The Most Beautiful Concert Imaginable - and Somber Thoughts

Last night we heard an Austrian tenor, Daniel Johannsen, accompanied by a British pianist, Graham Johnson, perform Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin. Johannsen's voice is sweet and accurate, his stage presence is modest, and he sings strongly but almost as if he isn't trying to. I am not particularly fond of Lieder in general, but Schubert's Lieder are something else.
Then, after the intermission, we heard the string quartet, Death and the Maiden, performed by the Aviv Quartet: Sergey Ostrovsky, Evgenia Epshtein (violins), Nomie Bialobroda (viola), and Alexandre Khramouchin (cello). Their playing was on the highest level, dramatic and entirely in harmony with one another. We were elevated by the performance.
During the intermission, I looked at the audience. I am seventy, and I didn't feel old compared to the other listeners. It was great to watch the people greet friends, gesture animatedly, and respond enthusiastically to the atmosphere of high art. These old people, including myself, are engaged in life, interested in getting out and hearing music, pleased to see one another.
Then, in keeping, perhaps, with the morbid theme of The Beautiful Miller Girl, whose admirer drowns himself in the end, and the title of Death and the Maiden, I started wondering where the audience for Lieder recitals and chamber music is going to come from when we all die off. How many of us will still be alive in ten years, coming together again to hear great music?
As my wife and I walked home from the concert, I didn't raise my depressing thoughts. Rather we talked about how wonderful it is that these four musicians have worked so long and so hard to become masters of their instruments, brilliant interpreters of music, and an ensemble that plays with such mutual understanding. 
I also had thought, during the concert, how the music written after Schubert, which the Aviv Quartet also plays, radiates back onto Schubert. Ears that have heard Shostakovich cannot but hear Schubert in a new way. We recently watched a BBC program about the first performance of Beethoven's Eroica, based on the conceit that no one, not even the musicians, had ever heard the symphony before. But that's not how we hear classical music now.

Iron(ing) Man

The dry cleaner on Bethlehem Road, near the corner of Yehuda Street (in Jerusalem, of course), has a pair of amazing shirt-ironing machines. The shirts are placed vertically in the machine, the machine puffs up the sleeves, and then it presses and folds the shirts. Nevertheless I don't bring my shirts in to the laundry. I wash and iron them myself.

I could afford to have the shirts done, and they would come out a lot better than they do when I iron them, but it's a point of honor with me to iron them myself. What exactly that point of honor is, I'm not sure. I try to be self-sufficient. If I can do something, I would like to do it myself.

My mother used to send my father's shirts out to be laundered. A man named Mr. Epstein came to our apartment once a week to pick up dirty laundry and deliver the clean shirts and sheets. They would come back starched with a shirt cardboard in them, and eventually I would get to draw on the shirt cardboard or paste things onto it. Mr. Epstein was lean and energetic, and kind of gruff. My mother made a point of speaking very politely to Mr. Epstein and calling him by his last name. She absolutely never spoke rudely to storekeepers or to the people who worked for us. She was a democratic person.
 When I iron, I don't feel as if I'm a man doing women's work, though I guess more women iron clothes than men. I certainly would never expect my wife to iron my clothes for me. That's not how tasks are allocated and shared in our
An acquaintance of mine, a wealthy, gay English Jew who eventually jumped out of a window and failed to kill himself immediatelWhen I iron, I don't feel as if I'm a man doing women's work, though I guess more women iron clothes than men. I certainly would never expect my wife to iron my clothes for me. That's not how tasks are allocated and shared in our y (he died in hospital some time later), once shared an Arab Christian cleaner with us for a wh ile. The cleaner, Bashir, was actually a chef at the King David Hotel, but tourism had fallen off to almost nothing, and he was laid off. It was a bit embarrassing to be hiring such an intelligent and highly qualified man just to clean our house, but he needed the money, and he wasn't ashamed to work.

While Bashir, was working for us, I bumped into our gay acquaintance on the street, and he told me that Bashir did shirts splendidly. Then he looked at me and said, "But you probably iron your own shirts, don't you?"

It wouldn't have occurred to me to ask Bashir to do our ironing. I can't handle having a servant, though my mother always had women in to clean our small apartment, and in fact they had very little to do, so they also did the laundry and ironed our clothes.

These African-American women were a constant presence in my life as a child. My mother (who was nosey because she cared about people) got them to talk about their lives, their children, and their husbands. She spoke with them like a friend, not like a mistress to her servant. Obviously she was white, and they weren't, and she was rich, and they weren't, and that affected the relationship. But that was an unavoidable given of the situation.

One of the women who worked for us for a long time was named Dorothy. She had very dark skin and very African hair, which she didn't disguise in any way (though she didn't have an Afro either; this was in the 1950s). Dorothy was smart and dignified, articulate, and no one could push her around. If she had had a fair start in life, in a society that gave black people equal opportunities, she would have been a lawyer, not a house-cleaner. She often spoke to my mother about her sons, whom she was sending to Catholic schools, for the discipline. I hope they went on and did well.

Dorothy was very dismissive of my mother's skill when she saw something my mother had ironed by myself. I sure Dorothy would have a good laugh at me.

I don't enjoy ironing, so I let my laundered, wrinkled shirts pile up for a couple of months before I iron them. I only wear buttoned shirts that have to be ironed on Shabbat, so my supply of shirts can almost last me all winter. When I finally start on them, I get involved in the process. Yesterday night I had thirteen shirts to iron, and I resolved to do them all.

When I iron, I don't feel as if I'm a man doing women's work, though I guess more women iron clothes than men. I certainly would never expect my wife to iron my clothes for me. That's not how tasks are allocated and shared in our home.

We had gone to a recital earlier in the evening, Schubert Lieder sung by a plump American tenor, and it was about ten when I set up the ironing board, filled the steam iron with water, and set to work. I iron in the living room and listen to CDs while I work. Last night I listened to Helene Grimaud playing two Mozart concerti and Jean-Pierre Rampal playing twentieth century music for flute and piano. Two brilliant French musicians.

I didn't like the music that Rampal was playing all that much, but I was full of admiration for his sound and technique.

It took my nearly two hours to finish the shirts. By the time I was finished, my legs were aching, and I was exhausted. But I went to bed with a feeling of satisfaction. Ironing is meditative. It takes some concentration, but it's not terribly demanding. As I iron, I listen to the music and follow the thoughts and memories that pop up in my mind.

I imagine I'll have to iron another batch of shirts in the spring, when we put away out winter clothes. I can't say I'm looking forward to it, but I won't mind either.

Engagement with Life and Drifting

One of the most satisfying moments for a parent, in my experience, is seeing one's grown children assume the commitment to raising a child of their own. If they do well at it, this is an assurance that one hasn't done such a bad job oneself. Beyond that ego satisfaction, raising children, like marriage, is a sign of engagement in life - though there are many other ways of engaging in life, and certainly not every parent has made a mature commitment to being a parent.

Many of our friends have grown or growing children who have never, as the saying goes, found themselves, which is hardly surprising. Finding oneself has not been easy since modern societies have told us that we must invent ourselves rather than accept the definitions imposed by traditional society.

Since I have to admit that I am an old man, at least chronologically (see how I can't accept the definition), my engagement in life is different from what it was when I was an ambitious student, a new husband and father, a man trying to make a career, and so on. Ambition is part of being engaged in life, but how much sense does ambition make toward the end of one's life? Or, what sort of ambition is appropriate for one at the beginning of one's eighth decade?

Recently, because a good friend forwarded me a message from a man who was a professor at Princeton when I was an undergraduate, I sent him an email, which he answered almost immediately. As it turns out, he's only ten or eleven years older than I am, though at the time I never even wondered how old he was. He was a professor! But, from my present perspective (and his, I assume), he was a kid then.

Being in contact with that professor put me in mind of my immaturity when I was in college, of how little I knew about myself and the world, about how thoughtless I was. Being smart enough to get into a top university didn't mean I was smart enough to know how I wanted the rest of my life to unfold. I said I was an ambitious student, and I was, but my ambition was restricted to getting very good grades, to excelling, not to anything beyond that. I have always found transitions difficult.

But I was engaged. I didn't drift while I was in college, and I didn't rebel (maybe I should have). I was fortunate enough to get a Fulbright scholarship to study in France between college and graduate school, and I used that year to drift. I had no particular aim beyond talking a lot of French. A friend of mine in the Fulbright program used her time to write a very ambitious paper about something, and that idea never even crossed my mind. I read a lot, wrote a lot of letters home, did some traveling, and went to lectures at the university. Sometimes I reproach myself. I should have used the year more productively. I should have accomplished something. But, in retrospect, having a year to drift, and getting a monthly stipend to subsidize my drifting, was valuable.

Maybe I should let myself drift now.

Praise of The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

About a week ago I finished reading The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, one of the best writers I know about. This is an early novel of his, first published in 1988, and set in Calcutta, Dhaka (Pakistan), and London. Several passages in the book stood out for me because of the insight they offer about living in India.
Most of the characters in the book are middle class or wealthy, educated and privileged. A bit before the middle of the book, the narrator describes a visit he made with his mother and grandmother to a poor relative whom they had discovered. The narrator, still a boy, looks out from a balcony at "a patchwork of stagnant pools, dotted with islands of low, raised ground. Clinging to these islands were little clumps of shanties, their beaten tin roofs glistening rustily in the midday sun."

Ghosh is brilliant at descriptive writing. These two sentences convey all the poverty of Calcutta. Ghosh goes on:

     Our relative spotted me leaning on the railing and ran out.
     Don't look there! she cried. It's dirty! Then she led be back inside.
     I went willingly: I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.

That "jungle-craft" is probably highly developed in India, where the extremes of wealth and poverty are greater than in the West, but it's something we all have, if we're privileged.

Ghosh goes on:

But still, I could not help thinking it was a waste of effort to lead me away. It was true, of course, that I could not see that landscape or anything like it from my own window, but its presence was palpable everywhere in our house; I had grown up with it. It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother's voice when she drilled me for my examinations; it was to these slopes she pointed when she told me that if I didn't study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn't use them like claws to cling to what we'd got, that was where we'd end up, marooned in that landscape: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was that sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.

One of the themes of The Shadow Lines is the contrast between the more securely genteel life of an English family (lacking "the fine edge of frenzy") and the hysterical gentility of his own family - though part of the book takes place in London during the Blitz, when the facade of normal life in England was literally stripped away by bombs, and the myth of high European civilization was shown to mask unthinkable barbarity.

Later on in the book, in describing an outbreak of ethnic violence in Calcutta when the narrator was a schoolboy, Ghosh speaks of a kind of fear, which, he asserts, underlies all of life in India:

It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world - not language, not food, not music - it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the mirror.

I believe that "the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent" is not uniquely Indian. All over the world today either there is no normalcy at all, in the complacent sense that we privileged people feel it, or that normalcy is threatened by the potential for violence, by economic insecurity, and by the looming environmental crisis (to offer a short list).

The Necessity of Art Work

Why should anyone read my poetry, when there is so much excellent poetry out there already? Why should anyone buy my painting, when there are so many brilliant paintings in the world already? Why should anyone listen to my music, etc. etc.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
True, some people are professional artists, and they continue to produce art because that's their profession, and, in some cases, they even make a living that way.
But most people, if they are artists at all, are aspiring, apprentice, or amateur, and, if they are professional, don't make their living from their art.
The only reason to produce art, to be engaged in art work, is because it's of vital importance to us, whether or not anyone else likes it, or whether or not we like it ourselves.
Recently I decided to publish a novel that I began writing in the 1980s: "Site Report," an Israeli novel: http://www.amazon.com/Site-Report-Jeffrey-M-Green/dp/1502300621.
The manuscript I produced back then was huge and ungainly, and I saw I had no chance of getting it published, so I shelved it. Then a few years later, I reread it and cut about 1/3 of it, but I still didn't have the heart to send it out to agents and face disappointment after Today I am lessdisappointment. A few years after that, I put the whole thing onto my hard disk (I began writing it before I had a computer, and then, when I had a computer, it was an Osborne, one of the first home computers marketed, which ran on CP/M, so I couldn't copy the diskettes over to a PC).
Years went by, and I kept fiddling with the MS, cutting it, revising it, and then forgetting about it. When I heard of the possibility of publishing it for free and having it available on Amazon, I decided to reread it and see whether it was worth publishing.
By that time, I barely remembered writing it, and I was very surprised at how decent it was, so I did publish it. But I didn't have the sense of necessity about it, the drive that had enabled me to write it in the first place. I let too much time go by. And I have changed too much.
The novel is, as I see it now, about a person (an American Jewish woman) whose life is more or less stalled. She is divorced and can't meet any man worth marrying. She has a good job, but not exactly one she is committed to. So she decides to take a Sabbatical year in Israel and study biblical archaeology. In Israel she meets all kinds of people who are committed to their paths in life (though all the paths are different), and most of these people try to recruit her: stay in Israel and be what I am.
When I wrote it, but to a lesser degree now, I saw living in Israel as a kind of mission that transcended personal ambition and self-interest. It's hard for me to see life in Israel that way today. The novel conveys what attracted me to Israel thirty years ago. I could never write a novel in a similar spirit today.

Discarding Ambition?

This year, as most people in the world are unlikely to know, is a Sabbatical year in the Land of Israel. The Torah says that every seven years all agricultural labor must cease, and whatever grows in fields, orchards, and vineyards can be picked by the poor.
Some scholars say that this impossible arrangement was actually observed during Second Temple times. Today the rabbinate has made the colossal error of reinstating the rule, only to find a way of getting around it.
I contend it was an error, because I imagine the rabbis could have said they had no idea when the cycle started and, consequently, couldn't determine which year was a Sabbatical year. But they attached great value to the fulfillment of a commandment, even if it was more or less impossible to do it right. So, from their point of view, it was not an error.
But I digress.
I have been studying the subject of the Sabbatical year with a group of adults at an unusual Israeli institution called Elul, a House of Study open to secular and religious men and women. At Elul we try to focus on the meaning of traditional texts for us in our lives, not in the sense of dictating details of Jewish law, but in the sense of implying values that we may or may not identify with.
In our discussion of the Sabbatical year, for which the Hebrew word is "shmita," from the verb "lishmot," meaning to drop, to let go, we have been discussing the ethical and spiritual value of abandoning things in our lives, to which we cling, the way property owners, according to the biblical law, had to forgo their crops, an aspect of their ownership. (If this smacks of Buddhism, let it smack!)
At Elul, as I said, we have been thinking and talking a lot about discarding, and I have just reached the age of seventy, an age when further acquisition doesn't make much sense - unless it is for the sake of my children and grandchildren.
To illustrate my attitude: our good china shows a good deal of attrition, but when my wife and I start thinking about spending another few hundred dollars to replace the broken and chipped plates, we say to ourselves - why bother? How long will we be using it? We've had most of it since we were married in 1970, we replaced some of it about 20 years ago, but what's the point of doing it again now?
Another seemingly unconnected thought that has been on my mind for a while is the matter of ambition. At this time, I happen to be translating a book by a very ambitious young man. Indeed, most of the work I do is for ambitious people who think their thoughts and words are so precious that they must be made available to the English speaking world. I'm not complaining. If no one was ambitious, no one would hire me.
I was once ambitious, I think. When I was young and thought I was very smart, I thought I wanted to be widely respected and influential, famous. I say, "I thought," because, as I look back at the decisions I made in my life, I see that I didn't really want to be famous, since I never strove for fame. I didn't have that drive. Fame never came to me, and I never sought it out. But I grew up with the idea that a person had to be ambitious, so I thought of myself as someone who hadn't lived up to expectations - whose expectations? Don't ask.
Ambition doesn't make a lot of sense when your seventy years old, and I'm not sure how much sense it ever makes. Success, recognition, should be thought of as a tool: if, say, as an artist, I gain recognition, then I can continue to be an artist. If I want to improve the world, I need to attain a certain status so that people will listen to me and do what I propose. But the status is instrumental, not essential.
Have I discarded ambition? I think I did so long ago and never noticed.
Just today I learned that an essay I entered in a creative non-fiction contest didn't even make it to the honorable mentions. I guess I care. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent $25 to enter the piece in the contest. But, when you come down to it, my satisfaction came from writing the piece, and if it isn't interesting enough to be published, so be it.

Flies in the Ointment

Is there a method of critical analysis that can explain and demonstrate why a work of art is great, or one that enables someone to distinguish between great art, good art, and mediocre art?
From high school through graduate school I attended many classes on works of literature, and, in my experience, the teachers always chose to teach works that were acknowledged to be excellent, or at least historically important. We never, so far as I can remember, took a bad story and picked it apart to show why it was bad. Nor were we ever given a poem to read, for example, and asked to judge it.
Much later in life I took courses in musicology, including a rather advanced method of musical analysis, which essentially showed that Mozart's sonatas followed certain harmonic rules, but which didn't show why they remain interesting musically after more than 200 years, while so much of the music of Mozart's contemporaries is never played.
Sometimes I think there is a kind of circularity at work. Certain people are trained as arbiters of taste, and they train acolytes, and these experts assert that certain art is good. Having made that assertion, one can rather easily dissect the work and point out the things one likes in it. Indeed, most likely these experts are right, though they can be blind to the excellencies of certain kinds of art, and there are matters of taste. I can acknowledge that Verdi's operas are great music, but I'm not on opera fan, and I don't enjoy them.
At the moment, an album of Clark Terry's, "Serenade to a Bus Seat," is playing and totally distracting me from writing. In addition to Terry on Trumpet, the other musicians are outstanding: Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. You could hardly think of five greater jazz musicians. But I don't know how I could persuade someone who doesn't like jazz that this music is beyond superb. What could I say? Just listen!
Obviously there's a matter of skill. You can hear that these musicians are masters of their instruments and that they play together with precision - but skill is no guarantee of artistic excellence.
What about the other direction: can MFA programs teach people how to become excellent artists? Or at least to become the best artists they can be? I admit to ignorance. I suspect that the answer is no, but I'm not well enough informed.
Food for thought in any event.