Eden in Lockdown, Senior Style

No Senior Art Exhibit Openings at OC Right Now!

So already, I didn't like the first sentence of my horoscope in today's Boston Globe:  "An elderly family member needs your help more than he or she is saying." Not a good thing to read in the era of coronavirus lockdown!

My parents both live at Orchard Cove, a Hebrew Senior Life facility in Canton. And currently, I can't visit either them: in accordance with the protocols put into place by Hebrew Senior Life and the mandates issued by the governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, there can be no visitors to Orchard Cove right now, except under the most serious of circumstances.

My parents live in two separate sections of Orchard Cove. We were going to celebrate their seventieth wedding anniversary last Sunday afternoon with a family party in the Cove Room, but, of course, that party had to be cancelled.

For the time being, my father can't visit my mother, and I can't visit either of them. How long this will last, and what questions I'll need to answer in order to be admitted when the "No Visitors" ban is lifted or modified, I don't know. But I will say that if I didn't have two nonagenarian parents in my life, I'd be less anxious about contracting coronavirus myself.

Needless to say, with each passing day, it becomes increasingly disconcerting not to be able to visit them, despite the wisdom of the ban. My father understands exactly what's going on. My mother sometimes does. 

As soon as I read my horoscope, I called both of my parents, and then the nurse on my mother's floor, since my mother didn't answer the phone. My dad informed me that one of friends who brings his own favorite kind of dry cereal to breakfast every morning wasn't worried about running out because he has five boxes of it in his room. The nurse on my mother's floor assured me my mother, who was having breakfast in the common dining space on her floor, was fine and usually did understand that everything was different right now--not just her.

So let me say what I'm grateful for at this moment.

• I'm so glad that a few weeks ago, my parents got to meet their first great grandchild--my niece's son. This was such a happy day for all of us--I met him for the first time that day, too. Thankfully this happened before all of us needed to stay home and stay away from Orchard Cove.  

• Since I'm the one who sets up my dad's medication boxes, I'm so glad that I'm always at least three weeks ahead in terms of keeping him stocked up: he has all the meds he needs for up until the middle of April. I'd thought we were preparing for the possibility of a blizzard that might temporarily separate us; not so.

• I'm so glad that the people at Orchard Cove are not only taking such good care of my parents and all the other seniors living there, but also communicating regularly about what they're doing to keep everyone as safe as possible. Thank you, Orchard Cove for keeping the world far away right now. And my parents and I have a constant topic of conversation these days: the latest protocols that have been put into place.

• I'm also so glad that the Orchard Cove staff is doing all they can to keep families connected in meaningful ways, most importantly by facilitating technological face-to-face communication between residents and their near and dear. Seeing people and not just hearing their voices seems to be making all of this separation just a little less intense.

• Finally, I'm so glad that the weather hasn't been an issue for us--although I'm thinking that the people in Tennessee who are still living much in response to early March's tornadoes probably feel otherwise. We've had some Massachusetts mid-Marches that were remarkable for their late-winter blizzards, or their gale-force winds and flooding rains--fallen power lines and underwater roadways. But not this year: God has been good!

Speaking of God, an email I received from my synagogue shared the reflections of our rabbi, Daniel Klein, as he contemplates what's being asked of us and given by us at this time:

'It is a profound sense of service. Our physical distancing is both self-protection and an offering to the people around us. It is a way of keeping others, particularly the most vulnerable among us, safe and the systems that care for people functioning and not overwhelmed. In the last few years, I have come to feel that the most essential statement of my work in the world is from the Shema":

 וְאָ֣הַבְתָּ֔ אֵ֖ת הָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֑יךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ֥ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ֖ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶֽךָ
'Love God/Everything/Everyone/The One/The Oneness with everything you have"

'As we move through this experience, may we feel and be connected to others even as we are physically apart," . . . ."

I believe that few of the people who take care of my parents are Jewish, but I also believe that the good work of many of them reflects a spiritual as well as a professional commitment to serve. I think Rabbi Klein's words would resonate with many of them.

* COVID-19 Update 2 [E-mail to the author]. (2020, March 17). (from The Boston Synagogue)

Eden In Lockdown: A Poem

So already, with novel coronavirus running the show, I was inspired yesterday morning to write a poem, but not a novel. It's my general practice to sit with poems awhile before soliciting response and critique, but since this one is so much about this present moment, I've decided to dispense with temporal distancing, do some virtual social outreach, and publish it here in its raw, not-ready-for-prime-time state.

I'd like to hear from you about it. Specifically, I'd love to know about any piece of it--or even about the whole of it--any of following:

• what it makes you think, and/or 
• what it makes you wonder, and/or
• what it makes you feel, and/or
• what you think works, and/or
• what you think doesn't work, and/or
• anything else.

I also have a few questions I'm wrestling with, to which your answers would be welcome: do my allusions work**? are there too many of them? Should I explain the allusions in footnotes? I'm not sure why using allusions seems so important to me right now. Maybe you'll have thoughts even about that last statement.

I think there are some verb tense problems, too. 

So first I'll present the poem; and then I'll tell you where you can respond: there are several places and ways. Ideally, I'd like you to be able to see others' responses, but I'm happy for your name not to accompany your comments, if you'd like to respond anonymously.

Here goes!

Eden in Lockdown

        "Eden is that old-fashioned House
         We dwell in every day . . .."*
                                         Emily Dickinson

We hadn't known we were in Eden
'Til we learned we couldn't leave it.
But we had time on our hands,
Something we seldom did,
Something we seldom took into our hands
When the choice was ours.

So what to take into our hands,
Given the perils of touch itself,
What to shape to our most 
Private self or public need
When dreams deferred so oft to fear  
Since what happens next  
Is in all our hands? 

I started with meatloaf 
On the evening of the first day--
And it was good.
On the morning of the second day,
I bundled newspapers for recycling,
Wrote checks and birthday cards,
Filed clippings in folders where I'd never look.

I told myself what was still good:
Spring just days away,
Robins flocking to the neighbor's hedge,
Electricity surging through power lines,
Keeping us warm and and within reach,
Softening exile at the edge of the unknown.

Best to be placed on house arrest
When one calls someplace home.
On the third night, when the March wind
Silenced the whispers of spring,
I thought of those sentenced to the streets
For whom Eden might be memory,
mockery, or myth.

Okay, if you want to respond to this poem and can leave a comment below (I know some of you have lost comments trying to do this in the past), please do so. If you respond on my Facebook page, I will copy your comments into the comment section below. And if you prefer to email me your comment, I will also post it below.

Also, if you're a "See-Think-Wonder" thinking routine*** fan from our shared or not shared Project Zero days, feel free to respond using that format.

Above all, stay safe and well! Take lots of soap into those hands that you have time on!  Thank you for reading and responding, should you choose to. And looking forward to seeing you in the spring.

* Emily Dickinson, CVIII from Part Five, The Single Hound. 

** Black, C. (2008). "And God separated the light from the dark" [Cartoon]. Winnipeg Free Press.

*** Ritchhart, Church, M., & Morrison, K. (2011). Making thinking visible: How to promote engagement, understanding, and independence for all learners. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Camus, Coronavirus, and Concerts About Matthew Shepard

So already, we had to do it today--post the adjacent on the Broad Cove Chorale-Unicorn Singers web site home page. We (the BCC-US board) haven't given up all hope of good news. Maybe, just maybe, we will get to perform Considering Matthew Shepard (CMS) the last weekend of March. Never say never, right?

An on the other hand, we're not blind to the handwriting on the wall; hence the front-and-center writing on our web site home page.

But it's about more than being practical and responsible. After all, it's Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard that we're singing. While acknowledging the reality of the human experiences of tragedy and confusion and death and hopelessness, CMS affirms life and ultimately enlists "All of Us" in becoming an authentic "we" for the sake all of us. It's about being authentically in the same boat--hopefully, a ferry and not cruise ship at this moment--and taking good and loving care of one another. When we posted our coronavirus-related update and pledged to keep our potential audience aware of further decisions and developments, all we did was walk the CMS talk we've been singing about for the last three months.

"Life Study" by Scott Ketcham*

Not that we'd never heard this talk or hadn't walked it before. But as the sixteenth section of CMS reminds us, "Some things we love get lost along the way." Or at least shoved aside for too long.

That estrangement from what we love and know to define our best selves, combined with the relatively unchecked march of coronovirus, have me thinking so much of Camus's The Plague (La Peste en français). 

I've mentioned this book in the past, usually in connection with some failure of human attention and human compassion; I'm hard-pressed to think of any book that gets it more right about the human proclivity to cultivate a sense of numbness, or at least detachment, through the mindless embrace of habits that eventually conceal us from ourselves. The Plague also gets it right about the consequences of that human inattention and detachment.

This time around, though, I'm thinking about The Plague because it's so much about how a bureaucratic entity deals with a health crisis that threatens the lives of its citizenry. As the book's title suggests, it's a recurrence of plague that constitutes that health crisis, and its locus is a single city--Oran, in Algeria. Camus tells us early on that Oran is home to a population that is remarkably devoid of "intimations" (5).** Oran, Camus explains, is a "modern" (5) city in which virtually all is done "with the same feverish yet casual air" (4). To have an intimation means to have "now and then an inkling of something different" (4).

One of my favorite moments in the book is when, in Part I, Dr. Rieux, one of the town physicians consulting about how best to fight the plague, refuses to spend the group's limited time debating whether or not to call the outbreak "plague": " . . . it has small importance whether you call it plague or some rare kind of fever. The important thing is to prevent it from killing off half the population of this town" (49).** 

I'm not sure why at moments like these people generally prefer to talk about semantics rather than "taking precautions" (49). Because they'd rather not feel fear? Because they're campaigning for re-election?

Of course, taking precautions isn't pleasurable--it requires so much attention. But then again, since when did semantics, half-truths, or non-truths stop the spread of disease? My belief is that disease thrives on mixed messages and deceptions generally. So do any number of ills, not all of them related to our physical health.

The first sentence of Part Two of the book is "From now on, it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us." There's that phrase again, "all of us." In times of pandemic, we all have to do what we have to do; pieces of music like Considering Matthew Shepard get us thinking beyond "me" and "my friends and family" to "all of us." My choral groups may not get to sing CMS two weekends from now, but it's already given us so much. I hope we'll pass it on, even if that can't happen at the end of March. It's a good thing when great art spreads!

There I go again, with my customary enthusiasm at such moments of disappointment combined with faith in those things that, as Considering Matthew Shepard says, are "the things that sway and pass/dance in circles." So I end with the cautionary words with which Camus ends The Plague, when plague is gone and the city is returning to its normal:

And indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good: that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come again when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in happy city.

We live in a global world in which more than people travel. Let's hear it for books and music that help us make sense of, respond to, and somehow rise above those moments like our present one! 

* from Scott Ketcham's web site: https://www.scottketcham.com/image/185236694032

** Camus, A. (1991). The plague. Vintage Books. [Note: Thankfully, coronavirus won't kill half of the population, but it will still kill many people, especially if we don't do what we can to limit it.]

*** Barria, C. (2020, February 28). Trump claimed coronavirus could 'disappear' in the United States, adding to the administration's mixed messages. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-claims-covid-19-could-disappear-2020-2

Gearing Up For Considering Matthew Shepard, Part IV

So already, it's time for the final installment of the Considering Matthew Shepard talk that I shared at Linden Ponds last week, and that my fellow singer Stephen Tooker and I developed together. As some you know by now, the two choral groups that I sing in, the Broad Cove Chorale and the Unicorn Singers, will be presenting Craig Hella Johnson's passion oratorio on Saturday, March 28 and Sunday, March 29 in Norwell, Massachusetts. 

As was my last installment of this talk, this installment is also linked to a full performance of CMS by the Western Illinois University Singers. I will tell you at what minute you can hear the pieces of music the audience at Linden Ponds heard--and a couple of other pieces I mention, too.

At the end of the last installment, I left you with the question Stephen and I wrestled with as we considered CMS: So if the ugliest, most violent parts of the story are over in the first third of the piece, what is the rest of the piece about? Just the resulting anger and pain?

So here's our answer to that question, and the final installment. 

The answer is no. Stephen and I knew from both singing and listening to the piece that it acknowledged and dramatized the anger and pain of people, but it also delivered them from it. But we had to give some thought to exactly how it did that. In the prologue, as I told you, the singers vowed to be open to the story (at 14:30) but being open and staying open can be hard, even if we have the will to be. Stephen taught English in college, and I taught English in high school—and in puzzling over this, we found ourselves talking about what CMS had in common with a Walt Whitman poem that we both loved: (Slide 29) “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Don’t worry if you’ve never read it or haven’t read it in ages.

“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is about the deaths of Abraham Lincoln* and of so many young men who died in the Civil War. Whitman despaired over the wasteful deaths of so many young men—and really despaired when Lincoln was assassinated, though, of course, many Americans did not: Whitman had believed that Lincoln alone could reunite a frightfully divided America in which so many had lost so much. 

Like Whitman, Johnson, wanted to help people move beyond paralyzing, unbearable mourning. And also like Whitman, Johnson wanted people—the country and the world—to move beyond destructive division back to commonality and unity.

      

      In terms of the moving people beyond paralyzing unbearable mourning was concerned,  

• this meant writing music that could help people to appreciate death as part of something bigger and eternal--as part of a natural cycle, and therefore as a source of life—so in CMS, you’ll find both cyclical time—the time of nature—and linear time—the time of history.
• It also meant writing music that could help people understand death not just as the cause of suffering, but also, in some circumstances, as an end of suffering.
• It also meant writing music that could help people to accept their sadness—hopefully, over time, their non-crippling sadness--as a natural response to the memory of death.

Walt Whitman

As far as the second bullet goes, this meant writing music that would oh so very gently encourage people

• to recognize and explore their own human complexity—and
• to acknowledge and experience the humanity they shared with others, including those they were inclined to regard as the monstrous “other.”

In supporting people to be open to all of the above, Johnson used a lot of the same techniques Whitman did:

• He mixed genres—literary genres and musical genres.
• He employed a lot of visual language.
• He employed motifs—repeating images, or patterns of images that recur throughout a work—and therefore help to unify it. You may want to pay attention to the many references, explicit and implicit, in this work to parents, to human hearts—and to fences.
• He presented many voices—inner ones, outer ones. And with those multiple voices always invariably came a multiplicity of perspectives—so many different angles from which to see events and the world. You might be surprised by who and what speaks in this piece.
• He relied on allusions, on references to and even direct quotations from other music and literature and history and religious traditions that might somehow resonate with us—we saw this in “A Protestor.”



When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, Wordle**

• He wrote a long work divided into sections that create a journey. Sometimes he juxtaposed two contrasting sections. Sometimes he balanced one section with a related section later in the piece. Invariably he gets us to think and feel from different perspectives as we make the journey.

Since we’ve already talked about #9 (at 27:56), I want to tell you to pay attention to #10—because #9 and #10 juxtapose two very different mothers' voices—and two very different musical traditions. And I believe #10 (at 32:25), with its blues/jazz style, its unnamed mother grieving deeply over the death of an unnamed son, intentionally evokes a whole other tradition of American hate crime—anti-Black hate crime. Johnson seems intent on acknowledging all hate crime victims and comforting all sufferers.

Meanwhile, in terms of sections that balance each other, the mothers of the Westboro Baptist Church don’t get the final word when it comes to lullabies in CMS: #26 (at 1 hour 11 minutes) also sung by the women, restores the sweet dream potential that lullabies usually have.

So I’d like to play you just a couple more short selections from the Passion section of CMS so you can hear a few of these techniques in action.

First, I’d like to play just the choral beginning of the piece that sits right at the middle of CMS. But before I do, I want to share with you a part of my story—because, let’s face it, each one of us brings their own story to Considering Matthew Shepard –and to any work of art. I was a teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 2013 when the Boston Marathon bombings happened. The Tsarnaev brothers both graduated from CRLS, and a number of my colleagues and our then juniors and seniors knew Dhzokhar***--he was called Jahar by those who knew him at CRLS. And lots of us had personal connections to some of the people who were among the most badly injured in the bombings. So pretty much everyone in the school was a mess—the kids and the adults. One day, a girl in one of my classes who knew Dzhokhar came to talk to me, and she asked me a question that, frankly, no other student asked me during that time—and that I’ll never forget. Her question was, “How do I know that I won’t change and become somebody who could do something just as terrible as Jahar did?“

I think of her every time I hear this next piece from CMS. The voices we hear here are tense, inner voices of an unidentified “I” speaker who addresses Matt’s murderers.

#16 "I am Like You" (at 55:00)

I am like you
Aaron
and Russell
When I think of you (and honestly I don't like to think about you)
but sometimes I do,
I am so horrified, and just so angry and confused (and scared)
that you could do things to another boy--they were so cruel and
so undeserved, so dark and hard and full of (I don't know)
Late one night I had a glimpse
of something I recognized, just a tiny glimpse--
I don't even like to say this out loud,
It isn't even all that true--
but I wondered for a moment,
am I like you? (in any way)
(I pray the answer is no)
Am I like you?
I bet you once had hopes and dreams, too.

Don’t think the whole piece continues in this way; it actually has a second half. As Stephen put it, “This tense and dissonant introspection leads into the stirring melody sung by the men in unison: We are all sons of fathers and mothers.” I think it’s really significant that #16, with its two-part structure, sits right in the middle of CMS. It’s almost like through this piece, we musically manage to round the spiritual, emotional Cape of Good Hope, this place of great risk, and we start our ascent to a better, less dangerous place—which doesn’t mean there’s only clear sailing ahead.

And now for the last piece.

The fence is a major motif that runs through the piece—it even reaches into the Epilogue. Here’s one of the fence pieces, one that explores, from a very unusual perspective, the human penchant for pilgrimage to places to pay tribute to the dead and, I think, to reckon with our own feelings. 

#19 The Fence (One Week Later) (at 43:43)****

I keep still
I stand firm
I hold my ground
while they lay down
flowers and photos
prayers and poems
crystals and candles
sticks and stones 
they come in herds
they stand and stare
they sit and sigh
they crouch and cry
some of them touch me
in unexpected ways
without asking permission
and then move on
but I don't mind
being a shrine
is better than being
the scene of the crime

I want to assure you, since you’ve just listened to a couple of the more “troubled” pieces in the Passion, that there’s much more affirmation than angst in the Epilogue. I promise you you’ll experience affirmation and hope once you’ve completed your journey through the Passion.

So now that you’ve had a foray into some musical moments, I’m going to end with some more of Stephen Tooker’s words:

Laramie Wyoming Photo by Debi Milligan

“ . . . after experiencing CMS you may come to view CMS as unusually suited to our times. Mention Charlottesville, Charleston, Tree of Life Synagogue, whole immigrant groups labeled as rapists and drug dealers, immigrant deportation, family separations, children in cages. Cruelties committed when groups and individuals are seen as the other; their voices not heard. Could prophetic poetry work in here? Art as transformer?  (Slide 40) Note that even the murderers are not cast aside as objects of hate and revenge. While their acts are never excused, CMS works towards understanding of our flawed human condition and our commonality of experience: . . .. Instead of hate, fear, and division, CMS advances love, understanding, and inclusion. For the singers, this message is amplified by the act of raising our voices together, breathing together, feeling together, in short, making music.”      

Thank you for inviting me here today; thank you for being such an engaged audience—and I’m looking forward to seeing you and singing for you on March 16 [Note: March 16 is the date of our dress rehearsal performance at Linden Ponds; our final public performances are on March 28 and March 29.]

* Photo from Wikimedia Commons. "Broadway Blvd, Albany New York. April 26, 1865." timesunion.com. Retrieved March 10, 2020. 
** When Lilacs Last In Dooryard Bloom'd, photograph by David Bearden uploaded on 11/29/11. 
*** I blogged about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's death sentence a while back: https://soalready.blogspot.com/2015/05/digesting-dzhokars-death-sentence.html 
**** I blogged about this piece--this fence--in another blog in January: https://soalready.blogspot.com/2020/01/on-fence-on-maine-friday-morning.html