An essay in five movements: 2

1.      2. Allegretto

I have seen shame and blame move at breakneck speed.  We are all each other’s informants. We are our own informants. We betray ourselves so easily now, so early, so often, that we clump together with like-minded people like a herd of buffalo ranged in a circle, defensive, fearful.  The enemy is at hand.  No, the enemy is clumped in another circle, not far off, fearing their own opponents.  And sometimes at the centre of these circles, the real enemy lurks, protected by those they have trained so well in fear.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs puts physical needs and the need for safety at the base. How can we ever be social—not to mention aspire to greater things, to be creative, inventive and to flourish—when those needs are constantly threatened?

Are they threatened?  

Some, certainly.  I know people who today, in what is considered one of the best countries in the world to live, fear for their lives just for being who they are.  There may not be a knock on the door in the dead of night, but people struggle on a daily basis and some die.  And yet…and yet…for marginalized groups, turning to each other builds strength and community, helps counteract fear.  Often creativity flourishes, the flowers growing up through the cracked pavement, the reclamation of what has been taken—because it is this creative spark that triumphs over inhumanity.  Again, and again, and again, it is inextinguishable.

But when the fear is less grounded in reality, community can only exist in augmenting that fear.  The community focuses on the fear, and only that fear.  Social interactions become increasingly based on common enemies, not on friends. We pour our adrenaline into the fight or flight reaction.  Creativity withers. 

This is the trap that has been set for us, and we are too often blindly taking the bait.

I have seen shame and blame move at breakneck speed.  I have seen people so eager to categorize, compartmentalize, and either accept or dismiss that they’ve stopped asking why, and listening.  And dare you go into that no-man’s land in the middle?  You’ll get shot from the front and from the rear, by both your friends and enemies. 

I understand why. There are only so many hours in a day, and life is stressful. Why spend that time with people who vex you? With people who might even hurt you?

Ten years now, I have been an orphan. It has been 18 years since I lost my mother. My parents were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, and somehow they produced me.  I am a socialist.  I’ve only recently accepted that about myself, because where I come from, I might as well have hung up a picture of Lenin in the bathroom. (If you’ve been to my bathroom, you know why that’s an amusing thought).  But I never rebelled against my parents. Quite to the contrary—the majority of their core values are mine to this day.  Those core values included curiosity and a lively sense of inquiry, love expressed through unwavering support and partnership, the importance of community and family, pride in accomplishment but lack of overweening ego, the idea that material wealth was not an end in itself, and the idea that learning and personal growth was a lifelong process.  These values also modulated some of their less-desirable beliefs.  My parents, born in the 20s in the rural Midwest, were racists.  There is no nicer term for it.  The derogatory terms for black people that I heard at home as a young child could not help but be formative in the way I saw people of colour. There were other words—particularly for Italians, for some reason.  I would be a liar if I claimed to have completely overcome that upbringing.  Yet I heard these terms less and less over the years.  My parents, in their later years were good people who had begun to learn that these words were not acceptable (even though I am sure they still saw black people as less-than). 

In today’s world, where we are told that there are two groups of people—those who agree with you, and horrible people—would my parents be horrible people?  Would I have written them out of my life as toxic?  Well…

If I have one regret in my life, it’s that I never asked my parents questions about their lives.  I knew the basic outlines, of course, but looking back, I know so few stories.  I went recently through a box of black and white photos from their life together in the 18 years of marriage before I was born, and what I would give to be able to ask them about those photos—but I can’t.  The people in those photos look like my parents, but they are strangers.  The opportunity is gone. The stories are gone.  The photos are relics, without context or meaning.

I never asked why.

More and more, we walk amongs invisible ruins.

****

Let's go for a drive, see the town tonight
There's nothing to do but I don't mind when I'm with you

This town's so strange they built it to change
And while we sleep we know the streets get rearranged
My old friends, we were so different then
Before your war against the suburbs begin

Before it began

Now the music divides us into tribes
You grew your hair so I grew mine
You said the past won't rest
Until we jump the fence and leave it behind

My old friends, I can remember when
You cut your hair, I never saw you again
Now the cities we live in could be distant stars
And I searched for you in every passing car

The night's so long
Yeah the night's so long
I've been living in the shadows of your song
Living in the shadows of your song

In the suburbs I, I learned to drive
You told me we would never survive,
So grab your mother's keys, we leave tonight

But you started a war that we can't win
We keep erasing all the streets we grew up in

Now the music divides us into tribes
Choose your side, I'll choose my side

All my old friends they don't know me now
All my old friends are staring through me now
All my old friends they don't know me now

Arcade Fire, “Suburban War”,

An essay in five movements

First movement: Adagio

I was not ready for the 8^th when it first came to me.  In the world of music, some songs are meant to be blasted from a car stereo on a warm July night, when you are 19 years old and have nothing better to do than drive around Columbus late into the night with your two best friends, one in the front seat, one stuffed into to the tiny back seat.  Here I am in my red Firebird, and this is my music, and you will hear it and know me.  Some music must be heard live to be understood, heard with a small room of devotees or an arena full of fans, but heard together with others who are likewise passionate, and in that moment united. Here is our music, and we are one.  Some music means nothing until you are part of it, performing it, standing on a stage with over 100 others, singing in Latin as loud as possible, rivalling the timpani and the brass sounding the Judgement day, “tuba mirum spargens sonem…” Here is our music, and our voices and instruments are one.  Some music is meant to evoke a feeling or a mood—to make you dance, or perhaps to clear your mind for meditation—but is not in itself be deep in meaning. Here are beats, and sounds, and movement.

The Shostakovich 8^th Symphony in C minor is none of these things, and so it kept its confidences until played in the correct manner.

 I needed to listen to it alone. On headphones. To let it permeate my brain.  And I did not understand what it was, and where it was leading, until I did.

***

My research method is simple.  1) Read a book, or an article. Possibly completely by accident.  Learn a thing. 2) My God. This thing is amazing/fascinating/disturbing.  I am not sated! I must learn more! I must know!  Invoke the Google Fu! Read all the books!  3) Oh look, here is an interesting aspect of The Thing that is worthy of research in its own right…more Google! More books! It is not in the least bit linear.  I know this. It was the single biggest obstacle to completing a straightforward, linear doctoral thesis. 

Almost all of my passions have some place on a great Tree of Knowledge somewhere.  My love of hockey arose from the Miracle on Ice in 1980.  I adopted the Detroit Red Wings as my team in the early 90s once I had regular access to viewing hockey games; I still remember what sealed it—footage of Sergei Fedorov scoring a dazzling end-to-end goal in one of his early seasons.  Being a Detroit fan meant I began following the team online through Detroit newspapers—and I began to learn about the city.  And in one of the papers, I read an article on the work of Camilo José Vergara, and bought his book American Ruins. Vergara is a photographer of urban ruins, particularly the decaying architecture of what is often termed the “inner cities.” Blight. Decline.  These are part of a larger narrative of the evolution of American cities, the “hollowing out” that occurred in the latter half of the 20^th century, often driven by the construction of highways, the decline of manufacturing industries, and race-related issues.  Detroit famously was hugely impacted by all of these.  Growing up, Detroit was a scary place for a suburban white girl to even contemplate. Seeing the burned-out buildings and the boarded-up storefronts during a trip there in 1985 only served to emphasize this to me even more.  Now, I stopped being afraid of Detroit and started learning its full story.  I found the Fabulous Ruins of Detroit website and spent hours upon hours wandering virtually through the abandoned mansions of Brush Park, the empty skyscraper hulks in what Vergara called the American Acropolis of ruins, touring crumbling hotels that now played host to birds, rats, and the occasional squatter.

Ruins were not new to me; no classicist escapes them; no romantic can fail to be moved by them.  But the concept of modern ruins was new, and became a source of fascination, both those caused by unintentional neglect or disaster and those caused by intentional destruction.  But as I focused in on single buildings, I also exploded my view to see cities as a whole—not just buildings, but people. We think of ruins as architectural constructs, but they would just be crumbling buildings without the story of the people who first built them, who lived in them, and then abandoned them.  Ties break down or are broken, sometimes by acts of nature, sometimes by acts of humanity or inhumanity. What once was solid dissolves, sometimes slowly, other times abruptly. 

But in the midst of every ruin is the evidence of persistence. Surviving a period of ruin forever marks a building. It marks a city, and it marks a person, and none are ever the same after. Sometimes what rises in the ruins is a pale echo of what went before, an attempt to reclaim glory now lost by replicating its outward forms.  Sometimes, when the centre collapses, life surges—or creeps--back inward from the margins where it never died at all.  Sometimes it is a new thing altogether.  Whether proudly worn or hidden, the scars are there over the broken that has healed.

There is sadness in a ruin, and much that is bleak, but there is a joy. A ruin says “I have not yet been forgotten.  I may yet be again.  There is a choice still.” 

Ruins are quiet places, places that demand thought from the thoughtful, where each element is meaningful, deserves its own attention, tells part of the story.

I came to the 8^th through the 7^th, and I came to the 7^th through Leningrad, which I came to because, under siege and starvation, it was frozen in history in the moment of ruination.  It was a dormant branch on the Tree of Knowledge, an old one, awakening after a long slumber, to say “you knew me once, as a child, and you have filed me away.  Here is my music; listen and understand.”  And I did, the music broadcast from speakers on the ninth of August, 1942, music meant to be played loudly, amidst the guns, as a weapon itself, indeed, across the lines to a besieging army.  The Shostakovich 7^th Symphony does not invite introspection; it begs to be played loudly. It demands to be heard. It nearly collapses at the end from pure exhaustion, but it has persisted. And silence. And then, thunder.

The 8^th is not that.  The 8^th, to me, is the embodiment of ruin.  It looks inward, at the broken places, fragments of the past sticking out like jagged edges.  It makes onlookers uncomfortable. “Shouldn’t you be over your grief by now?”  It eventually draws completely inward, dark, numb, before it can find resolution, and even then there is no shout of victory—just a quiet hope, born of persistence, cognizant of where it has come from and the yet-tender scars.

I have found my way back here after eight years.  I do not exaggerate:  I arrived an hour ago.  This place was abandoned, almost passed from memory altogether. But here are my words. “I have not yet been forgotten. I may yet be again. There is a choice still.”

Second movement: Allegretto