Quick Takes: Heimweh Edition

1. It's that time of year again, August, the cruelest month, mother of nostalgia.  New Yorkers and former New Yorkers, do you love August there as much as I once did?  Yes, it's hotter than hell (though the hotter-than-hellness has intruded ever earlier into New York summers over the past few years).  But the  sultry August air is redolent with mystery as it shimmers over the  asphalt, and cicadas sing even in the scanty grass that grows up between sidewalk squares, even in the parts of the outer boroughs most characterized by chain link fencing, used car lots, and metal recycling plants.  Every patch of green is like a reminder of lost paradise, reminding me of Tennessee Williams's poem "Heavenly Grass":

My feet took a walk in heavenly grass.
All day while the sky shone clear as glass.
My feet took a walk in heavenly grass,
All night while the lonesome stars rolled past.
Then my feet come down to walk on earth,
And my mother cried when she give me birth.
Now my feet walk far and my feet walk fast,
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.

2.  Today I walked past an upstairs window in my house, and caught a glimpse of the brick wall of the house next door.  For a split second I actually thought I was back in my New York apartment, where the brick wall of the building across the air shaft was my constant view.

3.  I thought about New York again when a contractor came to put in a new front door.  He is my across-the-street neighbor's father-in-law.  The guy who paints your apartment in New York is always your super's father-in-law (sometimes his brother-in-law; sometimes both).  These in-laws rarely speak much English; nor did the father-in-law who came today.  The difference was that this father-in-law was Greek, and the New York fathers-in-law are usually Serbian or Dominican.

4. On Sunday I was so overcome with loneliness that I stood at my kitchen sink in Northern Appalachia and bawled like a child.  It's been nearly three years, and I still feel like I'm floating, untethered, in space.  But I tell myself how much better it is for children to be here, and it is, especially for children, like my son, with special needs.  Though I've considered homeschooling him, I know he needs to be with other children, and, though I'm an experienced teacher (albeit of older students), I'm not an occupational, speech, or physical therapist.  He is getting a panoply of services through our local school in the fall, including a one-on-one aide in his mainstream kindergarten classroom.  He wouldn't get that in New York.  No one gets one-on-one aides anymore.  Parents with means generally send their special-needs children to private school, and then sue the city for tuition reimbursement.  The city usually settles, because even private-school tuition in New York City is less expensive than a one-on-one classroom aide.

Today was a beautiful day, and we spread a picnic blanket and had our lunch in the backyard.  Though my son generally prattles on constantly, a rare peace settled over us as we turned our faces to the sun and listened to the breeze rustling the maples and copper beeches.  I let myself relax for about five minutes, which is something I would never do in New York.  I thought where we would be at that time on that day if we had remained there: probably at a playground, which would require me to be on the continual qui-vive.  I have heard that, when your children are of school age, you can make friends with other mothers at pick-up time.  I wonder if that will happen for me.

5. Heimweh, as you will know if you're an aficionado of German romantic poetry and music (or if you read this blog regularly), is often translated as "homesickness," a spiritual yearning for the home to which the sufferer can no longer return.  Nevertheless, the term, which originated in seventeenth-century Switzerland, was coined to describe the actual physical illness, sometimes resulting in death, experienced by Swiss regiments when they were stationed far from the Alps. "To ward off [this debilitating] nostalgia, Swiss soldiers were forbidden to play, sing, or even whistle Alpine tunes," because Alpine melodies "haunted the hearer with 'an image of the past which is at once definite and unattainable.'"

Perhaps Heimweh is, itself, a kind of disability.

6. Baritone William Sharp and pianist Stephen Blier sing and play Paul Bowles's haunting setting of Williams's "Heavenly Grass":

  
Above:  Community garden in East Harlem. 

Music and Memory, Part 20: The Matrix

Last weekend I had a visit from A.B. -- my former mentor, the most important voice teacher I've ever had, and the generous donor of my autoharp -- because he happened to have business in a Northern Appalachian town not too far from here.  We went to a hippie café that is often frequented by my family because of its surprisingly good draft beer selection and the cheerful tolerance of the staff toward little children.  Although our pupil-teacher relationship ended badly in the mid-nineties (he ordered me out of his studio one day when I told him his instructions were confusing me, which was really only the culmination of many months of growing tension), after a few years passed we were friends again.  In my doctoral program, I studied voice with his best friend, who was on the faculty, and A.B. was a frequent audience member at my New York-area performances, as well as a thoughtful and provocative critic.

At the hippie café, I showed him the repertoire for a concert I have coming up, and we talked about it. The concert's theme is childhood, and the music includes, among other things, pieces by Charles Ives and the three "Heimweh" settings of Johannes Brahms, one of which, A.B. opined, was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful songs ever written.  A.B. is one of the most brilliant musicians I know, one of the rare souls who deeply understand the elusive language of music and are able to interpret it in subtle, powerful, and nuanced ways, and, when I have the opportunity to talk music with someone like that, I'm in my supreme happy place: the place where -- to quote Brahms himself, out of context and with inappropriate self-aggrandizement -- I start to feel as if "straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God."  And this makes me wonder.

It makes me wonder, because my supreme happy place -- the nirvana achieved through strenuous periods of talking about music, performing music, researching music, studying music, reading about music, teaching music -- was all I ever wanted, from childhood onward.  Once I discovered classical music, it was as if a series of doors opened one upon another, and kept opening in my mind, and as if something shifted into place in my being with a loud sort of thunk.  I was about eleven at the time, and from that point, the everyday, experiential world became like a dream to me.  Music was what I wanted, music was my real world, and everything else was the Matrix. I think the reason I was so happy in graduate school was that the time I got to spend in Musicland exceeded the time I spent in the Matrix, and everything that I did in the Matrix served what I was striving for in Musicland.

But we are all cast out of Paradise at some point; for some of us it happens sooner, for others later.  I think a clear-eyed observer of my life would see an overly-sensitive and romantic girl, who, perhaps not atypically, found a form of escape from an unstable home situation and the anxieties of daily life, in a neurotic striving toward a Bacchic transcendence that can be gained only through an Apollonian rigor.  Indeed, my self-imposed work ethic superseded that of practically any singer I've ever known, but the oblivion I found in practice and study was topped by the bliss I found in being able, after many years of hard work, to make music say what I wanted, and use it to express the deepest emotions of my soul.

And of course, my allegiance to this striving, this oblivion, and this bliss turned everything else around me to shit.  I can only credit the mercy of God with the fact that I'm still standing, still able to have relationships, still able to function with some degree of effectiveness as an adult.  But I'm rarely, these days, in my supreme happy place, the lost paradise that Brahms's "Heimweh" songs are all about. The most beautiful and most famous of these songs, the one that A.B. praised, is the first song in the video below.  The great scholar of German Lieder Eric Sams has written that in this song, called "Heimwh I" or "O wüsst ich doch den Weg züruck," Brahms "is overcome by a personal feeling that goes far deeper than the regretful words, into real tragedy."


(The text is a poem by Klaus Groth, translated here by Leonard Lehrman:

Oh, if I only knew the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
Oh, why did I search for happiness
And leave my mother's hand?

Oh, how I long to be at rest,
Not to be awakened by anything,
To shut my weary eyes,
With love gently surrounding!

And nothing to search for, nothing to beware of,
Only dreams, sweet and mild;
Not to notice the changes of time,
To be once more a child!

Oh, do show me the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
In vain I search for happiness,
Around me naught but deserted beach and sand!)

I spend most of my time in Matrixland now, where I feel like a stranger who hasn't mastered the language, and I wonder if I ever will.  And what Telly notes mournfully after this classic performance with Itzhak Perlman on Sesame Street -- that it will never happen again -- is true not just of all musical performance, but also, of course, of all human endeavor, and is the final response to Brahms in his fruitless quest to return to Kinderland.

Music and Memory, part 14: The Carousel

I had the radio on in the kitchen yesterday afternoon during "Performance Today," which has a fun feature on Wednesdays (fun, that is, if you're a total music nerd) called Piano Puzzler, in which the pianist and composer Bruce Adolphe plays a popular or show tune in the style of a great composer, and then asks a call-in contestant to identify both the composer and the tune.  As a committed Brahmsophile, I immediately recognized the composer and the piece Adolphe pinched, Brahms's Intermezzo op. 118 no. 2 in A Major, one of the pieces perhaps most redolent of a sort of restrained but heartfelt nostalgia in the entire western canon.

Adolphe substituted Brahms's B section with the Rodgers and Hart tune "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered."  It was skillfully and beautifully done; to hear it, you can go to the Piano Puzzler link above.

I first heard the op. 118 no. 2 while growing up in my culturally-anachronistic classical-music-loving family.  My mother had the Glenn Gould recording, which is why I chose a Youtube video of Gould's performance for my example above.  Gould is not the pianist most aficionados of late-Romantic piano repertoire would immediately think of for this piece, but his performance of it is remarkably true, I think, to the practice of classical restraint that Brahms always used in his most profoundly moving pieces, which serves only to make them infinitely more moving than if they had been composed by one of his more overtly passionate contemporaries.  And Gould brings out the complex network of Brahms's inner voices, teasing multiple melodies out of the piece's dense construction, so that, while you listen, your heart can be broken at several spots and in several different registers of the keyboard.

Coming late to the party, as is my wont, I have only recently discovered the AMC television series Mad Men.  It happened when my husband was out of town.  We don't have real television here, so, after seeing the first episode on a free site that has since shut down, I took to downloading every other episode of the first season.  I got a couple of free ones through an Amazon promotion, and then I couldn't stop.  I watched the first-season finale last night, which includes a brilliant, marvelously-acted scene in which the troubled ad-man Don Draper makes a pitch to Kodak to create the campaign for its new slide projector, overriding the client's initial branding instructions and calling the device, in his own copy, "The Carousel."  (You can watch the scene here; copyright laws prevent me from embedding it in this post.)  Advertising, Draper tells them, is about nostalgia, which, he says, means in Greek "the pain from an old wound."  A Mad Men fan site challenges Draper's definition, translating the Greek as, essentially, homesickness -- or, for Brahms, who wrote several songs with the title, Heimweh.  Here is the best known of his Heimweh songs.

The text, by Klaus Groth, is translated thus by Leonard Lehrman:

Oh, if I only knew the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
Oh, why did I search for happiness
And leave my mother's hand?

Oh, how I long to be at rest,
Not to be awakened by anything,
To shut my weary eyes,
With love gently surrounding!

And nothing to search for, nothing to beware of,
Only dreams, sweet and mild;
Not to notice the changes of time,
To be once more a child!

Oh, do show me the road back,
The dear road to childhood's land!
In vain I search for happiness,
Around me naught but deserted beach and sand!

There is a large, lovingly restored belle-époque carousel in a public park within walking distance of our house.  It's painted with idyllic childhood scenes à la Kate Greenaway, and it booms out its highly-orchestrated turn-of-the-century tunes from a period Wurlitzer calliope.  Admission is free, so when we ride it, we usually ride it for an hour or so, which gives my son all the time he needs to pretend that each separate ride is one of the stations on the Metro-North Railroad from our old neighborhood in the Bronx down to Grand Central Station (he, train-obsessed, also calls the carousel "the magic turntable").  This also gives me time to think.

Occasionally at the carousel I see a haggard young redheaded woman.  She is surrounded by seven redheaded children between the ages of about one and thirteen, and is pregnant with another.  A social worker with a name badge sits on a bench and looks on.  I have seen this mom waiting for her kids by the parking lot, talking with the social worker, and then seen a minivan taxicab pull up and all the kids piling out of it, including the baby in a car seat. The mother has plastic grocery bags full of soda and chips for their picnic, and they all make their way over to the playground area, where the social worker helps with pushing the little ones on the swings and mediating their childish disputes.  My friend who knows the director of a local foster-care agency tells me that this mother has lost custody of these seven children temporarily, and of an eighth permanently, while awaiting trial for soliciting johns for one of her pre-teen daughters.

The orderliness and cleanliness, the gay music, the ethos of innocent fun represented by the carousel make me think of Wallace Stevens's poem "The Anecdote of the Jar."  Like Stevens's jar, our carousel makes the "slovenly wilderness" surround its artfulness, its artifice, its order; but our carousel, like Don Draper's Carousel, also dispenses a false nostalgia, the longing for a home that most likely, for most people, has never really existed.

Here is some vintage carousel footage from Coney Island, set to the song "Carousel" from the original cast recording of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

Quick Takes: God Takes the Sugar

1.  One of my oldest friends says that all poetry is based on the premise that things used to be better than they are now.  Sometimes I think that this blog is based on the premise that everything is better in New York than it is here.  But my premise is true.

2.  On the other hand, I saw two of those birds again today, the drab, starling-sized ones with the iridescent green heads, and I felt very kindly disposed towards them.

3.  I went for driving practice with my husband yesterday, and, as I nervously contemplated the death-dealing power conferred upon me by my seat at the wheel, I remembered with what ease and comfort I used to entrust my life to other drivers, chiefly those who drive cabs in New York City (who may be among the worst drivers in America, if not the world).  And it's not that they're technically bad in terms of their knowledge of the mechanics of maneuvering an automobile, but that they drive with total disregard for the rules of driving and with that special, self-centered New York sort of sprezzatura, by which everything one does is the equivalent of raising one's middle finger to the world.  This is true even for drivers who are freshly arrived from the Punjab or the Ivory Coast.  A hundred cab drivers flashed before my eyes.  I couldn't begin to count the number of drivers in my life who have asked me, "Where are you from?  You have an accent" (as often happens with classical singers, most traces of regionalism have disappeared from my speech, although here, everyone says I talk like a New Yorker).  I would make up random nations of origin -- Canada, South Africa, Holland -- until finally I started saying, "I'm from here, and you have an accent," which was, after all, the truth.  I began to recall individual taxi drivers, like the Sikh who got very excercised while driving me up the West Side Highway one night.  He explained to me that the Sikhs had to assassinate Indira Gandhi, because she had her troops destroy the Golden Temple, his religion's holiest site.  As he described to me his contempt for the ways of this country and his disdain for the Sikh immigrant boys and girls who grow up in America and start holding hands before they are married, a crime punishable by death back in India, he started to drift dangerously over the line, and I wasn't sure if I should ignore him or frantically try to calm him down.

I also remembered a soft-spoken middle-aged cab-driver I had once, a white man when such were becoming a rarity, who told me that he was only driving a taxicab in order to write a piece for the New Yorker about driving a taxicab.  "Uh-huh," I replied offhandedly, sure he was lying.  But for all I know, he might have been telling the truth.  I remembered another cab ride, when the driver, a handsome young man, sighed when I reapplied my lipstick in the back seat and asked hopefully if I was Jewish.  And another time, I left my handbag in a cab when I was living on a gated street on the border of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, subletting the faculty townhouse of a Pratt Institute professor.  I had gotten out at the gate and gone inside the compound in a late-night post-waitressing haze, not realizing I'd left my entire purse behind.  About an hour later -- this was sometime between three and four in the morning -- there was a knock on the door.  It was the taxi driver, who'd been driving around and around the neighborhood, trying to figure out how to get in and give me back my purse, which was flush with my tips (though what I really cared about among its contents was my journal and my copy of Remembrance of Things Past, on the inside cover of which I'd pasted a picture of M. to remind me that he had given it to me).  The driver refused the money I offered him.

4.  I came across one of the best descriptions of exile that I've ever read in Colum McCann's novel Let the Great World Spin, which is excellent so far (I'm less than a hundred pages in).  The narrator is an Irish writer in 1970s New York who's taken a bartending job in Woodside, Queens.

I figured I might write a play set in a bar, as if it had never been done before, as if it were some sort of revolutionary act, so I listened to my countrymen and wrote notes.  Theirs was a loneliness pasted upon loneliness.  It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave.  Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left.  My accent deepened.  I took on different rhythms.  I pretended I was from Carlow.  Most of the customers were from Kerry and Limerick.  One was a lawyer, a tall, fat sandy-haired man.  He lorded it over the others by buying them drinks.  They clinked glasses with him and called him a "motherf---ing ambulance chaser" when he went to the bathroom.  It was not a series of words they would have used at home . . . but they said it as often as they could.  With great hilarity they injected it into songs when the lawyer left.  One of the songs had an ambulance chaser going over the Cork and Kerry mountains.  Another had an ambulance chaser in the green fields of France.

The place grew busier as the night went on.  I poured the drinks and emptied the tip jar.

5.  A Turkish woman I know who adopted a son from Korea after struggling with infertility told me that in her country there is a saying:  "God takes the sugar, but in its place leaves honey."  And honey is so much better than sugar, as today's poem from the Writer's Almanac suggests:

Honey
Luxury itself, thick as a Persian carpet,
honey fills the jar
with the concentrated sweetness
of countless thefts,
the blossoms bereft, the hive destitute.

Though my debts are heavy
honey would pay them all.
Honey heals, honey mends.
A spoon takes more than it can hold
without reproach. A knife plunges deep,
but does no injury.

Honey moves with intense deliberation.
Between one drop and the next
forty lean years pass in a distant desert.
What one generation labored for
another receives,
and yet another gives thanks.
-- Connie Wanek

Heavenly Grass

My feet took a walk in heavenly grass.
All day while the sky shone clear as glass.
My feet took a walk in heavenly grass,
All night while the lonesome stars rolled past.
Then my feet come down to walk on earth,
And my mother cried when she give me birth.
Now my feet walk far and my feet walk fast,
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.
But they still got an itch for heavenly grass.
-- Tennessee Williams

I assigned one of the students in my voice class a setting of this poem by American cult author and composer Paul Bowles. The song is short and beautiful, written in a simple, folk-like style; the phrases that mention feet walking are conversational, while the phrases that speak of nature are lyrical and rhapsodic. We talked in class about how it mirrors the Romantic concept of Heimweh, which is more than just homesickness; it's the longing for a place which is not anywhere near the place you are, and which is in fact a place to which you can never return. I love the simplicity of Williams's poem; it reminds me of the greatness of other simple poems, like Yeats's "Brown Penny" and "Down by the Salley Gardens."