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The Ruckus Clause

Remember the Ruckus Clause in the Constitution – the one that says if you create a ruckus in this country while legally visiting from another country, your permit will be revoked and you will be sent back? Ruckus, mind you, defined as voicing an opinion that is opposed to administration think, not a crime, a riot, a participation in illegal activities – simply making use of free speech? Free speech guaranties that apparently no longer apply to green card holders or other legal foreign residents?

Well, I don’t remember it either, but here is Marco Rubio on the specifics of PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk:

“We revoked her visa … once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States … if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”

This is, of course, was the Tufts woman who was snatched by plain clothed, masked goons pushing her into a car and abducting her to an unknown site, unable to speak to her lawyer for 24+ hours and not until after she was in Louisiana — despite a court order that she not be moved from MA. For having voiced an opinion in a student news paper as one of four co-authors, a year ago no less, about Israeli attacks on Gaza and university divestment from funding warfare in the Middle East, with no evidence produced that she did anything unlawful. Rubio claims that they are doing it every day, having revoked around 300 visas so far on the basis of disliked speech, not criminal action.

Then there is the Russian dissident, a scientist from Harvard medical School, who was arrested yesterday upon re-entry at our borders, returning from a research trip to France and having some undeclared items due to messed up papers in her luggage. If she is deported to Russia she will likely not survive as a known, outspoken critic of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. some claim we are now helping to squash dissent as demanded by our newest ally.

Never mind all the tourists who have been detained, some under torture-like conditions, eventually needing medical attention.

I am trying to get the point across that many people shrug when “Venezuelan gang members” are shipped off to a gulag abroad without due process. That some people are more concerned when they are coming for foreign academics or simple tourists from western countries. That WE ALL should be frightened, however, for one and all, once the normalization of abduction, neglect of Habeus Corpus, and absence of any recourse that due process would allow, has taken place. Every single person can be snatched and disappeared, just as 1930s Germany or contemporary Russia model, with claims that the officials know what they are doing and punishing criminals – how can you prove that you are not, when sitting in a cell with 80 other women, unable to speak the language (some tourists) and no access to lawyers in Louisiana, if you are lucky, or El Salvador, if you are not?

Is it surprising that many countries in the world have now posted official travel warnings against visiting the United States? Or, more nightmarish to me, that prominent scholars of fascism have chosen to leave this country and teach abroad (historian Timothy Snyder and philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale among them?)Not counting the brain drain of our best scientists leaving for countries where their work is revered and can continue in contrast to here with all the department closures?

I was thinking about all this while watching how various wildlife traverse our garden, how freely they move, with no borders to stop them and certainly no ICE or Customs personal snatching them into custody, moving them to unknown locations or sending them back to places where there is existential threat waiting for them.

The deer come and go.

The coyotes come and go, blissfully ignoring my wildly barking dog.

The squirrel has claimed the owl house.

The owl has claimed the redwood where the crows nest. (That is a crow behind the owl, unsuccessfully yelling at the owl.)

The finches and sparrows and various other birds freely come and go, ready to snatch nesting materials.

One of the people detained upon entry to the US last week was composer Andrew Balfour, on his way to perform with the Amabile Choirs at Carnegie Hall, conducting selections from his work Tapwe: Songs of Truth. There was some mistake in his papers, and he was held for hours in isolation, phone and luggage taken from him, until he was given a choice: he could wait (for days) for an immigration judge to decide his detention, or he could take a flight back home to Toronto, to which he was then escorted by armed guards. He was lucky – some have been kept in detention for 2 weeks, completely clueless about what the accusations consisted of.

Anyhow, Balfour is a singular musician in the sense that he has two things that matter for his creative focus: his love for sacred music by Renaissance composers, particularly British ones, and his identity as a Cree, infusing indigenous spirituality into the music he creates. The music I am linking to today takes scores from Byrd and Tallis, and arranges them around Cree and Ojibway words. The project, called Nagamo , which means “sing” in Cree, is not a translation of the old texts, but an infusion of indigenous perspective. It’s quite something.

If you are interested in the whole composition, go here.

Below are some parts that I picked, demonstrating diversity of melodic and rhythmic approaches.

And at the very end you can watch a short video that introduces the composers and his biography.

Let the music fill you with a sense of resolve – people have overcome injustice and trauma for centuries.

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Connecting the Dots.

Last blog for this year, looks like. I am defying the impulse to offer a balance sheet of a difficult year, or prepare a battle plan for the even more difficult one ahead. Instead, I will write about things that made me intensely happy at one point or another during the last 12 months, in hopes to get the transition into 2025 off to the right start.

Let’s begin with the fact that I am embedded in or adjacent to a ton of people who are highly creative. The range runs from (inter)nationally renowned artists, to successful local ones who can devote their life to making art. From published writers, painters, photographers, ceramicists who have shows, to all those people who pursue their urge to create regardless how unacknowledged their efforts will remain.

People who work 60 hour weeks and then come home to teach themselves how to make lace. People who lovingly and inventively design little flower fairy scenarios in their front rock gardens, enchanting the neighborhood with their creativity. People who make a house a home by determinedly finding the right way to paint the walls and hang the art. People who create native plant gardens that weave and flow from a dusty, dry cement desert. People who fabricate the most imaginative porcelain containers, dainty and elegant, with painted details. People who knit to the point of carpal tunnel syndrome, or embroider little creatures onto grandchildren’s crib blankets. People who weave, and those who quilt, adding new ideas to age-old crafts.

One of them is a friend who spends much of her time writing grants and breathing life into the finances of her organization, dealing with PR and recruiting advertisement, organizing membership drives and donor meetings, never mind keeping the books and making sure everyone gets paid.

Laura Grimes needed a retainer wall in front of her house and decided it had to be more than just cinder blocks. It has become a project that is creative on many levels – constructing themed mosaics from shards, remnants, beads, toys, thrift- and dollar store finds as well as generous donations from the community of the local Buy Nothing web site. I can just envision her sitting night after night in a basement experimenting with the right cement glue, the appropriately sized cinder blocks, the arrangement of a thousand trinkets and marbles, the groupings by shape and color and category membership.

It is not Art with a capital A, and I assume was never meant to be that. It is a desire to fashion something representing joy if not beauty from lots of circles and dots, or to tell a story or two, as all creative endeavors end up doing.

Maybe all these creatives convey the history of a craft, maybe they account for the requirements of a climate zone, maybe they refer to fables in their porcelain work, or maybe they speak of birds, or mermaids, or vegetables embedded in imaginary landscapes. Maybe they depict the hard truths of our time.

All of it, however, is directed at an “other,” the viewer, establishing a connection across time and/or space, letting us “read” what they have to say, or just feel gifted by the expressions they had to bestow. Art or craft engenders curiosity, instills pleasure, perhaps even admiration, linking two minds for a moment, a first step toward community. Giving one’s imagination a creative form is an act of reaching forward, outward, the possibility of forming a bond, no matter how playful or artful the base. Nothing more important in times where loneliness and division are dark clouds threatening to engulf so many. I am so happy to be surrounded by creativity offering connectedness in this way.

***

Fast forward from dotted mosaics to dotted paintings. I have always admired the defiance of African-American painter Howardena Pindell who set herself the life-long task to decry racial segregation by using dots and circles in her art – originating in her childhood experience of red dots glued to the bottom of glasses and silver ware in public restaurants, to be served Blacks only, keeping the unmarked ones for Whites.

But recently I have been completely taken in, without ever seeing it in real life, by the dot-dominated work of a painter who started in her late 70s and whose visions exploded onto the art world horizon soon thereafter. Emily Kam Kngwarray produced about 3000 paintings during the 8 years she still lived after taking up the craft, about one a day. Those of my readers lucky to live in Great Britain will be able to see a retrospective at the Tate Modern, starting July 10th, 2025. What stirs me is not just the movement and exuberance that makes these canvases come alive, but admittedly also the very notion of “late-blooming.”

Kam Kngwarray’s works on show. Photograph: National Gallery of Australia

Installation view of Kim Kngwarray’s Batiks

Kam Kngwarray grew up in a remote area of Australia, with little contact to the outside world until she was 80 years old. She was as Anmatyerre elder, and a lifelong custodian of the women’s Dreaming sites in her clan Country, Alhalkere.

“Whenever Emily was asked to explain her paintings, regardless of whether the images were a shimmering veil of dots, a field of ‘dump dump’ dots, raw stripes seared across the surface or elegant black lines, her answer was always the same: Whole lot, that’s whole lot, Awelye (my Dreaming), arlatyeye (pencil yam), arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), ntange (grass seed), tingu (Dreamtime pup), ankerre (emu), intekwe (favourite food of emus, a small plant), atnwerle (green bean), and kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint, whole lot.” ( Interview with Rodney Gooch, translated by Kathleen Petyarre.)”

Emily Kame Kngwarreye Summer Celebration (1991)

Kam Kngwarray Alhalkere – Old Man Emu with Babies (1989) Photograph: Courtesy of D’Lan Contemporary

The connection to place reveals itself even to the likes of me who are totally ignorant about Aborigine art. The abstracted vision, paralleling Modernism or styles found in Japanese calligraphy, grasps something universal, reverberating with many of us, lightyears removed from the artist’s existence. Universal: the concept that you can embrace place, the very part of the natural (or even built) world where you live, that informs and infuses you, providing a sense of belonging. It is there for all of us, even if Western culture during the last century has tried much to dull our sensitivity to its call.

***

From dotted paintings to pearly music: Y’Y, the new recording by pianist and jazz composer Amaro Freitas makes me goose-bump happy (here is the link). It, too, encapsulates a tribute to a place, a region, the forest and rivers of Northern Brazil, featuring legends, spirits and rhythms from the Amazon and Pernambuco, where the artist grew up. The piano score is ravishing and the way he manipulates the strings by inserting soft objects like seeds, produces a creative new sound, always echoing the water drops and rivulets of the subtropical environment.

For me the album registers on a different level as well, making it special – a link to personal history. As I have mentioned often before, I am not one to spend much time perusing the past and introspecting about how life unfolded. But occasionally some glorious moments deserve to be remembered, and the album delivers the impetus, with its compositions bearing resemblances to Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturian, and Egberto Gismonti, the Brazilian musical giant.

I swear I survived adolescence only because I could bang out Khatchaturian’s Toccata (here is the music). And I mean bang out, paying no heed to differences in dynamics, just hitting the keys with rage. And one of the best experiences of my life was a backpacking trip along the Rio Negro in Ecuador, first (and, alas, last) visit to the Amazonian rainforest, captured so well in much of Gismonti’s work, and now Freitas’. Art linking to personal history, then, invites to remember the past, which in turn contains the implication of a future, where I intend to spend my energies to help connect the dots, as best I can. Just keep the creative output coming!

Happy New Year!

And speaking of connecting the dots (since this blog is dedicated to art, nature and politics, after all): I thought we might as well end 2024 on a combination of laughing, crying, screaming, and gasping at the theatre of the absurd upon us: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/eliot-weinberger/incoming – courtesy of the London Review of Books.)

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Der Erlkönig

· Beyond the Treeline ·

One of the most amazing pieces of music from the romantic period is a song written by Franz Schubert ((1797-1828), The Erl-King or Elf-King. It sets a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) to music, words that were based on a medieval Danish ballad, Elveskud. The narrative describes the night ride of a father carrying his feverish child on his galloping horse. The child fearfully tells his father that he sees the Erl-King, a metaphor for death, but is calmly and rationally told that it is just the wind, fog, trees and darkness that scare him. The Erl-King, after trying to lure the child with promises of toys and amusement, eventually threatens to take the boy by force, and the father gets increasingly anxious, realizing that the vision is not just a hallucination. When they arrive at home, the boy is dead in his arms.

Every school child of my generation had to learn the poem by heart, having no clue what it was all about other than a horror story. It contains many of the elements so important to the Romanticists: nature, death, the supernatural. Goethe certainly knew about fear of death as a youngster – he fought tuberculosis for two long years before he even turned twenty. Schubert’s composition manages to capture dread with changes in key and tempo, as well as introducing 4 distinct voices with different melodies, ranges and key changes alternating between major and minor keys. There is the narrator who frames the story at beginning and end, and then alternating vocalizations of the father, the kid and the Erlkönig. A fifth personality – the horse – is represented by the piano with a relentless, pounding rhythm throughout for the right hand (and the score specifies every single move the accompanist has to take, incredibly thought-out and rigid. The whole things comprises three or so minutes, a good thing too, otherwise your right hand would fall off.)

To this day I know very few pieces that embody dread, particularly the dread of an innocent child that senses death, as well as this song. It gave me goose-bumps as a child. Now the fear of being a helpless parent is more prominent – trying to distance yourself from the realization that horror lurks, and wanting to protect the child (as well as yourself) from that reality, to no avail.

The photomontage is an older one that I recently added to the series of images representing music that matters to me. It captures a torso of a young child surrounded by birches and alders (the “Erl” in Erlkönig is the German word for an alder tree: Erle. Unclear if Goethe ignored the Danish “Elven”, or it was a translation error. My speculation would be that he wanted to stage the eeriness of the moors where alders grow at the damp places. But what do I know.)

I photographed these very trees on the grounds of the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, a camp where so many Jewish children died of disease and starvation, as did their parents, eventually. (52.000 human beings, as a matter of fact, 13.000 of those after liberation of the camp, too starved to recover.)

How does a parent, themselves aware of the inescapability of potential death, protect the last weeks of their children? The history has renewed relevance for us, given the unrestrained rise in anti-semitism, both In Germany and here in the U.S. – an unrestrained rise fueled by unrestrained language encouraging violence against Jews, preemptively blaming them for election losses, and throwing out dogwhistles (serial numbers for to-be- deported immigrants was the latest in Floridian fantasizing, evoking tattoos of the Holocaust, and publicly welcoming fascist ideologues. Here is an overview article in The Atlantic about anti-semitism of the upper echelons of the American right wing. Read it and weep.

I weep also when I think of the mothers and fathers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon desperately trying to find some fashion of normal life for their children among the bombs and the hunger and the disease. It is they to whom the children turn, like the boy in the poem besieges his father, expecting comforting and protection. And it is they who cannot explain that all the laws we thought would protect us, have been cast aside, are ignored, or scoffed at, on all sides.

U.N. experts, for example, consider exploding pager and radios a terrifying violation of international law.

“Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities….Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said. Humanitarian law additionally prohibits the use of booby-traps disguised as apparently harmless portable objects where specifically designed and constructed with explosives – and this could include a modified civilian pager, the experts said. A booby-trap is a device designed to kill or injure, that functions unexpectedly when a person performs an apparently safe act, such as answering a pager. It is also a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians, including to intimidate or deter them from supporting an adversary,” the experts warned. “A climate of fear now pervades everyday life in Lebanon,” they said.”

Legal experts in the US disagree with each other whether law violations occurred with these booby-traps (Ref.), but nobody disputes that Israel defies the orders from the U.N. top Court to halt its military offensive in Gaza, after South Africa accused it of genocide.

Many argue that targeted attacks against the militants of Hamas or Hezbollah are justified in a war. Civilian casualties are seen as an inevitable side effect and within the boundaries of international law, justified by the warring factions in pursuit of their strategic goals. That cannot, however, count for actions that affect civilian populations most grievously and indiscriminately.

The Gazan children are starving. Over 50.000 children ages 6 months to 4 years are in urgent need of treatment for malnutrition. Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, according to our own government authorities, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.  

“USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.”

“Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.” (Ref.)

Secretary Blinken and President Biden disregarded the assessment, since it would have stopped us from sending bombs to Israel, per the law. Here are the details from an investigation by ProPublica published yesterday. Aid organizations across the world agree with the original plea by our agencies: CARE, Oxfam and multiple others warn about a humanitarian disaster because of Israel’s obstruction of aid: food, water, medicine. The U.N. General Assembly concurs. Here is the report of their special rapporteur.

What do you tell your child, all over the world, when the Erl-King calls and there’s not a morsel to eat?

Here is a different iteration of the song – above I had linked to Ian Bostridge, here is Fischer Dieskau.

Who rides at a gallop through night so wild? It is the father with his dear child.
He grips the boy firmly in his arms,
He holds him safe, he keeps him warm.

‘Son, why do you cower so fearfully?’ ‘Father, the Erl-king! Can you not see? The dreadful Erl-king with crown and tail?’ ‘My son, it is mist blown by the gale.’

‘You lovely child, come away with me, We’ll play together down by the sea; Such pretty flowers grow on the shore, My mother has golden robes in store.’

‘My father, my father, oh do you not hear What the Erl-king whispers into my ear?’ ‘Be calm, stay calm, it’s nothing my child But dry leaves blown by the wind so wild.’

‘My fine young lad, won’t you come away?
My daughters are waiting for you to play;
My daughters will lead the dance through the night, And sing and rock you until you sleep tight.’

‘My father, my father, can you still not see
The Erl-king’s daughters waiting for me?’
‘My son, my son, I can see quite clear
The moon on the willows, there’s nothing else there.’

‘I love you my boy, you are such a delight; And I’ll take you by force if you put up a fight.’ ‘My father, my father, he’s gripping me fast! The Erl-king is hurting! Help me, I’m lost!’

The father shudders, and speeds through the night, In his arms he holds the moaning boy tight;
At last he arrives, to home and bed:
In the father’s arms the child was dead.

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The Berlin Requiem – Red Rosa.

· Beyond the Tree Line ·

“Die rote Rosa nun auch verschwand / Wo sie liegt, ist unbekannt / Weil sie den Armen die Wahrheit gesagt / Haben sie die Reichen aus der Welt gejagt.” – Bertolt Brecht, Epitaph to Berlin Requiem.

I think I reported on this here before, some years back, but the memory repeatedly pops up. On my 11th birthday I received a book with the title Famous Women in History, or some such. Probably meant to be inspirational, or teaching history through human interest stories – but I bet the bank my parents never read a line of it, otherwise they would have reconsidered. The heavy tome included an accumulation of bloody fates, either executed by powerful women, or experienced by powerful women, or both.

There was Judith (dead Holofernes, a head shorter), Cleopatra (dead Antony, falling on his sword, dead queen, self-poisoned), Queen Boudica (80.000 dead Roman legionaries, dead queen by suicide), Jeanne d’Arc (a lot of dead soldiers, a martyr burnt at the stake), Queen Mary I. a.k.a Bloody Mary, (beheaded competitor, Lady Jane Grey, countless executed protestants), Charlotte Corday (dead Marat in the bathtub, guillotined Charlotte), Marie Antoinette (off with her head), Catherine the Great (murdered husband, Peter III, innumerable dead after she extended and harshened serf conditions from Russia into Ukraine,) Typhoid Mary (dead everybody) and so on. One notable exception, and the only scientist mentioned: Mme Curie (dead by radiation exposure.) You would think famous women were all naturally born killers.

I have, of course, no clue how accurate and complete my memory is for a book likely written in the 1940s or early 50s, if not earlier. The book itself is long lost during my many moves in the ensuing decades. Maybe only the horror examples stuck, and I forgot the chapters about happy princesses, humanitarian nuns, or outstanding female artists. Maybe the selection of prominent bloody endings was intended to instill fear of power into impressionable little girls, keeping them in their place. Or maybe it just happens to be historically accurate that the few women who made it into the history books had, indeed, to be ruthless to join the ranks of male rulers, religious zealots, (anti)colonial fighters and tyrants.

I do know, though, who was not included, because I was introduced to the name only when my interest in politics awakened: a female intellectual and revolutionary who left a mark on her world and/or the future. She’d fit the pattern: a woman who supported an uprising, murdered in the most heinous way, her mutilated body dumped into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal: Rosa Luxemburg. (Her comrade Karl Liebknecht, who was executed the same day, was granted a funeral, because he was not Jewish. Käthe Kollwitz was asked by his family to visit the morgue and created one of her most famous memorials.)

Luxemburg, one of the first women to receive a doctorate in law and economics, a brilliant philosopher and fighter for justice, has been on my mind because we have been hearing the word Freedom brandished about in the election campaign. One of her most famous quotes (criticizing the new Russian regime, no less, in a book written in 1918 and published in 1922, The Russian Revolution,) was this:

“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”

Also on my mind has been the fact that she and Liebknecht were killed by soldiers from the so called Freikorps, a group composed of former officers, demobilized soldiers, military adventurers, fanatical nationalists and unemployed youths hired by right-wing extremist von Schleicher, a staff member for President Paul von Hindenburg (who later appointed Hitler as chancellor.) The Freikorps was explicitly founded to fight left-wing political groups and Jews, deemed responsible for for Germany’s problems, and pursued elimination of “traitors to the Fatherland”.

“The Freikorps appealed to thousands of officers who identified with the upper class and had nothing to gain from the revolution. There were also a number of privileged and highly trained troops, known as stormtroopers, who had not suffered from the same rigours of discipline, hardship and bad food as the mass of the army: “They were bound together by an array of privileges on the one hand, and a fighting camaraderie on the other. They stood to lose all this if demobilised – and leapt at the chance to gain a living by fighting the reds.” (Ref.)

I don’t have to explain why images of violent losers and wanna-be heroes ready to incite bloodshed are on my mind. Never underestimate the danger from a militia.

The montage is trying to reflect Kurt Weill’s 1928 composition The Berlin Requiem. Weill included Bertolt Brecht’s poetic memorial Epitaph upon Luxemburg’s death: “Red Rosa now has vanished too…. / She told the poor what life is about, / And so the rich have rubbed her out. / May she rest in peace.” (The second movement.)

I chose a wide path bordered by crooked trees to celebrate a woman’s courage to leave the straight and narrow one proscribed, pursuing an ideal of radical democracy instead, her thinking opening windows into a brighter world. She reached high in her pursuit of social justice and freedom for all, just like these trees are reaching for the light, defying the storms that bend them. They were photographed in Holland at the North Sea, but same can be found in coastal Poland, the country where she was born.

Here is the Requiem.

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Papageno

· Beyond the Tree Line ·

Five years ago I hiked in the Bandelier National Monument in Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico (a previous report on my adventure with lots of photographs is in the link.)

It is an incredible place, a plateau formed by volcanic eruptions, with steep rocks made of volcanic ash, their crevices enlarged and inhabited by the Ancestral Pueblo People living there over 10.000 years ago, grid farming at the bottom of the canyon and adjacent mesas.

The canyon is bisected by a small creek, carrying scant water for most of the year. On occasion it brings death: when wildfires destroy the upper watershed, as happened in 2011 and, worse, 2013, flash floods ensue and take out entire parts of the extant vegetation, the last remnants of old forest included. The devastation was visible everywhere when I visited, but so was new life, small pines that had survived and young cotton trees in verdant green that radiated against the grey, pink and white of the tuff rocks. Swallows and ravens flew overhead, I saw quail along the path and woodpeckers were busy.

I don’t know if it was the quail running – I suddenly thought of Mozart’s Papageno, the bird catcher in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. One of his arias (Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm!) has the same speed and staccato feel as the passing quail did. (The name Papageno actually comes from Papagei, the German word for parrot.) In any case, the opera is about how things in life never unfold in a straight line, how trials and tribulations need to be weathered with persistence, courage and fortitude to arrive at a satisfactory (or happy, if you’re lucky) ending. Nature in front of me contained both, downfall and renewal. The music in my head – its beauty as breathtaking as the canyon around me, as filigree as the fresh greenery on the saplings – was tightly linked to the same alternations in my own life.

During the seemingly endless years spent in bed with childhood diseases, rubella, mumps, the measles, whooping cough, ear infections and later staph infections, I was allowed to listen to a small radio my mother brought up from the kitchen. There was a program called Schulfunk (school radio) that educated young listeners for an hour or two during the week days. It was started in 1924, but after the war it really took off, with the opening music being Papageno’s first aria. It is probably the only piece of operatic music that every German person of my generation knows by heart.

Everyday, in addition to language, biology, music or physics instruction, there was an episode in this program acted out by famous actors, of some dilemma or social conflict happening in a small village, not unlike the one I lived in. The character in News from Waldhagen (Neues aus Waldhagen) represented all aspects of society, and were as familiar to us as the Sesame Street characters would later be for TV audiences in the U.S. The social studies message was uniformly one of “peace, pals and pancakes” (Friede, Freude, Pfannekuchen) as the German proverb goes: keep the peace, stay in your place, conform and life will be sweet. Moralistic treacle, but dressed up in witty enough garb that we swallowed it line, hook and sinker.

Or did we? I surely was equally drawn to the allure of Papageno, who withstood authority, acted out in strange ways, who had real problems pursuing a straight path of virtue. All these trials, all this non-linear unfolding of a life, made him into a very different person – maybe a better one, maybe just different. Stretches of submissiveness alternating with defiance could be the one sentence-description of my own life, finding myself alone, bursting with happiness, strength and adventure in a New World canyon in my late 60s, a million miles and years away from that little Old World girl in pain, being comforted by listening to Mozart.

He died at age 35. The Magic Flute was the last opera he composed, thrilled that it took off to great appreciation in the two months before he died, even though the tale is internally quite inconsistent, defying logic wherever you inspect it closely. But the music? Eternally thrilling.

35 was the average life expectancy of the Ancestral Pueblo people as well, felled by childbirth and diseases. My generation had vaccinations against polio and small pox, helping us on, my children benefited from inoculation against mumps and measles. Spared much suffering, let me tell you. It is incomprehensible to me how an anti-vax attitude has been able to take root in our current lives. In my darker moments I think it must be a combination of sadistic joy at the suffering of others, mixed with eugenic aspirations. More likely it is caused by forces smartly laid out in this short essay from last year’s Atlantic.

The montage consists of a photograph of the wooded oasis in Frijoles, luminous green matching the exuberance of the music. The superimposed bird catcher was a mural by street artists in Montreal, defying anti-tagging ordinances in solidarity with a non-conformist Papageno. Or so I fantasize.

Here is Papagenos’ aria from Act I of the Magic Flute.

Here is the full opera, a production by the MET with James Levine. (My favorite version is a 1990 production with the Vienna Philharmonic under Solti, but that is not available for free.)

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Morning Mood

· Beyond the Tree Line ·

When I was little, my bedroom was situated right above the room where my mother played the grand piano some evenings. The minute I heard Morning Mood from the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46 by Edvard Grieg, I waited for the piece I really adored, Anitra’s Dance, trying to stay awake through the intervening The Death of Åse. I had no clue how popular this music had become and knew even less about its origins, a dramatic poem by Henrik Ibsen that he made Grieg set to music. I was just taken by the melodies and chords.

Fast forward to 1965, now in boarding school as a 13-year old, at war with an elitist all girls’ world I despise and yet try to find a place in. My piano teacher, she of the permanent bad breath but sensitive understanding of lost souls, complains about my perfunctory performance of the suite – all I can do to stave off my homesickness is hammering the keys mechanically. She hands me a dogeared paperback with Ibsen’s poem translated into German, so I get an idea of what we’re working on. I devour it, like any other book given to me in those years, and don’t have the faintest idea what it really is about – other than having a strong reaction about why a woman would wait and waste all her life to take a narcissistic fraud and con-artist back into her lap after he ditched her. Got my priorities right, early on!

(I also stupidly abandoned my piano teacher to take up the cello – for the sole reason that it allowed me a weekly escape from school into the city where the conservatory was offering lessons. That did not last long, a story for another day.)

The short version of the Peer Gynt poem, now seen through the eyes of an adult, is this: boy tries to be someone, not sure who, and confabulates, lies, tricks and swindles his way through the world, from Norway to Northern Africa and back, with abduction of other people’s brides, intermittent stops in the halls of mythological troll kings, royal interludes in insane asylums and pursuit by the devil. Two women love him, yet see through him and call him on it, his mother, Åse, who dies, and Solveig, who takes him back when he returns broken, unrecognized, still without identity, her love the key to his redemption.

Essential here is Gynt’s search for identity (or the rejection thereof), a trying on of roles, and a desperate avoidance to be cast in fixed form while the searching is so much more exciting. Why be an ordinary person if you can be an adventurer, a rich merchant, a wise man, a king? With the arrival of modernity, predestined class or social organization no longer determines who you are – replaced by a compulsive search for self -determination. Sooooo many options to choose from, why settle on one? And so Peer steals stories from others, trying on their selves, forever non-authentic, as called out by his mother from the very beginning. He runs away from negative feelings with fantasies of omnipotence or flat-out denial, and does not care who gets hurt in the process. No wonder he feels deadened by the end, but then gets miraculously saved by Solveig’s unconditional love.

Young – and – old Heuer: Spare me the romanticism! Give me poetic justice!

In reality, I was probably enraged that in my teenage existence any deviation from “good girl” stereotypes, any trying out of alternative identities would surely be punished – WAS punished – no redemption in sight. Reserved for the boys, as per usual.

The montage is capturing the original childhood joy at hearing the sounds of Morning Mood waft up to my room, the lightness and serenity of the atmosphere mirrored by the sunlit pine sapling. The image also includes two figures in a wishful representation of Peer and Solveig sharing a life as equals rather than foils for each other.

I selected the super-imposed painting, Couple on the Heath, because the woman looks a little bit like my young mother. She often escaped her grief through music and I want to dedicate the image to her, in gratitude of opening the world of art to me from an early age.

The painter, Lotte Laserstein, spearheading the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, was a prominent artist in Weimar era Berlin, where my mother was born and raised. Of Jewish origins, Laserstein fled Germany for Sweden in 1935, anticipating that a particular identity could be a death sentence under the new regime. In an ironic, if horrid, twist, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was adapted by the Nazis and made into a nationalistic heroic tale with Gynt’s Nordic identity absurdly fixed into the fascist cult, with the trolls representing Jews.

Maybe next time when you roll your eyes that Classic FM is playing the old war horse again, you can think about all this complicated stuff associated with the music. As much as Grieg was set on showcasing the folk tunes of his country, or the sensuality of desert princesses, or the grief associated with losing a parent, all musical transcriptions of concrete events in the tale, he nonetheless reminds us that there was a larger narrative behind it all. Worth a re-read, in a time where identity politics, the need for belonging and othering, respectively, continue to play such a poisonous role across a divided world.

Here is Grieg’s Morning Mood as an orchestral version by the Berlin Philharmonic and as a PIANO VERSION.

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Die Moor Soldaten

· Peat Bog Soldiers ·

“Hope will never be silent.” – Harvey Milk

Robert Pinsky once said that many of the poems by Polish poet Adam Zagajewski are “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel.” (Zagajewsky’s work is intensely copyrighted since his death three years ago, so here is a link to one of his most famous poems, Try to praise the Mutilated World, which encouraged hope and believed in the return of light after darkness.)

I have been thinking that it is certain pieces of music that inject the past into my own, ordinary present, affecting how I feel and see things, a past that was formative in dealing with the history of my own origins and era.

One of the focal points of coming of age in the Germany of the 1960s was, of course, the working through the Holocaust as our responsibility as one of the first post-war generations. There was, at that time, little to go by. Our parents, who had participated in the war and/or the fascist horrors, or had been victimized by either, were shocked into silence by shame or guilt or trauma, or all of the above. The country, at the time, did not want to look backwards, but rather forwards and so institutions did not exactly educate about the history or engage in a memorial culture for the victims. (That has changed in the intervening decades in impressive and encompassing ways, although there is certainly room for doubt how far true remorse and willingness to accept responsibility has come. A topic for another day.)

For those of us growing out of the post-war gloom and rebelling against a society bent on economic achievement, conservative alliances and new wars, protest music became an important tool to learn about the past and envision a future without war and oppression. The music was widely performed, at demonstrations, during gatherings, on May Day and so on. One that lodged deeply in my head was a song created in 1933 by inmates in one of the very first Nazi labor camps, Emsland Lager, filled with political prisoners, mostly socialists, communists and union members.

The Peat Bog Soldiers was written by a miner, Johann Esser, and an actor, Wolfgang Langhoff. Music was composed by Rudi Goguel, and sung through the next decades by Ernst Busch, a famous German musician, and eventually picked up as an anthem by the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. 16 members of a workers’ chorus performed it for the first time in August 1933 in the camp, having over a thousand of the inmates join the chorus, once they picked up the melody. The song describes the harsh labor in the camps, a life where nature has fallen cold and silent, the inevitability of death if you try to escape, and the intense longing for home and loved ones. At the end the performers stuck their spades into the ground, that now looked like a graveyard of crosses.

The very last stanza, though, expresses hope: winter and darkness cannot last forever, and at some point there will be a return to home. I think what registered most for me was the fact that hope could not be eradicated even during the worst of human experiences, a shared sentiment that bonded those thousands of doomed souls. Maybe I locked onto that because it was easier to think about than the despair contained in the remaining stanzas or my association with the perpetrators. Or maybe because I knew that I need to fight a tendency to be fearful, then and now. In any case the song has remained with me through a life time.

Here is the English translation:

Wherever the eye gazes
Bog and heath all around,
No chirping of birds entertains us.
Oaks are standing bare and crooked.

Refrain:
We are the peat bog soldiers,
And we’re marching with our spade into the bog.
We are the peat bog soldiers,
And we’re marching with our spade into the bog.

Here inside this barren marshland,
the camp is built up.
Where we are, far from any joy,
stowed away behind barbed wire.

Refrain

In the morning, the columns march
towards the moor to work
digging under the searing sun.
but our mind toward our homeland yearns.

Refrain

Homeward, homeward everyone yearns
to the parents, wife and child.
Some chests are widened by a sigh,
because we are caught in here.

Refrain

Up and down the guards are walking
Nobody, nobody can get through.
Escape would only cost the life
Four fences secure the castle.

Refrain

But for us there is no clamoring,
It can’t be an endless winter.
One day we’ll say happily:
“Homeland you are mine again!”

Refrain

The montage reflecting on this piece of music, from the series Beyond the Tree Line, is primarily based on a photograph I took during sunset in the heath of Lower Saxony, the state where the camp was located, about 2 hours away from my grandparents’ village. I added the cormorants because they are essentially silent birds (the absence of birdsong so prominent in the first stanza), hang out in groups like the inmates, but also represent the guards ensuring no escape – dual roles that can be switched in history in the blink of an eye, with victims becoming perpetrators and vice versa, as we see all too clearly in the wars of 2023/24.

I pierced the cloud, covering the setting sun, in honor of those who still believe in the return of the light, reminding myself to focus on silver linings rather than the darkness that descends.

Here is the German version of the song and here the music in English, song by Paul Robeson.

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Arcing, Stilling, Bending, Gathering.

Rather than spend time reading today, I encourage you to listen. Classical composer Lisa Illean creates music that is often serene, able to soften the knots in your stomach, head, back, or soul – wherever the pain currently resides.

If you want to read nonetheless and need to know a little bit more about the focus of her work, here are the composer’s words describing it.

Although most of the movements are inspired by oceans and waves, I picked the album for today’s photographs of caterpillars on common ragwort, who, too, are arcing, stilling, bending and gathering. They are cinnabar caterpillars who will molt into cinnabar moths, which play a key role in successfully controlling ragwort, a toxic weed poisonous to livestock.

They use nature’s tricks well. Newly hatched larvae feed from the underneath of ragwort leaves and absorb toxic and bitter tasting alkaloid substances from the food plants, becoming unpalatable themselves. The bright colors of both the larvae and the moths act as warning signs, so they are seldom eaten by predators, other than cuckoos! Not too many of those around here.

Here is the music.

Ragwort patch

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Spiritual Medicine

Somewhere I read someone describing Bach’s music as spiritual medicine. I guess it depends what ails you, but I couldn’t agree more that his music is sometimes balm for the soul, and often, in the fugues and preludes of the Wohltemperiertes Kalvier, torture for the brain and fingers. On net, it rules!

Today’s oratorio is probably one of his most often played compositions, sending a message of hope with both text and music.

Since we need all the hope we can gather, this will serve us well over the holidays.

Wishing you peace and joy and enough rest to enter the next many months fortified so you can engage in what needs to be done to keep the darkness at bay.

Otherwise we’ll listen to Henryk Gorécki’s third symphony for an unspecified number of years….

Merry Christmas!

Photographs are European church doors admired across years of travel.

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The Second Night of Hanukkah

Tonight we light the second candle on the Chanukiah, the traditional candle holder for the festival of Hanukkah. Last night I was wondering what became of the children I photographed a full decade ago (with parental permission) during this time of year. They were participants at a Peace Camp organized by Grace Memorial Church, attended by Christian, Jewish and Muslim children. A Muslim friend of mine taught the little ones about the customary hijab and how to wear it. Sort of. It was such a fun exercise, with a piles of old headscarves flying though the hall.

It was about getting to know each other and finding commonalities among the differences, with the hope of raising a generation that can reach out to each other. Are they in college now? Do they feel compelled to take sides, are they able to build bridges and acknowledge human suffering on all sides? Will they bring a smidgen of peace to a world that has declared war on so many fronts? A world where children like these are killed by the thousands, accepted as collateral damage?

My hope is that they were immersed in families that strove for peace all year, given that they sent their children to these kind of encounters, providing their kids with a moral compass where true North is humanity.

Of course the story of Hanukkah is also one of war, an armed rebellion that purportedly generated a miracle for those who clung to their hopes. It is also a story that was told from very different perspectives with different conclusions. Here is a contemplation by Raphael Magarick, who teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

“In part inspired by the polemics that surround Hannukah, this year, for the first time since childhood, I reread the two books of Maccabees. I realized, although few people who pontificate about Hannukah mention it, that our earliest records of this holiday are precisely, inescapably doubled: two texts, written by different authors around the same time, about sixty years after Judah Macabbeus lived, which have opposite perspectives on almost everything that matters to them.

One was originally written in Hebrew; one in Greek. One is pro-Hasmonean propaganda; one seems unexcited by, or even hostile to, the dynasty. One is composed of sober, matter-of-fact political and military history; the other is stuffed full of flashy, divine miracles. One views Seleucid Greece as the natural enemy of the Judeans; the other takes great pains to suggest the problem is just one, deviant ruler. One permits, and perhaps even requires, wars of self-defense to be fought on Shabbat; the other apparently implies the opposite. One makes a point of mocking people who observe God’s law and get killed for it; the other intensely valorizes martyrdom. One shows no interest in the afterlife; the other thinks you cannot understand the morality of our world without it. And so on.

The point, as I take it, is: we know of no version of Hannukah which was not infinitely contentious among the Jews who were celebrating it. There is no pure, original holiday to get back to. “One” holiday was not transformed into “something else” (say, a military holiday into a religious miracle), because the holiday always contained within it multitudes of contradictions. Difference and contest go all the way down. Whatever one thinks of a present-day desire for a singular Jewish community in ideological lockstep, it is not a desire that has anything to do with our earliest records of Hannukah.

Hannukah is truly, as the great Haredi thinker Rav Yitzchak Hutner wrote, the holiday that celebrates dispute and disagreement. Wishing everyone a happily disputatious Hannukah.”

—–

I fear we have gone far beyond disputation and reached an unbridgeable chasm in our views of what necessitates wars or constitutes justified self defense. Here is music by a 20th century Jewish composer focused on peace, Ernst Bloch – Nigun. And here is a contemporary album Nigunim by Pawel Szamburski. This music shines a light equal to the candles in the darkness.

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