New Experience

"Having too many experiences is the prerogative of fools," said the tiresome German novelist Robert Musil.

But who's to say when we've had too many?

Hilary and I went down to the Guthrie the other day to catch Metamorphoses before it left town. I liked it ... though I didn't love it. There were plenty of imaginative and surprising moments, for sure, but thrashing around in a big pool of water can only go so far to create moments of true dramatic frisson, and  the play veered toward the cynically comic, at the expense of the more pastoral and "enchanted" tone of the original, a little too often for my taste.

We also got deeply involved recently in a vast global movement that has nothing to do with the Chinese, undocumented workers, or with us. Billions of beautiful feathered creatures are passing through the region as they travel from their winter homes in the tropics to breeding grounds in the temperate and arctic regions of North America, where food and nesting grounds are plentiful. Now is the time to go out and catch a glimpse of some of them as they pass by.

The tiny warblers—often very colorful and no larger than a pocket knife—are cause for special interest and excitement, though sometimes a larger bird, unusual and unexpected, can be no less of a thrill to spot. One morning recently Hilary and I ventured out for a morning of birding—a bright sunny day in the midst of a moody May stretch. (It also happened to be my birthday.) Our itinerary included one stop in farm country—the 180th Street Slough—and two spots on Lake Pepin just north of Lake City.

I won't give you the blow by blow, but perhaps I could highlight a few of the sightings that were especially "good" for one reason or another.

When we arrived at the slough, I saw the shorebirds feeding in the mud only after I saw three birders looking in that direction.

I approached the birders (always a good idea) and said, "What are we seeing here?"

"Dowitchers," was the reply.

"That's what I thought!" I said, and it was true: The heavyish, mottled, coppery-brown body, the thick straight bill. Only thing is, I hadn't seen a dowitcher in twenty years. 

"Short-billed or long billed?" I said.

The man with the scope was looking in a bird book. "It's hard to tell. The bill length overlaps between species. Short, I think. But the call is the only distinctive feature between the two."

Meanwhile, one of the men said, "There's a sora down there where the water is flooding across the road. Also a Virginia rail. The rail is unusually friendly."

Just then the dowitchers—there might have been twenty of them—lifted off and flew in a loose group to another strip of mud a few hundred yards away, emitting strange cries as they flew.

One of the men pulled out his phone and soon found what he was looking for: a screechy bird call. Tapping another option, a second call emerged from the device. "That was the long-billed dowitcher," he said. "That's what we heard just now." 

I continued to wander down to the place where rising water from recent rains had flooded the road. I was eager to see the rail and the sora, but concerned about scaring off the birds before Hilary could join me. She was still half-way up the hill looking at a flock of least sandpipers (we think.)

I typically catch a glimpse of a sora once a year as it dashes out of sight amid the cattails at the edge of a marsh, but as I approached the flooded stretch of road, I saw one darting about in the shallow water in plain sight. Then I saw another one moving through the rubble of last year's cattails! I eventually determined that there were six of them in the vicinity.

Yellow-headed blackbirds are a sure bet at the slough. Still very common in the Dakotas, the population in Minnesota has been declining for decades, and we never see them in town any more. It's nice to know they're still around.

And a black tern is always a welcome sight. Terns are among the most supple and beautiful fliers. Though I find it hard to distinguish between the common and the Forsters tern, the black tern is a no-brainer: his body is black!

We had a good morning and ended up seeing sixty-odd species, including twelve members of the warbler family. Another favorite was a lark sparrow--a prince among sparrows with its colorful facial markings.

I had an experience just this afternoon that I've never had before: a package arrived from Daedalus Remainder House. There's nothing new about that. I knew it was on the way, had gotten emails notifying me of shipping details. But in a typical shipment there will be one or two books that I really want to read, accompanied by four or five cheapies that I've added to make the $7.95 shipping charge seem more reasonable. What was new on this occasion was the fact that I couldn't remember a single book that I'd ordered. There was nothing inside that I was burning to read. It was like opening a well-chosen birthday box: a total surprise, yet everything seemed right down my alley. Whoever sent box this to me knows me very well.

The first book to emerge was a collection of essays titled Euro Jazz Land. My knowledge of Eurojazz is largely limited to the productions of Manfred Eichen on his ECM label, so naturally I looked him up in the index. This led me to a courageous article by the Italian pianist Arrigo Cappelletti in which he comes down pretty hard on this vein of expression.

"Melody plays such an essential role for the first time; no jazzman had ever "dared" so much. Jazzmen used to take commercial songs to attract people and then completely renew them from the inside."

Cappelletti observes that the musicians Eicher chose for his melodic "revolution" often took the colors and flavors of other cultures—Brazilian, Russian Orthodox, Arab, or Nordic—though "the original music rarely emerges in a clear and explicit way. More often melody floats above its roots and becomes universal, a melody that belongs to us all."

Cappelletti has mixed feelings about these melodies:

In some cases melody has an ambiguous fascination, that of a no-man’s-land that is not inhabited but that reminds of a past human presence. In other cases the music sounds spineless, deprived of rhythm and energy, and has a general effect of cold abstraction. As a matter of fact, an element of this music that you can often find in ecm “products” is a certain stillness. The promised journey is evoked, imagined, dreamed of, but never really made ... What really matters is to reach the consumers, to persuade them that they are facing something different and distant from them ... The unknown they are looking for (otherwise they wouldn’t have left in the first place) must be suggested, but they must not be led there on a difficult and risky path. Everything is organized and studied in a way that they are not led far from what they are and which brings them back to their ordinary lives feeling proud of having met a fascinating and mysterious “beyond” that cannot really (thank God for that!) change their lives."

I don't entirely agree. But I have noticed that many of the ECM CDs I have—the Swiss pianist Colin Vallon, the Norwegian reedman Karl Ivar Refseth, the Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, and even the American reedman Charles Lloyd—are initially alluring, but can eventually become somewhat tedious.   

Anyway, the book ($1.00) has already proven its worth.

A slim photo-filled biography of Samuel Beckett was the next out of the box (48 ȼ). It's part of the Overlook Illustrated Lives series. Thumbing through the book at random, I came upon a full-page image of a wine label.

This is the wine Beckett drank when he was writing Waiting for Godot. Seeing it reminded me that in 1990 I stood for a few minutes on the side of the road in the Luberon Valley, not far from Cote de Ventoux, where Beckett is alleged to have stood, waiting for a lift, when the idea for that play first entered his head. But does the play have an idea, really?  I don't know. I've never seen it.

Written in Stone: a Jouney through the Stone Age and the Origins of Modern Language was the next to emerge. The title says it all. If we encounter a bad smell, it's hard to say "phew" without pursing our lips in a frown; it's hard to say "smile" without raising the corners of our mouth. The dictionary tells us that phew ("a voiceless bilabial fricative usually followed by a voiceless 'y' sound") entered the language in 1604, but cavemen and women were making these same sounds 8,000 years ago, and they meant the same things.

To judge from the $6.98 price-tag, this must have been one of the titles that inspired the order—a book that I really wanted to take a look at.

In Alexandria: The Last Nights of Cleopatra, Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, describes his struggles to finish a book about that Egyptian queen in Alexandria during the Arab Spring (78 ȼ). On Further Reflection is a collection of Jonathan Miller's occasional writing, including a lengthy interview with art historian E.H. Gombrich.  I could see immediately that I was going to have trouble with How the World Moves: the Odyssey of an American Indian Family. It's 550 pages long!

But down in the bottom of the box I found what must be considered the order's raison d'être: a 2-CD edition of J.S. Bach's French Suites, played on harpsichord ($10). Giving it a preliminary listen, I find the tinkly harpsichord sound appealing, softer and more lyrical than the piano sound I'm used to, be it Gould, Perahia, or Hewitt at the keyboard, less prone to vain flights of virtuosity.

The most unusual new experience I've had recently is that of living in a world without my father-in-law, Gene. He died a few weeks ago at the age of 94 after a short stint in the hospital with pneumonia. The whole family was there at his bedside, and the room was full of care and love, but it was also a sobering event, to say the least.

Now the days go by, we visit Hilary's mom often, or gather as a family to plan a fitting memorial service: his favorite music, what he meant to people.

     Gene has been an important part of my life since the mid-1970s, when I was first getting to know his daughter. In the course of time he helped me and enriched my life in many ways.

Such relationships have always stood at the center of Gene's life. He loved to help people, and felt a little lost when he wasn't involved in that activity. But I want to talk about something a little different, namely, a few of the things Gene pursued for their own sake, because they piqued his interest or satisfied a personal need. Three specific things come to mind immediately: the outdoors, the arts, and the French Canadian Catholic ethos within which Gene was raised.

Gene's love of the outdoors was broad but it manifested itself most fully in his devotion to bird-watching. He was a birder from an early age, and he renewed that enthusiasm later in life birding with Peter Herbert and other friends. Hilary and I often went up to Hawk Ridge in Duluth in the fall with Gene and Dorothy to watch the raptors pass overhead. If you're a birder yourself, you'll know how absorbing a day spent in pursuit of those often unexpected encounters with some of nature's most beautiful creatures can be. And you'll also be aware that on a quiet day, a birding trip can become merely a walk in the woods. Nothing wrong with that, either. But I think what Gene liked about the activity was the total absorption in his natural surrounding that came with every expedition. And he also enjoyed the legwork—the study of minor clues and characteristics, arrival dates and nesting statistics—that could fill the condo with intricacy and anticipation long before he set out on the trail.

But recently, catastrophe struck. Gene lost his bird book!  Now, if I'd lost my bird book, I'd just go out and buy another one. But Gene's was covered, page after page, in notes, color-coded arrows, dates written in margins: decades of material that he'd accumulated in his tireless quest the greet each new season of activity.

Gene found his book, and continued annotating it 'til the end. We were planning a trip to Sherburne NWR when he died.

Gene's love of the arts was equally deep. And he naturally became involved in promoting the arts as part of an arts development group that included Brad Morrison, Penny Bond, Patricia Mitchell, and others whose names I forget. But Gene (and Dorothy, I might add) also enjoyed attending musical and theater events, especially those that were rich in human emotion. Gene was a romantic, a sentimentalist, but also an explorer. He played the clarinet in a neighborhood jazz trio that also boasted Sid Little on the drums, and he was an avid participant in the monthly Jazz and Pie gatherings we've held for perhaps 20 years on a monthly basis as a family.

One evening, maybe fifteen years ago, he and Dorothy invited Hilary and me to see a play together. Theater Frank, as I recall. The play was Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. It was being performed in an unheated annex of the Pillsbury A Mill, the starting time was rather late, and the chorus was being performed by a rock band. The play was interesting. But as I sat on that bench in near darkness in my down jacket, way past my bedtime, watching this rock-n-roll anti-war drama, I thought to myself, If Gene and Dorothy hadn't invited us, we wouldn't have gone to this play in a hundred years.

But to them it was natural. It was what they enjoyed doing.

I also think it's important to mention the family environment out of which Gene's values grew. It seems to me that Gene was touched from an early age by the French-tinged Catholic world of his Crookston relatives. Family, faith, food—not necessarily in that order.

 Gene's grandfather had emigrated to the Red River Valley from a small town on the St. Lawrence River upstream from Quebec City. I don't think French was still being spoken much around the house during his visits, but there was an atmosphere of family love and joie de vivre at the Crookston home of his uncle Harry and aunt Henrietta that was still palpable decades later when Hilary and I used to visit them. No one talked about religion, but threads of Gallican Catholicism were woven throughout the fabric of his family life, and Gene continued to cultivate those threads as an adult. In time his Catholicism took on a Thomas Merton-esque caste— deep meditation wedded to social justice—that found a home at St. Joan of Arc and First Universalist. I never heard him make a theological or metaphysical statement, but I know he relished his visits with brother Chuck, sons, and nephews, to an annual silent retreat at DeMontreville, where I'm sure he often turned the listening skills he lavished on others inwardly as he wrestled with the questioning voices deep within himself.

 For me, every day is a novelty, now, because it’s a day without Gene. Yet I see no reason the presume that his spirit has been obliterated. His presence, his good judgment, his instinctive kindness, and his good humor surface often, and in a variety of circumstances, and it’s likely that his influence also makes itself felt in ways that have become habitual and unthinking.

I have a sneaking hunch that Gene's attention is now focused elsewhere. New worlds for him to explore. Why not? In the end, it’s all a great mystery.