George Smoot's Wrinkles in Time: Thrill of the Hunt

(Reflections on WRINKLES IN TIME by George Smoot with Keay Davidson, published by Morrow Press.)

I never look at the stars without remembering that I'm looking back into time. The light of one star left its source a century ago, and the light of another left at the time of Jesus, and so forth. I also understand the Doppler effect, how we can know that an object is approaching or receding by the wavelength of its light. I "get" the idea that gravity is the curvature of space rather than some kind of magnetic tugging. But when I try to grasp George Smoot's lifetime work of mapping the universe's grand structure, well, it's like I've got too many variables to juggle in my mind at once, and I drop all of them.

Mapping the universe, looking at light from its first seconds, and measuring distances between clusters of galaxies: Wouldn't that be like trying to drive through town with blacked-out windows, using photos of the streets made during the previous decade?

So this book contains large swaths of text that I just had to take for granted, couched in a narrative of decades spent on one hunt, pursuing leads and double-checking results over a period of five decades. Smoot begins the story with a primer in ancient physics, mixed in with the story of his own childhood fascinations with stars.

Throughout the story, he communicates gratitude for others whose work flowed into his, and for many others who worked with him. The work takes him to mountaintop observatories, to launches of balloons three stories tall, to Antarctica (where he vividly describes his panic when his overexertion caused him to inhale too quickly, freezing the liquid in his runny nose, stopping his ability to breathe, doubling the gasping...) and to launchpads for satellites. Much of the work seems to be mundane problem-solving, such as how to screen out light and radio waves from earth when trying to detect those from outer space. He's always working in teams, and it always feels like guys in a college dorm room somewhere, puzzling over a problem together. Sometimes he fretted that another team would get the data first, but he seems to have been genuinely disinterested in the outcome, actively trying to prove himself wrong in order to be sure that he was right.

For me, the new concept that I can grasp is the idea that, in the first seconds of bang, there were "seeds" or wrinkles that, eons later, are the sources of inconceivably vast curtains of "dark matter" that dwarf galaxies by comparison, drawing those galaxies with gravitational force at outrageous speeds.

His conclusion mentions those who scorn the Big Bang theory because it seems to lend support to Christian fundamentalists. Smoot diplomatically slides to an assertion that he disagrees with his old teacher: the universe isn't pointless, isn't random. The discoveries of which he is a part point to an increasing sense of unity - as all organs and limbs of a human body stem from the same DNA, he says (p. 296). And, he concludes, "We are awed by the ultimate simplicity and power of the creativity of physical nature -- and by its beauty on all scales."

Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia: You Had to Be There

(reflections on THE COAST OF UTOPIA, comprising three full-length plays VOYAGE, SHIPWRECK, and SALVAGE, by Tom Stoppard)

Maybe if I had seen all three of these plays last month when they could be viewed over a single weekend in New York, I'd associate the names of all these characters with faces of the actors who played them, and some characters and some episodes would stand out. But I've only read them, and I'm unable to recall any action or words by any character in any situation (not counting one that was described in a review that I read).

In fact, after reading them, I can't say more than what I knew from reading reviews. The play more or less follows Russian radical Alexander Herzen and his friends and family over several decades during which his efforts to hasten the liberalization of Russia (mostly articles in journals) become relics and they themselves are derided: "We have left you far behind, and you refuse to notice. ...You're a poet, a storyteller, an orator, anything you please, but you're not a political leader or thinker" (Salvage 110). This image echoes earlier verbal images, and it relates to off-scene events in the trilogy, most memorably the shipwreck in which Herzen's estranged wife and beloved deaf son perished. I appreciate that, but it's not enough to pull these hundreds of pages together for me.

Maybe that's Stoppard's intended effect. Minutes from the end of the whole trilogy, Herzen says, "But history has no culmination! There is no libretto." So, Stoppard has fashioned a very long drama that constantly looks forward to an event that never happens. Herzen in old age, has learned, "A distant end is not an end but a trap." There is no coast. There is no Utopia. Anyone who believes in a Utopia must impose it on the rest of us with tyranny as oppressive and dumb as the czars'.

All the talk of Russian politics and Western culture is played against a background of family life. There are sibling affections and disappointments in marriages in VOYAGE; the loving tutor Matwilda and the sorrow and guilt over the wife and deaf son in SHIPWRECK; reunions of old friends in SALVAGE. Stoppard layers these in every scene, and that's another point: the family, the loves, the kindnesses and taking care of each other are in the end more important than all the writing and debating.

Grasping for a way to comprehend it all, I find an analogy to CANDIDE. Herzen and friends view the world, and find that it never conforms to their worldview. In the end, they realize that they should stay home and make their gardens grow. It's a good thought. But Voltaire expressed it in ninety pages.

I enjoyed many incongruities in the dialogue (when the personal and the political are juxtaposed humorously). I'd like to see it and compare the experience of reading it. But I'm relieved that I didn't slam down $1500 for that weekend in New York.

Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross: Fighting Words

"My daughter --" begins the has-been salesman as he pleads for a chance to swim again with the real estate sharks of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Three times during the play, he begins to use her to gain sympathy, and he never completes the thought. That's as close as we get to the lives of these characters outside of the arena where we see them.

That arena is everything. The men are all searching for points of advantage, points of the opponent's vulnerability. Like boxers, they spend a lot of time circling and stalling, and even when they lash out, they often hit empty air. They also connect, and it's painful and funny, too.

As in A LIFE IN THE THEATRE (see earlier review at this blog), Mamet trusts the actors to find nuance in apparently idiotic lines. So this play begins with a silent well-groomed young man listening less-than-patiently while the harried looking older man "Levene" searches for the right tone to begin his pitch. He's going to beg, but he doesn't want to sound like he's begging. So he tries five times: "John. John. John. John. (pause) John -- " When it doesn't work, and the other man interrupts, "Levene" says, "Hear me out," and tries a whole other approach. This happens a half-dozen different ways.

Later, there's a hilarious dialogue that includes variations on this line: "Are we talking about this, or just talking about it?"

What are the character in this play talking about when they're talking? There's something about a sales contest; there's a bit about some real estate. There's one extended speech about a particular sale. Once in awhile they mention money, and even pile cash on the table. But those all seem to be small objects in passing. It's all abstract. It's words and phrases used for positioning, daring, drawing lines, crossing them. A disgruntled member of the audience said, "Every two seconds!" and I knew that she was referring to the "f" and "s" words that are used for emphasis, for stalling, for attacks. (A sign at the door warns, "Parental Guidance Advised: There is strong language in this play, a !#$**?!! ton of it!")


In the production at the Alliance Theatre's Hertz Stage in Atlanta, the three scenes of act one take place in Chinese restaurants, and act two takes place in the real estate office. The verbal sparring is relentless. At the end, when all seven actors line up for their bows, it feels like we're applauding athletes at the end of an exhausting, exhilarating exhibition.

Pair of Parodies

I've always enjoyed the challenge of writing parodies, especially when they rhyme. For St. James Marietta's fund raiser "Bad Music for Good Causes," I wrote this couple of parodies:

If I Won the Lottery, with apologies to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe

All I want is a double - wide*
Kitchen freezer with one outside
Hot tub to rest my bod
Oh, if I won the lottery!

High-def flat screen with DVD,
Ford like Dale's, and a red Humvee
With tires as big as me
Oh, if I won the lottery!

I'd be
Hot if I got some implants
And my tummy tucked.
Nose job,
Hair transplants, and then --
Get all of my lypo sucked!

Someone's head resting on my knee
Warm and tender as he can be...
To hunt and fetch for me --
A coondog would be loverly!

*"bod" is intended to rhyme with "outside" and "wide"

My Favorite Episcopal Things with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein

Beautiful flowers and vestments and votives,
Sounds of the bells and of train locomotives.
Incense so sweet that we asphyxiate -
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

"Wonderful Days," Christian Ed., Polk Street Players,
Words that aren't mushy in lyrics and prayers,
Prayer books called "new" since nineteen seventy-eight:
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

Sermons succinct with occasional lapses
Vergers who know their rear naves from their apses,
Ushers who don't pass the guilt with the plate:
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

When the Vestry
Says our giving
Isn't all we planned,
Our Warden reminds us of all these great things,
And -- POOF! -- there's a hundred grand!

v. 2

Vestments by Ruta, our fashion designer,
Hymns that are happy in keys that are minor,
Keeping our Christmas trees weeks out of date:
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

One priest's a jazzman, and one priest's a broker;
One priest does chili, her husband does yoga.
One's shippin' youth all the way to Taize -
Ces quelques choses nous feront admirees!

Bagels and coffee with someone remarking
How they beat Baptists to premium parking.
People who differ and yet tolerate:
These are the things that make St. James Church great.

When our Outreach
Needs some uplift
To work as it should,
St. James comes together for music that's bad,
To give to a cause that's good.

Lunch with W: Report from London Columnist

Columnist for the Sunday Times of London Irwin M. Stelzer contributed an item to The Weekly Standard (March 12, 2007) that he calls "Reader of the Free World: A Literary Luncheon with the President." I summarize his article for my own reference. I cringe often when I hear the President stumble through unprepared remarks, yet I've found much to admire in the President when he has been filtered through other sources (Bob Woodward's Bush at War, for example). This article is one of those. I have to suppose that this "filter" is a corrective lens, not rose-colored.

The occasion for the article was a lunch-hour seminar at which the President wanted opinions from experts on some books he has read recently. Stelzer had attended other such gatherings. This time, the guest of honor was Andrew Roberts, author of a sequel to Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples from which I taught history for years in the 80s.

Part of the discussion concerned the use of the terms "good" and "evil" in formulating public policy. Bush argued back when guests suggested that public officials usually must choose among "lesser evils." He said that the choice can be made between evil and good principles.

Some of the discussion concerned Britain's anti-American polls. "Is it due simply to my personality?" he asked. Answer: Yes, plus envy of US power and a preference for Palestinians.

On lessons of history from Mr. Roberts:

• No deadlines for withdrawal. England did it in India, and bloodbath started one minute after the deadline. Bush has been seeking other guides, including a study of France in Algeria, where more Algerians were killed after French withdrawal than before.
  
• Rich powers fall to poorer ones when they can't take the heat. The author states that World War II was "nearly over" before the public was permitted to see a photo of a dead soldier, and he muses that today's coverage is "sapping the West's will."
  
• Intern enemies until the war is over. Example found in Ireland during WWII.

About the pressure in his office: "I just don't feel any." He is confident, says the author, that he is promoting good by his policies, in the long run.

In summary, the author writes:

Here is a man who is comofrtable in his own skin; whose religious faith guides him in his search for the good, without leading him to think he has a private line to God...; who worries less about his "legacy" than about his standing with the Almighty; who is quite well read; and who believes that the President of the United States must be, to use his much-derided coinage, "the decider."

Tchaikovsky as Dramatist

(response to the Metropolitan Opera's production of EUGENE ONEGIN, opera by Tchaikovsky from the verse novel by Pushkin.)

I've seen EUGENE ONEGIN only twice, enough to know its dramatic shape well and its music only vaguely. I know it mostly by its a remarkable dramatic effect. Like tremors, the drama may leave structures standing, but it is felt deeply.

Its plot is minimal, something like this: girl tells boy she loves him; boy cares for nothing and no one; girl rebuffs boy when he realizes too late what he has missed.

The mood is autumnal, highlighted in the Met's abstract design by falling leaves that carpet the stage during act one. Acts two and three take place at two different soirees, represented in each act by a rectangle of straight-backed chairs within which the party-goers dance... though the rectangle is larger and the chairs are more plush in act three. During the preludes to the each scene, the director shows us the boy Onegin, now middle-aged, looking back on the events of his life with regret.

Tchaikovksy expertly focuses us on these people, and makes us care. He leads us into the opera with wistful and slow - moving music. During intermission, the audience who saw the show live via satellite at movie theatres got a glimpse of a rehearsal, when the conductor calls the music "dangerous" because it's so simply constructed -- a single phrase repeated in a sequence of pitches -- that the orchestra must use shadings of tone, dynamics, and emphasis to bring it alive.

Tchaikovsky sets each act with a social group, elevated at each act: peasants working at harvest, then provincial gentry, and finally, high society at a palace.

The action, such as it is, happens quickly. Music and words tell us immediately that the stranger Eugene Onegin "is the one" when Tatiana and we first see him; Onegin's speech destroying her hopes is direct and curt (and, in this production, we see Tatiana slowly crumpling her love letter to him behind her back). In act two, his flirtations drive his best friend to a rash challenge in just a couple of dances, and we believe it. The duel in which Onegin kills his best friend takes one minute or less to accomplish.

Yet Tchaikovsky takes time to make these points of action meaningful. After a fond nurse puts Tatiana to bed, we see Tatiana's long night awake to write a love letter to the man she's just met, and we see the sun rise. We appreciate her courage and her certainty in her feelings. In act two, there's an odd intrusion as a lightweight French singer interrupts the party to sing a banal and fruity lyric to Tatiana. It seems like a mere comic relief, but Tchaikovsky is achieving something dramatic, here: everyone's watching Tatiana, including the man who rejected her, and the words are all about her blessings and beauty, and she's bravely enduring not just one verse, but an encore. It's an effect that takes time, and nothing obviously dramatic is happening, but we feel it. Before the duel, Tchaikovsky takes time for Lensky to remember his happy childhood and happy love while he waits for Onegin to show up. The duel over, Onegin turns away in regret.

At that point, this director skips to Act Three without intermission. Dressers change Onegin's costume in full view during the glorious and grand prelude to the party at the palace. Now it's years later, and Onegin tells the audience that his life has been a bore, traveling and caring for nothing, but always haunted by the fact that he killed his best (only?) friend over a meaningless flirtation. Immediately, Tatiana enters the party. We and Onegin learn how Tatiana has matured into a gracious and wise lady, not by hearing her, but by hearing the adoring guests as she silently greets them in the background. Tchaikovsky gives her husband Prince Gremin a long aria of affectionate appreciation for her.

In all these instances, Tchaikovsky achieves drama by evoking context swiftly, and probing inner action patiently.

I understand that Pushkin's original novel is satirical, and we do see signs of that in the libretto. But instead of laughing at the girl Tatiana for the romance novels that she takes so seriously, or laughing at her brother in law Lensky for his jealousy, we sympathize.

Finally, we all feel Onegin's regret, what might have been if he had been less wrapped up in his own ego.

A Precious Detective: Agatha Christie's Opposite

(Response to novels by Alexander McCall Smith, featuring Precious Ramotswe.)

"Even Agatha Christie, two-dimensional as her writing is, has a worldview," a director of one of her plays told his cast, "and hers is, 'everyone's hiding something bad.'" The mystery novels of Alexander McCall Smith aren't really mysteries, and they're not really novels, and Smith's world view reverses the usual detective novel's: there's always more good to discover in a person.

Smith has now fashioned six books around his character named Precious Ramotswe, founder of Botswana's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. About forty years old, "traditionally built," and old-fashioned, "Mma" Ramotswe is the root of the series while characters branch off and grow from book to book. Crime is little more than a pretext for our time spent with the characters. In Smith's latest, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, there's a mysterious intruder who steals trousers from Mma's clothes line, an embezzler from Johannesburg that she's been hired to find -- but these are forgotten for chapters at a time as we get involved in Mma Ramotswe's looming encounter with her Ex, and her secretary's enrollment in dance class, her husband's new apprentice, and the dangerous liaison of the young apprentice who quits.

The central characters are motivated often by a sense of duty and heartfelt gratitude, as they discover "precious" qualities in people whom they've judged by appearances. Smith's loosely tied plots give him room to have his characters ruminate on good old days, on modern manners, on dancing, on the almost-human character of automobile engines, on women's figures, and on tea. I heard the author in an interview say that he thinks of his fiction as "tea-drinking books," to be enjoyed and savored in a relaxed way.

Through these books, I have absorbed a mental impression of Botswana at odds with all the other images I have. Smith, a Scot, lived in Botswana for many years. Is he showing us the Africa he saw, or is it a highly selective vision? Checking the internet, I found Smith's own comment about that:

One or two people at signings usually ask me … am I ignoring the harsh realities of life … We have all become familiar with the images of boy soldiers and hungry children and cattle dying in dried-up river beds. We need to see all this … but we should also bear in mind the magnificent humanity and sheer decency [to be found in Africa]. There are legions of people trying to lead good lives - and doing so - in the face of difficulties which would floor most of us in no time at all ... The world which I try to portray in these books … seems to have resonated with a vast number of people who, I suppose, want to believe that the human spirit can transcend the horrors which confront us.

Smith, quoted in Frank Devine, "The World of Precious Ramotswe" in Quadrant Magazine, October 2003

Devine adds: "[From Botswana's] apparent hopelessness, McCall Smith has conjured a universe of light and cheer, of tranquillity, good manners and comic warmth."

The six Mma Ramotswe novels are:
The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
The Full Cupboard of Life
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Calm Advice for Episcopalians in Opposition

(response to an essay in WEAVINGS: A JOURNAL OF THE CHRISTIAN SPIRITUAL LIFE, March/April 2007. The theme of the issue is "Abide in Me.")

Elected to my first year on the Vestry of my Episcopal church, I suddenly find on my plate the ugly conflict(s) over "the gay Bishop." He's not the real problem, of course; he's just the reduction of a long-simmering brew of differences about scriptural interpretation and ecclesial authority.

So I'm getting it from both sides. A friend from another branch of the Church was unable to hide his schaudenfreude when he related a news item that Bishop Alexander seems to be losing a struggle with dissidents over use of church property. Parishioners have taken me aside for whispered pep talks about fighting the "liberalism" in our diocese and in our national church, and others who know me better look to me to voice their understanding that the Church is a body that continues to mature, any changes of outlook being a sign of collective experience and wisdom. I said to one parishioner, "Being Episcopalian means that we believe the Spirit has guided the processes of selecting our leaders through the centuries; and if the Church is leaning away from what we believe, then it's probably time that we should re-examine what we believe (with reference to earlier teachings about race and divorce)."

For self-defense as I wade into this war, and for soldiers on both sides, I recommend an essay, "The Christians are Fighting -- Again" by Robert Corin Morris. He takes the long view -- very long -- starting from the partisanship among Jesus' twelve apostles, and the decision of the early church to accept different practices of Jew and Gentile in the same church.

Far from being a new problem, war within our church is something we've always had, and, Morris writes, "something in us likes it a lot." (He cites a book by Chris Hedges, WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING (read reviews), and asserts that war is "our default position.") He tells anecdotes of how Christians have denied each others' faith since the days when Athanasius called a childhood friend "The First-born of Satan" for a nuanced difference in their ways of describing the divinity of Christ.

Morris agrees with all sides that "doctrine matters" as the "common ground of belief and practice" for any group to "hang together." But the agreement doesn't have to be absolute, any more than it was at the Council of Jerusalem, where the early Church drew a line at "the pollutions of idols and from unchastity and from what is strangled and from blood" (Acts 15:20).

But Morris presents Jesus himself as the unifying factor beyond doctrine. While some parishioners in my church have derided "warm and fuzzy theology," they'd have to admit that a lot of what Jesus said was to blur the sharp and hard lines of the theology of his day. He reduced the ten commandments to two, he cheerfully broke sabbath laws in the name of kindness, and he makes "love" the defining characteristic of his true disciples. His opponents use doctrine against him, and he always subverts it towards something warm and fuzzy, like humanity, and caring for the poor and the prisoners.

In our present conflict, Morris suggests that we adopt "the Gamaliel Principle." A Jewish leader named Gamaliel spoke in defense of Peter and John, saying that if their new Christian movement is of God, it will last (Acts 5:26-40). Morris concludes the main part of his argument by facing the present controversy directly:

Is it so impossible to imagine part of the church calling gay and lesbian Christians to live according to the same principles of sexual fidelity in consecrated relationships that bind heterosexuals, while other parts of the church demand that homosexuals consecrate themselves to celibacy as the only discipleship option? We don't know the long-term consequences of the "innovative teaching," spiritually or socially, though both sides claim they already know the answer. What if both proponents and opponents prayed the same Gamaliel prayer: "O God, if this is from you, let it flourish; if not, reveal its flaws"?

Finally, Morris suggests that, in the worst case scenario, we could make the best of it by aiming for an "amicable divorce." Some divorced couples, workingout shared responsibilities, find "new, if more distant, relationships." He imagines ways "to recognize that we're still estranged parts of the same family...not able to see eye to eye."

Morris is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Newark, and the founding director of Interweave, "an interfaith adult education center for spirituality, wellness, and the common good in Summit, New Jersey." His books include the Isaiah section of the SPIRITUAL FORMATION BIBLE and the recently published, PROVOCATIVE GRACE: THE CHALLENGE IN JESUS' WORDS. (Link to his page at Amazon.com)

Sondheim's FOLLIES "Encore"

In the early 70s, influential critics at the New York Times panned Stephen Sondheim's first two collaborations with director Harold Prince, COMPANY (1970) and FOLLIES (1971). In spite of those reviews, the musicals garnered much favorable critical attention and Tony Awards. Still, those reviews contributed to a popular conception of Sondheim as "cold," "cerebral," unhummable, and "too clever by half."

This weekend, the paper's head critic Ben Brantley sets the record straight, reviewing a concert staging of FOLLIES in Broadway's "Encore!" series:

The brittle shield of ice that was once widely believed to encase anything Stephen Sondheim wrote continues to melt apace. On the heels of John Doyle’s intense back-to-back revivals of “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway, this “Follies” definitively tears off the stigma of cerebral chilliness that was attached to it when it opened 35 years ago.
Directed and choreographed with winning sensitivity by Casey Nicholaw, and acted with a blend of complexity and clarity that rarely happens in musicals, the Encores! “Follies” opens a floodgate to a dizzying rush of feeling from the first strains of its overture. That opening music, conducted by Eric Stern, glitters with grandeur, lyricism and an uneasy undercurrent of fragility. It is the sound of beauty with fracture lines, just about to crack.

Another recent article by Gina Bellafonte contains comments about the current revival of COMPANY directed by John Doyle. She, too, corrects earlier failure of perception:

“Company” seems so sophisticated now partly because of its prescience. It opened a few months before the publication of “Play It as It Lays,” Joan Didion’s deadening novel of ... the psychological consequences of a ruptured national morality. “Company” is unquestionably a cheerier affair, however much it resists its own optimism, but no less ambivalent an indictment of the sexual libertinism to which the 1960s gave sanction.

...It has been fashionable to think of “Company” as an endorsement of marriage steeped in resignation and reserve. But the show lacks the dismissiveness that that interpretation implies. This production suggests that a marriage, or a lasting one, anyway, is not about a union of two impassioned souls forged against the world. It is a communal enterprise, its success sustained by the order of social life.

None of this is news to me. FOLLIES has sent shivers up and down my spine since the first time I heard a scratchy LP of it, and finally seeing it on Broadway in 2002 (?)
showed me even more than I'd expected. I've seen several productions of COMPANY, and I played "David" in a production at Duke University in 1979, but it wasn't until I saw a couple of productions in one year that it deeply moved me: one production on a small "mod" set of trapdoors and platforms reminiscent of "Laugh-In" at Actors Express, Atlanta, and the wonderful big production (directed by orchestrator Jonathan Tunick) at the Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration in the summer of 2002.

Following that celebration, Ben Brantley wrote similar thoughts: "After seeing the six musicals in this series, I began to think that Mr. Sondheim may be the most emotional composer in the history of musicals." He points out that earlier productions hadn't the "clarity" of the later ones.

Directors and actors may be better at realizing what Sondheim and his collaborators were doing. Possibly, without the pressure of creating a new thing, later directors have been able to focus their productions more acutely.

"A Doorway into Thanks": Mary Oliver's Thirst

(response to THIRST, poems by Mary Oliver, 2006)

Everyone expects some virtuosity in art. "Even I could do that!" means the painting (or poem, or song) isn't even worth disliking. I've heard people say that about music by John Adams, and they were mistaken (see earlier blog entries on him). Now I'm tempted to say the same things about these poems by Mary Oliver.

Take for instance the second poem in this collection, "Walking Home from Oak-Head." It begins with the phrase, "There's something about the snow-laden sky in winter. . . ." How many cards in the drug store right now begin the same way? "There's something about a Mother. . . There's something about a good friend. . . There's something about (fill in the blank). . . ." Then, Oliver's poem is about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. Whose idea this is, I think I know! Without the complex rhyme scheme in Frost's poem, this one proceeds in groups of little lines, each indented one step beyond the one before.
     Anyone
               can
                   do that.

Yet, I'll admit it: there really is something about a snow-laden sky in winter that causes "elation," just as Oliver says, and I'm kind of glad that she made me remember it. And when she describes the snow's falling "casually, then irrepressibly," that's nice, too, though not remarkable.

We expect, if not virtuosity in word play and compression, then at least some kind of insight that might not have occurred to us. Here, again, Mary Oliver finds some angles on things that, while not revelatory, are at least pleasantly reminiscent. There's a poem from the perspective of the patient donkey in the gospel that bears Jesus into Jerusalem, whose burden turns out to be -- as Jesus said in another context -- light. Several poems here focus on a dog named Percy, or maybe a series of dogs named Percy, whose cavorting on the beach provides me with vicarious pleasure and reminds me to try to accept the present as dogs do. My own pups teach me the same lesson.

Now, this particular collection of poems is, I understand, a departure for Ms. Oliver. She's had a reputation for politically stringent, environmentalist verse. But this book collects poems published in such periodicals as The Episcopal Times, Spiritus, and Nature and Spirituality. Following the death of a long-time partner, Mary Oliver went into an orthodox Christian church - whether RC or Episcopal, I'm not certain. Several poems here refer to newfound faith, prayer, and eternal life. Has faith made her "soft?"   [See a short worship service that's a collage of poems mostly from Thirst]

One insight does emerge from the collection, which, along with those pleasant images and reminders, is enough for me to want to keep this collection nearby. It is that poetry and prayer and perhaps even the secret to a good (and eternal) life is simply what she describes in a poem called "Praying." You "pay attention" and "patch a few words together"...

                             . . .this isn't 
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

That feels right. Poetry, like prayer, doesn't have to be about virtuosity. I'm satisfied with any "doorway into thanks."

Met Opera's First Emperor Banishes Critics

(response to the Metropolitan Opera's high-definition broadcast of THE FIRST EMPEROR, a new opera by Tan Dun and Ha Jin, and to a couple of reviews of it in the NY Times and Atlanta Journal Constitution.)


When I couldn't drop everything, fly to NYC, and buy a $400 ticket to see the Met Opera, I had to take the word of critics. Now, with high definition live broadcasts to a big screen movie theatre in Atlanta, I can see for myself how wrong the critics were. The creators of THE FIRST EMPEROR, from librettist and composer through to the designers and choreographers, right on down to the performers - even the chorus and orchestra - showed imagination, ingenuity, and evident pleasure in creating a dramatic spectacle that is a world apart from anything else I've seen.

As we hear some alien sounds from the orchestra, a visitor from Chinese opera appears in front of a vast curtain depicting the unfinished wall of China and Chinese characters. This visitor, "Yin Yang Master" with a mocking red face front and a demure masked face behind, sets the tone for the epic story: beware irony, he seems to say. He sets the action two thousand years ago.

The curtain opens on breathtaking spectacle and sound. Stairs occupy the whole stage from curtain back to its upper reaches. The chorus is arrayed in rows dressed as soldiers modeled on the famous clay modeled soldiers of that time. It's several minutes before we hear anything that sounds like our Western music. The Yin Yang Master screeches and laughs, the chorus slaps its thighs in rhythm, and even the orchestra is shouting, growling, and whooping on cue. In front, a line of serious looking men bang drums with stones, and knock or rub the stones together. A percussionist in costume knocks ceramic pots that make bell-like sounds.

When Placido Domingo enters, he demands "Silence!" and calls for a new kind of music to replace this ancient sound. (In a documentary feature at intermission, we learn that Tan Dun based this opening sequence on pictures and literary descriptions of the music of the time, though no one knows how the instruments were played.) Domingo as Emperor Xin (for whom "China" is named) sets up the metaphor that shapes the entire opera, the yin and yang of Music and Silence, Light and Shadow. He calls for his old friend, his cellmate from a time in his life when he was jailed, a composer whom he calls "Shadow."

When Shadow is captured by Xin's prospective son-in-law the general, the conflicts of the piece are clear at once. The general loves Xin's daughter, while the princess (petulant, energetic, and disabled by a childhood injury to her legs) is immediately interested in her father's "shadow," and the composer himself defies the emperor whose army leveled his village, enslaved his people, and killed his mother. Motivating the plot, Xin is determined to have a piece of music that will unify his vast empire. We sense, then, that some piece of music will somehow be the climax of this opera, and we've been warned that it won't be what the emperor ordered.

Along the way to the end, we have great moments.

There is the romance between Princess and Composer, which miraculously restores her ability to walk. He won't eat or speak or even open his eyes, in defiance of the emperor; she extracts a promise from her father that she can marry him if she can make him speak. This is a wonderful seduction scene, in which the action is amplified by lurking presences behind the actors: percussionists bowing hand-held bells, and dancers making suggestive moves glimpsed under the stairs.

There is a scene of a chorus of slaves building the Great Wall, singing of their only dream: to lie in a grave on a hill side near home. Tan Dun's music here is notable for simplicity and sparse accompaniment - mere glances of orchestral sound - and for extremely long diminuendos. As they sing in their drab slaves' costumes, the Composer wanders among them dressed finely in blue. He is now the Princess's lover and Emperor's employee.

During a thrilling orchestral interlude, we watch the ceremonial dressing of the Composer for the Emperor's inauguration, at which the long-awaited national anthem will be heard.

The final scene is a grand spectacle that begins with the conventional song of praise that the Emperor would expect. By the end, however, the Composer has had his most-appropriate revenge.

Alien as the setting and some of the music was, there were also many parallels to traditional operas. The doting Verdi father is here; the willful and erotic Princess Salome is here; the chorus of Hebrew slaves from Nabucco is referenced. And, of course, the Emperor is MacBeth. Having fought his way to the top of the world, he has lost everything that made the triumph worth having -- friendship, family, love, and respect. His triumph is a mockery of him, and a tragedy for his kingdom.

Critics said that the audience was bored, that the opera needed extensive cutting, that Domingo looked ridiculous, that the story line was unclear. Sorry, critics: we've seen it with our own eyes, and you're way off-base.

Anticipation and Dread: Robert Olen Butler's Fiction

reflection on HAD A GOOD TIME: Stories from American Postcards by Robert Olen Butler (Grover Press, 2004).

I'm always a little afraid when I start to read fiction by Robert Olen Butler. I know he's going to draw me into a corner of our world made strange in some wonderful way through a character's eyes. I know that he'll surprise me. I also know that, looking back on the story or novel, I'll see that the surprise was inevitable, usually implied from the start. I know well the feeling of delighted anticipation that often grows as we approach the climax. But I also know its opposite, a feeling of strong dread that makes me regret having started in the first place.

Most wonderfully, Butler's fiction often builds towards something dreadful that turns into a something joyful, surprising, and still inevitable. That worked on a grand scale in his novel MR. SPACEMAN, and repeatedly in short stories, which are his specialty.

What I've described sounds perhaps like a formula, along the lines of O'Henry, and Butler's work is anything but formulaic. More than any creative artist I know (besides Stephen Sondheim and Tom Stoppard), he keeps challenging himself to wring quality from unlikely sources. In this collection from 2004, HAD A GOOD TIME, each story is his extrapolation from actual postcards from the 1890s to 1920s. An earlier collection TABLOID DREAMS took off from headlines he found in the National Enquirer, and one of those stories, "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover" was the basis of his novel MR. SPACEMAN. The collection that I read first was A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN, in which every story concerns Vietnamese immigrants living in the area of New Orleans.

I'm still working on my own interpretation of something he remarked in the radio interview that brought him to my attention back around 1990. The interviewer pointed out that Butler, a Vietnam War veteran, had been labeled as a "political writer." Butler agreed that his writing was political, but not in the way that people usually mean. Parties, policies, and beliefs, he said, are all superficial signs of any person's political core, which he says is much deeper, established very early in life.

If I were to try to put Butler's creed into words, it would be like my own effort to define Sondheim's creed. It would have something to do with deep empathy, understanding even repulsive people. Get beyond class, race, groups, careers, beliefs - and you reach the unique and valuable person. The Christ-like alien in MR. SPACEMAN prepares himself to reveal the truth of our universe by walking among us, trying to experience our daily grind, and by using a brain scanner to inhabit the stories of people he plucks up from Louisiana to his spaceship. I'm reminded of an emblematic line from Flannery O'Connor, "Even the meanest among them sparkled."

Another element of his creed would be that violence never achieves its perpetrators' real objective.

So it's with a mixture of anticipation and dread that I'm going to look for his latest collection, SEVERANCE, which grows from his most daunting, least promising, challenge to himself: Each story is what goes through the mind of an individual during the estimated ninety seconds of consciousness left when the head has been severed from the body.

Cartoon Puzzles: The Real Intelligent Design

(Reflections on THE NEW YORKER BOOK OF CARTOON PUZZLES AND GAMES by a team of writers who call themselves "Puzzability." Foreword by Will Shortz and Robert Mankoff. Also, a report on NPR's Morning Edition about the efficacy of crossword puzzles for staving off senility. Memories of another novelty book in French "Mots De Gousses, Rames" )

If you don't believe in God, this may change your mind:

From thousands of cartoons printed in THE NEW YORKER over the decades, eight appear on pp. 116-117 of CARTOON PUZZLES AND GAMES. One word is omitted from each caption. The letters of one missing word overlap letters of the next one, and so on: waver, averages, start, tartan...and so on. That's pretty cool But arrange them in order in a grid, coiling from the outer squares to the inside, and all the letters down the middle of the grid spell the caption of a ninth cartoon.

That's what I call "intelligent design." And survival of the fittest has nothing to do with it.

When I work this puzzle, I think exactly what Will Shortz says in his introduction. (He's the NY Times' affable puzzle editor, familiar to me from years of hearing him on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday). "I haven't just solved something, I've discovered something that's pretty. And I don't know how the people who put this together did it."

A gift from my friend Kitty Drew, this book makes me shake my head in disbelief, even while I'm laughing at cartoons and working through possible solutions to the different styles of puzzle. Shortz makes another apt observation: "When the incongruous parts of a cartoon come together, you want them to come together in a rush -- a snap. That's what produces a burst of laughter. It's the same thing with puzzles." Some of these cartoons are by Charles Addams, whose Addams Family cartoons are etched deep in my memory from around age 5.

That experience of "snap," when incongruous things suddenly fit, and when everything works vertically, horizontally, meaningfully, humorously - well, that's what you get in Bach, in Stephen Sondheim's lyrics and music, in a staging of Tom Stoppard's best plays (Arcadia, foremost). An earlier blog entry quotes Duke Ellington when he said that the "snap" (he called it "the fitting") was the same as happiness.

For me, this is evidence of God. Sure, logical positivists say that such puzzles should make me believe in the capacity of the human brain, not in a supernatural being. Fair enough. But, what on earth explains anyone's desire to put together such totally useless wonders as these?

I'm reminded of a small book I saw twenty-five years ago, apparently in French. I say apparently, because it's actually in English. Under the pretense of collecting folk lyrics from provinces in medieval France, with all the obscure imagery explained in copious footnotes, the author actually was giving the reader Mother Goose Rhymes (he called it "Mots de Gousses, Rames") with a thick French accent. For example, a poem ostensibly about a drought that reduced one apple harvest in the 14th century begins, "Pie terre, pie terre / Pommes qui n'y d'aire" ("pity earth, pity earth / apples that never reach the air"). When read aloud in French, it produces "Peter Peter Pumpkin eater." Got it? That guy didn't do it for money or popularity; few people could "get" the joke. Did it help him to propagate the species? Naw. Did he have too much time? What motivates someone to do something like that?

For me, writing music is satisfying in the same way. And, just as I don't go back to revisit crossword puzzles I've completed, I don't think often about the songs I've written -- only the next one.

In case anyone needs another reason, there's some evidence that exercising the brain in mid-life builds up a "cognitive reservoir" that ameliorates the inevitable effects of the brain's aging. Crossword puzzles, along with mentally stimulating work and continuing education (learning an instrument or a language) serve that purpose, according to a report on this morning's NPR.

Round 'n' Round with Poets 'n' Dogs

(references to a review in POETRY of Dec. 2006, a review by Joel Brouwer, poet-blogger Greg Rappleye's review of Brouwer's review, and my own review of Brouwer's own poem.)

I'm amused. A day after shaking my head over those literalists who deny that any interpretation is involved in their reading of Scripture (see my review of Rob Bell's VELVET ELVIS) , I find this statement by Irish poet Paul Muldoon, quoted with commentary by Brian Phillips in POETRY:

"The poem is, after all, the solution to a problem only it has raised, and our reading of it necessarily entails determining what that problem was." But since this process is inevitably speculative, it also means that the reader creates the writer, that we can bring to reading anything we like, that the poem has no end.

The "problem" is to communicate an experience with any inner effects or reflections, as succinctly as possible. Of course, ye literalists, of course, the readers will bring their own background to an interpretation. We know this from the usual Law School Jury 101 experiment, in which the class witnesses some extraordinary event and immediately writes accounts of the event that disagree. When the event is also meaningful, the room for interpretation expands.

Minutes after reading the review in POETRY, I was checking blogs for comparisons to my own review of Joel Brouwer's wonderful poem "A Report to the Academy" (see "Joining the Moments, Enjoying the Moments", Dec. 10). Along the way, I found an illustration of this phenomenon: two poets disagree on how to read a third poet, and I disagree with both!

The blogger-poet Greg Rappleye at Sonnets at 4 a.m. decries "Joel Brouwer's ice-axing of Roy Jacobstein's A Form of Optimism (Northeastern University Press, 2006); a review that appears in this morning's New York Times Book Review. "

Rappleye presents the following poem by Jacobstein, and follows with his own comments:

THE DOG RACES IN FLORIDA

He can't stop thinking
of his mother, contorted
in her last bed, her voice

Running to empty, able
only to repeat A point, I need
a better point, and unbidden,

he flashes to the dog track
in Florida, the loudspeaker
growling over its own static

Here comes Swifty--and they're off!:
a mass of yelping greyhounds
chasing that tiny tin rabbit

trailing the black Buick coupe.
Around and around the tamped
dirt the pack strains. Anyone

would have bet the dogs
had learned by now no matter
how fast they run, Swifty runs

faster. Then the point breaks
clear: They know and run anyway.*

I read the poem as an original (and nearly cynical) comment on the futility of life; a suggestion that many of us will choose to go on living in futility no matter how unwise that choice is. I do not read it as a sentimental comment about anyone's mother, as a sweet insight about the "Great Chain of Life" metaphor, or whatever it is that Brouwer claims the poem to be.

So Rappleye sees cynicism in Jacobstein’s poem, and Brouwer sees a sentimental message in it.

What I bring to Jacobstein’s poem is the way my dogs enjoy running for its own sake, chasing and barking at each other with no "point." So, I don't see the cynicism, and I don't see the sentimental message "Life goes on," but I do see an insight that I consider to be more positive than either: that the "point" is beside the point, as running is what the dogs do well and enjoy. Good for Swifty, too bad about the mother who wanted more.

Enjoyed as well the fact that Brouwer in his review derides "the 'anecdote + reflection = insight' school", while my whole review of his poem makes much of the fact that it reports an insight reached by reflection on an anecdote.

Teaching Technology When the Power Goes Out

(This is a response I've drafted for a report to the National Writing Project, for which I've participated in a group of teachers looking for ways to use technology in the classroom "more thoughtfully." Education )

In the first minutes of our team's first meeting, the power went out campus-wide, and we were left in the dark for a couple of hours, leading immediately to the question, "What's our back-up plan if the technology fails?"

Since then, that question has broadened to this one: "What do we teach with technology that couldn't be learned as well without it?" Collaboration, research, editing, and writing for a broad audience have always been possible and desirable in the classroom, and posting a piece of writing to the internet now makes all those experiences much easier to achieve. Still, that's old learning, just speeded up, and techno-phobes could thereby argue that technology is a luxury, not a necessity.

But, in developing our workshops, we all found ourselves addressing the dangers posed by the easy flow of shallow or false information, the rhetorical manipulation of visual elements such as images and layouts, and the digressive nature of text that allows a reader to jump to hyperlinks instead of following any thought to a logical or nuanced conclusion. Of course, these are all opportunities, too, for those who have a critical appreciation of them.

To be discerning citizens, our students must develop the appreciation both for the old-fashioned kind of long-form, developed writing, and for the new kind that develops in bits of verbal and visual text.

Rob Bell's "Velvet Elvis": Seeing Through Brick Walls

(Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell, 2005 - a Christmas gift from friend Dr. Roger Wilk.)

Rob Bell's title Velvet Elvis comes from a painting the author found, which the artist signed simply, "R." Bell imagines that the artist was so proud of his work that he didn't bother identifying himself, as he expected to be known through the ages anyway, as the one who painted the last, greatest, all-sufficient work of art. Of course, that's absurd. That's how Bell introduces his main concept: Christianity, as we've received it, is a picture from its time. It's great. But God wasn't finished when it was.

Bell's ideas seem to me to be pretty mainstream, at least in the Episcopal Church, but they are presented colloquially and packaged to appeal to people who grew up in the 90s. The cover depicts a young man in baggy jeans falling through darkness, the type is sans serif, and the page numbers are computer-ish (e.g., "p. 54" is "054"). Bell makes wise guy asides, and his pages are good for readers raised on USA Today and internet chat rooms: lots of paragraphs consist of six words or less. Much of what he says also finds expression in my blog entries, especially in the idea that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of the Exodus happen to us as individuals, to us as a community -- again and again. It hardly matters if they happened once in history.

Bell wants to appeal to those put off by people he calls "brickians." Brickianity is Bell's word for seeing every doctrine as a hard brick. Brickians' main concern isn't life, but life hereafter, and that's threatened if even one brick is pulled out, because the whole wall will tumble.

Bell offers a counter image, faith as a trampoline that supports and exhilarates, and doctrines as the flexible springs. He gives the virgin birth of Jesus as an example, merely showing how the story of the Virgin Mary can justifiably be accounted for in more than the literal way. If we learned that "virgin" could mean simply "young wife," he asks rhetorically, "Is the way of Jesus still the best way to live?"

But huffy bloggers, brickians all, read Bell's gentle, self-deprecating book as an attack, arrogant, deliberately controversial. That passage that points out reasonably how the story of the Virgin birth just might be read as something other than the writer's account of an historical event gets singled out in blogs for particular invective. The story (never mentioned in other gospels, or in any of the writings of Paul or other epistles) is defended as a "core" belief, demonstrating what Bell said about Brickians: unable to read the Bible as what it is (not a book, but a library), they feel threatened by light thrown on any doctrine.

One blogger who thinks he's being clever observes that a trampoline can work without some of those springs. Well, right, that's Bell's point exactly. Another blogger goes on to assert that every word of the Bible, right down to the verb tenses, represents a choice made by the creator of the universe. What a difference it would make if the blogger would see what's obvious, that every word and verb tense is a choice made by (1) a human writing about what he remembers and (2) several intermediary editors, translators, copyists, and councils, and (3) that doesn't make any of it a lie -- any more than any other memoir or textbook -- and it is to be read with consideration for the source(s) as any other writing would be.

I'm reminded of three influences that brought me out of "brickianity" :

• Four years of study with the Education for Ministry program out of the Episcopal School of Theology from University of the South at Sewanee. (I suspect that Bell isn't aware how his ideas resonate with traditional Episcopal theology. He does make references to "empty ritual," in which I detect a whiff of his scorn for the Episcopal church.)

• "Repaintings" of the gospel in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, and especially in THE BOOK OF BEBB by Frederick Buechner (see my essay on that at My Favorite Novel )

• The root of it all: a walk across the main quad at Duke's East Campus fall of 1978. I was in distress, because my fundamentalism was threatened by an acquaintance whose literal reading of the Bible led to what seemed like an inescapable (and repugnant) conclusion. My friend Kendrick Mills, serenely Catholic, just laughed. "My God isn't so petty!" he said. He once asked me, incredulously, "So, you're faith depends on proof?"

Let the brickians tend their wall. I prefer Bell's vision, especially in a personal passage where he describes some moments of extreme joy and significance in his life when God spoke to him without Scripture. These are coupled with examples from Scripture of Paul and early Christians quoting pagan sources for the truths found there. He's trying to show that the Bible, like the Velvet Elvis, contains enough to live on. The English prayer book said as much in its earliest preface - 1549 -- but thank God for the contributions of later artists, composers, playwrights -- and religious thinkers.

New Episcopalians: Are You Comfortable?

(Reflections on a parish meeting and survey. Religion )

I'm a card-carrying partisan of the Episcopal Church. When our parish survey asked, "Why do you come to St. James Church?" I realized that I attend first, because it's Episcopalian. That it's a small, welcoming church is secondary. I wonder if we take for granted that everyone who attends fully appreciates our distinctive qualities?

Here's a draft of something that might answer some FAQs, fitting on a laminated card peeking out from behind the prayer books and hymnals. It's intended to highlight some of the Church's wonders, to explain parts that might seem alien. I welcome comments -- click on "comments" below to amend my draft, or to explain why this is a bad idea.

Are you comfortable?
While we hope that the Episcopal Church feels right to you, we realize that our church doesn't fit well with secular culture.

We are comfortable with silence.

Our music's more than fast or slow, happy or sad. Some of the music has been heard in churches for over 1000 years, and some is new. Our music sometimes expresses awe, yearning, anguish, or peace. Our lyrics are sometimes in the original languages of ancestors; other words are thought-provoking poetry.

Our service involves everyone. It's not a show or a class. While clergy lead the service, we all read, we move, we pray together, pray in silence, we sing, we eat and drink. The sermon is one part, not the core, of our worship. The focus is always on how God reaches to us.

We're traditional and modern. We are comfortable with the latest technology, and we're engaged in world events; yet we share prayers and practices with worshippers across the centuries.

We are comfortable with tension. We can agree to disagree, united in worship.

We think of faith as an action, not just a belief. It's what you do, trusting in God. We're comfortable with the fact that faith can change with maturity and understanding.

We believe that God still speaks. Our lectionary takes us through God's word every three years; we study the Bible and our prayers come from Scripture. We also believe that God continues to speak to us through reason and experience.

Rumsfeld's Conscience

(Response to Rumsfeld's resignation. News and History | Religion )

This isn't the first time that Donald Rumsfeld has left the helm of the Defense Department to someone else, under fire from all sides. It will be the last. Combative to the end, he has tried not to show the doubts that must roil within him. Here's some of what he said at the ceremony honoring his retirement Friday:

"It may well be comforting to some to consider graceful exits from the agonies and, indeed, the ugliness of combat. But the enemy thinks differently," Rumsfeld said at the ceremony.... "Ours is a world of unstable dictators, weapon proliferators and rogue regimes, and each of these enemies seeks out our vulnerability," he said. "Ours is also a world of many friends and allies, but sadly, realistically, [these are] friends and allies with declining defence investment and declining capabilities," he added.

(source: TV New Zealand, tvnz.nz.co)

A retrospective piece at National Public Radio ended with news that hasn't been headlined these past few years, that Rumsfeld and his wife have made regular visits, every two or three days, to Walter Reed Medical Hospital to cheer up injured soldiers. We also heard a snippet of Rumsfeld's own taped message to the troops, how he wished that he could meet every individual soldier, "look you in the eye, shake your hand" and express appreciation for courage and "professionalism."

As an actor, I see these bits of the Rumsfeld script and sense the effort it takes him to convince himself that, in spite of everything, he has done the right thing. Those visits to Walter Reed show in those words "agonies" and "ugliness," and he clearly has wanted to find a "graceful exit." But "the enemy" has determined his choices, and he is aware that the price is being paid by those soldiers.

Is there any other way? Does religion apply, here? "What Would Jesus Do?" is a fair question to guide one's personal decisions, but Jesus never accepted the role of King that others put on him. An individual can shame an enemy by "turning the other cheek," and an individual can choose martyrdom. But for a leader to "turn the other cheek" submitting his people to suffering for the sake of his own conscience -- that's unthinkable. There are kings and "judges" in the Hebrew Scriptures, and they are often advised by God to do things that don't seem worldly wise -- to march around Jericho silently without attacking, or to go into battle against the larger force just trusting in God, or to send a shepherd boy into battle against the other side's champion. They also do "ugly" things, as when the wily Jews pretend to accept the other's side's peace offering -- that is, the men of the other side will undergo the Hebrew rite of circumcision -- and, in the enemy's vulnerable state, massacre every man and enslave every woman.

Rumsfeld has clearly been considering other options. Could we step back a pace and seek a more united front with our friends and allies? Rumsfeld says no, they won't measure up. Could we retreat within our borders, take a defensive posture, and work for containment? Rumsfeld perhaps dismisses these options too easily in that line about "a world of unstable dictators, weapon proliferators, and rogue regimes," especially when he adds that "each ... seeks out our vulnerability." Truly, not one of those enemies seeks more than self-importance and self-perpetuation. Attacking the US in rhetoric mostly, in sneaky assaults through small terrorist cells sometimes, is a way to maintain power in lands shaken with feelings of inferiority and failure, where self-respect depends on having an outside force to blame.

There's also this issue of our own credibility, and here's the trap in Iraq. We fear if we "cut and run" now, as we did in Vietnam, we embolden our enemies for now and for the future. But that's the thinking that kept us in Vietnam long after the best-informed leaders knew there was no hope. President Kennedy admitted privately in 1963 that we were achieving nothing by staying there, that he would remove us after he won re-election. His successor, facing a futile situation, swore that he'd not be the first President to lose a war. So we stayed in Vietnam another twelve years simply to "save face," at the cost of fifty-eight thousand men and the loss of everything we claimed to be fighting for.

There's another religious approach, from a different religion. The Hindu epic Bagavad-Gita begins with a Rumsfeld -- Prince Arjuna -- surveying his army in the moment before ordering an attack. Considering that it's a civil war, Arjuna shudders to think that no matter which side wins, both sides lose brave warriors and family. The rest of the epic occurs in the space of that first minute, as the god Vishnu demonstrates to the Prince that the apparent differences between wins and losses, death and life, enemies and friends -- are actually infinitesimal on the vast scale of real life. Vishnu concludes that the only thing a Prince can be responsible for is his own duty.

Now, if a Secretary of Defense becomes aware that the premises for his decisions are flawed, it is his duty to do something about it. In his last weeks in office, Rumsfeld submitted a gloomy report admitting as much. He, Cheney, and Bush attacked on the premises that Hussein was a participant in the vast Al-Qaeda conspiracy with WMDs on line, and that the Iraqi people were united in their desire to be rid of Hussein and that they would be grateful to us and ready to cooperate. Within a month of our invasion, all three of these premises were in doubt. The rest has been an effort to make the best of a bad mistake, and to turn it to good, somehow.

Here's where the promises of religion do come in. The truth is, no choice is final; God works through any situation; we do not need to be trapped by what we have already decided.

Sondheim - Bernstein - Weill: "Saga of Lenny"

( Sondheim's tribute to Leonard Bernstein. Drama | Music ) For Leonard Bernstein's 70th birthday celebration, Sondheim wrote new lyrics for "The Saga of Jenny" from the Kurt Weill - Ira Gershwin musical Lady in the Dark. Thanks to YouTube, we can watch Lauren Bacall singing it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIaqfNabeLQ .

Poor Lenny,
Ten gifts too many,
The curse of being versatile.
To know how bad the curse is,
Will need a lot of verses
And take a little Weill.

The lyrics cut perilously close to the bone, fingering sore spots in Bernstein's career -- i.e., the perennial complaint that Bernstein spread his talent too thin, the ridicule from some quarters that greeted his attempts to be "with it" (whether "it" was atonality or rock music) --

Lenny made his mind up
At forty-six
That maybe atonality
And rock would mix.
Though it certainly was serial,
With rhythm on top,
It had lots of snap and crackle,
But not enough pop.

-- and the painful and public upheaval that his family experienced when he "came out" and left his wife Felicia. In the song, Bernstein's mother Jennie is quoted as saying, about marriage, "I don't care if he picks a / Schlemozzle or a shiksa" if he'd just make up his mind. Sondheim doesn't shy away from these painful facts, but he turns them to humor, and builds to a generous and loving conclusion. I admire this greatly. The music cleverly incorporates hefty chunks of Bernstein's own music.

Two personal notes:

The pianist is Paul Ford, who accompanied the original casts of SUNDAY..., INTO THE WOODS, ASSASSINS, and the 1985 FOLLIES concert, not to mention his work with Mandy Patinkin. He was also the man who, fresh out of high school, was both teacher and pal at Atlanta's Northside School of Performing Arts during my summer there. He's the one who introduced me to the name of Stephen Sondheim, and he even tried to get me to see A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC with him during our field trip to New York in the summer or 1974 (but I saw RAISIN instead, to my ever-lasting regret). And Paul told me that his favorite musical (at that time) was LADY IN THE DARK. I still have a photocopy of "The Saga of Jenny" that he gave me.

Then, the video brings back memories for me, because I wrote Lenny a long letter for that 70th birthday, telling him honestly how much his music had (has!) meant to me from my very earliest memories of wearing out Mom's WEST SIDE STORY L.P., to the influence his MASS had on my own religious development, and finally to becoming a composer myself. I got a reply to "W. S. S.*" (with an asterisk: "*Did you notice that you have the same initials as West Side Story?") and a dream-come-true offer to meet with me to discuss a possible collaboration. A project with Peter Schaffer (another idol of mine) had stalled, and he was looking for someone else with a facility with language. I'm afraid that a follow-up phone conversation made clear that he was also looking for a worshipful young male companion, confirming the worst reports of him. Within the year, he had died.

Happily, the experience didn't sour me on his music, which still pushes my emotional buttons the way no other music does.

Sondheim's Religious Vision

(Regarding my own article: Drama | Music | Religion )


The 50th issue of The Sondheim Review (vol. 13, number two) contains an essay by yours truly under the heading "So Many Possibilities: Sondheim's Religious Vision."

UPDATE: After The Sondheim Review folded, I revised the article and re-posted it on this blog. See Sondheim's Religious Vision.