146. Life on the Low Wire

Toby Strikes a Bargain (gutenberg.org)

One of the first American novels I ever read was a children’s book called Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks with a Circus, by one James Otis. I had no idea, reading it in India in the 1960s, that it dated back to the 1870s. America was an exotic and uncharted land, and anything could happen there. Toby Tyler was an orphan boy in a small town who ran away with a small traveling circus, convinced that the community and the camaraderie that he saw in it would give him the home he longed for. But as soon as he was on the inside, the circus took on a different, menacing aspect, and he was caught in a nightmare of cruelty and exploitation which made his foster home look like Paradise. Those ten weeks felt like forever to him, and they did to me too, much as I also derived a vicarious thrill from reading of his harrowing escapades and narrow escapes. (Funnily enough, I now teach Angela Carter’s 1984 novel, Nights at the Circus, in my Contemporary British Fiction course, and for all of its over-the-top grotesquerie, the turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century American circus it conjures up bears a close family resemblance to the one Otis described in my childhood Toby Tyler.)

I never experienced the classic American Barnum & Bailey circus directly. By the time we arrived in the U.S., it had ballooned into a massive, three-ring extravaganza which filled sports arenas like the Boston Garden and seemed so removed from the audience that there was no thrill in it for me. The circuses I had seen in India were even smaller than the ones in Toby Tyler, and the experience was inextricably associated with the up-close swish of acrobats’ ropes and elephants’ tails, the pungent whiff of sawdust and tiger manure. Close up, the thrill was visceral, and a middle-class child could imagine herself part of a romantic world in which one was taken from the cradle to be a performer, and became an integral, contributing member of the family almost as soon as one could walk.

Moscow aerialists (showbizdavid.blogspot.com)

A circus from Moscow came to Kharagpur, with a troupe of high-flying aerialists. A whisper of fear-laced excitement went through the audience when we realized that they were operating entirely without safety nets. High stakes indeed! We watched their flawless performance with our hearts in our mouths, as they not only carried out feats of acrobatics while flying through the air that would have been jaw-dropping even if performed on solid ground, but they transformed athleticism into high art with the grace and timing of Bolshoi-trained ballet dancers. Their lives were on the line in every moment; every performer had to entrust his or her life to the others, since one slip by one person could plunge them all to their deaths.

Afterwards, I tried to perform feats of acrobatics with my best friend Puttu. She lay on the ground with arms and legs outstretched and I balanced on her feet and hands. But alas, we had not been born into a family of trained trapeze artists, and we, poor earthbound children, had to write our essays and recite our times tables instead of being taught from earliest youth to fly through the air with the greatest of ease.

Circus elephants, Mumbai (blog.travelpod.com)

Another time an even smaller, homegrown circus came to town. All I can remember are the elephants and the acrobats. Looking at one of the elephants, my parents’ friend Gopal Mitra intoned, with a straight face, “The elephant is a creature of many long things.” My mother suppressed a giggle, and when I followed our friend’s gaze to the creature in question, I saw that he—for indeed it was a he—did seem to have a lot of curious appendages dangling and protruding from various parts of his anatomy. (More than forty years later, in 2009, the Indian government issued an order that 140 elephants living in 16 circuses and 26 zoos around the country were to be moved to special encampments in wildlife reserves where they would be able to graze freely. I do not know whether or not this order has been enforced, or whether facilities have been set up in these encampments to ensure that the elephants are adequately fed and cared for.)

Pinky, Sunita, and Ratna, Great Royal Circus, Gujarat, 1989. Photo by Mary Ellen Mark, Indian Circus (shadowingmaryellenmark.wordpress.com)

The acrobats in this indigenous circus did not have the equipment or special effects of the Russians, but they were almost as accomplished and certainly took as many risks with their high-wire act. They carried out their amazing feats in a serious, almost businesslike manner. Very few artistic turns or fancy flourishes: this was work. As usual, they seemed to be a family, performing as one unit, used to putting with their lives in each other’s hands. I wondered at their closeness and concentration, at the oneness of their life and work, about the life of a child in that family.

Six-year-old girl in street performance, Gauhati, 2009. Photo by Anupam Nath (UN Children’s Rights from archlandscapes.com)

A few days later I caught just a glimpse of that life. I must have been out bike-riding with one of my friends on open ground somewhere on the outskirts of the Hijli campus, when we came upon the circus encampment. No caravans, no color,  just a straggling group of makeshift shelters and bedding laid out on the bare, dry ground. A flickering fire, with someone cooking; costumes hung out to air; essential equipment in small bundles; and—the embodiment of my imaginings—a tightrope, with a child my age on it. Not a high-wire, but a low one, set up for practice, for there was clearly little downtime in this child’s world. No romance, no heart-pumping excitement, but a transient, hardscrabble life in which survival itself depended on flawless performance every time. No exceptions or allowances possible, even—or especially—for children. If I had ever had the slightest desire, like that American boy Toby Tyler, to throw up my settled life and run off with the circus, it vanished in that instant, at the sight of that small, spare, intensely serious child, balancing on the low wire, the weight of the world on her shoulders.

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145. Just a little is enough

photo by Mr. Kris (from zenhabits.net)

It’s a line of Pete Townshend’s from his 1980 album Empty Glass. He was echoing the point he had already made back in 1971 on Who’s Next with Too Much of Anything. How many times in the 1980s must I have listened to A Little is Enough, whose lyrics made it clear that the author himself couldn’t stop at enough, let alone leave well enough alone? But his message continues to resonate through the decades.

We learned self-restraint as children, when it was a special treat to have two—and only two—pieces of candy from the biscuit tin where our mother kept  it.  The moment we waited for, when she would open the tin and allow us to pick out any two pieces of our choice, we called Reprise Time, after the segment on the weekly talent show Opportunity Knocks, hosted by the delightfully smarmy Hughie Green (whose unabashed sleaziness in the role out-sleazed Monty Python’s Michael Palin). While we must surely have wanted more, I honestly can’t remember even entertaining the thought that it was possible, let alone asking for it. But then, we knew what happened to Oliver Twist when he dared to ask for more.

It doesn’t really count, though, if you have self-restraint imposed upon you. Pete Townshend’s point is that a little can actually be better than a lot, that a person of discernment prefers it, for sheer pleasure as well as for self-preservation.

I’ll always remember Eve, the consummate artist in the kitchen, giving me this advice about cooking with herbs:

A little oregano goes a long way; don’t be heavy-handed with it.
(Thyme, she said, was different; you could never use too much thyme. )

The same principle applies to basil—it should be used sparingly. In an apartment a group of us shared in our twenties, we had a housemate who added basil  (her favorite) by the fistful to everything she made, thereby rendering it inedible for everyone else. With condiments, of course, while a pinch of salt is the stuff of life, too much is an utter disaster. And to my mind, in the case of hing, or asafoetida, even a little can be too much.

It was Bob Marley and the Wailers who made the point most powerfully for me. In the mid-seventies, when the band retired after a long and wholly satisfying set, when the audiences would go wild, calling for more as if they hadn’t already been given plenty, Bob Marley, in a brilliant move, would deliver up an encore of Want More:

Now that you’ve got
What you want
Do you want more? (Want More? echoed the I-Threes).

I was always chastened by this gesture. The band had just given the audience their all; how much more could we demand of them? It was now our turn to carry their positive vibrations back out into the world, and to discover for ourselves, by doing, when enough was as good as a feast.

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144. The Blab-Off

prweb.com

Not having grown up with television, my family was unaccustomed to sitting passively in front of the Goggle Box. So when we moved to America and acquired our first TV set, my parents treated it like an opinionated and rather exasperating guest: they listened politely for a while, then began to argue with it. Not for us the hushed murmurs of a silent family gathered as if in worship in front of a blaring telescreen. Mum and Dad would frequently talk back to it, and so, inevitably, did we.

As we turned on the TV on a Saturday night to wait impatiently for Sherlock Holmes (“Warlock,” my sister called it, with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson), my Dad would make comments throughout the last few minutes of The Lawrence Welk Show that preceded it, referring to its geriatric audience as “the Geritol set,” after the ads for the product that sponsored the show. Mum and Dad regularly told prevaricating politicians and tiresome talk show hosts to stuff it and in so doing, taught us to treat it with a healthy irreverence. The only exception was when a James Bond film was playing.

Will, Penny, and the Robot (fanpop.com)

In the 1970s I was newly sensitized to the rampant sexism in the mass media, first exemplified for me by the infuriating regularity with which Penny, my favorite character in Lost in Space, was overshadowed by her kid brother Will. When I realized that Pennie never starred in an episode, but always seemed to get lost or abducted by aliens so that cocky little Will could rescue her, I was outraged, and told the television so, along with everyone else in the room. My father usually tolerated my tirades (or tuned them out, more likely), but as he settled down to enjoy the super-cool Bond, who he knew would provoke an predictable stream of criticism from me, he would warn me pre-emptively that he wanted not a word of running commentary, and that if I couldn’t oblige I had better leave the room. I would do so, ungraciously, no doubt, muttering that I didn’t want to see that male chauvinist pig anyway.

One of the first things we learned about American TV was that the advertisements were longer and more frequent than the adverts in Britain, and that they were aired at a significantly higher volume than the regular programming. No remote control devices in those days, not until the late 1970s/early 1980s; as soon as the ads came on, one of us had to dart over to the television set and turn down the volume knob, another task that kept us active as viewers. But in my last year of college a technological breakthrough changed all that, thanks to Andrew’s younger brother Dan.

Dan was a tech wizard; there was nothing he couldn’t put together, from engines to electronics, hardware and software alike. As a teen, he had already set the house on fire with his homemade fireworks and made a pair of windscreen-wiper sunglasses for rainy days. But the master stroke of genius was his new invention: the Blab-Off.

Amazingly simple but brilliantly effective, the Blab-Off was a little box that attached to the television set with a cable and allowed us to mute the sound with a simple on-off switch. Dan had already made one for his own set, to our deep admiration, and when it was our turn to contribute a home improvement project to the college co-op house we lived in, he gave us the parts and the simple instructions to make our own. With what triumph we shut off the volume, and watched gleefully as the salesman on the screen opened and shut his mouth helplessly, like a fish gasping for air.

Although we now have a remote control device (or three), I still scramble to press Mute, not only because my reflexes are slower (although they are) or because there is such a proliferation of remotes for the various machines that I can’t remember which knob to press, but because I am conditioned to react like a Pavlovian dog when I hear the tell-tale tones of a TV ad: my blood pressure rises and I reach for the Blab-Off. Blissful silence, and I breathe a deep sigh of relief.

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143. Waste Not, Want Not

Clean Your Plate, Save the World? (in.reuters.com) Photo: Reuters/Romeo Ranoco/Files

My father has always had a horror of waste. If my sister or I left any food on our plates he would feel compelled to finish it for us. There was no need for him to mention the children starving in India—we saw them all around us every day. Whenever we went to the IIT students’ hostels for special functions, which always included delicious dinners, we saw the children scrambling to polish off any scraps of food left on the plates after the feast.

My mother taught thrift by example. When she cooked, she made everything from scratch. On the rare occasions she made pancakes, always a special treat in 1960s India with food rationing and white flour a precious commodity, she gave us all the perfect ones and ate only the rejects, usually the first and the last. She didn’t talk much about the poverty of her childhood, focusing instead on special treats and times of plenty; but quite recently she mentioned something in passing that spoke volumes. I was washing and chopping mushrooms, perhaps to make a mushroom gravy for a lavish Thanksgiving spread, when she observed that she didn’t see a whole mushroom until she was an adult, since her mother could afford to buy only the stalks. It shames me to think of how much of the mushrooms I waste when I clean and prepare them, sometimes throwing the stalks away entirely.

photo: Tyrone Turner kidsblogs.nationalgeographic.com

Of course, the horror of waste can go too far. Forcing oneself to eat food one doesn’t want or need is neither good for one’s own health nor does it feed starving children. And if one composts organic waste, it is not wasted but returns to enrich the soil. Nevertheless, a culture of waste squanders precious resources, increases food prices, puts increased pressure on farmers, and breeds bad habits that multiply and perpetuate the problem. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the average American throws away 40 pounds of food every month. I know that I buy food and, rather than constructing the week’s meals around what I have in the fridge, forget it until it’s too late. We would do well to recall the thrift of our parents’ generation.

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142. Route 66

Well if you ever plan to motor West,
Just take my way that’s the highway that’s the best,
You can get your kicks on Route 66.

All our cross-country road trips over the past 40 years blend into one great road trip, and all the highways on those road trips blend into one legendary highway: Route 66; or more accurately, the modern Interstate-40, with sections where you can still see the old Highway 66 running parallel to it. When you drive onto an East-West highway, the far end draws you like a magnet, and you cannot rest until you arrive at the other coast. So it always was for me as we set out from Massachusetts for sunny California, with the song’s litany of places along the way running through my head. (Although “Route 66″ was composed by Bobby Troup back in 1946 and recorded first by Nat King Cole, it was the Rolling Stones‘ 1964 version that I heard first and love the best.)

It winds from Chicago to LA
More than two thousand miles all the way

We would either pick up Route 66 in Missouri or in Oklahoma, getting there either by a northern route through Illinois to St. Louis or a more southerly one, down to North Carolina and through the hills of Tennessee, accompanied by country music and fire-and-brimstone preachers on the radio.  Sometimes we would be driving Andrew’s trusty old 1950 International Harvester milk truck whose maximum speed was 55 miles per hour, and at other times my first car, a 1966 Ford Falcon, with its  “three-on-the-tree” gear stick on the steering column. In the 1970s, with gasoline prices ranging from 39 to 69 cents per gallon (even after the oil crisis of 1973), three people traveling together could drive across country and back for $40 to $70 each.

Truck Stop, I-40, W. Central Tennessee (hankstruckpictures.com)

Driving across more-or-less nonstop, we would take turns at the wheel, pausing only for fill-ups of gas and coffee (or tea in my case) at truck stops along the way. Three was the ideal number of people for a cross-country road trip, because it allowed the person due to drive next to sleep stretched out in the back seat while the person who had just driven shifted over to the passenger seat and kept the driver awake.

short stack, Western View Diner, Rt. 66 (photo: Gil Gorduno nmgastronome.com)

For me, as a new immigrant, these trips did more than anything else to introduce me to America. What pleasure to pull into the truck stops and ask for a “short stack”—two or three massive flapjacks hanging off the plates like American steaks, swimming in melted butter and drowning in syrup. Truck stops in which the waitress would look at me in utter incomprehension when I asked for tea (not coffee), hot (not iced), with milk (not cream), and no sugar.  What a relief to learn that the drivers of the trucks and tractor-trailers, those barreling juggernauts that terrified me during my driving shifts, followed a strict courtesy code of their own that made them the safest and most predictable of the vehicles on the highway at night. Once I learned their limitations and their secret signs I found a deep satisfaction in respecting their rules, showing them that I knew their language, and receiving their signals in response to my own.

Well it goes from St. Louie down through Missouri
Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty

The Ozarks between St. Louis and Oklahoma City were indeed pretty country to drive through (at least until our most recent road trip in 2004, when warring billboards lined the route, both marketing pornography and proclaiming God’s opposition to it). I approached Oklahoma City with eager anticipation, since my knowledge of that part of the country was based solely on the lyrics of the song. Instead, as the southbound highway swung round the city and began heading West, a sickening stench began to assault my nostrils. Ahead of us was a large expanse of ground covered with fenced-in pens,  each one filled with cattle, standing on their own excrement, waiting for their death. These were the holding-pens of Stockyards City. Oklahoma City looks oh so ***ty.

Thankfully, just a few miles further on, also in Oklahoma, a new spectacle distracted me from the horror of the stockyards. In the middle of nowhere, right along the side of the highway, a row of big old American cars stood plunged head-first into the bare desert ground, looking like something one would expect to find in an avant-garde art installation in New York City. This was Cadillac Ranch, Andrew informed me. I was filled anew with the wonder of the West.

Besides the truck stops along the highway, there were also the occasional state-provided “comfort stations.” On my first road trip I had no idea what this term might refer to. When Andrew enlightened me, I was amazed yet again by the American penchant for euphemism.

from route66world.com

Hour upon hour, we hurtled—more accurately, trundled—through Oklahoma and Texas, along  hundreds of miles of straightaway. But when we got to New Mexico, everything changed. First the evocative names: just across the state border, the town of Tucumcari, known to me only through Linda Ronstadt’s truck-driving song, Willin’. Then the Sandia hills and into Albuquerque, home of the Big I interchange, where the East-West I-40 intersects the North-South I-25, and of our dear friend Michael, who took us out for the best New Mexican food, covered liberally with red chile sauce, in my case. (New Mexicans identify themselves by whether they prefer Red or Green chile as the British identify themselves by whether they pour the milk or the tea in their cups first.)

The Big I interchange (interstate-guide.com)

You’ll see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico

Through Albuquerque and Grants, New Mexico (Uranium Capital of the World), where we were shocked by the open trucks piled high with raw yellowcake on the highway in front of us and shuddered at the thought of all the Navajo Indian miners stricken with lung cancer as a result of their exposure to radon gas in the uranium mines. On into Indian Country, and Gallup, New Mexico, which always reminds me of my first encounter with the American West, through a wonderful course I took in college called Literature of the West from the Civil War to the Present. It was taught by Kevin Starr, who was soon to leave the rarefied air of Harvard and move back out West himself. A brilliant lecturer, Professor Starr would start class by issuing shocking, delightful instructions to put away all notebooks and pens, just sit back and listen. I will always remember one of his opening lines, “I was in a bar in Gallup, New Mexico. . .”

Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Winona
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino too
Get hip to this kindly tip
And go take that California trip

From New Mexico we tended to leave long before dawn to avoid the desert heat and, unless we were branching off at Flagstaff, Arizona for the Grand Canyon, drive right through to Los Angeles, Californ-I-A, where we would be welcomed with open arms by Andrew’s cousin Mischa.

I’m in California as I write this, visiting my dear friend Marianne, with my last cross-country road trip fading into the distance of a rear-view mirror. Flying just can’t compare.

Get your kicks
On Route 66.

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141. The Yogi of Beals Street

The Kennedys’ first home, Beals Street, Brookline, MA (semp.us)

Almost as far back as I can remember, my father practiced yoga morning and night: in our little parquet-floored apartments in Athens, on the cool polished-stone floors in Kharagpur, and in Coolidge Corner, Brookline.

from Light on Yoga, by B.K.S. Iyengar

He had an ancient and well-worn yoga manual from India which he had carried with him from country to country, illustrated lavishly with fascinating (and sometimes horrifying) black-and-white photographs of men with their stomachs sucked in to their backbones. (Note: the photographs here are from a newer book that has been one of my guides over the years.)

from Light on Yoga, by B.K.S. Iyengar

As a child I learned a few basic asanas, but mostly accepted Dad’s daily exercises as part of the routine of everyday life in our household. As a teenager I began to take a mild interest and after taking a course on Vedanta philosophy at university, learned the surya namaskar (Salute to the Sun) series of exercises and began to perform them twelve times in the morning. (I do not say every morning, because that would by no means be true. I have never managed to be regular in my practice, which has progressed in fits and starts.)

Today yoga is ubiquitous in America, and that is a very good thing. As it does in India, it offers a bewildering array of varieties and approaches. Here in the U.S. it is tailored to practitioners of every stripe: Gentle Yoga for beginners and senior citizens, Yoga Warriors for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, and that oxymoron (to my mind), Power Yoga, keeping busy professionals competitive and fighting-fit. It also seems to require the purchase of a bewildering array of accessories, from mats, blankets, blocks, and straps to fashionable, form-fitting outfits designed to enhance the buff, yoga-toned body. As a now-universal practice, yoga no longer “belongs” to Indians, even if it originated on the Subcontinent. A few years ago I was eating out at a local restaurant with a group of graduate students and young faculty members, many of them Indian American, when the conversation turned to yoga. One of us, who had just had a book published on desi (South Asian) youth in America, asked around the table mock-anxiously if she was the only one who wasn’t taking yoga classes. When it turned out that she was, that even the non-South Asians at the table were standing on their heads on a regular basis, her mock-anxiety turned visibly into real dismay.

In the early 1970s, though, yoga was nearly unknown, associated vaguely in Americans’ minds with Ravi Shankar,  Transcendental Meditation, and the Indian Rope Trick. For our first several years in the United States we lived in rented apartments in the comfortably middle-class neighborhood of Coolidge Corner in Brookline, Massachusetts. Brookline is a liberal urban suburb just west of Boston with an excellent school system, which was why my father took an apartment there when my mother, sister, and I received our green cards and were able to join him. I was more than halfway through high school when we arrived, and after I had gone off to university in nearby Cambridge, my family moved to the top floor of an owner-occupied house on staid, settled Beals Street, opposite JFK’s birthplace, which was a modest house that looked no different from the others on the street. Kupel’s bakery, famous for its bagels, was at the top of the road and Devotion School, a neighborhood primary school, on the corner just a block away.

from Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar

One afternoon, on my way home from university, I was surprised to find a solitary man standing on his head in Devotion playground. It turned out to be Dad, the Yogi of Beals Street, absorbed in his practice and utterly unconcerned with his environment or the perceptions of passers-by. I don’t think I disturbed him as I walked by. Thinking back on him as he was then, an immigrant to a new country in his late forties, I marvel at his confidence and courage. Perhaps practicing yoga out in the open was Dad’s way of claiming this new neighborhood as home—or, as a conversation with my yoga teacher has suggested, a way of coming home to himself wherever he might roam.

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140. Music Alone Shall Live

As a child, I noticed that the adults in my life seemed to break into song whenever someone used a word or a phrase that recalled one that they knew. Marveling at their massive repertoires, I conceived the idea that a grown-up was someone who knew a song corresponding with every single word in the language, and I longed to attain that enviable state.

As I grew older, I turned into that same kind of adult, who took every opportunity to break into song regardless of the setting, no doubt embarrassing members of the younger generation who, despite the fact that they had music piped into their heads 24/7, seemed to think that singing was an intensely private act that ought to be restricted to the shower. I sang a few lines of a song in class one day, purely to illustrate a point, and later that week a student of mine from another class asked, lowering her voice, whether the rumors circulating round campus were true.

Singing has always been the thread that has sewn together the disparate, far-flung fragments of my life. I’ll never forget an experience I had one summer back in the 1980s, while visiting my dear cousin Sue. Her friend Helena’s boyfriend, who had offered to drive us all over to my Auntie Bette’s house in his car, put the tape of Bob Marley’s Exodus into the cassette player. Six or seven of us, there were, from four to forty-something, jammed into the car singing Jammin’. As we all sang together, Exodus: movement of Jah People, we were united across differences of age, experience, ethnicity, and musical taste. For the duration of that short ride across North London I knew what it was to feel One Love.

Visiting London again in 1996, now in our forties, Andrew and I entered a quiz contest in a Hampstead pub with Sue and her then-twenty-year-old daughter Oleen, and won, acing every category because our collective musical knowledge ranged from the Fifties to the Nineties, and from pop to rock to reggae to house. Each of Sue’s three daughters and each of their five children in turn has different musical tastes, and Sue knows them all in addition to her own favorites from the Fifties and Sixties.

Unlike many other adults who define “their music” as the limited group of songs they came of age with, Sue has stayed young at heart by continuously refreshing and expanding her musical repertoire. In contrast, I realize that I have all the signs of hardening of the musical arteries. Where once I could recite the Top Twenty almost as easily as my ABCs, if I ask myself honestly when last I learned a new song I realize that I can hardly remember a single one less than five years old; to be honest, precious few less than ten, since Nikhil left high school almost a decade ago. It’s not that the new songs are necessarily any good, quite the contrary; it’s rather that every successive generation thinks music has gone downhill since they last had their fingers on the musical pulse of the times.

I’m thinking about music today as I look up the lyrics of songs to to adapt for my dear friend (and sister-in-law) Eve’s sixtieth birthday party, and realizing that although her musical repertoire is continuously growing as she learns new songs to perform in her band, my own knowledge of her favorite songs is sadly dated, ranging from Dominique (1963) to Sweet Black Angel (1972) to Mirror in the Bathroom (1981). For my part, the “new” songs I’ve found myself learning in the past decade have only been new to me, as I’ve been returning to folk, country, blues, old film songs, and bhajans, deepening my musical roots rather than trying to keep pace with what’s current.

By my childhood definition, I’ve almost achieved adulthood, since I can toss you back a few bars of a song for just about any word or phrase you pitch at me; but now I have a new formulation, this one of immortality. In the words of this round, which we sang at school in India in the Sixties:

In the original German:

Himmel und Erde müssen vergehn
Aber die musici, aber die musici
Aber die musici, bleiben bestehn.

and in English:

All things shall perish from under the sky
Music alone shall live, music alone shall live,
Music alone shall live, never to die.

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139. Sealed With a Kiss

It’s hardly necessary to say that Valentine’s Day is overblown and over-commercialized, heralded by a barrage of advertising that peddles greeting cards, red roses, dark chocolate, sentiment by the truckload, love itself. In my childhood and youth, February the 14th was marked very differently, when it was marked at all. But I imagine that children and young teens have always had rituals that introduce them to the gender norms of their society and prepare them for courtship before it begins in earnest.

In my primary school in Athens I seem to recall a flutter of excitement accompanying the approach of the day, when a student might receive an anonymous Valentine in the internal mail, creating breathless speculation as to the identities of both sender and receiver—among the girls, at least; only dread and embarrassment among the boys, or so they let it be known. As children growing up without the influence of television (or even, in my case, the radio), we were effectively shielded from the incipient youth culture of the early 1960s, our innocent imitations taking their cues from romantic pop songs. Although my parents’ small collection of 45-rpm singles and 33-rpm EP’s contained next-to-no American records, somehow I learned a few songs, memorably Oh Carol (See St. Catherine’s and Miss Tutte), Wolverton Mountain, and perhaps my favorite, Sealed With a Kiss.

In boarding school in Darjeeling we didn’t mark the day at all, but nevertheless had our own year-round rituals and practices that signified to whom our hearts had been given, for the time being, anyway. Again, music gave words—inadequate approximations always, but words just the same—to the inchoate murmurings of our young hearts. I can still see the boys in The Strange Infatuation, our co-ed band at Mount Hermon, sending shivers down our spines with their performance of the Beatles’ Boys at a rehearsal snatched between Afternoon Study and dinnertime. We girls, not to be outdone, responded with a sultry imitation of Nancy Sinatra’s Boots.

In my year-long sojourn in England in 1968-69, I was mostly an outside observer of the strange courtship rituals of British teens. The kind of interaction with the opposite sex that I experienced personally was one at a double remove from the person in question. A boy who had his eye on me might send his friend to tell my girlfriend that he liked me. If I looked up and dared to meet his eye, he would look away hastily, pretending not to have seen me; and if I were to cross the boy-girl divide and actually ask him to confirm the truth of his friend’s message, he would certainly deny everything. Of course, the whole exercise was based on the unspoken understanding that I would never have the nerve to do so. Whether, and if so, how they celebrated Valentine’s Day, I honestly can’t remember.

By 1970, when we got to America and the avant-garde Brookline High School, dating was already considered passé, and teen rituals of the 1950s such as the Senior Prom and Valentine’s Day similarly retrograde. The cool thing to do was to go out in a large mixed group, and not to seem to have a preference for any one individual. But of course, we did have preferences, which we still whispered about with our girlfriends and recorded in our secret diaries. Though we could have friendships and carry on political and philosophical conversations with boys that were never dreamed of  in our Indian schooldays, our feelings were essentially unchanged: we were still unsure of ourselves and of how to interpret and express all that we were feeling. Ostensibly, all the rules had changed; in reality, we were as clueless as teenagers have always been.

Tweety-n-Sylvester Valentine (from valentine-cards.blogspot.com)

By the time Nikhil was in primary school in the States a generation later, it was obligatory for all students to make and distribute Valentines to all their classmates, so as not to make anyone feel left out. At first, I think, he rather enjoyed the process, taking trouble with each and every card in the intended spirit of inclusiveness, but as he got older, his interest progressively diminished (or so he feigned, anyway) until it was his long-suffering mother buying the Love Hearts candy and the Valentines and making sure that he inscribed and addressed them all. Still, I got the distinct impression that, despite the best efforts of the well-meaning authorities,  certain girls and boys inevitably received more Valentines than did others, and rumors circulated that so-and-so had been seen opening a top-secret envelope that was clearly a cut above the innocuous offerings bought in bulk at CVS or Woolworth’s.

The whispers and giggles of elementary school soon passed. In middle school Nikhil was more interested in film-making than in girls; the love song that echoes through the late 1990’s for me is Aqua’s Dr. Jones, to which he made his first music video starring all his best friends (in my maternal opinion much better than the official one here). The friendships deepened, love flowered all around, and my memories of his high school days are characterized by a heap of leggy teenagers piled on the couch in our den during a study break, melting into the ultra-romantic Come What May from Moulin Rouge or Enya’s May it Be in Lord of the Rings.

You may notice that I have skipped over a quarter of a century, between my young adulthood and that of my son’s. What happened in-between? Just about everything. What was all that Valentine’s stuff all about? Little more than nothing. A rehearsal for a rehearsal. Love, the real thing, remains as mysterious as it has ever been.

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138. Learning How (Not) to See

As children, small pleasures gave us endless delight. One of these was solving picture puzzles, identifying objects depicted in a drawing or photograph. A regular puzzle in our children’s magazines required us to recognize an everyday object from a close-up of it. For example, this close-up:

and the object:

from theimage.com

Children see things differently. Remember the opening of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in which the narrator discussed his Drawing Number One and Drawing Number Two (below)? In Drawing Number One, what was obvious to him as a child was opaque to the grownups, so he created Drawing Number Two, in which the meaning was transparent. Still the grownups were not satisfied and advised the boy to stop wasting his time with such nonsense. But when, as a grownup himself, he met the little prince and showed him Drawing Number One, the boy recognized it at once.

Drawing Number One: a hat?

Drawing Number Two: not a hat, a boa constrictor digesting an elephant

When I was about eight one of my school friends showed me the drawing below and asked me what it was.

Like the little prince, I gave the correct answer without hesitation:

“A pen nib in a box.”

“Yes, it is,”  replied my friend, seemingly unsurprised by my penetrating eye. Perhaps she, too, felt that it was the obvious answer.

Do children play such simple games anymore, games that require no money, employ no electronic devices or equipment of any kind, and have no special effects? Even if they did, would they even recognize some of those objects, little more than a generation later? What’s a bath plug? What’s a pen nib? I pray that a generation from now, children will not have to ask, “What’s an elephant?”

Those games taught us not only how to see but different ways of seeing. Close up, or seen from an unfamiliar angle, the most ordinary household objects could be unrecognizable. We found that we needed to re-focus, to change our perspective, in order to see them anew. The drawing my friend showed me counted on most of its viewers seeing the cozy picture of a light in a curtained window. They wouldn’t generally expect to see into a dark box, revealing the pen nib lying within. Somehow, I did, although I’ve always been more of a verbal than a visual person (perhaps I had just filled my pen: see My Ink-Smudged Youth); but asked the same question today, I might not trust my first thoughts; instead, I might be more inclined to say what I knew most people would expect me to see.

We learn to hood our eyes, to blinker our vision, so that the world becomes opaque to us. The little prince, in his clear-eyed innocence, reminds his young readers how precious their fresh perspectives are, and—unless they remain very attentive—how short-lived.

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137. A Victorian Frame of Mind

Sever Hall (photo © AntyDiluvian)

Student engagement? Active learning? Office hours? Pshaw!

In the Spring semester of my freshman year of college I took a course on British intellectual history of the Victorian period. I knew nothing at all about the subject but it looked interesting, so despite the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday (you heard right—Saturday) schedule I signed up for it. A couple of the books I bought for that course still gather dust on my shelves—The Victorian Frame of Mind (which I have consulted since) and The Utilitarians (which I have not). No selling back textbooks at the end of the semester in those days, let alone renting them.

Our professor was impossibly old—or so he seemed to me—and utterly inaccessible. I’m quite sure that I never exchanged a single word with him in the entire semester. Neither did anyone else; there was no class discussion, even though the enrollment couldn’t have been more than thirty.

This was his modus operandi: he swept into the classroom just  before the period was to begin, raised his head so that it angled up at some invisible point just over our heads, clasped his hands behind his back, took off his spectacles (without which he was almost completely blind), closed his eyes, and began to speak in an uninterrupted sonorous drone. He lectured nonstop for the entire class period, at which point he gathered up his things, restored his specs to his nose, and hurried out of the room without looking to left or right. I’m certain he never even made eye contact with me.

For my part, I never sat in the front of the class or ventured to raise my hand during any of the split seconds when he must have had to pause to catch his breath. Did his syllabus list office hours? He was probably required to keep them, but I wouldn’t have known. Not in my wildest dreams would it have occurred to me to make an appointment to meet with him outside of class.

I had only the haziest idea of the content of the course, most of it going right over my head. To be fair to him, the professor was probably brilliant, and no doubt I was a callow youth with only a fraction of my attention on the work at hand. Still, looking back at the experience through the lens of contemporary pedagogy, I’m appalled at what passed for teaching forty years ago. I don’t remember having to write a paper for the course, and so didn’t get any written feedback beside the marginal notes on the mid-term and final exams that served to evaluate the sum total of what we had absorbed; which, in my case, was very little.

Harvard Student Strike. Apr 9, 1969 (dipity.com)

In my freshman Spring of 1972 my friend (and now my sister-in-law) Eve, a graduating senior, complained about having to sit for the final exams. Each of the previous three springs, starting with the student strike of 1969, had been so turbulent that finals had been cancelled. I bemoaned my belatedness. Having immigrated to the States in February, 1970, I had missed the Summer of Woodstock. Just a few months after we arrived, both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died. On those somnolent Saturday mornings it seemed as if the Sixties had never taken place. We might as well have been in the Victorian era.

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