I remember, as a child, going to the zoo and being impatient if I couldn’t see the animal immediately. The lion was off in the shade at the back? Move to the next animal. Children often have short attention spans, and I was no different.
As I’ve aged, I’ve been surprised to discover how much more I can concentrate, how much more patient I’ve become. I can look long and hard until I see the lion, and wait to see what it will do next. Perhaps lick its paw; perhaps roll over and snooze. Oddly, with less time left on this earth, the amount of time I’m willing to wait has become inversely proportional.
I am now an old man, with a powerful sense of how few years I will be able to enjoy this existence. People I knew and loved have left before me, giving me an imminent sense of what to expect.
Maybe I am just growing soft in the head, or is it simply old age and the recognition that annihilation isn’t that far off, or some other cause, but I am almost daily having moments of utter beauty that remind me what I love about being. Moments that James Joyce might have called “epiphanies.”
I have been going out and sitting on the back patio pretty much every day, usually for a half-hour at a time, sometimes longer, and saying to myself — or is it to the universe — “Show me something.” And every day, if I wait long enough and be patient enough, something will happen.
Yesterday, a hummingbird flew not more than a couple of feet from my face to hover in front of a basil flower and then buzz back past me as he left. Another time, it was two cottontail rabbits hopping across the back yard, first one and as I watched it, a second one caught up.
Once, I watched 15 vultures soar and climb in the air currents, one eventually so far up it was no bigger than a period at the end of a sentence in a book held at arm’s length. Yet again, a mockingbird sat on the roof of the shed beside the patio and sang his medley over and over, like I wasn’t there. Squirrels run around with acorn in their tiny front arms. A towhee landed on the steps of the shed. A rise of cumulus clouds was so white against the sky blue it nearly blinded.
It never seems to fail. Each day, it is something new to delight me, and to remind me of the tremendous animation of the cosmos, and how minor fluctuations pile on top of one another to make it all new.
A bright red cardinal flew directly at me, just a few feet above the grass, and turned away at the last minute to fly to my right and up over the roof behind me.
A groundhog poked out from the brush and glanced at me and then, apparently deciding I was no threat, waddled across the full stretch of the back lawn to disappear in the brush at the other side. Not a lot happens over the course of an hour sitting there, but every time I go out, there is something for me, as if the cosmos knew I was paying attention and wished to reward my efforts.
Recently, I heard a crow caw, looked up and watched as he flew in a great “S” curve, coming from behind me on my right, flying past me to the left no more than 20 feet away, then looped back to the right, circled away and looping back to the left and eventually behind the stand of trees, uttering caws the whole way. The curve was so graceful, I felt it in my esthetic sense. “As the crow flies?” Not a straight line.
And so, every day, I sit and wait for the moment that the butterfly will land on the flowers at the edge of the patio, or the wasp will pause on the bluish florets of the mint. Or I will notice a small yellow flower that wasn’t there the day before.
It is fall, and one of those flower seeds with its wisp of fibers landed on my shirt. I held it up in the light to see its tiny hard black seed and it reminded me of Carl Sagan’s “spaceship of the imagination.”
Today, it looks like rain. Dark clouds are everywhere, with the occasional white brightness poking through. And I sat in my silent seat when the wind came up, as it often does just before a rain, and all of a sudden, from the tall oak tree at the top of the hill in the back yard, a hundred leaves let go to flutter down, but, since the wind was blowing toward me, the leaves did not drop straight down, but all floated toward me, up in the air, like a hundred butterflies, or snow in the wind, or bubbles bobbing around in the currents. And so, from a hundred feet up at the top of the tree at the top of the hill, the tumbling leaves filled the sky from edge to edge of my vision, dancing in the air, each showing shadow and light as it twisted, making a glitter in the sky. It was so ungodly beautiful, I began weeping.
This is the beauty I don’t want to leave. It fills me up. I know I will have to leave, and sooner rather than at some indistinct time in a future that once was only imaginary, but now is palpable in muscle and bone.
So, perhaps I am going soft in the head. Should I be so moved by such pedestrian events? I am more aware now than when I was young and had other goals in mind, of the complex connectedness of all of the sensate world, and how that makes an organism too immense to take it all in or understand it. Little things we may understand and describe, but the wholeness of it all can only be apprehended as beauty.
And so I feel gratitude for the world and what it is willing to show me. I do not want ever to leave it, though I know I must.
And when the final curtain drops on the final scene, I can say “NO” to the end, and “YES” with the same conviction.
When I was a boy, one thing divided us into tribes: Was Willie Mays the greatest baseball player, or was Mickey Mantle? (This was before Mantle’s legs gave out).
And of course, this was a silly argument, first because there were many other great ballplayers at the time, but mostly because choosing the “greatest” anything is a meaningless endeavor. (Just in the 1950s, we’re counting Stan Musial, Duke Snider, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Ken Boyer.)
But for us kids on the sandlot, it was a clear choice between Mays and Mantle. Was Mays the better hitter? Was Mantle as good a fielder? And are we comparing each player at the height of his abilities? Are we comparing lifetime batting averages, number of home runs, percentage of votes to enter the Hall of Fame? In the era of sabermetrics, there are so many obscure statistics to weigh, it all becomes bogged down and pointless. (Who is best at hitting with a 2-and-1 count, on an overcast day with men on second and third — it can get quite specific, i.e. quite anal).
By the way, I was a Mays guy. Perhaps I was swayed by the fact that my father hated the Yankees. He was National League all the way.
It’s all really quite silly. Above a certain level, players just count as exceptional and comparisons are meaningless. I mean, who was the greatest pitcher? Sandy Koufax? Bob Gibson? Nolan Ryan? Greg Maddux? They were all so different, with different strengths, and playing for widely different teams and different eras. (I remember when Roger Craig lost 20 games for the NY Mets, but was still considered the team’s pitching ace — how can you measure his quality when playing for one of the worst teams ever? How many games could Gibson have won playing for the 1962 Mets? They went 40-120.)
Ranking is a game, but one that is ultimately meaningless. Let’s face it, the most mediocre ballplayer in the major leagues is still hugely talented. We’re talking gradients of excellence.
All this comes to mind when I remember how classical music listeners talk similar nonsense over the “greatest” conductor or orchestra, or recording of the Mahler Second.
I was guilty of such silliness earlier in my life. When I was in high school, there was no question in my mind that Arturo Toscanini was the greatest. I had all his Beethoven symphonies on LP. Later, having listened to a wider range of recordings, it was clear that Toscanini had his limitations. And not the least of these were the lousy quality of his recordings — they were hardly hi-fi.
Open any Gramophone book of recording ratings and you will find a “top ten” and the “best” recording of any particular work. Top 10 lists are immensely popular as clickbait on YouTube. Critics argue endlessly about why this Mahler Ninth is the greatest and that one is just awful.
But the truth is, that pretty much any recording you buy will give you the music you want, in a performance that is generally very good. Even a middling performance of Beethoven’s Fifth will give you 80 or 90 percent of what’s in the music.
The arguing usually comes over trivial details that the critic considers essential: Was the tam-tam audible in the finale? Was the oboe in the second movement a bit squeaky? Was the tempo in the finale too fast, or too slow? We all have these benchmarks that define what we demand from a performance of a particular piece. But should that disqualify an entire performance?
I have to fess up to a level of insanity here — I have 30 complete Beethoven symphony cycles (I used to own more, but have since divested of some). It was a decades-long quest for the ultimate set, the perfect lineup of Beethoven symphonies. Which is best?
Well, now, I see them lined up on the shelf, and I realize they are all fine. They all deliver the goods. They are quite different, from Karajan’s smooth unctuousness to Hermann Scherchen’s outright weirdness. Toscanini (which I still own, now on CD) is quick, abrupt and rhythmic; Bruno Walter is gentle, humane, and warm. And so, at different times, in different moods, I will choose one over the other for the moment. But they are all perfectly good. Why rank them?
Yes, there are some outliers, badly played or outrageously conducted — Listen to Sergiu Celibidache doing the Eroica and you wonder if you are playing the disc at the wrong speed — it’s the speed a novice orchestra might play for an initial sight reading. Glacial in a way that is just nuts. Or Roger Norrington, who conducts as if his bladder is bursting and he needs to get it all over with fast. (Norrington races through the adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth in 10 minutes; Bernstein in Berlin takes 20 minutes for the same music. You pays your money and you takes your choice.)
But the mainstream recordings, from George Szell to Andre Cluytens to Pierre Monteux to Joseph Krips, all give perfectly fine, reputable, performances, whether Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, Stravinsky or Shostakovich. They are excellent musicians with excellent orchestras (some, such as Maurice Abravenel, had less than excellent orchestras, but made them play on a level you can hardly credit).
So, we search endlessly for that one performance that will send us into paroxysms of ecstasy, that single transcendental recording, and each CD we buy we hope will be that one. Wilhelm Furtwängler recorded Beethoven’s Fifth 13 times from 1929 to 1954 (most of them miserably low-fi, even amateur recordings), and the Furtwängler cult will search endlessly for a 14th, hoping it will finally fulfill their hunger for the ultimate, the one after which they will gladly give up life with a satisfied smile on their faces.
It is widely opined that Klaus Tennstedt’s live 1991 recording of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is more emotional, more tragic, more vital than his earlier 1983 studio recording with the London Philharmonic. And that’s probably true. But if you only heard the earlier version, you would not be aware of anything missing or lesser in urgency or power.
Martha Argerich has a habit of recording the same few concertos over and over again (how many Beethoven second piano concertos do we need from her? She has recorded it at least 13 times, and I may have missed a few.) And some people swear one or another is “the best,” but they are all excellent, and whether you prefer her with Abbado or Dutoit or Sinopoli is nothing more than a matter or taste. If you own one and you like it, there is no reason to buy the others, unless you are part of the Argerich cult, and if so, there’s nothing we can do for you. (Classical music does tend to generate cults: Maria Callas, Celibidache, Arturo Michelangeli, Jascha Horenstein, Toscanini, and, above all, Furtwängler. Cult members will search world over for the one missing 1949 partial recording from a radio broadcast from Rio de Janeiro. The heart goes pitter-pat.)
(Just for the record, Argerich has recorded once with herself conducting the London Sinfonietta; and also with Vladimir Ashkenazy; Gabor Takacs-Nacy; Gabriel Chmura; Lorin Maazel, Charles Dutoit; Neeme Jarvi; Giuseppe Sinopoli; Claudio Abbado; Riccardo Chailly; Seiji Ozawa; Lahav Shani; and again with Takacs-Nagy Please make her stop. She’s wonderful, but she needs to branch out.)
Yes, you will undoubtedly develop favorites, conductors who play more to your tastes. I know I have mine. But I cannot in honesty say that the ones I like best are demonstrably better than the ones I have less affection for. Taste is a different issue from quality. Basically, with a few unfortunate exceptions, if a performance was good enough to justify the expense of being recorded, produced, distributed and promoted, it will be perfectly fine. You don’t need 30 complete sets of Beethoven symphonies.
So, one should not worry about what performance, what orchestra or conductor you get. Chances are, it will give you what you need. Bernstein or Walter; Mays or Mantle — they were each great players and picking one over the other is just silly.
Over the past dozen years, since my retirement, I have written and posted some 730 blog entries. But I have started many more than that. Some just get forgotten when something more urgent appears; some end short because nothing longer needs to be said. Some just led nowhere. Others began as lists, but ended as lists, unfilled by full sentences. And still more still wait to be written.
The odd thing, to me, is that there is always something new to write about. With 75 years of life packed into this aging piece of meat, there are endless stories, bits, adventures, ideas, experiences, disappointments and discoveries to draw upon. The well keeps refilling.
But here are a few fragments that never filled out beyond their early inspiration. Maybe I will get around to it, sometime.
What is it that women see in men? Because I am a man, I know what men see in women, but I have a hard time reversing the equation.
I am not here talking of sex or the ardor of the loins — understanding is not required for that; it is simple, direct action — but the desire of women to share company with men. What is the reward for that? Women are so much more interesting, and interested in such a variety of vital issues. Men seem interested only in sports and politics, neither of which carry much import in the lives we live. As I used to say, “Politics answers no question worth asking.”
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2. I was a writer for many years, making my living from putting words against words, hoping to find the best way to express something I hoped would be genuine.
Recently, my old employer, Gannett, made a new hire, and announced it in such a clot of management-buzz that I got a bad case of hiccups. Newspapers used to have editors, now, with middle management bloated beyond belief, while laying off reporters, photographers and copy editors, what they have is a “Chief Content Officer.”
The announcement came with a gnat-swarm of buzz words, which may mean something to other management types, but not anything penetrable by actual human beings:
“ ‘We are thrilled to welcome Kristin to Team Gannett to champion innovative storytelling opportunities and develop strategic content initiatives to expand our audience and drive growth,’ Reed said in a Monday news release.”
“Strategic content initiatives?” You would think that those people who run a newspaper would have some sensitivity to language. If I had written prose like that, I would have been out of a job.
3. The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. Or maybe not so much.
We owe a great deal to ancient Greece. At least, we pay lip service to our debt of democracy, philosophy, literature, science and not least, saving European culture from being overrun by that of Persia. But there are a host of words that describe the part of ancient Greece we would rather forget: Misogyny, xenophobia, pedophilia — come to us dressed in Greek etymology, and descend to us from Greek ideas and practice. We need to address some of the less attractive legacies of that Golden Age.
Such as patriarchy, idealism, imperialism, colonialism, religious intolerance, cults, ethnocentrism, slavery. To say nothing of understanding sex as an exercise in dominance. And while we may think of Plato as the source of all philosophy, remember that he despised democracy and was an ardent believer in totalitarianism.
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4. Columbus Day is a month away. I expect more anti-Columbus newspaper columns, art, a few tracts and manifestoes and perhaps a new opera. Much current art that tries to be political is really just polemical. To espouse any ideology is to strip life of its complexity. Yes, Columbus was a bad man and the evils he brought with him are real. But instead of preaching to us self-righteously, there are real problems to be discussed, such questions as, “What is in the nature of humans that causes territorial expansion, that causes them to make invisible the people they subjugate, that causes them to divide the world into Them and Us? Why does the boundary of ‘us’ expand and shrink periodically? Why is a world once headed in the direction of one-world nationhood, where the ‘tribe’ is humanity — why is that world now constricting so that nationhood is more tightly defined by blood, so that Serb kills Croat, Azerbaijani kills Armenian? The ethnic separatism that is emerging worldwide is, I believe, a source of exactly the same intolerance that the European West has for so many centuries visited on the rest of the world. Will it devolve to the point that Chiricahua despises Mescalero, or Venetian rises to kill Neopolitan? At what point does a coalition of interests grow from our recognition of our shared humanity?”
Questions such as these are avoided by nearly all political diatribes, whose authors prefer to point fingers and whine like grade-school tattle-tales. If a short perusal of the history of the world teaches us anything, it teaches us that war, inhumanity, violence, intolerance are universal. It isn’t only the Hebrews with their God-ordained genocide of Moabites and Amonites; it isn’t only the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia; it isn’t only Hitler killing Jews and homosexuals; it isn’t only Japan subjugating Manchuria; it isn’t only Custer at Sand Creek; it isn’t only the Hopi at Awatovi.
No one gets off the hook. Native Americans are no more righteous in this than anyone else, from Inca to Aztec to Lakota. If artists and writers chose to look a little closer, they could use Columbus as a metaphor for something richer, profounder, truer. They could have seen that Columbus was not sui generis, but rather representative of the species.
As it is, they came off sounding self-righteous. And no one self-righteous ever has much self-knowledge.
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5. Stasis is the enemy. Or rather, because stasis is utterly impossible, the idea of stasis is the enemy. It is the fatal stumbling block of every religion, political philosophy and marriage that has ever existed. Over and over, hundreds, thousands, millions of people die because someone promised them that if we only do things my way, everything will be forever hunky peachy.
It is the lie behind the “original intent” argument espoused by some Supreme Court justices, and behind the infantile promises of politicians — most on the right, these days — that their policies will “finally” fix things and make them good forever. (In the past, it was the left and Marxism that promised a final end of historical change. It is not the sides one takes, but the phantom of permanence).
The problem is that stasis is always temporary, which makes it not stasis. I.e., stasis is a pipe dream.
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6. In America, “no” has become a dirty word. Americans like the positive attitude, the gung-ho approach to things. We feel actual moral disapproval of the word “no.”
It can make your life easier and simpler. It can shake a load of guilt off your back. Although people talk of simplifying their lives, you can never simplify by doing something, you can simplify only by not doing something. Just say no. It is the yang to “yes’s” yin, and the universe cannot function without both.
“Yes” is kind of namby-pamby. “Yes” doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. “Yes” is go-along to get along.
“No” is emphatic, direct, take-no-prisoners. “No” means no. Every change and improvement in life, every revolution begins with a “no.”
In some way, every important historical development starts with somebody or some group saying no. Dissatisfaction, after all, is the great inspirer of humanity. If we were all duck happy all the time, nothing would ever get done.
7. I am 75 and am near death (Oh, I’m generally fine, but old and weak) and I think about non-being quite a lot, but not with fear, but a kind of objective interest in the whole idea of no longer hearing birds or feeling the breeze on my skin. Death seems to me a natural “rounding off” of a life and not something that I need to hold in my mouth like a tough crust of bread.
I saw Carole take her last breath. I felt her turn instantly cool to my touch, like I was touching unfired clay. She ceased being. It was uncanny. My grief was incalculable — and it still is, although worn down — but it felt as inevitable or as natural as the coming of winter. I know the same awaits me — “To die — to sleep no more.” No dreams. Nothing.
I didn’t sense a spirit or soul leaving her body, just her body ceasing to produce her being, like a light bulb blown out. We don’t ask a burnt-out lightbulb “where did the light go?” It ceases being generated.
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8. One of my problems with Rilke is that I have no use for categorizing angels and animals. Angels don’t exist — not even as metaphors for me — and I accept that I, as a human being, am an animal. I am not so fast to accept that no animals know they are going to die. We have no evidence for that assumption. Perhaps they do; perhaps they don’t. I suspect that some, such as porpoises or whales, may very well have some concept of death. I remember when we human beings were so sure that what separated us from the beasts was tool-making. Ah, but then we discovered how many other animals forge tools.
9. It has seemed to me that part of the German soul is to speak in general and categorical terms, in ideas, rather than in things. It leads to mistaking words for reality. Logic has its own logic, but it is not the logic of the world. (Whole rafts of philosophy, including my hated Plato, only seem to work in words. You can prove with logic that Achilles can never catch the tortoise, but that ain’t how it works in reality.)
But I fear that they are much more about language than about experience. And that is my problem in a nutshell. I made my living with language, and I love words to distraction, but the older I get the more I am convinced that language is merely a parallel universe, with an order and meaning of its own, roughly mirroring the world, but never actually connecting, never touching the pulse of reality. I know, it’s all we have, but I still counsel wariness.
10. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Why write at all? It is a question I have wrestled with all my life. Do I have anything worth saying to be value to anyone else? Dr. Johnson said that “nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Well, I’m a blockhead: I no longer get paid to string words together. But it doesn’t seem to come as a choice. Some may choose to write; I write with the same volition as I breathe.
Early in my life, words were thin and sparse; it seemed as if there were a lack of hydrostatic pressure from within: I needed to fill myself first. But after living a certain time, the inside pressure grew and it had to come out. It became a fountain I could not stop if I had wanted to. And the well was constantly recharged.
Now I am old, and travel becomes difficult, habits become settled, reading more and more becomes re-reading. In retirement I can no longer afford to attend concerts, plays and dance the way I used to. The incoming has slowed, and I suppose the outflow has dwindled in response, but the backpressure is still there. Hoping to cease not till death.
Richard Nilsen 