Good Friday Read: "The Morning Watch" by James Agee

Waking before dawn in his boarding school's dormitory, a twelve - year - old boy dresses and hurries to the chapel for his assigned hour of the Gethsemane vigil, Episcopalians' response to Jesus's plaintive question to sleepy apostles, "Could you not watch with me one hour?" On his knees, the boy Richard tries to focus on the crucifixion of Jesus. When the hour is over, he goes swimming with a couple of classmates. [Photos following this article show locations at Agee's actual boyhood school.]

My synopsis of The Morning Watch by James Agee tells only the situation for each of the novella's three chapters; the action happens inside his consciousness, where Agee finds humor, horror, and a religious experience to top the compulsory one.

[Page references are taken from the Houghton Mifflin Company's second printing, 1950.]

The layers of the novella are on display in the last couple pages of chapter one. While Richard dresses silently, two classmates wrangle over a shoe that one threw at the wall (12). One country boy explains to Richard, "Jis trine wake up Jimmy... God All Mighty Christ, can't even wake nobody up in this friggin School --" Bothered by the swearing, Richard resists calling the boy out for it.

If Jimmy told Hobie to shut up and quit cussing Hobie would take it off of him, they were buddies; but by now [Richard] knew enough to keep his mouth shut. He felt uneasy, though, because he was glad he had not sworn. That was like being thankful you were not as other men and that was one of the worst sins of all; the Pharisee.

The boys, late for their duty, rush to the chapel before Richard can put on his shoes:

[Now that], for the first time this year, he felt the ground against the bare soles of his feet it was as if, fumbling among clothes in a dark closet, he had put his hand on living flesh. Even though the ground in this schoolyard was skimmed with dusty gravel, its aliveness soared through him like a sob and lifted his eyes in wonder upon the night (13).

We're in Richard's world, a fraught territory between childhood and adolescence, where he's vulnerable, self - absorbed, and just becoming conscious of a world outside himself. In his first moments awake, he's ashamed for failing to stay awake for Jesus, and also "thankful" that he wet the bed only a little, this time (5). We learn that the boy's father died when Richard was six, that his devout mother sent him to this Episcopal boarding school in the mountains of Tennessee to have "men in charge" of him (42). He watches the other boys and the men in the place for clues to how he should be, as when the boys encounter senior prefects in the chapel, preparing for services. Richard is awe - struck, and wonders about the "hump" between the broad shoulders of the school's star athlete Willard: "It must be a very greatly developed muscle, Richard realized, [yet] he felt there now on his own body and there wasn't even the beginning of a muscle there" (23). After the vigil, he risks telling the other boys "Come on" and striking out alone for the stone cut swimming hole: "He was surprised that he had spoken and the more surprised to hear them following" (93). Almost immediately, he also recognizes that he's scared of them. Undressing to swim, he compares his body's development to theirs -- and they do likewise (101).


Like Richard's qualms about being proud that he didn't cuss, his moral dilemmas are frequent, urgent, and mostly ridiculous. Richard is both afraid to be too good, and afraid that he's not good enough. He wonders why a priest once seemed amused when Richard confessed to picturing an "irreverent" image during the prayer "Blood of Christ inebriate me" (32). Recalling a line in a Lenten hymn, "Perish ev'ry fond ambition," Richard "magnanimously" resolves not to become a naturalist: "I'll never even own a monkey, or be junior tennis champion"(40). Contemplating the crucifix, Richard fantasizes about building a cross in the school's woodworking class and somehow nailing himself to it. While boys and teachers who've bullied him gape in astonishment, his mother weeps, and he imagines saying to her, "Someday, you'll understand." Off to the side, mighty Willard says, "Jesus the kid's got guts" (50).


Agee mediates Richard's stream of consciousness with an adult's precision, but without an adult's ironic distance. The prose is textured and intense, verging on poetry. For example, in a single paragraph that fills three pages, Richard's focus on the head of Jesus, veiled for Good Friday, morphs into Richard's memory of his father in an open casket:

Dead, the word came again, and shutting his eyes he prayed swiftly for his father the prayer of all his childhood, God bless daddy and keep him close to Thee and may light perpetual shine upon him, Amen; and casually, obliviously, as a trout into shadow, the image memory vanished (28).

The sensation of "aliveness" in the ground that lifts Richard's eyes to the sky is Agee's hint of a spiritual presence in Richard's life informed by, but outside of, his childish religiosity. Post - vigil, as Richard leads the boys to the stone cut pool, they pass a chicken coup, where Richard sees "how the big rooster darted his vigilant head and shuffled his plumage: in the silence before daylight a priest, vesting himself for Mass" (93). Then one of the boys hurls a rock at the rooster who "chuckled with terror."

At the swimming hole, Richard has three experiences that take him deeper than his vigil did into the death, resurrection, and redemption that the day represents. On the way there, the shell of a locust, sharp claws dug into the bark of a tree, sends Richard's imagination far into thoughts of dinosaurs, of when he might have seen the locust during its life, and, finally, seeing its back split, he thinks of how that pain must have been about the same as crucifixion (100). Diving into the cold water, Richard's exploration of the quarry's bottom becomes a prayer:

O Lord let me suffer with Thee this day, he prayed, his lungs about to burst; and took hold more firmly. You got no right, his own voice silently told him, you got no right. No right; but still he fought off his need for air.

When Richard emerges, almost too late, "I could have died, he realized almost casually. Here I am! his enchanted body sang. I could be dead right now, he reflected in sleepy awe. Here I am! (106). He turns his face from the boys so they won't see his "unexpected tears," and, identifying with the suffering of Jesus, "crying for tenderness and thankful wonder, [he] gazed steadily into the beating sun." Moments later,

a snake more splendid than Richard had ever seen before was just achieving a sandstone ledge and the first heat of the risen sun. In every wheaten scale and in all his barbaric patterning he was new and clear as gems, so gallant and sporting against the dun, he dazzled, and seeing him, Richard was acutely aware how sensitive, proud and tired he must be in his whole body, for it was clear that he had just struggled out of his old skin and was with his first return of strength venturing his new one (107-108).

Seeing "his princely elegance," Richard feels "almost worshipful delight and awe." Spoiler alert -- with two twelve year old boys at a stone quarry, the snake's story doesn't end well, but Richard, going in close to put the creature out of its misery, earns the boys' respect and returns with its blood and venom on his skin.

Died and reborn through a baptism, redeemed by the blood of a "prince" in the "risen sun" -- Richard has come through The Morning Watch. Agee was cagey about his own faith. He did attend the St. Andrews Episcopal School outside Sewanee, TN, in 1926. Among his very few publications is a posthumous collection of letters to Father Frye, evidently the model for the sympathetic priest in Watch. The prologue to his autobiographical novel A Death in the Family is a mixture of memory of security and love when both his parents were alive, and a prayer of thanksgiving that they were somehow all alive on this earth together. Did he stay connected to the church? I don't know; but The Morning Watch is suffused by a sacramental view of the world, Richard's thoughts and experiences all part of an ongoing conversation with a loving Creator urging his growth.

Photos from Agee's Boarding SchoolMy friend Gene Taylor, who loaned me his copy of The Morning Watch, revisited the campus of St. Andrews Episcopal School, Sewanee, TN during the first week of June 2019, and sent me several photos, printed below. Here are his comments: One is of the dorm that James Agee lived in (and my home during my Junior year as well as this weekend), one is of the main chapel and another is the small Our Lady Chapel where the Morning Watch takes place, and the last is the reservoir.

Of Related Interest

• See my essay about the universality of Agee's memorable, sweet and acutely painful memory of early childhood "Knoxville, Summer 1915," prologue to A Death in the Family 07/14/2017
• Although I've just read The Morning Watch this month, the book's synopsis captured my fervent evangelical imagination in 1975, and I now recognize that a boy's effort to try to feel the religious devotion and contrition that he's supposed to feel is what lay behind my words and music for Four Candles, an Advent cantata that I spent several years writing in my twenties and thirties. Read the text of that in my post of (12/02/18).

Joyful Symmetry: Bernstein & Beethoven with ASO Chorus

Saturday, The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus presented Bernstein's Chichester Psalms with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. All season, the ASO has paired works by L.B. & L.B., i.e., 2018's centennial composer Leonard Bernstein with Ludwig van Beethoven, whose works Bernstein memorably conducted so often. While Bernstein could be self - consciously portentous in his compositions, and Beethoven set the standard for Romantic struggles, these pieces work through their dark moments to reach heights of contentment, gratitude, and exuberant joy.

I've loved both pieces for nearly fifty years, so it was fun to notice a symmetry in their presentation.

At 20 minutes, Bernstein's work is a vocal piece with a few orchestral interludes; at 60 minutes, Beethoven's work is an orchestral piece capped off with a choral fantasia. Bernstein's texts are psalms, in Hebrew, praising God and extolling "how good and pleasant it is when God's people dwell together in unity"; Beethoven's text is from Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy," another expression of unity.

Both composers work with identical motifs, a descending fourth followed by a descending fifth -- with the difference that Bernstein starts his descending fifth up a minor seventh. Both composers announce those intervals at a stately pace right away, then bandy them about in different registers at different speeds. In the last movements of both pieces, these intervals return to bring the listener's journey full - circle.


Both composers were re-working some older material. Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" is a better draft of the "Choral Fantasia." The violent theme ("Why do the nations rage?") that interrupts Psalm 23 in the second movement of Chichester Psalms is lifted from Bernstein's early draft of the Jets' opening number in West Side Story, reports lyricist Stephen Sondheim in his 2010 memoir.



The vocalists acted their pieces as roles. Countertenor Daniel Moody [see photo] seemed blissful as he sang (in Hebrew) "The Lord is my Shepherd," his voice filling the auditorium before diminishing to sustained soft ends of phrases; he seemed regretful while those raging nations trampled all over his lovely melody. In the Beethoven, soprano Jessica Rivera, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Lauricella sang earnestly; tenor Thomas Cooley and bass Andrea Mastroni, singing of brotherhood, were jolly.

Because I've heard recordings of both pieces many times, I picked up on a few passages of the Bernstein when guest conductor Thomas Søndergård had trouble keeping chorus and orchestra together, but, hey, it's live music, and the meter was 7/4 and 10/8. Perfection on a recording is nice, but palpable risk is part of the live experience, and the sound in a concert hall is so much better.

In the end, the audience was genuinely pleased and we left with another L. B. -- a little bounce to our steps.

Of Related Interest on this Blog"The Weight of Bernstein's Mass" (11/23/2013) focuses on thirty wonderful minutes in a work I sometimes call Bernstein's Mess.

Lenny's daugher Jamie wrote her memoir Famous Father Girl about her life with Lenny, but even at a distance, she and I shared some of the same experiences of him. See "Lentennial: Bernstein at 100, Profane and Sacred" (11/22/2018).

Lenny's second symphony "Age of Anxiety" is central to an article I wrote about the ASO's season premiere a couple years ago, "Homecoming with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra" (09/24/2017)

The ASO community includes musicians, composers, and audience. I wrote about "Bringing New Composers into the Family" when I reviewed a program that included Bernstein's West Side Story suite. (04/09/2013)

George Washington Weighs in on Trumpenfreude

Comedian Paula Poundstone imagined Attorney General Barr's summary of Dickens's massive Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times." Though the President says that Barr's summary of the Mueller report completely exonerates him, Barr's four - page memo falls short of that. Still, Mueller's two - year investigation would seem not to have turned up kindling to light impeachment fires under this administration.


The news wasn't bad enough to be good enough for Democrats in Congress, who've armed themselves with subpoenas to comb the full report for damaging tidbits.  They are clearly animated by the unseemly and damaging emotion I call Trumpenfreude.


Like its cousin schaudenfreude (literally "harm - joy"), Trumpenfreude is the ghoulish pleasure his opponents take from the frustration of the President's will, from mockery of him in media, and from anything he says embarrassing enough to make opponents think, "Ah - HA! This time he's gone too far!"

But what's bad for Trump is not good for the United States. That was Mitch McConnell's attitude after the 2010 mid-term election when he said, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." We expect our legislators to achieve more for America than scoring points for their parties. Does anyone want investigations of political opponents and recourse to impeachment to become the norms? If the President believes his personal attacks on our allies and his personal friendships with the world's worst dictators are getting good results, should anyone hope for bad results? If the President wants to take credit for economic growth that began soon after his predecessor took office, should anyone hope for signs of recession?

Trumpenfreude is a manifestation of the "party spirit" that our first President warned about in his farewell address:

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. (from Our Documents.gov)

That last bit is what Mueller found "not enough" evidence of. Washington was prescient.

When Trumpenfreude rises up in your chest like acid reflux, repeat what my church says every Sunday, from the Episcopal Prayer Book:

We pray for Donald our President, the Congress of the United States, the Supreme Court, and all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world,
that there might be justice and peace on the earth.

Amen.

Is Jordan Peele's "Us" US?

It's a common observation that the best horror films show us a shadow side of our culture. Alien body - snatchers reflected America's paranoia during the Red Scare, "Stepford Wives" embodied reaction to feminism, and the zombie hordes ubiquitous on screens since 9/11 resonate with American fears of fanatical barbarians at our borders. Now what we see in Jordan Peele's Us, like a Rorschach ink blot used in one promotional image [below], reveals our uneasiness about us in the US.


Resonance is a pleasure that the movie delivers after you leave the theatre, after it has already delivered shudders, gasps, and laughs in about equal measure. That's as Peele intended. To Ailsha Chang of NPR, Peele said that horror and comedy both aim to get "a visceral, uncontrollable reaction from the audience. These are not genres that can end with just silence" (NPR, March 22, 2019.


The story is a family vacation comedy gone awry. At a lake house near Santa Cruz, the Wilsons find themselves under attack from a family identical to them in red jumpsuits, only speechless and implacably bent on murdering their doubles. The Wilson father "Gabe" (Winston Duke), confronting the strangers holding hands in his driveway, sounds like any ineffectual sitcom dad making a threat when he waves a baseball bat and yells in a high voice, "You want crazy? I can give you crazy!" After several gory encounters with doppelgangers, Gabe warns his wife "Adelaide" (Lupita Nyong'o) to hush, or she'll "scare the children." "Too late," says teenage daughter "Zora" (Shahadi Wright Joseph); "Too late," echoes her kid brother "Jason" (Evan Alex).


But resonance is Jordan Peele's gift that keeps giving after we leave the theatre. When Gabe asks "Who are you?" to the invaders, Adelaide's double "Red," the only one of them to speak, squeezes the reply out of her throat with apparent effort, smiling, "We're Americans!" The incongruous response gets a laugh in a crowded theatre. Along with the handholding, her response reminds us of the "Hands Across America" campaign that we saw advertised on a TV screen during the movie's prologue, set in 1986. That cheerful ad urged Americans to join hands in a human chain across the continent to demonstrate our unity in diversity.


Peele twists that idealistic campaign with the notion that America underground is crossed by a network of tunnels -- plausible, when we think of depleted mines, abandoned military bunkers, never - completed transit projects. Because of a traumatic incident in 1986, Adelaide has known from a young age that her double exists underground. What "Red" explains boils down to the idea that Adelaide Wilson, enjoying a successful life and loving her family, has forgotten all about her double, who lives a parallel life of deprivation in a shadow community underground, "tethered" to her, seething with envy.


The scenario echoes H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. When Wells in 1895 extended his vision of England's social stratification eons into the future, he imagined the Eloi, beautiful and useless, lolling about sunny fields at leisure during the days, but preyed upon at night by the Morlocks, who emerge grimy and hungry from underground mines and factories.


If Peele intends a statement that we and the affluent Wilsons are Eloi, then their neighbors the Tylers put an exclamation point on it. Lolling about the beach at mid - afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Tyler (Tim Heidecker and Elisabeth Moss) are already three glasses into their wine and complaining about each other. He's into boasting about his expensive purchases; she's vain about "some work" done to her face; their teenage twin daughters instantly disdain the Wilson daughter's clothes.


The doppelgangers' red jumpsuits suggested factory workers to my friend Susan; convicts, to me. Either way, they lead their parallel lives underground, seething with envy, awaiting their chance to take over.


The idea is mine, but not mine alone. A search for "Peele" and "eloi" brought results:

Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair likened the film to “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, describing “Us” as “a vague statement on inequity and class struggle, framed as a sort of unconscious Eloi vs. Morlocks system of oppression,” while the writers at Yahoo Movies pointed out that the items used to slay the Tethered — among them a golf club, a piece of geode art and a boat bought in an impromptu splurge — “are all upper-middle-class status symbols.” (Kyle Buchanan, New York Times, March 26, 2019)

Peele himself leaves interpretation wide open. In his interview with NPR, he says, "I think a lot of people are catching onto the fact that there's a lot of United States/American imagery in this. And the duality of this country and our beliefs and our demons, I think, is on display. But I think 'us' is bigger than that." He continues,

I think one of the reasons this movie has an expansiveness is because "us" is subjective. Everybody thinks of the term "us" in different ways — it can be "us" the family, "us" the town, "us" the country, "us" humanity. I think in the simplest form, the very nature of "us" means there is a "them," right? So that is what this movie is about to me, is that: Whatever your "us" is, we turn "them" into the enemy, and maybe "we" are our own worst enemy.

Peele's script and direction give us more cultural resonances to appreciate:

• Religion: "Jeremiah 11:11," scrawled on cardboard, appears in the hands of a shaggy white guy in 1986 and again much later. The number alone fits the twin theme of the film, pairing pairs; the words of the Bible verse tell warn of impending doom. Then, Adelaide's double "Red" says that the two of them share one soul, and she claims that God set her aside, drew them together in childhood, and made her a leader. My friend Susan thought of a Moses, leading his people to a Promised Land that he never gets to see.
• References to other horror movies: Tunnels, baseball bat, bloody twin girls, all recall The Shining, a favorite of Peele's; the name "Jason" and the mask on his double "Pluto" recall slasher heroes of the 1980s, while Pluto's burn - disfigurement recalls "Freddy Krueger"; and the final image of the film recalls the original ending of Hitchcock's The Birds, deemed too grim to get past the censors.

Before I saw the film, I was interested in hearing Michael Abel's original score. Abel had been composing for students in an independent school for decades, when Peele went searching YouTube for black orchestral composers to score his wonderful race - themed horror - comedy Get Out. The two plan to work together from now on, like Spielberg and Williams. Here's what Abel says about the thinking behind the music:

"There was a real need to convey the tortured emotions of those characters because they are us, and yet they're angry and mistreated," Abels explains. "So the score is a balance, I think, emotionally, between sheer terror and a sort of despair and empathy with what they're going through."
For the main titles of Us, Abels wrote a nonsense-language anthem for a chorus of children and adults. "The anthem really represents the spirit of the Tethered, and the uprising that they're about to stage. There's a group of people, and they're organized, and they're angry," he says.
The score for Us plays with the duality and mirror imagery in the film. Abels paired normal instruments, like a solo violin for the young girl, Zora... with much more abnormal ones, like a cimbalom for Zora's Tethered counterpart, Umbrae. (Interview with Michael Grieving, NPR, March 25, 2019)

So Us is thoughtful, with cultural resonance that make it "about" many things. But don't let that scare you: it's fun.

P.S. As the credits rolled, eerie music in the background, I was startled when a large man all in red rose up behind me. I asked him if he'd selected the bright red sweater and pants purposefully for this movie? No, he laughed, "I'm going home now to burn them."

Us (2019)Jordan Peele, director
Michael Abel, music (read/hear NPR story)

Principal Cast:Adelaide Wilson / Red ... Lupita Nyong'o
Gabe Wilson / Abraham ... Winston Duke
Kitty Tyler / Dahlia ... Elisabeth Moss
Josh Tyler / Tex ... Tim Heidecker
Zora Wilson / Umbrae ... Shahadi Wright Joseph
Jason Wilson / Pluto ... Evan Alex

Warren Wolf Teaches "Generation Vibes" at Spivey Hall

Just shy of 40, Warren Wolf already looks back over 30 years' playing vibraphone. In his program "Generation Vibes," presented Saturday at Spivey Hall near Atlanta, Wolf paid homage to great vibraphonists he's met. It was, he said, a history lesson.

First, though, he had to explain that the instrument center stage was not a xylophone. He demonstrated the sustaining pedal and the tremolo effect.

"Air Mail Special" at breakneck speed was the first music, a swing tune of vibraphonist Lionel Hampton's big band days. Wolf told how, at six years of age, he played near a venue where the much older master Hampton was doing a concert. Little Warren introduced himself. "Mr. Hampton, you ought to come across the street when I play and check me out!"

Watching Warren Wolf play was a lesson in improvisation, because we could see as well as hear the patterns he found in the music. He's a weightlifter, and this looked like a workout. After working the treble end of his keyboard, mallets moving too fast to see, he'd hurry down to the bass end; after a wide - ranging run across the bars, he would hover over the center to play a tricky pattern.

Wolf and crew displayed a more pensive side on Milt Jackson's "Django." A set of three songs written by Gary Burton with pianist Chick Corea included music for vibes and piano alone. Wolf explained that Burton was Vice - President at Berklee College of Music when Wolf studied there, but they didn't speak much: "You don't talk to the Vice President of your school." But when Burton retired, "he became way cooler."

Wolf often looked back to his bandmates with a broad smile, evidently surprised by something they'd done.

When Wolf checked his watch a couple of times, I thought we must be getting ready for a recess. I was shocked to learn that our history lesson had already lasted nearly two hours. He skipped ahead to "one of the most brilliant vibraphonists of today" to play his own freshly composed tune, "Come Dance with Me," dedicated to his wife in the audience, a ballerina. For a finale, Wolf played a piece by Roy Ayers, "Sunshine," inviting the audience to sing the hook with him. For an encore, of course, the blues.

Class over, my friend Susan and I ordered Wolf's CD "Convergence."

Warren Wolf, vibraphone
Carroll Dashiell, III, drums
Allyn Johnson, piano
Jeff Reed, bass