Weekend Arts

I think I forgot when I lived in Lourdes, in Palestine, and in Richmond what a joy it is to be in a place where there are neat things going on all the time. It's a thrill. 


This weekend Kate MacLeod, a member of the Quaker Meeting, had a concert celebrating the release of her latest CD, which is called Deep in the Sound of Terra. She got fabulous coverage in Salt Lake's Catalyst magazine - last week's cover showed her album's cover artwork, which is a fabulous representation of her playing the fiddle. 

The concert was terrific, and she was a great performer, connecting nicely with the audience, being funny, informal, and of course terrifically talented. Fiddle music is so fun. I'm listening to the CD as I write this.

Today's arts began in literature. First was the next 50 pages of Catch-22, which will be discussed in the book club tomorrow. Two interesting articles, here and here, were posted by someone in the group, and they have helped me gain appreciation for this book even if I still don't like it. The next month's reading is short stories by Anton Chekhov, and I am greatly looking forward to that! 

Yesterday I finished Burned by Ellen Hopkins, a YA book that took an unexpected turn at the end. It's the story of a Mormon girl in Carson City, NV who is in her Junior year of high school. Her father drinks and abuses her mother, and Pattyn becomes increasingly disillusioned with Church doctrine and leadership. When she starts acting out at school, her parents send her away to her aunt's ranch in the desert of Nevada where she learns to drive, ride a horse, and or course, falls for a hunky cowboy who is home on summer break from UC Davis (where apparently none of the Californians have lassoed him). 

The book's themes of dark secrets within LDC families has distracted me as I live my life in Salt Lake this weekend. I was actually thinking about the book as I biked through downtown today; I was reflecting that in religions we need to focus on the important things like justice and equality, and forget about the silly things like dress, appearance, food and drink, and other elements of behavior we focus so much on that don't have anything to do with the kind of work Jesus and other justice-oriented people have done. 

As I rode, I found myself amid a mob of pedestrians in skirts and suits, and I realized I was on West Temple and this is Conference Weekend, so the LDS conference center was swarming with mormons of all ages. I felt a little guilty about the way I looked at them after reading this book!

Once done with Burned, I have started Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I have it on audio, and the author reads his books, which is in the format of an address from him to his son. He's explaining the reality of being black in this society, and in doing so speaks a great deal about his own past and process of learning how to live in a black body and keep it safe. 

Coates refers to the black body constantly, emphasizing that the black experience is a physical one, based on a physical trait that poses an enormous liability to his safety. He speaks also of those "who think they're white," referring to how no one doesn't have blackness in them, and how whiteness is a social construction as much as any other race is. It's been powerful to listen to. I can tell I'm going to want to listen to it more than once. 

This afternoon at the Marmalade Branch library, there was an event dedicated to Rumi poetry. I didn't really know anything about Rumi before this, and it was good to hear some of his work and others' reflections on it. 

Close to the end of the event, a woman took the stage and immediately her presence and dignity changed the energy in the auditorium. She moved with grace and gravitas, and she read the following poem like it was something that really mattered. 

Jesus On The Lean Donkey
by Rumi 

Jesus on the lean donkey,
this is an emblem of how the rational intellect
should control the animal-soul.

Let your spirit be strong like Jesus.
If that part becomes weak,
then the worn-our donkey grows to a dragon

Be grateful when what seems unkind
comes from a wise person.

Once, a holy man,
riding his donkey, saw a snake crawling into
a sleeping man’s mouth! He hurried, but he couldn’t
prevent it. He hit the man several blows with his club.

The man woke terrified and ran beneath an apple tree
With many rotten apples on the ground.
Eat! You miserable wretch! Eat.
Why are you doing this to me?
Eat more, you fool.
I’ve never seen you before!
Who are you? Do you have some inner quarrel with my soul?

The wise man kept forcing him to eat, and then he ran him.
For hours he whipped the poor man and made him run.
Finally, at nightfall, full of rotten apples,
fatigued, bleeding, he fell
and vomited everything,
the good and the bad, the apples and the snake.
When he saw that ugly snake
Come out of himself, he fell on his knees
before his assailant.
Are you Gabriel? Are you God?
I bless the moment you first noticed me. I was dead 
and didn’t know it. You’ve given me a new life.
Everything I’ve said to you was stupid!
I didn’t know
If I had explained what I was doing,
you might have panicked and died of fear.

Muhammad said,
If I described the enemy that lives
Inside men, even the most courageous would be paralyzed. No one
would go out, or do any work. No one would pray or fast,
and all power to change would fade
from human beings

so I kept quiet
while I was beating you, that like David
I might shape iron, so that, impossibly,
I might put feathers back into a bird’s wing.
God’s silence is necessary, because of humankind’s
faintheartedness. If I had told you about the snake, 
you wouldn’t have been able to eat, and if
you hadn’t eaten, you wouldn’t have vomited.

I saw your condition and drove my donkey hard
into the middle of it, saying always under my breath,
Lord, make it easy on him. I wasn’t permitted
to tell you, and I wasn’t permitted to stop beating you!

The healed man, still kneeling,
I have no way to thank you for the quickness
of your wisdom and the strength of your guidance.

God will thank you.

What occurred to me as she read was that this "Jesus" figure is every neighbor who feels compelled to act on behalf of compassion. Jesus was not unique in history. There are thousands of people who would do and do do "What Jesus would do" in this and other situations. Why do Christians insist on the singularity of Jesus? Well, I suppose they do in order to be able to distinguish an "us" from a "them" - those who are saved by this specific Jesus and those who aren't. What a ridiculous boundary to draw around goodness and righteousness. 

This performance reminded me that how poetry is read has utmost importance. It is not powerful if it is not read powerfully. At least, that's the impression I had. 

The other person who spoke very well was an 83-year-old man who has retired from 25 years of teaching English at East High School and now teaches poetry classes for senior citizens. I'm not sure why, but he read the opening to a T.S. Eliot poem (actually, I do know why. He had been asked to talk about the importance of poetry, and he used some poetry which had been important to his own experience in his answer). The Eliot poem is called "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock". Here's the opening stanza: 

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

I recognized the poem when he read it as one I had read this past summer in the poetry class at Bread Loaf, but I couldn't remember the poet. And I didn't have many feelings about the poem itself. This experience helped remind me that poetry sticks in my mind when someone tells me it's important, and talks about what they get out of it. This man said this poem helped him know what to expect from life, when he read it in his early 20's. 

Rumi