I expect I betray a peculiar sense of humour, but this, from Ursula Le Guin’s “Collectors, Rhymesters, and Drummers”, had me giggling helplessly over pizza in Romeo’s restuarant.

As to why the whales sing, it is certainly significant that they sing the most, or the males sing most, in mating season. But if you can say a song lasting half an hour performed by a hundred individuals in chorus is a mating call, then you can say a Beethoven symphony is a mating call.

Sometimes Freud sounds as if that’s what he thought. If (as he said) the artist is motivated to make art by the desire for “fame, money, and the love of beautiful women,” then indeed Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because it was mating season. Beethoven was marking his territory.

It’s probably the image of the wonderful, but very brassy Beethoven Ninth as a mating call. I wonder what it would attract: something extrovert, no doubt, unlike the forlorn prehistoric relic of Bradbury’s “The Foghorn.” It’s hard to say what exactly is the subject of the essay, since from paragraph to paragraph it moves from the nature of beauty to rhythm in nature and art, and in her introduction Le Guin said she wrote it for her own entertainment – and it is fun.

Freud never did seem to have much time for artists, although upon a recent glancing enounter with him in last year’s history of modern Europe course, I decided that he was one. One of our assigned reads was a long passage of Freud’s about how he could not go to Rome, and his analysis of what Rome represented to him. Plainly, he was not going to just get over it and go to Rome (ie, do the experiment), until he had extracted the maximum possible creative juice out of not going to Rome. It’s one of those artist things: falling in love with unattainable people, and writing poetry about it, leaving home and yearning to return, and writing novels about it.