On the Road Again

I’m back at the airport. It’s been three months since I’ve been here. I didn’t miss it and it didn’t miss me, but we’re both fine seeing each other again. Except I hardly recognize Terminal 3.  In my absence, and without consulting me, United went and completely changed things around. I think they got jealous of the new Terminal 2. It’s disorienting. I was looking forward to greeting my old gates and now I don’t know where the heck I am. Everything slick and new. It fits America’s concept of goodness, but hey, there’s great comfort in familiarity and as far as I knew, the old Terminal worked just fine.

Did I miss traveling? Not particularly. It was good to hunker down into the routine of work and between the Winter break, short trips in the car, the ever-surprising encounter with children in my music classes, the always-surprising encounter with my own imagination improvising jazz piano, there was plenty of novelty and variety to keep me alive and alert.

But now two months of travel ahead and it still thrills me, that sense of being on the move, new sounds, new sights, new people, new possibilities. There’s a different quality of attention as one is called upon to negotiate signs in other languages, transportation systems, restaurant menus and beyond. And there will be plenty of repetition to keep things familiar—my own established world saved in folders on my laptop, books, a journal, Crostics puzzles, playing cards, teaching my familiar material in workshops, all the portable temples I carry around. Similar routines shifted to new locales.

It is that conversation between repetition and variety, familiarity and novelty, that keeps things both comforting and interesting. It’s the way our brain grows, the way our winged imagination finds feet and our footed imagination finds wings. Many rhythmic cycles to this dialogue and mine seems to have settled in three-month blocks, a cycle which began all those years back at Antioch College, where I studied for three months in Yellow Springs, Ohio and then went off somewhere to work for three months. Back and forth for four years like that. Who would have imagined that 30 or 40 years later, my life would resume the same rhythm? Three months at school, off somewhere to travel and teach (or home to write with a different schedule and feeling), back to school.

And so it begins with a short flight to Portland, Oregon to re-unite with my darling Zadie and equally darling (though now in the background) daughter, son-in-law and teenage step-grandchild Alijah. Then one more week at school—I’m not quite done—and then off for real to Europe, then Asia. The traveling music teacher come alive again.

The flight to Portland is mercifully short and no time zones crossed. Picked up by the men, Zadie at daycare, hop on a bike to meet my daughter Kerala for lunch downtown. First time biking in Portland, untrafficked back streets with plums blooming, 45 degrees and overcast, but warming up, a tricky stretch to figure out how to cross the Morrison Bridge, weaving in and around the homeless culture. Hard to avoid in Portland, but especially populated under the bridges. Then meet up with Kerala and my growing grandson in her belly, lunch at a Lebanese restaurant and catch up on the news. She back to work, me to Powell’s Books, my ritual pilgrimage. Find a good novel, book of poetry and two books for Zadie. Look for my own ABC’s of Education on the—well, Education shelves. It was there one visit! But not now. I guess it’s just so dang popular it sells out fast. Ha! In my dreams.

The return uphill bike ride awaits me, a pause on a bench at Powell’s and memory of the last time I was here, when my sister had just called and let me know that my Mom was on her way out. That was a difficult time, trying to decide whether to rush home. I didn’t, she waited and we said our last goodbye almost a year ago, April 6^th. A friend’s recent news on Facebook about her Dad’s passing quoted him: “Nobody gets out of here alive!”

Truth with a dash of humor to lighten it a bit. And since it is true, let us attend to the gift of being here, alive, alert, awake. Yes indeed.

Scheherezade

Do you remember the Arabian Nights? A king who was disappointed in his wife’s infidelity married a new virgin each night and executed her the next morning for vengeance. After 1,000 such women came Scheherezade and she had a plan. She told the king a story and stopped in the middle. Eager to hear the end, he postponed the morning execution. The next night, she finished the story and then began another, leaving off again before it was finished. Another stay of execution. And so it continued for 1001 nights, 1000 stories, before she confessed that she had no more. By then, his heart had softened and they lived…happily ever after?

I never read the whole collection, but was familiar with the well-known ones like “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves” and “Sinbad the Sailor.” Rimsky-Korsakoff’s piece (Scheherezade) was one of my all-time favorites as a kid, the soundtrack to that exotic locale and very different world.

Why am I talking about this? Because this is my 1,000^th Blog. One thousand stories about my day that have helped shape further and clearer my sense of what each had to offer. With the added pleasure that someone out there is reading them. But I wonder if I might entice readers to come back again and again if I stopped each story in the middle.

Because just last night, I received an e-mail from a beautiful Iranian woman I met in Europe many years back. Her name was Sharzhad and her voice when she sang was like pearls glistening in moonlight. One night, we were at a café sipping gluhwein and she turned to me and said, “You know, I wouldn’t tell anyone this ordinarily, and least of all you, but this wine is working some mischievous magic on me and the distant mountains in the moonlight are so lovely in this evening air." She touched my arm and looked me in the eye and spoke in a soft whisper, "So I think it’s time to confess to you that…”

To be continued.

The Right Kind of Trouble: Art and Social Change: Part II

(Part two of an unpublished article I wrote some eight years back).

As the title suggests, art is a force for social change without necessarily intending to be so. The artist by nature is not content to wholly accept things as they are, be they a social convention or a way of seeing. He or she develops a habit of thinking, responding, imagining, creating and re-creating. A person who is constantly thinking, constantly responding from the heart and seeing with the soul is a person who does not easily obey orders and accept whitewashed propaganda. He or she may care more about art than politics and choose not to get involved in group action— any group, no matter how good its intention or honorable its values, is vulnerable to creating its own type of stifling conformity and mass mindedness and the artist by temperament may be inclined to resist this.  But the role of the artist is to provoke, to question, to prod and that slows down the manufacturing of consent that much politics depends on.

Mass culture depends upon statistics, stereotypes, averages, both making people too much alike and too much different. The soul as revealed by art is always both one of a kind in its particulars and universal in its qualities. To take but one example—a good novel explodes the convenient lie that the people not living in our neighborhood are strange and wholly other. By hearing their story, we cannot dismiss them as less than human, an exotic tribe or collateral damage. When a Richard Wright or Arundhati Roy or John Steinbeck present characters that live and breathe, exult and grieve, rise above human foibles or fall from grace—in short, people like us—they offer a powerful antidote to the 6 o’clock news.

Poets can do the same. Anyone who has read Rumi or Basho or Lorca and paused to wonder how people so distant in time, place, temperament and upbringing can speak so eloquently to our own feelings and experience knows that there is indeed a universal human spirit beneath our constant squabbling and it is worth our attention to cultivate dialogues that bridge differences instead of wave our flags of divisive self-righteousness around.

I believe it was C.S. Lewis who once said that art is the reminder that we are not alone. What is worth noting here is the diversity of the company we keep.  The town of the imagination that I live in has young black women, dead white men, Sufi mystics, beat Zen Buddhists, state senators, revolutionaries, insurance salesmen and itinerant vagabonds all living together on the same block. My library and recording collection is an international marketplace crossing borders of space and time. Hafiz sits down to dine with Gary Snyder, Thoreau and Mary Oliver have a little chat, Dickens writes letters to Zora Neale Hurston, Schubert, Miles and Ravi Shanker trade tunes with each other.

Such exchanges don’t only exist on an imaginative level, but in real time as well. Louis Armstrong, who grew up a poor black person, never got past 5^th grade and began his career in a reform school, sang the songs of Cole Porter, that upper class privileged white man who attended Harvard and Yale. When we hear Satchmo transform the tune “You’re the Top” from a clever song to a soul-stirring performance or hear Billie Holiday take Porter’s “Love for Sale” and tell us the story of her life, we witness a mingling on the artistic level historically prohibited on a social level. Without Porter—or Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and dozens of other songwriters outside their social group— Louis and Billie surely would have found something else to sing, but it might not have touched the nerve in American culture the way that these songs did. Without Louis and Billie, that repertoire would have remained a footnote in American musical history, the novelty acts of Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians. When society’s restrictive lines are crossed in art, something wonderful often happens. And for the alert listener, it is not too far a leap to consider that maybe those lines can be crossed in life as well.

A case in point. In Ken Burns’ documentary “Jazz,” he tells the story of a young 19 year old law student named Charlie Black who happened to attend a concert by Louis Armstrong. He was mesmerized by the music, moved in a way that he had never experienced before. As his insides began to stir in the way that only art can stir them, he was struck that such power and beauty was coming out of a horn played by a black man. His notion that blacks were inferior, fed to him by his upbringing, met the inescapable truth of the man in front of his eyes. Years later, he found himself one of the team of lawyers who ruled against segregation in the famous Brown vs. Board of Education. Had he not stumbled into Louis Armstrong that fateful night, that decision may have turned out differently.

Art can often serve as the antennae of society, tuned into the next social change that needs to be made. A mark of a healthy society is one that encourages arts as a means to keep it honest. If practicality and economics are to own most of the seats in the Senate, it seems important to at least reserve a few seats for Soul to have its voice. When decisions are made, the aesthetic, artistic or spiritual cost should be factored in and for that, they need the voice of art.

If we are to take this possibility seriously, we need to begin the process in those training grounds for future citizens, the schools. As they exist, these institutions are mostly obedience schools for children to learn to beg, heel, roll over and play dead, Where it is allowed in the door at all, arts education is often just another tedious attempt to learn the proper techniques, duplicate the established canons, perform to please parents or gain prestige or provide entertainment at the football games.

A genuine arts education begins by challenging the passivity of rote learning and inviting the children to dig down past the right answers to the unanswerable questions that fuel the engine of creativity. Good arts programs help children develop habits of astute observation, imaginative interaction and skillful wrestling of imagination into form. Arts in the schools can be the place where children see the stories the mainstream media doesn’t show on the news, hear the tales kept out of the newspapers and history books, meet the characters whose skin, face, sex or upbringing are so radically different, but whose thoughts and dreams are so astonishingly the same.

The democracy yet to be not only requires informed citizens, but experienced citizens, people who have had their assumptions challenged by a novel, their breath interrupted by a dance gesture, their world stopped by a painting or their life turned upside down by a piece of music. Following Neruda and Yeats and Vaclev Havel, we can use actual poets and artists in positions of power, but perhaps more important, we need the arts to take their seat in the Senate of our imaginative life. We need to lift art out of its second class role as entertainment, diversion, hobby and raise it to a force of powerful transformation.

Mozart’s once radical music is now muzak for a less stressful commute, John Coltrane’s tumultuous saxophone probings have been reduced to Kenny G’s smooth jazz. Before one can fully experience the comforting arms of art, one must fall down and skin a few knees. And that means risk, questioning, doubt, not only learning the arts themselves, but the forms of artistic investigation.

As I told my students yesterday at the Martin Luther King Day celebration, a community event that delivered its message through songs, hip-hop dancing and poetry, “Your job is to go out in the world and cause trouble. Not an aimless, selfish, indulgent kind of trouble, but the right kind of trouble.“

Maybe that’s one definition of art— a way to guide you to the right kind of trouble. 

"Go, Romeo!"— Art and Social Change: Part I

In my life before this blog, I used to write articles. Some I sent to Orff magazines, but many lay unread in some folder on the screen or file in the cabinet. I wrote them simply to try to organize my thinking about whatever I happened to be thinking about. It was a good practice, but sometimes I think I should re-organize them and put them between two covers to complete the process.

I’m reading a book now with a few excellent chapters about orality and literacy and peeked back into my old files to try to find an article I once wrote about that subject. Alas, couldn’t find it, but came across another one that called to me. My daughter Talia is looking at art as a vehicle for social change in her 4^th grade classroom and lo and behold, there is my article on that very subject! A different take than her focus, but I found it worthy of a re-read nonetheless. So until I collect these in a book, here it is on the blog in two parts. Enjoy!

A friend and I once made a short movie for our college film class. We were both novice Buddhists and were proud of our loose haiku-like narrative accompanying images of peace and serenity. Our teacher, however, was less pleased. “There’s no conflict. No conflict, no art.”

We were indignant and felt self-righteously misunderstood in only the ways that 19-year olds can. We privately accused our teacher of being so Cartesian in his need for opposition and shook our heads with pity that he failed to grasp the peaceful principles of Buddhism. Little did we realize that Buddha’s very story is a classic tale of conflict. A privileged prince is raised to continue the royal line, sheltered from all unpleasant things. He convinces his chariot driver to sneak out of the palace and encounters a sick person, a hungry person, an old person and a corpse. Confronted for the first time with injustice, suffering and death, he is filled with self-doubt and eventually leaves his wife and family to seek the truth. After traveling down several false paths, he finds his moment under the Bo tree and begins a teaching that will influence the life of most of Asia for the next 2500 years. One story of conflict— big results.

As my friend and I matured in our Buddhist practice, we also came to realize how many conflicts raged within our own breasts as we faced our inner demons in meditation retreats. There may be a “peace that passeth all understanding” at the end of the spiritual rainbow, but the path is filled with unending bumps and rough places. Transformation seems to require that we stumble and fall repeatedly and pay our dues with bruised knees and broken bones.

Whether it be the art of living or the art of art, our film teacher was right—no conflict, no worthy art. Art begins with a conflict that demands to be heard and moves through various levels of transformation in accordance with our strength and courage to face it. It often begins with the refusal to accept that which is handed down to us. Had Huck Finn meekly submitted to Aunt Polly’s attempt to civilize him and sat in his assigned seat obediently doing his schoolwork, there would have been no story. Had Tita resigned herself to Mama Elena’s dictum that the youngest sacrifice marriage to care for her, there would be no mouth-watering conflict to drive the story forward and enliven both the dinner table and the bedroom. Like water for chocolate, things need be brought to a boil before we taste the sweetness.

Society in all its many faces—from Dickens’ London to Hussein’s Kabul to Achebe’s Nigeria—asks for compliance with convention. Without this implicit agreement, the mail couldn’t be delivered nor the trains run on time. But what is efficient for the machinery of society can sometimes by troublesome to the soul. And this is where art begins.

Take marriage, that most necessary and universal of custom to continue both the family line and species’ survival. For most of human history, the arranged marriage is the preferred mode— a mere matter of convenience, economics and ethnic purity. Enter love, that troublesome emissary of Soul and suddenly Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Tony and Maria, are sneaking around in defiance of all accepted protocol—and we, the reader/viewer are cheering them on. They remind us of our own deferred dreams, our own secret loves and our own crazy ideas that we keep wrapped up tightly away from society’s gaze. That’s what art can do for us—speak our deep longings that would be ridiculed at the pub, ignored in the workplace, or considered dangerous by Homeland Security.

Schools, parents and therapists keep working to make sure we’re normal, but most people who have made a difference in this world have had raging conflicts lighting the fire of their passion. It’s hard to imagine as we listen to Mozart’s pleasant harmonies to reduce stress during rush hour, balance our biofeedback, make our children smarter, or set the mood for romance that such beauty came forth from inner turmoil. As his biographer Maynard Solomon reminds us, Mozart came “to disturb the slumber of the world.” Where the day to day world prefers things at a mild intensity, the dial set to background, Mozart and indeed, every artist worth his or her salt, asks for something different—listen, stretch, attend, feel. Don’t sleepwalk through this life with the comfort of easily learned routine.

The artist committed to creation can never rest. No sooner is one painting finished or novel signed off than the next one begins. An advertising man can invent one clever slogan and live off the fat of his paycheck for the rest of his life. The composer can write an entire symphony and still have to get up the next morning and write the opening theme for the next one. The creator is driven to observe the world and respond in perpetually new ways.

The Real Story of George and the Cherry Tree

Remember the story of little Georgie Washington who was so enamored with his new hatchet that he went around hacking everything in the yard? Including his father’s beloved cherry tree. When the father demanded to know who chopped down his tree, little Georgie fessed up, “I cannot tell a lie. It was me.” And his father embraced him, saying his honesty was worth more than any tree.

Well, prepare for a disappointment. Just like Columbus as a hero and Santa and such, it turns out that it probably wasn’t true. Somebody lied. Maybe the same guy who actually did chop down that cherry tree. Who knows? It was a long time ago and their were no Instagrams to provide immediate evidence.

But with most San Francisco kids off from school this week, I have a theory. I think the story goes like this:

“George as a young teen went out to eat one night at a Chinese restaurant and fell in love with the waitress. Because mixed relationships were discouraged— someone who ate with a fork and another who ate with chopsticks— they started meeting secretly behind the cherry tree. When Lunar New Year came, George wanted to give his new love a gift. The cherry tree was in bloom, the pink blossoms were close to the coveted red colors of the Chinese New Year celebration and they both had many fond memories of their time lying under the tree. Since the florist was closed, he decided to chop down the whole tree to give it to her as a gift. He traveled 9 miles from his log cabin where he could barely read the heart-shaped candies he bought with secret messages like “B My Valentine” and delivered the tree and the candies and some Valentine fortune cookies, returned the extra penny the candy-maker had given him by mistake and went home with a full heart. (One version reports that he also did extensive research and learned how to sing” Sakura” to her until she politely told him that this was a Japanese song. Oops!)

When he got home, he overheard his father fuming about the tree and decided to get out of Dodge. So he grabbed his skis, returned to his beloved and took off for a week of glorious skiing until things cooled off. When he got home, his father had forgotten all about the tree because he had hurt his back shoveling the driveway. And then George became President.”

And that’s why this week, the SF Unified School District kids get off school for Chinese New Year, the private school kids go skiing, the Post Office is closed on President’s Day and everyone celebrates Valentine’s Day. Four-in-one!! All because of George’s secret love affair with a Chinese waitress, whose name has remained anonymous (though some conjecture she changed it to Martha and forbid all portrait painters in her house, worried that future fanatics in Alabama would stop using dollars to protest their mixed marriage.)

The end.