800 Words: The Parallels and Paradoxes of Daniel Barenboim (part 1 of 2)

1.



A spell of fatigue and dizziness barred me from tonight’s Beethoven’s 9th at the Proms. Nothing else could have, and certainly no suspicions that some nut would use the appearance of an Orchestra uniting native Israelis and Arabs at the Proms as an excuse to stage a political protest (or far worse) on the night of the Opening Olympic Ceremonies.

I wanted to go desperately. Not because I thought the performance would have been so wonderful, or because it’s an Israeli-Arab orchestra. Rather, it’s Beethoven, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Proms, three subjects I’m as fascinated by as anything in my life. If there ever were a concert tailor-made for me to go, tonight was it.

It certainly wasn’t Daniel Barenboim that pulled me there. Daniel Barenboim’s view of Beethoven is as fascinating as it is dogmatic. Whereas most other musicians of our day pay heed to the advice of musicologists to play close heed to Beethoven’s metronome marks and a chamber-orchestra complement of strings, Daniel Barenboim plays Beethoven as though it’s still 1932 - huge orchestras, broad and flexible tempos, weighty bass-heavy sound. There is no attempt made to play Beethoven as he saw himself, this is Beethoven as he was played accumulated after a century of accumulated performance tradition - with (nearly) all the moss and ivy unstripped from the varnish. It is neither Beethoven for the age of Beethoven nor Bjork, it is Beethoven for the age of Wagner.

2.



No conductor in the world - not Thielemann, not Runnicles, not Gergiev, and certainly not any of the other major opera house directors - makes Wagner as exciting as Daniel Barenboim. With Barenboim, those inevitable forty minutes at a time of boredom and bombast can be cut down to twenty or fifteen. No conductor has ever made Wagner sound like every note counts, but Barenboim usually comes closer than any living conductor and closer even than most from more fruitful ages of Wagner performance.

There is clearly something in Barenboim’s temperament: a mixture of showman and intellectual, that responds very deeply to Wagner. Many musicians clearly have such affinities with particular composers; Bernstein had it with Mahler, Schnabel with Beethoven, Casals with Bach. In each case, it manifested itself not only in a desire to play the music extremely well, but to explain the composer himself - to put the composer within the context of his time, of music history in its entirety, and his relevance to our contemporary world.

It should then follow that a conductor who has such a deep affinity for a composer should want to perform it in his homeland. As it happens, that homeland is unfortunately Israel. To perform it there is to ask to become an outcast, and that is precisely what Barenboim has become in his homeland.

3.



As so few Jews found themselves throughout history, Barenboim was uniquely situated to privilege. As a child, he lived in Israel full-time for only two years. His father was a great piano teacher in Argentina and close friend to Arthur Rubinstein, and Barenboim’s gift was nurtured as few others are from the cradle. At different points he found himself mentored by Rubinstein, Igor Markevitch, Wilhelm Furtwangler, John Barbirolli, Nadia Boulanger, Otto Klemperer, Isaac Stern, Gregor Piatagorsky, Edwin Fischer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and even that twice-over Nazi party member Herbert von Karajan. Did any other Israeli of his years generation that level of privilege in any other field? Any at all?

Barenboim is widely reviled in the country he still thinks of as home. He brought the opera orchestra he’s lead since 1992, The Berlin State Opera Orchestra, to Israel for the express purpose of breaking the Wagner taboo. He has not only criticized Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the most strident possible terms, but also made statements to the effect that Israeli society has become sick and rotten at its core. As it happens, I agree with most every gesture and statement he’s made. And yet there’s still something about it that sits very wrongly with me.

Barenboim says that Israel has lost the sense of mission and moral purpose which he loved as a child in the 50’s. Does Barenboim have any memory what happened in Israel between 1952 and 1954? Israel had no more (or less) sense of mission nor moral purpose even then - the sole difference was that the country’s survival was far less guaranteed. Israel was in such fiscal danger that they had to take $3 billion in reparations from West Germany. Even then there were nearly a dozen lethal incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some were government-sponsored, some civilian. Right-wing Israeli militants not only threatened violence against the government as they do today, they attempted to carry it out - like the 1953 attempt to bomb the Department of Education by the terrorist organization Brit HaKanaim.

Life in a tough neighborhood is always hard. It’s very easy to sentimentalize the scrappy underdog country which finds itself beset by problems on all sides yet still manages to pull through. But Barenboim himself lived in this underdog country for only two years, and since then has been able to look on Israel from the perspective of a Citizen of the World - welcome in every first-world country in precisely the way nearly all other Jews would not be (still). Israel has been faced with threats to its very existence from before it was even a country. Even if he doesn’t agree with every decision the Israeli government made, why should Barenboim begrudge Israelis for wanting a small portion of the security which he takes for granted?

4.



There is a similar question which besets the biography of Barenboim’s now deceased bff, Edward Said. Said is, still, the pre-eminent Palestinian intellectual voice - and like Barenboim combined the role of intellectual with a showman’s flair for activism and agitation. But in Said’s case, as in Barenboim’s, there is a troubling question of how such well-off people can claim to speak for those less fortunate than they. How can a son of wealth who could simply live in his parents’ Cairo house after Israel took away his Jerusalem home have any idea what true exile from a homeland means? It not only discredited his authoritative-seeming criticisms of Israeli violence, it discredited his authoritative-seeming criticisms of Palestinian violence too.

The West-East Divan Orchestra may yet prove to be the cornerstone of both their achievements. I will never forget the tears in my eyes when I first heard their wind soloists in the slow movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K. 333. It literally felt to me as though they were describing a dream of a better world, a longing for the balance which still eludes everyone who lives in that region. Anyone who doubts that music cannot express concrete things must hear that recording.

Yet people as well-educated as Said and Barenboim must know that there is absolutely nothing which the West-East Divan Orchestra can do except make a futile, sentimental gesture toward the peace which the Middle-East clearly eludes. If it accomplishes so little for peace, then is there any point to it but self-aggrandizement - a kind of exploitative posturing that makes Barenboim taken more seriously as an intellectual and political, perhaps even musical, figure, but brings the conflict no closer to resolution. And if such an orchestra does not bring our world closer to peace, does it then mean that it brings us farther away?

But maybe, just maybe, on that 1% of 1% of 1% chance that some leaders will be so moved by the sight of Arab and Israeli musicians playing together in perfect harmony that they can imagine a better solution to the Middle East conflicts, it will have been an entirely worthwhile project. And if it is so, then even if the entire point of the orchestra is to massage Daniel Barenboim’s ego, it will have been entirely worth doing.

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800 Words: The Very Reverend Evan Tucker

(To the tune of “God Bless America”)

I am an Anglican,
I am CE,*
Not a High Church,
Not a Low Chuch,
But Apostolic, Catholic and Free.
Not a Lutheran,
Not a Presby,
Not a Baptist,
White with Foam.
I am an Anglican,
One step from Rome.
I am an Anglican,
One step from Rome.


If I could have one honor in my lifetime, it would be to be called ‘The Very Reverend Evan Tucker’ as a title - I would even take that over wearing a terrible toupee that everybody’s too polite to ever point out.  Of all the absurdities in the English language, there can’t be many as absurd as allowing bishops and deans to hold the title ‘The Very Reverend.’ Calling someone “Reverend” is bad enough, it’s a subtle way of claiming a priest as ‘revered’, but uses a form of English grammar so antiquated that it probably went out of use by Shakespeare’s time. Obviously they know this, but to refer to your priest as ‘Revered’ is generally a lie. But by compounding it by calling a clergyman ‘The Very Reverend’ they compound its absurdity and its pomposity by an exponential figure  - nobody even remembers that ‘reverend’ is supposed to be an adjective, not a noun. Imagine a congregation where the clergy is called ‘The Very Rabbi’ or ‘The Very Imam.’


This was, of course, the thought which occurred to me yesterday afternoon as the Very Reverend such-and-such intoned a greeting to me over the Westminster Abbey Audio Guide. I say ‘of course’ because this thought occurs to me at least once every few months - usually more often. And once the sing-song voice of the clergy stopped (is ‘sing-song intonation’ a course requirement at divinity school?), it was replaced by the unmistakable rasp of Jeremy Irons as my tourguide. As far as tourguides go, it was not as good as the creepily bug-eyed rector with black hair and an albino face I had eight years ago, but having Jeremy Irons as a tourguide ensures that the Church of England still knows how to keep it creepy. 


Months ago, when I was booking this trip, I thought to myself that I did not want to have one of those inevitable American trips to Europe in which we cattleprod ourselves into reverend awe over the fact that such beauties can exist as one finds in the great European historical sites. Big vacations are too precious to waste on nothing but ‘great art.’ Beauty is amazing, but is fun on a vacation too much to ask? Would it be too much to ask that we Americans actually enjoy ourselves in Europe rather than merely claiming to? 


So like an alzheimer’s patient I’ve visited Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral in my first two days. Better to get religion out of the way first I suppose. And as I re-toured the many stunning chapels and tombs at Westminster, I could not help the fact that the most striking thing about it was the IKEA lamp box I saw peeking out from underneath the tomb of an 18th century soldier (of course, the name already escapes me...). We don’t live in a reverential (reverendial?) age, and after a certain point, one reaches a diabetes like numbness in the face of so much beauty. 


I understand why Westminster Abbey is a truly stunning building, but like all the churches I will soon see in France, it is a relic from a completely different age of humanity. The French churches hail from the anonymous age of the Gothic Cathedrals when anonymous architects and stone carvers made churches so large and ornate that they gave their worshippers a foretaste of eternal life (more on that in France...). But Westminster Abbey was begun in 1245, the Gothic Age was already half-finished. Unlike Notre Dame de Paris, the purpose of Westminster Abbey has always changed throughout the centuries. It is not a pristine Gothic monument to God, it is a monument to the English State. After 1550, it was no longer even a cathedral. God has so many cathedrals, surely the English Kings can have a church of their own... Rather than glorify God, Westminster Abbey exists to glorify England. And so it has the tombs of monarch after monarch, poet after poet, military leader upon leader, musician, artist, tax-collector, patent lawyer...


England has Westminster Abbey, God has St. Paul’s Cathedral. Kings and Queens marry and are crowned at Westminster, but their funerals are at St. Paul’s. Westminster is Gothic with a captial G, St. Paul’s is neoclassical. Christopher Wren designed the Cathedral with a challenge to Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s in Rome with its Parthenon-like columns and proportions clearly in view. Having been to both, I couldn’t see much contest at first. When I went to St. Pauls eight years ago, it was under heavy scaffolding, dirty, and much of it sectioned off from view. ‘What a dump’ was my first thought. It has since finished its cleaning - itself a ten year project! - and it has a kind of pristine glory that today’s Westminster (clearly in a bit of disrepair itself) lacks. Westminster Abbey reflects the infinite Gothic aspirations of Medieval times, whereas St. Paul’s is presided over by a Renaissance god who wants even religion to be at harmony with its surroundings. The building itself is every bit as friggin’ huge as any self-respecting cathedral should be, but somehow I wasn’t surprised that the original St. Paul’s was still larger by a third. And yet even in this miniature version of St. Pauls, and even after the cleaning, the cathedral is still too big. Parts of it already look dirty again, and one wonders if even after ten years they couldn’t get to cleaning all of it. Nobody should wear white. 




But the biggest shock came when I went to Choral Evensong at St. Paul’s. The Choir of St. Paul’s was unfortunately on holiday, so instead we got a local parish choir. Anyone who’s been to a local (white) church service in America would utterly roll their eyes at this prospect - an out of tune mishmash of unmusical kids whose parents make them sing and too-loud-singing adults who still think a singing career is still an option. But even the parish churches of England apparently have incredible choirs with perfect blend and diction, and the perfect ‘straight tone’ (no vibrato) English sound. It would be nice though if English choirs sang better music than the cheap 20th century Anglican knockoffs which pale as much in comparison to the great composers of the English Choral Tradition as America’s Episcopal choirs compare to their Anglican equivalents. 


I did not find any part of this spiritually inspiring, not even remotely. In our day, we needn’t take things nearly so seriously. Why is Westminster Abbey such a miracle when wikipedia can give us a virtual tour of it? We neither understand nor need the high seriousness of a Choral Evensong. But I can understand why someone else would.


It was before but a blink of an eye in the world’s history that reverential awe was the step forward. In an era that knew barely anything of instant gratification, great workmanship was a state to which all humankind had to aspire. Three hundred years ago, all citizens of Christendom could look from the floors to the walls to the windows to the ceilings of the great cathedrals and see a glimpse of infinity: infinite space and time, infinite soul, infinite beauty, infinite justice, infinite compassion, infinite workmanship, infinite patience, and infinite effort. In an age when all work was done with hands, the cathedral was the sum total of man’s achievement. When a family of stonemasons or woodcarvers went to Westminster Abbey, they could see for themselves what could be done with their hands, and we should never doubt for a second that the reverential awe they felt at such sites was as ecstatically real as ours is forced.

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800 Words: The Proms Wakes Me Up

Had I returned to London any year before this one, reacclimation would have been easier, perhaps instant. For seven years after I lived here for a mere summer, I had looked back on London as ‘my city’ with all the fervor of a spiritual home: in which the people are far better educated, more polite, friendlier, funnier, than any other place I’d ever been. Hell, maybe it’s even true. 


But I could far easier make a claim for ‘my city’ to be Baltimore, Washington DC, Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, perhaps even New York or Bethany Beach, Delaware and not have to be one of those stupid Americans who thinks of Europe as a kind of magic dreamland which exists completely apart from reality. On the other hand, London really is my kind of town to a degree no other city has ever been; not even New York or Boston. All the cultural amenities of America - the TV, the movies, the music, are thriving here with a public that boils with enthusiasm and make themselves present to a degree that would cause any American to feel at home. But on the other hand, there’s the old-world veneration of those things about which so many Americans have completely forgotten: old music, straight theater, the written word, Art with a capital A. Certainly some American cities: New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, have those qualities as well, but none of them feel built to house both in tandem to nearly the same degree which London does. Perhaps Paris will, but whatever Paris holds, it will reveal some very different things from London. For me, London stands as the cultural watchdog between Old World and New, meanwhile becoming a playground for the best of both. Now if only I had unlimited amounts of money....


But this London, ‘my’ London, seemed almost absent for me on my first day. By the time I arrived early yesterday morning, my bleary-eyed self had barely slept in 24 hours. I spent the plane ride reading about France, failing to finish movies, and being woken up by crying babies and restless neighbors.


Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, but the alarming truth was that I spent an entire day in London without it entirely hitting me that I was back (poor me..). It was shocking how absent the frission was of seeing the city’s omnipresent green spaces, being back in the tube, walking around South Kensington, standing next to Royal Albert Hall... it was as though I’d completely forgotten what once thrilled me about this place. It just seemed so....white!


It’s just like the sense of entitlement a college student feels to see a place which resembles nothing so much as a fairy tale and decide that such a place is his birthright. But my first reaction was a sort of deadened hilarity at how homogeneous English people are. Certainly there is a large Middle Eastern and Indian population, but at first glance, the white population seems so secluded, so segregated from that population that it seems to affect them not at all - at least in America whites interact with blacks and hispanics by forcing them to serve as the underclass...


For a country so well known for its class system, today’s England is strikingly casteless. Interacting with today’s Englishmen feels not unlike interacting with the Americans of two generations ago. To a contemporary American, it can seem like a relic of the perfect (or perfectly dead) society which we will never know in which everybody gets a stunningly high base level of education, to a point which no cliques seem to have formed with each holding their own values and ‘languages,’ and everybody seems to interact one another with such security that nearly the entire country seems like an extended family. The different parts of English society have so successfully, seemlessly blended that there is hardly a melting pot of which one can speak. Compared to America, today’s England seems so secure, and so shielded from conflict, that it can almost deceive you into thinking it dull. Is this a sign that the country is on the precipice of an explosion, or a sign that it’s about to have half-a-millenium of uninterrupted peace?


It was only around 7:15 yesterday evening, upon us ‘prommers’ being led into the gallery of Royal Albert Hall after roughly hours of standing in a queue, shepherded into the most crowded imaginable space like Muslims on the Haj into the Grand Mosque to see Daniel Barenboim conduct two Beethoven Symphonies and a ‘modern’ work by Pierre Boulez, that I began waking up to an overwhelming sense of culture shock.




I was standing exactly four rows behind the conductor’s podium. And around me in that gallery was a panoply of ages, and at least half a dozen simultaneous conversations about classical music, all knowledgeable and completely audible. Two rows behind me was a young man talking up a beautiful woman and seemingly trying to impress her with his knowledge about Charles Mackerras’s career. One row behind me to my left was a man and a woman clearly on a date, both in their late fifties, and telling each other about the most memorable orchestral concerts they’ve seen in the last few years. In front of me was an older gentleman, telling an older lady about how Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven stacked up to all the other Beethoven cycles he’d seen. My friend, The Harris, and I struck up a conversation with another guy there; in his fifties, my height and vaguely Jewish looking (we were the only two people there under five-and-a-half feet tall) and spoke about Barenboim for some minutes. Near me was a German couple in their thirties, and from whatever little German I have I picked up that they were very excited for the Boulez. Next to me was a still more beautiful woman than the other who seemed to have come to a Proms concert completely alone. Near me another guy, early twenties and looking like an American popped-collar frat boy, standing completely on his own. Another guy in his twenties stood alone, and was reading some sort of music book. Clearly the older generation seemed more knowledgeable on the whole, but here was a city where classical music still clearly has a future.


It was only at intermission that I worked up the nerve to do what I barely had the nerve to do eight years ago - I spoke to nearly all of them. The kid reading the music book was a doctoral fellow at Kings College in Medieval Literature who hated Wolfram von Eschenbach. The ‘jock’ was an enthusiastic amateur violinist who loved playing Beethoven in semi-pro orchestras. The beautiful girl standing alone was a French girl with barely any English, but she played Beethoven on the piano and wanted to hear the symphonies. The German couple were jazz music lovers who wanted to determine if Boulez sounded like free-jazz, or if free-jazz sounded like Boulez (they also gave me some delicious olives). Of the couple on the date, I learned that the guy had been going to the Proms every year for thirty years and had been going to concerts of the Liverpool Philharmonic since he was a child, and of the woman I learned that she has a personal, not musical, hatred of Roger Norrington.  

The Proms is the greatest music festival in the world. Period. There is nothing in any other genre in any city which compares to the coordination it takes to assemble a different orchestra from a different part of the world every night for two months in a venue that can house six-thousand people with standing room 5 pound tickets in the front of the hall. It is now in its 117th year, and the seasons show only signs of growing in size and scope - there’s even an additional chamber music festival now at Wigmore Hall.


In America, a festival like this is utterly unthinkable. In order for The Proms to happen, there needs to be a massive government subsidy from a national broadcasting organization (in this case the massively funded BBC) which thinks classical music is in itself a public good - and they therefore produce, distribute, and advertise the concerts throughout the entire world. The whole idea that classical music, or even music itself, is a public good would cause many Americans to laugh themselves senseless - and perhaps rightly so. There is very little evidence that much good is done for the public by putting a hundred or so classical concerts. But ultimately, that is why The Proms are so awesome. Artists thrive on risk, and the best art is neither made when artists have too little money nor a too stable source of income - neither situation inspires people in the arts to their best. What inspires them is that tenuous middle ground where the funding to survive can be taken away at any moment - and they therefore must beg, borrow, or steal the money they need to fulfill their dreams.

Many music lovers in the UK protest the fact that the Proms, and the organization who produces them, are being irredeemably dumbed down (how spoiled can you be?). But unlikely as it sounds, should the economy of Britain crumble to the ground tomorrow, what program will be hacked up first? The Proms or the National Health Service? Its the very fragileness of a festival like the Proms that makes it such a miracle. I’m not sure if I believe in God, but I believe in The Proms.

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800 Words: I Need a Vacation

In recent vintage, the posts on this blog have gotten darker and still darker, more and still more self-revealing, less and still less well-advised. I’ve tried to make it a rule for this blog to keep some kind of balance. Something dark must be followed by something light, something serious by something frivolous. If it can be helped, no writer, and no person, should ever edge too far in any mental direction without returning the other way. If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you; if you avoid the abyss, the abyss no longer gives a shit.

Even as I’ve felt no less happy in the last month (if anything, rather happier than usual), I’ve found my thoughts on these pages gravitating toward bleaker and still bleaker sentiments. The longer an anxious person goes without feeling anxiety, the more he feels anxious about the anxiety to come. And the more premonitions he has, the more likely he is to allow them to come true.

I’ve had two separate friends tell me that this blog is coming to resemble a Dostoevsky novella, one of whom said it weeks before I even mentioned Dostoevsky here. Lest you think I’m being overly egotistical by bringing this up, please understand that I often seriously question whether Dostoevsky is not an absurdly overrated author – and I don’t doubt that they meant it in precisely that same spirit. I can love Dostoevsky for fifteen minutes at a time, and then invariably get absolutely tired of him. But the sentiments in Dostoevsky, the long-windedness, the narcissism, the constant hysterical confessions by total strangers, the glorification of suffering, the proto-fascist longing to be told what to think by a higher power….those sentiments are all beginning to sound a little too familiar... I never wanted to write bad Dostoevsky, I wanted to write bad Chekhov and bad Pushkin. Ideally, this blog was meant to house well-proportioned writing which mingles every possible emotional state at a length that never outstays its welcome. Blogging, like life, seems to aspire to a state of Chekhov but ends in a state of Dostoevsky.

But all good blogs are good in the same way, all bad blogs are bad in different ways (I know, I know, that’s Tolstoy). When this blog is good, I like to think that in its small way it gets the whole flavor of experience. From day to day, I have new ideas for all sorts of subjects whose thoughts seem to write themselves, and they run the gamut from serious to silly, sad to happy, heavy to light, smart to stupid. When this blog is bad, the mental acuity slows, and I very much feel like I’m agonizing to think of every word. When that happens, the emotions gravitate more toward one end of those scales and forgets the other. Needless to say, lately it’s been gravitating more toward seriousness, heaviness, sadness, perhaps even stupidity…

Fortunately, the past year of writing’s experiences far number more in the former category than the latter – I’m damn proud of the writing I’ve done here, and would never take back a word of it (except the grammar mistakes). Like any writer who finds the process easy, in my best moments I don’t feel like it’s me who’s writing. It’s only in my worst moments when every individual word feels as though it must be sucked out of my brain and I have to tap into things which I probably shouldn’t’ be sharing on this blog in order to keep the writing at a pace.

I do not regret becoming what many bloggers call an ‘oversharer’. If you want to write, then to a certain extent you have to draw on personal experience – where else can you draw? If people want to understand each other, then they unfortunately have to expose information to one another that might not be well-advised to expose. My red flags used to go up instantly when I saw someone share the private details of their lives online, as though somehow that was indicative of a person being particularly volatile or insane. But then I realized, who the hell am I to pretend that my bodily emanations don’t stink? And what the hell do I have to lose? I’m not particularly special, I’m just a nerdy kid from Baltimore who in his own way has led a fairly interesting life.

And then I remembered, this is what most if not all decent writers do – no matter how well a writer conceals the details of his life, all writing, even all fiction, is a variation on autobiography. Even if your unconscious dictates your material, that’s autobiography; even if you’re inspired to write something by what you read, that’s autobiography; even if you’re inspired by the details of someone else’s life – a friend, a famous person, a person you meet at a bar – that’s autobiography. In each case, it's you who has to process the information, and at least in that sense it's happening to you as much as it's happening to anyone else. Some writers are clearly more upfront about this process than others, and it makes little difference to the quality of their work whether they conceal the details of their lives in their work or share them – different processes work for different writers. But so long as human beings do the writing, we can only write based on what we perceive.

I’d like to think my perceptions are about to change rather drastically. Tomorrow, I’m headed to France and England for a month. This will be the biggest vacation I’ve been on in thirteen years and the first time I’ve been back to Europe in eight. Eight years ago, I lived in London for a summer – and in so many ways that was the summer which defined all the choices I’d made since then. It was in London that I began writing a blog, and blogging has been the most consistent activity I’ve had since then. I had the most horrendous internship with a British musical organization imaginable (not telling which), and it’s soured me towards office work ever since (not that I’ve successfully avoided it in recent years). I was in what is still my favorite city in the world, yet all I could think of was how much I missed my friends back home – friends who are still among my closest. Every night I heard new pieces of music and theater that made me want to stay in this city forever, and it made me broke three separate times during that summer – a financial state I became intimately acquainted with as the years went by. 

Like all Americans of some cerebral bent, I still put a cache on Europe that probably isn’t entirely deserved. To Americans, Europe is the place where fairy tales are reenacted. It’s less true than it once was, but Americans don’t understand history. The idea that we are who we are because other people got us here is completely antithetical to an American self-image. We believe we are masters of our destinies, hatched from our mothers’ wombs sui generis, and view the entire world as an orange to be squeezed. America has always been a vast, uncharted space of opportunity – a blank canvas on which we can all paint our own mural. Europe is a collage on which millennia’s worth of people already made their own forms. European cities seem as chaotically organic as any natural forest, on which thousands of years of growths collide, clash, and overtake one another – each generation splattering a new seed and pollen into the ecosystem. American cities are like planned forests, in which the buildings seem like trees planted in a straight line – no American city is more than 300 years old, and it’s impossible to obtain the diversity of style and spirit which each age added to the most mythical European cities.

Americans view Europe with a confused mixture of intimidated awe and the irritation with which young people have for nagging parents who try to shame their children in an unconscious effort to stop the kids from achieving more than they ever did. But Europe is even more confused by America, and their stereotypes are hilariously inconsistent. Americans are fat, yet obsessed with health. Americans are lazy, yet obsessed with work. Americans are warm and friendly, yet could not be more obnoxious. Like an older generation viewing a younger one, they dotingly observe everything about their ‘kids’ yet can’t understand a single thing they see, and just like when old people try to imitate the habits of the young, their oft-made attempts to be more like Americans are rather hilarious. To take some famous examples, no American would place the value the French do on Jerry Lewis, or the Germans on David Hasslehoff, or the Russians on McDonalds. Every person interprets other people through their own filter, and Europe and America continue to talk at each other in a series of blackly comic misunderstandings that grow more unstable every decade. Once upon a time, German physicists were imported to Chicago and New Mexico to work on a nuclear bomb; today American physicists tele-commute to Switzerland work on the Higgs Boson particle research. From the new American liberalism of Roosevelt partnered the imperial conservatism of Churchill, the Atlanticist political relationship evolved into the imperial conservatism of George W. Bush partnered with the old American liberalism of Tony Blair. Fifty years ago Americans flocked to movie theaters watch the Hollywood-influenced artfilms of Truffaut and Fellini, today Europeans buy DVD’s by the gross to watch European art-film influenced TV shows made for American cable in their own homes. Europeans once envied Americans for their social programs and efficient government…you know the rest…

Europe is different than America. I plan on enjoying every one of those differences for maximum contrast and updating this blog as often as I can to chart precisely how weird it is to be an apple pie American again on the strudel continent. If posts have gotten quite dark lately, I have a feeling (though can in no way guarantee) that balance will be restored, because the tone is about to get lighter in kind.

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800 Words: Happiness - The Mortal Enemy: Part 3 - The Beast in Me

This is the first internet meme I remember seeing. I laughed so hard I probably watched it twenty-five times in a row. One of the more modest accomplishments of my life is that I can honestly say I have never destroyed a computer in a rage, though I’ve come close thousands of times. I even banged on a computer that was stalling hard enough that afterward it would randomly, instantly shut down mid-session without warning. Even so, I’m sure there are people who have come still closer than I have to destroying their computers.

I have, however, thrown phones across rooms several dozen times in my life. I never broke them completely, but I did once come so close that the phone would only work after I duct-taped it together. I’ve thrown glasses, full ones, against walls and floors. I’ve slammed doors hard enough to break the hinges. When I was fourteen I tore a painting off the wall and broke the class frame into thousands of pieces. When I was sixteen I nearly ran over two classmates with my car. As an adolescent I tore books from their shelves, set fire to pieces of paper, and once threatened someone with a knife. I’ve yelled so many times in my life that I’m surprised I still have a singing voice. I’ve neither provoked nor been provoked into a physical altercation since I was a college freshman, but I probably got well over a hundred before that. More often than not it was picked on me, but far more times than I’d like to admit, I picked it on them.

Imagine, at least if you care to, what it’s like to be diagnosed as a depressive at the age of eight, as I was. A third of your childhood, the third you have no trouble remembering, has been stolen from you. Days which should be spent in the happy ignorance of the adult trials that await are spent in the throes of the worst emotions with which life can bequeath at any age, and there is as yet no part of you which understands how to view the awfulness of what may come in proportion to its merit. There is only the ineradicable sense that life is an unremitting agony, constructed for the sole purpose of tormenting you alone.   

And yet it’s not the childhood years which I remember with horror, I must reserve that for adolescence. The realization that other people did bad things to you is ultimately forgivable and in some cases can be remembered with a certain black humor. But what can never be totally forgiven is the moments when you acted badly towards others, because each of us must live with the choices we make. I don’t know precisely when it was, but there was a moment when I awakened to an almost inarticulable realization that life perpetrated a terrible injustice on me, and I had no idea whom to blame for it; so I blamed everyone. To this day, it shames me to say that whatever evil was done to me, I repaid the debt to the best of my ability in a thousand ways. And in my still too frequent lowest moments, it is not what was done to me which I remember, but what I did to others. There are worse things in life than knowing that other people’s sins are on your head, and one of them is knowing that you did not turn the other cheek.

Today, we read about another young man who opened fire in a crowded area simply so he could kill people. Every time we read about a new adolescent killer, I do have to wonder…how close did I come at that point in my life? How close did other angry kids I knew come? The truth is, probably, not very; most adolescents have rage in them which they cannot articulate, and sometimes that rage is truly black. But was there really that big a difference between Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold and myself?

The reasons the Columbine massacre happened are extremely complicated; a confluence of too easy access to weapons, righteous anger, bullying, a culture of violence, family pressure, ignorant faculty, and (primarily) sociopathy. It takes an extremely fragile combination to provoke the correct chain reaction to result in a massacre. But frankly, if it hadn’t been the two of them, it might have just as easily been fifty-thousand other young adults that year, perhaps even a hundred kids I knew, or me. The fact that some angry kids outgrow their rage and progress to a fruitful maturity while others remain forever remembered as murderers may be simple luck.

But luck is never simple; it’s a relative term. I’ve been lucky to outgrow this adolescence into a reasonably content adulthood, with many good friends and a family that loves me. But perhaps a truly lucky person would never have undergone those dark years I did.

I freely admit, in the worst moments my temper is still the absolute poison it ever was. In order to keep it in check, I have to keep myself on guard every day of my life. When the alternative remains crippling depression or horrendous panic attacks, anger can seem like the best of all possible options. But aggression puts the pain which you feel onto others, and at least sadness does not transfer the blame for your lot onto innocent bystanders. If I have a surfeit of loyal friends, I don’t doubt that it’s because to an extent that surprises even me I’ve learned to shield my worst moments from them. Those moments certainly still exist, but to the maximum extent I can help, no one shall ever see them but me. Sadly, I have not yet learned how to shield many of those moments from my family to nearly the same extent. I pray that the day I can will come very soon.

(Part of why Crimes and Misdemeanors is an over-rated movie is that this is actually not a bad definition of comedy.)

When you live knowing you have faults like these, and I suspect more people have similar ones than would ever like to admit so, what is there to do about it except to confess your faults and open yourself to the ridicule to which people would subject you anyway if they ever saw you act so stupidly? I have yet to meet a person better at self-deprecation than me (how’s that for an egotistical statement?), and for many years it’s been the best weapon I have to ingratiate myself. Some people can live their lives in blissful unawareness of their own ridiculousness – others have to embrace their inner clown head on. The anger which once coursed through me so viciously through my insides is now something I wear on the outside, a court jester’s outfit – ready at a second’s turn to do something outrageous.

(try telling me this wouldn’t be awesome…)

For three years, I’ve been trying to finish every page of The Brothers Karamazov – that great and greatly flawed novel among novels which my uncle gave to me as a present while I lived with him in Israel. I haven’t quite finished it for a couple reasons – some having to do with aesthetic concerns. But fundamentally, the biggest problem I have with this book is that it is far too great to not hit far too close to home. At heart, this is a book about a father and his four sons. When I first read it, I couldn’t help seeing parallels with myself and my relationships to my Dad and brothers. But as I got further, I began to perceive that every character in this family is me: Dimitri the well-meaning hot-head is me, Ivan the intellectual whose nihilism drives him insane is me, Smerdyakov whose meanness hides a lifetime of terrible experiences is me, even Alyosha the saint who forgoes his own desires in an effort to be compassionate to the sufferings of others can be me. But even the character who I thought could never be me is me.

If there was one thing in this book of which I was sure as I was reading, it was that the boys’ father, Fyodor Karamazov, was my Dad: nature’s provocateur; always doing what he could to be the center of attention, always trying to find the most outrageous thing to say, always trying to shake up people’s self-conceptions, picking at their insecurities and inflaming their resentments for his own entertainment; playing the part of the fool so as to mask a great intelligence, and so as better to make others uncomfortable. In my least charitable moments, this was how I always viewed my Dad, and here was an image of him staring directly at me from the page.

Yet that does my father as much a disservice to much else that he is as any description could. As a bookworm and as my father’s son, I must say that this description neither does justice to Fyodor’s evilness or to Dad’s goodness. In fact, if this comparison were in any way made seriously to either Dad or a real life Fyodor Karamazov, it would be incredibly insulting. And if anything, at this point Fyodor Karamazov is a better representation of my personality than my Dad’s.  

If Dostoevsky can create a family of five such characters, all of whom resonate so clearly within the same person, then clearly the book’s clearest insight is that we all have emotional beasts of burden; demons carried within us which gnaw as painfully as any cancer, and which will only fester without a proper outlet. Each of the Karamazovs is a part of us, carrying that same demon around which we all have and each trying to find a proper outlet for it.   

Perhaps these next questions get us off the hook a bit too easily, but are there really demonic (or even evil) things within us, or are what we see as our demons simply misdirected passion?  The will to live life intensely is there in us all, but if we’re (relatively) lucky, we can direct that will towards something that helps others, or at least doesn’t hurt them. I’m not a person given to quoting Bertrand Russell (and I read this quote in a classical CD review) but there is one by him which I love: “Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire.” Some people have ready-made ways to be passionate, and find hobbies and passions which so inspire them that they feel at peace with themselves, utterly contented by what they do. I want to beat the shit out of such people.

Because no matter how much misanthropy and vengeful feeling is inspired by depression, anger, and anxiety, it is not bad feeling which inspires such terrible emotions. It is good feeling. It is the knowledge that somewhere, there is the possibility of a better life which we seem unable to lead. It is not a hatred for life that inspires black feeling, it is love of life.

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800 Words: Happiness - The Mortal Enemy: Part 2 - Being in Hate

We have all felt that energetic fission of the instant attraction – the moment when two people catch each other’s eye and feel as though they’d been hit by a thunderbolt. It feels as if the universe has conspired to bring them to precisely this moment at this place, and from the split-second they lock eyes, each sees their destiny bound up in the other. That destiny may last an hour, it may last fifty years, but they know at that moment that life as they know it is over, because after realizing the existence of that other person, colors look different, words no longer carry the same meanings, and the songs on the radio make sense. And from the numinous shock of that first contact they hate each other with the Promethean fire of a million supernovas and desire nothing more out of life than to devote their remaining years to making the other person miserable beyond measure.

It’s like the time oil first laid eyes on water, or the dog on the mailman, or fingernails on a chalkboard. Occasionally a person comes along who so toxically offends your sense of everything beautiful in the world that you can only thank God every day for such a gift as a person who so conveniently explains our world’s division of good from evil. Had people like this particular person never born, the world would be a far better place than it is. All it requires is a single interaction, a particular emphasis laid on a certain word, a well-placed comma in an e-mail, and all the world’s evil makes sense.  In the annals of human villainy, there’s Hitler, Nero, Genghis Kahn, and this person.

Just like in love, if we’re lucky, we get the pleasure of being in hate more than half-a-dozen times during our life. Food tastes better, drinks are more potent, and the weight of life’s burdens disappears from our shoulders. When we’re in love, we experience a respite during which we think the awfulness of the world could be redeemed. When we’re in hate, the feeling is savory rather than sweet, and just like with savory food, it is sometimes more pleasurable than any amount of sweetness.  Rather than we having a respite from life’s torments, we possess something potentially better - a mastery of life’s bitterness, and an explanation for why life must be so. The act of living, with all the tragic messiness and misunderstandings which that carries, has meaning and explanation for the first time, and with such a divine gift the sour becomes more pleasurable than the sweet.  

We all have such people who offend every concept of what we think is good and decent in the universe. If we’re wise, we’re simply thankful they exist. How could we make sense of the world’s horrors without them?  But like love, hatred is fickle, and as a species we’re no more evolved to remain monogamous with the object of our sworn animus than we are to the object of our sworn affection. Human stuff is frail, and a surfeit of emotion makes him sway from the ground: too much love causes men to fly above the earth into the decompressed airlessness of the heavens, too much hate causes men to dig themselves into the suffocating dirt of the ground.

But all of us have those people who simply make the world lousy. Just as there is someone – perhaps a thousand someones – in the world for every person to develop a life-long loving bond in the correct circumstances, there are perhaps a thousand someones in the world with whom in the right circumstances we all can seal a lifelong bond of hatred.

Just as in love, there must be precisely the correct mixture of similarities and differences – both in interests and temperament. But there must also be that extra special something – a bond that can only be sealed in the moment when destiny conspires with coincidence who colludes with happenstance to bring two people together so precisely that the right circumstances of vulnerability, aspiration, and sensibility are met to produce this extra special bond. All one has to do is think of the other person, and the world’s confusion makes sense.   

Why do we feel this way? What is it within us which provides the dopamine and adrenaline, either in love or in hate, which simplifies the world so? Why do we feel so completely as though our instinct is completely right, and no rational consideration is necessary? Why can’t we separate ourselves from these powerful emotions to realize that we currently have no greater claim on how our understanding of the world is correct than we did before we met this person? What if such a person does not share our hate? Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, and is there any worse feeling than knowing that we reside in the mind of the object of our animus or affection with none of the intensity with which they reside in ours?

Is hatred more powerful than love? And if it isn’t…how terrible would it be for us if we found a way to make it so? Really. Would it make the world any worse a place if we found out hatred is more powerful than love? And would anybody really be surprised if that were the case?

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Russian Sailor's Dance

Just because...

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