Mallards at Sundown

Yet another in a long succession of clear, beautiful days is drawing to a close. Above freezing most of the day. Staring out the window as twilight approaches, I open the book I have here with me in the den, The Limitsof Analysis by Stanley Rosen.  Page twelve.

"One cannot make sense of Platonism or Kantianism without giving an elaborate account of the functions of the intellect. This account will of course differ sharply in the two cases. [Of course] In the first case, we require a description of the intuition of the formal structure, whereas in the second, we need what Kant called as account of the "transcendental ego," that is, of the principles of subjective activity or construction which are invariant from one individual intellect to the next."

Rosen adds:

"In both cases, then, we must present an account of the subject as well as the object (or the thinker as well as the thought content.)"

But this isn't true. Not at all. When we have an intuition of beauty, for example, there is no need to describe the "formal structure" of that intuition, or what it feels like to the individual who experiences it. Anyone who has the slightest sensitivity to beauty will know what it involves, generally speaking. The challenge lies in describing the specific experience that has elicited such a feeling, and explaining what the attributes and effects are that warrant our enthusiasm and affection for it. The analysis doesn't focus on the psychology of the subject, but the character of the experience itself.

For example, when the sun sets, as it's doing now, mallards often fly back and forth across the sky in several seemingly random direction, just above the treetops, grouped in sevens and twelves and nines, and they're traveling fast. Who knows where they're going, why they're flying in opposite directions, or what affinities underlie their choice of traveling companions. Maybe they're headed for the big pond by the Honeywell plant on Winnetka Avenue. Maybe they're headed for the open water on that section of Bassett Creek that winds through the golf course, or the very small pond, surrounded by willow shrubs, just across the road from the maintenance shed on Wirth Parkway.

It doesn't matter. What's beautiful is the evening sky, interrupted from time to time by the startling appearance of these ducks, which appear much whiter than usual as they rocket past, catching the last rays of the setting sun.

I just now saw eleven of them moving north, flapping wildly. Did the mallard in the lead suddenly lift off, gripped by the desire to visit the Coon Rapids Dam, with his mate, off-spring, and various hangers-on scurrying behind?  Or was there some kind of discussion beforehand?

In any case, the zeal of these birds is remarkable, and their inexplicable movements adds both drama and mystery to the sunset hour. I'm tempted to call their presence sublime. In comparison, the flocks of crows that drift dilatorily across the neighborhood before dawn, cawing at random and almost always heading west, come across as genial slackers.  

A Season of Music

It's far too soon to start imagining that winter is almost over, but as light returns to the morning sky, it's tempting to review a few of the musical events that helped us through the dark evenings, and also to celebrate the variety of organizations and venues that continue to bring great shows to town.

Fred Hersch 

Jazz pianist Hersch can drive and swing with the best modern trios, and has long since earned his reputation as one of the post-modern greats at the keyboard, but he's even better known as an extraordinarily thoughtful soloist whose spontaneous contrapuntal lines would often be worthy of being published as "classical" compositions. He arrived at the Dakota downtown with guitarist Julian Lage, and that worried me a little. Would the younger artist be capable of contributing to the flow consistently, fashioning an evening to compare with the one pianist Brad Mehldau and reedman Joshua Redman gave us a few years ago in the same club? The answer is an astonished yes. It was a remarkable night, with Lage's tastefully electrified licks offering a perfect foil to Hersch's rich but sometimes delicate elaborations.

The duo gave us one long set, then signed a few CDs and disappeared into the night. That's a much better option, for my money, than two short sets with a tedious intermission in between.

Duruflé Requiem

The Oratorio Society of Minnesota chorus presented a program of French sacred music in the magnificent Basilica of St. Mary in downtown Minneapolis on a cold November evening. Short works by Fauré, Franck, Widor, Dupré, and Honegger made up the first half; the second was devoted to Duruflé's beloved Requiem, which I'd never heard before. Sweet and slippery French harmonies throughout, several soloists who knew how to fill the lofty interior of the basilica, and a chamber orchestra and pipe organ also helped to maintain an atmosphere of beauty, reverence, and occasionally, of awe.

JazzMN Orchestra

Billed as the Midwest's premier big band, the JazzMN Orchestra filled cavernous Chanhassan Dinner Theater with its joyous blare—which is half the fun—in a December "Christmas" concert that mostly steered clear of cloying holiday classics or spruced them up in spiffy jazz arrangements . The ensemble playing was crisp and the soloists were uniformly top-flight, with the exception of the guitarist, who perhaps had gotten a new fuzz-tone device as an early Christmas present. Vocalist Yolande Bruce, of Moore by Four, appeared on stage for a few numbers, but the band was doing just fine without her.   

Le Vent du Nord

For my money, the best slice of the Celtic music pie is the one performed by musicians from Brittany and Quebec. Irish music, even when played at breakneck speed, can fall into a yutty-tutty regularity that begins to numb the mind. French tunes in a similar vein are almost invariably more complex and interesting rhythmically, and the harmonic coloring also tends to have more variety and appeal. Whatever the case may be, Le vent du Nord took the stage at the Cedar Cultural Center intent on delivering a rousing and varied show, and under the impetus of an electric bass, a mean hurdy-gurdy, two stellar fiddlers, an accordion, and rich vocals throughout, they produced a display of music that I'm tempted to rank in my all-time top ten.

Giulio Cesare in Egitto

The Minnesota Bach Ensemble presented a concert version of excerpts from this Handel opera at Antonello Hall on a Sunday afternoon recently. I've always liked the hall, which is rich in wood paneling and so small that no seat is more than a hundred feet from the stage, behind which there are gigantic windows looking north past a few brick buildings toward the Mississippi River. The windows had been covered with white panels, alas, but the orchestra was sharp, and the three vocalists were distinctively different yet uniformly appealing. Linh Kauffman, a soprano that we've seen in several other recent productions, sang the part of Cleopatra, while the roles of Julius Caesar and Sesto were taken by two mezzos, Christina Christensen and  Spaniard Nerea Berraondo. Jacob Miller's narration strung the arias together and gave me a vague sense of what was going on, but it hardly mattered: it was mostly about the music.

We took Washington Avenue home, marveling at the big city lights beaming from buildings that used to house hardware stores and bicycle-repair shops, heated up some left-over chicken with lemon slices and oil-cured olives, turned off the lights, and dropped a few CDs into the CD-changer by Natalie Dessay, Theresa Berganza, and Lisa Saffer singing (what else?) some of Handel's Italian arias.    

Russian Renaissance

The Schubert Club has done a good job of booking unusual groups to fill out its Mix program, and Russian Renaissance is no exception. The group's instrumentation is drawn from traditional Russian folk instruments, including the triangular balalaika that we've all seen in films, the oval domra, a big button accordion, and the huge bass balalaika, which measures almost four feet on a side. The playing is energetic and precise, so much so that two years ago this quartet won the $100,000 grand prize at the M-Prize Competition, the biggest jackpot in the world of chamber music.

The concert was held in a cavernous "hall" lined with rugged exposed brick in the former Allied Van Lines building, which is located in one of the few parts of the warehouse district that still has warehouses in it.  

All of that being granted, I must admit that I left the concert with mixed feelings. The performances were tight, yes, and the play-list was varied. But too much of the program was given over to the furious diddling that produces the balalaika's trademark tremolo effect. The slower, more atmospheric pieces tended to be more satisfying. The group was adept at producing the abrupt stops and starts required to bring drama to the tangos, but it didn't dwell long enough in those languorous spaces that provide that genre's sensuous ground. I was intrigued to see compositions by famed French accordionist Richard Galliano, Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt, and Argentine bandoneon-player Astor Piazzola on the program, but in each case, the balalaika version didn't quite measure up to the originals running through my head.

It was an unusual and entertaining evening, just the same.       

The Perils of Interlibrary Loans

It’s nice to know you can lay your hands on almost any book you want if you’ve got the patience to wait a few weeks. And all for free. The privilege only becomes hazardous when the books you request all arrive at the same time. They can’t be renewed, so you’re suddenly struggling under the onus of reading quite a few esoteric books almost simultaneously. Such a crisis is sometimes compounded by the untimely arrival of once-wildly popular books in your local library’s general collection, books that you put in a request for last summer—number 88 on 4 copies—and forgot about completely.

It would be criminal to simply ignore such riches, returning them unexamined, especially considering how hard library staff work to make them available to you. On the other hand, no one but a Harold Bloom could possibly read them all in so short a span of time.

I found myself with just such a glut a few weeks ago, and I gave it my best shot. Here are the results.

The Sum of Small Things:

A Theory of the Aspirational Class

I came across a reference to the title in a N Y Times  editorial; I suppose I was attracted by the word “aspirational.” I have long had it in mind to write an essay focusing of aspirational energy as the force that not only “makes the world go ‘round” but also gives life meaning. (Haven’t gotten around to it yet.) I also liked the phrase “small things,” being reminded of one of my mother’s favorite expressions: “Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.” Perhaps faint echoes of W. H. Hudson’s classic essay collection, A Traveller in Little Things, were also making themselves felt in my brain.

Though it was published by Princeton University Press (or perhaps because of that fact?) the book turned out to be a snooze—but an instructive one. The author, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, aspires here to very little except to do an update on Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption among the leisure classes at the turn of the twentieth century. Currid-Halkett makes the case that nowadays, due to various social and demographic changes,  the same pernicious impulse to “show off” that Veblen described manifests itself among the upper-middle-class “elite” in the form of little things.

 A single example will serve to prove the point, or lack thereof. Here is how she describes those individuals who try to impress their friends by taking expensive exercise classes: “These classes signal financial stability and free time for leisure activities,” she says, adding that such conspicuous leisure “operates on a number of levels.”

She mentions the high cost of the classes and adds that they constitute an exhibition of “conspicuous leisure to anyone who has also shown up,” and goes on to elaborate this obvious point in some detail—so much so that she loses sight entirely of a more important point she had stressed just one page earlier.

“These exercises really worked. Because the exercises isolated specific muscles through discrete movements, one’s body really looked different—toned and tightened in ways that an ordinary run, game of tennis, or visit to the gym could not accomplish.”

So which is the motive here? Develop a “buff” physiognomy or impress your peers by flaunting your wealth and free time. Both impulses are perhaps at work in some cases, but it seems odd for Currid-Halkett to lay such heavy emphasis on the second one. After all, participating in an excruciating exercise routine for many weeks is an unnecessarily difficult way to show off, unless you also happen to be interested in fitness, muscle tone, and so on.

More generally speaking, Currid-Halkett, in her dissection of the “many levels” of consumer behavior, repeatedly ignores the most important one: that people, regardless of class, have a desire to improve themselves, often accompanied by the desire to help others. That’s the “aspirational energy” that animates the universe and drives it forward. Her slant, superficially cunning and statistically well-founded, exposes one of the core intellectual defects of our time. 

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur gave it a name in 1965: “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Ricoeur was referring to the reductive theories of thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud, but the same attitudes are widely held today, when worldly-wise scholars and pundits feel called upon to demonstrate that every human activity harbors a secret motive, and is more shallow and self-serving than it appears. 

Let me suggest we take a clue, not from Currid-Halkett or even Thorstein Veblen, but from Veblen’s contemporary George Simmel: “Life is that which seeks to go beyond life.”

Made in Sweden

This is sociology at its best, which is to say, not sociology at all. Elisabeth Åsbrink offers vignettes of twenty-five individuals and cultural habits that shaped the Swedish character and nation, some for the better, others not so much. The book’s subtitle, “how the Swedes are not nearly so egalitarian, tolerant, hospitable or cozy as they would like to (have you) think” might give you the impression that it’s yet another shallow exercise in debunking grass-is-always-greener fantasies, but it’s richer than that.

Among the individuals she portrays are the novelist who wrote a proto-feminist work about a couple who do not get married but treat each other as equals—this back in 1815. In another essay she describes how eager the Swedes were in the late nineteenth century to practice eugenics and sterilization, and how comfortable they seemed to be, as a “neutral” nation during World War II, helping the Nazis with all sorts of logistical problems. One chapter deals with the Swedes’ equivalent of the  social security number: we protect ours religiously, they recite theirs at the grocery store checkout to accumulate points for gasoline discounts. Another chapter relates how Astrid Lindgren spearheaded an effort to ban all forms of psychological and physical violence towards children in Sweden.

One thing I especially liked about this book is that the author makes no attempt to connect the dots. Sweden is a complex society. Why reduce it to a formula or a simple-minded theory?

How Natives Think

Nowadays no politically correct reader would so much as glance at a book with a title like this. Too bad. The author, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, was a landmark anthropologist, among the first to speculate seriously, on the basis of his and other field research, on the fact that indigenous peoples in other parts of the world often apply a "logic" to their common experiences that differs markedly from the one we're familiar with. I requested this book after coming upon a reference to him in a book about shamanism that I was thumbing through, along with the phrase "participatory mystique." I like that phrase, though I imagine that if it were translated correctly, in might come out as "mystical participation," which means largely the same thing but doesn't sound so good to my ear.

The was published in 1922 with an English translation a year later.  This particular copy came to me by way of the collection of the Minneapolis Atheneum, later absorbed into the Minneapolis Public Library, later absorbed into the Hennepin County system.

"Primitives see with eyes like ours, but they do not perceive with the same minds. We might almost say that their perceptions are made up of a nucleus surrounded by a layer of varying density of repre­sentations which are social in their origin. And yet such a simile seems somewhat clumsy and inexact, for the primitive has not the least feeling of such a nucleus and surrounding layer; it is we who separate them ; we, who by virtue of our mental habits cannot help distinguishing them... The profound difference which exists between primitive mentality and our own is shown even in the ordinary percep­tion or mere apprehension of the very simplest things. Primi­tive perception is fundamentally mystic on account of the mystic nature of the collective representations which form an integral part of every perception. Ours has ceased to be so, at any rate with regard to most of the objects which surround us."

Isn't this one of the great challenges we all face: to participate in a meaningful way in life? Work, family, recreation, service. But these types of involvement are concrete. It seems to me that the phrase "mystical participation" would apply to the affinities we feel toward a football team, say, or a scheme of religious observance, or a riverside getaway that we've been returning to since childhood.

I didn't get far in Levy-Bruhl's book, but I think he was on to something.

 

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik is a talented, erudite, and good-natured writer well-known to readers of the New Yorker. His book about living in France with his family, Paris to the Moon, became an instant classic, and several of his more recent books about living in Manhattan also make for a good read.

In A Thousand Small Vanities Gopnik extends his range to take up the issue of liberalism, and the results are mixed. The book draws heavily on profiles he wrote for the New Yorker, and that fact leads to some odd areas of emphasis. And Gopnik frames his long essay as if he were explaining to his young daughter where liberalism comes from, and this gives it, at times, a vaguely flippant tone.

Yet there is plenty of meat on the bones, too. Gopnik reminds us of the role played by common-sense British philosophers of the eighteenth century in shaping liberal values, and that’s good.

“Hume, following Shaftesbury, thought that sympathy was the primary human faculty, our key gift. It’s the emotional mucilage that brings men and women together and keeps them together. Sex may make us want someone else’s company, but that’s an animal desire: it’s our ability to feel for someone, rather than to just, uh, feel them, that makes us human.”

He finds a similar bent in the works of Adam Smith, better known today as the high priest of capitalism than for his earlier work on moral sentiments. “Adam Smith believed, not that markets make men free, but that free men move toward markets.”

This whirlwind tour of what we might call humanist theory is refreshing. It leads Gopnik to the conclusion—echoing the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas—that “the coffee-houses and salons of the 17th and 18th centuries helped provide the foundation of the liberal Enlightenment—a caffeinated pathway out of the clan society into cosmopolitan society. Democracy was not made in the streets but among the saucers.” 

It’s an attractive theory—especially if you’re a long-winded coffee-drinker like me—but I’m not sure it’s entirely true. For example, Gopnik largely ignores the impact of religious thought on the development of liberal values. I seem to recall that in his classic History of European Liberalism (1934) Guido de Ruggiero emphasizes the role played by the Presbyterian church, among other institutions, in developing the idea that the people have a God-given right to choose their own leaders. These ideas eventually made their way from Scotland to the New World. And on a deeper level, Benedetto Croce emphasizes the fact throughout his long career, but especially in History is the Story of Liberty, that the only things we care to remember, in the long run, are acts of creativity—scientific, aesthetic, juridical, or whatever—and such acts are intrinsically “free,” hence liberal. Conservatism might preserve a few things, but almost by definition, it produces nothing.

Gopnik’s book is riddled with fine turns of phrase, and he is to be commended for devoting entire chapters to such questions as why conservatives hate liberals. But here he gives too much credit to political argument, whereas conservative postures are usually based largely on irrational resentment, low self-esteem, bigotry, the love of guns, and the success with which conservative politicians exploit the gullibility and irrational fears of their “base.”

Yet even here, Gopnik’s historical perspective is valuable. He describes Disraeli’s hunch that the working classes would be likely to side with imperialist pride over social betterment as “one of the shrewdest guesses” in modern political history, and goes on to note that in the US, the white working class doesn’t side with the social democrats because “identity, or national pride, if you prefer, has proven time and again to be incomparably more powerful than economic self-interest narrowly defined.” De Gaulle was also among those who intuited that myths matter. “Without a sense of common significance and shared symbols, it is impossible for any modern state to go on.”

Conservatives find few symbols to savor in the liberal agenda, which, according to Gopnik, they see as “a moral atrocity and a practical failure, a baleful compendium of bad ideas,” including secularism, cosmopolitanism, relativism, and permissiveness.”

He devotes another chapter to why progressives hate liberals, but here, too, it’s largely breath wasted. A single sentence would suffice, and he provides it. “Liberals believe in reform rather than revolution because the results are in: it works better.”

In the end, Gopnik’s vision is that of a literary man who imagines that if everyone is given the opportunity to express themselves in a coffee-shop or a brew-pub while imbibing among friends who’s views don’t differ much from theirs, all will be well.

I learned more about the world we live in today, which includes China, Russia, Turkey, Brexit, white nationalists, and all the rest, in the first chapter of Edward Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism than in the 100-odd pages of Gopnik’s book that I got through. But I enjoyed Gopnik’s book more—probably because I share his vision.

See you at the coffee shop?

Chipping Ice on a Warm Winter Day

There is something special about February sunlight. I notice it  year after year. This year that glorious presence announced itself with a bang, after two weeks of uninterrupted gloom.

Hilary and I tried to make the most of it this weekend by exploring some out-of-the-way parks. We skied on Saturday morning at Lebanon Hills, parking at the west exit on Pilot Knob Road and skiing west under the highway and off into the wooded hills. The trails are typical two-track classic trails, somewhat narrow, and this being our first visit, we walked down three or four steep hills that disappeared out of sight around a bend. Good call.

On Sunday morning before breakfast I noticed a largish bird at the edge of the woods with his back turned to us, tail bobbing slightly. By the time I'd found my binoculars, it had turned in my direction. It was a cooper's hawk calmly tearing chunks off of flesh off a female cardinal.

Scenes like this remind me how much humanity and cuteness I tend to project on these beautiful but self-centered creatures.

The temperature was 43 degrees by 9 a.m. when we left the house to hike some trails at a park we'd never been to before north of Elk River. Blue sky, white snow, fresh air, shadows in the woods. Very nice.

On our way back to town we took a detour to Crow-Hassan Park, south of St. Michael, where there's always a good chance you'll see a rough-legged hawk sitting in a bare tree on the county road going in. Once again, we did. We hiked out into the fields for a while, relishing the silence and the empty, grass-covered fields. There were horses in the parking lot by the time we got back to the car, and people with exotic, uncontrollable dogs.

When we got home, I still hadn't gotten enough of the balmy atmosphere, and I decided to chip away at the sheet of ice at the end of the driveway. Perhaps you'll accuse me of setting the bar rather low, but I find this activity to be one of the most satisfying on earth. Why? Because when the weather turns warm, the sheet of ice becomes soft, and it doesn't take much effort to chop off a big piece from above, or slide the blade of your shovel underneath and pry loose a handsome continent.

But there are also perturbations involved. As you liberate a chunk and toss it aside, a stream of water rushes in to fill the gap, and you begin to wonder if there will be a new chuck of ice just as thick as the one you removed in the same place tomorrow morning. Then again, you begin to wonder whether, if you didn't do anything at all, the ice would melt anyway by sundown, rendering your efforts superfluous.

To counter these dark thoughts, I remind myself that superfluous or not, I'm enjoying this little project. When I no longer enjoy it, I'll stop doing it. But I struggle with the nagging suspicion that if I could only break through the thick dike of ice right here at the edge of driveway, the water would all drain away and I'd be set for the rest of the winter.

Our final expedition, after all that labor, was to a third distant corner of the city, to a concert given by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra at the St. Andrews Lutheran megachurch on the outskirts of Mahtomedi. I grew up in that village—back when St. Andrew's was a modest church on Mahtomedi Avenue—and I spent a few minutes in the lobby of the  attractive new structure on the outskirts of town examining faces and trying to bend them to my  memories: "Is that Tony Konkler? Can that be Meta Jensen? Boy, they've changed!" Of course, the likelihood that someone from my class might happen to attend this particular performance, much less that I'd actually recognize them, was nil. But at a certain point in life, everyone starts to look vaguely like someone you used to know.

I did become reacquainted with one old friend during the performance: Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Hearing it live for perhaps the first time, I was impressed. But the performance also reconfirmed my long-standing opinion that the piece has absolutely nothing to do with the seasons. Each of the four "movements" is made up of  several sections that vary widely in mood and tempo. The "Spring" section doesn't sound at all like spring, and "Winter" isn't particularly wintry. I don't know why the people who write program notes continue to offer us that crock of cut cork. Maybe it's because they know audiences like to have something concrete to hold onto in the midst of such mercurial shifts in mood. Or maybe in Venice the seasons are all pretty much alike. Perhaps we should just chalk it up, once again, to romantic projection.