Literalists, Figuratists, and Terrorists

I don't know how far I can pursue this thought, which has been percolating in my mind for years. Suddenly I see it as connected to religiously inspired terrorism, but I don't know whether I can articulate the connection.
In my years of association with religious people, I have come to see them as being of two kinds: the literalists, who believe in the absolute truth of their religious creeds, and the figuratists (of which I am one, if I can call my self religious at all), who understand that their religious observance is metaphorical and stands for an ineffable spiritual truth (which is shared with other spiritual traditions).
Literalists believe, for example, that God revealed himself at Mount Sinai and gave the Torah to the Israelites, just as the event is described in the Bible. Religious people of the second type might say, "something must have happened at Mount Sinai," or that the story is a myth -- not a "mere" myth, but a powerful, formative myth. For figuratists, the historical truth, if it is ever discovered, is of little relevance. It doesn't matter whether the exodus from Egypt actually occurred. What matters is that this is the way the JeWe see wish people understands itself, and the way Christianity subsequently used the story of the Exodus, and its use in literature, drama, painting, and so on.
There is no common language between the first and second kind of religious people. The figuratists understand religion as a collective work of art, created by communities over centuries. Thus, since religions are works of art, their inner ideational structure (one can't use the word "logic" here) is the associative, creative, mysterious structure of dreams. Religions, for us, are systems of symbols, and symbols are not real the way nature, for example, is real.
The literalists live in the dream world of religion, and it is more real to them than what we figuratists call "objective reality." And this is the meaning of the violence of religious extremists, not a rational meaning, but an expressive meaning. They do not draw any distinction between what we figuratists call symbols and empirical reality. Everything is symbolic.
We figuratists are mystified by religiously inspired violence, because it doesn't serve any discernible rational purpose. It is not calculated and political, like the Russian encroachment on the Ukraine. Nor is it what a figuratist would call symbolic, in that for the literalists, everything is symbolic, which means that nothing is symbolic in contradistinction to what is not symbolic.
We figuratists see the killing of innocent people, whether they happen to be standing next to a terrorist when he is assassinated by a drone, or whether they are attending a concert in Paris, as an act of unspeakable cruelty. For the literalist, we are all actors in a cosmic drama, and our lives and deaths are part of the plot. Killing people off is hardly different from getting rid of a character in a TV series.

Creativity and Dreams

In real life this painting, "Family of Saltimbanques," by Picasso, done in 1905, is huge. On my last visit to the National Gallery in Washington, DC, I stood before it for a long time, and now, too, when I see it in miniature, on the display of my computer, I can barely take my eyes off it, though I want to write something about it.
The painting has been on my mind because I might be giving a paper on "Translating Creativity," if my proposal is approved, at an upcoming professional convention, so I've been wondering how one recognizes creativity in the first place. To me, this painting is a, so extreme, indeed, that comment seems superfluousn extreme demonstration of artistic creativity, from which one can learn almost everything one needs to know about it.
We are most creative in our dreams, and this painting has a dreamlike quality: six figures are placed in a non-landscape, A fat middle-aged man in a reddish costume looks at a tall young man, dressed in a harlequin costume, who stands with his left hand behind his back and looks away from the man in red. A young girl in a ballet costume stands at the younger man's right, looking down and away from him. A boy, wearing only a bathing suit, approaches, carrying a barrel on his shoulder. He is almost in the center of the painting, but stands a bit behind the fat man. Another boy, younger, wearing a turquoise jacket, open at the neck, stands in a kind of dancer's pose, and, in the lower right corner of the painting, looking away from the five other people, sits a young woman in straw hat, whose gaze is also turned away from ours.
Who are these people? What is the connection between them? How did they get there? What are they doing? Where are they going? The painting only raises questions. Yet, despite all the unexplained things, Picasso used items of visual vocabulary that ordinarily mean something to us: costumes, poses, facial expressions, recognizable objects (a basket of flowers, a jug, a cask), a kind of landscape. These figures probably had personal meaning for Picasso, and they are meant to have personal meaning for the spectator as well, personally meaning that Picasso didn't state explicitly (that's part of what's dreamlike about the painting): parents and children (perhaps), youth and maturity, the impossibility of communication among people in their own worlds? We are invited to project our own issues on these figures.
Picasso was well-versed in the history of painting, and he must have thought, for example, of Watteau, whose painting of these "Italian comedians" is nearly as mysterious as Picasso's painting. What is the meaning of the statue behind the figures in the upper right of the painting? Why are these five actors standing where they are? (Five, because the face of a black man peers out between the left shoulder of the Pierrot figure and the musician who is bending over).
Watteau's comedians are dressed in recognizable costumes, like Picasso's saltimbanques. The dream is not entirely incoherent, the way some of my dreams are, but the choice of the figures, their pose, their situation all obey a dream-logic.
Dreams are notoriously difficult to remember, which may be why we need art: to evoke our dreams, or even to replace them.
As I meditate on these paintings and write about them, the city of Paris is reeling from cruel terrorist attacks that have left more than a hundred people dead, well-planned attacks that are, in their way, also a demonstration of creativity, also the acting out of a dream-logic.
I'm not sure what to do with that idea.

Some Thoughts about Hunger and a Fat Dentist

Understanding hunger is important to a lot of people in the developed world, because we believe we are too fat. If only we could be less hungry, we would eat less food, and we wouldn't be so fat.
I'm not thinking about Hunger with a capital 'H,' the hunger of people who don't have enough food at all. I have never experienced that kind of hunger, and I pray that I never well.
I'm also not thinking about the hunger one feels on Yom Kippur.
I'm also not thinking about the hunger one feels for emotional reasons, or just the simple pleasure of eating something sweet or salty, a brownie or some potato chips.
I'm thinking of the hunger that well-fed people feel at the hour when they ordinarily eat.
That hunger, as I experience it, is a kind of discomfort, not more acute than, let's say, having tired feet at a museum, and a lot less acute than a bad headache. But it's real discomfort.
That kind of hunger is different from other types of discomfort, because it's so easy to get rid of it. You don't have to take an analgesic. You don't have to sit down and take off your shoes. All you have to do is eat something.
I get very hungry before mealtimes and especially when, for some reason, I am
eating later than usual - much more hungry than a lot of people I know (like my wife).

Years ago, when I attended some meditation retreats, I was taught how to deal with discomfort while meditating. Instead of saying to yourself, "My back really hurts," you're supposed to think, "I have a sensation in my lower back," without classifying it as pain, and thus as something to avert. You're supposed to give the sensation your attention, to locate it, to feel it - and then, as happens in meditation, your mind will wander, you call your attention back to your breathing, and the sensation in your back no longer distracts you.
Can one do the same thing with hunger? It's seven o'clock, say, and you ordinarily eat at seven, but tonight you're going out and you won't be eating till nine. Your abdomen is telling you to put some food inside yourself.
You have several options: you can give in and eat something, you can hold out, not eat, and become grouchy, or you can examine the message your abdomen is sending you: Where is the discomfort situated? How acute is it? What other sensations are connected with it? Usually I eat something.
In our society, while we are constantly being bombarded with advertisements for highly caloric, unhealthy foods, nevertheless being overweight tends to be regarded as a moral failing. When I was a child, my mother routinely referred to our dentist with the almost Homeric epithet of "that fat pig," as in, "I have an appointment with [name withheld, even though my mother and the dentist are long deceased] today, that fat pig."
Fat or not fat, he was a great dentist.

I Don't/Can't Understand

A train of thought.
After living in Israel for more than forty years, I have come to realize that I will never understand this country. The society is too complex and diverse. The history is too deep and mixed up. People's agendas are strongly conflicted. And the symbolic importance of Israel in our own eyes and in the eyes of other people in the world - friends and enemies, both categories too extreme - not only makes it impossible to stick to facts, it also makes it impossible to figure out what the facts are.

Then I started thinking about the ways a society understands itself, if it's at all permissible to think of societies as entities that can understand or misunderstand. As individuals and as members of a society, we use the stories we tell about ourselves to persuade ourselves that we understand ourselves. Historians, social scientists, journalists, authors, film-makers, religious leaders, politicians, and so on to create and modify these stories. But every story is partial, selective.
This also applies to the stories that individuals tell themselves about themselves, to explain to themselves who they are. At bottom, I think people are as helpless to understand themselves as they are to understand the society and world they live in. We don't know enough, even about ourselves, to understand ourselves.
This thought led me to realize that all understanding is partial. No one can know enough to understand fully even the tiniest thing or event. For what would full understanding be like? To understand a water molecule in my blood, do I have to know how hydrogen was produced in the big bang that purportedly marked the beginning of the universe? Millions of biological processes transpire in our bodies every second. Can I ignore them if I want to understand myself? Only if I think that what goes on in my body has no connection with what goes on in my mind and heart.
Experimental science has moved toward understanding phenomena by keeping every variable but one constant, so as to understand how that variable works. But as soon as you put that variable back into the context of the whole phenomenon, you get stuck in a wilderness of details.
Also, of course, things are constantly in flux.
This line of thought led me to understand [sic!] something I heard years ago about the importance of metonymy - the part for the whole. Think of an ordinary film. In two hours or so, it takes you through a much longer period of time, years, perhaps. It does so by persuading us that the little scenes of life that we see on the screen are representative of much great chunks of experience.
This is true of all our experience of other people and of life. We have a conversation with someone and feel as if we know that person. We spend a week in Paris and feel as if we know the French. We know four or five supposed facts about someone and imagine we know their life history.
It's upsetting to think that all knowledge is partial. We want a story that will explain everything perfectly and leave no loose ends. So, inevitably we will be either deluded or disappointed.

Duty Calls - Do I Have to Listen?

Two things fall together: my reading of Shakespeare and the High Holidays.
Honor is one of the main themes in Shakespeare's plays, especially as the duty a person has to self-image. A noble person is expected, and expects himself, to behave nobly. Honor is worth more than life itself - or at least that is how the ideal is presented in the plays. Betrayal is both of the trust placed in one by others and of the standards to which one holds oneself.
Honor is not a particularly Jewish value, at least as it plays out among the European aristocracy. If you insult a rabbi, he's not going to challenge you to a duel.
But the theme of the High Holidays is not unrelated to the idea of honor: we are deeply aware that we have sinned, we promise to better ourselves, and we ask God for forgiveness. A Jew who takes her identity seriously sets high standards of behavior for herself. Failure to live up to those standards is almost inevitable, but one has the duty of trying.
The sense of duty applies in almost every area of life. One has duties toward one's family, one's friends, one's community, one 's employer, and oneself. The sense of duty is both contractual and emotional, to the letter of the law and to its spirit.
In my work as a translator, I often have no personal connection with my clients. I have never laid eyes on some of them. My obligation to them is strictly professional. Yet I feel a personal obligation to them - to do the best work I can, on time, even to do things that aren't expected of me like checking the spelling of authors' names. I try to live up to what I see as professional standards, and it's always a pleasure to encounter someone else who has that attitude.

* * *

Here's a great example of high professional standards:
Recently Dror Ben-Gur, a musician and saxophone repairman, told me about the Japanese repairman who instructed him in New York. Dror once arrived a few minutes early for a session and found a flute lying on the repairman's table, completely in pieces.
"How are you going to finish putting that together in time?" Dror asked.
"Watch this," said the repairman, and in five minutes he had assembled the flute down to the last screw and spring.
"How did you do that?" asked Dror.
"In Japan," the man replied, "we learn to work in the dark!"

* * *

Some people appear to have no sense of duty, while others suffer because their sense of duty is exaggerated. On Yom Kippur you're really not supposed to say to God, "I did the best I could," but for the sake of sanity, while it's a good idea to aspire to improve, one must be aware of one's limitations and accept them.

Electronic Shakespeare

When you read on a tablet, you don't feel the heft of the physical book, the feeling that the end is in sight as the stack of unread pages on your right (with an English book) gets smaller, and the bulk of read pages on your left gets bigger. I knew that when I got to The Tempest, I was close to the end, and I was surprised to find out that Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida still awaited me. Unless another play is hiding behind Troilus and Cressida, I'll have read through the complete works in a little while.

Timon of Athens, which I'd never read, turned out to be something like a hybrid of "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" and the Book of Job, and Titus Andronicus (I can't imagine anyone else reading that play unless it was assigned in a course) is as violent and gruesome as some of the movies and TV series I've been avoiding.
Clearly some of Shakespeare's works are of literary interest today only because they were written by the genius who wrote Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream. But even in the sub-standard plays there are passages of breathtaking beauty, of course.
Of course?
You try writing a passage of breathtaking beauty like John of Gaunt's praise of England from Richard II, not one of Shakespeare's greatest plays:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry, Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son, This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement or pelting farm: England, bound in with the triumphant sea Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds: That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

The project of reading all of Shakespeare offered me a fine demonstration of my ignorance (about British history, for example, and of Elizabethan English) and has left me with a lot of questions, whose answers I might pursue, if I'm not too lazy.
One of these questions involves the connection between dramatic convention and real life. One of the main drivers of plot in Shakespeare's plays is the conceit of love at first sight.
The moment Romeo lays eyes on Juliet, he forgets all other women. The moment Ferdinand spies Miranda (in The Tempest), he knows she's the woman for him. In Midsummer Night's Dream the lovers keep falling in and out of love with each other, on the spot, thanks to magic - perhaps a humorous comment about the dramatic convention.
I don't know the history of this convention. It certainly goes back as far as Jacob and Rachel in the Bible and remains powerful in contemporary fiction, drama, and film. So maybe there's something to it, and it's not just a literary convention.
In general, there is something to almost everything in these plays, meaning that, even though some of their concerns are local and time-bound, Shakespeare manages to present them in a way that enables us to identify with them, five hundred years after he wrote them. 
Perhaps I should be distinguishing between conventions like love at first sight, which he uses to push the action forward - insults to honor, intrigue and manipulation, deceit - and universal human concerns. 
Take Cymbeline, which involves a bet on a woman's chastity, rather offensive to twenty-first century readers. Still, if the spam messages I keep getting, advertisements for services to find out whether my spouse is cheating on me are indicative of anything, the issue of trust in relationships is perennial. 
Needless to say, the themes of ambition, revenge, honor, trust are not peculiar to English society at the end of the sixteenth century. Conventions change, but people have always been people, so I assume (and hope) we'll keep reading and staging Shakespeare.

A Hospital Lobby, Flute Practice, Turning my Back on Someone in Need

A week or so ago I found myself sitting in the lobby of a hospital with nothing much to do, waiting for my wife to emerge from a medical examination, so I started scribbling in my diary, something I do only occasionally. 

I used to write lengthy entries in diaries, and I kept them for years, but when our son Asher died, I threw away all my old diaries. I knew I would never reread them, and I didn't want to leave cartons full of banalities for posterity. His death made me feel very unimportant.

The paper in the diary I'm writing in now is hand-made and thick. I bought it in Mumbai. I write with a fountain pen, and it's fun to see the way the ink is absorbed in the paper. I write by hand because I enjoy the act of forming the letters. I get no physical pleasure from typing and seeing the letters pop up on my computer screen.

Since Asher died, I find myself prone to worry about illness and accidents – not to myself so much as to the people I love. But I wasn't worried about the results of my wife's examination. We were focused on the unpleasant preparations and never thought about the possibility that it might reveal some horrible disease (fortunately it didn't).

Recently two vital people we knew, both younger than we are, died of cancer. Our age cohort is thinning out. 

Once I was an optimist.

* * *

In my diary I started writing about the flute I bought at an exorbitant price, an unjustifiable extravagance, perhaps, but I'll try to justify it nonetheless.

How much longer do I have to play flute until I die? Not that many years. I'm sure I'll never be as good a player as I'd like to be, but why not give myself the pleasure of playing on a good instrument while I can still play? Besides, I'm a fairly rich man, though I find it hard to write those words (my mother always thought of us as “middle class”). I could afford to buy a professional-level instrument without affecting our standard of living at all – so I did it. Anyway, the flute will always be of value, and my heirs can sell it.

I wasn't really sure when I went to the music store in Tel Aviv that I would upgrade my flute, but the moment I played two or three notes on the instruments the salesman showed me, I could feel the difference between my decent instrument and the excellent ones I was trying out.

I know the flute is not going to sit in a corner untouched. I've become obsessive about practicing. Every day I go through a methodical routine to improve my tone and articulation, and this slow and careful work has carried over to my saxophone playing. I hear more.

* * *

I have been exposed to two different approaches to practice. My flute teacher, Raanan Eylon, is a stickler for detail and aims at control of the instrument. He has decades of experience and a coherent method for attaining that control. A couple of years ago I heard a fantastic young guitarist say, “practice the same thing every day” – a corroboration of Raanan's approach. If you practice the same thing every day, you can monitor your progress.

However, the late Arnie Lawrence, my musical guru, if I ever had one, said, “Don't practice! Play!” The approach of Raul Jaurenga, a brilliant tango musician to whom I was exposed this summer, is similar to Arnie's. He said you should start out by falling in love with your instrument, spending time every day just exploring the sounds you can make.

The point is to combine the two approaches. Arnie was a master of his instrument, and Raul plays the bandoneon with incredible skill. Raanan, with all his emphasis on sound production, aims at enabling his students to play a melody communicatively. When I play something badly he says: “I don't understand.” Technique and feeling must go hand in hand. Feeling must provide the drive for acquiring technique, and the acquisition of technique enables the expression of feeling.

* * *

As I was writing this I got a phone call that makes all this thinking about music feel terrifically self-indulgent (as if reading about the refugee crisis in Europe or the asylum seekers here in Israel weren't enough to make flute practice a bit like feeding brioche to the poor). Two distant relatives of mine have gotten themselves in a bind, and I've become involved in their problem even though, objectively (if there is such a thing), they are not my responsibility.

I am not prepared to do what a more charitable person would do, which is to take them into my home, lend them money, and care for them until they can get onto their feet. I would admire someone who did that, but I have to admit to myself that I'm not the kind of person I would admire.

I feel guilty and angry at the people who put me in a situation where I feel guilty.

Interesting, Important, and Authentic (1)

Nothing is absolutely interesting. A lot of what I care about, for example, is of little or no interest to most people, and a lot of what many people in the world care about (at least insofar as the media pays attention to it) is of little or no interest to me - like who wins a golf or tennis tournament, or whether a certain movie star is having an affair with another movie star.
Since I am a translator and editor, I am very interested in correct and effective word choice, issues of fidelity to the author's intention, sentence structure, and a great many other technical matters that I wouldn't necessarily care very much about if it weren't my job to care about them. I certainly don't expect anyone in a casual conversation to respond to these topics without a yawn.
Similarly, as an amateur musician interested in improving my improvisational skills, I am concerned with harmony, rhythm, phrasing, originality, coherence, and so on, with specific application to playing a melody over a series of chords. There is no reason why anyone who isn't trying to improvise in music to have the slightest interest in these things. You can enjoy listening to jazz without knowing how Sonny Rollins handled a half-diminished chord.
Yet good writers and movie-makers do manage to make technical details interesting even to people who ordinarily don't care about them. How?

**

Long ago, when I was a student of literature, I never considered the issue of why some writing is boring and other writing is fascinating. All the works we were reading in the courses that I took were more or less universally acknowledged to be important, hence interesting. And the better teachers managed to bring us into the works and make them interesting for most of us, because they themselves were interested in them. That, perhaps, is they key to arousing interest in an audience of readers, listeners, or viewers. One manages to make oneself interesting, and, consequently, what interests one will also interest others. Though, obviously, some of the students in general literature courses in college were only taking them because they were required to, and the only interest they developed in the books they read was related to passing the course. The charisma of the professors, if there was such, was lost on them.
I majored in French literature because I thought it was important, not just because I was good in French and enjoyed reading. I was interested in literature because I was convinced that it was important.
But what did I mean by important? In what way is literature important? How could I convince an economics or engineering major, for example, that he or she ought to care about Shakespeare? For that matter, how could they convince me that it was more important to master economics or electrical engineering than to understand King Lear?
Is "importance" just as relative as "interest"?

Klezmer and the Unity of the Jewish People (?)

We enjoyed the Klezmer festival in Safed because the music was, in general, great, the crowds were relaxed and friendly, and almost every variety of Jewish Israeli was represented. Because admission to the concerts was free, lots of people who couldn't ordinarily afford to go to concerts came to Safed to hear the music. The streets were lined with booths selling fast food, jewelry, clothes, and assorted stuff (I bought a digital wristwatch for only twenty sheqels!).

Between pieces, many of the Israeli musicians offered religious inspiration. After all, Safed was the home of Kabbalah five hundred years ago, and a lot of the townspeople are following personal, mystical agendas, floating through the streets of the old city a few centimeters off the ground.
Speaking for myself, I could have done without earnest sermons about the potency of the month of Elul for penitence, the coming of the messiah, and miracles that came through prayer. Music itself is enough of a miracle.
One of the sermonizers, the guitarist in the middle of the top picture, gave a heartfelt plea for Jewish unity. If only we were all unified, respecting differences but still together, we could surmount all obstacles.
His talk made me realize how much anxiety people like him feel because of the deep and significant conflicts among segments of the Israeli Jewish population (forget about the gaps between the Jewish Israelis and the Muslim, Christian, and Druze Arabs, as well as the black African asylum seekers, and the non-Jewish immigrants from the former USSR).
What kind of unity was he talking about?
I deeply disapprove of the behavior and opinions of quite a few of my fellow Jewish citizens of Israel, and I know they disapprove of me. For example, I regard the Jewish settlers in Hebron as criminals. Expressing that opinion publicly, on Facebook, for example, is an invitation to vicious attacks, even death threats (since almost no one reads this blog, I don't think I have anything to fear on that account). How can there be unity between people who disapprove so categorically of one another?
Anyway, Jewish unity is a myth. There never was Jewish unity, and there never will be. We have a culture of controversy and confrontation, both within the tradition and between traditionalists and modernists. Perhaps because we were always differentiated from the gentiles around us, we are very sensitive to differences within our community: differences in ethnicity, in levels of Jewish observance, in social class, in political orientation, and in level of education.

Shlomo Bar, an extremely Moroccan musician, appeared with Tsemed Re'im, an extremely Ashkenazic pair of singers who have been performing together for more than forty years. They sang beautifully and made a lot of stupid jokes about Moroccans and Ashkenazim, but they also showed great respect for each other's music and made a show of the traditional Jewishness they all drew upon. They, too, preached Jewish unity, as if admiration for both Andalusian and Moldovan Jewish music would solve all of Israel's problems. Their message was a feel good message, not overtly religious or political: we can all get along, and our culture is big enough for both Oriental and Klezmer music.
But anxiety about lack of unity has a strong political dimension. That anxiety is a characteristic of right wing politics, certainly in Israel, and probably elsewhere as well, and comfort with diversity and difference of opinion is characteristic of the left. The left challenges the status quo, the right maintains it.
One reason why the left can't get its message across to the very people who are suffering most because of right wing policies is the failure to address this anxiety. The left is seen as negative, controversial, divisive. Zahava Galon (the head of the leftwing Zionist party, Meretz) doesn't make anyone feel good.

Klezmer Plus

From the end of July to the beginning of August, every day for a week, I was playing music at the international Klezmer Seminar here in Jerusalem - paradise!

About forty musicians attended, mainly clarinetists, but also flautists, violinists, and saxophonists (including two other baritone sax players). Many of the participants were young music students, but there were three or four professional musicians, and a lot of good amateurs. People came from Germany, France, Switzerland, and even Brazil, as well as from here in Israel.
It was all acoustic, nothing electronic, nothing synthesized.
In addition to workshops and master classes from nine to four, every evening we gave a concert somewhere else in Jerusalem. The concerts were more than well attended, some by more than a thousand people.

Actually, I'm not a big fan of klezmer, and I wouldn't have signed up for the program if they hadn't offered a tango workshop and Balkan music as well. But now that I've played some klezmer stuff, I'm more disposed to like it.

The teachers were extraordinary. Every morning I attended a tango workshop taught by Raul Jaurena, a bandoneon player, composer, and arranger originally from Uruguay. He is the kind of musician that can never be trained in a conservatory, someone who grew up playing his music as part of a living tradition.
We worked very diligently to get his arrangements of tangos just right - and we didn't actually manage to learn them well enough to perform, because they were a bit too tough for the three clarinetists in the group. But the experience of rehearsing with a master like him was more important than the final result.

Equally inspiring was the German klezmer clarinetist, Helmut Eisel.
The entire group of forty musicians was led in performance by a brilliant quartet, Les Gitanes Blondes, a klezmer group based in Munich.

The communication among musicians playing together is uplifting. Being with other people who were willing to take a week out of their lives and incur the expense of participating was a fine thing.

Under the Knife

I am used to being pretty healthy. I had a minor operation on my big toe yesterday - sounds ludicrous, doesn't it? - and I realized that it was the first time I was in a hospital for any kind of treatment since I was ten, the end of the summer of 1954, when I broke my leg very seriously.
The operation was to remove a lumpy thing from my toe, not a tumor, because it had begun to be painful, and the bureaucracy was more formidable than the operation itself. First I had to get an appointment with an orthopedist who specializes in the foot, and his first available appointment, when I called in early May, was in late June. To get my health fund to pay for the visit, I had to obtain a large number of documents, and when the time finally came for my appointment, I ended up being seen at twelve-thirty or so, although I'd been called for two hours earlier.
The consultation was at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, a huge, labyrinthine factory of a hospital, which has been on the verge of bankruptcy for several years. As I wandered through the halls, looking for the orthopedic outpatient clinic, I could only think of all the parts of one's body that can stop working. Not only was I made aware of how many of one's bodily organs can break down, but I saw hundreds of worried people in the corridors. Almost all my recent visits to Hadassah were for the births of my grandchildren, and everyone in the Mother and Child building looked pretty happy.
Once I saw the doctor, and he agreed that I needed an operation, I had to run another bureaucratic gauntlet. Even though the operation was minor, on an outpatient basis, I had to have a complicated blood test, an ECG, an ultra-sound on my foot, and a chest x-ray.
So my wife drove me to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus yesterday morning at 7:30, and of course I was fasting. I also hadn't slept well the night before, though I wasn't aware of being nervous about the operation.
Dozens of people gathered in the surgical outpatient department, including quite a few parents with young children, mainly Palestinians. We also bumped into some people we knew. Again there was bureaucracy and a lot of waiting around. My turn in the operating room didn't come until around 11:30. I was pretty hungry and thirsty by then.
What's astonishing about the hospital is the way Jews and Arabs mix without visible tension.. Doctors, nurses, patients, and workers can be all native speakers of Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, English, or what have you. The anesthesiologist who numbed me was Palestinian, one of the nurses was Russian, one of the physicians was also Russian, and one of them was, I think, English.
Today the nurse at the health fund who changed the bandage on my toe was a young Armenian woman from the Old City. If only we could live together outside of the hospital the way we do inside it, life in this country would be closer to tolerable.
I imagine I'll be seeing a lot more of hospitals as I speed along from being old to being very old (or dead), and I'm not looking forward to it.

Living Cinematographically

I have begun experiencing my life as if it were in a movie, after spending hours and hours watching films in the past week and a half at the Jerusalem International Film Festival.
The first movie we saw was "Tikkun," directed by Avishai Sivan, which eventually won a lot of prizes at the festival. It was shot in black and white and depicts the Hasidic community of Jerusalem from the outside, though it pretends to see it from within. It was thought-provoking, very slow moving, laconic, and not entirely convincing to me (though I appear to be in a minority).
We then saw "The Assassin," a Taiwanese film directed by Hou Hsiai-Hsien, which was slow-moving, boring, laconic and engimatic. I strongly recommend that you avoid it.
Another slow-moving film (maybe films shown at festivals have the right to be slow-moving, as it were, because they are addressing an audience committed to film), but an excellent one, was "The Pearl Button," directed by the Chilean Patricio Guzman, whose earlier film, "Nostalgia for Light," we had seen a few years ago at the film festival. Guzman moves from the element of water through the indigenous people of Patagonia, who were almost entirely exterminated by white colonists, to the Pinochet regime: nature and politics.
Another Chilean film that we saw was "The Club," about a group of defrocked Catholic priests in a coastal village. Harsh - I don't think many committed Catholics would enjoy it - but original and, again, thought-provoking. The high level of these two films indicates a sophisticated film industry and a society concerned with probing its own dark areas.
I went to see "Dreamcatcher" by myself, because my wife was deterred by the subject. It's a documentary about Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute and drug addict who now devotes her life to saving other women from that fate. One admires Myers-Powell greatly from start to finish and feels nothing but empathy and sadness for the victimized girls and women she reaches out to. However, the movie barely touches on the victimizers, the men who rape girls and traumatize them, so they turn to prostitution, and who patronize prostitutes, often beating them up and sometimes murdering them.
We saw one Indian movie, "Umrika," which was charming but slight. We liked it because it showed us India again.
We also saw "I Smile Back," because it stars Sarah Silverman in a serious acting role, not as a comedian, and we were sorry we saw it (though I have to admit that I was impressed by Silverman's acting). The film had two major problems. Rather than a plot, it had a situation: a wife and mother was mentally unstable and dependent on drugs, did irresponsible and self-destructive things, and there seemed to be little hope for her rehabilitation at the end. Also, because Silverman is not just an actress, but a comedian with a persona, it's very hard to see her as not in the role of the raunchy, irreverent stand-up comic.

We would strongly recommend "Iraqi Odyssey," a documentary by Samir, about his own family, scattered all over the world, like millions of other Iraqis, by the violent politics of their country. Samir manages to bring out the vivid personalities of his relatives and reminds you of the catastrophic history of his country, tying it to their fate.
We also saw the last documentary film made by Albert Maysles, "Iris," about Iris Apfel, a nonagerian New York Jewish woman, who talks just like everyone I knew when I was growing up, a woman who has devoted her life to style. Unlike the other movies that we chose, which mainly make you feel sad about the state of the world, "Iris" was cheerful.
"Land and Shade," a Colombian film directed by Cesar Acevedo, was another slow-moving movie, but one that didn't get very far. At most it makes you think about the oppressed workers who cut the sugar cane to sweeten your food.
I think the best film we saw was "Song of my Mother," directed by Erol Mintas, about displaced Kurdish people in Istanbul. The hero, an elementary school teacher teaching Kurdish children, is torn between the demands of his mother, obsessed with returning to their village, which has been destroyed, his pregnant fiancee, and his ambitions as a writer.
On top of these eleven films, we got hooked on a twenty part Danish thriller, "The Killing," which is much better than the American version, which we initially started to watch by mistake - I downloaded the wrong series.
So no wonder I am looking at my life as if it were a slow-moving movie, which might be more of a situation than a plot.

Difficulties - Dietary and Musical

Another reason why losing weight is challenging: you aren't called upon to do anything so much as not to do something.
Doing something can be difficult, of course: getting yourself to exercise, to make unpleasant phone calls, or to get around to an errand you have been postponing. But not doing something is even more challenging, unless it's something you don't do anyway. I've never been a smoker, so not smoking is no challenge for me, and neither is not shooting up with heroin. But everyone eats (except anorexics), so not eating at all is not an option.
The challenge is turning abstention (I won't eat any more chocolate ice cream) into a positive action. Could it be that re-framing abstention as action is a way of making the process easier: I am changing my eating habits.
Is this related?
Yesterday I played flute duets with a friend, who has been playing flute for a lot longer than I have, though it isn't his primary instrument, and I played below my ability. Why did that happen?
It's always harder to play with other people than it is to play by yourself. You have to listen to them, keep up with them, and be listened to by them. You're playing under pressure, even if the people you are playing with are friends and supportive. When I play alone, I'm not self-conscious. I assume that anyone who can hear me is trying hard not to pay attention. But my friend and I were paying attention our own playing, and attention is critical (if not necessarily judgmental). Also, we were sight-reading a bunch of duets that neither of us had practiced, so we naturally made mistakes (my friend was also playing below his ability).
The difficulty in playing an instrument in a new situation, with other musicians, is in collecting yourself, remembering to do all the things that make your playing passable: breathing, embouchure, fingering, feeling the music and playing it correctly. Paying attention to all of these factors is easier when you don't have the additional distraction and pressure of playing with someone else.
So maybe it's a matter of re-framing again. The presence of a fellow musician, rather than distracting you from what you need to bring to your playing, should focus your attention on it.

Thoughts About Losing Weight (Again)

Until I was about fifty, I was a jogger, and my weight wasn't a problem at all. We didn't even own a scale. But I got lazy and heavy.
For the past twenty years or so, I have weighed about eight kilograms more than I wanted to, and I somehow thought that I could will the excess weight off very gradually, without making any drastic change in my eating habits. Indeed, my weight fluctuated between two kilograms below my ordinary weight to one or two kilograms above it, but it always settled back to the same number. I wasn't gaining weight, which is apparently an achievement in itself, but I certainly wasn't losing any.
Essentially, I wasn't seriously motivated to put myself on a diet. Sure, it would be nice not to have the paunch I was carrying around, but most men my age have a paunch, usually quite a bit bigger. It goes with the territory. Also, the articles I looked at casually seemed to say that being moderately overweight wasn't much of a health risk. But perhaps that's a tautology: if you aren't so fat that you're endangering your health, you aren't overweight.
A couple of times I did manage to diet and lose those eight kilograms, but, while my attention was directed elsewhere, as it were, my weight crept back up to what it was before I dieted. That's a blow to one's motivation.
But about two months ago I had some alarming results on a blood test, which gave me a strong motivation to reduce the carbohydrates in my diet very drastically. On top of that, my knees have become arthritic, and carrying excess weight isn't good for them. Since then I've lost five of those eight kilograms. Let's see whether this time, once I get down to my target weight, I can stay there.
My strategy is not to count things or weigh things but to eliminate certain foods, especially bread, as completely as possible from my diet, and, when I'm hungry, to eat foods like vegetables, fruit, and nuts, which are good for me. Or I drink a cup of coffee or tea (without sugar or any artificial sweetener, of course).
While subjecting myself to this regimen, I've noticed some things:

• Carbohydrates are habit-forming and eating them stimulates the desire for more. Conversely, refraining from eating them reduces the desire for them.
• In order to lose weight (or change one's diet for any other reason), you must believe what should be obvious, but which most people deny: what you eat really makes a difference. It's so easy to say: "What harm could a mouthful of halva or a couple of cookies do?" (It helps if you congratulate yourself for not giving in to temptation.)
• If you watch what people eat (at a buffet or party, for example) you can generally see a strong correlation between what they eat, how much they eat, and how fat they are. But you have to remember that it's not immoral to be fat, and it's not virtuous to be thin. Eating is fun, and if some people want to enjoy themselves, it's up to them.
• There is a difference between real hunger and simply wanting to put something tasty in your mouth.
• There are times when I feel like eating something in some generic way, but I stop myself and compare my present, dieting behavior, to my former eating habits. So that's why I couldn't lose those eight kilograms!
• Oddly, when I weigh myself in the morning and see those low numbers, I sometimes feel alarmed. A couple of people have noticed that I've shed some weight and have asked my whether I'm ill. We're conditioned in contradictory fashion about weight. We think that slim people are pretty, but we think that thin people are unhealthy.
• Being too strict with yourself is counter-productive.
• Nothing is more boring than listening to someone talk about their food obsessions. Enough of this!

Creativity and Dreams

The most creative moments in our lives are dreams, and there is a strong connection between art and dreaming. For me, the best part of art is the inexplicable part, as in this famous, enigmatic painting by Picasso, where the figures appear to be floating in a dream.

A while back I proposed giving a talk entitled "Translating Creativity" at the annual translators' conference in Jerusalem, but we were going to be in India when the conference was held, so I withdrew my proposal. But I'm still deeply interested in the topic.
When I was taking clarinet lessons in high school, my teacher, Irving Neidich, told me that the greatest music is that which surprises you every time you hear it, which makes sense. How else could a soloist play the same piece time and time again and not be bored and not bore her listeners? Only because she discovers something new in the piece every time she plays it.
I did a brief search for "creativity" on the Internet and ran across a "creativity test," which, being a sucker for that kind of thing, I took. It turns out my creativity is significantly lower than average. Troubled by that result, I took another look at some of the statues I have made, and I realized that the people who designed the test had a rather different idea of creativity in their mind.

It was fairly dumb of me to bother taking that test, when our house is full of concrete evidence of my creativity.
If I ever get around to writing that paper on "Translating Creativity," it would have to begin with a section on recognizing creativity. And, since you can't recognize something you can't define, I'd have to define it.
And that would bring me back to the subject of dreams, which are undeniably creative. If you look up "dreams" on the Internet, you'll find dozens of articles about "How to Harness Your Dreams" to succeed and make a lot of money. I'm not interested either in that or in dreams as a key to one's personality. I'm interested in the feeling you have when you dream: you are in an invented world, which you invented, and things happen arbitrarily there. However, you accept those events as if they were ordinary. A person you haven't thought of for years shows up in your dream, but he or she doesn't look at all the way they did in real life - but you know who they are! You also find yourself in inexplicable situations. In my anxiety dreams I discover I had been supposed to teach a college course in calculus and forgotten about it, aside from the fact that I've never studied calculus and could not more teach it than I could teach Sumerian.
Recently we heard performances of Beethoven string quartets. In a way, the late ones are like a stream of consciousness, the volatile flow of moods, as in a dream. Obviously Beethoven didn't record his moods in real time. But he remembered the flow and put it in musical form, highly complex, carefully planned, but sounding spontaneous.

Thinking in the Languages of Music

It's a good idea to take a simple melody, "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," or "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," and play it in all twelve keys, or to take a phrase you made up, a riff, and play it in all the twelve keys.
Usually I do it using the circle of fifths, so that the tonic of the tune becomes the dominant next time around, but once in an informal music group I was attending, we were challenged to play "Autumn Leaves" twelve times, each time going down half a step. We started making a lot of mistakes when we got to the keys with lots of sharps and flats. Jazz musicians commonly play that trick with "Mack the Knife."
Another good idea is to play through all seven of the modes in one key, starting in the Lydian mode with the sharp fourth and then flatting each note in proper order till you get to the Locrian, with the flatted fifth, then flatting the tonic and finding yourself playing the Lydian mode in them in the next key, and so on until you get back to the first key. E.g.:
C - D- E- F# - G - A- B - C (Lydian)
C - D- E- F - G - A- B- C (Ionian or major)
C - D- E- F - G - A- Bb - C (Mixolydian)
C - D- Eb - F- G- A- Bb - C (Dorian)
C - D- Eb - F- G- Ab- Bb - C (Aeolian, or natural minor)
C - Db- Eb - F- G- Ab- Bb - C (phrygian)
C - Db- Eb - F- Gb- Ab- Bb - C (locrian)

then when you flat the C, turning it enharmonically into B, you have the B Lydian scale:
B - Db (=C#) - Eb (=D#) - F (=E#) - Gb (=F#) - Ab (=G#) - Bb (=A#) - B


This kind of exercise is valuable because it's interesting and forces you to pay attention to what you're playing. It's a bit like changing sentences from one tense to another when you're learning a language or moving from singular to plural verb forms.

Incidentally, while I was checking on the nomenclature, I ran across a valuable chart of scales.

Who's Doing the Playing?

My flute teacher tends to work more with my imagination than with the mechanics of playing, and sometimes his instructions mystify me.
From the start, more than two years ago, he has been telling me to put myself into the notes that I play, and I have been struggling with that metaphor.
In a way, it's no different from the general message of Buddhist meditation. One should always put oneself into where one is and what one does.
My teacher also speaks of being aware of reality while one is playing, being attentive to what comes out of the flute and also to what one is putting into the instrument, and how (the quality of the breathing, the vibrato, the shape of one's lips, the tension in one's fingers, how one is standing and holding the instrument, and so on). This is clearly another way of saying that one should put oneself into the notes one plays.
His main criticism of my playing is what I might call timidity. I want to avoid making mistakes, so I don't take chances. I hold back and don't play with confidence. (Naturally, at the beginning, when I was never sure whether a note would come out of the instrument at all, I lacked self-confidence, but by now I am closer to being able to produce a reasonable sound every time I play a note, so I should get past that timidity.)
At my last lesson he told me that my alter-ego should be playing, because playing a musical instrument is one of those rare opportunities that life gives one to express what one ordinarily keeps under wraps.
This not an easy instruction for me. I am in fact not big on alter-egos. I'm not an actor by nature, though I could think of a few situations where I do let my alter-ego do the acting: mainly when I participate in religious services.
So, this morning, I decided to imagine an alter-ego who could play for me. I was very surprised by the figure that appeared in my imagination, not Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, but large, rather corpulent man in a tuxedo, light on his feet and very assertive. This morning he didn't play much better than I do, but he has potential.

Piano

I had to have some oral surgery, and the doctor said I wasn't allowed to play a wind instrument for a week or ten days, so I've been playing a little piano, very badly, instead.
The piano makes me think of a lecture-demonstration we just heard. Gil Shohat was ostensibly talking about madness in modern Western classical music, but it was mainly Shohat being his charming self (I am a big fan of his).
He started by playing a CD of the first Prokofiev violin concerto, with a mainly sweet and melodic first movement and a manic second movement, leaving me puzzled. How could Prokofiev have thought up that music? How did he plan it out?
Later Shohat was joined by a fabulous pianist, Dorel Golan, whom I had heard before and remembered. Her performances of extremely difficult etudes, entirely from memory, were extraordinary.
So, from piano to piano, there was a clip on the NY Times web site about an eleven yeard old jazz prodigy from Bali (!) named Joey Alexander (check him out), who plays better now than most pianists can ever hope to play.
One can only marvel at such a gift, be grateful for the rejuvenation of jazz, and hope that he develops into a mature artist (or, for that matter, that he takes up theoretical physics or whatever he wants to do).
No matter how wonderful these musicians are, both the prodigies and the products of long, disciplined practice, they don't make one's own meager efforts to produce music any less valuable to ourselves. One can't have a world where only one in ten thousand does what he or she does on the highest level, and all the rest of us sit in awe.
True, a lot of modern music (actually since the beginning of the nineteenth century) can only be played by virtuosi, and this might be a flaw in it - hard to play and hard to listen to. Last month I heard a performance of a string quartet by the Israeli composer, Tzvi Avni, much farther away from the conventions of classical music than Prokofiev's work, and I wondered how the musicians learned their impossible parts separately and then put them together, a truly astonishing feat - to say nothing of the composer's work. How did he hear the music in his mind and notate it?
We humans are capable of such wonderful things, and just a few hundred kilometers north of where I am, in Syria, we are treating our fellow humans with ferocious cruelty, and "the world" (whatever that is) can't or won't put a stop to it.

Interesting and Important

After my mother died, more than twenty years ago, we faced the problem of dealing with the contents of her home, since my father had died a year earlier. We live in Israel, and her home was in New Jersey, making it difficult and expensive to bring her belongings to us, even assuming there would be room in our apartment for all of her things.
She had told us about certain items that she wanted to give to some of her nieces and nephews, and we took care of that. But we couldn't deal easily with all the rest, trying to sell everything for what it was worth. So we called in a man who specialized in emptying out people's apartments, paying some amount for some of the things, and guaranteeing that the place would be empty and ready to sell. Obviously we could take what we wanted from the apartment before letting him have his way.
He was a heavyset, blunt Italian-American, super smart, friendly, and persuasive.
After surveying the entire place and making notes to himself about the furniture, decorative objects, paintings, and appliances, he sat and went through my mother's costume jewelry rapidly, saying "this is interesting" whenever he came upon a piece he liked, before offering us a global price for the whole batch.

I was interested in the way he used the word "interesting."
He meant, "I can sell this for a profit," but it wasn't only that. He took my wife and me to his warehouse, and it was clear that he liked his business, loved the objects he had for sale, and enjoyed having them pass through his hands.

"Interesting," after all, is a relative term. Every item of my mother's costume jewelry must have interested her when she bought it, or my father, when he gave it to her, but there was a lot of it she never wore - she had lost interest in it. My wife did not share her taste in jewelry at all, so absolutely nothing in the batch interested her. Some of the pieces were of great interest to me, regardless of their monetary value, because they reminded me of my mother in her prime, and I didn't let the man have them.

"Important" is another relative term. Is anything objectively important? No. Events, people, animals, and objects are only important to the people who find them important. A historian could tell you that the Opium Wars in nineteenth century China were very important, but if someone said, "The history of European colonialism in China is not important to me," the historian can only respond, "Okay, don't take my course or read my book."
Of course, one might also tell the historian, "I acknowledge that your topic is important, but it doesn't interest me right now. I'd rather focus on professional golf, in which I take a great personal interest."
We aren't always interested in what is important.

The Touches of Sweet Harmony

"Is it not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?" (Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, Scene iii)

The question Shakespeare puts in Benedick's mouth is one of the deepest questions we still ask about music: Why does it affect us the way it does?

Shakespeare's characters have more to say about music toward the end of The Merchant of Venice, a denouement which, for Shakespeare and his Christian audience, was entirely satisfactory. Not only is Shylock defeated, he is forced to convert, and his daughter has also converted and married a Venetian nobleman.

Lorenzo's praise of music in conversation with Jessica, his bride, in Act V, Scene I, is symbolic of this harmonious ending. He begins:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

These lines are of such exquisite beauty that no comment is necessary, beyond noting that it shows us Lorenzo's refinement and his true love for Jessica. He goes on to speak of the metaphorical music of the heavens:

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

This heavenly music, the motion of the stars, is mystical:

Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

Jessica's response is puzzled:

            I am never merry when I hear sweet music.

Lorenzo's first explanation is psychological, empirical:

The reason is, your spirits are attentive:
For do but note a wild and wanton herd,
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;
If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
Or any air of music touch their ears,
You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze
By the sweet power of music:

He then goes on to confirm this observation with a reference to classical literature:

therefore the poet
Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods;
Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.

Finally, in a kind of non sequitur, he claims that failure to appreciate music is a sign of villainy, probably a veiled reference to her Jewish father's ethical and spiritual inadequacy (prior to his conversion):

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

Lorenzo's line of thought is as follows: the music we hear on earth is a reflection of the divine voices of the angels in heaven, by implication, what is revealed in Christianity; therefore sensitivity to music, although natural (even wild animals are subject to it), is a sign of communion with mystical truth, and those insensitive to it are not to be trusted. The people in The Merchant of Venice who are not to be trusted are the Jews.

Obviously a Jew reading these lines rejects the Lorenzo's theory, but is there a less tendentious ethical dimension to the love of music?

We are left with Benedick's mystery: “Is it not strange that sheeps' guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?”

A Musical Gem

Tellingly, although musical talent is almost universally regarded as a sign of general intelligence, if not genius, African-American musicians have, in the past, been thought of as having "a natural sense of rhythm." As an amateur musician who has tried for years to learn to play jazz, I have nothing but respect for the intelligence and craftsmanship, and, yes, genius, of the African-Americans who invented and developed the idiom.
Among the most brilliant Afro-American musicians who have enriched the culture of the world, was the eccentric Thelonious Monk, who wrote the gem I've been thinking about, "Straight no Chaser." It's a twelve-bar blues, with no substitute chords or advanced harmonization: it's straight, as the title announces. But it's all chaser.
The melody is also deceptively simple, a riff that's repeated ten times, with some variations, including a chromatic version of it near the end. Hardly changing the riff at all, Monk made it fit perfectly over the traditional harmonic structure of the blues. It's a bit like a puzzle that's been solved, but the solution is so clever that the challenge of the puzzle remains in the air. What makes it so elusive and unpredictable is the way Monk starts the riff on different beats, managing to surprise the listener again and again in the restricted, twelve-bar framework. 
I can hardly think of a piece more satisfying to play, as hard as it is to play it well.

Enough of "Measure for Measure" - Shakespeare (6)

The very title of Measure for Measure counsels moderation, so I've started reading the next play in the Collected Works, another dark comedy, The Merchant of Venice - particularly dark for Jews.
But I did want to mention a few more things about MfM that struck me. One of them is connected with the clown-character, Elbow.
Like many of Shakespeare's comic characters, his name is absurd:

ANGELO Elbow is your name? why dost thou not speak, Elbow?

POMPEY He cannot, sir; he's out at elbow. (Act II, Scene i).

In an effort to use high language, Elbow is also given to malapropism, one of Shakespeare's favorite kinds of verbal humor.In the same scene Escalus tries to elicit a coherent story from Elbow:

ESCALUS How know you that?

ELBOW My wife, sir, whom I detest before heaven and your honour,--
ESCALUS How? thy wife?
ELBOW Ay, sir; whom, I thank heaven, is an honest woman,--
ESCALUS Dost thou detest her therefore?
ELBOW I say, sir, I will detest myself also, as well as she.
 People are not what they seem in the play. The friar is really the duke, the virtuous Angelo is really a vicious lecher, and the lecherous Claudio is really a faithful husband.
While Elbow inadvertently says the opposite of what he means, most of the other characters do it purposely upon various occasions.
Vincentio, the Duke, tells everyone he is going away, but instead he sticks around in disguise. He allows Claudio and his sister Isabella to believe he will let Claudio be executed, which he has no intention of doing, and he makes Isabella think that he has been executed. The Provost sends Angelo the head of a prisoner who conveniently happens to have died, telling him that it is Claudio's head. Angelo beats around the bush before telling Isabella she can save her brother by sleeping with him:

Admit no other way to save his life,--
As I subscribe not that, nor any other,
But in the loss of question,--that you, his sister,
Finding yourself desired of such a person,
Whose credit with the judge, or own great place,
Could fetch your brother from the manacles
Of the all-building law; and that there were
No earthly mean to save him, but that either
You must lay down the treasures of your body
To this supposed, or else to let him suffer;
What would you do?
                                               Act II, Scene iv

Later, following Vincentio's instructions, Isabella arranges an assignation with Angelo, intending to send Mariana in her place. Most perfidiously of all, Angelo goes back on his promise to Isabella and orders Claudio's execution, and Lucio lies to everyone.


Information is always a major element in the unfolding of a plot: what the audience knows and what the characters know, and when they find things out. In Measure for Measure people are not what they seem. The friar is really the duke, the virtuous Angelo is really a vicious lecher, and the lecherous Claudio is really a faithful husband. Part of the resolution of the plot is the realignment of true identities: the right person marries the right person, and everyone knows who they are.
A true comedy is benign. Everyone is happy at the end, more or less.
A tragedy leaves a lot of characters dead, but many are ennobled.
Measure for Measure, a dark comedy is neither benign nor ennobling. The law cannot eliminate vice, even if it is unreasonably severe (suggesting that the law must always be inadequate to the circumstances of life). Lucio must marry a whore, and Angelo must marry the woman he has wronged. People connive and lie to each other.
That's life, I suppose.

Shakespeare (5): Real Vice and Vice in Name Only

We learn that Claudio is to be beheaded for getting his fiancee pregnant from the Madam of a brothel, Mistress Overdone, who complains that her business is bad:

What with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk.

Pompey, her tapster, then enters and gives her even worse news: "All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down."

But then he reassures her: "Come; fear you not: good counsellors lack no
clients: though you change your place, you need not change your trade." 

Pompey is confident that prostitution can outlawed but never eliminated. In Act II, Scene i, he says so to Escalus:

ESCALUS 

How would you live, Pompey? by being a bawd? What do you think of the trade, Pompey? is it a lawful trade?

POMPEY

If the law would allow it, sir.

ESCALUS

But the law will not allow it, Pompey; nor it shall not be allowed in Vienna.

POMPEY

Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?

ESCALUS

No, Pompey.

POMPEY Truly, sir, in my poor opinion, they will to't then.

In Act III, Scene ii, Lucio says more or less the same thing to the Duke in his disguise as a friar:

LUCIO

A little more lenity to lechery would do no harm in [Angelo]: something too crabbed that way, friar.

DUKE VINCENTIO

It is too general a vice, and severity must cure it.

LUCIO
     Yes, in good sooth, the vice is of a great kindred; it is well allied: but it is impossible to extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put down.

I believe that this is Shakespeare's opinion, and at the end of the play we see severity applied correctly. Unlike Claudio, who fully intended to marry Julietta, Lucio has fathered a child with one of Mistress Overdone's sex workers, and he has no intention of marrying her until he is forced to do so:

DUKE VINCENTIO

Is any woman wrong'd by this lewd fellow,
As I have heard him swear himself there's one
Whom he begot with child, let her appear,
And he shall marry her: the nuptial finish'd,
Let him be whipt and hang'd.

LUCIO

I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whore.

Four marriages are about to take place at the end of the comedy. Claudio, spared, will marry Julietta, Angelo, reprimanded, will marry the woman he jilted, Lucio will be forced to marry a woman of ill repute, whom he wronged, and Vicentio intends to marry the virtuous Isabella, whom he has also wronged by toying with her emotions and allowing her to believe her brother is dead - but this is acceptable within the conventions of Elizabethan theater.

Why We Should Look for Ideas in "Measure for Measure" - Shakespeare (4)

Shakespeare was fortunate to live early in the age of freedom of information and able to educate himself by reading plenty of printed books. A century earlier, printed books were scarce, and two centuries before that, there were none at all.
In any society, what counts as true information is determined by institutions such as universities. In medieval Europe, the universities belonged to the church, and education, in the sense of book learning - theology, law, medicine - was essentially an ecclesiastical monopoly. Other kinds of practical education were in the hands of craftsmen, who imparted their knowledge and skill to apprentices. In medieval Europe, probably the only prestigious knowledge aside from university studies was the military training of the aristocracy.
During the Renaissance, the church and its universities lost their uncontested power to determine what an educated person should know and what was true. An intelligent, literate person like Shakespeare could educate himself outside of the universities, and his plays provide abundant evidence that he did so. He knew British and ancient history, classical mythology, and literature. He was familiar with the ideas under discussion in his time and put them in the mouths of his characters:

Look at Angelo's argument to Isabella, who has come to plead for her brother's life, in Act II, Scene ii:

Condemn the fault and not the actor of it?
Why, every fault's condemn'd ere it be done:
Mine were the very cipher of a function,
To fine the faults whose fine stands in record,
And let go by the actor.

Or Vicentio's effort to persuade Claudio that life is worthless in Act III, Scene i:

Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn'st toward him still. 

But, more importantly, ideas are at issue in the very action of the play, and I plan to discuss them.

Measure for Measure Again - Shakespeare (3)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
The Warrior (Fantasy Portrait), c. 1770
Oil on canvas
The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

When I saw this painting on my recent visit to the Berkshires, I was immediately reminded of the character of Lucio, who appears right after the dignified trio of Vicentio, Escalus, and Angelo leave the stage.
This painting of a type (Lucio is called "a fantastic" in the list of dramatis personae), reminds me that we are all, viewed in a certain fashion, types. If an author were to model a character on us, she would classify us to help her readers understand who we were and then, if she is talented, show how we deviate from our type. If we weren't types, in real life as well as in fiction, we would be totally opaque to one another.
Shakespeare's characters, especially in the comedies, are also types, though, because of his genius, even his types have psychological depth.
As for Lucio, like the far from angelic Angelo, he bears an inappropriate name (meaning "light"), contrary to his dark character. We encounter him bantering with two unnamed gentlemen until Mistress Overdone (labeled "a bawd"), whom Lucio refers to as "Madam Mitigation," enters with news:

MISTRESS OVERDONE

Well, well; there's one yonder arrested and carried
to prison was worth five thousand of you all.

Second Gentleman

Who's that, I pray thee?

MISTRESS OVERDONE

Marry, sir, that's Claudio, Signior Claudio.

First Gentleman

Claudio to prison? 'tis not so.

MISTRESS OVERDONE

Nay, but I know 'tis so: I saw him arrested, saw
him carried away; and, which is more, within these
three days his head to be chopped off.

LUCIO

But, after all this fooling, I would not have it so.
Art thou sure of this?

MISTRESS OVERDONE I am too sure of it: and it is for getting Madam
Julietta with child.

Claudio's plight provides the motivating force of the plot, and the news of it comes as a shock both to the characters on stage and to the audience of this comedy after Lucio's frivolous talk with the two gentlemen, especially since it is borne by a totally disreputable character.
Significantly, in accordance with the genre of comedy, the play is full of unapologetic low characters like Mistress Overdone, representatives of the pleasure instinct, and, equally significantly, their response to Claudio's plight, unlike that of the rigid Angelo, is humane. Mistress Overdone says Claudio is worth "five thousand of you all," and the superficial Lucio is appalled: "After all this fooling, I would not have it so."

* * *

A note of explanation.

Why am I filling up this blog with comments on Measure for Measure?

Having gone somewhat beyond the halfway point in the Complete Works, I decided it was time to take stock, and a lot of ideas bubbled up in my mind while reading Measure for Measure. After all, I do have a doctorate in Comparative Literature, and I did concentrate on the late Renaissance, so I'm connecting with things that mattered a great deal to me when I was much younger.