Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Songs and Dreams

I’m reading a book, “The Holy or the Broken” by Alan Light, about the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” and I have discovered something about myself. My dreams, particularly the recurring ones that seem to want to tell me something about my inner life, are like songs that tug at us mysteriously, seemingly representing meanings—not ideas, for those are cerebral, these are gut feelings—that go deep inside us, perhaps even culturally.

The book describes how that particular song has become mythic, having been used in venues as separate as weddings, funerals, even in the MVI program observing the 9/11 disaster. It’s played every Saturday by the Israeli armed forces radio network. And it’s been sung by countless artists over the years. It’s been described as spiritual, even though some of the lyrics are decidedly sexual and romantic. The word hallelujah itself, repeated as the entire chorus, is both celebratory and despairing.

We like to think that our dreams mean something, at least to us. And yet often their meaning eludes us. We dream situations that we can seldom identify precisely, mostly that they affect us on some gut level. I’ve awakened from dreams feeling euphoric or despairing without knowing why. The details of my dreams usually fade from my mind in the minutes I’m trying to remember them, while the feelings linger. I have several recurring dreams; that is, the resulting feelings are the same or similar while the details vary. Rarely do I get more than a glimpse of understanding.

The poetry of songs often seems like that. We get feelings from some songs that we can’t explain adequately. “Hallelujah” is one of those. In the book, Alan Light quotes a number of people who attempt to explain the power of the lyrics, from religious figures to musicians. One, ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, instead referred to the waltz rhythm and the “ascending notes that lift us”—more non-verbal, gut responses. From its inauspicious beginnings (the album was rejected by CBS Records), it grew in popularity until in 2012 Leonard Cohen was honored for “Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence” by Poets/Playwrights, Essayists/Editors, Novelists (PEN) judges.

The singer-songwriter Paul Simon compared his “Bridge over Troubled Waters” to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in its mysterious popularity. Yet the two songs are quite different in their relative meanings. “Bridge” is a comfort song, a reassurance that the one being sung to is held, somehow, in embrace by the singer. The lyrics, while poetic, are clear. The Carole King song, “You’ve Got a Friend,” and Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me” are much the same kind of songs.

The lyrics of “Hallelujah” refer to the irony of sexual desire and loss, yet they suggest some inner strength that can enable us to endure. One can read them in different ways, different contexts, as they refer to a “broken hallelujah” that feels like life. The listener is comforted, perhaps, by the deep knowledge that life endures, even without the external comfort offered by “Lean on Me.” Cohen himself said, “The world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess.” Hallelujah.

As I think about my recurring dreams—about feeling lost and confused in the midst of semi-familiar surroundings, of inadequacy, even “if they really knew me” kinds of doubts—I’m aware of those feelings mostly suppressed in my waking life. I’m probably not alone in these feelings. That I dream them tells me that my doubts are, for me, universal in the sense that they are a deep part of my psyche. They are not some misunderstanding I have of myself. They are basic to me. And yet they permeate everything I do.

And they are as mysterious as the feelings I have when I hear “Hallelujah,” or Leonard Cohen’s equally mythic “Suzanne.” A way to “embrace the whole mess.”

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Joyce Kilmer Was a Man

There are two kinds of people: male and female.

Yesterday we watched a documentary film on CNN, "Lady Valor," about a retired Navy Seal who changed his gender to female. It showed how complicated such a decision becomes socially; those among his/her family and friends who could accommodate to the change in his identity accepted it with varying comfort (his father and his older brother recovered from initial shock to an acceptance; his youngest sister seemed unbothered; his mother and two other sisters declined to appear in the film). Strangers often seemed mystified. Because he took upon himself a task to publicize his decision, author a book about it and appear in various gatherings and media events, people had sometimes strong reactions to him, positive or negative.

To me, Kristen Beck came across in the film as a man in women's clothing. His behavior was male-typically forthright and deliberate. (Okay, you don’t have to say it.) His voice was deep: a man's voice. With makeup, under the right conditions (much of the interview with him in the studio showed an attractive middle‐aged woman in a classy dress), she became unambiguously female. Shown romping around in a government free‐fire reserve with military firearms and high-heeled boots, she became something else.

All of which left me curious. What was this peculiar person? Intellectually, I have no problem with anyone choosing how to dress or behave, within the limits of civility. I'm okay with ambiguity regarding the norms of sexuality. My own inclinations are clearly heterosexual. The fact that I recently discovered that Joyce Kilmer, who wrote "I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree" was a man left me "recalculating" my GPS of what the world looks like, or that Evelyn Waugh (whom I knew only through literary references) was not female, never shook me to any extent. I've been mostly comfortable with how the human race is divided. If Christopher/Kristen Beck were my own brother/sister, I might feel differently.

A lot of the world's polarities are little more than conveniences in categorization‐‐we all look for such regularities to keep our balance in life. It seems unfortunate, at best, that many people get riled by "them vs. us" issues. I suppose that I'm simply lucky to live in a pretty liberal and predictable environment.

I know people whose sexual preference runs to their own kind, and yet their identity appears to coincide with their physiology. It might be personally disconcerting to know that cute Ellen Page is not “available” to me in the sense that other attractive females might be. (Set aside for the sake of this discussion the enormous logistics implied in that statement.) Someone like Kristen Beck, who claims to be, in essence, a woman in a man's body, leaves up in the air the question of sexual preference. That was my main question after watching the film: where does she fit in my typography? My reading in Wikipedia that Kristen Beck “never really felt gay” left me scratching my head.

Someone who has had a sex‐change operation and clearly is attracted to the newly‐opposite sex is understandable to me. I've discovered that my biggest problem seems to be with those whose preferences are indeterminate. They leave me to question my own vulnerability. The sexual drive seems so ubiquitous among people; I'm at a loss how to think about those who seem to have no such drive, as though there must be something pathological going on, perhaps in me. Bisexuality is not the problem for me; asexuality is. Even at my age, well beyond a state of sexual competence, I'm invested in the bifurcation of people into "objects of desire" and "erotically uninteresting." The attention that has accrued to LGBT recently gives me much to ponder, particularly when I’m confronted with particular examples.

Many years ago, I experienced a similar nudge to my world view when I discovered that a young folk singer who had agreed to my making a documentary film about her, turned out to be lesbian. Up to that time I had never personally known anyone who was gay. The following weeks were, indeed, eye opening for me.

It’s a big and complicated world out there. My “bifurcation” of human beings is getting foggier and foggier. There are not just two kinds of people.

Monday, June 16, 2014

Charles Ives

I’m most often moved by words. No, that’s not right. I’m most often moved by music. No.

A conundrum. I guess it’s more that I’m moved by either or both. I have an amateur’s ear for both music and words; perhaps if I had ever mastered either I could discuss what all this means.

To go back to the beginning, to what most recently moved me: a piece in The New York Review about a book recently published by Stephen Budiansky about Charles Ives. I’ve never been a fan of Ives’s music, and apparently I’m not alone in that. What caught me in this review was the first sentence: “Charles Ives, the crazy and brilliant patriarch of American music, loved a good cacophony.” What I remember of Ives’s music is just that: cacophony. I find most modern music difficult, with a few exceptions such as the work of Aaron Copeland and others who have written for the movies. Perhaps, I thought, I can get something from this.

I assume that Jeremy Denk, the author of the review, was reporting more or less what the book’s author said about Ives, but Budiansky is actually quoted very little; indeed, his name is not included very often in the piece. But no matter. What I read was the first clear description I’ve seen of what Ives thought and felt and composed. He was considered naïve and amateurish by some of his more well-known contemporary composers, and a genius by others. The core of the controversy, it seems, stems from his use of traditional and easy melodies juxtaposed against dissonant crashes and conflicting themes. It’s difficult music to understand.

Ordinarily, such esoterica would have caused me to turn the page and look for something I could follow more easily (my amateur’s ear). But I found myself hooked. Denk obviously admires Ives. He explains what all the dissonance and conflicting passages mean, and at the end I realized “I got it!”

Throughout the review, I wished I could hear the passages he describes. If I had recordings of Ives’s music I would have been tempted to put them on and listen, even though I’d have to wade through a lot of music just to find the examples, and I know from experience that the distraction of that process spoils the curiosity that has led me there. I get lost. But what was amazing to me, just reading Denk’s words gave me a sense of Ives that I’ve never experienced before. Now I need to hear some of that music while I’m still in the thrall of the prose. I’ll be looking for those little things that he says represents what Ives meant in his music. I suppose that’s what reviews are for: to expand one’s curiosity.

Would I ever get to the point where I’d choose to listen to Ives more than to Rachmaninoff? Not likely. I’m a romantic about a lot of things. Still, I have curiosity about the rest of the world; that’s why I read things like the New York Review. At my age, my neurons are disappearing faster than I can build them, so there’s no way I can become who I always thought was my destiny. (Welcome to the club, my father would say if he were still around.) I have to be content to occasionally feeling moved.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

I Am My Grandfather

Friday, May 23, 2014

4:31 AM

I've been tinkering lately with gadgets. The most recent one is a photo lamp made from an array of LEDs, those ubiquitous little lights that have become the next big thing in household and automotive lighting, promising to replace the incandescent light bulbs and even the fluorescent tubes that have been standard for many years. My homemade lamp, constructed from a brownie cake pan, a few pieces of hardware and strips of LEDs pasted onto a sheet of plastic, nearly 500 of them, powered by a surplus 12-volt power supply salvaged from an old laptop computer. Mounted on a tripod, it throws a respectable flood of light for portraiture. I understand the professionals are using such LED-powered lights, but this one cost only a few dollars and gave me the opportunity to build something again. Forty or fifty years ago, I was obsessed with tinkering, having built my own music systems and cobbled-together photographic gear, and my first three or four computers.

My grandfather was like that. I remember visiting him once after he had retired, and marveling at his gadgets. He happened to have been a watchmaker for a while during the depression, and had built a little projector for examining the gears in women's watches. Discovering a burr on a gear tooth, he could smooth the tiny part so that it would function properly.

Before he retired, he installed giant hydroelectric turbines for General Electric all over the world. Self-taught, he had attended school only through the fourth grade, learning algebra from books and eventually becoming a licensed engineer.

I was about twenty when I had some time to get to know him. By then he was past his prime, trying to be useful with the knowledge he had accumulated over the years but no longer sharp enough to compete in a changing industrial milieu.

I wonder now what he thought about, sitting in his little retirement cabin in the woods, watching the world go on without him, tinkering with watches and other gadgets. No, I guess I don't have to wonder, because I'm caught up in the same old age, remembering the curiosities and occasional successes of a long life, feeling pride in accomplishing but knowing at the same time that none of it has changed the world; none of it will be known by anyone in another decade. The people who knew his work are mostly dead themselves. The relics of his life's efforts are now rusting in abandoned power plants and junk yards. It reminds me of some of the episodes of Star Trek.

Maybe it's an age thing, to dwell on the past. We old guys don't have much future to contemplate, no plans, few dreams. It just seems a shame that those little contributions we've made to the progress of the world would soon disappear so completely. They seemed too important at the time to become like sand paintings, done only to be erased on completion.

At least I know that I'm not alone.My grandfather must have gone through this. I remember him, but few others do, and in another generation no one will. And the same thing will happen to me.

Monday, May 5, 2014

The slow death of isolation

 

I’m getting used to not hearing much of what people say around me. For a quarter of a century, I’ve had a hearing deficiency, and it’s slowly getting worse. A little earlier, I developed tinnitus, that ringing in one’s ears, but that affected my hearing only incidentally (the noises I experience seem to begin at around 5000 Hz, and that’s about where my hearing begins to fall off). The real loss appears to be in understanding what people are saying, even when their voices are loud enough. No amount of amplification seems to overcome that part of it. I attribute it to faulty wiring in my brain, the part which “makes sense” of what I hear. It makes sense (!) to me that the vibrations striking my eardrums and converted to neural signals by the hair-like cells in the cochlea of my inner ears go through some pretty complex transformations on the way to “hearing what is said.”

In a quiet environment, I can converse easily with someone who is speaking at a normal level close to me and directing their speech directly at me. Not always, actually—some people’s voices don’t register well, but most do. Add some background noise, however, and my hearing loss becomes increasingly apparent. The worst situation is a noisy restaurant, sitting at a table with a number of people who are talking among themselves. I end up simply ignoring what others are saying, because to question them repeatedly is to interrupt the conversation and call attention to my deficiency. More and more, I choose to drop out of such group conversations. And thus isolating myself even more.

Ironically, what I miss most in my life is intimate connection with others. Before this hearing loss began, I discovered something about myself that I hadn’t realized before, that I treasure exactly that intimacy that comes from sharing of feelings with others. In an ongoing community someone introduced me to, I found that I’d always felt separate from people in general, too shy to approach others, “lacking in social skills,” because I hadn’t had enough practice. In that community, I learned some of the skills and confidence to overcome my isolation. With the loss, in time, of that community my reclusiveness returned.

Perhaps this shyness is what encouraged me to focus on writing. Since adolescence, I have written a lot. With practice, I developed comfort in putting words together. Writing makes me think and it gives me time to gather my thoughts enough to share them with others. I’d much rather write letters than to engage in a telephone conversation. That preference has intensified with the growing loss of my hearing. Just this essay is an example of something I’d be hard put to express orally. Few people would want to wait for me to put the right words together in a conversation.

Yesterday, I was having one of those rare intimate conversations with someone I have known and loved for a long time, but whom I have not been with much. The environment was an ordinary family gathering, with people talking and working together, focused mostly on the tasks at hand. I thought I was hearing well enough to taste that intimacy, but I found out later that I had missed completely at least one remark, one that would have made a great difference in the depth of my understanding of the conversation. I missed the significance of what was said to me. The moment is unrecoverable, at least for now.

I share my life with someone who knows me deeply, with whom I share just as deeply, and most of the time with her I feel understood, in spite of this growing silence in my head (replaced by amorphous clicks and pings and other racket). Otherwise, I find myself increasingly isolated. I have a number of people whom I count as my friends, but seldom do I have the opportunity for extended sharing of intimacy.

Just as my physical body is slowly deteriorating with age, my sense of life seems to be fading away. Medical remedies may postpone the failure of my kidneys and my blood-making processes, but I despair sometimes at the loss of myself as a person—defined and supported by interaction with others. The nothingness of death sometimes seems not all that awful.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Regrets

Most of the time, I can look at my life and acknowledge that I’ve done well enough; certainly, I currently live a better life than perhaps I deserve, karma-wise. I love and am confident that I’m loved—that in itself makes life worthwhile. While my health is about normal for someone my age: kept alive by medications, kept functioning by a modicum of mental and physical activities, I know that my days are limited.

What might have been part of my life seems a bit ridiculous to consider, I suppose. I might have done better by those who trusted me over the years, but that’s not the present consideration.

I’ve been sitting on a sunny Sunday morning, reading The New Yorker, one of my favorites, and listening to the Saint Saëns organ symphony (which of course prompts one to close one’s eyes and simply absorb the resonances that make reading impossible).

I’ve also been wondering—again—why I didn’t stick with an early experimentation with music. As a teen-ager, I plinked a lot on my sister’s piano, hearing things that fascinated me, trying out various chords and even writing down a few “songs.” Nobody really encouraged me, but nobody discouraged me, either. If I’d had enough gumption, I’d have pushed myself to at least take lessons and try to satisfy that needling curiosity about why music affected me. I’ve never felt that I “could’ve been a contender” in music, but I might have accumulated enough skill to play for myself and feel the stuff that was inside of me come out as far as my fingers, at least. Regret number one, recurring over most of my life.

When I was eight years old, a family friend took me to a local airstrip and paid for me to be taken up in a brief flight in an old (even at that time) tandem airplane of some kind. Ever since then, I’ve fantasized about flying—not the hear-to-there-crammed-into-a-seat-isolated-from-“flying,” but feeling the lift and the freedom of a light plane, crawling over the landscape, above ordinary life itself, it seems. I’ve read about people who conquered mountains or brought back medals from the Olympics, but never was I tempted to emulate them. I couldn’t imagine myself winning an air race, or even trying. Enough for me is to hang suspended by slender wings three thousand feet above green fields and silver lakes, and then climaxing the experience by turning into final approach with the thin wedge of a rubber-smeared runway coming toward me and feeling the soft plump as tires meet concrete. There is no gourmet feast that could compare with that experience. I know that had I been persistent in my youth, I could have had that as a regular part of my life, in some form.

Both of these holes in my life could have been filled. I say often that I don’t know why they never were, but it’s obvious that I didn’t work hard enough. Hence the regrets.

There was something else that as a young person I dreamed about: writing. I wrote some silly (erotic, of course) stories in my teens, and for a while seriously pursued the idea of professional writing. It never occurred me to go for a MFA (if such was even available at the time), but I never let go of the desire to be a writer. In middle age, I did get a degree along those lines and eventually managed to support myself writing technical material. It wasn’t until I retired that I said, okay, from now on I write for myself. I didn’t dream of fame. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts at marketing, I decided that that part of the process didn’t interest me. I simply wrote. Not many people have read what I’ve written since. I can honestly say I don’t care, although I can’t deny that a wider recognition would give me some satisfaction. The recent advances in technology allow me to put my work up where it might attract a reader or two, the limit of my marketing efforts.

So what has my life been about, and how might it have been more satisfying—aside from the emotional and relational part of it? I think I used the word gumption here somewhere. Something I lacked enough of. I suppose I could blame that on my early environment—inadequate role models, little encouragement, whatever. The bottom line is that I didn’t have enough of it. Some people are born with other, more influential, limitations. This has been my life. I can wish, on occasion, for it to have been different.

On the whole, approaching my eighty-sixth year, I can’t complain.

Monday, January 27, 2014

Folk or Country-Western?

I don’t know much about music, even though it’s been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. As a kid I sat alongside our old console radio and listened with equal fascination to Grand Ole Opry and the Telephone Hour. It was a long time before I sorted out the difference between the passages from Les Préludes by Liszt and the more famous Overture to William Tell by Rossini, both occurring in every episode of The Lone Ranger. Without that music, I suspect that my favorite radio program would have been just another program.

I lived within range of WCKY, from Covington, Kentucky, one of the most widely heard radio stations in the country during the heyday of Clear Channel stations. They played a lot of different music during the day, but at night, when their signal reached over half the continent, it was all what we called “Hillbilly music.” In my snobbish teen years, I came to avoid such music, preferring either classical or swing, but it was hard to avoid Country music in the Midwest. Only after World War Two, when FM radio bloomed, did there seem to be an alternative.

When I began to travel a bit, I found that Out West, country music was called “western music.” If there was a difference, it might have been due to the nasal twang of Appalachian voices and the more Southern accents of the Rockies. Seemed to me to be the same music, the same limited chord choices, the same relaxed diction (the word ain’t was ubiquitous either way).

Country music for the most part came from the Scot-Irish settlers of the Appalachian Mountains, carried over from their ancestors back in the Old World. There was a lot of reference to broken relationships and personal suffering. Western music was “cowboy music,” which emphasized the often lonely life on the range.

A decade later, the world was changing again, and suddenly a new/old musical genre came to my attention—Folk Music. It was like my old favorites by Hank Williams and Roy Acuff, but with a pedigree that came from way earlier than Nashville. I couldn’t tell much difference, but then, as I said, I don’t know much about music, so the musical differences seemed to me to be slight. The political differences, however, were plain. Folk was about the struggles of ordinary people with the environment or with the establishment; Country was about the struggles of plain people with their more personal situations—love and drink, mostly. Not that I analyzed all that at the time.

Kim Ruehl, in About.com/folk music, wrote, “Country music evolved out of the folk music tradition, and continues to influence it in hindsight. However, much of contemporary country is far more relatable to pop music than to folk. The difference is the involvement of big business in the development of country stars' careers. While folk artists occasionally find their way into the mainstream music industry machine, for the most part folk music is a sub-corporate genre more concerned with community involvement and speaking for the people than in record sales and image consultants.”

I hadn’t given all this much thought until the recent release of the movie Inside Llewin Davis, which was about the beginnings of the renaissance of folk music in Greenwich Village just prior to Bob Dylan. It inspired a lot of conversation among people I associate with, although some of us found the movie itself disappointing. It occurred to me that our interest in it might have something to do with our ages—the folk revival of the Sixties occurring at important phases in our lives. Musically, the movie sparked interest in the style because of the attention given to “authentic” folk, leading to a concert in New York.

Folk/country/western is a far cry from Ravel and Rachmaninov, but I can get lost in either. I can tell the difference between Sibelius and Brahms, and between Johnny Cash and Gene Autry, but for me, music fills  a large place in my soul. There’s room for it all.