by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Along with Mandela, Remember Steven Biko
“It is ended,” South African premier Jacob Zuma said yesterday, and the finality of the statement – biblical echo intended or not – captured just how long a journey Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom was.
No one now would wish Mandela’s life had gone some other way than the way it did. But the ennobling of his years of imprisonment by his eventual freedom and triumphant leadership – and by the arranging of these events into a narrative of purpose and destiny – makes it possible to forget that there were many, many people (thousands; no, tens of thousands; no, more) whose lives ended in prisons like the one on Robben Island that Mandela walked out of with his smile wide and his head held high.
Steven Biko was one of those people. He died in prison in 1977, age thirty, bludgeoned to death by one of his guards.
In an essay a few years ago – almost twenty years ago, I realize – I proposed that, had he lived, Steven Biko, even more than Nelson Mandela, likely would have emerged as the president of a democratic South Africa. As an organizer of the Black Consciousness Movement, Biko showed exceptional leadership qualities, even after he was placed under a “banning order”:
Deprived of a public role, he developed a King William’s Town branch of the BCP; headquartered in a disused church, it became a vital agency for blacks of the district, and a focal point for political activity as well. Then and until the end of his life he led the Black Consciousness movement by working in stealth mode – holding clandestine meetings, using associates as go-betweens, and flouting the banning order as he dared.
Challenging the apartheid government’s account in the death of a colleague, he brought a hard truth to light:
Working behind the scenes, he was a key figure in the inquest into Mohapi’s death. It was established that Mohapi had “died by strangulation” but that no one was at fault – a blatant equivocation on the government’s part, but nonetheless a rare acknowledgment that a detainee had died suspiciously.
Imprisoned, he made his status as a “detainee” come to stand for all the ways in which apartheid was a system of detention:
What was being detained was the development of justice in South Africa, the long march toward notions of universal human rights.
Murdered, he called forth an extraordinary homily from Archbishop Desmond Tutu:
For Biko – Tutu uses the language of scripture – had been called by God to be his servant in South Africa, to proclaim God’s righteousness by calling blacks to the fullness of their humanity. Biko’s great insight was to see that “until blacks asserted their humanity and their personhood, there was not the remotest chance for reconciliation in South Africa.” (Tutu fiercely adds, “You don’t get reconciled to your dog, do you?”)
And from his friend the Anglican priest Aelred Stubbs:
In the purified church that will be reborn out of the destruction of this racist society, in that church he will be venerated everywhere, as he is by some of us now, as a true martyr of Christ, the Christ whom he maybe could not consciously be often in communion with because of the disfiguring guises with which the churches had distorted him.
Biko’s story began in the west with Richard Attenborough’s film Cry Freedom and Peter Gabriel’s song “Biko.” Now, as Nelson Mandela’s life story is capped with the film of Long Walk to Freedom, let’s not forget all the people of South Africa whose stories, lacking happy endings, need to be told even so.
Turn, Turn, Turn
I can’t remember the last time I actually liked using a Microsoft product. Most of them feel as ossified as this bone church.
This morning, though, I followed a tip from Nick Bilton and went to Photosynth, the company’s 3D-auto-photo-stitch application site. A new upgrade is due tomorrow (and made Safari crash today). Meanwhile, I circumambulated the bone church (the Sedec Ossuary in the Czech Republic), rubbernecked at the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, and peered in at this Neapolitan creche. Fifteen minutes unobjectionably spent — and without a single error message!
Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 14: Bruce Springsteen, “The Promised Land”
On December 15, 1978, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played the Winterland in San Francisco. The entire show was broadcast live over KSAN and several other FM stations in California. People listening at home had their cassette decks at the ready, and Springsteen knew it: he give a shout-out to “all you bootleggers” at one point in the three-hour show. Pressed on vinyl, the recording circulated (and made it into Tod Gold’s record collection in my hometown), and the concert came to be known as the greatest show from the person who was, and is, rock-and-roll’s greatest living showman.
I shudder to think that it happened on this day thirty-five years ago.
This recording of “The Promised Land” comes from that show, and the song is where the biblical story and Springsteen’s own story meet most pointedly. He originally meant to call Darkness on the Edge of Town “The Promise,” and all his music (as many have pointed out) is about promises: the promise of American freedom and prosperity, the ecstasy and sustenance promised in romantic love, the implied promises in the contracts between workers and employers, and the mutual promises made night after night, record after record, decade after decade, between an artist and his audience.
I am not a Springsteen devotee. His centrality and ubiquity run against the terms of devotion as I understand them. He belongs to everybody (I feel the same way about U2), and something is lost when that feeling is funneled down into individual devotion.
But I am a devotee of this live recording. Like the Band’s “Last Waltz” concert, it can be heard in full on wolfgangsvault.com; and just as I play the Band show – recorded at the Winterland on Thanksgiving 1976 – around Thanksgiving every year, so I play this Winterland show in the run-up to Christmas. ”This is powerful rock ‘n’ roll revivalism,” the site’s descriptive text has it, “and Springsteen makes the heat rain down upon the assembled Winterland parishioners.” It’s the concert the inescapable Springsteen version of “Santa Claus’ Is Comin’ to Town” comes from, and once you know that, the Christmas song bleeds into the whole concert, making the show festive and celebratory, or bringing out the festive and celebratory qualities of Springsteen’s concerts overall and joining them to the season. Even the name of the venue suggests the seasonal.
Winterland begins here, with a full-on expression — in one night of one band’s music — of promises made and fulfilled.
A Comfort to the People
It probably took the editors of Time about two minutes to choose Pope Francis as the magazine’s Person of the Year. And that’s one more reason why he was the right choice.
No, I don’t mean that he was the right choice because he saved the editors a lot of work. I mean that Francis made the choice easy for them through all he said and did this year, and that his way of making this easy goes to the heart of his pontificate and his reform of the church (because that’s what it is).
Last night I went with family to hear Handel’s Messiah – the Christmas portion – at the Church of the Transfiguration on Lower Fifth Avenue, better known as the Little Church Around the Corner. A friend of the family is a boy treble in the church’s choir of Men and Boys, the oldest such choir in the country.
It was all the Messiah one could ask for: chilly evening, lovely country church, crack historic choir, evergreen threaded through the eaves – and the music itself, restored to its nature as sacred oratorio through the setting and the care taken with the presentation, so that the sequence of biblical promises really sounded like promises, not remnants of the world-picture of a vanished prior age.
Near the end – right before the “Hallelujah” chorus, appended as it generally is – came the aria that goes “My yoke is easy, my burden light.”
That is what Francis has done this year. He has lightened the burden by a few pounds, loosened the yoke a notch or two; he has reminded us that the yoke can easy and the burden can be light.
This is not to say that religious belief of this kind doesn’t have its complications – beginning with the most complicated question of all, which is, as Newman had it, is the question of the “being of a God” – or that it isn’t worthy of the complicated society we live in.
It’s to say that the gospel suggests, as often as not, that there is something natural about the beliefs set out there: that they follow on aspects of human character that we consider natural to us when we invoke the divine, call him by name, recognize the stranger, feel for the person less fortunate, yearn to live better and more fully than we are doing, or acknowledge how far short we fall. Those great men Wojtyla and Ratzinger made it easy for us – for me, at least – to lose sight of this in their stress on the strenuous character of the gospel and the myriad obligations of insistence and resistance that (in their account) followed on it.
The yoke can be easy; the burden can be light. I don’t think it’s too much to say, in Advent, that this is a simple truth we’ve been waiting for – waiting for, some of us, for a third of our lives.
Nothing but Russian Playboys
There’s no shortage of data about how people read on electronic devices, but we still need to know much more about than we do about the different ways people read printed books. In short bursts or long stints? On the bus, or in bed? In silence, or in the ambient thrum of a crowded coffee bar, or with the sound of somebody else’s television coming through the wall from the next apartment, or with some voice compounded of our own voice and the author’s pronouncing in our inner ear?
Pankaj Mishra spent much of his twenties reading for up to ten hours a day in a village in northern India – much the way Nathaniel Hawthorne spent much of his twenties reading for many hours a day in the northern United States. All that solitude left him – surprisingly, but not that surprisingly – unable to get “the knack of reading in public, among strangers.”
So while on holiday, he explains, he takes “a vacation from reading,” the better to spy on other people’s reading habits.
The practice calls forth his inner aphorist:
… the tyranny of the Booker shortlist is to be feared wherever middle-aged travelers from Britain congregate.
One Cuban beach, rimmed with resorts, was utterly book-free, a wasteland of Russian editions of Playboy and Cosmopolitan.
Certainly, we need a moratorium on Asian and African translations of Ayn Rand.
Lately, Mishra’s best reading has come from rereading the books he amassed at that house in the Himalayas, where he found that
… in their familiar arrangements of words, on pages rust-browned and corrugated by the damp of many monsoons, I could remember the excitement I felt on those first readings, and I could still make out odds and ends of myself as I was then.
Weekend of Freedom in Rome
For 300 years the Pontifical University Urbaniana — a k a the Urban College — was located in the palace at the top of the Spanish Steps. For the past century it has been on the Janiculum Hill, between Vatican City and Trastevere: and that’s where several dozen scholars are meeting today and tomorrow for a major conference on Christianity and freedom organized by my Georgetown colleagues Thomas Farr and Timothy Samuel Shah.
As the Advent reflection I cited earlier this week points out, what we conceive of as “freedom from” is often better understood as “freedom for.” But Farr and Shah all through their work have kept in view the simple fact that for tens of millions of believers worldwide — and that’s putting the figure modestly — there is no “freedom for” anything because there is no “freedom from” persecution by anti-religious rulers or majorities. More regularly than we may suppose, the believers who lack such freedom are Christian believers, and the conference will explore the topic by placing the freedom of citizens in the context of freedom as it has been understood through Christian history — the history that began at the catacombs not far from the Urbaniana and led up to the declaration of the place as a pontifical institute by John XXIII shortly before Vatican II.
Shah summed up five myths about global Christian persecution on Foxnews.com earlier this week. Myth four, in his formulation, is this: “Christianity has been a net nuisance, bringing persecution onto itself.” That gets a certain attitude just right in just a few words.
That’s part of the catacomb of San Stefano above.
Artists, Make Room for the Audience
John Updike (in the foreword to Hugging the Shore) suggested that in a well-written book review something like a quarter of the words will be words drawn from the book under review.
The Times's reviewer of Alisa Solomon’s new cultural history of Fiddler on the Roof observes that principle, and so brings to prime time this incisive account of how artists making worldly works dealing with religious material (in Fiddler, director Jerome Robbins and performer Zero Mostel) fashion an artistic truth that cuts both ways:
In different fashions, both men were internally making the show’s primary contradictory gesture: embracing Jewish practice at arm’s length. `Fiddler’s own dialectics — Tevye’s constant on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand reasoning — expressed this ambivalence and made space for audience members, whether Jewish or not, at any point along several spectrums of observance, knowledge or parallel experience, to find a place of emotional entry.”
Rainy Day Afternoon Nos. 1-40
Somewhere, somehow, the music is still playing, the way the rain falling on the museum the afternoon I was there is still falling, somewhere, somehow.
The music is Thomas Tallis’s motet Spem in alium, sung by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir and rendered by the conceptual artist Janet Cardiff into The Forty Part Motet, and installed in a Castilian chapel at the Cloisters, the conglomeration of several actual medieval European chapels and cloisters on the rocky northern tip of Manhattan island.
Tallis was a Renaissance English composer who managed to write successfully under four different monarchs, varying his approach to suit the religious predilections of each.
Spem in alium, written for forty singers, has forty different vocal lines or parts. Most vocal music has four parts: soprano, alto, tenor, bass. Most audio recordings today are made in sixteen or twenty-four parts (tracks) and reduced, for “stereo” playback, to two channels: left and right. Cardiff’s installation uses technology to maintain fidelity to the original parts. Forty singers, male and female, were recorded individually on forty different tracks. For playback, forty state-of-the-art speakers are mounted on stands at head height and arranged in an oval about forty feet long (so I would guess). As the recording plays the forty voices come and go, rising and falling, separately and together, loud and soft, so that the music moves about the oval; and listeners, too, are free to move about the oval, following the shape of the piece as the spirit moves us.
I’d heard Spem in alium sung twice live by the Tallis Scholars, each in a remarkable setting. The first time, at the Jesuit church of St. Ignatius on Park Avenue in New York, the singers stood in two columns along the aisles and passed the music back and forth, so to speak. The second time, at Westminster Abbey in London – during the memorial service for the poet Ted Hughes – they stood in rows up near the altar, concert -style, and the profound orderliness of the piece and the performance, beautiful as it was, seemed at odds with Hughes’s looser, wilder, order-defying poetry.
Last Friday it was raining hard in New York. There was no reason to walk through Fort Tryon Park other than to go to the Cloisters, and the weather served to make devotees of those of us who did go.
The sound of forty voices could be heard from the admissions desk, but I couldn’t bear to plunge right in. So I went quickly through the museum, a favorite place of mine, keeping an eye out for religious miniatures — the Bury St. Edmunds cross, with the Hebrew prophecies of the Messiah carved into a piece of ivory a foot tall; a sandalwood coffin of Dives the size of a child’s ring finger — in anticipation of a piece of writing I am putting together.
And then I was in the oval, having timed my arrival roughly for the three minutes of silence between each play of of the 12-minute recording. And then the voices were coming at us. We were several dozen people in rainy-day deshabille. A bearded man followed the score on his iPhone. A couple clutched each other sculpturally. A woman in her thirties, artfully made up and dressed all in black, cocked her head to one side: a singer with a habit of hearing voices that way, her ear trained for concentration.
I was near some speakers that were putting out soprano voices. I heard what composer and conceptual artist alike want us to hear: the human quality of the voices, the interplay among them, the layered humanity of the whole.
The forty speakers, putting out forty channels, made this possible, just as they made it possible to circumambulate the work, following the sound around the oval.
But I found that the technology worked in a less dramatic way, too. The oval, inviting movement, made it possible to move, and so to relax, rather than having to sit at attention in a church or a concert hall. And the recording — and the knowledge that it was playing over and over again, all day long — made it possible to listen to the work rather than to seek to capture it aurally once and for all. Sure, I was missing much of it, but I would be able to hear it again in a few minutes.
I did hear it again. This time, some friends happened to walk in. We mimed hello, gave Spem in alium a thumbs-up four hundred years on. When the music ended we chatted for precisely three minutes. Then the music started again, forty twenty-first century human voices. This time I left the oval partway through, and went out into the rain, which was still falling.
Ars Brevis, Criticus Longa
Russell Banks’s new book of stories got a breathtaking review from Michiko Kakutani in the Times the other day. It wasn’t the review itself that took my breath away. It was the match of writer and critic. Because Kakutani was the critic who wrote the Times review of Banks’s novel Continental Drift that I remember reading over breakfast in the cafeteria at Fordham in the spring of my sophomore year: Wednesday, February 27, 1985.
That’s right: almost twenty-nine years ago, same novelist, same paper, same critic.
(Also in the paper that day: TIp O’Neill chided President Reagan for claiming that the U.S. “does not impose its will on other countries by force” while urging Congress to aid the contras in Nicaragua. Oh, and Bruce Springsteen won his first Grammy. That’s how long ago it was.)
We hear so much about the waves of change in the media business: Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, Newsweek closing and opening and opening and closing, New York magazine shifting from a weekly to a biweekly. We hear less about the people who (for whatever reason) manage to stay where they are, writing for publications that have figured out how stayed more or less in place. Jon Pareles has reviewed live music for the Times since I was in high school. So has David Fricke for Rolling Stone and Robert Hilburn for the Los Angeles Times. James Fallows has written several hundred pieces for the Atlantic since serving as a White House speechwriter during the Carter Administration. Robert Silvers has edited the New York Review of Books since 1963. Anna Wintour has been running Vogue since the days when punk was punk.
What are the effects of such Supreme Court-rivalling stability? That’s a discussion worth having.
Ray Davies, Laureate of the Local
Six degrees of separation – so much fun when applied as a social principle to college friends or movie stars – is useful as a literary-critical device, too. It’s a way of measuring influence and suggestivity. The strongest books link up with other books through a process Melville described (and Edmund Wilson propagated), in which “Genius the world round stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition unites them all.” In the same way, the strongest, vividest characters suggest kinship with other characters, real and imagined.
So it is with Binx Bolling, protagonist of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. No sooner had I begun to process Binx’s unmistakable points of kinship with Don Draper of Mad Men than Bill McGarvey on his America blog suggested another, more surprising kindred spirit: Ray Davies of the Kinks.
It’s not just that Davies lived for some years in New Orleans after dissolving the Kinks in the early nineties. It’s that his keen sensitivity to the local, and all the ways the local is fragile and so perpetually endangered – on the classic record We Are the Village Green Preservation Society, or in his new memoir Americana – is akin to the feeling New Orleansians have for their city.
Bill puts it perfectly:
If Binx finds some measure of hope and purpose in “the possibility of a search,” Davies’ own search is mired in what feels like nostalgia for a time that never quite existed. It’s as if he continues to feel the pain of a phantom third arm.
Raise your third arm if you too find these characters kin.