Monthly Archives: March 2023

Happiness is the most innocuous of emotions; it is plain and uninflected. Compared with its brawny cousins, such as hatred, passion, grief or joy, it is rather simple and nondescript. It is to those as water is to wine.

Happiness is what you see on the faces of children playing outdoors. It is for them, who don’t yet have the burdens of adulthood or the cares of life. They can innocently play with happy abandon. Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Yet, in those cares of life, who doesn’t wish for a few seconds freedom to experience once again the simple happiness of when we were young and didn’t know any better.

Most of our art and music concerns the bigger things. The emotions you get from Mahler are big, complex emotions, piled Pelion on Ossa, building overpowering climaxes that leave us hollowed and purged.

Think about Bach’s B-minor mass, Wagner’s Tristan, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and you find the complexity of life threaded around itself. Of the big emotions, none is uninflected, but includes a tincture of its opposite. “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught.”

Happiness, as I’m using the term here, is unalloyed. And while most of the greater emotions are felt as “happening” to yourself, happiness takes you out of yourself. You are unaware of your self when experiencing it. It is a grace.

In that sense, there is ego invested in the transcendence of Mahler or the Ode to Joy of Beethoven, but when you are happy, you barely exist: Only the happiness exists. You are only really aware of it when you wake from it and realize what you have been gifted.

Of course, such a state can only last a comparatively short time. When the philosopher asks if you have had a happy life, the only accurate answer is that life is not happy, but only moments are.

Art can rouse in us a huge range of emotions, and classical music is designed to explore the subtleties of them, and we are overwhelmed by the passions in Mahler, the transcendence in Bruckner, the joy in Beethoven’s Ninth, the angst in Berg’s violin concerto. All huge, complex emotions.

But surely, there must be some music completely devoid of such cares, and can arouse in us those feelings of abandon and freedom we had as little children. Is there music that is simply happy? This is music I put in the CD player when I just want to rock back and enjoy the simple tunes and unfettered sounds of being happy. Bouncy, tune-filled, catchy feel-good music.

The place to start, where most of the habits of classical music start, is Joseph Haydn. He seems to have invented everything: the symphony, the string quartet, the sonata form — they all descend from Haydn. And Haydn was perhaps the sanest person ever to write music, burdened by no metaphysical agonies. But even his music expresses a variety of thoughts and emotions, movement by movement, from the depth of the Seven Last Words of Christ to the finale of Symphony No. 88, which bounces with unfettered happiness. (Link here).

That kind of ebullience is hard to sustain, but here are five examples from classical music that bounce from beginning to end, along with some suggestions for recordings. (Not “the best” for I have not heard all of the recordings, but these are my favorites).

Franz Schubert Piano Quintet in A “The Trout”

The Trout Quintet is unusual in that it includes a double bass, which provides a solid bottom for the music, which allows the tunes to float along like rafters down a river. It is a sunny quintet, with hardly the whisper of a shadow in its five bright movements. Even the minor-key variation in the fourth movement is dispelled with a major chord — “I was just playing,” its composer seems to be saying.

It was written in 1819, when Schubert was 22, for piano, violin, viola, cello and bass. Through most of his best music — the late piano sonatas, late quartets and the great C-major string quintet — there is a strain of despair that is heartbreaking. Even in his short piano pieces, beloved of amateurs for a century and a half, there runs a vein of deep melancholy that shades even his happiest moments.

But none of this in the Trout. It spreads sunshine from beginning to end.

Almost any performance of The Trout will leave you giddy, but the one essential element of any recording is that you can hear — even feel — the string bass at the bottom. It is the foundation for the edifice.

I’ve always loved two performances. The first is Alexander Schneider with Peter Serkin on piano, Michael Tree on viola, David Soyer on cello and the indomitable Julius Levine on bass. It was on the Vanguard label. And Peter’s father, Rudolf Serkin anchors the Marlboro Festival musicians on Sony (then, Columbia). With Serkin is Jaime Laredo on fiddle, Philipp Naegele on viola, Leslie Parnas on cello and Levine, again, on bass. A classic performance, much loved by many, features Clifford Curzon on piano, with musicians from the Vienna Philharmonic. Originally on Decca (classical music labels are in constant flux, as mega-corporations gobble up older established labels; you never know where a classic performance will show up. Just check Amazon and you’ll find it.)

YouTube video at this link

Gioacchino Rossini String Sonata No. 1 in G

It shouldn’t be surprising that most of the music that expresses mere happiness should have been written by very young composers. The six sonatas for strings were written by Rossini when he was 12 years old, arranged for four string parts: two violin parts, one for cello and one for double bass — again providing that delightful solid bottom for the tunes.

The bass is there because Rossini wrote them while visiting the home of bass player Agostini Triossi in Ravenna, Italy, in 1804, and tossed all six sonatas out in the space of three days to be played by members of the household, with Rossini himself on second violin.

Although written for a quartet of players, they are usually performed by a full ensemble. Versions have been adapted for normal string quartet and for wind band, but the string ensemble has that fresh appeal that matches the music.

I could have chosen any of the six sonatas. They are each in three movements, fast-slow-fast, and in major keys. But I mention the first because I particularly love its jaunty finale, with a tune I can’t get out of my head.

I’ve never heard a bad performance on disc, but mostly I listen to the Naxos recording of the Rossini Ensemble, Budapest. They almost always come in a pack of all six sonatas, so you are likely to love them all. Neville Marriner has a smooth set with the Academy of St. Martin’s in the Field, and Brilliant Classics has the version with four solo players.

YouTube video at this link

Georges Bizet Symphony in C

Another prodigy, Bizet wrote his symphony when he was 17 years old and a student at the Paris Conservatoire. It was never performed in the composer’s lifetime and indeed was lost and forgotten until 1933, when it was found in the composer’s papers, and was given a first performance by Felix Weingartner in 1935. Since then, its infectious tunes and untroubled elan have found it a place in the repertoire.

I have always thought of it as a 19th century version of a Haydn symphony — perfectly proportioned, tuneful, and with no dead spots. Others may have stormed the heavens with Wagnerian thunder and Blitzen, but this symphony contents itself with pleasing its listener with melody, rhythm and smooth harmony.

It has also been lucky on disc, when three of the most lively conductors have taken it on. Leonard Bernstein with the NY Phil, and Leopold Stokowski with the National Philharmonic (a pickup orchestra), and Thomas Beecham with the Royal Philharmonic. You can’t go wrong.

YouTube video at this link

Serge Prokofiev Classical Symphony in D major, Op. 25

Another student work, in 1917 Serge Prokofiev wrote his first symphony in a kind of parodistic style of Haydn or Mozart, but with modern piquant dissonances — what has been derisively called “wrong-note romanticism.”

But the four-movement symphony has proved enormously popular. It bounces from first to last, with memorable tunes and sharp wit.

The composer Boris Asafyev, according to Prokofiev, “put into my mind an idea he was developing, that there is no true joyfulness to be found in Russian music. Thinking about this, I composed a new finale, lively and blithe enough for there to be a complete absence of minor triads in the whole movement, only major ones.”

The energy in this music is propulsive. If anyone is feeling down, with the feeling of systematically knocking the hats off anyone you meet on the streets, a listen to the Classical Symphony will cure you and leave you with a goofy grin on your face.

Many have recorded the symphony. The only failures are when the conductor takes the music too seriously or lacks any sense of humor. There are several dry versions. But I have three that I have loved. Leonard Bernstein and the NY Phil have all the elan and vigor you could ask for, if the ensemble is a tad scruffy. Eugene Ormandy and Philadelphia cannot be topped. It is a perfect recording of the music, bright and witty with gorgeous string playing. And I remember an old Odyssey LP I once owned with Max Goberman and the Vienna New Symphony. Perhaps one day a CD version will be offered.

YouTube video at this link

Darius Milhaud Le Boeuf sur le Toit, Op. 58

Imagine you are in a Brazilian dance hall and the crowd, sloppy with drink and dance, are bouncing to the music of an exuberant band — not all of whom are playing the the same key. And you cannot help but tap your toe, then jiggle your leg, and then get up and dance and sweat with the crowd. That is Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit (“The Bull on the Roof”).

It is a string of mostly Brazilian tunes, some borrowed, some invented by Milhaud, all of which are infectious and life-affirming. It is the most single-mindedly happy music I have ever encountered, completely unselfconscious and joyful. Milhaud himself called it, “15 minutes of music, rapid and gay, as a background to any Charlie Chaplin silent movie.”

You can get a recording of Milhaud himself conducting the Orchestre du Théâtre des Champs-Elysées from 1958, perhaps a bit ragged, but with all the spirit. A standard for decades has been Louis de Froment and the Orchestra of Radio Luxumbourg. But for me the perfect embodiment of this happy music is the Orchestra National de France under Leonard Bernstein; he is the perfect vehicle for the life-spirit of this music.

YouTube video at this link

Those are my five suggestions. There are others: Benjamin Britten’s 1834 Simple Symphony, made up of tunes he wrote when he was 10 years old; or perhaps Shostakovich’s Three Fantastic Dances from 1920, which he wrote between the ages of 14 and 16 — before the specter of Joseph Stalin darkened his art. Perhaps you have other suggestions to leave in the comments.

Seeing things

March 15, 2023

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This is a toaster. Something so banal that in our ordinary lives, we hardly notice or look at it. Actually this is a picture of a toaster, which is a remove from the real thing. But then, so is the word “toaster,” which is also not the real thing, but a remove from the reality.

For most of us, most of the time, seeing something — like the toaster — means being able to name it and move on to something more interesting or more immediately useful. The image in the picture functions as a pictogram, or a different “spelling” of the word. We read the image as if it were the word.

Pictogram to “read” as teapot; teapot image as “seen”

It is how we respond to most images that bombard our daily lives. We name the item seen. It has been categorized, filed and forgotten. Our lives are too busy to spend any time remarking that the toaster is yellow, or made of plastic, or has rounded corners. These details are of no particular use when fixing our morning bagel, and so, they might as well be invisible.

Of course, being able to recognize things quickly is a survival skill, and humans have survived these hundreds of thousands of years precisely because they could point quickly and yell, “Tiger!” So, I’m not pooh-poohing that ability categorically.

But life is about more than just survival. The things of this world are bursting with sense data that gets ignored by reading rather than seeing the visible world. The toaster was designed to have an esthetic impact; the yellow was chosen to be pleasing to the eye; the curves were worked in to make the shape more inviting than it would be if it were all pointy edges.

We are embedded in a universe of things — a material world — and all of those things have physical and sensuous properties. They have shape, color, heft, texture, volume, solidity or softness, shine or roughness. And all of these properties make up the elements of art, and one of the jobs art does is to remind us of these delights we normally pay no attention to. Art reminds us we are alive.

Any life can be enriched simply by paying attention. To notice the yellow, the curve, the size and shape. In fact, to those awake to the world, it is all art — and the emotional richness that the awareness brings.

It is one of the things artists were doing at the beginning of the last century when they began making abstract art: art about the color, shape, texture, without a nameable subject.

Of course, artists have always paid attention to these visual qualities. Just because a painting is of a still life, and we can name the objects, doesn’t mean that the artist wasn’t obsessed with the sensuous truth.

And so, it is a worthwhile exercise to occasionally attempt to forget what you know and see the things of your life freshly, as if you didn’t know the names, but saw only the qualities.

Humanity is varied in its ability to see beyond the names. It takes an imagination — a way of turning off your rational mind to see only the vital facts and not their meaning or use. Some people have the hardest time: I remember one woman who was asked to close her eyes and describe what she could see in her mind’s eye, and her answer was “With my eyes closed, I see only black.”

But attempting to see past the names of things is deeply rewarding. The pleasure of colors, shapes, designs, apprehended primally enriches our lives immeasurably.

Certainly the natural world invites us with color and beauty. But it isn’t just the flowers and trees, the birds and the clouds. Everyday items can be appreciated for their roundness, plumpness, hardness, color, shape, even the feel under your fingertips.

Many eons ago, when I was teaching photography at a two-year college, one of the assignments I gave my students was to photograph something in such a way I could not tell what it was. I made sure they understood that I didn’t mean just out-of-focus, or so badly lit it was murk. But to see something from a different angle, or to find a meaningful detail and separate it out.

The purpose was to help them see without depending on what they already knew things looked like. To see directly.

For example, here’s something most people see almost every day.

Did you spot what it is? It is a view of your driver’s side rear view mirror as you approach the door to open it. A great big globular shape.

One of my favorite images is one taken by Voyager II in 1983 as it passed the (then) planet Pluto and snapped this image of its moon, Charon. And compare with the more recent, and clearer image taken by NASA’s New Horizons space probe on its flyby in 2015.

Actually, that’s a lie. The image on the left is a doorknob.

And so, here’s a little quiz. These photographs were taken to illustrate the shapes, colors and textures of ordinary objects, but seen in fresh ways. But they are still recognizable, if you can spot them. Can you tell what they are? The answers are at the end of the column.

Even when you are not trying to be tricky, it is good to pay attention to the physical properties of the things of the world. Those shapes make images more memorable. And there are shapes all around.

A doorway turned into a check-mark

A paper tissue half out of a box

A kitchen strainer

We are alive on this planet for such a short time, and there is so much to take in. With our five senses we are privy to such delight and can never exhaust the riches around us. But we must be open to them, aware of them, awake to them.

Learning to see is a part of art education. To see a picture of a giraffe and point, like a first-grader, and say, “Giraffe,” is not seeing. But take up a pencil and attempt to capture what you see on paper will teach you what things really look like. Paying attention is the great secret of life.

Quiz answers: 1. Paper plates; 2. Work glove; 3. Windshield wiper; 4. Measuring spoons and ceramic duck head towel hook; 5. Old Oxford cloth shirt; 6. Toilet paper; 7. Plastic mixing bowls; 8. Pop-open gas-cap cover for Buick; 9. Ceiling fan lamp fixture; 10. Assorted shopping bags.

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Who you are is what you can’t get rid of

March 7, 2023

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This essay, now updated and rewritten, first appeared as my June, 2020 entry for the Spirit of the Senses website.

When most of us think about our “selfness,” if we ever do, we most likely think of something interior — a psychic identity. That self is an accretion, a slow buildup of experience that memory binds into a continuous story.

But we are not purely interior beings. We live in a physical world and our selves expand into every corner of our existence. My selfness is where and how I live, who I surround myself with, the items I buy at the grocery store, whether I wash and polish my car, or leave it to the elements. All me.

I finished college 50 years ago, and I have changed a great deal in that half-century, and I don’t just mean the issue of losing hair on the top of my head and gaining it in my ears.

But much has remained the same. And what has remained is what I take as the essence of my self, who I am. For most writers who tackle the subject, the self is defined primarily by memory: The continuous thread of remembering from our earliest recollection to the moment an instant before this. This continuity is our self. It is what we have held onto. It remains separate from what others believe about us or their perception of our who-ness.

There is something very insubstantial about this thread of memory. After all, the past doesn’t exist; it is a reconstruction, not an actuality. And so, for many thinkers, the self is also a construction — a back-construction. We are reminded of this when we meet old friends and talk about “remember when,” and discover that our friend’s remembering is different from our own, or that they remember things we have long forgotten.

Surely the self is more than our own cogito ergo sum, recalled in memory. It is also our behavior, the sense we make of the world and how it is constructed and how it functions. It is not simply our past, but our expectations of a future. And there should be some outward manifestation of our selfness, not solely the interior rattling around of snippets of memory, strung together like a necklace of remembered events. Self is continuity.

I began to think of such things when I woke one morning and sat on the side of the bed, facing the bookshelf on the wall in front of me. I happened to spot the slim volume of The Elizabethan World Picture by E.M.W. Tillyard, an ancient paperback that I had in college. It is a book I’ve owned for more than 50 years. It is where I first encountered the idea of the “Great Chain of Being.”

Then, I gazed over the shelves to discover if there were other books I’d owned that long, and saw Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which I attempted to cook from during my first marriage, when I was still in college. Are those two books as much a part of my selfness as the memories of the old school or the failed marriage?

As I wandered through the house later that day, I pored over the many bookshelves to seek the books I’ve owned the longest, through divorces and break-ups, through four transcontinental relocations, through at least a dozen homes I have rented in five different cities. Nine cities, if you count homes from before college, which I didn’t rent, but lived with parents.

The oldest book I have owned continuously is my great-grandmother’s Bible, which was given to me when I was four years old. I also have my grandmother’s Bible, in Norwegian, and the Bible my parents gave to me when I was a boy, with my name embossed on the cover in gold. I am not religious and don’t believe any of the content scribed therein, but I also have to recognize that the culture that nurtured me is one founded on the stories and strictures bound in that book, and more particularly, in the King James version, which I grew up on and which has shaped the tone of the English language for 400 years.

Surely, completely divorced from doctrine, the KJV is a deeply embedded part of who I am. In this sense, my self extends well back beyond when I was born. Roots are deep.

The second oldest book is one my grandmother gave me on my eighth birthday, a giant-format Life magazine book called The World We Live In. It was a counterbalance to the Holy Writ, in that it was a natural history of the world and gave me science. At that age, I was nuts about dinosaurs (as many young boys are in the third grade), and The World We Live In had lots of pictures of my Jurassic and Cretaceous favorites. It also explored the depths of the oceans, the mechanisms of the weather, the animals of the forest, the planets of the solar system, and a countering version of the creation of the world, full of volcanoes and bombarding meteorites. I loved that book. I still love it. It is on the shelf as a holy-of-holies (and yes, I get the irony).

Both the Bible and The World We Live In are solid, tangible bits of my selfness that I can touch and recognize myself in, as much as I recognize myself in the mirror.

I pulled down Tillyard from the shelf, and gathered up the several Bibles and began a pile by my desk, and went through the bookshelves finding the many books that have defined me and that I kept through all the disruption that life throws at us, with the growing realization that these books are me. They are internalized and now their physical existence is an extension of my selfness into the world.

The pile beside my desk slowly turned into a wall, one stack next to another, building up a brick-foundation of me-ness. They were cells of my psyche very like the cells of my body, making up a whole. And they began to show a pattern that I had not previously noticed. The books I’ve held on to for at least 50 years sketched a me that I knew in my bone.

I’ve kept books from 40 years ago, from 30, from 20. I’ve got books that define me as I am at 75 years old that I have bought in the past month. But the continuity of them is a metaphor for the continuity of my self.

When I was just out of college, a neighbor of my parents died and left my a pile of old books, printed in the 18th and early 19th century. There are three volumes of the poetry of William Cowper, a History of Redemption by Jonathan Edwards, a fat volume with tiny print collecting the Addison and Steele Spectators, and a single volume of Oliver Goldsmith’s History of the Earth and Animated Nature. I have Volume IV of five volumes, which contains descriptions and illustrations of birds, fishes and “Frogs, Lizards, and Serpents.”

And while my great-grandmother’s Bible gives me a sense of roots running four generations deep, these older books take those roots deeper into the culture that made me. I see myself not as a single mind born in 1948, but as part of a longer-running continuity back in time. A reminder that any single generation is simply a moment in a process: seed, sprout, plant, flower, fruit, seed. Over and over. My self grew from my mother’s womb and she from her mother’s and so on, back to a mythical primordial Eve. And my psyche grew from all the books I’ve read, and all the books that have shaped the culture that produced those books. It is a nurturance that disappears in the far distant past, like railroad tracks narrowing to a point on the horizon.

I am not here making an argument for nurture vs. nature. I am not simply the sum of the books I’ve read. Rather, the books I’ve read that have remained with me — and there are many times more that have not stuck with the same tenacity — have not only nurtured me, but are the mirror of who I was born, my inner psyche, who I AM. They are the outward manifestation of the inward being.

I have books left over from college, such as my Chaucer and my Shelley, my Coleridge and my Blake.

I have the poetry I was drawn to when first discovering its linguistic and cultural power, such as all the Pound I gobbled up.

There are the two volumes of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, edited by Artur Schnabel. I could never be without them. I read scores for pleasure just as I read words. I still have piles of Kalmus and Eulenburg miniature scores that I have used over the years to study music more minutely than ears alone can permit.

Books that have turned the twig to incline the tree stay with me, such as Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen, or the Daybooks of photographer Edward Weston, or The Graphic Art of the 18th Century, by Jean Adhémar.

I still have the Robert Graves two-volume Greek Myths that I had when taking a Classics course my freshman year, and the Oxford Standard Authors edition of Milton that I took with my in my backpack when I tried to hike all of the Appalachian Trail (“tried” is the operative word), and the photographic paperback version of the Sierra Club book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.

My many Peterson Guides and wildflower books have only multiplied, but the basics have been with me for at least five decades.

The Thurber Carnival I still have was actually my mother’s book that I took from home when I went off to school. The catalog from the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. is now browned out and tattered and the Hokusai manga is another holy of holies.

All these have stuck to me like glue all through a life’s vicissitudes, many with ragged and torn covers, as I have myself in a body worn and torn by creeping age.

I could name many more, but you get the idea. And it is undoubtedly the same for all of us. For you, it many not be books; it might be a shirt or blouse you have kept, or maybe a blanket that comforted you when you were an infant, or your first car. These are the outward signs of an inner truth. The you who is not separate from the world, but embedded in it, connected to it, born from it and in some way, its singular manifestation.

Self is what you can’t get rid of.

NB: The books illustrated are all some of them I’ve lugged with me for at least 50 years; anyone who knows me would recognize me in them.

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Wonderful World

March 3, 2023

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On Sept. 1, 1967, ABC Records released a recording of Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World. That was the year of the Torrey Canyon oil spill off the coast of Britain; Charles Manson was released from prison in Los Angeles; military coups in Sierra Leone, and Greece; riots in Hong Kong kill and injure more than 800; guerrilla war begins in India; civil war in Biafra begins;

“June Movement” terrorist group forms in West Germany; the “Six-Day War” between Israel and Arab states; 159 “race riots” explode across American cities; China tests its first hydrogen bomb; 70,000 protesters march on Washington calling to end Vietnam War; President Lyndon Johnson concludes that the American people should be given “more optimistic reports on the progress of the war” (i.e., lying).

What a Wonderful World stayed on top of the UK pop charts for most of 1968, during which year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Also: deadly Army nerve gas leaked in Utah; American soldiers killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai Massacre; one million students and protesters riot in Paris; 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 6,500 tanks with 800 aircraft invade Czechoslovakia to end the “Prague Spring” liberalizations;

the Democratic National Convention in Chicago breaks out in chaos as police riot against protesters; Vietnam War expands into Laos and Cambodia; Chinese Cultural Revolution sends urban educated to the countryside as farmers.

That, of course, is a very narrowed down list of the horrors of those two years. And Louis Armstrong sang, “I see trees of green, red roses too/ I see them bloom, for me and you/ And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.” So, it is hardly surprising that a number of critics responded badly to the tune as horribly sentimental and out of touch.

But that is only if you pay attention to the words and not the music. Too often, we hear the lyrics of a song and assume that is what the song is about. Yet, sometimes, the music and words create a tension, and Armstrong’s version of What a Wonderful World is sung with a powerful undercurrent of sadness. It’s there in the constant shifting from major to minor harmonies, and most of all, it’s there in his worn, gravelly voice; it is a song that is having it both ways.

Neil McCormick, chief rock music critic at The Telegraph in London, wrote in 2012, “What makes it so powerful is Armstrong’s vocal, which is not smug or avuncular, his voice is so old and cracked that it contains a sense of loss within it, the bittersweet tinge of a man looking back, who has already lived a long life and is acutely aware of how precious it is. So, curiously, it seems to me there is an almost invisible shadow of melancholia in the song.”

Armstrong was occasionally attacked during the Cold War years for acting as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. and called an Uncle Tom. And it can be hard to endure all those variety TV shows on which he sang yet one more version of Hello, Dolly. But one should never forget that he also recorded a powerful version of (What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue. “Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead/ Feel like old Ned, wished I was dead/ What did I do to be so black and blue?”

Armstrong turned it from its original comic purpose in a 1929 Broadway musical, Hot Chocolate, into a protest song. In 1965, on a tour of Europe, he reacted to police brutality against marchers in Selma, Ala., he told audiences in Denmark he became “physically ill” watching the beatings on television, and added, “They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.” Later, singing in East Germany, he sang the song again, changing the lyrics to emphasize its civil rights message: “I’m right inside, but that don’t help my case/ ’cause I can’t hide what is on my face./ My only sin is in my skin/ What did I do to be so black and blue?”

“Some of you young folks been saying to me: ‘Hey, Pops — what do you mean, what a wonderful world? How about all them wars all over the place, you call them wonderful?’ ” For everybody knows or else should know that if nothing drastic is done, waves of anger and fear will again circulate over a low dishonest decade, and the unmentionable odor of death will darken the lands of the earth.

And yet. And yet, I always remember the boys, underfed and cold in winter, with grinning smiles on their faces as they play soccer in the mud of the refugee camp. And I remember the mother smiling as she pulls back the cloth and shows her babies beaming face. Earth’s the right place for love, I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

And there are very few, even knowing that life is suffering, who would choose to leave it, and indeed, hold on to the very end, hoping always for one more breath. Life makes no sense and yet, it is beautiful. I don’t mean my life or your life, but life as it covers a planet in green and in fertile waters and even while evil despots send armies to smash home and body, the daffodils still open in spring. It makes no sense, but it is still beautiful.

I look out my front door — always my measuring stick for a world taken for what it is — and I see the winter trees, bare wooden bones, and I see the birds dotting the crossing branches and I hear them, especially in the morning, and I cannot see and hear that as anything but intensely beautiful. And in a month or two, the twigs will bud and new leaves will fill out the armature. The trees will be green again, and red roses, too.

You have to take it all, the grieving, the pain, the loss, the joy, the love, the radiance, and take it as a bundle. Yes, there is evil, and evil people. There always have been and always will be. There will also be contention between those who believe it is the others who are evil, as they perpetrate it themselves. It is enough to make grown men cry.

In the Mahabharata, the archer Arjuna is standing in his chariot waiting to signal the beginning of a terrible war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. And he foresees the horror, violence and death and he hesitates. The misery he sees makes him break down, drop his bow and decide to leave the battlefield. But then, his chariot driver, who is the disguised god Krishna explains to him why he must fight, and what is the nature of the world. There is much in the discussion that is explication of Hindu doctrine and requires much gloss to understand. But, in the middle of the catechism, Arjuna asks to see Krishna in his divine form, and Krishna grants him the vision.

What he sees is both terrible and frightening beyond telling, but also radiant and intensely beautiful. “If a thousand suns were to blaze forth together in the sky, they would not match the splendor of that great form,” it says. “There Arjuna could see the totality of the entire universe in one place.”

“Be neither afraid nor bewildered on seeing this terrible form of Mine,” says Krishna. “Be free from fear and with a cheerful heart.”

The universe is something well beyond the needs and understanding of humans. It is cold and heartless, but it is also unimaginably beautiful. You could say, both at once, but more to the point, not both, but rather, the same thing. It is. אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה Eyeh asher eyeh.

And it is this totality and its overwhelming terror and radiance that shine through those refugee boys playing soccer, that community digging through the rubble of a bombed building to find the survivor desperately breathing life, to discover in the murderer the glowing passion that led to the crime.

The bright blessed day and the dark sacred night.

—Richard Nilsen

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Monthly Archives: March 2023

Can’t help but smile

Seeing things

Who you are is what you can’t get rid of

Wonderful World