles—it’s ok if it has good consequences for others, if it satisfies the demands of social justice, if it furthers the perfection of an imperfect world.
My favorite expression of a framework for human development was penned by the Bard of Avon, the playwright known as Shakespeare, one of my choices for a magic dinner along with Frederick Lewis Douglass, Geronimo, William Faulkner, and Bob Dylan. It’s actually a monologue from ‘As You Like It,’ but it also is commonly indexed as a stand alone poem—“The Seven Ages of Man.” Check it out here or google it. I’ve used Seven Ages as a touchstone for several lyrics in original songs, most notably “Valley of the Shadows.”
I have no firm, scientifically derived views on stages of human development, and I believe that the depth and maturity of various frameworks vary across existential domains, but I have concluded that thought devoted to the holistic topic, even sporadic and tentative, isn’t wasted. As I wrote in my lyric Valley of the Shadows, the hour is coming when you go home, there’s no escaping that long dark night—the purple rain Prince saw when he was 14 and wrote about in his song; the same purple rain Joe used as an excuse for staying in Omaha and not going for a ride on Ventura Highway in the song by, appropriately enough, America; the purple rain that will fall for us all sooner or later when we look back over the contours of our lifescape one last time—awareness that we did the best we could to mature as a human being will help. Build yourself a beautiful kaleidoscope to view your landscape with your mind’s eye at a speed well beyond light. Therein lies my take on heaven.