#128: Stuff To Read
Good morning everyone
I am grateful to Buddy Wells for his club The Blue Room. Each city needs a few good music venues. The rent really should be paid by the city, it is – to my mind – a public good.
I have no musical training or understanding and still, I love the experience of the sound washing over and through me. Music connects me to my creative self. I find whole sentences forming as I listen. Of course, I then have to pull myself back to the music, because I have drifted into deep dialogue with a Sea Point Seagull who is insistent that the words I put in his beak don’t fit, “What Seagull would say that?” Jazz takes me places.
This week we were blessed to see two great guitarists – Rheza Khota and Bheki Khoza. Khota’s quartet included Wells himself.
Wells’ aesthetic is part saxophonist, part immortal warrior. He is a quiet force on stage. Theatrics are not his game. His instrument makes his contribution. He is also unmistakably there, a tall, striking man, and still is the power of his art that you feel. One senses that in another context, he might wield a shinai or dlala ‘nduku with equal ease and effect. His is a master’s presence. You sense his power. He has no need to show you. You know.
I last saw Khoza perform in the early 2000s, in Johannesburg’s The Bassline. Time has dusted his hair with silver and added some heft to his torso. That same sorcerer has given me similar blessings.
Khota paid homage to the guitar greats. Khoza bridged the worlds of jazz and maskandi. Khota is a gentle, serious presence. Khoza, playful and joyous. Both reconnected me to me. I felt better after a week washed in music.
Today’s letter is about stuff to read. I’ve wanted to share all of what follows for some time but couldn’t find a neat way to bring it together, so it is just stuff to read. It’s a little longer than normal, so grab a coffee.
/strategy
Our actions always tell us something. We often act without deep awareness, but our actions are nevertheless the expression of something we need. We may ignore or misunderstand what they’re telling us, but rest assured they’re telling you something strategic.
This truth is present in the chapters ‘On Intimacy’ and ‘The Bigger the Front’ in Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life, which draws on his experience as a psychoanalyst.
Respectively, they tell the stories of a father, Joshua, who had started to see an escort, Alison, several times a week for a few months following the birth of his son and another father, who refuses to have anything to do with his Jewish daughter, Abby, after she marries her blonde Catholic boyfriend.
Joshua tells Grosz that he is being foolish, that he is about to destroy his life, but that he can’t help himself. His relationship with Alison is not sexual, they speak, he tries to help her. Initially Grosz wonders whether he is perhaps not trying to emulate his wife’s mothering. But as the conversation unfolds Joshua asks Grosz “Did I tell you she calls the baby by the name she used to call me?”
Grosz writes “he was jealous of the closeness his wife and son shared. Unable to imagine a way in, Joshua could not find his place as a father. He experienced this incapacity as his wife abandoning him. What he claimed brightly as an act of folly was really an act of revenge”.
Abby’s father makes terrible comments about her fiancé. He tells her that he’ll have nothing to do with her if she marries him, that he’ll sit shiva. She marries. He cuts her off and responds to no messages for years. Her mother follows suit. Abby is baffled, their family wasn’t particularly observant and her husband, like her father, was a talented doctor.
After years of silence, Abby’s mother calls. She tells her that she is divorcing her father. She has discovered that he has been having an affair for decades, an affair with his blonde Catholic receptionist.
Both Abby’s father and Joshua actions expressed deeper truths. Guilt and loneliness. Or perhaps the lack of courage to reconfigure a life and the lack of imagination to reimagine one’s new role. Their actions were a strategy to avoid deeper challenges. Equally, the actions spoke powerfully. They declared the need to find ways into new lives.
When we act in ways that are bizarre to ourselves, that are destructive or unhelpful, it is worth not judging or dismissing them. They’re clues. Our soul has a strategy, and it wants to be heard. Listen. Be curious. It’s not always literal. The soul is a space of image and metaphor.
(I have previously shared some of Grosz’s book in the letters Be Sad and Ways to Keep Moving Forward.)
/self
William Dicey’s Mongrel is a collection of essays traversing the South African landscape. In “A Story in Which Everyone Looks Bad” he tells the story of a murder trial. Dicey is drawn into the telling by his friend Liam whose uncle is the victim.
The killers are arrested four months after the murder. It takes 18 months for the trial to come to court and another five years before they’re sentenced. Dicey recounts the excruciating journey to justice. In each court appearance, Liam is confronted with his uncle’s killers, their obfuscation and disregard.
Liz McGregor’s Unforgiven is about her father’s murder and her efforts to meet his killer, a search, and a desire for some understanding to make sense of the unthinkable.
In both tellings, individual identities get flattened until they disappear into labels. Liam’s uncle, Teffy, becomes the victim. McGregor’s father, Robin, too becomes a victim. For the families of the murderers is the bewilderment of someone they love, who they remember as a toddler exploring the world, getting buried by this new label.
For both Liam and Liz part of the telling is reclaiming the fullness of their loved ones’ lives. The court system turned them into the object of a prosecutor’s job. Not full people with lives and history, but placeholders for a bureaucratic process. Both find themselves desperate to reconnect with the person’s spirit.
After a day in court Liam emails Dicey, he writes “Increasingly, as this trial has progressed and I’ve assigned him different roles – uncle, employee, homosexual, deceased – I’ve lost sight of the old Teffy, the real Teffy, the person we all know. His impish personality, his joie de vivre: these things have been superseded by a pathetic victim-like quality.”
McGregor eventually gets to meet her father’s killer but does not get the honesty she hoped for. She encounters the same evasions and silences that characterized the court case, that left her not knowing. She reflects “It comes to me that what I really wanted from this quest was to hear my father’s voice one more time.”
Both Dicey and McGregor remind us how easy it is for the richness of life to be reduced to labels. In an increasingly polarized and bureaucratized world, these stories of painful and violent loss bring home the need to search for the person, to not accept the label as the truth.
/soul
Richard Powers’ Bewilderment will break your heart. It is beautiful. It will break your heart. It tells the story of a father’s relationship with son, and his son’s deep love for the natural world.
Robbie, the son, is unconventional. He struggles to behave in ways that fit easily with the strictures of modern life.
His parents take him to countless specialists. Each offers a different diagnosis. His father, Theo, reflects that ‘when it goes from non-existent to the country’s most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the course of one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there’s something wrong’.
Eventually, they walk away from medicine. Theo decided “Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe that I could never fathom. Everyone of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing”.
Robbie is overwhelmed by our planet’s destruction. “‘Two percent, Dad?’ He snarled like a cornered badger. ‘Only two percent of all animals are wild? Everything else is factory cows and factory chickens and us?’”
With moments like “I fed my card into the cab’s reader and credits poured out from a server farm nestled in the melting tundra of northern Sweden…”, Powers reminds us that the underneath the alluring headlines, the must-have-newness are costs, costs that make Robbie despair. Costs that lead him to hold a solitary protest outside a state legislature. He holds a placard that he has expertly illustrated with soon-to-be-extinct plants and animals. It reads “Help Me I’m Dying”.
I will leave you with Theo’s explanation of the Four Immeasurables, “There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind towards everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours”.
As I type these final words, I realise that there was, after all, a thread through all of this, the thread of remembering to see, ourselves and others, to be curious and to care. I just didn’t know it before I finished. I hope you’ve enjoyed today. If you have, please share it with someone.
Much love
Karl
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