Worthy Words, Part 8: Duke Ellington

Today is the 125th anniversary of Duke Ellington's birth. Edward Kennedy Ellington (1899 – 1974) was a bandleader who kept his orchestra touring for more than a half-century and an extraordinary pianist. As for his great musical compositions, I rank him as peerless among American composers and second to none among the classical Europeans. Ellington's range was staggering, from blues to sacred compositions. His music, especially his suites, continues to give me countless hours of pleasure, and I'm glad that Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will celebrate the maestro's contribution to world music with three concerts later this week.

Ellington was also an exceptional writer, as he shows in his endlessly entertaining 500-page autobiography, Music My Mistress. In what amounts to a scrapbook of his long career, the book pays homage to hundreds of people Duke met and loved throughout his life. He mentions each one in a positive light, proof that none of us can get where we're going all on our own. 

One particular passage in a section called "Music and the Primeval" strikes me as emblematic of how Ellington saw humanity:

The human being has patterned his every move, sound, and image after God's other creatures and natural wonders. Birds whistle like birds, leopards walk like leopards, horses run like horses, gulls fly like gulls, lions roar like lions, and fish swim like fish. All animals, except people, act like their species.

Music, for instance, began with man, primitive man, trying to duplicate Nature's sounds—winds, birds, animals, water, the crescendo of fire—after which great systems of learning were set up, only to discover that music is limitless. The more you learn, the more you want to learn. And the more you hear it, the more you want to hear it. (page 436)

I have read numerous writers, starting from the Ancient Greeks and the New Testament right through the existentialists, describe what makes humans different from other species, but none has explained it any better than Duke. His words capture humanity's ingenious nature, our desire to understand and drive to create. He makes me want to listen to his "Sunset and the Mockingbird"; excuse me as I do that now.

Worthy Words, Part 7: Grace Schulman

In her remarkable memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage, Frost Medal recipient Grace Schulman writes this of her husband of 57 years, Jerome Schulman, an epidemiologist, as he struggled with a terminal disease:

Jerry was crafty at hiding, even from himself, the gravity of his illness. That skill, famously called denial, had obvious drawbacks, but did offer a way of going on. Although he knew that his heart was pumping at a small fraction of the minimum, Jerry phoned in February of what would be his fatal year for tickets to see a new play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the following autumn. He ordered new novels online, and bought tailored, no-iron chinos for the following summer. 

Reading this paragraph reminded me of my beloved father-in-law, Peter Kostares, a World War II veteran, who from his New York Hospital bed as he was dying of stomach cancer with hours to live talked about how he was looking forward to attending his niece's wedding five months into the future. We have at least two ways of looking at Schulman and Kostares. One is to say they were ridiculous optimists unable or unwilling to face the inevitable end of their life; the other is to say they were experiencing life at its most intense fullness, a mindset that looks forward to the future in a never-ending, life-affirming present.

Grace Schulman's prose, like her award-winning poetry, inspires us to realize that regardless of our circumstances, we want to go on. We want to plan as if we will live forever, which is not a bad thing, provided we experience life as if we have only this moment.

Worthy Words, Part 6: Thich Nhat Hanh

If one must carry the burden of being a genius in a particular discipline, I suppose the most useful to society would be one of the human condition. Composers, musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers—they all have their huge place in inspiring and entertaining us, and you could rightly argue that such artists are themselves communicators of the human condition. But as much as I love the performing and fine arts, I do not know a quarter from a sixteenth note, can barely draw stick figures at best, and dance more with my hands than with my feet. Yet, I breathe. I think. I look at and listen to the world around me. I encounter life's mysteries. I have no words to describe to you the moments my senses experience so that you can experience them the same way. 

These remarkable capabilities are the specialties of Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022), and from what we can tell of his voluminous writings, he bore his genius with grace. Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who traveled globally to promote peace and teach the Way of the Buddha, had a singular influence on many other renowned authors, including Daniel Berrigan, bell hooks, and Thomas Merton.

In A Lifetime of Peace: Essential Writings by Thích Nhất Hạnh appears this excerpt from one of his many best-selling books, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation (1987): 

Keep your attention focused on the work, be alert and ready to handle ably and intelligently any situation which may arise—this is mindfulness. (p. 76)

This simple statement may seem too obvious to acknowledge as wisdom, until we realize that we spend most of our waking hours pursuing personal goals, attending business meetings, and running all sorts of errands. Nhất Hạnh insists that we can be mindful in those situations as well. One of the keys to mastering mindfulness is focused breathing, a practice beyond the scope of this brief post. My intention here is to draw attention to a master of life who shows us that living at peace requires exercises that are rather easy to practice, but not so easy because of their demand on our persistence.

Worthy Words, Part 5: Edward Said

Edward Said's collection of 46 essays, "Reflections on Exile" and Other Essays (2000) appeared in print three years before his death. One of those essays, "On Defiance and Taking Positions," begins with this sentence:

Compared, say, to most African, Asian, and Middle Eastern universities, the American university constitutes a relatively utopian space, where we can actually talk about the boundaries of the academy. (page 501)

Knowing how candidly self-reflective Said was, I wonder in this age of gotcha journalism if he would retract this statement. We have seen the results of accusatory rhetoric following Harvard's Claudine Gay, MIT's Sally Kornbluth, and Penn's Liz Magill testimony before the United States Congress, as well as numerous legal cases challenging employers over alleged discriminatory practices as a violation their free speech.

During my undergraduate years in the mid-1970s and graduate years in the early 1980s, I would have backed Said's observation. But I had already begun seeing signs of a reversal of freedom of speech on campus during my Rutgers doctoral years throughout the 1990s. Two instances come to mind. I failed one of four essays for my qualifying examination. The reader who failed me was a tenured political conservative professor who disagreed with my socialist approach to the education topic. He said, "Your paper got to the wrong reviewer." Fortunately, I passed the essay the second time around. Then a tenure-track liberal professor, recommended for my dissertation committee by the committee chairperson, said of my position, "You know that's a racist viewpoint, don't you?" I replied, "I could see how some people might agree with you, but ..." "I said it's racist," she interjected preemptively. The next day I asked my committee chairperson to remove her from the committee. He did so, but if he had not, I am certain I would not have attained a doctorate.

As you can see, there's plenty of blame to be shared by both political persuasions. A quarter century later, we are living in times when free speech is endangered. We need more thinkers like Said to swing the pendulum toward Americans' First Amendment rights.  

Worthy Words, Part 4: Galway Kinnell

American poet Galway Kinnell (1927-2014), Pulitzer Prize and Frost Medal recipient, wrote many poems in his six-decade career, from haunting dreamlike sequences like the 13-line "Promissory Note" to sweeping epics like "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World." One of his poems in particular, "When the Towers Fell," about the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, contains two haunting lines in the first stanza that still strike me to the core of my soul. Describing the Twin Towers, the poet writes we: 

grew so used to them often we didn't see them, and now, not

seeing them, we see them.

I passed through the former World Trade Center hundreds of times as a student, employee, or business owner during its brief 28-year history. While I remained awestruck by its underground network of shops, restaurants, theaters, subways, and commuter trains, I was never impressed by its exterior design. Thus, I looked only at its shadow as I walked past it. But after it fell, I wanted it back. I wanted to see it. I don't want the Freedom Tower. I want back what I cannot have. It is not there, yet I still see it. I sometimes feel that I still have not moved past the anger or depression stages of grief. Kinnell's two lines speak for how I live with this loss.

I am grateful that The New Yorker makes "When the Towers Fell" available on its website.