Ideas - Nine: A Number of Synchronicity

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Going the whole nine yards, dressing to the nines, being on cloud nine. In pop culture, in ancient folklore, in music, even in sports the number nine is everywhere. In the last episode of our series, The Greatest Numbers of All Time, we explore nine and its uncanny connections. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 29, 2023.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm Nala Ayed. Welcome to Ideas and to another episode in our series, The Greatest Numbers of All Time. I just got an invitation through the mail. Your presence requested this evening. It's formal. A top hat, a white tie, and tails. Top hat, white tie, and tails. Now that is a Fred Astaire level of formal. He's obviously dressed, as you might expect, to the nines.

So where does that idea of being dressed to the nines even come from? There is an old theory that it comes from the nine yards of material needed to make a proper suit. But it's not a very good theory, as there's no real evidence for it. However, it is a great example of how the number nine sneaks into everyday expression. Like a stitch in time saves nine. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. And of course, it's the best place we could ever hope to be. Ideas contributor Tom Jokinen looks at the nearly, but not quite perfect, number nine. And the astonishing connections it has with everything from Norse mythology,

to Hindu folklore, to music, modern and ancient, and to popular culture. The number of the day, favorite one of mine, the number of the day is... nine! Nine coconut custard pies! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine! You have nine unheard messages. Tom Jokinen, leave me a detailed message and I'll call you back. Thanks.

The weirdest thing, I got your email this day. I'm reading a book about Scandinavia and Viking history. I was reading a section called The Number Nine, and it was all about the significance of the number nine in Viking culture. End of message. Are you still there? The drive north from Winnipeg, where I live, to Gimli, Manitoba, is about 90 minutes. Gimli's most famous landmark is a giant Viking statue.

There's a big Icelandic population in Gimli, and the town's big on Vikings. Gimli, that's north on Highway 9. The August long weekend, Gimli is overtaken by Vikings and visitors. The name Gimli. That's also a character in The Lord of the Rings. A dwarf warrior. The one who's given a lock of hair from a princess. He lives in Middle Earth, home of the Nazgul, who are also called the Nine Riders, or simply the Nine.

And there's a Highway 9 in seven of the ten provinces in Canada, plus one in Yukon. All of this morning between four, five, and nine. I want you to meet your Hollywood invite. Carl Jung called this kind of connection making that I'm doing synchronicity, recognizing events and circumstances that appear to have some profound connection, but only in the mind of the beholder. You know the feeling. It's a shiver down the spine. You keep seeing a word, a name, a number, so it must mean something. Tar Heel Slim with Number 9 Train. Gentleman Jim Reeves with The Wreck of the Number 9.

A Jungian synchronicity, maybe, with old rhythm and blues and American folk music and their mutual fixation with night. Up in East Kentucky around Harlan and Perry County, the coal miner sings a little song called the Nine Pound Hammer. Here's another synchronicity. The hammer John Henry uses to pound out a railway tunnel is a nine-pounder, to show he's as fast as any steam-powered machine. John Henry, the song goes, is a steel-driving man,

and the hammer is Thor's hammer, a bit of Norse mythology by way of West Virginia. Nine-pound hammer Nine-pound hammer A little too heavy A little too heavy For my size For my size Thor's hammer, a bit of Norse mythology by way of West Virginia. Take a look at the number nine itself, the Arabic numeral. It's recursive, a circle that loops back on itself. Turns out that dressed to the nines may come from the proverb, it takes nine tailors to make a man.

It's a catchphrase that goes back to at least 1682. Nine tailors, that's also the title of a 1934 mystery novel by Dorothy Sayers. It was her ninth novel. And just who are these tailors? An article from a 1936 issue of The Spectator tells us that nine tailors are in fact nine tolls that were rung on the bell whenever a man dies to alert the villagers of his passing. The bell is rung nine times for men, six times for women. So for at least half of us anyway, nine means death. Flipside, in Hindu culture, the number nine is life-affirming.

Navgriha are the nine heavenly bodies that shape life on earth, the sun, five planets, and three phases of the moon. In the 19th century, Indian composer Matasvami Dixitar wrote nine pieces in honor of the Navgraha. And in modern India, nine is still an important number. In 2020, in the midst of the COVID crisis, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a special announcement. Now today, the Prime Minister has asked the country to switch off lights at 9pm for nine minutes to show we're all united in this fight against coronavirus.

to show we're all united in this fight against coronavirus. Modi's goal was to lift everyone's spirits during the lockdown, the way people in North America took to banging on pots and pans to show support for frontline workers. But he looped in mythology and numerology and the significance of the number nine. For nine minutes, at nine o'clock, everyone turned their lights off all over India. Now with several states expressing concern over the power out for nine minutes and

then suddenly everyone will once again switch off lights, the Central Power Regular has advised them to use gas and hydropower as backup. It was a PR gimmick, but a good one. Modi alluding to this in 2020 has actually started an internet buzz that he must have some access to higher knowledge. And then the internet started putting out theories of the auspicious power of the number nine and that Modi was a genius, right, in identifying this precise time for defeating the virus. You start to see all of these Hindu organizations, their cultural organizations, but not just in India, promoting the significance of number nine. My name is Dr. Deepa Sundaram. I am a professor of Hindu studies at the University of Denver. I teach about digital religion, Hindu nationalism, yoga, and performance and ritual.

In a lot of ways, what Modi is doing here is playing on an age-old popular religious tradition within Hinduism that is coupled with numerology, but also this idea that if we do these rituals, we are literally empowering people like doctors and nurses and giving them that divine power to actually be successful. So nine is the number of both death and life and can send strong enough cultural signals to be used as a political tool. Nine is also found in the Indian tradition Navarasa, the nine aesthetic emotions of art and of theater and of music. The root of the term is rasa. Rasa means flavor. That's the word. For example, where my family comes from in the South, rasam is a popular daily served dish.

It's a tomato lentil based soup. But when we're talking about the Navarasa, there are eight prominent rasas. They correspond to eight residual emotional reservoirs within the body and within the human self. And the ninth ras is shant, meaning tranquility or peace. And this is a really major intervention. It's a major intervention in the history of aesthetic and philosophical thought in the world. Oh, I mean, almost every drama, every Bollywood movie, drama, every Bollywood movie, right? Paintings, drama, literature, poetry, all have rasa. More on the nine rasas later.

But in the spirit of synchronicity, we can draw a line from ancient Indian art and music to the most famous use ever of the number nine in modern music. Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine. Far from the noise and pace of city life in the cool, clear air of Rishikesh, North India, Pathi News reports from the meditation retreat of Maharishi Maharishi Yogi, the man who, through transcendental meditation, is currently bringing peace of mind to the Beatles. February 1968, the Beatles in India and an encounter with the Maharishi and with Indian classical music. George Harrison is studying the sitar with Ravi Shankar. When George Harrison came to me, I didn't know what to think.

In Mumbai, the Beatles record The Inner Light, which is the B-side to Lady Madonna. The Inner Light, this is take six, and it's a copy of the stereo original take five. What matters here is what they absorb from the streets and temples and their retreat in India. The Navgriha, the guiding

influence of nine heavenly bodies. And the Navarasa, the nine emotions contained in art and music. George especially has the antenna for receiving Indian culture. And the Beatles brought Indian sounds and Indian ideas with them into the studio later that year when they recorded their White Album. Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine. I heard it before I was really into new music, and I heard the White Album,

and my reaction was the same as everyone else's, which is, what the hell is this thing doing here? It's the longest piece the Beatles ever recorded. My name is Martin Iden, and I'm Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds in the UK. It's arguably the strangest piece that Beatles ever recorded. My name is Giacomo Fiore. I'm a lecturer in music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. How would you describe what it is? It's a sound collage.

It's the track on the White Album, the Beatles' White Album, that people skip over. So I was born in 1967, and this record came out in 68. I'm Amy Beal. I'm a professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So, I mean, my parents bought it. They used to say it was the first thing they ever bought with a credit card. And so I remember hearing it as a kid, and I remember my sister, who was two years older, walking around going, Number 9? Number 9? Number 9? Number 9? Number 9? I think it was an astounding moment. The first question is, why is it called Revolution Number 9?

What do you think upstairs, Chris? John Lennon and the Number 9 is a very interesting thing. When you look into it, it's very, very compelling. He's born on the 9th of October. He lives at 9 Newcastle Road, which is not far from where I am now. 9th of February 1961, first time that the Beatles play in the Cavern, as the Beatles. 9th of November 1961, Brian Epstein meets them 9th of May 62

George Martin finally offers them a proper recording test 9th of February they're in America for the Ed Sullivan show 9th of October again John's birthday Sean's born Sean Lennon's born and then you end up with him doing songs like

Number 9 Dream. From an album which is Walls and Bridges, which has a drawing reproduced where he has a football player with a number nine on his back. It gets to number nine in the charts in America. It's his 9th post-Beatles single from his 9th post-Beatles album, and

it's the 7th track on the album, so you can't have everything. Number nine. Who's to know? Who's to know? Who else? You get the picture. John Lennon and what has to be the most skippable Beatles song ever recorded, Revolution No. 9, but second only to Beethoven's Ninth

as the most recognizable nine song in Western music history. So this is a confusing and rich moment. I don't know if you agree with this, but it sounds to me like listening to the radio with all of the possible stations at once. My name is Jennifer Iverson. I'm an associate professor at the University of Chicago. The analog that I would use is that if you're scanning all the radio stations, there will be moments of silence and then there will be moments where communication comes up. Sounds will come out into and out of focus. Sometimes you can discern. One thing that's a little bit different is that there is a pattern of words and sonic images that are repeated.

My name is Barry Falk. I'm a professor of English at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. To understand the nine in Revolution No. 9, I'm going to go back to the Arabic numeral and its recursive shape, the circle with a tail looping back into itself. The song or construction or whatever you want to call the apparent chaos of Revolution No. 9 is in fact an elaborate construction of tape loops, recursions controlled by Lennon and Harrison mostly, with some Ringo and a lot of Yoko. You become naked. So tape music or musique concrète would be what I'd call it. Musique concrète is a French term that came to be used around 1948 when there were two particular French composers, Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, who started experimenting with tape music. So playing things backwards, splicing things, re-splicing them, slowing them down, speeding them up.

The arrival of tape recorders meant even the most basic sounds could be transformed. Musique Concrete is a composition which uses raw sounds pre-recorded on tape to replace musical instruments. The possibilities of doctoring natural sound using the new magnetic tape became an obsession. This isn't the normal playground for pop music, so for the Beatles to dig into musique concrète is something only the Beatles could do. They were famous enough to record their grocery lists if they wanted to and get them on the Billboard chart. If I wind this piece of tape through the machine

by hand at a speed which isn't constant and in a direction which is forever changing, those three twangs become a collection of quite different sounds. As for its most famous bit, John Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine in 1972 that he was the one who found the iconic sound clip from an EMI training tape. And given all the nines in John Lennon's life, his finding the tape is yet another case of Jungian synchronicity, the accident that's fated to happen. One of the things that Musique Concrete does is it teaches you that you can listen to all those sorts of things that you didn't think were music as if they are. As a composer who uses found sound and seeks out sound for composition, how much is deliberate and how much is chance? For me, the thing that's deliberate is the sort of generality of the sound. So I'm sitting right now next to a radiator that I recorded.

It doesn't work very well. If I turned it on, you'd have exactly the sound of a piece of mine going on in the background. And it doesn't heat up properly. I don't really know why, and I should probably get it fixed. But I spent ages sitting in this room, kind of listening to the sound. get it fixed, but I spent ages sitting in this room kind of listening to the sound and wondering whether I liked

it enough to go to peace and then realised I'd been sitting listening to it for about six months and I really did like it and it was really interesting. When you hear Revolution 9 or think about Revolution 9 is there a particular piece from any period that makes you think, oh, it's very similar to this? I think Sackhausen, and particularly a piece called Hymnen.

Hymnen is this amazing, enormous, it's about two hours or so, sound collage. So it's made up of recordings of national anthems from around the world. so it's made up of recordings of national anthems from around the world. And those are interspersed with some electronically generated sound and noise, with shortwave radio interference. Hymnen, by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a mash-up of the French, Russian, American national anthems, the Workers' Anth, the human voice, and the turning of the radio dial.

This piece was composed around the same time as the Beatles' Revolution 9 collage. It's primarily a tape work that's very long. I would say the Beatles, I think it's very plausible that they used Stockhausen as a model. It's also plausible that Stockhausen's hymnen and the Beatles' Revolution No. 9 are another case of synchronicity. There's this bit about four and a half minutes in, and you hear a croupier say, So place your bets. And then there's a sort of aural spin of the roulette wheel. And then a few minutes later, you hear the result of that spin as the croupier says, Nerf.

Nerf. The nine. The nine. Number nine. Number nine. Number nine. So did John Lennon, who was already deeply connected to the number nine, hear this? And did it prompt him to try a similar audio experiment

in the studio for the White Album? The thing with synchronicity is you can't know if there's a material connection or not. It's a possibility, an uncanny ghostly possibility. You're listening to Ideas and to our series, The Greatest Numbers of All Time. This episode by contributor Tom Jokinen is nine, a number of synchronicity. Well, you know, we all do what we can. Ideas is a podcast. You can find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're also a broadcast. Heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

I'm Nala Ayed. The Watusi. The Twist. Elder Order. Take this, brother. May it serve you well. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films, and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more.

I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. A special characteristic of the number nine is that it's almost 10. Almost perfect. It's more human. Like nine times out of 10 by Salty Holmes and the Brown County Boys. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Nine times out of 10, you're going to be lonely. County Boys.

And Teddy Pendergrass. There's Nine by Patti Smith, Nine Crimes by Damien Rice, If Six Was Nine by Jimi Hendrix, and of course this one by Dolly Parton. And the most famous of them all, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Its influence on later composers was huge,

not just musically, but culturally. For some, the Ninth Symphony stood as a monument, a final word. Beethoven died before finishing a 10th symphony, so the 9th was his last. And in the Gothic imagination of his time, this fact was ominous. It was known as the curse of the 9th symphony.

It's a myth, really, that developed towards the end of the 19th century about composers, particularly based on the model of Beethoven, composers who seemed to be unable to proceed beyond a ninth or unfortunately died after having composed a ninth symphony or even during composing a ninth symphony. And it coalesced really around the composer Gustav Mahler, whose wife gave an account about this issue

in her memoirs of her life with Mahler. My name's Jeremy Barham, and I'm Professor of Music at the University of Surrey in the UK. Gustav Mahler wrote eight symphonies before composing a work he called Das Liedwander Erd, The Song of the Earth. Crossing his fingers and hoping to bypass the curse of the Ninth Symphony. The source for that story was his wife, Alma Mahler. And she said the following, if I can just quote this. She says,

The numeration of this he wished to dodge in his dread of a Ninth Symphony, as neither Beethoven nor Bruckner had reached a tenth. So at first he wrote Das Lied von der Erde as the ninth, but then crossed the number out. When later he was writing his next symphony, which he called the ninth, he said to me, actually, of course, it's the tenth. Now the danger is past. And yet he did not live to see the ninth performed or to finish the tenth. Beethoven died after his ninth symphony

and Bruckner before finishing his ninth. Hence it was a superstition of Mahler's that no great writer of symphonies got beyond his ninth. He's trying to dodge the curse by not calling Das Lied von der Erde, or the Song of the Earth, a symphony. But he does end up writing another, and he calls it the Ninth. And then, he dies. So in the end, maybe the curse really did get him.

Yes, I think Mahler, I wouldn't say he modelled himself entirely on Beethoven, but he had to match up to Beethoven's legacy in some way as a composer. So yes, the Ninth was a sort of benchmark, I think, against which many composers measured themselves, including Mahler to a huge extent. He felt a pressure, I think, in following the Beethoven legacy. Composer Arnold Schoenberg had this to say about Gustav Mahler's fate. It seems that a ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if

something might be imparted to us in the tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not ready. Those who have written the ninth stood too close to the hereafter. Some scholars don't think Mahler really believed in a curse, and that his wife Alma was not only an unreliable witness, but that she was the one who was superstitious. Yet as the line goes from the John Ford film, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. There's also a film curse. By 1962, Federico Fellini had made eight films, if you don't count Variety Lights, which he co-directed with Alberto La Tuerta. So when he hit that ominous mark for what would have been his ninth movie, he called it eight and a half.

And fittingly, it's the story about the inability to create or finish a work of art. Marcello Mastriani, playing the role of Guido, says, would you be able to give up everything and live life over? You'd get to keep one thing, and one thing only, and it's the thing that gives your life meaning. What is that one thing that gives your life meaning, that you'd keep? Say maybe it's almost perfect, but has that flaw, the crack that lets the light in. Not the perfect ten, but the more attainable, more modest nine.

Located on the west shore of Lake Winnipeg, an hour's drive from the city of Winnipeg, Gimli was settled by Icelandic immigrants in 1895. It's hard to miss the Viking statue guarding the harbor front. Standing 15 feet tall, it has become the symbol of Gimli. The giant Viking in Gimli, Manitoba is a classic roadside attraction. Unveiled in 1967, a symbol of the Icelandic diaspora here. Nine's for Manitoba 9 North. Almost all the Old Norse myths, the stories of Thor and Odin and Freyja, came from Iceland.

They make up a worldview that, for whatever reason, seems to be obsessed with the number nine. Nine seems to be quite a significant number in Old Norse mythology. As early as the year 793 AD, a lusty horde of blonde giants begin to boldly sail these seas. Some of the most prominent nines are the nine worlds that we're told exist. And the nine worlds are under the roots of the world tree, Yggdrasil. And we also have nine knights as a quite significant period. And a god who is somehow the son of nine mothers. We'd really like to know quite a lot more about how that is possible.

Praise be to our god, Odin. We have found the new land of the West. To Odin! To Odin! To Odin! It's also a tree from which the god Odin spends nine nights hanging. So there we're back to the nine again.

Odin hangs there without food or drink for nine nights. But somehow through this suffering, he's enabled to find the secret of the runes, which are the alphabet that allows people in pre-Christian times to write things down and therefore to preserve them in memory. One view of myth is that it's a kind of pre-Freudian explanation of human psychology. The hero travels to the underworld to retrieve something, maybe a loved one, or to destroy something,

or ascends to a magic tree to gain something. This is you and me, and the underworld is the unconscious, the tree is the ego, and the runes, as a source of moral order, make up the superego. Within myth and psychology both, there are themes that repeat and echo one another, and seem to be connected somehow, what Carl Jung called synchronicity, the piling up of impressive coincidences. Nine worlds beneath a sacred tree, nine nights of

suffering. I have a book, a novel called The Nine Unknown, from 1923 by British writer Talbot Mundy. Mundy wrote adventure tales. He was born in London, was married five times, got into spirituality and theosophy, a late 19th century conglomeration of science and religion, a kind of precursor of the New Age. Some of Mundy's tales were adapted for radio, like this one, Moon Over Africa. Mundy's stories are boilerplate, but they tease you with the idea of what's real and what isn't. In The Nine Unknown, there's a secret society of nine chosen men who are consigned with the task of guarding nine books of knowledge and who must face the nine Kali worshippers,

Kali being a Hindu goddess associated with death and discord. They came at last to the world's end, where a shadow blacker than a coal mine's throat declared that life left off and might have been believed except for moonlight that glistened beyond it along the ragged outline of a broken wall. There, under the bough of an enormous tree, whose tendrils looked like hanged men swinging in the wind,

they turned into a space once paved so heavily that no trees grew and only bushes strangled themselves. There's an echo here of Yggdrasil, the sacred tree from which Odin was hanged for nine nights. And there's another echo with the Nine Worthies from medieval times. They were first described in France in a text from 1312. The Nine Worthies consists of three Jewish worthies, three pagan worthies, and three Christian worthies. My name is Dr. Christopher Berard, Professor of the Humanities at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. The three Jewish worthies include Joshua, the successor of Moses, King David, second king of the United Monarchy of Jerusalem, Judas Maccabeus, who will lead the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire and restore traditional worship in the Second Temple. This is the time when the world is full of knights and princesses and chivalry. The three pagan worthies are Hector of Troy from the fame of the Iliad, Alexander the Great, the Great World Conqueror, and Julius Caesar. The time of tournaments of banquets and feasts of noble lords and

ladies and their silver armored knights. The three Christian worthies are Arthur of Britain, Charlemagne, and the Crusader, first ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Godfrey de Bouillon. And the greatest of these, King Arthur. Long live Arthur, King of England. So how does Arthur, a British king, become a hero to the French? Arthur could represent the defense of the faith against overwhelming odds. He can also represent the preservation of a civilization, in his case, a Christian civilization, against some sort of external non-Christian threat.

Arthur as a defeater of giants is picked up on, interestingly. What is the story of Arthur and the giant, though I don't know it? One is this Arthur versus the giant named Rion. There's actually a tradition that this giant would go all over Europe. He would defeat these kings, and as tribute, he would demand that they shave their beards. And then the beards would be stitched together in this cloak that the giant would wear. And because Arthur was said to be the mightiest king,

the giant wanted Arthur's beard to have a place of significance. It's like the border of this cloak. So the two fight. There's actually an Icelandic text which says after he defeats the giant, he gives the different bits of the beards back to their former owners, right? Which is very generous.

And since I'm caught up with echoes and synchronicity, Arthur, King of Britain, one of the Nine Worthies, is given a gift of hair in tribute, bringing to mind Gimli, the dwarf, not the town, who as a member of the Fellowship of Rings, received the gift of hair from a princess. And the synchronicities don't end there. You also have nine spheres of heaven in Paradiso, in Dante's Paradiso,

the third part of the Divine Comedy. And those nine spheres include the moon, the inconstant, Mercury, which represents the ambitious, Venus, the lovers, the sun, the wise, Mars, the warriors of faith. Here you would expect to find some of the nine worthies as warriors of faith associated with Mars. Jupiter, the just rulers. Saturn, the contemplative. And then the fixed stars, faith, hope, and love are eight. And then nine is the prima mobile, the angels.

This is also Navgriha of Hindu mythology, the nine celestial bodies that influence all life on earth. The nine worthies are incredibly influential in terms of artistic depictions. You see murals as far as Poland with the Nine Worthies theme. It becomes very, very popular in Flemish art, Dutch art, and 17th century in particular. All of these engravings. Is it trite to refer to them as superheroes? Well, it depends how you define superhero. They are extraordinary, but they're also human.

And if they do have more than a human ability, in many cases that help comes in the form of divine intervention. form of divine intervention. No more guarding Let's create a turnover. Time really flying in this first quarter. We have 5.05 remaining, no score. He's got some protection. In sports, the number nine is a mythic number.

We've talked about Vikings and superheroes, so consider this. Quarterback Tommy Kramer wore the number nine for the Minnesota Vikings from 1977 to 1989. Coincidence? Of course it is. But it may also be another synchronicity. Just as in hockey, where the number 9 is reserved for high-scoring superheroes. We all combed our hair like Maurice Richard. We all wore the famous number nine on our backs. How could we forget that?

Rasa is aesthetic emotion. Aesthetic emotion is rasa. Rasa literally means juice. Nectar is one slightly fanciful translation. Let's say juice. Sweets are dipped in ras, so it's any kind of enlivening elixir or juice. I'm Amit Chaudhary. I'm a writer and a musician. Rasa, R-A-S-A, a Sanskrit term. In Indian aesthetics, there are nine rasas, denoting the nine emotions that are stirred by works of art. So the earliest use of the word rasa really means anything that's liquid or fluid. But then beginning around the earliest centuries of the common era, the word rasa is picked up in a tradition of literary theory in Sanskrit, in which it's

used to denote what's usually described as aestheticized emotion. And the idea of Rasa really relates to this question of what is it that's actually happening when we perceive a work of art? My name is Zoe Hai, and I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. In 2019, the journal American Psychologist published a study by University of California, Berkeley.

American psychologist published a study by University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley had built an audio library of the nonverbal sounds humans make to express emotions like confusion, interest, fear, elation, embarrassment, and then created an online map that creates hundreds of these sounds as you sweep your mouse over its colored dots. It's what you're hearing right now. The researchers envision clinical uses for these sounds to help those with dementia, autism and emotional processing disorders to better understand what they're hearing in the world around them. You have to use Chrome as your browser for the map to work.

You can find the link on the IDEAS webpage. For now, the library is limited to American idiom and to 24 particular emotions that are familiar as nonverbal sounds. But you can easily imagine a different map for China or Japan. What are the most important emotional signals in French or in South Asia? In fact, if you take India, they're way ahead of Berkeley. It was in the 10th century that a Kashmiri poet and dramatist named Abhinav Gupta settled on a group of core emotions that he said were crucial to understanding art, music, and drama. There were nine of them, the nine rasas. Rasa means flavor. That's the word. But when we're talking about the Navarasa, there are eight prominent rasas. They correspond to

eight residual emotional reservoirs within the body and within the human self. And the ninth ras is shant, meaning tranquility or peace. And this is a really major intervention. It's a major intervention in the history of aesthetic and philosophical thought in the world. Amit Chowdhury is a fiction writer and also the author of a memoir called Finding the Raga, an improvisation on Indian music. It's a personal look at Indian classical music. He's a singer as well. According to this 10th century idea, there are eight basic rasas, or emotions, and a mysterious ninth. To understand a work of art or a play or a raga, a piece of Indian classical music, the audience member, that's you or me, should know what these rasas are so we can recognize them in the work, not just to feel

them ourselves, and this is crucial, but to acknowledge them, to recognize how they operate at a kind of arm's length. They're all familiar emotions. You can find them in the UC Berkeley map online. The eight rasas are hasya meaning laughter Sringara meaning adornment the emotions to do with you know when somebody is adorning themselves Rodra meaning

anger Karuna meaning pity Bibhatsa meaning disgust Bhibhatsa meaning disgust. Hayanak meaning terrifying, horrifying. Veer meaning heroic, the heroic ras.

And Adhuput meaning wonderful, astonishing, strange. These are the eight rasas. The ninth is added in the 10th century. And that rasa is this rasa of peace, but it corresponds to this reservoir within you. One way to describe the ninth rasa is that it's the experience of consuming art while knowing that it is art and not real life. What happens on stage, not just in Indian drama, but in any drama, whether a Greek

tragedy like Medea or Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Goodbye to clocks ticking and my butternut tree and mama's sunflowers. We can be swept up in the emotion of the scene, the anger, the horror of Medea killing her own children, or the compassion in our town. Oh, Earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you. But we know these aren't real emotions being portrayed, but are staged, idealized, performed. There's a distance that we need there to understand it as a work of art and not the chaos of real life. The strange paradox that whatever it is that we are encountering, whether it's horrifying or disgusting or funny, we are neither breaking down nor bursting out into helpless laughter where we cannot stop,

and yet we distance from all these emotions. The distance is not a negative. It is what allows the tasting of the Russ. Okay, this is fascinating because if you remember the old, when motion pictures first began and people saw the train coming at them and they thought the train was really coming and they jumped out of the way in the seats of the theater. And then later the theater experience was more, there was an awareness that what they were experiencing wasn't real, but some interpretation. So that's where the ninth rasa comes in, the sort of calmness of encountering

art. That is where the ninth rasa comes in. And this is part of an ongoing argument that it's not emotion, it's aesthetic emotion, you know. Don't confuse the two. So the ninth rasa connects to aesthetic emotion, which functions as a kind of prosthetic emotion, one that somehow protects us from the discomfort of real life, but which allows us to enjoy the power of art without confusing it with life. The lesson from the ninth rasa for us is not to get emotionally stuck on the art. Revolution 9 may annoy you, or alarm you, or by now bore you.

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9. But the point is to be attentive to all of it. It's our aesthetic emotion that turns it all from noise into art. That's why we should listen intently, but with a little distance. The distance is not a negative. It is what allows the tasting of the ras. Because the ras is a juice. It has to be savoured.

It has to be tasted. It is what allows the tasting of the ras and the joy of the tasting, the bliss of the tasting, to be made possible. The thing that you find listening to music on cut Crête is that the things that you didn't think were musical, you can listen to musically just fine. These are philosophical and artistic moves that take us away from

the human centered the subjective they see the breakdown of that ownership or authorship as being where delight happens and sometimes the things that don't sound musical are really, really lovely.

90 minutes south now, on highway number nine. Okay. Okay. We all want to change the world. You tell me that it's evolution. Well, you know. We all want to change the world. You've been listening to an episode by contributor Tom Jokinen titled, Nine, A Number of Synchronicity. It's part of our special series, The Greatest Numbers of All Time. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. All right. Don't you know it's gonna be? All right. Don't you know it's gonna be? The twist.

Elder order. All right. Take this, brother. May it serve you well. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca Take this, brother. May it serve you well.