Names and Pianos, with a side of Moses - A Short Play

 A conversation with Klavier:

Moishi: Morning, Klavier, or should I say, “Morning, piano?”

Klavier: Good morning, Moishi. I’m delighted to note that you’ve broadened your garden of knowledge by adding the fact that in Germany, a klavier is a piano.

Moishi: Thanks. I do like to know stuff.

Klavier: Knowledge can be very handy residing in the hands of … well … let’s let that be … for now.

Moishi: So why did your parents name you, well, piano?

Klavier: Because they would have considered it foolish to call me Dulcimer or Harpsichord. Anyway, it’s the two-syllable sound with the one-syllable last name, Onk, as much as the meaning that decided them, I think …. Given names and surnames should never have an equal number of syllables; it makes the name too prosaic, too … too, well, not musical.

Moishi: I don’t get …

Klavier: … and then there’s the repetition—or its avoidance—of vowels and consonants. Had they named me an alliterative, say … well, say Gronk Onk, some Country and Western artist would have written a song about Gronky Honky Onk, and … and there’d emerge a new dance called the Honky Gronk, and me and my name would submerge in a sea of pop culture, taking me with it.

Moishi: I still don’t …

Klavier: Then maybe try this on. My father was a concert pianist; we had two baby grand pianos in the house and lived a stone’s throw from the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. To say he worshipped the piano would not be exaggerating. He told me once that the invention of the keyboard literally made the composing of great concertos, symphonies, even opera what they are—I mean, were.

Moishi: I’m … I’m almost sorry I asked, Klav.

Klavier: By the way. Most people mispronounce my name. They say Clah-vee-eh. That’s French. It should be Klah-veerrr’. That’s German. And, by the by, it’s—the instrument, not I—it’s come to be called a piano in English, Spanish and Dutch from the Latin, piano, meaning soft. Luckily the Italians recognize the problem and call it pianoforte which translates, soft/strong.

Moishi: How come you know all this?

Klavier: If your parents had named you Guitar, wouldn’t you be curious about the why? Especially when in your schooldays, everyone joked about “playing on you,” then proceeded to do so? Wouldn’t you seek to know the why, the meaning of the naming of you? Anyway, if my father were alive today, I can hear him saying something like: “The piano and Mozart, Beethoven and Liszt made good music possible; the electric guitar and Clapton and Young did their best to destroy the very concept.”

(Beat)

Moishi: My name is Yiddish. My Mom said it means Moses.

Klavier: And why would your parents call you Moses?

Moishi: Don’t know. I hate it.

Klavier: I think Moses is way more significant than Piano. You should search it out. Perhaps your name will make of you a modern-day Moses.

Moishi: Ah, but what’s in a name anyway? Everyday, I mean. If you rename a rose a Dogturd Flower, won’t it still smell … well, rosy?

Klavier: True … sort of. You’re wiser than you think you are, Moishi. But that’s too big a subject for today, and I yearn for a coffee. Shall I pay today?

Moishi: (As they leave) If your parents named you now, you’d probably be Coffee, or Synthesizer, wouldn’ that ….

 Afterword: Ich hab ein Klavier, einen Hund und gut und gern 500 noch nicht gelesene Bücher daheim. (German writer apparently listing the ingredients of his good fortune: “I have a piano, a dog, and fully 500 as-yet-unread books at home.” -Huby, Felix, Bienzle und der Biedermann.

Dr. Surly meets Ophelia

 

‘Round about the mid nineteen-sixties, I spent time in a 100-seat lecture theatre along with about seventy-five fellow undergrads who’d chosen Physics 101 as an Arts degree elective. I don’t remember the professor’s name, but I’ll call him Doctor Surly; his greeting to us was, “Good morning. I’m thinking you probably don’t want to be here, and I know I don’t. So let’s just get it over with.” (Note how he used a preposition to end his sentence with.)

He was mostly right, of course. Taking a science elective was mandatory.

I have never been a nerd, except that my relative success in the humanities in high school probably branded me that in the mouths of what we now call the STEM people (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Experience had taught me that an orange rolling off the table will end up on the floor, not on the ceiling, but under the cold, dry pronouncement of Dr. Surly, I suddenly became enamoured with the possibility that certain speeds of falling (including terminal velocity) could be calculated mathematically as could the strength of gravitational attraction in relation to material size. (My heights-and-falling-phobia may have been implicated here.)

My days of wondering why, “if an orange in Canada falls down, why doesn’t an orange in China fall … well, up?” were over. Perhaps the attraction came from thinking that Hamlet learning of his mother’s unfaithfulness would inevitably lead to his estrangement from Ophelia. Gravity (in both its definitions) would become integral to plot developments studied in Can. Lit. 101 as well as in Dr. Surly’s half-hearted curriculum.

Physics, the study of the behaviour of things physical. Although behaviour seems the wrong word, as if some choice is allowed an oxygen atom when it bumps into the hydrogen twins on the street and ponders whether or not to pursue forming a water molecule with them. (Sorry, Chemistry, but you’re just a thin branch of Physics in the end.) “Natural laws are immutable, indestructible, 100% predictable, all the time,” Dr. Surly would intone. “There never have been, are not now, and never will be miracles—if miracle means that the laws of nature can be thwarted.” With one wave of his chalk-wand, he turned seventy-five Sunday-schoolers into agnostics; all the water-walkers sank as one.

But, my slowly-awakening, undergraduate mind protested: “Human behaviour is not immutable, predictable. Estrangement doesn’t progress at a specific velocity, is not bound by a terminal speed either. Hamlet doesn’t have to drive Ophelia to suicide. Neither are the odds of a certain choice mathematically calculatable.”

Inadvertently, accidentally, Dr. Surly provided much to the education of the Humanities-bound students in that lecture theatre. For those who would enter careers in what was called, “English teaching,” the dichotomy posed by the material and the emotional would be foundational to everything from literary criticism; to logic; to story construction; to first learning, then transmitting the deepest essentials of human experience to malleable, youthful minds.

Oranges continue to fall earthward, both in Canada and China. And  Ophelia will continue to drown herself in front of high school students annually … and predictably, and her friend Laertes will make that silly comment: “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,/And therefore I forbid my tears … (Hamlet: IV, vii)

And in classrooms everywhere, a young man will fall asleep on his palms, elbows on his desk, but will produce a startling, lecture-stopping bang when his head-prop slips and gravity smashes his acned face into Hamlet: IV, vii.

Isn’t Physics wonderful? Thank you, Dr. Surly.  

 

Glory Halleluja

 

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword

His truth is marching on

Glory, glory, hallelujah …

 

Called (The Battle) Hymn of the Republic, this patriotic American anthem takes its place among a genre that includes Die Wacht am Rhein in German and the French La Marseillaise. (The Battle) Hymn of the Republic echoes Old Testament imagery repeated in the book of Revelations where the judgment of a righteous and jealous God is symbolized in a great and final wine harvest. A near-hopelessly mixed set of metaphors ranging from that harvest to the “terrible swift sword” and the tramp, tramp of the marching victors concludes the first stanza of the American anthem.

In its simplest interpretation, I suppose, the judgment day sees the mighty vintner operating the winepress where all humanity has been stored as grapes (of wrath?) and he squeezes from this mass the good (the wine) and leaves the evil (the hulls and husks) to the fire. Where all the blood comes from in all this violence in John’s dream appears to be window dressing.

John Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, interprets this line from (The Battle) Hymn of the Republic through the hardships of the Great Depression. Probably stretching a metaphor far beyond what was intended in John’s Revelation. A judgment was forced on the tenant farmers and the poor by the 1930s drought and the depression, with the double trampling squeezing the wine of life from the American working classes. At the same time, the winepress of God may be visualized as taking the harvest sickle to those who caused the misery of the Great Depression.

^“The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.” - Revelation 14: 19-20, NIV

That the bloody imagery of judgment in Revelation should become foundational to an anthem to American exceptionalism cries for analysis. Penned in tribute to the Union side in the civil war, (The Battle) Hymn of the Republic, lends itself to ranks of soldiers marching into battle on its cadence, the association of their cause with God’s judgment on their hearts and lips:

“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.”

I’ve been impressed—as have many others—with John Steinbeck’s portrayal of the American national character between wars, amid crises that can’t be conquered militarily. It’s not a stretch to say that in the upheaval of the Great Depression and the dust and drought of the 1930s, the hubris of military superiority was no defense against the devastations exacerbated by the arrogance and carelessness under which the American people chose to do politics and business. Like winning a lottery, winning a war can come with costs related more to sloppiness of national character, to unjustified convictions of invincibility. The implication in Steinbeck that the fate of the union is in the hands of the rich and powerful who cannot but defend their status, is clear.

“If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I" and cuts you off forever from the "we".— Chapter 14 (quoted in The Grapes of Wrath - Wikipedia)

Going right back to the formation of what we now know as The United States of America, the thread of Christian faith has run through practically every aspect of its life. (The Battle) Hymn of the Republic softens before it concludes:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Running as a candidate for the presidency requires that one must be—or pretend to be—a defender of the Bible and its teaching. Unfortunately, religious faith—like any ideology—can’t guarantee a unity of purpose, or even a polity of tolerance. It’s possible to be as fundamentalist or as revisionist in faith as it is in politics, a phenomenon illustrated in Western Christianity generally … in spades.

American “culture wars” are somewhat clarified by an apparent irony. The Christian gospel is concerned with individual souls living under, but detached from, "the world." And the irony is that in Western—ostensibly Christian—states, the struggle between the two entities is very much a love/hate proposition. A “you cannot serve two masters, but you must try” dilemma. Patriotism is not a Christian virtue although it is definitely foundational to the success of the modern industrial state, particularly one that’s come to see itself as the world’s guardian of freedom and democracy … and failed at that role as often as it’s succeeded.  

The “in the beauty of the lilies” stanza (above), the grammar conveys the suggestion that although Christ came to America as an immigrant (“[he] was born across the sea), America is Christian homeland. The idea of the USA being a Christian nation (but not quite like Iran is Muslim, of course) reappears time and again in support of this or that position, to the point where the wall separating church and state sometimes becomes remarkably porous.

In conclusion, it can be justifiably said that an anthem is not a country’s constitution, but a rallying cry poetically, musically designed to invite hearty, harmonizing participation. It can logically be asserted that it’s a vehicle for arousing feelings of patriotism and loyalty in times of national threat; the hymn in the title serves to suggest again that the line between discipleship to Christ and patriotism toward the state is tentative and weak.

By now, (The Battle) Hymn of the Republic and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath belong primarily to history, although the former is still sung repeatedly, the latter often read. Neither should be ignored in any quest to discover the character of our southern neighbours, or how they came  to be as they are.

But while we’re on books and songs about the USA, I suggest playing American Tune by Paul Simon a few times, and noting how in the singer’s dream the Statue of Liberty goes sailing out to sea. Renditions of the three anthems mentioned are easily found on YouTube.

Class, Caste and Racism - Isabel Wilkerson

 

Friend Gord suggested the book, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson; it’s an enlightening read at this time when racism and white supremacy terms are supporting a particular culture war in North America. You may find it odd that I’d review it before I’ve even ploughed through the entire first half, but the theme I’ve already picked up has got me thinking, and writing is a system of thinking I use. So sue me.  

I was already familiar with sentiments behind, for instance, “There’s only one race; the human race,” and the biological evidence supporting that. I was also marginally aware that in India, particularly, the population has been sorted into social-status baskets we’ve come to call castes. What is new to me is the organic connection between social caste systems and the divisions we normally attribute to racism. As harsh, cruel and arbitrary as slavery or as benign as waiters wearing uniforms, all around us are the markers of societies’ propensity to pigeon-hole their people into categories of privileged/not privileged, respectable/unrespectable, worthy/unworthy, master/servant.  

Caste systems serve purposes, or else they would die out. Plantation owners in the Southern USA became obscenely wealthy by utilizing slave labour, but for justifying their practices, slaves had to be dehumanized, made into an “untouchable caste,” unworthy of independent thought, self- determination, even of pity. The marker by which their unworthiness could easily be deduced was skin colour. The unwritten objective in the slave trade was not tied to racism though; race (skin colour) was a handy marker of caste. Had the plantation slaves had white skin but blue teeth, they would have been “the blue-toothed sub-humans fit only for slavery.”

 

Come to think of it, our language is full of terms that infer caste. Middle class, working class, working poor, elites, celebrity, wealthy, poor, the great unwashed, professional, Harvard educated, etc., the list is long. Treaties with Canada’s indigenous people turned out to be the legalizing of a caste system that persists, the relevant marker not so much skin colour as a crown registry and a tendency toward black hair and a certain swarthiness of complexion. Again, racism supports casteism.  

As I read on, I’ll be looking for the possibility that Wilkerson is making a distinction without a difference. I expect not; her book is copiously notated and leans on credible research and authoritative data. But if racism is just an adjunct of casteism, then a whole different strategy for guaranteeing freedom and equal opportunity for citizens may be called for. What that strategy might be is one thing for which I’ll be reading.