I have to follow up this morning's post with a website I found as I browsed for performances of the St. Matthew Passion. This is a group of Dutch musicians who have created a project called "All of Bach". This link shows a filming of the entire piece, and you can navigate to different pieces using the drop down menu. My suggestions:
65
66b
60
49 (if you're in the mood to cry - this one is so heart-wrenching. It's Mary Magdalene saying "For love my savior now is dying.")
To find my favorite chorale, navigate to 2:03:00 and keep listening.
listening And this delightful paragraph about March Madness counterpart in The Netherlands. I hope they're not exaggerating, this sounds so wonderful: The ‘Dutch’ passionWhether or not they are lovers of classical music, practically everyone in the Netherlands knows the St Matthew Passion. Every year, there is a real ‘Matthew madness’ in the month before Easter. Each town has its own performance and any reasonably large concert hall has at least two or three. The first performance of the St Matthew Passion in the Netherlands was in Rotterdam in 1870. Amsterdam followed suit in 1874. With the Concertgebouw orchestra, Willem Mengelberg then instituted a Passion tradition in Amsterdam that still continues today. In reaction to the Mengelberg performances, the Netherlands Bach Society was formed in 1921. The founders thought that the St Matthew should be performed where it belonged – in a church. The annual performance by the Bach Society in Naarden grew to become ‘the’ Dutch St Matthew Passion.
This week missed the traditions that linked my high school community at Emma Willard. I have been experiencing a more-than-usually intense Holy Week as rehearsals with the Salt Lake Choral Artists for the St. Matthew Passion ramped up. And up, and up, until our Good Friday performance last night which was... breathtaking to be part of.
I have wished to share with others the intensity of the feeling I have being part of the telling of the Easter story this week. This is, for me, the most powerful part of the Christian calendar, Thursday and Friday of Jesus' final supper and then conviction and crucifiction. Easter is, by contrast, not an important or compelling part of the story for me. I think Jesus defeats death in the way he dies, not in the way he rises. Anyway, the story is so powerful, I want to be able to talk about it with people who are around me. I love working in a multi-cultural school, but this week I wished I were working in a Catholic school so we could talk about the power of Holy Week, the feelings and thoughts that come up this week. There is such power in being part of a story together - knowing the important parts and communing over them. At Emma Willard, part of this story was Revels, the play we put on at Christmas. The roles were the same from year to year, but who played them was a secret until the performance night. The songs we sang on stage were part of the tradition. The idea of being at a great feast together to celebrate the year was part of the tradition. There are other parts of Emma Life that speak of a shared narrative. For me some of the biggest ones were the award ceremonies for upper class women. At Honors Convocation and the awards night in the spring juniors and seniors received awards for their accomplishments and their service to the community. It was an important part of our shared lives, as if we were affirming: "This is what we honor and value in this community - hard work, authenticity, service, creativity..." I wonder if my school, if a public school with a highly mobile and highly diverse population, can achieve this sense of tradition. At five years old, it seems that we don't have too much shared narrative at the school. The students arrive with much in common as immigrants - how significant is it that I, the teacher, don't share that part of their story? I was surprised by the conviction with which I spoke to the Alto next to me last night about the power of the story of the passion. I was even more surprised this morning when, as I read The Alchemist, my heart fairly fluttered as Jesus was mentioned. The story at this point focuses on a Andalusian shepherd working in a north African crystal shop, about to start a caravan toward Egypt in the company of Arab Muslims. The shepherd meets an Englishman, and when he asks what the Englishman thinks of shepherds, the Englishman responds, "It was shepherds who were the first to recognize a king that the rest of the world refused to acknowledge." I felt my spirit flip as I read this allusion to Jesus' birth, because here was a shingle of "my" story, embedded in a wall of shingles from other traditions. I could locate myself in this story, all of a sudden. It became much more "mine" in that moment. Which is funny because I don't even believe most of what Christians believe about Jesus! But it's the power of story here I'm talking about, not of truth. This article talks about the Muslim perspective on Jesus, which is actually closer to what I believe than the Christian one (Jesus was a prophet, was not the son of God, did not resurrect). But still I felt more at home yesterday in the Cathedral of the Madeleine listening to the choir sing Pergolesi's Stabat Mater Dolorosa (about the Virgin's woes) than I would have in a mosque.
Cathedral Choir School
Even though I don't believe in the virgin birth, I find the story compelling, and I certainly feel for Mary's pain at the foot of the cross, even if it never happened. This story contains the power of fiction which I try to harness for my students all year long: the power of tapping into universal themes and feeling a connection to tradition by linking those themes with your own experience.
What does it take to destabilize the patriarchy? Not much. In Arthur Miller's A View From The Bridge, the young Katherine is able to do so simply by telling her uncle that a movie she went to with her beau ended late, causing her to arrive home later than usual. Eddie, the uncle, isn't able to verify the story of course. Can he trust her? Did she, despite her words, go to some bar and sit in a dark corner doing dark deeds with her young Italian immigrant boyfriend? She has never lied to him before - could this be the beginning of a downward spiral in whose twists she learns to be deceitful? His hitherto unquestioned grasp on her life is shaken loose with remarkably little disturbance.
His authority over his wife is also challenged, not even by any action on her part, but by her tone of voice when she tells him "What do you want from me? I did what you asked." And so she did. He cannot relroaach her action but tries to reproach her tone. "I don't like the way you're talking to me!" he replies, and it sounds like a confession of weakness. He's already lost the respect he is telling her he wants. It turns out, the legitimacy of this patriarch rested on wobbly posts. It's rather shocking how little recourse he has. Not only does he find that the law offers him no reinforcement when his women start defying him and young men come a-calling, but even taking things into his own hands by becoming violent and then setting immigration police on those he perceives to be his enemy, he cannot reassert the authority he has until now enjoyed without having to do anything except be a man.
The patriarchy was turned in its head for a few minutes in an auditorium of Roland Hall on Friday night, where Junot Diaz and Leo Espinosa gave a book talk for kids. Their joint effort, Islandborn, is a beautiful children's book about a young girl named Lola growing up in the Bronx. She finds out about the island of her origin, the Dominican Republic, from her neighbors who weave a tapestry of memories for her. The illustrator, Espinosa, lives in Salt Lake City with his family. Diaz is from the Dominican Republic and won the pulitzer prize for his book on Oscar Wilde. At the end of the talk he asked for questions from the king kids only, and then when those had been exhausted, suggested that we "turn the world on its head and ask for question only from women of color." There were hollers of approval.
When I have described John Banville's The Sea, I've said that the narration is imbued with a bitterness, resentment, and fear of a narrator recently walloped by an awareness of mortality. The wallop came in the form of his wife's death. In the chapter I just read, close to the end of the book, his inner turmoil finds its reflection in a mighty storm which rages in the beach town from his youth which he has made the sight of a post-mortem pilgrimage. Listen to this passage: "We have had a storm. It went on all night long and into the middle of the morning, an extraordinary affair, I have never known the like, in these temperate zones, for violence or duration. I enjoyed it outrageously, sitting up in my ornate bed as on a catafalque, if that is the word I want, the room aflicker around me and the sky stamping up and down in a fury, breaking its bones. At last, I thought, at last the elements have achieved a pitch of magnificence to match my inner turmoil! I felt transfigured, I felt like one of Wagner's demi-gods, aloft on a thunder-cloud and directing the great booming chords, the clashes of celestial cymbals." First of all, a catafalque is the ornate platform upon which a casket rests during a funeral. Later in the passage he goes on to declare his life-long belief that life thus far has been a rehearsal, and at some point he will pass on and the "real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin". He sees his end as imminent, but he also believes (though he himself admits it is "a common delusion") that the end of this stage is the beginning of a more significant one.
I don't think I believe that. I think this is the drama, and I don't get to prepare forever and earnestly for it. Right now there is snow falling hard outside on 6 already-accumulated inches. This storm does not mirror my inner state, which feels neither tumultuous like the storm in the story, not quietly stifling like the snow. It feels like a bright cloudy morning, with a desire to go out and converse. Luckily I won't have to go very far to converse this evening, when the Literary Classics book club is meeting at the O'Falafel near my house to discuss another stormy book, The Tempest. The Sea's example of pathetic fallacy (when nature's events mirror the events or emotions of the story) is the second of this 24 hours. Yesterday, on the beach inhabited by the nascent savages of The Lord of the Flies, Ralph and Jack approached each other, words flying like thunder bolts, while real thunder bolts interrupted their aggressions from the sky. The climax of this human storm is Piggy's fall to his death on the wavy rocks below the cliff, at which point a thunderclap of great intensity seems to summon the waves ...ok I have to stop. I just made that storm up. Isn't that funny. I went back to the text after writing "waves" and realize there was no storm going on. Ha! It was my own inner turmoil at the intensity of the scene which generated the storm in my head! Anyway, here is the troubling paragraph in which the storm abates for a moment, but only like those storms in Maine that would become gentle enough to give me hope they were over, then return with great booms and gales, made more dramatic by the brief respite that preceded them. The hunt is about to get more intense, as Jack and his hunters seek out Ralph to finish off the outlaws. Here's Piggy's end: "The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a
thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a
grunt, traveled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock
bounded twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the
square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms
and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a
long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back
again, the body of Piggy was gone." Lois Lowry wrote this article for the occasion of TLOTF's 60th anniversary. She points to the character Simon, who is the only one on the island who intuitively knows that the "beast" that haunts them is really inside them. "Maybe it's only us," he says timidly, and no one takes him seriously. I sometimes feel the sense in the classroom that the students who make the most incisive analysis of the world are the least listened to among their peers. They speak less, and more quietly, and with more hesitation. It seems to be my job to bring their comments out into the open and build on them with others. I hope that hearing their ideas highlighted will make them more confident in a world where no teacher will ask them to repeat what they said, louder, or paraphrase it for their peers. We do have storms inside us. To ignore them is to invite violent outbursts. Yesterday I went to a documentary film workshop for teachers, and saw trailers for two films about the consequences of unaddressed internal pain. One was Bully, a trailer I couldn't even watch in its entirety because it was so distressing. The other was The Mask You Live In, made by the creators of MissRepresentation, this one about how American masculinity is codified and then shoved down boys throats, at great cost to everyone, especially the young men.
They had done it, they had done it at last!
The room they were standing in was long-shaped and
softly lit. The telescreen was dimmed to a low murmur; the
richness of the dark-blue carpet gave one the impression of
treading on velvet. At the far end of the room O’Brien was
sitting at a table under a green-shaded lamp, with a mass of
papers on either side of him. He had not bothered to look up
when the servant showed Julia and Winston in.
A hilarious cover on an old edition. Winston does not look like that.
The most uncomfortable thing about 1984 is that Winston Smith's death, if indeed he does die in that second to last paragraph, is unnecessary. His life has been rendered so meaningless, his thoughts so controlled and his will so supple, that death would have been a welcome relief. But the catharsis of death is denied us, even if he does die, because the significant part of death, when human energy and will and resistance leaves a body, happened while Winston's body was alive. In fact, his body improves a great deal after he has completely succumbed to the horrifying tactics of O'Brian and the Party.
In the earlier part of the book he is aware that his death will come, but he seems to rather look forward to it, as an honorable end for a rebellious martyr. He'd rather die, it seems, that comply with totalitarianism. He refers to his impending death often, both he and Julia do, so that the idea of dying does not startle the reader at all. Life is so constrained in Oceania - with its mindless jobs, language designed to shrink the human capacity for thought, gin like car petrol, and saccharin tablets instead of sugar - that death doesn't seem much of a sacrifice.
By the end death seems like it would actually be a blessing, if only Winston could achieve it with integrity. But he doesn't, defeated by the torture of fear [of rats], and he is broken rather than dying heroically committed to his ideals. It is a very discomfiting ending. His admittedly tepid fervor simply fizzles into the nothingness of unrecorded history. If man is preoccupied with his legacy, and I think at least every white man is, Winston's is pathetic. Not even pathetic; it doesn't exist.
One of the most interesting aspects of the book to me was the idea that thought is so unreliable a form of record. Our thoughts are variable, unstable, and so easy to contort. How easy it is to convince myself that something went differently than it did (I think I do this all the time with my lessons). And if pressed on something, I would have a hard time saying that it did, absolutely, happen. The first episode of Sarah Koenig's Serial podcast asks the listeners to try to remember what they were doing a week before at a specific hour. Her point is that witness testimony is fallible, because our memories are so imprecise. The records, it turns out, are absolutely essential. I wonder if this is an idea that my students would appreciate if we spoke about it in relation to Animal Farm. The laws of the land (The Seven Commandments) keep changing, and we need literate people to read them and write about the violations of them if the commandments are going to mean anything.
Two other books in which death looms large:
1. John Banville's The Sea. The narrator's wife has died, and his reflections during a visit to the town where his family used to spend summer holidays are overlain with a bitterness and ---- perhaps it's not bitterness. What is it? Sourness. Ha, yes, Sourness is the right word, because it also evokes smell, which Banville talks about on almost every page. The narrator is understandably sour, having lost his wife, and I imagine his face screwed up into squinty contortions as he encounters the smells of his memories. Here is one passage in which he describes the mother of his playmates, Mrs. Grace, with whom he is infatuated.
I would have said then that she was beautiful, had there been anyone to whom I would ahve thought of saying such a thing, but I suppose she was not, really. She was rather stocky, and her hands were fat and reddish, there was a pump at the tip of her nose, and the two lank strands of blonde hair that her fingers kept pushing back behind her ears and that kept falling forward again were darker than the rest of her hair and had the slightly greasy hue of oiled oak. She walked at a languorous slouch, the muscles in her haunches quivering under the light stuff of her summer dresses. She smelled of sweat and cold cream and, faintly, of cooking fat. Just another woman, in other words, and another mother, at that.
Can't you hear the sourness? He (the narrator) seems to paint the world with his descriptions with a brush dipped first in tar, then in the colors he chooses. The tar bleeds through and lends everything a ruined texture. Everything is mildly disgusting in his lens, though he never says he is revolted. Indeed, if everything has this hue, what is there to compare it to? Well, I shall answer my own question: he must compare it to his life before Anna died, when the brush was pure. Although, come to think of it, there is no indication thus far that his marriage with Anna was a happy one. Perhaps it is just his newly invigorated sense of morality, or his enhanced feeling of loneliness, which prompt him to be so sour.
My favorite moments in the book are the darkly humorous ones, which usually are only funny because of the placement of a period, or the lack of one.
"For my part, although I am ashamed to say it, or at least I should be ashamed, what Myles put me most in mind of was a dog I once had, an irrepressibly enthusiastic terrier of which I was greatly fond but which on occasion, when there was no one about, I would cruelly beat, poor Pongo, for the hot, tumid pleasure i derived from its yelps of pain and its supplicatory squirmings."
The continuation without reverent pause in the form of a period, in "cruelly beat, poor Pongo," renders the line, I think, very funny, even if I find the image disturbing, and I do.
Or, here, the candor and surprising nature of the confession is subtly funny:
"As the years go on I have the illusion that my daughter is catching up on me in age and that by now we are almost contemporaries."
Looking at these excerpts, I don't think I would read the book. The narrator sounds awful. And perhaps he is, but he is quite real. And the book is not very long.
2. Markus Zusak's The Book Thief What a difference a good narrator makes. I'm listening to an audio production of this book which I tried and failed to read on my own this summer. I could not get into it, it felt much to cleverly Young Adult, as though the author was trying to make friends with the multitudes of teens by using cloying techniques like saying, in the middle of a chapter: "Some statistical information:" or, "Some facts about Frau Schneider:" I found these to reek of pandering, and I put the book down before I was 40 pages in. But I love the audiobook version, not least because the British narrator does all the German in a convincing accent and uses entertaining voices for the verbally abusive mother and the schoolmate, among others.
The story is narrated by death, who seems an amiable character, who gives what I find reassuring spoilers. He tells us after one episode between the best friends Liesel and Rudy that Rudy won't tell Liesel he loves her for four years. When Liesel is given two books for Christmas, we learn immediately that she will read one of them thirty times, the other nine. Given that the story is set in Germany in 1939, these spoilers are reassurances that life continues for Liesel, which this reader appreciates.
OK, last note on death. The Bach St. Matthew's Passion is of course about the triumph over death. It is marvelous. We have only really gotten to the chorals, the parts of it in which the chorus, representing the masses witnessing Christ's story, reflect on the events and their implications for their own lives. Here is my favorite so far (it's dark!):
Actually, to call this the voiceless weekend is not accurate. The airwaves of my apartment have been trafficked almost constantly by voices but not mine. I lost mine on Thursday evening and it has not approached home since. I just got back from the boys basketball game where I was the meekest cheerleader in the bleachers. My apartment smells strongly of turmeric. After I tried Golden Milk Tea on Wednesday at Sugarhouse Coffee, I was so intrigued with this warming drink I looked up homemade mixes for it. It has ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, and black pepper, all of which are supposed to boost the immune system. But I fear the recipe I used called for too much turmeric in proportion to the other ingredients - we'll see if it seems like tasting chalk when I mix it with regular milk for a warm drink. It is a beautiful color. The foreign voices in my apartment have been three - two audible, one inside my head. One has been the voice of Khaled Hosseini reading his 2003 novel The Kite Runner. I've been hearing for years not only of friends reading this book, but of high school English classes reading it. I think it's too long to do with a class, unless significant reading can be assigned outside of class. Aside from that I'm not sure I'd choose it - it's too bound in historical context. Yes, there are themes of guilt, friendship, cowardice. But they are not universally relatable, certainly not in the terms in which they are described. The main character, Amir, fails to stand up for a loyal friend of his when he's about 12, and he never gets over it. It is a life-defining moment for him, as he realizes what stuff he's really made of, and feels ashamed but powerless to change. His failure as a friend is quite specific to him though - while I'm sure others have failed to stand up for friends, this is not a feeling I can imagine animating a class conversation where everyone has equal access. And the nature of the book is so intimate - I think few kids would be willing to share the thoughts or experiences it brings to mind. I don't think I would want to share in a class half the things which the book brought to my mind... I had very little knowledge (ha, still have very little knowledge) of the historical context of the novel, which takes place in Afghanistan during the period between the coup in 1973 and 2001 when the Taliban were forced into hiding. Since finishing the book last night I've engaged in a little bit of study about the author and his context. He grew up at the same time as Amir (though he says in this interview that only parts of the book are autobiographical. The interview contains significant spoilers - this is why I never listen to these things before I finish the book!). When the coup happens, Amir and his father move to the Bay Area (as did Hosseini). In the 1990's he is called back to Kabul, the city of his childhood. It is nigh unrecognizable. The descriptions of how bad things are after the disastrous rule of the Taliban recalled the horrors of New Orleans after Katrina in Zeitoun, but five steps worse. Reading about the dysfunction of institutions in Kabul made me wonder, "Who on earth would want to be in leadership in a place like this?" When I looked up Afghanistan in the New Yorker archives, this article came up, which answers my question by describing the past and present of Afghan president Ashraf Ghani. It's funny, and a bit disheartening, that I read this article with interest when it came out, and had remembered nothing about it when I reread it this morning. Part of the appeal of working in Afghanistan, for Ghani, is working with a tabula rasa. I remember in 11th grade my history teacher, Dr. Naeher, told us that during the Great Depression Franklin D. Roosevelt had a unique opportunity to try new tricks with the economy. "What was the worst thing that was going to happen?" asked Dr. Naeher, rhetorically. "We fall into a depression?" I remember thinking, "Wow, what an opportunity." It wasn't until I studied that period of American economic history more closely that I realized how hard FDR worked to maintain capitalism, and wouldn't have considered what he was doing to be experimenting with new possible pathways through history. Afghanistan is at a much more profound bottom than the US was during the Depression, alors perhaps the idea of tabula rasa works better there. In this TED talk, Ghani points out that economics as it is taught in most universities cannot help Afghanistan:
Afghanistan The NYer article implies that Ghani is not necessarily the right person for this job, though it also implies that no one can accomplish what needs to be accomplished in order for Afghanistan to stand on its feet proudly again. I guess that is the saddest aspect of Afghanistan, which is poignantly captured in The Kite Runner: the irrevocability of history in some places, our inability to bring back any semblance of what has been lost. This unrecoverable loss is seen in the book through the destruction of Kabul, the loss of a friendship with Hassan, and, perhaps most painfully, through the loss of childhood, innocence, and a happy and healthy environment for Hassan's son, Sohrob. At one point Sohrob, maybe 8, says "I want my old life back." That life involved living with his parents, playing with his godfather in the garden, going to school. All these things are impossible now, and as a reader I felt that keenly. In the TED talk Ghani points to Germany as a remarkable example of improbably history - unified and democratic after having come so close to annihilation after the second World War. So in some instances, the gashes left by history do heal. But they do not heal through bandaids. Ghani rails against international aid and says that investment in Afghanistan, especially the textile industry, is the best way to help it further. This was in 2005 - I don't know if he's saying something else now. Sometimes I feel like the questions I try to answer in the classroom are so, so hard - there is nothing harder than asking what will help kids learn, and how I can best engage them in their own learning. But then I read about people and places like this, and thank Allah that my work doesn't involve questions of this complexity! My new book is All the Things I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng, which has started dramatically with the disappearance of a teenage girl. This is why I don't read back covers! I'll probably find out if I read it whether and in what condition she is found, and right now I'm relishing the ignorance. In the olden days there were no back cover summaries, no GoodReads.com to tell you what happens in the book. And better that way! The voice inside my head has been that of the narrator in Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale, which is "eerie and fascinating" just like the quote says on the front. I'm glad I promote independent reading, because none of these books would I do in class, but I can recommend them to some of the more advanced readers in the class.
