This morning, as I watched an elderly black couple board a full subway car, a seemingly unremarkable series of events occurred: a young white woman rose and offered her seat, then a middle-aged Hispanic man did likewise. America at its best, in a nutshell, right? But it wasn’t so long ago that America didn’t work that way — as these two old folks doubtless knew better than I. With the election mere days away, I wondered: what would an Obama presidency mean to them? My emotional response was immediate and shocking. I had to turn my mind away from the thought to keep from bursting out in tears somewhere between 96th and 103rd Streets.
I don’t know anything about these two people, I don’t know how they’ve struggled, I don’t know where their political sympathies lie. Maybe they aren’t Obama supporters; it doesn’t matter: I can easily imagine two more just like them who are, and I can make the leap to imagining that an Obama victory could be the sort of victory that justifies all they went through, that makes it all worthwhile in the end. Because they would have seen this happen, in their own lifetimes, with their own eyes.
Like I said, I don’t know anything about these two people, other than their age and skin color (but I repeat myself). Yet the narrative I facilely superimposed on them acted on me with tremendous force, and if I think about it only out of the corner of my brain, I can understand why. Freedom and justice are two of my most vulnerable emotional pressure points.
My ability to empathize with fictional people notwithstanding, for me Obama represents neither freedom nor justice. I fear his presidency almost as much as I suspect I’d like him personally. (In the interest of fair and balanced commentary: I fear McCain’s presidency far more than I’d probably like him personally.)
I don’t want to be 80 before my country shows signs of offering me the freedom and justice I deserved all along. I don’t want a symbolic shift that’s enough to let me finally die in peace. I want my government to recognize and protect my rights. I want it soon, so that my life can be the better for it. I want my own liberation in my lifetime.
P.S. If you think I’m a jerk for even making this comparison, then you’ve just been a jerk. Don’t presume to tell other people what their oppression feels like, let alone whose is more valid.
While browsing through the Smithsonian Global Sound archives, I happened across a recording by Sri Chinmoy, a name that sounded vaguely familiar for no reason I could think of. The title caught my eye, too: “Music for Meditation.” As a skeptic with my own ideas about spirituality, I wanted to know what this recording was going to sound like and, more than that, what it was supposed to do. What does it even mean for music to be for something? As a musician with my own ideas about music, too, the prospect of this recording was already a spectacle, and I hadn’t listened to it yet.
It turns out Chinmoy’s name rang a distant bell because he was a major figure in the 1960s and ’70s bringing Indian music and culture to American spiritual seekers, and thus has entered American cultural parlance. And it turns out this record is a fairly smooth syncretism of all of the above. Recorded in New York City in 1976, with “cover design by Ashok Chris Poisson” and “cover photos by Pranavananda Anthony Hixon,” Chinmoy already had an American following. Track titles for side one: “Music (poem),” “Invocation,” “Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.” Side two: “I Sing Because You Sing (poem),” “Ke oi dake,” “Amar asru nire,” “Jibane marane,” “Jedike phirai,” “Amito tomare.” The ordering of the contents constitutes evidence for the Americanness of the record’s target audience, starting with English-language titles and only entering into Bengali devotional song after turning over the record. The first track, “Music (poem)”, exemplifies Chinmoy’s genre-crossing in the span of one minute. In spite of its title, it contains nothing that a listener would normally identify as music: the first half is spoken English, intoned as though from a hortatory speech, and the second half is a single long “Om” without a clearly defined pitch. Here we have Chinmoy immediately challenging us to relax our conceptions of what music is, what poetry is, and indeed to relax our conceptions in general in order to make room in the same arena of consciousness for a meditative mantra. He has rather cannily set the table for the record, prefiguring for the willing listener the nature of what is to follow.
My skeptical interpretation of the title “Music for Meditation” is that any effect the music has on the listener is largely due to the power of suggestion; put another way, the stating of its intention is necessary in order to achieve that intention. Toward the same goal, the pamphlet notes included with the record have much more to tell. First, they prescribe (along with the track listing and credits, on an unnumbered page) the recommended manner of usage: “Note: This album should be listened to at a soft volume during meditation.” Chinmoy offers a more personal followup:
Let us not try to understand this music with our mind. Let us not even try to feel it with our heart. Let us simply and spontaneously allow the music-bird to fly in our heart-sky. While flying it will unconditionally reveal to us what it has and what it is. What it has is Immortality’s message and what it is is Eternity’s passage. (3)
At a high level of awareness of his audience, Chinmoy then makes use of the preponderance of the available space as “a general introduction to meditation,” under the headings “Proper Breathing”; “Concentration”; “Meditation”; “Contemplation”; “Mantra”; “Flowers, Candles and Incense”; and “Choosing a Guru” (3). Mostly this contains no surprises, but there are two points which offer keys to interpreting his work. Early on, he steps outside of his explanation of breathing to allow that “This is not the traditional yogic pranayama, which is more complicated and systematised,” perceiving and reminding that these spiritual lessons are compressed versions of something larger (3). Near the end, he explains the guru as a spiritual master by way of a thoroughly modern analogy, placing his record in a particular place and time familiar to his audience:
Right now I am in London. I know that New York exists and that I have to go back there. What do I need to get me there? An airplane and a pilot. In spite of the fact that I know that New York exists, I cannot get there alone. Similarly, you know that God exists. You want to reach God, but someone has to take you there. (6)
So this is what Chinmoy has to say directly about the ideal experience he wishes the music to engender. There are also a few revealing comments in the “About the Artist” section. For instance, “…he has written nearly 300 books on spirituality and painted 120,000 paintings” (2). (If true, this number becomes more tractable to the imagination as an average of over seven paintings a day from birth to age 45, which is how old Chinmoy was at the time of the record’s creation.) These numbers appeal to well-worn and still deeply held Western notions of the inscrutably creative artist (a holdover from the Romantic era) and of the tirelessly productive worker (an idea perhaps as old as the United States itself). The beginning of the following paragraph admits as much, then goes right for the American spiritual seeker’s jugular via generic flowery language: “Sri Chinmoy’s musical creativity is in a class by itself. It unites the lyrical, devotional tradition of India and the power, speed and vastness of the dynamic West — all in the universal human aspiration toward the Infinite” (2).
It is Chinmoy’s own interdisciplinary approach that suggests such close reading of his liner notes, but what of the music itself? The Bengali songs (with English translations provided for accessibility) consist of Chinmoy’s thin, wavering voice backed by a very simple waveform (not much more than a square wave) outlining the same pitches as the singer. His unsteady voice — or violin, on other tracks — is more than a little distracting to my ear. If this be music for meditation, it’s for someone other than me, and here my reactions to the record begin to enact the same sequence of reactions to Ravi Shankar we discussed in class. There is something cheap about this Chinmoy record: it offers the impression of the ritual, the ascetic, the spiritual, but the impression is lightly acquired at a record store, and then experienced as needed, to taste, in the comfort of one’s living room. Is the kind of meditation we can experience with the assistance of this record of the same kind Chinmoy himself experiences, or is it lesser not only in degree but also in quality? Does the process of meditation really benefit from certain kinds of sounds deliberately provided, or is it a shortcut of sorts? Chinmoy seems not to hold the American spiritual seeker in terribly high esteem. When what is desired is to pause from the practice of doing, of thinking, of feeling, and simply to be, Chinmoy presumes that this is too much to ask and instead offers a substitute activity, exaltedly relaxing though it may be designed to be. My least charitable interpretation is that Chinmoy is doing little more than cashing in on the Indianist trend that rose to prominence when certain of the Beatles took an interest in Indian music, but upon passing this judgment I become aware of what I’ve done and can take a larger view. A more charitable interpretation is that the effect of Chinmoy’s album — whatever his intent — was to take advantage of the favorable cultural conditions to introduce, to a very wide audience, a set of ideas and beliefs worthy of being studied and discussed further. His continued American career suggests that this effort met with some success.
It’s been far too long, and I’m going to make up for it by abusing this blog as the soapbox it, despite my best efforts, often manages not to be. For while you may not be aware that for me it’s midterm season — which is how I’m currently justifying “it’s been far too long” — you know all about election season. Many of you will even vote next week. I won’t, and this time it’s not because of midterms.
I’m open to changing my mind, if you can point out something I haven’t thought of. So let me explain as briefly as I can, with the hope that you’ll be likewise open to my line of thinking, and then I’d very much like to hear your comments right here at the end of this post. With thanks to Brooke, who was the first to ask, here goes:
None of the presidential candidates want government to do what I want it to do — in fact, rather the opposite — and if one of them were somehow in the ballpark, they wouldn’t be able to make much progress toward the goals that I consider important. If I were forced to vote, I’d have to choose at random, which hardly constitutes good citizenship. Thank goodness it’s still a free country (sort of) and nobody’s being forced to vote (not yet, anyway). So if I want to change how the country works, which I do, I’m free to seek other means by which to change it. Turns out telling conscientious, educated people I’ve never registered to vote leads to pretty intense intellectual conversations, which add up to a tiny impact in the grand scheme of things, but still way bigger than a vote (especially a random one) could possibly be. Same goes for other political offices.
Really short version of what I want government to do: Why is it necessary that, in order for gay people to be allowed to get married, we have to pass or repeal laws? How could it possibly not have been legal all along? I’m not suggesting we should have been smart enough to get it right the first time. But the mistake was magnified because marriage is something government does. Imagine if it weren’t.
That’s not a complete argument by any stretch, but it’s a good place to start discussing. Please, comment away! (If you’re reading by email, first follow the link to the web version of this post.)
P.S. You might think I should vote for the Libertarian Party candidate. He’s a kook. In fact, the Libertarian Party is full of kooks. Not that it matters: my argument has very little to do with attributes of particular parties or candidates.
There’s lots more to Munich than giant helpings of pig and beer, but neither are the experiences in any way misleading. Just to be sure, Tuesday’s lunch on the outskirts of the Viktualienmarkt was another Schweinshax’n. I atoned with lots of walking: from Viktualienmarkt to the Deutsches Museum, through a fairly high percentage of the interior, then by feel (a fairly inefficient route, as it turned out) to the Neue Pinakothek, discovering that it had just closed for the evening, crossing the street to the Alte Pinakothek, wending my way through most of it, and then by feel (again inefficiently) through the streets between the universities until I found a take-out döner for dinner. By day’s end, my feet and knees sorely wanted me to know that I’d bitten off a bit more than I ought to have chewed. As though I weren’t fully aware!
Greetings from sunny Prague, where summer is officially underway. The same is true for me, having visited friends in Baltimore and Cleveland (the latter a quick little road trip with Judith) and now doing more of the same this side of the pond. It’s turning into a travel-filled summer. A few days after this trip ends, Judith and I are off for another long weekend drive, this time to Massachusetts; the whole middle of July puts me back in Ohio; I got into KlezKanada, so there goes a week in late August; a summer camp reunion and a visit to the parental homestead may open-face sandwich that week. And somewhere amid all this, I have work to be doing, which is why I’m here: I’ll be presenting my Google Summer of Code project — currently no more than a series of twinkles in my eye — at pkgsrcCon in Berlin next weekend. But first, some travel notes from the train to Prague.
South of Dresden the rails trace the path of the Elbe, squeezed in against the increasingly vertical left valley wall. Across the river there’s enough perspective to see rolling hills of dense green, trees filling every possible tree-spot. Occasionally sheer rock faces poke out, or the odd crag. The river towns appear alternately charming and kitschy (Schöna in particular the latter) but there’s no arguing with the fundament on which they sit. The signage at Bad Schandau station includes “východ” along with “Ausgang”; at Děčín, the first stop into Czechia, a field trip boards and the test begins: how well do I hear this language after 2.5 somewhat lackluster years of study and the last semester off? So far, a tiny bit well, which is more than expected. Maybe subjecting myself to a few minutes’ strafing of first-year audio exercises before Dresden helped. When one of the youngsters asked the others “Máte tužku?” I wanted to reach into my bag and produce a pencil, just to prove the point. The land flattens out a ways into the Czech Republic, and thankfully so do my travels for the night. Off to Bratislava tomorrow.