The Coast of Utopia

Tom Stoppard: The Coast of Utopia. I: Voyage: through May 1. II: Shipwreck: through April 19. III: Salvage: through May 4. Shotgun Players, 1901 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley, California; 510.841.6500 Marathon production of all three plays: April 26, May 4, 12 noon, 4pm, 8pm.

WE CAN ALL be clockmakers, or astronomers. But if we all wanted to be Pushkin .. if the question is, how do you make a роem Ьу Pushkin?— or, What eхаctly makes one poem or painting or piece of mцsic greater than another?—or, what is beauty? or liberty? or virtue? — if the question is, how should we live? .. . then reason gives no answer or different answers. So something is wrong. The divine spark in man is not reason after all, but something else, some kind of intuition or vision, perhaps like the moment of inspiration experienced by the artist ... "

That's Vissarion Belinsky talking, in a characteristically impassioned outburst in the first act of Voyage. He's a literary critic living in poverty in Moscow, way out of his depth, visiting the wealthy, complacent, cultured country estate of the Bakunin family. I have to confess to a great deal of sympathy for poor Bakunin Vissarion; I think I was similarly unsure in my youth. He doesn't know German or even French; he hasn't studied Hegel; he doesn't know how to approach the four beautiful Bakunin girls.

He could be a comic figure in a Chekhov play, but he isn't: this is the first of the three plays making up Tom Stoppard's trilogy The Coast of Utopia, which follows Mikhail Bakunin, then Alexander Herzen, from the dacha to Moscow to Paris and London and finally Geneva, over a span of 35 years from 1833 to 1868, interleaving romance, marital drama, and political philosophy in an engrossing eoght hours of theater.

Among the characters in this fascinating cast: the revolutionaries Bakunin and Herzen; the poet Nicholas Ogarev, the political philosophers Karl Marx and Ernest Jones; the exiled nationalists Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Stanislaw Worcell, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Lajos Kossuth; Turgenev: wives, sisters, and mistresses; serfs and servants. Somehow Stoppard manages to juggle this huge cast, long history, and intricate conflicting and competing world views without bogging down or losing focus.

The plays are published in a handsome slipcased and hardbound edition by Grove Press, and I heartily recommend them as reading material — and especially before seeing the productions currently running in Berkeley. Some have complained, online, about losing interest during the reading; I found the texts gripping. In the theater, the plays, directed by founding Shotgun artistic director Patrick Dooley, seem perfectly faithful to the letter; and of course fleshed out on stage, spoken through actors in fine costume and rising generally quite to the dramatic pitch Stoppard offers, the plays are more present, more vigorous: but a prior reading helps the viewer negotiate this intricate voyage.

Stoppard's trilogy has two interwoven lines: the domestic and the political lives of his characters, and particularly of Bakunin and Herzen. Bakunin of course was the model of the impetuous 19th-century anarchist; but Herzen — the illegitimate son of a Russian mother and a German father — was the more reasoned, ultimately by far the more pragmatic. The play proceeds through conversation laced with outbursts, like Belinsky's quoted above; and, throughout, through pointed parries between the men and the women, condemned by the assumptions of their time to be as observant, intelligent, and deserving as the men, but less informed and less influential in public life.

The position of the men, endlessly comparing their readings of the great 19th-century German philosophers, is summed up in a wonderful speech given to the radical poet George Herwegh:

…being a stoic  didn't mean a sort of uncomplaining putting uр with misfortune, that's only how it looks оп the outside—inside, it's alI about achieving apathy… which means: a calming of the spirit. Apathy isn't passive, it's the freedom that comes from recoginisirg new borders, a new country called Necessity… it comes from accepting that things are what they are, and not some other thing, and can't for the moment bе altered ... which реорlе find quite difficult. We've had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it's going to do. … Political freedom is a rather banal ambition, after all … all that сan't-sit-still about voting and assembling and controlling the means of production. Stoical freedom is nothing but not wasting your time berating the weather when it's bucketing down on your picnic.

It isn't easy for an early 21st-century American to imagine the position of these leisured intellectual Russians in the 1840s, after the failure of the Decembrist demonstrations, all too aware of the backward, marginal position of their country in the European context. The Age of Reason had led to the French Revolution, the Divine Right of Monarchy had been questioned, republicanism had taken hold successfully in America but had failed in France; slavery had been abolished in most of Europe but not (yet) in America or Russia. The press was rigidly controlled in Russia; to have any idea of current thought in political or social philosophy one must be able to read English, French, or German and have access to banned publications in those languages. 

On top of all that, there was no literature in Russian — only Pushkin. Women o the upper classes were lucky if they'd managed to learn enough French to read George Sand, who famously taught the dangerous injunction to Follow Your Heart. But if you think all this describes a situation with no relevance to our own time, consider this speech, the Slavophile Akssakov's outburst from Shipwreck:

We have to reunite ourselves with the masses from whom we became separated when we put on silk breeches and powdered wigs. It's not too late. From our village communes we can still develop in a Russian way, without socialism or capitalism, without a bourgeoisie, yes, and with our own culture unpolluted by the Renaissance, and our own Church unpolluted by the Popes or by the Reformation. It can even be our destiny to unite the Slav nations and lead Europe back to the true path. It will be the age of Russia.

Think about those lines the next time you look at Vladimir Putin's unsmiling face on the television news.

Stoppard's trilogy reminds us of the unending confusion of the 19th century, with its successions of revolutions and restorations, its civil wars, the hope of equality foundering between the intellectual shackles of Marxism and the cynical exploitation of the robber barons and railroad magnates, and the eventual plague of anarchism finally reaching its gruesome climax at Sarajevo, which precipitated a war that made the Reign of Terror look like a rehearsal. You come away from these plays reflecting that the excesses of that war, and the second world war, and all the proxy wars that followed, have been diversions, perhaps even diversionary tactics, to distract us from returning to the main problem: achieving a just society based on equality of access and sustainability of economy.

Fortunately, you also come away from these plays refreshed and entertained. They are, among other things, often very funny. The Shotgun production is well cast, on superb actors in the many lead characters; the costuming is splendid; the set modest but ingenious, the lighting and sound cues resourceful and suitable. You can't expect an opportunity to see this trilogy in one day, on an integrated cast, in a comfortable theater, at affordable prices, to return in any near future: it would be a shame to miss it now.

Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde

Shin-ichi Matsushita: Subject 17

THE RECENT CONCERTS by Other Minds brought an earlier festival to mind: the Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde, which I wrote about in EAR, a monthly newsletter I published in the 1970s. Herewith that article, much edited:


The Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde took place at 321 Divisadero St., San Francisco, in April 1965, sponsored by KPFA and run by myself, Peter Winkler and Robert Moran. Looking back on it I don't know how we had the guts: later endeavors have since convinced me of the enormity of such an undertaking. But we did, and it worked for the most part.

It was a sort of celebration of having the hall at all. KPFA and Ann Halprin’s Dancers’ Workshop joined the Tape Music Center in renting it. KPFA put on three concerts in the Festival, which was of course the first Third Annual. (There was a second one the following year, of which the less said the better.)

Opening Concert: April 2, 1965, 8 pm

Earle Brown: Four Systems     Robert Moran, piano; Georges Rey, violin; Gwendolyn Watson, cello
Robert Moran: Interiors     Third Annual Ensemble
Peter Winkler: But a Rose     John Thomas, countertenor; Peter and Judy Winkler, piano
Joshua Rifkin: Winter Piece     Robert Moran, Georges Rey, Gwendolyn Watson
John Cage: The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs     John Thomas; Peter Winkler
Ian Underwood: The God Box     Nelson Green, horn.
Douglas Leedy: Quaderno Rossiniano for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, bassoon, piano, horn, cymbals and bass drum.
     Third Annual Ensemble

Soft Concert: April 3, 1065, 11 pm

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati: Decisions I     Robert Moran; with prerecorded tape.
John Cage: three pieces for solo piano
Sylvano Bussotti: Piano Piece for David Tudor 3     Robert Moran
LaMonte Young: 42 for Henry Flynt     Peter Winkler, gong
Shin-ichi Matsushita: Hexahedra     Third Annual Ensemble
Morton Feldman: Durations 1 for piano, violin, and cello
                           Durations 3 for piano, violin, and tuba
Charles Shere: Two Pieces for two cellos
     Ed Nylund, Gwendolyn Watson, cellos

Closing Concert: April 4, 1965, 8 pm

Shinichi Matsushita: Hexahedra     Third Annual Ensemble
Shere: Accompanied Vocal Exercises     Linda Fulton, soprano; Peter Winkler, piano
Galen Schwab: Homage to Anestis Logothetis
Moran: Invention, Book I     Robert Moran, piano
Anestis Logothetis: Centres
John Cage: Variations II     Third Annual Ensemble


Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde Ensemble:
John Thomas, voice; Nelson Green, horn; Arthur Schwab, Robert Moran, Ian Underwood and Peter Winkler, piano; Linda Fulton, soprano; Georges Rey and John Tenney, violin; Ed Nylund, Gwendolyn Watson, cello; Jim Basye, tuba; Charles Shere, bass drum and cymbals; William Maginnis, percussion; Judy Winkler, door and piano interior

I don't recall who played flute or bassoon in Quaderno, or who played piano and violin in the Feldman pieces. I do remember the hall was pretty well full for the opening concert, say 150 people. We scheduled the Soft Concert — so called because it was generally rather quiet — late, because a big Ernst Bloch memorial had been scheduled for that night in Marin county, and we knew a lot of our audience would be playing in it, so we scheduled the Soft Concert late, starting at 11 p.m. to give people a chance to get to 321 Divisadero. In the event, we had a full house.

Jim Basye had never played solo tuba before, it was his 16th birthday and the performance was gorgeous. The Japanese composer Shinichi Matsushita had never been heard in San Francisco before. 42 for Henry Flynt almost brought me and Bob Hughes to blows, in a disagreement which was finally healed later when he heard the piece again, a few years later, played just for him at a symposium at Esalen. Peter Winkler's performance at this Festival was much better, as can be heard online.

When I last wrote about the Festival, in 1975, I concluded with a Where Are They Now paragraph. Many are gone from this realm entirely, alas. All the composers were living when their music was programmed; of them Brown, Cage, Haubenstock-Ramati, Matsushita, Feldman, and Logothetis have left us, and I don't know about Galen Schwab, who seemed ephemeral even at the time.

Commonplace: the uses of history

WHAT HAS TRADITIONALLY set historians apart from all other commentators on the past is their conviction that the past has both the ability to elucidate itself and a right to do so. This has meant respecting the past and recognizing that it knows as much about human nature as we do. The trick has always been not to make the past more amenable to us in our terms, but to make ourselves more able to think in its terms. Historians who do their job well know how to vanish before their subjects. Their readers put down their books believing that they have gotten to know intimately not the mind of the historian but the people of another age, and that they have had their own values challenged in the process.

Because of the bias of much new history against literate people with means, there has been a tendency to lose sight of sources that best preserve the voice of the past. As historical subjects, voiceless people without means have admittedly proven more amenable to confirming the truths about human nature that modern historians hold to be self-evident. But having means and being literate do not necessarily preclude ordinary experience or make one incapable of exemplifying ordinary life. By the sixteenth century it is certainly common to find literate people from good families whose lives are ordinary to the point of impoverishment. And unlike the voiceless masses whose human experience and culture they share, these people are also able to speak for their age. They explain as well as act. They not only have experiences typical of their time but do so self-consciously. They enable the historian to interpret the past with evidence from contemporaries. As a result historical study becomes a genuine dialogue between past and present.

- Steven Ozment: Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. xii

Einstein, Poincaré, and the drift toward Relativity

Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time. By Peter Galison. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003.

MOM ALWAYS LISTENED to a radio program on weekday mornings — some kind of news commentary, I think it was. It came on at nine o'clock sharp, and always began with the stentorious announcement that "It's High Noon In New York." Hearing that, I'd always look at our clock, which would read something between 8:45 and a few minutes past nine. It always fascinated me, this difference in times. I knew that anything said on the radio must be true, especially if it came from far away, yet my brain told me that it was nine o'clock, though our clock was rarely so sure.

Local time, Daylight Savings Time, Standard Time. Growing up in the country even a kid was aware of all these things, with that dim awareness kids have of such things. Except for school days, time was measured by sun and stomach: but school required promptness, and you wouldn't want to get there too early but you couldn't be late, and it was, oh, a good forty-minute walk.

These uncertainties prevailed even among urban adults until well into the 19th century. In spite of its title, chosen I think more for merchandising than for accuracy, Peter Galison's book is about the history of the synchonization of clocks in the Western World — as that history affected the gradual emergence of Einstein's theory of relativity, it is true. A photograph in this sometimes maddening book shows the Tower of the Island, in Geneva, which about 1880 had three prominent  clocks indicating the time(s): 10:13 here in Geneva, 9:58 in Paris; 10:18 in Bern. Six years later two of the clocks had been taken down, as time was now sychornized all the way from Paris to Bern, and beyond.

The problem, of course, is that the earth rotates on its axis (which is on the whole a very good thing). I look up at noon: the sun's as high as it will climb today, though probably in the southern sky. In New York, though, that happened three hours ago. 

There were a number of reasons the 19th century wanted to standardize time and synchronize clocks. It was a logical concomitant of the Industrial Revolution, of the Enlightenment. And therefore its history is grounded in that of England and France. Galison's hero, in this book, is certainly Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), the French polymath, graduate of the École Polytechnique, that quintessentially French institution born of the Revolution.

One forgets the essentially Rational nature of the Revolution, which replaced the superstition- and religion-obsessed Monarchy (which was positioned on  the Great Chain of Being, leading between the lowest worm and God,  just below God Himself) with a Republic grounded in the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. One of the major points was to replace arbitrary verities emanating from divine revelation or regal whim with equally arbitrary verities determined by groups of scientist-philosophers. The Metric System, for example, was developed by the Polytechnique, for the practtical reason of facilitating trade throughout the nation through standared weights and measures: a bolt of cloth woven in Nîmes should be measured the same as one woven in, say, Paris. 

(Another factor: the importance of bringing every corner of the nation under the administration of a central authority in Paris. The history of local-versus-capital tension is long, complex, and fascinating.)

Galison's story is significant and absorbing, but his editors and publisher have not done him many favors. There are odd lapses in grammar and even odd errors — in one case, for example, a confusion of starting and ending positions in an account of signaling between positions. The book is rich with detail, ranging from Poincaré's forensic investigation of a coal-mine explosion to the survey of meridians in Africa and the Andes. The poltics of scientific research would be a rich enough subject for a history all its own, and Galison valiantly brings it in, as well as the comic-opera argument between England and France over the decimalization of time measurement (France lost) and their joint research into the precise distance between the Greenwich meridian and that of Paris (England seems to have yielded). 

Galison's study is a chapter in the history of ideas, and a measure of the difficulty of writing such a chapter is itself a central aspect of his book. Early on, he describes the nature of this complexity, calling it "critical opalescence." He is so fond of the metaphor, and the reader needs so much to keep it in mind, that it's worth a long quote to show his method:

Imagine an ocean covered by a confined atmosphere of water vapor. When this world is hot enough, the water evaporates; when the vapor cools, it condenses and rains down into the ocean. But if the pressure and heat are such that, as the water expands, the vapor is compressed, eventually the liquid and gas approach the same density. As that critical point nears, something quite extraordinary occurs. Water and vapor no longer remain stable; instead, all through this world, pockets of liquid and vapor begin to flash back and forth between the two phases, from vapor to liquid, from liquid to vapor—from tiny clusters of molecules to volumes nearly the size of the planet. At this critical point, light of different wavelengths begins reflecting off drops of different sizes—purple off smaller drops, red off larger ones. Soon, light is bouncing off at every possible wavelength. Every color of the visible spectrum is reflected as if from mother-of-pearl. Such wildly fluctuating phase changes reflect light with what is known as critical opalescence. 

This is the metaphor we need for coordinated time. Once in a great while a scientific-technological shift occurs that cannot be understood in the cleanly separated domains of technology, science, or philosophy. The coordination of time in the half-century following 1860 simply does not sublime in a slow, even-paced process from the technological field upward into the more rarified realms of science and philosophy. Nor did ideas of time synchronization originate in a pure realm of thought and then condense into the objects and actions of machines and factories. In its fluctuations back and forth between the abstract and the concrete, in its variegated scales, time coordination emerges in the volatile phase changes of critical opalescence.

(Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, pp. 39-40)

Galison's discussion traces the development of time standardization and coordination through a fascinating period, the century-plus leading from the French Revolution (1789) to the publication of Einstein's first papers on time and space — in the history of ideas, from the disastrous triumph of Rationalism to the cubist fragmentation of Relativity; from the displacement of divine and regal authority by that of republican committees to the eventual triumph (or disaster) of unbridled democratic individualism and the provisional, negotiable structures that follow.

The only hope for truth or certainty, given the "critical opalescence" of the philosophical, political, and even scientific landmarks along this historical path, lies in some kind of reasoned abstraction defining an intellectual framework within which to negotiate the numbers assignable to the objects we contemplate: time, distance, justice, value, administration. It's too much to hope for a clear presentation of this problem, let alone a clear discussion of the concepts and illuminations brought to the party by such minds as Poincaré and Einstein — and a number of others mentioned in passing in Galison's book. 

I wish he'd had better copy editing. I wish someone had asked him to resolve repetitions, to clarify arguments, to provide timelines. I wish the index were more detailed. But I thank him for giving us a book worth setting next to Ken Alder's The Measure of All Things, and for including copious notes and drawings and photos and an extensive bibliography. Written toward a popular audience, it's a book worth keeping and ruminating over. 

The Dutch-American historical connection

From the vault: this was written last January, but for some reason never posted to the blog. It still seems to the point.

YESTERDAY I READ A BOOK confirming and explaining the connection I've long felt exists between Netherlands and the United States — a common mentality, you might say, a societal posture differentiating them from other nations. Not all other nations, perhaps; and not entirely: but a special orientation enabling a societal organization — "political," in fact — that underlies the social responsibilities enabling a social contract, written or not.

The book is in fact a pair of short essays by Geert Mak and Russell Shorto, 1609, The Forgotten history of Hudson, Amsterdam, and New York, published in 2009 in a handsome bilingual edition by the Henry Hudson 400 Foundation. Hudson arrived in New York harbor on his ship the Half Moon in 1609; the book was published as part of the events celebrating the 400th anniversary of that event.

Hudson was English, not Dutch, but he sailed on a commission from the Dutch East India Company, who hoped he would find a short route to Japan and China by sailing along the north Russian coast where the long summer days, it was thought, might melt the polar ice. He was four centuries too soon for that, as we know now, and before rounding the north cape of Norway turned back, crossed the Atlantic, and sailed to what is now Virginia to visit his friend John Smith in the colony there; then looked into first the Delaware river, then what's now the Hudson, hoping for a passage through the North American continent to the Sea of Japan.

(Not as ridiculous as it seems today, Shorto points out. At the time most navigators and cartographers thought that Ptolemy's ancient estimate of the size of the earth was correct; this would have placed Japan about where Ohio is.)

Hudson sailed up his river as far as present-day Albany before the river proved entirely fresh water, not salt, dashing that hope. But he explored the banks, and reported back to the Company that the fields were fertile and well-supplied with game. Before long the Dutch were sending colonists to stake out their own territory north of England's doomed Roanoke colony, and New York was Nieuw Amsterdam until 1664, when the English finally claimed the city at gunpoint.

By then the city had begun to develop qualities that characterize it still, qualities that early set it apart, Shorto writes, from "Boston, Hartford, or any other city in English North America." And what were those qualities? "Free trade and an immigrant culture," the features that enabled Amsterdam's rise in the late 16th and the 17th century as the most important, richest trading city in the world. The shipping companies were owned by a Dutch innovation, stock companies, not a monarchy; risk was shared as were returns; and the co-operation this necessitated was underwritten by a relatively liberal, tolerant view of differing social values.

Amsterdam, with its busy seaport, had already been attracting refugees from the religious wars in Germany and France, and the suppression of the Jews in Spain. "In an age of religious strife, it was almost universally held that a nation should be of one people and one faith," Shorto writes.

Intolerance was thus official policy in England, Spain, France… but not in the Dutch nation. There, tolerance became a topic of political and religious debate. Tolerance was adopted as a policy — not as a grand ideal, but as a way to deal with the mixed character of the population.

The Union of Utrecht, for example, declared as early as 1579 that "each person shall remain free, especially in his religion, and that no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of their religion."

As a result, Shorto argues, the Dutch colony in New York was a mixture of ethnic and religious strains from the beginning, approaching common problems and decisions in the spirit of common consent. "Even as early as the 17th century," Mak writes,

the Dutch had an uncontrollable inclination to assemble and to "polder" or debate until consensus is reached. This inclination based on the collective decision-making they were accustomed to as they worked together to reclaim their wetlands… Everything revolved around the art of persuasion, convincing others through debate.

The technique has its drawbacks, of course: it requires an educated, articulate, and probably fairly small body of discussants; and it takes time to arrive at its consensus. But it's a commendable procedure, and no doubt served as a model to the "Founding Fathers" as they themselves debated the form of the new government to follow the American Revolution.

Long walk to Fort Ross

Fisk Mill Cove, Sonoma coast

SATURDAY, JUNE 2: GLORIOUS weather, fine terrain, good company — only the pace, a little slow and far too often halted, detracted from a first-rate long day's walk.

The event was planned and organized, admirably, by Jeff Tobes, who has led similar history-oriented group walks on a number of previous occasions. This was in fact the eighth annual 25-mile walk produced for the Sonoma County Historical Society, and Jeff got more than he'd bargained for this time, as 130 people eventually signed up for the day.

Most of the walkers boarded big yellow school buses in Santa Rosa, but Thérèse and I opted for the closer departure point in Forestville. This allowed me to get up at 3:15 am rather than 2:30. I can't recall when I've got out of bed so early in the morning: but we were rewarded by a rare sight, the almost full moon about to set, huge and eerily apricot-colored, in an otherwise pitch-black sky.

About quarter past four the bus arrived for us. It took us out River Road, through Guerneville and Monte Rio and Jenner, then up Highway 1, Meyers Grade Road, and Seaview Road to the parking lot at Fort Ross School — about thirty miles from Forestville, but a slow slow grind; some of the roads were hardly wide enough for the bus, and the turns were tight, the drop-offs scary.

We arrived at the parking lot, still dark, about five-thirty, grouped for a count and instructions, did a few stretching exercises, and waited for our six o'clock departure time. I suddenly realized I'd forgotten to wear a hat: at 3:30 am, a hat was the last thing in my mind, and I'd neglected to set it out with my pack the night before. Oh well: I've done without before.

We set off almost on schedule just a few minutes past six, daylight by now well on the way. The morning sun was glorious through the tall firs and redwoods, and we walked past a few dooryards surprisingly tucked behind fences — you never realize how many people live out here in so apparently remote a place.

When I was in high school, in the early 1950s, the few students whose families lived out here usually boarded in town — Sebastopol — during the winter months. My mother taught a few years at Fort Ross school, and after only a few weeks realized she'd have to live out near the school; the commute from Hessel, 45 miles away, would take a good two hours in fair weather, much longer in heavy fog or rain. (She always had a chain saw and a shovel in the car.)

We walked three and a half miles up Seaview Road, then turned onto Kruse Ranch Road for another half mile, to Plantation. I knew this from the old days; Mom and my two youngest brothers lived here for a few months — I think they were boarded by school families by turns during her tenure: Fort Ross School, Plantation, Salt Point, Timber Cove. (Finally she found a place of her own, near the north end of the bridge over the mouth of the Russian River near Jenner, in a little two-room shack that disappeared long ago.)

In those days Plantation was a rather run-down boarding school run by the Crittendon family. Now it's a much more polished looking farm camp; I can imagine it would make a fine summer experience for kids needing to learn the basic skills of hard work and healthy living.

The sun was slanting down brightly over the gleaming white dormers of the main house, and we all gathered around outside the restored Druids Hall, where volunteers cooked a welcome breakfast for us — scrambled eggs and bacon, beans, rice and salsa, tortillas, and cases of fresh peaches and strawberries; best of all, plenty of good hot coffee — and, of course, the possibility of a pit stop.

I was impressed with Plantation. Improbable as it seems, it was a working resort a century or so ago; people rode up on stage coaches. By 1871 there was a saloon and a stage house nere and that same year a school was organized. The Druids Hall went up in the late 1870s — people needed their society in those days — and a post office followed at the turn of the century.

After half an hour or so we resumed the walk, continuing on Kruse Ranch Road, then on narrow trails through fairly dense forest in Kruse Rhododendron State Natural Reserve, where the native rhododendrons, lanky and a bit past their peak, still showed blue and purple high among firs and redwoods.

In the understory, at our feet at the edge of road and trail, among the ferns, we saw lilies, orchids, iris, and a number of other flowers — Khloris knows I am no botanical expert; I'm content to enjoy the imponderable generosity of their mere flowering existence.

By now, of course, we were descending at a pretty good clip; Plantation was about a thousand feet above sea level; we were headed for the coast. (Our starting point at Fort Ross School was the highest point of the day, at 1285 feet.)

In the dense forest my trail-mapping app lost sight of the GPS satellites it needs, but on a walk this long I think the resulting margin of error is acceptable. (You can download the .kmz file of waypoints for the entire walk from my website.)

After about three hours' walking, not including the breakfast break, we hit sea level at Stump Beach, downcoast from Fisk Mill Cove, which looked to me like about the one-third point on the walk. This part of the northern Sonoma coast, from Jenner at the mouth of the Russian River up to Sea Ranch or so, is studded with coves, most of which were used for loading lumber onto schooners in the sixty years or so after the Gold Rush.
Fisk Mill Cove, Gerstle Cove, Ocean Cove, Stillwater Cove, Timber Cove: we skirted all of these, sometimes on trails in parks, sometimes bushwhacking across fields, a couple of times marching three or four abreast in one lane of Highway 1, when twice it was restricted to one-way car traffic just to accommodate us.

The flowers were truly extraordinary. Reds, orange, yellows, blues, most of the blooms quite small of course — these plants have to be thrifty on their windswept, salt-sprayed bluffs. At times we came to groves of low mounding beach cypress; our trail even entered these mounds at times, and we found ourselves in dark, fragrant caves.

At Gerstle Cove we headed inland, climbing through fairly thick forest to cross the highway and head for the picnic grounds at Woodside Campgrounds in Salt Point State Park. Sadly, because of the California state deficit, many of the state park facilities are closed; but these campgrounds are operating — though curiously empty at the moment. The Fort Ross Store provided sandwiches, milk, and juice, and we sat at a picnic table, Thérèse and I and an interesting woman who joined us.

photo: Thérèse Shere

Among these 130 people there were few solitaries. Most seemed to be in pairs, some in larger groups, families perhaps, or walking buddies. Most seemed pretty well geared, many with hiking sticks and backpack-canteens; and though Jeff had cautioned us against carrying backpacks — and offered "sag wagons," cars that convoyed along and met us at strategic locations, to carry any packs, coats, extra shoes and the like for us, still nearly everyone had a day pack or a fanny pack or something of the sort. (I wore my hiking bandolier, which carries a one-liter water bottle, my iPhone and a couple of external batteries, a handful or two of dried figs and another handful or two of salted nuts, a notebook, sunglasses, and the like.)

By now it was past two o'clock, and I began to wonder how we'd ever manage to arrive at Fort Ross by six. We headed back to the coast, skirting Ocean Cove by walking on the highway for a quarter-mile or so, then returning to the trail along the edge of the bluff, southeasterly to Stillwater Cove. Here we took a detour up the Stillwater Ranch driveway, past its handsome stone house and its annoying peacock, and into Stillwater Park, one of Sonoma County's regional parks, where I was surprised to find the one-room Fort Ross schoolhouse — so surprised that I didn't think to photograph it, even though it was the building my mother taught in half a century ago — before it was declared surplus property, given to the state, then abandoned to the county's care, occasioning its relocation in this historically irrelevant place.

Oh well. From Stillwater we head westerly, away from the coast, up a pretty steep trail and through a private homeowners' association reserve — the sort of thing that can only be done by special permission, one of the reasons it made sense to walk in this group. This being the county historical society, and our leader being a retired history teacher, we took a short detour to ring a historical bell.

Before long we reached Timber Cove Road, whose quite steep, dead straight descent south to the coast was probably my least favorite part of the walk. Downhill on asphalt, after twelve or fifteen miles on the trail, is hard on toes and calves. We kept to the soft edge alongside the road where possible, but it was pretty narrow.

But soon enough we were at Timber Cove. I stepped into the Timber Cove Inn and phoned home to arrange for a pickup at Fort Ross, as we'd decided not to ride the bus back — it was going back via our start-point at Fort Ross School, and would take a long time, on twisty roads in the dark, right after dinner: not an attractive prospect.

The other 129 walkers were out in the parking lot, where the sag wagons and the trailer with its two portable toilets were steadying the troops. We were within shouting distance, only three miles or so, of our destination. But first our leader wanted to show us Beniamino Bufano's Madonna of the Expanding Universe, a 93-foot obelisk in the sculptor's characteristic naive-deco style which often strikes me as simple-minded, but occasionally attains considerable strength.

This particular piece, probably unfinished, takes a lot of thought if it isn't to be dismissed (or for that matter accepted) too glibly. There's no denying its seriousness of intent, and any work of art with so much thought, work, and intention behind its creation deserves reflective appreciation.

I won't describe it; you can read about it here. You must know, though, that it is the property of the State, and placed in a state park, the second-smallest in California — just big enough, we were told in an interesting and very enthusiastic little lecture by the park ranger, to contain it should it topple, which Poseidon forbid.

(The smallest state park contains Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, in Los Angeles: the two parks, and the two works of art they contain, make an interesting symmetry: the product of compulsive idealist outsider artists during the peak of Modernism, with foreshadowings, ironically, of the most intellectual conceptual art that would seem to displace them utterly in the history of 20th century art.)
We single-filed away from the Madonna on what struck me the most dangerous part of the walk, a dozen feet on a tight path that skirted a drop of fifty feet or so to the rocks below. At one point I stumbled on my own shoe and caught hold a branch hanging over the void: it would never have held me, but it steadied me, and I didn't attract any attention that I noticed…

After a half-mile or so on the highway, again protected by flashing red lights at each end of the stretch, we turned once again toward the coast, walking through first a private campground, then someone's side yard — amazing, that people can privately own territory at the very edge of the continent. We stepped through a private gate, walked through another enchanting field of flowers, and then surprisingly trod a hundred feet or so of ice plant, the succulent leaves breaking and weeping underfoot.

Another grove of cypress, another stretch of roadside trail, and then we came to a board gate at a fence. In a ludicrously clumsy ballet 130 of us laboriously hauled ourselves over the boards, our toilet-truck standing by in case of emergency I suppose; and then we set out again through a long final field, some of the most difficult footing of the day, a cow-pasture full of gopher holes, molehills, and hidden pools and runnels. This led to a second set of board gates, and here I actually had the sense, after watching a few people climb over them, to find the sliding bolt, draw it back, and open the gate for the others. (Of course, not being that smart, I'd already laboriously climbed it myself.)

photo: Thérèse Shere

By now the light was changing; the wind had come up; we were all ready to end the walk — and the fort still lay a mile or so off. All discipline was gone, 130 walkers were scattered across the cow-pasture, many toiling along a track, others of us heading on our own ideas of a more direct route to where we thought the fort must lie, teasingly out of view.

And then there we were. An asphalt road led underneath an overhanging cypress; beyond, the school buses were parked, and the sag wagons, and there was fragrant smoke in the air. We walked past the Call house, then through the stockade gate. I hadn't been here in years, not since the last big earthquake caused a lot of damage, and Highway 1 was routed away from the site, and the old Russian church was restored, and more recently a replica was built of the imposing Magazine, which I hadn't known about at all.

photo: Thérèse Shere

Another crew of volunteers were cooking up rice, beans and chicken in huge iron pots over an open fire. There was an array of what I think of as Oklahoma funeral salads: potato salads, macaroni salads, olive-and-sweet pepper salads. The rolls had been donated by Franco American, and took me back sixty-five years when they were a family favorite in my childhood; and the butter was churned on the spot from cream donated by neighboring milk-cows. Plenty of coffee; plenty of fresh fruit; delicious Russian cookies. It was cold, an hour and a half later than we'd planned, and we hunched over our plates.

Then came our reward: a quick lecture on the history of the site, and a cannon salute. Walkers volunteered for the five-man crew: Tent the vent! Clear the piece! Fire in the hole! Our leader set a match to the fuse; we covered our ears; a fine loud satisfying POP! roared across the champs-de-Mars, and our day was over.

It was l'heure bleue, and the full moon had climbed to the tip of a windblown cypress east of the stockade. Lindsey was waiting for us in the parking lot, we thought; soon I'd be home, perhaps with a celebratory Martini.

Of course it wasn't quite so simple. Unsure of our exact location, and concerned that we hadn't shown up in the parking lot, she'd driven off — to Fort Ross School; to Plantation; to Timber Cove, where she messaged me. Alas, there is virtually no cell phone coverage out on that coast. Ultimately we found one another, of course, after we'd walked another mile or two between parking lot and stockade. A long day; a strange day; a tiring day; a glorious day. I realize, just now, typing these words, I'd do it again.

Keener sounds: Robert Erickson at Mills College

"WHAT IS IT FOR?", Ann asked, as we sat in her small comfortable small living room after the concert. We'd been reflecting on the concert we'd just heard, and its small audience — no more than forty or fifty people, I'd guess, scattered through the nicely restored concert hall out at Mills College.

It was a one-man concert: five pieces by Robert Erickson (1917-1997), who was my composition teacher, and who I suspect guided my career in other ways, and whom I thanked, partly, by writing his biography, Thinking Sound Music. (In fact it was Ann whose Fallen Leaf Press published the book, back in 1995.)

"I mean," she went on, "why do composers go on writing music; it's so hard." Left unsaid: "And so few seem to understand, or be interested, or even be aware."

Another few beats of silence, while I thought about my grandson Simon, another composer. Well, I thought, what is life for; it's for making more life. Same for music: we go on composing, so the next generation can compose.

A high percentage of the audience had in fact been other composers; many of us Eridkson's students, at one time or another. We're a loyal crew, partly for human reasons, partly for musical. Human: Bob was enterprising, patient, affable (though he could be crusty too), generally optimistic, practical, generous. (He refused any payment from me for my lessons, knowing I had hardly any money to spare.)

Musical: well, those reasons were evident at the concert. If there are musical "mavericks," Erickson is certainly among them. He was born in Marquette, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and grew up in a Swedish-American family in a backwoods setting; but his intellectual curiosity and his remarkably sensitive ear — encouraged by early teachers — took him ultimately to Chicago where he met Modernism. Industry, Modernism, and an innate gregariousness informed the rest of his career: teaching, broadcasting (he was an early music director at Berkeley's KPFAA), writing, above all composing.

We're so conditioned these days to think in terms of quantity. There are billions and billions of us humans on this planet, millions and millions in this state: if a concert has a small turnout, something seems wrong. But as Gertrude Stein said,

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.

The Making of Americans, p.289

Composers compose similarly, I think, though with luck we all work for colleagues as well as ourselves and strangers.


Unfortunately the fundamentally paranoid streak in the American temperament, which promotes healthy skepticism to outright mistrust, leads audiences — and, worse, what critical establishment remains — to reject convivia not themselves embraced as exclusive and "elitist." (Think, for example, of the contempt lavished on Stein's own salon.) So we who "like," want, and listen to new music have in the last fifty years become increasingly marginalized, not by our own activity (or lack of activity) but by what you might call a culture-historical process.

(The late Milton Babbitt wrote about this a generation and more ago, in an essay commissioned by the magazine High Fidelity. He called his article "The Composer as Specialist," but the editors re-titled it, without consulting him, "Who Cares If You Listen?" The title, much more widely read than the article itself (which in this online version is dry and "difficult", like much of Babbitt's music), contributed to the marginalization of new music in the United States.)

Erickson tended to shrug off failure and rejection. He preferred to focus on the positive values of whatever resulted from his work, the performances of his music, the work of his students; he met indifference or, worse, distraction — faculty meetings, for example — with a cheerful kind of inattention. He knew, I'm sure, that it's Pythagorus, Euripides, and Epicurus who are remembered, who are "important," not the hundreds of nameless citizens who ignored them at best, hounded them at worst.

Still, it's hard not to be discouraged at the inattention of even the musical community to work of such interest and beauty as Robert Erickson's. He taught at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, and the San Francisco Conservatory: interestingly, only Mills College, among the important Bay Area music departments, seems to be curious about his work and influence. (He never taught at Mills, but one of his most celebrated students, Pauline Oliveros, oversaw the relocation of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, one of his "step-children," to Mills College in 1967.)

---

AND WHAT OF HIS MUSIC did we hear Saturday night at Mills College? The evening began with a clip from a San Diego television story about Erickson's activity as a soundcatcher, prowling towers, airports, and electric substations with a shotgun mike and a portable tape recorder: he was always keen to find new sounds in everyday modern life, sounds that could contribute to his composition, either directly as sonic ingredients or indirectly as suggesting areas of sonic awareness.

Then came an electronic example of that: Roddy (1966), for tape; a work of musique concrète whose original sounds were improvised (following the composer's scenarios) on a percussion instrument made by clamping various lengths of steel rod to the sounding board of a piano, then altered and edited in the Tape Music Center studio.

To my ear the "performance" of the tape — I mean its playback in the spacious Mills College Concert Hall — was more artifact than expression. Roddy, like much tape music, seems to me to be chamber music, to need intimacy between listener and sound source; the separation of the loudspeakers, their distance from the listening ear, and the awareness of a lack of listening community within the audience all made the piece more intellectually interesting than artistically expressive. But the rest of the program more than made up for this.

I had never heard the Trio (1953), for violin, viola, and piano, in a live performance before, and was charmed and fascinated by its eccentricity. The piece is tonally melodic, brusque and edgy in its architecture. The piano writing is non-pianistic, often single-lined though also often chordal, given (like the string material) to insistantly repeated notes. Erickson never showed much interest, as far as I know, in jazz for itself; but his music often reminds me of bebop. (A lyrical episode reminds me, oddly, of Dvorak.)

But this Trio also made me think of his Swedish-American heritage. Violinist and violist saw away at their instruments, alternating between careful collaboration and go-it-alone soloistics, with a determination (and a beauty and skill, in this performance) that seems utterly unselfconscious, utterly uninterested in musical conventions other than those dictated by the instruments themselves. Two quick movements, three minutes, then four; and it's over.

Next came Pacific Sirens (1969), for tape (altered environmental sounds, this time from the ocean near San Diego) and a group of sustaining instruments (in this case cello, trombone, flute, bass clarinet, trumpet, clarinet, two contrabasses, and three percussionists). Conducted (which in this case really means rehearsed and shaped) by Steed Cowart, the performance seemed utterly authentic, with all the contemplative beauty I remember from performances years ago. The instruments handed off sustained pitches effortlessly, overlapping and merging, occasionally emerging more or less soloistically (trombone; flute-and-trumpet; rolls on suspended cymbals and drums), as one's attention, at the beach, drifts from one suddenly isolated observation of sonic or visual or even tactile detail to another, always aware simultaneously of the more generally undistinguished fabric of all these cumulative events.

After an intermission, Gloria Justen returned to play Summer Music (1974), another environmentally responsive piece; its ongoing, meditative violin melody counterposed to a tape recording of processed and filtered natural sounds — a babbling brook, in fact, considerably altered but retaining its sounds-of-nature atmosphere. And the concert ended with a truly magnificent performance of The Idea of Order at Key West (1979), a setting of Wallace Stevens's poem for soprano, flute, clarinet, trumpet, viola, and cello.

Where Pacific Sirens is concrete, using natural sounds as if to anchor the music's process, the procedure Erickson uses to build a sonic artistic statement reflective of his impressions on reading about the sirens who sang to Odysseus and the moaning, singing sounds sailors still hear when rounding certain rocks on the Italian coast; The Idea of Order at Key West is more abstract. Like the unnamed "she" of the poem, the composer makes his music

…beyond the genius of the sea,
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood…

The music proceeds by repeated held tones, spinning into more quickening elements, always contrasting those two ideas but within no immediately apparent structural process: it is incantatory, improvisatory, yet clearly carefully (if intuitively) measured out. Many composers have turned to Stevens for material; few, perhaps none, have so persuasively achieved a sonic equivalent of his poised, intelligent, crystalline yet often decorative poetry.

What Stevens writes about — the nature of song as a generative, mediating influence between singer and setting — is a central issue of music itself, and certainly of the composition of music. "She" is of course Wallace Stevens, and Robert Erickson, as she measures

to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.…

as the poet and the composer are the single artificers of theirs, in their "Blessed rage for order…

The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Looking over these notes I realize how cunningly the program had been chosen and arranged, clearly and overwhelmingly setting Erickson in place as a composer whose music mediates musicianship and the environment. Perhaps this explains his neglect by the musical establishment, which is nothing if not urban, metropolitan even. The immediate effect of the material in the early Trio is very different indeed from that of Pacific Sirens or The Idea of Order at Key West; but on reconsideration they represent different moments in a body of work that's personal, intuitive though tremendously knowledgable, patient, aware of tonality but careless of conventions.

The perfomances were marvelous; all the musicians deserve mention. They were, first of all, Christine Abraham, the magnificent soprano in The Idea of Order at Key West. She has a very fine instrument; her elocution was spot-on; and her musicianship admirable. I can't imagine anyone singing this demanding cantata better. Then there was Gloria Justen, violin; Nils Bultmann, viola; Belle Bulwinkle, piano; Gianna Abondolo, cello; Jen Baker, trombone, Tod Brody, flute, Rachel Condry, bass clarinet; Tom Dambly, trumpet; Peter Josheff, clarinet; Adam Lowdermilk and Richard Worn, contrabasses; and Daniel Steffey, William Winant, and Anna Wray, percussion. Steed Cowart presides over this Mills Performing Group.

Fortunately, while neglected by the concert hall, Robert Erickson is fairly well represented by recordings, including all titles mentioned here except Roddy and, regrettably, the Trio. (Maybe the Mills Performing Group will rectify that omission.) Four works can be downloaded free at Community Audio, among them The Idea of Order at Key West.

Michael Milani: It Happens Every Morning

I'VE BEEN READING three books simultaneously: James Joyce's Ulysses, Victor Navasky's A Matter of Opinion, and Michael Milani's It Happens Every Morning. A modernist classic of fiction; a liberal journalist's memoir; a self-published account of the history and actors in the wholesale produce business in San Francisco.

Damned if there isn't a common theme: the bonhomie — is there an English term for it? — of convivial men (alas not too many women here) united in an overwhelming subculture. And each author's book finds in the theme a common narrative quality, however differently expressed: overridingly entertaining, comic exuberance out of a context of (and here the books diverge a bit) privation, or disillusion, or hard work.

As you might suspect, Milani's is the quickest read: 28 chapters and an epilogue in 325 pages of loose prose, not much edited, more enthusiastic than literary. Some of the pages may find your attention flagging; the accounts of the many produce-brokerage companies occasionally recall the Book of Numbers in their compulsion to include every begat, consequential or not. But there are so many practical jokes, drinking stories, funny asides, and improbable nicknames you don't dare skim over such passages.

More seriously, Milani describes the changing character of the business, from the late 19th century when produce was brought by horse-drawn wagons from San Mateo county to the city (only the lead wagoneer awake, the others dozing behind him, trusting their horses to follow the familiar route) to the days of shrinkwrap and standardization. He records the in-fighting resulting from city redevelopment's forced relocation of the business, meticulously examining motives and methods. And implicit in the book is the Italian-American theme of family, extended family, and business, with occasional appearances of goons and thugs.

Milani was born in 1937. In his teens he worked summers in his father's wholesale business, and it's easy to see why the camaraderie, coupled with a strong sense of family, led him into the business in his turn — after college, where he studied modern American literature, of all things. (I wonder if he read Pietro di Donato, or Frank Norris. Probably.) It Happens Every Morning — the title is no doubt intentionally a little risqué — certainly doesn't look like a Stanford literature student's writing: it's about as proletarian as you can get. But its portrayals of a century of change in a vital but largely invisible industry, and of the very human, smart, funny, fiercely competitive yet often surprisingly sentimental men who compose that industry, are truly memorable, in my opinion.

Of course I have a fondness for this sort of thing. This book will go next to The First Forty Years, Dieter Tede's account of his own San Francisco-based Marine Chartering Company, and The Flying Cloud and Her First Passengers, an account of the first voyage of the clipper ship The Flying Cloud around Cape Horn, written by Margaret Lyon and Flora Reynolds. Very small editions, completely uncommercial, these books preserve both small but significant slices of history while celebrating the humanity and intelligence of amateur writing in the best sense.

It Happens Every Morning and The First Forty Years can be found, in short supply, at Amazon.com; The Flying Cloud remains in print and is available from Center for the Book at Mills College.

Books, wine, war, talk

TAKING A BREAK from reading about Sicily, on Lindsey's advice, I've just read two books touching on World War II, a subject that's never really attracted me. (Lindsey's mother was a WWII buff, watching all the documentaries, reading all the books; and Lindsey herself recently read William Shirer's mammoth The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.)

The Twentieth Century was a violent one. Militarily I suppose it began in 1870 with the Franco-Prussian War; Central and Western Europe wasn't to see much peace from then until 1945, and the reconstruction of Western Europe was hardly complete until the 1960s. I used to think of World War II as a terrible interruption in the century; in fact, it was a termination.

(A termination of one kind of terror, perhaps followed by the beginning of another kind — not military but economic. Jury's out on that; we're in the midst of it, and can't see the forest for the trees.)

Lately World War II has been too much in mind, as if we knew, somehow, that we were on the cusp of another such trial. There's been a lot of discussion, for example, of honor and culpability, a lot of blame thrown at people whose own trials we can never really know. I'm thinking, for example, of Janet Malcolm's treatment of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, in Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007), a book that annoyed me considerably when it appeared. We must investigate; we must document; we must discuss: but we must never cast judgment backward on the past; it's hard enough to practice it on the present.

We can, however, learn. This is what Robert Mnookin does in his book Bargaining with the Devil. It's written as an argument for negotiation, even at times negotiation with enemies, even those one might think of as evil (or at least as having done evil things); but in support of that thesis Mnookin recounts two examples drawn from the period of World War II: Winston Churchill's refusal to negotiate with Hitler in May 1940 — there are times when even Mnookin agrees it's wrong to negotiate — and Rudolf Kasztner's decision to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann over the release of Jews from Hungary in the waning days of the war.

A third example, the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky and his refusal to negotiate with the KGB, contrasts vividly with Nelson Mandela's negotiations with F.W. de Klerk — negotiations that contributed to the end of apartheid in the Union of South Africa. (De Klerk himself is not examined in any great length, but appears as a sympathetic character emerging from an evil system: it would be interesting to hear a conversation between him and Mikhail Gorbachev.)

Mnookin's book appears at the right historical moment, when some of the American Right is vilifying the State Department's evident embrace of negotiation and diplomacy as the right course, even with potential enemies. Beyond its immediate political value, though, Bargaining With the Devil is an interesting book and one offering useful application to everyday life: I'm glad I read it.

Bargaining With the Devil: Simon & Schuster, 2010

Exposition, Development, Recapitulation

I think there's something to be said for the idea that Modernism stands at the beginning of the third of three great ages of human existence: the one preceding the awareness of consciousness, which Julian Jaynes puts at about the time of Homer; then a long age which is characterized by the long slow crescendo of human consciousness; and then a third age that begins with the awareness of the awareness of consciousness.

Well, perhaps Modernism is really best understood as a logical development of the Renaissance, whose “moment” is the true beginning (as if a single moment can define it) of this third age. But if you draw a rough analogy to the development of an individual human, maybe it would be:

1: Human life unaware of consciousness. Infancy-childhood: human history up to the Renaissance. (Sorry, Age of Pericles; I know you really belong later; you jumped the gun.) Prehistory.

2: Human life aware of consciousness. Adolescence: human history Age of Pericles-Modernism. History.

3: Human life aware of the consequences of the awareness of consciousness. Adulthood: Modernism on. Will there be an early senescence? Probably. Metahistory, or Historicism.

This looks like college-student late-night talk, I know. And it’s influenced by a book many think of as dubious, Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977). Jaynes, an American psychologist who published no other book, held consciousness to be a cultural construct, not an autonomous function of the individual human “mind.” (Those are precautionary quotes; let’s not take up the question of “mind” here.) As I recall — I read the book a long time ago, and haven’t revisited it — he takes care not to fix an exact date or cultural “moment” at which this construct appears; but he does identify it, in the Mediterranean context, with the Homeric age, arising between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Jaynes cites evidence for his hypothesis in linguistic and economic models, among others, and finds in psychological evidence of our own time parallels to the historical (and prehistorical) patterns of unconsciousness, consciousness, and their interfaces. I found his discussions persuasive; and am particularly interested now to read scientists arguing for the abrupt big changes that can determine human behavior, collectively (politically) as well as individually. Nassim Taleb, in The Black Swan, discusses such cataclysms in the economic sphere; the research geologist Dave Wahl, in the current issue of Terrain, discusses them with respect to climatological changes. (Taleb; my earlier blog on Taleb ; Wahl.)

Historicism is inevitably recursive. I’ve always loved Francis Ponge’s description of recursive irony — he cites Maurice Ravel's La Valse — as typical of periods "when rhetoric, dying, examines itself.” (Lane Dunlop's translation, in Soap [London: Jonathan Cape, 1969]; in the original Ce genre est particulier aux epoques ou la rhetorique est perdue, se cherche: [Le Savon: Paris: Gallimard, 1967]). [Cited in my article “What's the Matter with Today's Experimental Music? Organized Sound Too Rarely Heard,” Notes, December, 1993.]

To continue woolgathering: there may be a parallel between all this and the inevitable process which finds "art" declining from Religion to Art to Entertainment. (See Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ; and see also Wikipedia on Walter Benjamin. Come to think of it, Benjamin himself should be added to Jaynes, Cage, Duchamp, and many others as a seminal organizer of aware-or-consciousness consciousness.)

Oral history

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, January 12, 2009

JOHN WHITING'S COMMENT to the previous post here sent me an an egosurf to his My KPFA - an Historical Footnote , a repository of “Conversations, Coast to Coast" with a number of the workers in that vineyard we know as KPFA, the non-commercial radio station located in Berkeley, California.I was there as Music Director from 1964 to 1967 and stayed on a couple of years to work part-time. Since many of us tended to cover extra assignments, I was also the Folio Editor for a stretch, editing the program guide.

John has placed on his Historical Footnote interviews with Chris Koch, Phil Elwood, Robin Blaser, Henry Jacobs, Al Silbowitz, Richard Moore, Scott Keech, David Salniker, Marci Lockwood, Dick Bunce, Pat Scott, Larry Bensky, William Mandel, Erik Bauersfeld, Ernest Lowe, Peter Frank, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maria Gallardin, Charles Amirkhanian, Loren Rush, Alan Rich, Steve Bell, Ned Paynter, Wil Ogdon, Jack Nessel, Frank Sherman and me. Next time your’e laid up and want to listen to a few yours of intelligent conversation about an amazing institution, give this a try!

Two points here: First, on KPFA: SInce I was in the middle of it when I was there, I couldn't really see it from the outside; but I have the idea it was an extremely influential and instrumental agent in the formation of the uniquely energetic cultural atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay Area of those days, and what days they were.

Second, Whiting's work strikes me as an approach to a problem I've been noticing lately: lots of us oldtimers are dying off, and not much about our various work is on the record. We need a series of good, professional oral histories, but the big boys are out of cash and pick and choose very carefully their subjects. We should all begin to carry pocket recorders around with us at all times — I suspect many of us do — and make our own damn oral histories. I think I'll start doing this.

"Values," abstraction, accumulation, chaos

FOR SOME TIME NOW I've wanted to write about a fascinating book read last month, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007). Alas, I read it from the library, and did not take notes; I won't write about it in any critical detail here. (There's an extended discussion of the book online.)
Briefly, it's Taleb's point that history is the litany of convulsive unexpected events punctuating daily predictability. (It occurs to me that The Blog is a convenient analogy.) The title refers to the scientific and philosophical certainty, going back to Aristotle, that swans are white, a black one being exceedingly improbable — a certainty convulsed by the discovery of black ones when Australia was "discovered" in the 17th century.
Taleb uses analogy and metaphor to propel his book, analogy and metaphor and above all humor; and he does this so well that one races through it where one should stop and consider, take note and perhaps demur.
Another bird metaphor intrudes: his Turkey Narrative. The turkey, according to Taleb, assumes that tomorrow will be just like today, someone will come and feed it as has happened every day of his life. The turkey does not suspect that final morning, when instead of being fed he'll be sent to slaughter.
As you might have suspected, The Black Swan is largely about Wall Street. It is also an assault on the idea of the Bell Curve, on the notion that Experts Are Infallible, on The narrative fallacy which, according to the Wikipedia discussion referenced above,

refers to our tendency to construct stories around facts, which … may serve a purpose, but when someone begins to believe the stories and accommodate facts into the stories, they are likely to err.

and on the division of information among the categories Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
That last will sound familiar to those whose memories go back to the early days of the present Iraq war. I always thought in not amusing that Secretary Rumsfeld talked about "unknown unknowns"; it seemed a perfectly legitimate concept to me. Turns out that Nassim Taleb was a consultant, on occasion, to the Department of Defense. Indeed he writes, in The Black Swan, of a brainstorming session he attended in Las Vegas, of all places:

The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and ated like philosophers… I came out of the meeting realizing that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. … the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defense people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk. (p. 126)

TALEB REFERS TO HIMSELF as a "skeptical pragmatist," a phrase I like; and divides the world we live in into two mental constructs: Mediocristan, "the province dominated by the mediocre, with few extreme successes or failures," ruled by the bell curve; and Extremistan, "the province where the total can be conceivably impacted by a single observation," like that of the final arrival of the turkey-farmer. His book goes a long way to suggesting reasons for the institutional failure of the market this year, and indeed the statistical near-certainty that such failures will happen. Another publication, much smaller and less public, discusses a different philosophical approach to the problem: Money and the Crisis of Civilization, an essay by Charles Eisenstein published at Reality Sandwich, an online forum-magazine-construct so visually cluttered I haven't had the desire to explore it further.
I am impressed, though, with Eisenstein's essay (and thank Richard Burg for sending it to me). It explains the paper credit crisis very clearly (perhaps too simply, economists might object), and then comes to a startling conclusion. The entire affair is of course a gigantic Ponzi scheme (here again Wikipedia is entertaining): moreover, Eisenstein suggests, the entire history of capitalist economy is a Ponzi scheme, and the current crisis is another in what may be the death throes of capitalist economics as we've known it for the last century or so.
The startling conclusion is that Capitalism has very nearly eaten itself to death. The problem lies in the conversion of Things to Money. Money originated as a token of a pledge, an object to stand for the promise to pay in the future, with a service or a product, in return for a temporary loan symbolized by the token: a shell, gold, a slip of special paper, whatever.
Eisenstein recites the dismal litany of Things sacrificed, one after another in the several centuries of capitalist history, to the conversion into Money — which had gradually grown from token of delayed repayment to retained "Wealth":

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. …
The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the "developed" world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

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WHICH LEADS ME TO the phrase in today's subject-line. I think of this latest crisis, the one centered on the Global Economy and its collapse (though no doubt to be set right temporarily by the infusion of money promised, yet again, by an unknowable Future), as more evidence that contemporary social life is accelerating itself to death. Matt Matsuda writes about this in his book The Memory of the Modern (Oxford University Press US, 1996):

One key, recurring word explains all: acceleration. Pierre Nora begins Les Lieux de mémoire under its sign: "The acceleration of History: let us try to gauge the significance, beyond metaphor, of this phrase. An increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear." As History accelerates, the "lieux de mémoire" are designated sites which defy time's destroyer, the places of commemoration where memory anchors the past. My studies, rooted in the biology, technologies, and political economy of the late nineteenth century are somewhat differently oriented: they attempt to approximate Henri Bergson's understanding of memory as action and transformation. In looking to shattered monuments, financial markets, high-seed machines, and the nervous system, my subjects are not the memories preserved from an accelerating history, but histories of accelerated memory, subjected to the dramatic rhythms of an age.

(Think of Francis Ponge's note, in Soap, that that (French) literary device the momon is typical of late historical eras in which rhetoric, dying, turns on itself; Ravel's La Valse is a good example.)
If we're indeed in a "downhill slide," acceleration is as inevitable as gravity; putting on Henry Paulson's brakes will generate a lot of heat, very little light, and only somewhat slow the collapse of the monetary economy. So what should we do? In Taleb's words,

Snub your destiny. … You stand above the rat race and the pecking ordere, not outside it, if you do so by choice.
Quiting a high-payiing position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved… (p. 297)

And in Eisenstein's:

Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. So stop resisting the revolution in human beingness. If you want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, do not seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, allow your perspective to shift toward reunion, and think in terms of what you can give. What can you contribute to a more beautiful world? That is your only responsibility and your only security. The gifts you need to survive and enjoy will come to you easily, because what you do to the world, you do to yourself.

I THINK IT'S OUR endless tendency to evade the immediate that gets us into trouble, whether the evasion is prompted by boredom, distaste, laziness, or greed. It has something to do with our apparently also innate tendency to abstract and generalize, to categorize. Obviously it's useful to do that; it makes it possible to sort things out, to lay things aside for future use, to communicate concepts effectively (if not always truthfully) by using analogy and narrative. The problem is that it's so easy to forget that that's what you're doing, that you're dealing with not the thing but the idea of the thing. The Industrial and postindustrial ages have accelerated the extend to which the concept, the idea, has displaced the thing, the real. Profit-based economy is in a state of near-terminal confusion about this, generating commodities sold and bought for their code value, conceiving and generating services serving artificially generated needs.
When Senators Obama and McCain are asked what they will do about the economy they tend to talk about taxes, bailouts, jobs, mortgages: all of them very important politically. Lately Obama has also been talking about government kicking the economy by addressing infrastructure repair, which sounds a lot like a WPA effort: if so, good, say I: that was an triple effort aimed at improving the economy, employing the out of work, and providing for the community.
In the last analysis much of what I've been calling vaguely "the problem" results from the detachment of details from the context in which they exist. Money from an economy; concept from a reality; profit from an exchange; individuals from society. And, increasingly, it seems to me that this kind of detachment grows exponentially — accelerates, in fact — in a society whose numbers increase unsustainably, resulting in greater pressures of various kinds, and the temptation to turn against one's society, one's community, for sheer survival (as one thinks), rather than to trim one's individual sails, turn away from the accumulation of wealth, and take an appropriate place within the world as it is.
As the turbulence accompanying this process, and generated by it, continues, the things that truly matter to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are overcome by an accelerating accumulation of complexity leading to chaos. I hope the next Administration will think about these things. Perhaps the Department of Defense can give the departments of the Treasury and of Health and Human Services some pointers.

Gerhard Samuel 1924-2008

…s'il est de certaines paroles qui ne sont que les feuilles d'un arbre, il est de certains silences qui sont ceux de toute une foret.

Jean Biès: René Daumal

It is sad to hear of the death of Gerhard Samuel, of a heart attack, at the age of 83, in Seattle, where he had lived in retirement since 1997.

Gary, as we all always called him, was a mentor to me at first, a casual teacher, my first conductor, and an acquaintance; not only one of the leaves on the tree that led me to my maturity, but one of its most powerful branches; and now I hear in this new silence of his so many notes, so many tones of the music he led me to hear and, ultimately, to find.

I suppose I met him in 1963, the year I studied music, freed from the necessity to hold down a full-time job by the generosity of a patron (Edith Fitzell, a wonderful woman to whom I owe nearly everything of my life). As I wrote in my memoir, Getting There:

Let it be music, then: and I began studies, private lessons with Gerhard Samuel, who then conducted the Oakland Symphony. The first lesson was discouraging for both of us, I’m sure. He went to the piano and played four notes, one after another, and asked me to identify them. I couldn’t. They were G, D, A, and E; the open strings of a violin. Well, no matter, let’s work on them, he said, and before long they were burned into my mind, and we went on to more interesting things. I think he must have known I was not a performer, that I lacked every performing instinct. I would not practice; I didn’t play piano; I hadn’t touched a violin since I was seven years old. But clearly I did have some musical qualities; while he never praised them to me, I heard from others that he’d recommended me to them.

My “studies” with him involved attending all the rehearsals of the Oakland Symphony, listening for balances in every part of the hall, getting to know the music being prepared — not only from the score, which provided the notes and the form, but from the rehearsals, which revealed the importance of situational negotiations on such things as tempo and volume, the prominence of this group of instruments or that, the psychology of communication as conductor, section leader, or instrumentalist — not to mention the composer! — adjusted their various individual takes on the music to the evolving group process by which it came to life, finally, before an audience of two thousand people.

…

The early lessons with Gary were in his home in the Oakland hills, a tastefully furnished “ranch house” he’d named Villa Orpheus. The orchestral rehearsals were in the old Auditorium Theater, a fine small cube of a hall providing wonderful acoustics to an audience of two thousand. The first time I attended a rehearsal I think Gary introduced me to the orchestra, simply by way of explaining a stranger in their midst with no instrument in his hands. I was asked to turn pages for one of the bassoonists, who for some reason was playing not from his own part but from an orchestral score. (I later learned he was preparing to audition for Gary’s assistant conductor.) Awkwardly approaching an empty chair next to him I stepped on his wallet of spare reeds, lying open on the floor in front of him. I’m sure I smashed two or three. He was quite graceful about it, and later Robert Hughes proved to be an enthusiastic supporter of my music, commissioning in fact two of my best pieces — perhaps more because of his generalized enthusiasm for all things new than for the intrinsic appeal of my own music.

Gary invited me to attend the festival he had co-founded with Hughes and the composer Lou Harrison that year in Aptos, a hundred miles to the south, but I declined to go, thinking it too generous an offer. Gary was enthusiastic about and sympathetic to new regional music, and had asked to see the music I’d written by then. He seemed to like the songs — especially a fairly long one, setting Dylan Thomas’s “In my craft and silent art” for voice, recorder, and piano…

One of my first visits to the Berkeley radio station KPFA came in the summer of 1964, when I was asked to join a live-broadcast conversation with Gary in an interview conducted by the then-music director Will Ogdon. The subject was the Cabrillo Festival, which Gary had invited me to attend, finding me housing for one weekend. I was in on the conversation to provide a sort of review of the concerts, and I did that by listing Cabrillo's superiority, in terms of repertoire and performance, over the three-day Ojai Festival I'd heard a month or two earlier.

Comparisons are odious, Gary immediately said, deflecting all talk away from Ojai, and I learned two lessons at once: First, you do not commend one thing by demoting, irrelevantly, another. (I tried to remember that all the years afterward that I found myself working as a critic.) Second, you can draw attention where you want, and away from where you want, by taking a high moral position.

In 1965 Gary premiered my Small Concerto for Piano and Orchestra at the Cabrillo Festival, with the late Nathan Schwartz as the soloist. He'd had the score for some time, and had clearly studied it. He asked me to join him one morning at breakfast and asked me a few questions about it: what I thought of it, what music I liked, what the tempi and textures should be, that sort of thing. The concerto is in three movements, but is small in scale. I'd originally called it Concerto for piano and small orchestra, but he pointed out that I'd called for two Wagner tubas, a harmonium in the wings, English horn (muted!), and so on: the orchestra wasn't really small, but the concerto itself was. So we re-titled the piece.

It ran a little over six minutes, and when the tepid applause had died down he turned to the audience. "Since familiar patterns seem to be more enjoyable than unfamiliar ones and we would like to have this piece something you would look forward to hearing again we're going to play it once more." And they did, and I was grateful. (The piece has yet to receive another performance.)

A couple of years later Paul Hertelendy asked me to take over for him for six months as music critic of the Oakland Tribune, and I asked Gary what he thought of the idea. Don’t do it, Gary said; you’ll be forever marginalized, your music won’t be played, you’ll be seen as a part of the enemy camp. I was surprised at his vehemence and took his comment as strictly a personal expression and decided to give it a try, but in large measure he was right, I think. And he never performed my music again, though we stayed in touch.

The last time I had anything to do with him professionally was when the San Francisco Symphony inaugurated its "New and Unusual Music" series, in 1980, I think. Gary was invited to conduct one of the concerts, highlighted by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati's Credentials, or Think, Think, Lucky, a piece I greatly admired and had studied fairly closely. Composed twenty years earlier and set out in "graphic notation," the piece failed to persuade the musicians, and Gary had a rough time of it in rehearsals; after the performance itself, two or three of the musicians made rude sounds to express their contempt for the piece, or perhaps for the conductor. This produced a certain scandal, particularly when it turned out only one of the critics present realized (and reported) what was going on. Gary was, I thought, philosophical about the whole thing.

Gary's career with the Oakland Symphony ran for twelve seasons, from 1959 to 1971. In that time he continued the orchestra's historic commitment to contemporary music with performances of truly avant-garde work as well as the merely new: he led west coast orchestral premieres of the Ives Fourth Symphony, Terry Riley's In C, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen, and music by Henry Brant and Witold Lutosławski. He led the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra from 1961 to 1971; he convened a few seasons of Oakland Symphony Chamber Orchestra concerts in which he continued to feature new scores; he even led a few operas in the old Oakland Auditorium Theater for school presentations: I remember a fine production of Rossini's La Scala di seta.

He was instrumental in the creation of the Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra, which he handed to his assistant conductor, Robert Hughes; they continued the commitment to new music, culminating in an eloquent recording of Lou Harrison's Second (Elegiac) Symphony. And, most important perhaps, Gary was the founding conductor of the Cabrillo Music Festival, which he led for six seasons, firmly establishing yet another commitment to the performance of new music in presentations that did much to persuade audiences, if not always critics or boards of directors, of the perfectly normal place for such sound in the musical culture of their surroundings.

His programming was thoughtful and intelligent. I remember, for example, one subscription concert that went from Mozart's Masonic Funeral Music to Wagner's Siegfried's Rhine-Journey to Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. And his response to unfolding events was always humane and sympathetic: when JFK was assassinated he asked Darius Milhaud, then on faculty at Mills College, to commemorate the event, and within a few days was able to perform The Murder of a Great Chief of State, a piece which though neglected since quite measured up, I think, to the occasion.

In all this time he continued to compose. The first piece I recall hearing was an expressive 12-tone piece setting poems of Emily Dickinson; later scores turned away from serialism toward the neo-Impressionist collage-pieces that set in during the 1970s. I recall a concert he led as a guest conductor, after he'd left Oakland, when he joined a new piece of his, Looking at Orpheus Looking, to a performance of the Mozart Requiem: the entire concert was thrown thereby into the mode of retrospection — not nostalgia, but a reflective kind of perspective leaving Mozart (and Orpheus) in their own places, but linking those places the more organically to our own.

There are a few obituaries online, from San Francisco and Cincinnati and Seattle to begin with, all places where his presence made a difference to the musical and greater cultural scene. Some of them refer to difficulties his new-music loyalties presented with conservative boards: I myself feel strongly that his lifestyle, gay and liberal, was even more of a problem in the Oakland of 1970: it was notable that a requirement for his successor on the podium would be that he be a married man. Gary was truly a man of many parts, charming and irascible and impatient and generous; and above all a man of his time, of the postwar period reaching its peak in the glorious open-minded 1960s. It is sad to note his passing.