The piano teacher came twice a week to erase the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin.
Like so many (but not enough), I keep trying to make sense of that which makes no sense. Here is my latest attempt, using music as the central metaphor:
“People are endowed with certain unalienable rights and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ” These words that birthed our country were like a Chopin composition, inviting us to rise to master the virtuoso techniques, nuanced emotion, intricate forms of our human promise. They asked us to use the full range of the keyboard of our humanitarian possibilities, in all 12 keys, to navigate through the churling stormy passages and savor the quiet tender moments that lived only measures apart in the same composition.
The gap between what we said and what we did, between the exquisite vision and the brutal reality, was awful indeed. The very man who penned those words owned enslaved human beings who were systematically denied those unalienable rights. As did many of those white male landowners who signed that Declaration of Independence. But still they set in motion a mission for succeeding generations to achieve. Like the child first sitting down at the piano, their hands were too small, their minds just beginning to make the needed neural connections, their frontal lobes of empathy a long way from development. Their hearts could only hold what the past bequeathed them— the collective traumas and toxic narratives and cruel practices jumbled together with another lineage of inspired spiritual teachers, artists, authors who suggested a higher calling.
The idea of consciously crafting a government with a more lofty and inclusive vision than the legacy of kings and queens and conquerors and caste that offered no choice and no invitation to rise higher, where life was merely “nasty, brutish and short” was something new under the sun. Those words from the Declaration of Independence became our North Star, our guiding light by which we navigated that turned our gaze upward to the heavens. It promised a life more majestic and astonishing beyond what we could previously imagine. It offered a whole universe of possibility and encouraged us to rise higher through our own efforts. Like hearing Rubinstein play Chopin and coming out of the concert inspired and determined to practice diligently to erase that awful gap between the mundane and the sublime.
That North Star made all the difference and it was the terrible tension between the blood-soaked ground and the splendid sky that defined our American story. That was where the great drama was played out and where so many had their moment on stage to ennoble us all. From Phyliss Wheatley to John Brown to Emily Dickinson to Henry David Thoreau to Harriet Tubman to Walt Whitman to Frederick Douglas to Sitting Bull to Mother Jones to the Grimke Sisters to W.E. Dubois up to Ida B. Wells and Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King and Fannie Lou Hamer— the list is long and still growing. Not to mention the Jim Thorpes and Jackie Robinsons and Muhammed Alis and Wilma Rudolphs, the Zora Neale Hurstons and James Baldwins and Maya Angelous and Barbara Kingsolvers, the Louis Armstrongs and Duke Ellingtons and Billie Holidays and Charlie Parkers and Thelonious Monks and Nina Simones and John Coltranes who invited Dorothy to aspire to new complexities different than Chopin. All of them and thousands more dancing in that awful gap to bring us yet closer to our destiny among the stars.
And now look at who we are. Schools are forbidden to teach the science of the stars, our history is being silenced, our art ignored, our very attempt to educate shut down. Tech giants prey on children to addict them to the machines so that they’ll walk beneath the star-studded sky and never once look up, their gaze buried downward in their device that reduces their immense intelligence and feeling life to distraction and sensation, violence and porn. 2% of our population listens to jazz, 3% to European classical music, so Chopin and Ellington don’t even cross their screen. Music is now only played on the white keys and confined to the middle range of the keyboard, reduced to dull repetition of meaningless simplistic phrases at loud volumes. If you listen hard enough and look for it, beautiful music of all sorts is still being played, but is not banned from the Kennedy Center and not broadcast on public media. Our founding documents are being trampled on left and right and not enough are noticing. In short, there is no gap to close anymore. The North Star is now real estate for billionaires to take their trip in space and claim it as their own.
And yet. All around us are people refusing the attempt to slam the piano lid on their fingers. Like that extraordinary video of a woman playing Chopin in her home in the Ukraine reduced to rubble, this is how we will bear up while resisting the dismantling of our founding vision. This Dorothy has traveled fully across the gap to arrive at the promise we all equally share. And so should we.
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