Complexity #3 - L'Histoire du Soldat

For my Bar-Mitzvah, which was in 1957, I asked for a tape recorder, and several of my relatives got together and bought me a four track Revere machine. I used it a lot all during high school, playing duets with myself on the clarinet by laying down two tracks, and that kind of thing.  I also recorded programs from the radio.  The tape recorder came with a set of alligator clips connected to a plug, and to record from the radio all you had to do was attach the clips to the two wires that led to the speaker.
One of the pieces that I recorded was a performance of Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat in English.  I'd never heard the piece or even heard of it before I recorded it, but I immediately fell in love with it, and I played for myself repeatedly.  "Down the hot and dusty road, tramps a soldier with his load."
Last night while I was ironing my summer shirts, in preparation for putting them away for the short winter, I took out the LP that I  bought when I was in college of a performance of L'Histoire du soldat in French, narrated by Jean Cocteau, with the devil played by Peter Ustinov.  It had been years since I'd listened to that music, and I was immediately swept away by its brilliance, energy, and rhythms.  Stravinsky attained richness of timbre by using high and low instruments with nothing in between: clarinet, bassoon, violin and bass, etc. So that a small ensemble could have, at times, almost an orchestral effect.
Could it be that such an innovative piece was composed more than 90 years ago?
And why is this a demonstration of complexity, aside from the complexity of the piece itself?
Because so much time has gone by since I first heard that music, and my experience of life and of music is so much richer now.  On the other hand, I'll never have the sense of enthusiastic surprise that I felt when I was fifteen or so upon the discovery of Stravinsky and his music.
And think of the careers of Stravinsky himself, of Cocteau, of Ustinov, of the musicians who performed, of the conductor, the performance history of the piece, what it meant when first performed in 1918, right after World War I, in the throes of the Russian Revolution, and what it meant in the early 1950s, when the recording I have was made, and what it means today, after so much more music has been made and so much more history has happened.
The music, even while you listen to it, only goes so far in unifying your life.  Your mind wanders, you may imagine the ballet, you may think, if only I played clarinet well enough to perform that piece.  Two people listen to it, together in the same room, and they have entirely different resonances in their hearts.

The Bewildering Complexity of Life #2

This morning, as often happens, I was wide awake at 5:00 am, so I got out of  bed, went up to my workroom, turned on my computer, and got an hour's work done before breakfast time.  Why do I wake up so early in the morning?  What should I do about it?
The reasons why I wake up at that hour, which I started to call "ungodly," but in fact it is very godly, tranquil, calm, good for concentration, are probably a tangle of physiological and psychological factors, and the effort to untangle it all so that I could sleep for another hour or so, seems disproportionate.  Better to accept the situation and make the best of it.
However, there's the complexity again: I am a mystery to myself.  I don't know why I wake up before I want to.
Breakfast time came. I made the coffee, took in the paper, read about as much as I wanted to, but didn't eat or drink anything.  I had to go get a blood test, to see whether the pills that are supposed to be lowering my cholesterol are still working, and to discover whether any other signs of decrepitude and disease are in my blood.  I hate having strangers (or anyone) stick needles into my arm, and I almost put the blood test off, telling myself I was too hungry, but knowing that any day that I decided to have the test done I would be equally hungry, so why be a baby?
The laboratory at the closest clinic to our house, a pleasant twenty minute walk, begins doing tests at 7:30.  I got there at 7:20 or so, took a number, and waited my turn.  By the time my turn came, in about a quarter of an hour, the line was quite long.  I congratulated myself on my foresight.
The two people who were waiting when I got there hadn't bothered to take numbers, which is so stupid I can't believe it.  The old "system" in Israel was that you walked into a crowded waiting room, asked, "who's last?'"  Then you announced that you were now last and waited tensely until your turn came, fiercely protecting your place.  Routinely people would come in and announce that they had been there before and asked someone to save their place, giving you the helpless feeling that your good will was being exploited.
In the past ten or fifteen years, that chaotic situation has been remedied by the simple method of giving everyone a number.  Why you would prefer constant vigilance, announcing to everyone who comes in that they're after you rather than taking a number and waiting until it's called is beyond me - another example of human complexity.  Even on the simplest level, it's hard to figure other people out.
Rather than try to figure them out, I took three numbers, gave the lowest one to the woman with two children who claimed she was first and the next lowest one to the man who had told me he was last, and keeping the highest number for myself. I've decided to be more proactive in my life.  Let's see where that leads.
I'm back now, with a bulky bandage on the inside of my left elbow (I just removed it), having risen at the wrong time, eaten breakfast at the wrong time, and returned to my desk at the wrong time.  Just a little change in your routine, if you have a routine, can make your whole day look different.  Another instance of complexity.  If you jiggle your life in one place, you don't know what will be shaken somewhere else.

The Bewildering Complexity of Life in the World (#1)

Last night we walked down to the Bethlehem Road, not far from our house in Jerusalem, to a street fair organized by the municipality.  A sizable section of the street was closed off, many of the local stores and restaurants were open, two bands set up at intervals along the street, just far enough away from each other that you couldn't hear both at a time, unless you were standing halfway between them.  At stands people sold handicrafts, food, a lot of bread (Bethlehem means, of course, "House of Bread'), and there were some street performances.
Hundreds of people strolled up and down the street, the usual variety: young couples with kids in strollers, teenagers, older couples, and even two Hasidim, a father and son, wearing huge fur straimls and the golden caftans of one of the Jerusalem sects. 
We brought our dog, who didn't enjoy it all that much, but we thought he would be happier with us than left alone in the house.

***

When you think about an event like that -- planning it, the arrangements that had to be made, the security issues, publicizing it, setting it up, budgeting it -- you realize how far from simple it is.  Or if you think about the street fair from the individual point of view of every person who was part of it in any way, the experience they brought to it, their situation in life at that moment, their hopes, fears, loves, hates, you realize that it wasn't a single event at all.  For every person involved, it was a different event.
I was not in a good mood for the first half hour or so, for reasons that I can't entirely explain to myself, and nothing I want to go into here.  Neither of the bands was playing when we first got there, but when we reached the second band, which had set up on the balcony of a building, they started to play.  Judith was looking at the tablecloths on a stand on the east side of the street, and I was waiting for her with the dog on the other side of the street, close to the musicians.
Judith wanted to buy a tablecloth because today we're driving down to the moshav where our son-in-law's grandparents live, and we wanted to bring them a house present.  Everyone who looked at the tablecloths or bought one had a different reason for buying one.  And everyone who ignored the tablecloths completely, or decided not to buy one, had different personal tastes and needs. 
Our need for the tablecloth had to do with our connection with that son-in-law and his family, which is very different from our connection with our other two sons-in-law and their families.

***

The band started to play a Beatles song: Get  Back!  Within half a minute, my mood changed completely.  Everyone within earshot started dancing, some just quietly, for themselves, and others openly.  The musicians were good.  They had a strong rock and roll rhythm and they sang convincingly.  They were pretty young.  Most of them probably were born after the Beatles broke up and stopped performing.  None of them could remember the excitement that people my age felt when that exuberant wave of creativity swept the world of popular music, when it was something new and energizing.

***

People once thought they could figure the world out, that they could find one key idea that would explain everything.  If none of the current ideas was adequate, intense effort would get to the right one.  Christianity was such an idea, a universal religion that explained everything.  But from the very start, Christianity split up into competing sects, each with its own doctrines, each believing that it knew the ultimate secrets.

But even a simple event like the street fair on the Bethlehem Road, an event that lasted only a few hours, demonstrates the impossibility of grasping anything fully.  The broader the context, the harder things are to grasp.  

The Bethlehem Road was more or less a dirt track in a rural area when the British conquered Palestine during WWI.  Under the British mandate, it became an affluent Arab neighborhood.  In the war of 1948, the Arabs were driven out, poor Jews were settled in the neighborhood, two or more families stuffed together in a single apartment, but in the 1970s gradual gentrification took place.  In the past five years or more, the street has become more lively commercially.  

All that history also lay behind the street fair, as well as the contested status of Jerusalem today.  And let's not forget that the fair took place during the intermediate days of the Sukkot festival, something that might have been going on for three thousand years by now.

How can we get our minds around such complexity?

Squeezing Pomegranates and Getting Old

This morning I picked some pomegranates from the two thriving trees that grow in our garden, and I squeezed juice.  This is my agricultural task every fall, and I enjoy it, though it's time consuming.  Every year it's a race with the insects that lay their eggs in the fruit and spread rot, with the birds that come and nibble the fruit that splits open, and with the other things that I have to do. 
We have a huge quantity of fruit to squeeze.  So far this year I've produced about ten liters of juice.  It's a bit sour and very concentrated, so we add a bit of sugar water to it to make it tastier.  We always freeze a good bit of it and use it on special occasions during the year.
I could have gone on picking and squeezing for another hour or more.  I tend to get into things when I do them, but I tore myself away from the task.  Time to get back into the world of words!
The words have to do with acknowledging that, as I approach the age of sixty-seven, I can't think of myself as "middle-aged" anymore.  I have to admit to myself that I'm an old man now, luckily a vigorous and healthy one, still able to climb up on ladders and pick fruit from high branches, still active, but old.
So I've got to squeeze the juice out of my remaining years the way I squeeze the juice out of the pomegranates.  That's the germ of a poem that I might or might not write.