Retreating Back Into Plato's Cave

Maybe my late best friend was right.  Whenever I would lay out for him my latest enthusiasm for a topic more dark than light, he would say (in loose paraphrase) "I won't go there with you.  My prosaic demons, the demons of my childhood, are sufficient unto the day thank you very much."

And I myself have said elsewhere that once one goes down such a path, it is hard if not impossible to abandon it if it has perceived credibility.  In particular, the "Woo-Woo Choo-Choo" of what we now call "non-human intelligence" rolls on and on towards lands of high strangeness and of deep strangeness, with no gentle exit possible it seems.  Lately, intimations of:

• Bioengineering of the human race.
• "Hyperobjects" that are not only unknown to us, but essentially unknowable, fundamentally beyond our ken for the same reason that a spider, upon inspection, can't make out the scope and the function of a tennis shoe.
• "Other forms of life" in the words of one prominent former master of the US national security apparatus, hinting, I take it, at the reality of that very unknowability.
• An invasion of "sentient plasmoids," plasmoids that bring old myths to life, calling to mind as they do Moses and the burning bush, the tongues of fire that touched the heads of the apostles, the spinning sun of Fatima, and even the monster of the id that terrorized Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis in the classic 1956 film "Forbidden Planet."  In raw description, maybe Jerry Lee Lewis, of all people, came closest to the mark, with his "Great Balls of Fire!"

More broadly, there is an overhang, a premonition, if not of Apocalypse, at least of a time of Great Tribulation, perhaps to be followed by a genuinely new age, but one from which everyone born before, say, 1980, is excluded as collateral damage.  Tant pis.

 

Can You Picture It?

You are just finishing up the dinner dishes, this coming Wednesday evening.  You hear voices in the street, a little muffled laughter.  You turn on the porch light to spy ten of your neighbors, flimsy red books in hand.  When you open the door, they serenade you with songs of the season that everyone knows -- "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," "Joy to the World," "O Holy Night," and "Silent Night," of course.  The voices congeal and rise in a single column of condensation.

You invite everyone in, briefly, for a cup of eggnog (a little heavy on the nutmeg) to brace them against the cold before they head further up the hill.

Can I picture it?  No, I can't.  I can sooner picture ten of my neighbors conspiring to throw toilet paper over the branches of my favorite front-yard tree, then scurrying like roaches when I turn on that porch light.

The Steve Jobs Cultural Revolution marches on.

 

Will You Beg for Absolution?

Or, like Saddam Hussein, will you die defiant and unrepentant?

What, if anything, will turn on the outcome?  And is it only cowards who are finally repentant?

 

 

August 1944

When, after about 25 hours of viewing, the first US Army jeep arrives on the outskirts of "Un Village Francais," alone, it comes as a shock, if a welcome one.  In the course of four years, we have seen many elegant French sedans and no-nonsense French trucks, open German staff cars and also the light German personnel carriers that inspired the Volkswagen "Thing" in the late 1960s.  But the always iconic little jeep seems to signal defiance of the Wehrmacht all by itself, to signal, in fact, that the Liberation is at hand.  But by now we know that chaos and death will only accelerate in the short window between the jeep's appearance and the Judgment Day that awaits.

The jeep has come with two men to Villeneuve to blow up a bridge, so that a Panzer corps will be trapped in a pocket from which it can do no harm to the advancing US 7th Army.  Things go awry; "Bob" has to return to divisional headquarters to secure a new detonator, leaving his comrade Chris behind.

Our principal heroine, "Marie," a farmer who has risen to local leadership of the Resistance, convinces Bob to allow her to come along for the ride, for the purpose of convincing his commanding officer to rescue Villeneuve, with the Germans and the French militia threatening to slaughter the villagers on their way out of town.

At the headquarters, in the open air, Bob and Marie have a brief conversation as they wait for their audience with the CO.  As always in the series, Marie wears shabby clothes and appears to be without make-up, but the camera virtually caresses her beautiful and expressive face.  

Bob first asks Marie in his shaky French if she wants a cigarette.  (She does not smoke.)  Then he offers her a stick of gum.  "What is gum?" she says.  And then "I am not a cow!"  Finally he offers chocolate, and she lights up.  When he conjures a Hershey bar from a supply tent, here in the midst of battle, and more or less at the snap of his fingers, she smiles and says "Now I know that you will win this war!"

 

It's a Story More Strange Than Any Episode of "Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits"

But I beg your indulgence, to hear me tell it.

More than 300,000 years ago, a proto-Chinese man "married" a proto-Southeast Asian woman.  Let us call the tribe they engendered "Asia Man" ("AM").  Somehow, AM found his way, or was transported, to what is now Central Africa, below the Sahara.  The evidence for this includes the fact that the descendants of AM carry remnants of a disease that can only be contracted via the bite of the tsetse fly, whose range is narrow and concentrated in that part of the world.

Still about 300,000 years ago, Someone or SomeThing ("SoS") experimented with the DNA of AM, mixing it in with the DNA of chimpanzees or their close relations the bonobos, as well as other strains.  The result was the creation of an entirely new species of intelligent, bipedal creatures whom we shall call "Tridactyl Man" ("TM"), because its most striking features are its three-fingered hands and three-toed feet, both with more phalanges than are found in human fingers and toes.

There are other remarkable differences between TM and homo sapiens.  They are only about 60 centimeters tall, but their craniums are relatively large.  Their rib cages are structured much differently than our own.  Because they had no molars, we assume that they lived on a liquid, or at least very soft, diet.  The joints of their hips, and the structure of their feet, suggest that they must have walked in a way that would strike us as awkward and eccentric.

Some of the TM have metal plates, made from sophisticated alloys, embedded within their chests, perhaps implanted to overcome a genetic weakness in that part of the body.

And now something most difficult to explain.  By roughly the time of Christ, TM somehow had been transplanted across the Atlantic to the Nazca region of Peru, a coastal desert land that they shared with the Nazca tribe of homo sapiens.  There, some of the bodies of TM (the "Nazca Mummies") were buried in caves or tunnels, in what is called diatomaceous earth.  This is a powerful natural desiccant that is used even today to kill insects without poison.  It is assumed that it was used deliberately in the case of the Nazca Mummies to preserve their bodies -- not just skin and bones but internal organs and connective tissues as well -- because we find them now in a remarkable state of preservation after 2000 years or so.  Hence, the Nazca Mummies are not really mummies at all, not having been "mummified!"

The first of the mummies came to light, quite literally, about ten years ago.  Since then, a number have been subjected to intensive investigation by scientists in Peru and Mexico, but also in Petersburg, Russia and in the United States, the last under the auspices of one John McDowell who is, we are told, the eminence grise of forensic sciences in the States.  The research has included carbon dating, state-of-the-art medical scanning, and DNA sequencing that compares the specimens with all known terrestrial species that themselves have been sequenced.  Already, two peer-reviewed papers discussing preliminary results of investigations into their nature and origin have been published in mainstream journals.  Much much more will reach the scientific community and the public (if there is any interest in the public) in the next year or two.

Perhaps the best known of the mummies that have been studied is one called "Maria."  Her DNA analysis is so dense with information that scientists can conjecture as to the cause of her death -- a massive infection that was triggered by the eating of raw shellfish that are native to coastal Peru.

So far as we know, there are no elephants in Peru, but the elephant in this particular room is, of course, the implication that TM was made neither by natural evolution alone nor by the Hand of God, at least if God is conceived to be as portrayed in the Bible.  Who was this Someone or SomeThing that intervened in our world?  What was its purpose in doing so?  Is it still among us, or does it lie perhaps just beyond The Veil?

And a more disturbing question still.  Could we ourselves also have arisen, metaphorically speaking, from Someone's petri dish?

 

The French Language Is Bangin' Round Me Head

Thanks to three seasons of "Un Village Francais," binge watched with sub-titles.  (Four more seasons yet to be watched.)

Indelible characters.  Gorgeous period automobiles.  Gorgeous period women as well, but each captivating in her own, subtle way.  The farmer's ill-dressed wife perhaps the most beautiful of all.

The plight of the Jews portrayed unflinchingly, and not en masse; we have come to know each before a twist of fate or a betrayal places them onto cattle cars that the "sub-prefect" assures them are destined for a suburb of Paris, and not for Poland.

The factionalism.  The moral compromises.  The intense love affairs that the French simply can't seem to sublimate to the circumstances!

I understand for the first time what it really meant to join the Resistance -- often abandoning every semblance of normal life to live like a hunted animal, for a time indeterminate.

After three seasons, from the perspective of 1942, one can't help but see it through to the turning of the tide.  What will become, for example, of the SD Gruppenfuehrer Muller, who delights in extracting confessions by snipping strategic and most sensitive spots with the little wire cutters that he keeps in the drawer of his elegant desk?

Meanwhile, resonating at the Hour of the Wolf:

Ecoute-moi bien!

Pas de tout.

Les Americains sont sur les plages d'Afrique du Nord.  Personne ne sait ce que cela signifie.

(and lastly)

Ma cherie, je regrette completement de te connaitre, tu sais.

 

God Grant Me Respite From This Stupid Election

Respite, that is, in the form of two lengthy, European "streaming" serials -- "Babylon Berlin" and "Un Village Francais."

The first gives us a picture of Berlin during the Weimar years leading up to Hitler's ascension to chancellor.  We see chaos unfolding, and life-threatening struggles among many factions -- Hitler's Nazis, of course, but also brownshirts bitterly opposed to him, communists loyal to Stalin, communists loyal to Trotsky, militarists who want a revival of imperial Deutschland under the Kaiser, and the minions of vicious gangland figures.  And at the core, a beautiful, slow-unfolding romance between a police detective, scarred by his experiences in the trenches of WWI, who has been imported from Cologne to Berlin, and a young woman who splits her professional time between the Berlin Police Headquarters and a brothel that sits, not very discreetly, beneath the city's most popular and elegant dancehall/cabaret.

The second follows an ensemble of inhabitants of a French village that lies about halfway between Geneva and Marseilles -- Villeneuve -- from the day in 1940 that the Wehrmacht rolls in and from thence through the entire war.  Our focus is on a doctor who rather reluctantly becomes major of the town and his beautiful but faithless wife, the mayor's brother, a communist who takes up arms against the Germans, the brother's young son Gustave, the manager of a sawmill/concrete plant, his wife and his young mistress, who migrates into the Resistance, a sinister German functionary with an addiction to morphine, a police inspector of a certain age who falls in love with a Jewess who has been expelled from her position as headmistress of the town's elementary school, the endearing middle-aged man who is assigned to replace the headmistress, and a beautiful young teacher at the school who falls in love with a tall and handsome German sergeant.

The first production is German; the second is French; the creators/producers had nothing to do with one another.  And yet we can see the two stories as one story, separated in time by about ten years and in distance by less than 900 miles.  It is about a cataclysm in Germany that spread to become a cataclysm in France and, of course, further to the East, to the gates of Moscow, and how ordinary people were tested and ground up by that cataclysm.

This combined narrative disabuses us of the notion that we ourselves would have made the correct moral choices had we been Germans when Hitler was on the rise, or French people under occupation who had some choice to collaborate or not, to protect their Jewish friends and acquaintances or not.  Indeed in both countries, after the liberation and the defeat of Germany, there was a convenient re-writing of history on a scale that was massive and local at the same time, to exonerate ex post facto both the oppressors and those who chose to collaborate with them.

It might be a good moral exercise to blend the two character ensembles outlined above, all of the protagonists in the combined narrative that is, and imagine them standing at St. Peter's Gate.  Our charge would be to sort and rank them by the measures of courage and guilt, two sides of a coin.  We would find very few clear, un-nuanced cases, and we would walk away from the exercise feeling much more humble about our own standing in the world.

 

The Multi-Layered Meanings of "A Maggot"

It must have been sometime in the mid-1990's when I gifted myself The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.  Since then, I have cracked it maybe three or four times.  

It may be the shorter Oxford dictionary, but it is by no means short.  It comes in two heavy tomes, each of almost 2000 pages, and the print is fine.

On page 1661 of the first volume one may find the definition(s) of the word "maggot," both the contemporary -- "Any soft-bodied limbless larva, esp. of a housefly, blowfly, or other dipteran fly ...," and that derived from the old Middle English -- "A whimsical or perverse fancy."

"A Maggot" is the title of the last-published (1985) novel of the celebrated English writer John Fowles.  Fowles makes it plain at the very beginning of the book that in reading it our eyes should be more focused on the second and older meaning, suggesting that someone's "whimsical and perverse fancy" will be a driving force in the novel, and also that for him to write it arose from a whimsical fancy.  And yet, the more unsettling, one might say disgusting associations that the word "maggot" brings to mind hang over the novel that follows like a sinister white cloud.  (And what of Fowles' choice of the indefinite article in the title?  Does it reinforce the old historical meaning? (This, after all, from the author of "The French Lieutenant's Woman," not "A French Lieutenant's ...))

In any event, so it is that a perverse fancy, albeit a shifting one, is at the center of the novel.  The story is set in 1736.  A young English lord has had a falling out with his father, an eminent but unnamed duke, over the former's unwillingness to marry according to the wishes of His Grace.  His Lordship departs London for Devonshire in the company of four others, but in the guise of a wealthy merchant, one "Mr. Bartholomew."  The others are: a middling actor who pretends to be his uncle, "Mr. Lacy," a still lesser actor in the role of a retired soldier, "Sergeant Farthing," there to provide protection with his blunderbuss, "Dick," who alone carries his own real name and is the manservant of Bartholomew, though he be deaf, dumb and otherwise mentally feeble, and "Louise," who in fact has been hired out to His Lordship for the duration of the trip by Miss Claiborne, the keeper of the most notorious "bagnio" or brothel in all of London.  "Louise," sometimes also "Fanny," and in reality "Rebecca," plays the role of maid to a fine lady of whom His Lordship is deeply enamored and who, we are first told, is the object of his journey, for the purpose of elopement.

But as the novel unfolds, we are asked repeatedly to abandon our understanding of what sort of perverse fancy drives His Lordship, only to replace it with a more outlandish one.  Is he tormented by his own impotence, and does he hope to cure it both by witnessing Fanny and Dick in wild copulation and by "taking the waters" in a certain place in Devonshire that specializes in a cure for this particular ailment?  Is he on a quasi-scientific pilgrimage of some kind, to Stonehenge and beyond, with a Rosicrucian or other occult orientation to it?  Beyond that still, but in the same direction if you will, is he a practitioner of Black Arts whose intention is to win favor with Satan himself by offering up Fanny, in helpless sacrifice, to be ravaged by the Devil?  Or is he a high priest, in practical station if not in name, in a benevolent and powerful religion the likes of which we have never before seen, and is his purpose in such capacity to shake Fanny to her spiritual foundations so that she can break free of her sinful past and reconcile in piety with her Quaker parents?

We never discover the answer to this riddle.  His Lordship never returns from his journey, and his fate and his whereabouts remain unknown.  The fate of his servant, on the other hand, is to have been found hanging from a tree, dead by his own hand as far as we can tell.  For a denouement we don't have an unravelling of the riddle but rather finally, at novel's end, we see Fanny, now Rebecca, in late winter of 1736-7, married to an impoverished blacksmith and giving birth to a daughter, not by her husband but by Dick.  The daughter, we are told, is Ann Lee, who many years later will be buried in Watervliet, New York, near Albany, having risen to prominence as the second, female incarnation of the Christ, or at least said to be such divinity in the Shaker movement that she led!

Much of what we learn about the competing fancies of His Lordship we learn not in conventional description of the Devonshire pilgrimage but rather in long depositions of key characters, depositions taken by the lawyer Henry Ayscough, who has been engaged by the duke and charged with solving the central mystery and, more to the point, finding his son.  These depositions are posted to His Grace, as enclosures to obsequious letters in which Ayscough candidly explains his estimation of each witness and his tentative theory of the case.

The most noteworthy and, to me, impressive stylistic feature of the book is its immersion in the language of the time and place in which it is set.  In truth, I should say that I am as ignorant as the next person about what, in fact, the patois of that time and place sounded like, and so I can only say that Fowles' language has the ring of linguistic truth!

Here is a representative sample from Ayscough's deposition of David Jones, who played the role during the trek of Sergeant Farthing:

Q.  I would have you tell me what you made of Mr. Bartholomew's servant Dick.

A.  I made nothing of him, sir.  That 'twas beyond an Irishman's belief, a gentleman thinking to employ him for what he was.  He was strong enough, well set, for a good lackey, but naught else, see you.

Q.  Not a gentleman's servant, you would say?

A.  He did what he was bid, sir, well enough.  And I'll allow his master's secrets was safe enough with him.  And his belongings.  He would not even let me touch the little chest we had upon the packhorse, that weighed so heavy.  Our first day out I would help him carry it up, he pushed me off, and so for the rest.  He was more jealous cur than serving-man in that.

Q.  Marked you nothing else peculiar in him?

A.  That he would not laugh, nor even smile, not even when the company was as merry as cup and can.  There was a maid at Basingstoke one morning at the well, where Dick and I and others was standing by, and would dowse the stableboy for some impertinence, and ran after him with the bucket but fell, and dowsed herself, which a dead man would have laughed to see how droll it was.  But not he.  He stood always at the coffin's side, as the saying goes.  Ever found sixpence, and lost a shilling.

Fowles employs a clever conceit to buttress this our immersion in the language.  He reproduces and intersperses with the narrative facsimiles of actual publications that were popular at the time his tale takes place.  They are rather difficult to read, but worthy of the effort.  Here, from "The Gentleman's Magazine," the news of Tuesday, 19 Oct 1736 includes this entry:

Dublin.  A Woman big with Child going into the Country to lie in, was taken with her Labour on the Road, no body being near but a blind Man and a Boy, she begg'd the latter to go for Help, he refus'd unless paid beforehand, she pull'd out her Purse, in which was some Silver and a small Piece of Gold, which the Boy seeing told the Blind Man of, he immediately knock'd out her Brains with a Staff, took the Purse and went off : A Gentleman coming by, and seeing the Woman murder'd, rode up to the Boy, and threatening to kill him, he confess'd the Fact, and both were sent to Kilmanham Gaol.

Fowles' narrator qua narrator does not purport to be speaking from a perch in 1736, but rather in Fowles' own time.  For example, at one point he contrasts two characters as emblematic of left- and right- "brainedness."  Nevertheless, the narrator's own voice carries a modest level of formality that we may associate with times past, as here, where he inserts an aside after telling us that Rebecca has just hastened to use her chamber pot, "quickly raising her skirts":

She did not have to remove any other garment for the very simple reason that no Englishwoman, of any class, had ever worn anything beneath her petticoats up to this date, nor was to do so for at least another sixty years.  One might write an essay on this incomprehensible and little-known fact about their under-clothing, or lack of it.  French and Italian women had long remedied the deficiency, and English men also, but not English women.  All those graciously elegant and imposing upper-class ladies in their fashionable or court dresses, whose image has been so variously left us by the eighteenth-century painters, are -- to put it brutally -- knickerless.  And what is more, when the breach was finally made -- or rather, covered -- and the first female drawers, and soon after pantalettes, appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were considered grossly immodest, an unwarranted provocation upon man, which is no doubt why they so swiftly became de rigeur.

If it weren't clear before now, I have great admiration for "A Maggot" and the audacious imagination that spawned it, and this without having explained its most audacious turn of all, one that places it, for some, in the category of science fiction instead of, or in addition to, the category of historical fiction. What was that turn? The last of the motivations of His Lordship, the benign one related by Rebecca to Ayscough in her deposition, remarkably has her enter a mysterious cavern with the nobleman, there to witness an oblong white craft that she calls a maggot!  A door drops down, she enters the craft, and then she is transported to the skies above a new and glorious world that she characterizes as the "Eternal June."  This and other visions from the cavern and its environs she incorporates into her still evolving religious perspective, which we might call "proto-Shakerism."

To me it is striking and mysterious that Fowles, an unwavering atheist, would in a historical novel paint for us a picture nearly 40 years ago that bears such close relationship to the "tic tac" phenomena that our US Navy pilots described before Congress, under oath, just last year.  But for their hard shells, they might well have been called maggots rather than lozenges.  Perhaps, then, it all bubbles up from our still-opaque and Jungian "collective unconscious."

 

On the Impossibility of Policing Social Media Content

Consider the following:

• A "Road Runner" cartoon in which Wile E. Coyote is first crushed by an anvil and then burnt to bits by an exploding box of dynamite.
• A "Three Stooges" short in which Moe pokes everyone in the eyes with two fingers and smacks Curly over the head with a frying pan.
• A security camera film from Latin America in which a would-be thief in a bodega is shot three times in the stomach, leaves a trail of blood on the floor, and falls dead in the bodega's revolving door.
• "Un Chien Andalou," the 1929 surrealist collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, which opens with a woman, in close up, apparently having her eye sliced open with a straight razor (the eye of a dead calf was used in the making of the film according to Bunuel).
• An Instagram film of about 15 seconds length in which a series of toddlers scream their heads off until, from off camera, someone sails a slice of Kraft American cheese in such a way that it lands on, and adheres to, the tops of their heads, which immediately calms them.

Which of these films should pass muster on social media? The standards are different.  On X/Twitter, all of them would pass I think.  On Facebook, the first two would pass, and the second two likely not.  The last would be rejected, based on my own personal experience over the weekend, when I tried to put the clip on my Facebook feed together with a suggestion that I would try the "cheesehead" technique on my wife the next time she gets ornery.

And how would one write an algorithm that would rationally separate wheat and chaff here, taking into account historical and cultural context, the importance of preserving humor and sarcasm in a free society, and all of the other things that the courts have placed under the rubric of "redeeming social value" in judging, for example, whether pornography may be prohibited by law?  It seems to me impossible, but perhaps AI can tackle this challenge in our world to come like so many others.

I want to say (my overriding point really) is that it should be done, if at all, via the discipline of market forces, and most certainly not by the government, or else we will find ourselves on an Orwellian slippery slope of the most troubling kind.  This would be what you might call "a threat to democracy."

 

Hornblower Hamstrung

In my dream I was a British Navy captain, of a sloop it seems; she was smaller than a frigate, of 26 guns only.

She was a capture from the French, nee "Princesse de Cleves," but now "Aurora."  She was tethered to a grimy dock on the Thames, roughly midway between London Bridge and the Observatory at Greenwich.  In fact, it was always so; in all my time as captain she never moved under her own power.  And yet, one bright spring morning I stood on her quarterdeck and peaked up at the sun through her forest of cordage, and all seemed right with the world on that day.

On another day, we were compelled to host a small group of dignitaries on board for dinner in our cramped quarters.  We were so short manned that I was left alone to polish the silver myself in advance of the repast.

The strangest thing.  The Navy permitted me to share my cabin, indeed to share my bunk, with a beautiful young woman -- Pamela Liffey from the North Country.  She was slender and blonde, and her disposition was fiery and headstrong.  I loved her, and yet she never let me embrace her in the dark.  It was like a game we played between us; I would reach out to her over and over, and each time she rebuffed me.

Thus I was, and became known throughout the Service as, an emblem of futility.  I was The Little Admiral in Lead, painted white and black, and blue.

 

A Small Story With Profound Implications

I feel compelled to explain yet again why I feel "cosmologically shattered," "ontologically shocked," "existentially adrift," whatever you may call it in our common big-word vocabulary.  The feeling is most pressing in the dead of night, but it often spills over now into the daylight hours as well.  (I welcome technical tax work in part because it offers a respite from such thoughts.)

A small story may suffice, but it will only suffice for those with an open heart and an open mind.

Peter Levenda is a genial and unprepossessing man of about my age.  He is, more than most, intelligent and articulate.

Peter is the author, with a bona fide rock star of whom I had never heard -- Tom Delonge -- of a "high strangeness" trilogy called "Sekret Machines -- Gods, Man and War."  The last volume -- "War" --has just been published.  Peter is making the rounds, in part to promote it.  He appeared just yesterday on a radio talk show hosted by Las Vegas journalist George Knapp, during which Knapp asked him to recount the following story.

Decades ago, Peter was having a normal day in his house in a little town in northwest Rhode Island.  The day was normal, that is, until he noticed that there was a black Cadillac of a certain age parked near his house, with two men inside.  One appeared to be looking at the house, or at him, through a camera with a telephoto lens.  Peter decided to approach the car and ask the men what they were doing, but the Cadillac abruptly drove away.

More intrigued than frightened, Peter jumped in his car, in the driveway, to give chase the best he could.  But immediately after he got in, another car, an old wood-paneled station wagon or "woody," pulled in behind him, blocking his path.  In it were two young, smiling women.  They got out of the car and asked Peter if a certain "Mr. X" lived there, using a name that was peculiar and unusual.  Peter noticed that the women's clothing was "off" somehow, of a different cut and perhaps of a different era.  He informed them that he did not know Mr. X, at which point they got in the car and it "disappeared."  Thus Peter's goal to follow the "Cadillac men" (dare I say "Men in Black?") was thwarted.

This incident of high strangeness was a burr in Peter's consciousness, but it faded over time.  However, several years later Peter was posted by his corporate employer at a stint in Malaysia.  One day in that capacity he was rushing through the bustling Singapore airport to catch a connecting flight when he felt a tap on his shoulder.  He turned around to discover that he had been tapped by one of the two women in the woody!  As quickly as she had appeared, after a smile and a subtle wave, she disappeared into the crowd despite Peter's efforts to confront her.

Peter's story involves no saucers or grey aliens, no cattle mutilations or sightings of Sasquatch in the Oregon forest.  And yet it is another, more subtle sign of the Tearing of the Veil, a sign that we are not alone and we are not in charge.

I grow weary of otherwise intellectually curious people who say "Why should I think about such things when there is nothing I can do about it?"  I want to say to them "You are worried about climate change, for example.  Should you not also be concerned about the world that your children and your grandchildren will inherit, with or without the company of overlords that are beyond our comprehension?"  We should, in the 21st century, be more than high-functioning, but blind, mole rats.

 

Dead Reckoning

Or rather I should say "the reckoning of the dead," or "the reckoning that awaits the dead."

Some of the nuns (but by no means all of them!) told us that those unworthy to stand in the Light of the Lord will see that they are unworthy and recoil from the Light.  Surely, with all of the remorse that I have accumulated in this life, I will be among them.  What wilderness awaits me then as a consequence?  And what company will I keep in this the Netherworld?

Justice requires that, in making this reckoning, we see ourselves through a clear lens.  Otherwise, the worst among us, including the members of our political class, in their narcissism and supreme self-regard, would pass through the Gate of Regret.  And those who deserve Heaven -- the Dalai Lama, Fred Rogers, and countless single mothers, widowed and divorced, would join me in the ranks of the Netherworld.

 

From Moral Failings Fled

So many of Stalin's victims hoped, against hope, that if only they confessed to their crimes -- even, and perhaps especially, to crimes that they did not commit -- the system and the great leader would spare them.  But we know that there was no such absolution.

From my own moral failings, real moral failings, fled, I adopted a different strategy.  Glimpsing out of the corner of one eye the shadow of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, I decided to hide in his shadow.  And indeed with some difficulty I managed to occupy this space, but as if in an ill-conceived spelunking, with my arms outstretched without recourse into a narrowing funnel.  

Occupying that space itself was, for me, the severest of punishments.

 

Disturbances

A small pebble tossed into a large, still pond.

The philosopher L Wittgenstein might call our attention to the fact that it is impossible to identify the precise time when the pond will return to perfect stillness.  And yet we can still talk coherently about "disturbed" and "undisturbed" waters.  The categories function fine even though there is no fixed boundary between them.

The continental "big boys," people like Sartre and Nietzsche, will say something more "big picture" -- that the ripples that our own lives make in the cosmic pond are quite annihilated when we go.  This is the source of our most profound freedom to act; we should be grateful for it.  (No; I don't get it either.)

A new generation of philosophers -- is it right to call them neo-platonists? -- insists that each of us leaves behind a vibrational signature when we go, one that persists forever in the fabric of an "informational" universe that is beyond vast. 

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to refer to "Cosmic Consciousness."  It was, indeed, a brand for him.  It is something like that, but secularized, if you will, by passage through the lens of information technology, transhumanism, ones and zeroes at the end of the day.

Let us all bow down to the Algorithmic Golden Calf.

 

My Bicentennial Summer

Ann Arbor, 1976.  I had friends then, and family members who loved me, but they were scattered to the winds.  I was doing legal piecework, for a pittance, in the Great Hall of the University of Michigan Law School.  I had found a small and spartan room, also for a pittance, in a fraternity that was all but otherwise empty that summer.  While I must have, I can't recall exchanging a single word with another person in that house while I lived there.  I was broke, lost, lonely, a loser.

I did not know it at the time, but back home my mother only had months to live.  Perhaps her suffering, and the gloom that pervaded the little household that she shared with my father and my sister, made their way subliminally to me, collecting red rust and hopelessness as they traveled through and around Albany, Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Youngstown, Cleveland and Detroit, all of them emblems of decline, decay.

The thing about that summer: even if an angel or a psychic healer had descended to show me then the life trajectory that was to follow -- many more friends, a wife and two kids, a complex and successful career, material rewards that were beyond my childhood imagination -- I don't think it would have made much difference.  I was locked in a near suicidal space like a bug in primordial amber.

What would have made a difference?  A girl of a certain sort, I think, of which there were many still in those late hippie days.  She might have dropped me a friendly smile across the bar at the old Blind Pig, a locally famous blues joint that I did not exactly frequent, but dropped into from time to time, always alone, to nurse a beer.  Her gesture would have had to be direct and unambiguous, because I always assumed that if the girl was sending signs of availability, it was not availability to me, and even then I would have been awkward on the uptake.

If anything had happened at all, it would have accelerated very quickly.  It was as if I had two, discrete pressure vessels within me, both about to burst.  One was called "Accumulated Grief" and the other "An Aching for Love."  I could have turned the spigot on the first in the privacy of my chamber at the fraternity, and the second in a spontaneous embrace under a streetlamp, at the tail end of one of those strong Midwestern thunderstorms, just down the block from the Blind Pig.  From such beginnings often spring heartbreak sooner or later, but the ride would have been worth it.

 

Sound Adjacency

Lying in bed with eyes wide shut precisely at dawn, a sound intrudes that could be one of two things, equally: (1) a woodpecker working the very resonant trunk of a newly-dead tree; or (2) a cellphone ringtone, one of the simple ones that tries to mimic the ringtone of an actual telephone.  

Blind people must have to navigate such sound adjacency often.  With practice and a heightened focus, they get very good at it.  They seldom mistake the sound of a gentle summer rain for sustained applause, for example.

 

From My Back Porch

The back porch of the boat that is, on its mooring in the Parker River, Plum Island Sound.

It's a scorcher.  The thermometer in my car on the way home reads 99 degrees.  But it's pretty comfortable.  The canvas over my head shields me from the sun, and there is a strong breeze out of the northwest.  Late July in these parts is peak time for "greenheads" -- vicious little horseflies -- but this summer they seem to be sparse and, yes, listless!

Two heart-warming vignettes that make me glad I came to do nothing in particular, both throwbacks to a time and place not tainted by our incessant technology.

First, I spy a classic wooden catboat charging in my direction across the Sound.  The vessel is well known here, sporting as it does a big white mainsail, but with a large blue stripe making a diagonal, and within a stylized American flag.  I don't know the captain/owner at all, but I can say with some confidence, based only on the local culture, that this patriotic display is not of the aggressive, "in your face" kind; it is softer and more traditional than that.

I can tell that our captain intends to split the difference between my boat and the little sloop moored behind me, and then to tack over smartly towards the northeast, making his way up the Sound.  In the event, he can't quite accomplish it; the boat luffs up and loses most of its momentum.  But I can see that the captain is in control.  The boat retains enough momentum to slough off to the northwest, avoiding collision.  Only after 20 or 30 yards of separation thus achieved does the captain let her fall off again to a close reach, fill her sails and indeed tack over smartly.  Twenty minutes later, the big sail is just a dot on the northern horizon.

Second.  There is another such catboat moored to my right, with a light tan sail cover wrapping its boom and lowered gaff.  I know it as a near neighbor, but I have never seen anyone on it.  Abruptly, three young girls in bathing suits, fifteen, sixteen? (I could get a better idea with my binocs but that would invite allegations of creepiness), pop out of the cabin and blow up a very big, pink swan.  Think a poolside Rubber Ducky raft.  They tether it to the stern of the catboat, throw it overboard and jump in for a long frolic.

The Sound is notorious for two things not conducive to swimming -- cold and strong currents.  (I know two grown men who have died in this very anchorage.)  But the tide is now completely slack at its ebb, and one of the girls, her voice carrying with the legendary clarity over the water, declares the sea's temperature "a lot better than it was!"

There is a feature of the lower Sound, roughly 100 yards from my boat, maybe 75 yards from theirs, called Middle Ground.  It is an area of shallows about the size of a football field.  It becomes a little island, "uncovers" that is, but only about an hour each side of low tide.  Right now there are a couple of small boats beached there, and a man walks his dog in water that is maybe three inches deep.

The three girls make the swim to those same shallows, tugging their raft along with them.  There they soak the sun; I notice with admiration that their banter with one another is totally without teasing or malice.

But then another hour has passed.  They have to make it back to the catboat, and an incoming tide has set in.  I worry for them.  What if they have misjudged, and it becomes too strong for them to make headway against it?  And where, by the way, is there any kind of adult supervision to ensure their safety (and, it's true, take much of the joy out of their frolic)?

They have not misjudged anything.  To the contrary, the tether between their raft and the mother ship is slender but very long, and it's still attached.  When they make their way against the tide (which is, in fact, pretty gentle on this day and at this time), if they tire they can jump onto the raft and simply pull themselves back to safety.

I have two thoughts.  One is about how much I wish that my own mother's fear of the water had not prevented me and my siblings from becoming such little fish when we were young.  The other carries the clock forward about ten years from now when, statistically speaking, there is a pretty good chance that I will be gone.  The girls, though, will be in fine form and in fancy dress, together, as each in turn takes a husband.  And a few years after that, the cares of adulthood will have made themselves felt; in Philip Larkin's words, those cares will "gather like a coastal shelf."  But the three, lifelong friends, will still have memories of lazy summer days like this one.

 

Once Again, for Emphasis

And let's remember, in this game only, the correct QUESTION is the correct ANSWER!

Alex Trebek -- "What is the specific heat capacity of a potato?  What is the specific heat capacity of a potato?"

 

Visitors From Our Future?

Over the last ten years or so, I have placed myself under such an avalanche of information of a roughly paranormal nature, some of it compelling and some of it clear nonsense, that I feel it as a permanent burden on my back.  And yet, curiosity nudges me forward.

At the fringes of the fringe is the phenomenon called "remote viewing" or RV -- the supposed ability to see things that are far away geographically, or even in time, when asked to focus in a particular way.  It is said that everyone has this ability to one degree or another, and that it can be honed with practice.  It is also said that during the Cold War, the US and the Soviets each had secret programs to use RV for purposes of spying on the other; for example, an American psychic was able to pinpoint the precise location of an underground facility in which the Russians were building the largest submarine that the world has ever seen.

The phenomenon right now bumps up against our latest mad world-historical event.  Primitively-drawn pictures are circulating on social media.  They are said to have been sketched a few months ago by RV practitioners.  One quite clearly shows a crowd of people, a figure at a podium, the cross-hairs of a gun, and stray verbal cues, among them "assassination" and "failed?".

It will be easy enough to verify, or to debunk, the validity of these pictures in this our world of social-media foreverness.  And if they are real, what do they mean?

One theory purports to tie them to the notion that time is navigable, as in an H.G. Wells novel.  This notion is advanced now as well in an entirely different context -- the examination of the so-called "Nazca Mummies" found in the coastal deserts of Peru.  These desiccated creatures, which share features of homo sapiens but also of reptiles, are said not to be extraterrestrial, but to be our own descendants, returned in 800 A.D. or thereabouts, perhaps to steer our development away from some catastrophe.

But many scientists and philosophers long have educated us about a paradox that would seem to make time travel impossible, a self-cancelling circularity of causation if you will.  If I were to go back to Westport, County Mayo, in 1900, and to convince my maternal grandmother, Mary McGreal, not to board the boat for Boston, then I, of course, would never be.  I would disappear, in which case I couldn't very well go back to Eire.

The larger picture, though, is that things indeed and not just in my understanding of them, grow curiouser and curiouser, as if the world is facing right now a foundational shift, "slouching towards Bethlehem to be born."

 

In the Lowest Times of My Life

Which times came early on, in my adolescence and then sporadically into my twenties, I felt an isolation from other people so deep that it skirted the edge of madness.

I did not hear voices that were not there, but the actual heard voices, even of loved ones, passed through a filter that made them sinister, malevolent, without regard to what was actually said.  It was a phenomenon that you couldn't walk or run away from; after all, you take your broken mind with you wherever you may go.

Happily, these incidents were rare and short lived.  When they subsided, I felt as if I had been welcomed back into a zone of comfort, but I told no one about it.  To be permanently in such a place, in those days when treatment might consist of blunt-force drugs and physical constraints, would have been a horrible fate indeed.

 

Deep in the Weeds of English

A young woman properly can be said to be an "ingenue" and at the same time to be "disingenuous."

 

Cry, the Beloved Country

The expression belongs to another time, another place.  Out of principle, I won't look it up.  If memory does not fail (failed memory serendipitously holding center stage), the place was South Africa, and the time was under apartheid.  But it is apt for the here and now as America, like one of those drone-wounded Russian armored personnel carriers, careens pilotless towards a ditch, with its turret spinning hopelessly out of control.

 

She Said It in Wonder but Without Hubris

She said it as if she were outside herself, as if she were looking on from above, perhaps from a high hill.  She said it almost anthropologically -- "My soul magnifies the Glory of the Lord!"

In 20 centuries, who else has been entitled to say it?  Perhaps the bodhisattvas, but even then only in the hour of their ultimate death, when they are said to be irradiated, for all to see, in pursuit of Nothing at All.

For Us As For the Children of Pompeii

Did not the Bible tell me so?  Did not Jesus Himself say it?  He said that there would be no time at all for us to gather our things, to pack our bags, when the "blood-red tide is loosed upon the world."

We will be like the children of Pompeii.  We will be like the wife of Lot, arrested in flight, our very eyes turned saltine, caught gazing back at the Twin Cities -- Sodom and Gomorrah, Chelsea and Everett, Methuen and Billerica, East and West Orange, Minneapolis and St. Paul,  Buda and Pest.  No one, I say, will be spared.

 

Ask Your Doctor About Padloxidoxicillimen (TM)

It's the only drug clinically proven to eliminate the side effects of other prescribed medications that are marketed on television.

(Padloxidoxicillimen itself may cause bleeding gums and shortness of breath that in rare cases progresses to respiratory arrest.  Do not take Padloxidoxicillimen if you are pregnant and operating heavy machinery.)

Cut to a husband and wife who are barely able to contain their joie de vivre.  He is about 60, black with a helmet of grey hair.  She is much younger, Asian-American or perhaps a Pacific Islander.  She has just said something that has precipitated a laugh from her husband while they wait for a white man at the counter, equally carefree but servile, to spray disinfectant inside their bowling shoes.

 

The Blood Red Badge of Nihilism

Every day now, you can tune in to an X/Twitter channel that will allow you to witness the destruction of Russians in the fields of Ukraine, unexpurgated.  Of course, if the drone that does them in is a kamikaze, the video will end with impact.  More often, though, the same drone that dropped a bomb on them will record the aftermath.  Sometimes the killing seems clean and antiseptic; the "200" cooperate by lying face down as they bleed out.  Sometimes bodies come apart in the explosion; more often they are shredded by little bomblets designed for just such anti-personnel work.

More often as well now, a wounded Russian will abandon all hope of medical assistance or retreat, and end it all himself by blowing his brains out.  (We think of the expression -- "to blow one's brains out" -- as metaphorical, like "to work one's ass off" in the factory, but when you put a Kalashnikov under your chin and fire a round, the damage done is not metaphorical.)

«Петя!  Сколько раз мы тебе говорили, што спрашивать Дядю Ваню о СМО запрещено?»

"Petey!  How many times have we told you not to ask Uncle Vanya about the Special Military Operation?"

 

Two Old Friends

Whom I had not seen in decades appeared, in separate dreams, last night.

In the first, David stayed at my home for a couple of days.  He was effusive in his expression of affection for me throughout the visit, and I returned the emotion.  It was as if we both knew that this would be our last encounter.

David's brother showed up unexpectedly.  He led us in a Native American-inspired ritual that involved the burning of a small circle of grass in a clearing in a wood.  This was somehow connected with the friendship.  We stayed up very late that evening.  When David woke me at 10AM the following day, I was very groggy.  He announced then that he was leaving, immediately and without forewarning, for Atlanta.  I offered to walk him to his car, and he was gone.

In the second, Barbara and I were on a city bus, at night.  One of the other passengers, a scruffy middle-aged man, began to go off the deep end.  The driver stopped the bus and everyone except for me and Barbara, including the driver and "Mr. Berserk," fled on foot.  But a little while later Mr. Berserk reappeared, a few blocks away, holding a big bazooka.  He took aim several times at me and Barbara and the bus.  He nearly hit us, and his aim was getting better.  Barbara got behind the wheel, slammed the door shut with its remote handle, and drove us backwards at some speed through the city streets until we were well out of sight.

Then we disembarked and tried to blend into the knots of people in the neighborhood.  As we walked, Barbara began to talk about her husband, whom I knew back in the day, but in exceedingly cryptic fashion.  I said "Let me try to paraphrase what you just said about your marriage," and I did, very accurately according to Barbara.  This was intriguing, and I wanted to carry on exploring this theme, but she disappeared into the lobby of a building and was gone, for good.

 

A Darkness Complete

In the 19th century, a string of fortifications guarded major ports along the East Coast of the United States.  Two of them have a special place in American history.  "The rocket's red glare" over Ft. McHenry in Baltimore inspired the writing of our national anthem.  And the Confederate attack on Ft. Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina signaled that the Civil War had erupted in earnest.

The more modest history of Ft. Warren, which sits astride Georges Island in the heart of the outer ranges of Boston Harbor, is not without note.  During and immediately after the Civil War, it served as a prison for Confederates, among whom was Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the C.S.A. under Jefferson Davis.  And "John Brown's Body," sung by soldiers of the Army of the Potomac to the tune later adapted as the famous "Battle Hymn," was penned there.  As late as WWII, great "disappearing" guns of the fort were trained on the eastern approaches to Boston.  Its guns were never, in the history of the fort, fired in anger.  This does not mean that they were superfluous, but rather that they did their job of deterrence to perfection.

Ft. Warren is accessible by ferry, and it is maintained and administered by rangers employed by the Commonwealth.   In my young adulthood, I took part in a guided tour of the fort and the surrounding island.  The high point for me was not the abandoned gun emplacements, but a gingerly walk en masse into a great, cavernous room below the parapets, perhaps built as a magazine, that was entirely without natural or artificial light except for the sunlight visible at its entrance -- visible, that is, until one turned a corner into a part of the chamber from which there was no line of sight to that entrance.  There we in the tour group became a great, blind centipede.  The guide had us keep the tips of left fingers in touch with one wall and our right hands in touch with the person in front of us.  When we got to our destination and dropped our hands, the effect of the perfect darkness approximated an out-of-body experience; it was as if, without visual cues of location, our souls could float where they pleased.  (In sensory deprivation tanks, it is known, people after a period of time begin to hallucinate wildly, as if having taken a heavy dose of LSD or psylocibin.)

The feeling was thrilling, but if our guide at that moment had chosen to play a prank on us and unleash a recording of a dog growling or a snake hissing, I am sure that we all would have run each other down in a screaming panic.  Instead and in good time, we used our right-hand fingertips to trace our way back to the entrance, to the light.  The many ghosts of Ft. Warren there let us be.

 

In the Hour of the Wolf

Which is to say the hour of acute insomnia, all of the contingent facts about me are sinister.

My left thumb is double-jointed.  I had a tonsillectomy at age six.  I once flew upside down in a Yak-52.

Any contingent fact about me is like the contents of a black trash bag that lies in a landfill.  The mountain of trash bags is nearly, but not quite yet, complete.  A cherry at the top of this sundae will be most sinister, for what it portends, which is a completed life.

Compare and contrast facts that are necessary, logical, mathematical, geometrical.  (The analytic philosophers were obsessed with the distinction.)  Without the contingency, I can take comfort in them.  

So I broke the spell of the Hour of the Wolf not by counting sheep (as the wolf himself might), but by repeating to myself that C = piD.  The circumference of a circle will always be equal to its diameter times 22/7.  If I grasp hold of this and never let go, I thought, it may carry me off to a forever future, one free of contingency.

 

In My Dream

I was placed in command, by default and by necessity, of a large sailing ship as it was making course in the Tropics, on a close reach.  I knew how to sail a dinghy.  I knew how to sail a ship of this scale in principle; in fact, I had no idea which line controlled the end of which yard, which halyard had a purpose to raise or lower a particular sail among the fifteen at my disposal (main and foremasts each carrying a main, lower tops'l, upper tops'l, topgallant and royal, and the mizzen supporting a spanker, topgallant and royal; two headsails.)  What's more, the mate was dead and I had earned no authority before the other men.

First I had to ascertain where we were and where we were going, at roughly what speed.  With luck, I thought, we could hold our course until we came to an island or an inhabited coast.  There I could at least bring her up into the wind, wait for her to stall out completely, and drop anchor.  The sails and the lines would be a mess, but perhaps that could be sorted out at leisure.

Indeed, this is what happened, and as we were sorting the mess, a captain's gig rowed out with a new "master and commander," short, befuddled expression, bad teeth.  My personal futility, in other words, gave way to a more generalized one.

 

Rendered Fat

... by Photoshop and bad personal habits, Lizzo raises a ruckus, which only further inflates her notoriety and her net worth.

 

Let's Play that Goofy Childhood Game!

• "He's Choking to Death" by Heinrich Mann-Uber
• "I Can See Clearly Now!" by Barry Umenema
• "No More Smarty Pants" by Howard U. Know
• "The Jimmy Hoffa Story" by Preston C. Meant
• "Which Came First?" by Ogden Bacon
• "Get Her Some Glue!" by Lester Nozfullof
• "Screw the United Way" by Charity B. Ginzenhoem
• "I Shot Him in the Nuts!" by Eamonn Weigh-Tuleaugh

 

When I Awoke

I realized that, awake and asleep, I was, I had been, embracing a woman who was a chimera, but I didn't mind because I knew that soon I myself would be a chimera as well.

 

Lullaby for a Lost Child

The hospice worker's last words had the meaning, but not the form, of a lullaby.  "Close your eyes and rest easy.  There is nothing for you to fear."

 

History Repeating Itself

In the last days of Cardinal Richelieu, as recounted by Aldous Huxley in "The Devils of Loudun," the reins of power turned to dust in his hands, a physical rot rendered him repulsive to all, and torturous enemas were administered to him by a charlatan.  God did not comfort him.

I foresee much the same end for Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich.  He will drown in bitterness.  There will be no one to hold his hand.

 

Who Is That in the Funhouse Mirror?

Today I see a fat man in Jerry Nadler pants, cinched tightly under his armpits, and wearing a tiny necktie of dark red that is stained everywhere with turkey gravy.

 

Soon To Pass Over the Threshold of Oblivion

• Arthur Ashe
• Bix Beiderbecke
• Busby Berkeley
• Glenn Campbell
• Carlos Castaneda
• Wally Cox
• Foster Furcolo
• Dave Garroway
• Cookie Gilchrist
• Hermione Gingold
• Jackie Gleason
• Arlo Guthrie
• Learned Hand
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Edward Everett Horton
• Ned Johnson
• Francis Scott Key
• Gladys Knight
• Lester Lanin
• Merriweather Lewis
• Horace Mann
• Jayne Mansfield
• Francis Marion
• Carmen Miranda
• Gorilla Monsoon
• Agnes Moorehead
• Randolph Scott
• Omar Sharif
• Jay Silverheels
• Paul Stookey
• John Cameron Swayze
• Michael Tilson Thomas
• Alexis de Tocqueville
• Casper Weinberger

 

A List of Eminent People, Living and Dead, Who Will Be Vindicated

• Robert Bigelow
• Ralph Blumenthal
• Jeremy Corbell
• Ross Coulthart
• Richard Dolan
• Lue Elizondo
• James Fox
• David Fravor
• Ryan Graves
• David Grusch
• Budd Hopkins
• David Jacobs
• Michio Kaku
• Leslie Kean
• John Keel
• Darren King
• Kenneth Knuth
• Jeff Kripal
• John Mack
• Christopher Mellon
• Diana Pasulka
• Hal Puthoff
• Jim Semivan
• Whitley Strieber
• Travis Taylor
• Jacques Vallee
• Bryce Zabel
• Michael Zimmerman

 

Final Jeopardy

It caused only a mild stir when it was revealed that Alex Trebek died not in his home, surrounded by loved ones, but on the set, in what wags quickly labeled his "Final Jeopardy Collapse."

Lionel Porfiry of Youngstown, Ohio had just chosen "Hip-hop for forty."  Alex was going to say "That's incorrect.  The correct question is 'Who is Will da Beast? ... Who is Will da Beast?'"  But just as he was about to say the first "Will," his right hand reached for his throat.  He toppled back from the podium onto his haunches and smacked his head hard against the floor.  By the time they reached him to loosen his tie, he had no pulse at the carotid artery.

When Will da Beast himself saw the clip weeks later, he sent a floral display to Jean, Alex's widow.  It filled an entire small room, the room that served as Alex's first-floor office.

 

The Pied Piper of our Modern Dystopia

In hindsight, 13 years after his passing, that honorific would have to go to Steve Jobs.  A friend gave me Walter Isaacson's biography of the man some years ago.  I did not crack it, fearing that I would find him to be repellent and perhaps not very interesting at the same time.  No doubt that was unfair to him.

His ambition for a particular form of power seems to have been greater than his ambition even for money and celebrity.  That would be the power to pull on the puppet strings of humanity at a very large scale, and thereby to influence the zeitgeist as few had done before him (Edison, Henry Ford?).

I don't claim to be immune.  Yesterday I got bored in the late afternoon, as I often do. I resorted to scrolling my endless Facebook feed.  A clip lasting no more than 25 seconds.  In remarkable scale and clarity, a dung beetle rolls a perfectly round ball of dung that is about 100 times larger than itself along a flat plane.  Without malice aforethought (it can't see what lies in the ball's path), it rolls the ball over a very cute tiny frog.  When the frog reappears, it is squished, but not quite dead.

Is this supposed to be funny, like a cat chasing a laser dot on a wall?  Or is it supposed to be a metaphor for our own lives?  One day we are the dung beetle, and thereafter we resent the fact that we must make excuses for our own cruelty.  On another day we are the frog, annihilated in the most undignified way imaginable.  (There is no David Attenborough intoning that our demise contributed to the Great Circle of Life.)

We are all being drawn into a vortex.

 

In My Seafaring Circle, the Most Storied Name

is ... Harvey Schwartz.  By trade Mr. Schwartz was a litigator, and a good one.  (I hired him on one occasion to represent a work colleague who was burdened with a frivolous lawsuit, and he handled the job with skill and high humor.)

For a while Harvey had a big sloop at our yacht club, then he had a catamaran that he had named "Trial."  When a client bugged him in the summer to set up a meeting, he would say "I can't do it that week; I'm on Trial."  He was our Borscht Belt Horatio Hornblower.

Harvey was very friendly with the man who edited Wooden Boat magazine, which is published up in coastal Maine, which is to say "Downeast."  (The prevailing winds in summer blow from the southwest, so the coast of Maine is downhill, or downwind, from the more populated parts of New England.)  The editor would hand the keys to the magazine to Harvey for a month in the summer.  It was a barter arrangement; Harvey was paid nothing in cash, but he was given a slick sloop to live aboard and to sail for the duration.

After he retired from the practice of law, Harvey decamped to Paris, where he bought a big barge to live on, echoing in my mind, I guess, the celebrated old French film "L'Atalante."

I heard nothing of him for years.  But just a couple of weeks ago, he surfaced as a recommended Facebook friend, looking in his photo every bit the octogenarian that he is.  

Having pushed the virtual button, I was regaled this week with Harvey's fulfillment of a long-held dream -- to cross the Drake Passage from Tierra del Fuego to Antarctica.

Of course it's high summer in Antarctica.  But at latitude 60 degs S, there is no landmass to break up the prevailing westerlies that Melville and Richard Dana wrote about way back when. On this passage, on a stout cruise ship, the waves were 45 feet and the winds gusted to 47 knots.  Virtually no one ate.  Few had the stomach for it, and those who did went flying across the floor juggling plates as if they were vaudevillians.

Harvey says that it was worth it.  Nothing in his decades of nature travel prepared him for the abundance of life on the edge of the continent.  Donning rubber boots to wade through penguin guano is not a Disney experience, just the experience of a lifetime to hear Harvey tell it.

One of the most beautiful of the 12-metre boats that competed during the heyday of the America's Cup was called "Intrepid."  One of the lumbering ships-of-the-line in Nelson's Navy was called "Indefatigable."  Harvey, in his 80's, remains intrepid and indefatigable.  I, whose default mode at a younger but still advanced age is "listless and listing," bow down to him once more.

 

1946

If I were a writer of mid-length fiction, I would focus on a sole man in his 60's, named Christian, who walked, and then rode in a donkey cart, from Poland to Alsace-Lorraine in the summer of 1946.  (What the women generally went through I find too horrifying to articulate.  Others, of course, have done it well.)  

How he found the better part of a gold tooth in the underbrush by the side of the road.  The boy with the entrenching tool who did most of the hard work in burying the dead, while the common role of Christian was to say a nondenominational and perfunctory prayer.  The general disappointment among the surviving women that the war had emasculated him.

A pheasant for dinner!  A soup of dandelions and wild berries, boiled in an overturned Wehrmacht helmet nestled in some hot coals.  A weasel, and later a feral cat.  The donkey Ulysses himself at the end of the road, with the rest of him traded to villagers for some clean clothes.

His body strong enough to fend off typhus during the trek.  But, from 1948 according to the locals, half of his handprint in blood on a slab of cement, non-structural, in the root cellar of a minor aristocrat.  Not from an act of violence, but a sudden generalized hemorrhage of the lungs that was attributed to Silesian coal dust and other assaults common to the age.

 

Under A Warm Cuban Sun

My brother Kevin and I have just returned from six days in Havana, there under the auspices of a tour group affiliated with the Blue Note jazz club in New York City, the tour designed to give us near-total immersion in "Jazz Plaza de la Habana a Santiago," the 39th Cuban International Jazz Festival.  

We signed up for the trip with the faint expectation that it might afford us a 2024 version of the beautiful story that is told in "Buena Vista Social Club," the 1999 documentary film produced by American slide guitarist Ry Cooder and directed by Wim Wenders, about the revival of great but nearly-forgotten Cuban musicians of the 1940's and '50's into an eponymous ensemble, culminating in triumphant sold-out concerts by Buena Vista in Amsterdam and at Carnegie Hall.

Accommodations

We stayed at the Hotel Grand Aston La Habana.  This is the only hotel in which Americans are permitted to stay by the U.S. government (certain B and B's are also OK).  The logic of the limitation, to the extent there is any, may be that the Grand Aston is owned and controlled by foreign, to Cuba that is, interests (Asian I think).  Therefore ostensibly none of the money goes into the pockets of the Cuban authorities, which makes our friends the octogenarian and nonagenarian exiles in Miami happy.

The hotel is virtually brand new; it was built during the pandemic.  It is styled a five-star venue, with twin 25-story towers and a prime location directly on the Malecon, the iconic seaside strand that runs for about five miles WSW to ENE in the heart of the capital.  Its architecture and interior design are contemporary and dramatic, and first-class amenities like spa service are readily available.  On the other hand, there is a contemporary crisis of infrastructure in Cuba, and the hoteliers' attempt to insulate their guests from it is not entirely successful.  For example, the "new deco" sink in my room had a symbol behind the faucet that meant "don't drink this water!"  Also, hot water, and a robust flow of it, were intermittent.  And while I had two coffee cartridges for my Keurig-equivalent upon my arrival, attempts to get more during the stay were futile.  When this issue was raised with management, we were told that this five-star hotel only offers coffee on the first day.

On the ground floor, between the two towers, there is a breezeway where the bar/restaurant is situated.  (The restaurant offerings are modest and spotty; it is mostly a bar.)  It was constructed in such a way that in the evenings a refreshing breeze from the north is often a dominant feature.  On the evening before our departure, though, the breeze was not so much refreshing as dramatic.  Winds of about 30 mph tore through much of the open lobby, with only the inner bar offering protection from them.  The wind built up a dramatic surf that burst over the Malecon seawall onto the road.  (Speaking of neglected infrastructure, the sidewalk on the sea side of the Malecon has been widely pulverized by such waves, and two people in our group were pretty badly banged up when they fell while attempting a stroll there in more benign weather.)

For about two hours every evening, a little combo played in the hotel bar.  It comprised an acoustic guitar player, a percussionist, and a young woman singer, and the repertoire was mostly conventional Latin music, including bossa nova.  Late in our stay, I checked an item off my personal bucket list, convincing the band to allow me to step in as bongo player for one tune -- Jobim's "Desafinado."  Twenty bucks was the price of fleeting admission into this particular musical fraternity.

Our Groups and Our Hosts

There were about 50 or 60 people participating in the tour.  They were broken into sub-groups of about nine or ten.  The itineraries of the subgroups were essentially the same, but one subgroup might do certain things on one day and another group on another day, while big events, like certain meals and musical performances in the big National Theatre of Cuba, were attended by everyone at once.  Also, each morning we all were treated to an elaborate buffet breakfast in a large room above the lobby bar.

The demographics.  The typical people in attendance were folks of retirement age with a demonstrated interest in jazz.  (Many, like me, heard of the tour because they subscribe to the Blue Note's email list.)  There was a heavy concentration of New Yorkers, but quite a few people from the Boston area, and a scattering of geographical "others."  Most were successful professionals.  At my table at our "welcoming dinner" on the day we flew in to Havana, in addition to me, there were three lawyers specializing in criminal defense, labor law, and "reproductive rights" respectively (the last a man FWIW).  Also in the ad hoc group of new friends that we formed during the week were a teacher of autistic children from Boston and a hospitality consultant from Montana.

There were two doctors in the ad hoc group, neither of whom, to their credit, advertised the M.D., but who rather let it come out naturally in the course of conversation.  Both were boon companions for us and both highly literate in jazz.  

The first doctor, Dr. R, had Kevin and me at first wondering whether he was just masquerading as a Manhattan dermatologist, but it turned out that the rather eye-popping anecdotes he dropped were true.  Yes, Al Pacino was his only patient who required Dr. R to come to his house.  Yes, every year he went to the house of Jorma Kaukonen, lead guitarist of Jefferson Airplane and composer of "Embryonic Journey," for two weeks of personal guitar lessons.  Yes, he himself took the photo on his cell phone of his friend Larry David sitting on the toilet, as also he took some stunning, National Geographic-quality photos of Costa Rican tree frogs, eyes wide in the dead of night.

The second doctor, Dr. N, was for decades an ER physician on Long Island.  He was known among his colleagues for having a specialty in fecal dis-impaction.  (The "embryonic journey" of the roll-on deodorant dispenser extracted from one of his patients I will leave to your further imagination.)  He brought with him to Cuba some Latin percussion instruments, including a "cabasa" (I called it a "kielbasa" to tease him), sort of a wheel on a stick designed to make the noise of a rattlesnake.  Dr. N insinuated himself into the lobby combo before I did on my night of fleeting fame; in fact, by doing so he helped me work up the courage to play, publicly.

Each sub-group has a "tour leader."  By consensus they were terrific at their job, which is to herd everyone around to the numerous venues, share personal knowledge of the country and the city of Havana, and accommodate the sometimes-annoying off-script requests of their group members.  ("I know that all nine of us now are headed on the bus to Old Havana, but suddenly I feel an urge to take a nap, so can we turn around and drop me at the hotel for a few hours?")

My group of nine had a principal guide, Ivan, and a back-up one, Mauricio.  Their personal CVs were impressive, but the fact that they were working as guides given their backgrounds was a sobering comment on the state of the Cuban economy.  Ivan is a mechanical engineer by training, but apparently there is no work for mechanical engineers in Cuba.  Even more shocking, Mauricio is described as one of Cuba's leading neurologists.  I believe that he enjoys his people-to-people work, and the work itself is not to be disparaged, but the fact that he was tap dancing for tips from the likes of me for six long days set me back a bit emotionally.

Our "Uber-host"

The centerpiece of this tour, and the man who made it exceed our every musical and cultural expectation, was one Jorge Luis Pacheco.  He is a fortyish pianist and percussionist who stands now at the apex of the Cuban jazz scene.  But more than that, he is a force of nature.  He is the sort of person who lights up a room on entering it with his sheer charisma.  He is tall, handsome and built like a linebacker.  He sports a sort of carrot-top column of hair on his head that makes him appear even taller than he is.  But more than that, his personality projects gentleness, a self-deprecating wit, and a kind of generalized emotional outreach, and the combination seems to spread joy and good fellowship wherever he goes.

What of Pacheco's own music?  I checked it out via YouTube in advance of the trip.  Sample, with Jorge crowned by a less towering haircut than his contemporary one -- Jorge Luis Pacheco: "Silencio" - WWOZ Piano Night (2015) (youtube.com).  My pre-trip evaluation included a little skepticism about whether he leans too heavily on displaying his prodigious speed and dexterity at the keyboard.  (Early in the trip, discussing this issue, Dr. N and I at the very same moment said the very same word -- "frenetic!")  But having seen him play now multiple times, I withdraw my criticism.  Yes, he loves to play fast, and often in long riffs that are as physically daunting as any of the more challenging parts of Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, but he is able to shift effortlessly among sub-genres of Cuban and Afro-Cuban jazz, and his own interpretation of the signature piece from Buena Vista "Chan Chan," for example, is soft and sensitive.

Pacheco built our musical itinerary so that it had a certain logic to it.  What I mean is that it started with more conventional stuff and later branched out to the more esoteric, so that in the end we were better able to piece together the forest from the trees. But it was his network of friendships that made it possible for Blue Note Travel to expose us to the best of Cuban music, often in small, intimate settings.  (More about this later.)  And he was on the scene personally with us constantly, notwithstanding his own jam-packed performance calendar and, we were sad to learn, the death of his father about three weeks before the festival.

Non-musical Events

When an average American thinks of Cuba, he thinks of classic cars left over from pre-revolutionary times and held together, he thinks, with duct tape and ingenuity.  Kevin and I are both motorheads; he owns a 1973 Triumph TR-6 and I own a 1962 Ford F-100 "restomod."  We were more than a little excited to see and experience these old American classics.  Incidentally, they are not used solely in the tourist trade.  With one exception, they are the most ubiquitous vehicles in Havana, and some of them not used to ferry tourists are in tired condition inside and out.  The exception is the Lada, a Soviet-era knock-off of the Fiat 124 first built in 1970, which is seen everywhere in Havana.  In the Soviet era, the Lada was viewed in Western circles as mechanically less reliable than the Fiat on which it was based ("ahem;" and no, "Lada" is not a Russian acronym for "fix it again Dimitry.")

As promised, we got a one-hour tour of central Havana in a nice representative vehicle, a two-tone (bright purple and white) '56 Chevy Bel Air convertible piloted by driver/owner Christian, a genial man in his forties who teaches primary school as his main job.  He is part of an old car club, and we (Kevin and I and our new friend from New York Liz) tooled around town in the company of others in vintage cars.  (My favorite was an immediately pre- or post-revolutionary 1959 Dodge convertible in bright blue, the revolution having culminated in 1959.)  Almost all of the cars had multiple, musical horns, and the protocol on passing is to play a loud little tune that is unique to the vehicle.

Kevin and I wanted engine pictures!  But Christian had re-powered his car with an inline-four Hyundai diesel for the sake of fuel efficiency.  We took a photo of it anyway.  But when we all stopped at Revolution Square for further pictures, he persuaded his pal to open the hood of his '56 Ford, which sported what appeared to be an early Thunderbird V-8, with a throaty exhaust note to match.

Christian's mischievous sense of humor was on display when we stopped at the square which, in addition to a brutalist obelisk of about 150 meters, features two government buildings with stylized sketches of revolutionary heroes adorning their facades.  (When we went to the theatre, we discovered that these light up at night.)  One pictured hero was Che Guevara.  When I asked Christian who was the other, in perfect deadpan he replied "Osama bin Laden."  This I took to be a goof on both the Cubans and the Americans.  Certainly it did not reflect any revolutionary fervor on the part of Christian himself.  Rather, he was quite open in his disdain for his government, calling it a Mafia state.  And this seemed to be the prevailing view.  When Ivan, for example, was asked any questions with political overtones, he would simply clam up and smile, as if to say "surely you don't buy that horseshit."

On another day we drove about 25 minutes out of the city to the home that Ernest Hemingway maintained called Finca Vigia.  It is a spacious hacienda on spacious, shaded grounds.  We were not allowed inside the building, but the governmental tour did allow us to look through the windows of all the first-floor rooms, which are maintained as they were in Hemingway's time.

Another signal of the state of the infrastructure.  The men's room attached to the hacienda has a non-flushing toilet.  Instead, there is a woman whose job it is to pour a bucket of water into it after each visit, for a fee of one dollar.  A second, older woman with zero English guarded both restrooms.  Kevin and I gifted her some "chachkes" for children (pens in my case).  When she then pointed to her feet and said, in Spanish, that shoes for little children cost five dollars, I thought it was in gratitude for the gifts, but on reflection she was asking for another five bucks from each of us.

An unexpected pleasure for me.  One of my sisters once gifted me a book about Hemingway's famed fishing boat, "Pilar."  I assumed that as a wooden vessel of the 1940's, she was long ago broken up.  But no, there she was sitting "on the hard" under a specially-built canopy, and in spectacular condition.

We made one significant non-musical stop that was not on the itinerary at all, this to visit a museum of the revolution that we happened to pass by.  The museum featured another, larger motor vessel called "Granma," on which 82 revolutionaries, including Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara, landed in southwestern Cuba in 1956 after a hazardous and dispiriting trip from Mexico (the boat was wildly overloaded).  Soon after they landed, the rebels were attacked by government forces, and about 60 of them were killed.

In addition to the Granma, the museum included a Russian-built T-34 tank that was used by Fidel himself in the rebellion, two piston-powered fighter planes that neither Kevin nor I was able to identify with confidence, the shot-up tail of a B-26 bomber used by anti-Castro rebels in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and a Soviet-built surface-to-air ("SAM") missile of the same era.

For tourists like us at least, Cuba by no means has the look and feel of a police state.  Uniformed personnel of any kind are few and far between.  But there was a single military policeman, very smartly dressed, walking around a balcony on the second floor of the museum.  I struggled with arthritis pain throughout the entire trip, and there were times when I felt that I absolutely had to sit.  This was one of them, but when I sat on what I thought was just a concrete slab with no historical significance, the soldier sternly signaled me to get up.  Then a few minutes later, when I tried to simply lean my back against a structural part of the museum, he insisted via a hand signal that I get away from it.  This was too much and also a little scary, so Kevin and I discreetly left the premises.

With a little bit of embarrassment, many Cubans embrace an animist Afro-Cuban religion called "Santeria."  They may not really believe in it, but if they are opening a new tire repair shop, they may call on the deities to protect it and to fertilize, as it were, the endeavor.

The ceremonies of Santeria heavily rely on African percussion in which a conga-like drum, draped with little bells, has a head on both ends and is played lying flat on the lap with a hand at each end.  Generally speaking, gringo non-believers are not allowed to see this, but we were allowed to witness such a ceremony in the courtyard of the home of Pacheco's godmother.  Three drummers played two pieces, the first of which was quite long, maybe lasting 25 minutes.  Within the pieces, rhythms shifted many times, and rhythmically the playing was difficult to piece together from a Western musical point of view.  Because it was a religious ceremony and not strictly speaking a musical performance, I reference it here.

On Sunday, our last full day in Cuba, we were scheduled to take a two-hour walking architectural tour of Old Havana that was to end at the Havana Cathedral.  Because my body clearly would not cooperate for this piece, Kevin and I chose instead to try to attend Mass at the cathedral.  When we got there about 9:15, it was not yet open, so we had a second mini-breakfast at a little outside cafe that was called, in homage to Rene Magritte, Esto No Es Un Cafe.  The espresso and the eggs were outstanding.  A band of little kids ran down the street by the cafe.  They were not begging, merely having fun running around.  But I stopped them and gifted them some ballpoints and markers that I was carrying for the purpose.  There as elsewhere, they treated the gifts as truly treasured prizes, which of course made me feel good and bad at the same time.

At the cathedral, we heard an entire pre-Mass rosary recited in "call and response" fashion by two women in competing pulpits.  Kevin found this tedious, perhaps more so because in cryptic Spanish, but I enjoyed it, particularly the drone-like second half of the Hail Marys ("... ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.  Amen.")  Immediately thereafter the Mass started, but we had to duck out at the Gloria to rendezvous with our compadres in the plaza that the cathedral faces.  There, once again, my arthritis pain betrayed me.  There were no benches, so I resorted to sitting on the street or with my butt against the ledge of a window.  From those perches, in a mere half hour or so, I was exposed to three men who themselves were "of the street" and hence gave me and Kevin a more complete picture of the gritty side of Cuban life. 

The first was a wild-looking guy with an extreme Rasta hairdo, electric-looking glasses, and a nice acoustic guitar on which he was playing good old North American blues riffs.  He saw that I was suffering a bit, and therefore did not ask me for money but rather told me to sit and relax.  Then, for a tightwad's tip, he serenaded the trophy wife of a passing tourist.  I was hooked.  With Kevin as my banker, I changed a ten for two fives and gave one to him, asking him to play the classic "Viente Anos" made famous by Buena Vista. This he did most beautifully and it touched me.  Kevin got it down on video.

Then a rheumy-eyed, perhaps mentally-ill guy, a double amputee, pulled up in a wheelchair wielding his 10AM can of Heineken, and appeared to ask us for money.  We gave him some, then he asked for more.  Time to move away and leave him to other prey, but not before he rolled up his shorts to show us the ugly stumps of both legs.

Finally, a tall middle-aged man approached me.  He was in quasi-military garb including beret, and sported medals on his chest.  He carried a very cheap looking valise.  He told me, in Spanish, that he was on his way to work in the Ministry of Interior as best I could tell.  "Patria o muerte!" he said, echoing New Hampshire's "Live free or die!"  Kevin and I were a little dubious.  As an international good will gesture, we regifted him two Romeo y Juliet cigars that had been gifted to us by the proprietor of one of the restaurants where we had had lunch during the week.  (We wanted to smoke them in the bar of the Grand Aston, as is permitted, but they had no matches in the entire joint ca va sans dire.)

A Musical Stop Sans Music

Courtesy, as usual, of Pacheco, we were treated to a visit to one of Havana's most important and storied music studios.  A lovely middle-aged woman was the boss.  First she crammed us into a little room where old LPs are remastered, digitally.  A technician showed us how it was done.  We got to hear a tune as it sounds on the old vinyl or Bakelite from ... the '30's?  And then the remastered version.  Miraculous.  Our host told us that Placido Domingo has visited Cuba many times, and that one time, in gratitude, the studio found a very old recording of his mother, singing.  They remastered it for him, beautifully.  This little gesture, it seems to me, is emblematic of the larger charm of Cuban hospitality.

Then we moved over to the largest recording studio in the complex.  There a band comprising some of the most accomplished musicians on the island was rehearsing for a performance at the festival (so not entirely "sans music").  It was good for us to witness the hard concentration necessary in advance to make the playing in the evening look effortless.

The Food

In a way we were spoiled by our first exposure to Cuban food.  Our welcoming dinner was held at La Guarida, "the best restaurant in Cuba" per the 2023 World Culinary awards.  It is situated in a beautiful building of lavish stone and marble, and all 50 or 60 of us were seated in adjoining dining rooms with 30-foot ceilings.  The meal was of five or six exquisitely-prepared courses, but most of the courses had courses within the courses (for example a puree of eggplant next to a miniature taco of fish of some kind).  All of it was served with stunning efficiency to this large group.  If it had been a wedding reception dinner for the daughter of a billionaire, the guests would have walked away satisfied.  

Otherwise, dinners were not provided as part of the tour package.  Kevin and I generally went light on the dinners because we were eating too much, but we did have a very nice dinner of freshly-made pappardelle at Eclectica, about a mile from the Aston.  Our waiter called us a cab in the aftermath, and it proved to be another '56 Bel Air.  Kevin paid the driver ten bucks as if we were renting a classic car (we were), and he was very happy with that fare!

The lunches, which were part of the tour package, were delicious, if a little predictable.  First a welcoming mojito, then some empanadas, perhaps of fish, with a dressing that might be honey or might be some sort of cream sauce.  Then a green salad, from which Kevin and I steered clear fearing Batista's Revenge.  Then rice and beans.  Then several main dishes, pulled pork or beef perhaps and chicken and fish (often delicious swordfish but marlin on at least one occasion), typically in some sort of lightly-seasoned sauce.  Then dessert -- perhaps tiramisu, perhaps dark Cuban chocolate, which was to die for.

Finally, and Crucially, the Music

The festival itself offered 50 or more performances of Latin jazz musicians.  Most were Cuban, but by no means all.  One was a professor at Berklee College in Boston, and in the customs line at Jose Marti Airport, outbound, I met an American trumpeter from the heartland, fresh from the festival, who in the line serenaded an Orthodox Jewish family in front of him with a quiet "Hava Nagila."  We were given VIP festival passes to hang around our necks.

On the first night of music, we were taken to the National Theatre of Cuba to hear a three-hour concert featuring two groups, both very roughly in the Chucho Valdes Afro-Cuban style, and both outstanding (but up until midnight was a challenge for me!).  

Later in the week, we attended a concert by Pacheco himself and others in a spectacular old theatre in central Havana, steps from the Capitol.  It included pieces for two pianos played by Pacheco and by the celebrated young American pianist Emmett Cohen, pieces for four hands, and also a Cuban-American singer who did justice to both "December in the Rain" and a song or two from Buena Vista.  It was most interesting to see Pacheco in that rather formal setting and performing before thousands of his fellow Cubans.  The audience loved every minute of it.  In contrast, earlier that day we attended a private concert of Pacheco and Friends at the Cuban Art Factory, an industrial setting converted to both visual arts and the musical.  The performance once again was primo, and, in the informal setting, it was an open lovefest among Pacheco and his virtuoso comrades.

Along the way, Pacheco took us to two music schools that were (sorry) instrumental in shaping him as a pianist and a percussionist.  The first schooled kids from about eight until about 18, and its graduates went on to musical studies at university or to teach in their own right.  We were treated to performances ranging from two little girls singing in tandem to a jazz ensemble playing its own subtle and sophisticated arrangements, impeccably.  When it was over, I gifted two pair of well-used drumsticks, and I gave the woman who directs the school and some of her students Lindt chocolates.  My more generous brother gifted about six sets of drumsticks, a set of claves, and a number of packages of acoustic guitar strings.  All gratefully accepted.

The second school was devoted more to orchestral playing.  We sat within about ten feet of an orchestra comprising about 50 kids, all incredibly accomplished.  Among other things, they played a classically-oriented piece that was written and arranged by a young pianist who was a protege of Pacheco, followed by the same student's arrangement of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps."  Then two very black brothers, tall and handsome, aged 17 and 18, blew us all away with a violin duet, also classically oriented, that one of the brothers had written.  I think we all walked away thinking "how can this very poor and quite small country produce such prodigies when our own kids can't seem to stop looking at nonsense on their phones?"

On one day, we were scheduled to go far out into the countryside to visit an "eco-community" the building of which was commissioned by El Commandante himself.  But someone or something had a conflict.  This made some in the group happy, because they did not want to ride in mini-buses for four hours there and back.  Others of us were disappointed because we wanted to experience something of Cuba other than Havana.  But Pacheco himself stepped in to arrange an alternate schedule, and it proved to be a highlight of the trip.  In a beautiful courtyard setting, we had a private performance by some of the top musicians in Cuba, focused on a percussion-intensive repertoire that included a wild mambo and an Afro-Cuban style rendition of Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry."  And in the afternoon we had a private performance by a group devoted to teaching young women a unique style of integrated percussion and dance, with the latter heavily influenced by classic flamenco.  The girls were all beautiful and supremely talented.  It was breathtaking.

Later, our own mini-group of nine was the audience for an a capella singing group called Coro Leo, directed by Pacheco's own mom.  They performed some Cuban songs, then flipped effortlessly into North American gospel, including "My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord."

Finally in time, and a perfect exclamation point for our musical odyssey, we visited the National Lyrical Theatre, where Pacheco's late father directed operatic studies for many years.  Pacheco introduced us to four young men and three young women who sang at a world-class level.  They performed for us short pieces from the classical repertoire, a stark but not unwelcome contrast to the Afro-Cuban to which we had been exposed all week. 

As a finale, Pacheco said that the wonderful tenor among them would sing "Nessun Dorma," a song essentially of hope that was a favorite of his father.  To our ears, in our private audience, the young man knocked it out of the park, rivaling Pavarotti himself in his passion and in his execution, and when he finished on that signature fortissimo note, Pacheco burst into sobs, and the two embraced for a full minute before Pacheco was able to get it together again.  It was a stunning tribute to his father.

Summing Up

What is contemporary Cuba like?  Our experience of the musical culture was life changing, but I'm not sure we have much grasp of the full picture needed to answer the question posed.  The government, the power structure, was opaque to us.  It was as if the musical culture were the people's revenge against it, against the situation they find themselves in thanks to the vagaries of international politics.  Clearly, that culture is not monopolized by some political or economic elite in Cuba, as it commonly is elsewhere; it reaches down to the street level, as was evidenced by my Rasta Man.  But also clearly, in the deepest depths of poverty people don't have the luxury of cultural expression.

The music is a catalyst.  The music knocked my socks off all week, but if I had to isolate one thing that encapsulated Cuba for me, it would be the milk of human kindness, flowing in abundance.