Hanging at Hermann's

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Tickles arrived in town late last Friday afternoon to play an anniversary gig with a Quintet he joined 20 years ago. Hermann’s, the longest continuously open jazz club in Canada, celebrated its 28th anniversary that week, the Quintet being one of the highlights of the celebration.

Led by Stu (trombone, piano) and featuring Tickles (piano, tenor sax), Cam (alto and soprano sax), Ken (bass) and Dave (drums), the multi-award winning Quintet comprises the top musicians in Canada, possibly the world. (I’m only the teensiest bit biased due to baby bro’s presence among them.)

Stu’s a larger than life kind of person, a Dylan Thomas type who dominates any room he’s in and whose brilliance hauls you up by the nape of the neck and demands attention. When he plays with the other members of the Quintet, enchantment descends – an extra dimension insinuates itself, a chemistry combined with such consummate skill and artistry it takes your breath away.

I arrived at Hermann’s early as there are usually standing-room-only crowds when the Quintet plays. Perched on my accustomed stool by the bar – the one that affords the best view of the musicians and the best acoustics – I watched people arrive and imbibed the rising sense of anticipation and excitement. As usual my thoughts wandered off, this time to the weekend nearly 20 years ago when I first began getting to know the members of the band.

They were at the start of a cross continent tour that included Toronto and New York and ended up at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, famous for many historic events, not least the assassination of RFK in 1968. I was living in the Remote Coastal Village and in the throes of organizing a Spring Break trip to France for myself and 32 students. In exchange for some fund-raising help, I told the Band Teacher I’d try and convince the Quintet to extend their tour to include a concert and workshop in our village.

It didn’t take much convincing at all and, once the concert was over, they descended on my home to be fed. Tickles arrived bearing apple pies from my Mom and I had a savoury beef stew bubbling on the stove. Post-performance ebullience filled everyone except San, Stu’s girlfriend and the Band Manager. Prior to the Remote Village gig, they’d gone down to Washington State to kick off the tour.

Apparently there’d been some trouble at the border. “May I remind you,” San said sternly as I ladled stew into bowls, “that water balloons are forbidden. Absolutely. At all times. No exceptions.”

General murmurs of agreement greeted her pronouncement. Stu finished his dinner quickly and sat down on the couch with his back to Cam, who hunched over the table spooning up some last bits of tender carrot and beef. Then he casually removed a straw from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. From one of the front pockets he withdrew a handful of paper pellets. He put one of them in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, raised the straw to his lips and blew. Soon Stu’s back was peppered with spit balls.

Dave, meanwhile, brought delight to eight-year-old Creature’s heart by doing his famous – and startlingly realistic – gorilla imitation. Many children fled screaming when he contorted his face and let his knuckles dangle floorward. Not so Creature. She asked for it to be repeated again and again.

So – spit balls flew and a gorilla stumped through the carnage while Stu sat oblivious, telling tales of gigs past.

This happy halcyon scene faded from my mind as the crowd grew. Stu arrived and came by to say hello.

“I don’t know how it will go tonight,” he said. “We haven’t played together for a long time. I’m not even sure what we’ll play.”

I said I was sure it would be wonderful.

Cam appeared at my elbow. “I don’t know how it will go tonight,” he said. “I can’t even remember the last time we played together and we haven’t rehearsed.”

I repeated my reassurances. Tickles loped in. “I don’t know how it will go tonight,” he said. “We haven’t played together for ages, we haven’t rehearsed and Stu didn’t even bring any music.”

I offered yet more reassurances and, glancing at the two grand pianos inexplicably crowded into the musicians’ corner, added brightly – and in jest – “Maybe you’ll play some two piano.”

Tickles looked seriously alarmed. “I hope not,” he replied. “We’ve never done that. Besides, one of the pianos is a piece of crap. It took 15 years to convince Hermann to buy a decent one. I don’t know what it’s still doing here.”

He wandered off and I felt badly about teasing him.

Fifteen minutes later they began to play and, of course, it was wonderful – intricate, subtle, rich in tone and feeling.

Suddenly, unobtrusively, Tickles moved to the crappy piano and Stu sat down at the good one. Gently, so softly at first that it was like the liquid chords of one instrument, they launched into a two piano duet. A kind of glamour fell over the room. Fairy Tales.

After the break, Stu made the obligatory speech in praise of Hermann. “Three years ago,” he went on, “I wrote a song for the 25th anniversary, Hanging at Hermann’s. In my usual, absent-minded musician’s way, I gave the only copy to Hermann. He did me the honour of having it framed and hung it on the wall here.”

He moved aside a black curtain that had been looped up to deflect glare. Sure enough, there was a framed score, snuggled between a couple of decrepit trumpets. The rest of the band trooped over and gazed intently at the wall for a few minutes.

Stu let the black cloth fall into place again. “We haven’t actually played it again since that night,” he said, “But we’re going to give it a try now.”

And, once again, the melody that began to weave its way around the room was polished, elegant, riveting. Then, towards the end of Tickles’ piano solo, there was a slight thickening of sound. Stu had spontaneously turned on the bench where he was sitting to tentatively add a chord, a feather touch, once more making two pianos sound like one.

Abruptly, a fire overtook them. And it was a duel, a sound storm, a whirlwind of rising harmony and surpassing beauty, a haphazard gift of the moment, an exquisite merger, a duet. It commanded absorption, travelled like an electric current up the spine and filled the heart and the brain and the veins with glory.

We are the music-makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams...

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth...

World-losers and world forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yes, we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
A.W.E. O’Shaughnessy

Eye of the Beholder

I’m taking a break from the Jordan Saga to bring you a brief report from the confines of my Real Life. The weather continues dismal, cold and windy, permitting only a forced display of stunted daffodils and unhappy cherry blossoms.

My local newspaper offers the following comfort:

After enduring the coldest winter in 16 years and now persistent below normal temperatures that are chilling what should be spring, Islanders can be excused for asking what gives.

They may not like the answer.

Meteorologists suspect coastal BC is now being nipped by a trend of colder than normal winter temperatures that could last a decade. Or two. Or three.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a phenomenon of alternating phases in which offshore ocean temperatures tend to run warmer and then colder – for 20 to 30 years at a stretch.

I’ll never be warm again.

The global picture doesn’t look any prettier. Doom and gloom cascade down from all quarters. My favourite British newspaper, The Independent, under the headline Seven Years to Save the World, fills me in on the upcoming G20 Summit:

The agenda is an ambitious one. Beneath all the news hoo-haa about grungy protesters, cancelled police leave, be-suited City workers being told to dress down and even the spectre of a terrorist dirty bomb lies the grim reality of a deepening global financial crisis. The task before the G20 is to rescue the drowning global banking system, rewrite the rules of the financial markets and stop a global recession tuning into a great depression.

Well! As the Chinese like to say when they’re in the mood for showing off their English translation skills – Any clue what’s happened? Lady Macbeth cleaned up on the stock market.

Which reminds me of how Canada originally joined the ranks of what was then the G8, way back in the 70s. Gerald Ford came up to Ottawa one July – his first visit to the Great White North - to complain about something or other and the prime minister (either Trudeau or Joe Who, if memory serves) invited him to play golf. Ford was blown away. He’d set forth armed with skis, a heavy parka and fur-lined gloves only to find nary an igloo in sight. He had to borrow Canadian golf clubs. And they worked! And the Greenside Bar served Budweiser Beer! Montreal had paved roads! He was so impressed he offered us the greatest honour he could think of – membership in the G8. Once you’re in, of course, you can’t get kicked out again unless you do something really naughty. And Canadians are so quietly polite that no one notices when we’re naughty – so our very own Stephen Harper will be in London next week helping to save the world.

The planet really is doomed.

Closer to home, this little gem appeared in my mail box at work yesterday morning:

Dear Employee Services Person,

I suffer from alopecia of the eyebrows and lost all my brows. As I am 64 years old, it is due to menopause and hormonal change. I had my eyebrows tattooed recently as it was getting quite embarrassing. Does my Health Spending Account cover this procedure?

Please advise. Thank you.
Esmerelda

At first I thought my frolicsome colleagues were having me on – but no, truth is always stranger than fiction. I sank to use of a cliché there because the unthinkable has happened. I actually don’t know what to say to Esmerelda. Words fail me. The world may be coming to an end long before its G20-engineered doom overtakes it.

I wonder what she had tattooed. Two lines of exclamation marks? A stand of pine trees? Two rows of little chickadees waiting to dive into a bird bath cunningly stencilled on her cheek? What would you choose to replace your eyebrows? Jesus Murphy. I put that down as an expression of semi-disgusted surprise – a loose equivalent to Good Grief – but I suppose it’s as good a choice as any. And a skilled tattoo artist could make the letters come out even over each eye.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot

Off I go to collect my blessing.

Dancing With the Sand

What immortal hand or eye...

Wadi Rum

Disgruntled camel; Salameh's home; Salameh and his truck; Fig tree; Nabataean graffitti; Lawrence's House; Silly sheep

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After the exchange about marriage in Canada, we drove in relative silence until we came to another Bedouin village. Nazeeh pulled into a sandy lot, causing a couple of camels to glare at us balefully as he did so. A man emerged from one of the tents and walked towards us.

“My name is Salameh,” he said with a dazzling grin. “Means ‘safety,’ so you know I take good care of you. Come, we go in my truck,” and he indicated an olive green vehicle parked nearby.

I turned to Nazeeh. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

“You want me to come?”

“Yes, please.”

“Okay.”

Given my experiences with Bashir and the Egyptian Steward, I wasn’t taking any chances.

He didn’t bat an eye. “For this trip I give you Arabic name. Tha ee yah. Means Seven Stars.”

I was charmed and took care to jot down the phonetic syllables so I didn’t forget them but couldn’t help remembering my family’s reaction when I acquired a Chinese name. Some lovely students in the hinterlands of Hubei Province dubbed me Wen Rou, which means something like Gentle Heart. In response to my excited e-mail, my Mom said, “I couldn’t stop giggling. You sound like a character from Winnie the Pooh.”

We all piled into the ancient truck. The smell of gasoline was so strong I couldn’t breathe. My nose hairs bristled and my eyes burned. Good thing the driver’s name is Safety, I though. If someone waved a chilli pepper in our general direction, we’d go up in a towering ball of flame. I asked if I could sit in the back, saying I’d get a better view.

“But very windy,” warned Nazeeh.

“I don’t mind.”

Off we went across the trackless sand, winding around vast rock formations that rose towards the sky like the thumb and fingernail of God. The subtle gradations of colour were amazing, every imaginable tone and shade of brown, yellow and orange. I thought of the magnificent Egyptian monuments I’d seen so recently. Here God Himself had created something far more spectacular. It was as if the Egyptians had laboured in vain for millennia to recreate what already existed at Wadi Rum.

The truck swirled to a stop and Nazeeh helped me hop down over the tailgate, my brain still whirling in awe.

“The Holy Quran mentions Wadi Rum,” said Salameh. “There it’s called al Emad, the old word for mountain, and described as a place like nowhere else on earth, the place where Allah went ‘dancing with the sand.’”

Nazeeh walked over to a silver tree growing from a rock. “See what our God has done!” he said, an expression of rapture on his face. “No water, no earth, and yet this fig tree springs from the stone. It lives here just so for hundreds of years I think.”

I remained silent, not wanting to break the holy spell that had caught us in its shining wake.

A little while later we came to Lawrence’s Spring and Lawrence’s House. It isn’t really a house at all, just some foundation stones, and it wasn’t built by TE Lawrence but, scholars think, by Nabataeans, the same people who left Thanoud, or graffiti-like images of giraffes scattered throughout the area. It was, however, a favourite resting place for Lawrence of Arabia and he often camped here. I felt momentarily a part of his story, touched by the exotic magic that lingers round his name.

Meanwhile, the wind blew and flocks of silly-looking sheep trotted past.

We drove a bit further, to no particular destination. Nazeeh and I strolled about while Salameh stayed with the truck. We sat down side by side on a wide, flat rock and drank in the beauty.

Biblical phrases come to mind naturally here – “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills” – and Biblical scenes come alive. I narrowed my eyes and could almost see the Children of Israel trudging along in weary lines as they wandered in search of their Promised Land.

It was absolutely still and utterly quiet except for the mournful mutter of the wind in my ear.

“This is the most healthy life,” said Nazeeh, nodding towards the distant shepherds. “But it’s too difficult now for most people.”

We lapsed into companionable silence. The sky arched above us, a flawless blue bowl, and the awesome architecture of the wilderness – coloured in canary, pumpkin and sepia – stretched away on either side, a sacred stillness brooding over all, and contentment warming us.

“It doesn’t get better than this,” remarked Nazeeh.

No, it doesn’t.

Drink Your Coffee

Al Mansef

********************

I awoke to glorious sunshine. Cold still crimped the edges of the morning but light flooded the landscape, transforming Jordan into a hymn of radiance.

Nazeeh appeared promptly as I dawdled over my coffee and diary notes.

“Let me downstairs your suitcase,” he said. “Today we go to Wadi Rum and Aqaba.”

I smiled. “Downstairs” was Nazeeh’s all-purpose word, flexible enough to be nouned or verbed at will, for everything from the bottom of a valley to the lobby of a hotel.

As we set off into the sunshine, the inevitable question came up at last.

“Where is your husband?” asked Nazeeh.

Perhaps because it was so unexpected, intruding into the brightness like a shard of ice, tears gathered – sudden, unbidden – in my eyes and threatened to run down my face.

“He died last year in China,” I replied, brushing away the tears with my fingers.

Nazeeh was horrified. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I should not have asked that question. I make you cry. Never should I ask such questions. I not forgive myself. I am very bad man.”

“No, no,” I said. “Please don’t be upset. It’s a normal question to ask.”

“But I make you cry.”

“Not any more. See? I’m fine. Just a few tears. It’s part of the grieving process. And it’s good, really. I have to get through it. I can’t go the rest of my life never talking about my husband.”

Nazeeh eventually accepted that he hadn’t blighted my day and the little contretemps led to a description of Jordanian courtship and marriage rituals.

When a young man decides he’s ready to marry, he tells his mother and oldest sister who scout around for a suitable bride. They hold discussions with neighbours and low-key meetings with families to whom they’re allied by business, previous marriages or friendship. When a decision has been reached, there’s a big formal meeting in a tent or hall, presided over by the respective sheikhs (male elders) of each family.

The lady’s womenfolk prepare coffee and the lady’s sheikh sets it before the man’s sheikh. He doesn’t touch it. He acts as if it isn’t there.

“Why do you not drink this coffee I give you?” asks the lady’s sheikh.

“Why do you give me this coffee?”

“It is to greet you and welcome you.”

Still the man’s sheikh doesn’t touch the cup.

“Why do you not drink this coffee?” the lady’s sheikh asks again.

“Because I do not yet know if I should. We are here for a reason.”

“And what is the reason?” inquires the lady’s sheikh.

“We are here to know if there is an agreement between us, if our son shall marry your daughter. You must tell me whether or not we have such an agreement.”

A dramatic silence falls over the tent as everyone waits for the lady’s sheikh to speak.

“Drink your coffee,” he announces slowly, syllables resonating. Joyful noise breaks out and jubilation reigns.

The wedding occurs a few days later – of, if the man’s house isn’t ready, a few months later. The lady’s family needs time to prepare sweets and the bridal gown, as well as “to kill sheeps and goats” to make Al Mansef, a special nuptial stew.

On the big day, the woman wears white to symbolise her purity. The man wears black because it’s the colour of the hardest rock and indicates he will be strong and true, protecting and sheltering his wife so long as they both shall live, just as a tent nestles confidently at the base of a tall cliff.

There is no ceremony, no service at the mosque. The couple simply appear before a judge who questions them – the woman about her untouched state and her domestic skills, the man about his ability to care for a wife and children. Then they go to a great feast where there is music and dancing and tables groaning under the weight of wedding delicacies.

Finally the newlyweds head off to spend their first night together. In the morning, The Ritual of Blood on White Sheets is enacted. The bride’s mother and the groom’s mother arrive to make sure there’s proof of the girl’s virginity and the man’s virility.

Nazeeh sighed. “These are the good ways. The old ways. But week by week and day by day they’re changing. I do not know why. Young people get divorced. Some of them do not even care if the wife is a virgin.”

I made sympathetic noises. Then I said a very stupid thing and came closer to being killed than at any other time during my foreign adventures. I don’t know what possessed me to say it. It just popped into my head and fell off my tongue.

“In Canada,” I remarked, as absent-mindedly as casting off junk mail, “We’ve just legalized gay marriage.”

Nazeeh’s mouth fell open. “You mean two mens? Together?”

I nodded.

The steering wheel went slack under Nazeeh’s hands and we slid to the edge of the road, perilously close to plunging over the 200-metre drop off. My heart leapt into my mouth and I wondered when I’d ever learn to shut up.

At the last possible moment, Nazeeh regained control and we slithered back onto the highway.

“Two womens, too?” he asked, voice rising to a squeak.

I nodded again.

“This is too much.” He shook his head like a dog with a bee on its nose. “Not here. In Jordan, two mans go to judge and ask to get married? The judge say, ‘No, no, no. You go straight to jail.’”

He drove in silence for another few minutes. My heart was still racing.

“This is too difficult.” Nazeeh cleared his throat. “I cannot think about it. I must put it out of my mind.”

And so he did. The sun shone down and we continued on our way to Wadi Rum.

I made a resolution on the spot and have kept it ever since. When asked about Canada, I give a standard response: Canada is extremely big and there’s lots of snow. We are a peaceful nation of vegan hunter-gatherers and we’re very kind to our sled dogs.

Jordan Explained

Bedouins learning the traditional art of mosaic-making; Nazeeh and Bedouin guide at Little Petra; Hotel staff twist towels into fanciful shapes hoping to earn a tip

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“Bedouins nearly wreck Petra,” said Nazeeh as we sat over a very late lunch. “Thousands of them everywhere. And gypsies. They camp in old buildings. No room for foreign visitors. Finally government throw almost all of them out. Build a village for the ones who stay. FREE. Bedouins not pay.”

“That’s nice,” I remarked. “But I didn’t see any signs of a village when I was down there.”

“No. Village destroyed because Bedouins bring their animals inside. Sheeps and goats indoors with people. Very dirty. And gypsies just hide until government people gone. Then they come back.”

“Oh dear.” What else could I say?

“But Bedouins are learning. Slowly.” Nazeeh chewed reflectively. “And compared to Gypsies, they’re very clean. Gypsy women have no shame.”

“What do you mean?”

Nazeeh sucked his teeth and didn’t answer. “Bedouins,” he launched into an obviously memorized spiel, “live in large tribal groups. There are twenty or thirty thousand in Jordan. Unlike the Gypsies, they work.”

“What do they do?”

“They farm and herd, look after sheeps and goats. A few even go to school and one became a government minister. They are Jordanian citizens and they wander only within certain areas. Usually they are quite clean.”

“Tell me about the gypsies.”

Nazeeh made a face. “They are dirty, they steal and they don’t work.”

“I didn’t know there were Gypsies in this part of the world.”

“Oh, yes. Thousands of years ago, a Romanian king kicked them out of his country because they wouldn’t comply with decency standards.” Nazeeh looked very proud at his use of this phrase. “They are not Jordanian citizens. They have no passports and they roam around between Syria and Saudi Arabia, often travelling through Jordan. Sometimes they work in circuses.”

As I searched for a rejoinder, Nazeeh pointed his fork at me. “They use magic.”

“Really?”

“Yes. When I was a boy, even though my father said it was forbidden, I watched them make their camp. An old man untied a scarf from around his neck. Just a little scarf. He put it on the ground and suddenly I saw many things. A big loaf of bread, a bottle of milk, a bag of olives and a knife. All from the little scarf that come from his neck.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Also, they hypnotise people. I see this with my own eyes. Gypsy woman come to my grandmother’s door and ask for water. My grandmother afraid but is bad luck to refuse gypsy food or water so she bring a cup of water. Gypsy woman sip water but all the time she talk, very low, in Gypsy language and hold out her hand. My grandmother walk like in her sleep and put six gold bracelets in Gypsy’s hand.”

“Your grandmother told you this?”

“No, I was there. I, Nazeeh, see this with my own eyes. I looking through the keyhole.”

“And you didn’t run in to stop your grandmother, to wake her up?”

“No, no. I am too afraid. Gypsies are dangerous. Also they are fortune telling which Quran says is very bad.”

“Are you still afraid of them now?”

“Yes, I am very afraid.”

Back on the road again, Nazeeh said, “Now I take you to special place. You mustn’t tell my boss because he will say I charge you money. But I no charge money. Many people not even know about this place. Little Petra.”

I managed the biggest smile I could muster from my still frozen depths. “Thank you.”

We bounced through a village of Bedouin tents until Nazeeh stopped the car and said, “Wait here.” Soon he returned with a Bedouin teenager in tow and we walked across a desolation of rock and sand. Eventually the boy began to point out facades gouged from the rock. We climbed up and he showed me Roman frescoes almost blackened out of existence by the smoke from camp fires.

“Little Petra was like a hotel by the wayside,” the boy explained. “Caravans stopped here if it was getting dark and they knew they wouldn’t make it to Petra before the sun set. There’s a legend about a secret tunnel that connects it to Petra and comes out in the chapel there. I’ve looked since I was a little boy, though, and never found it.”

As I was thanking him and doling out the requisite tip, he added, “I can give this tour in seven different languages but haven’t gone to school for even one day. Not ever.”

At long last, I arrived back at my hotel, damp and chilled to the bone. I drew a gigantic bath and lay in it until my skin puckered and the rocky cold of both Petras was vanquished.

Petra

Moses' Spring; Equestrian Annie; the Kazmeh; Many Colours; Bedouin camels

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The next morning dawned rainy and chill. When I ordered coffee, a melancholy waiter informed me, “Sorry, no more.”

My downcast face prompted him to add, “150 Koreans come and drink it all.”

I hadn’t so far seen 150 of anything in the entire kingdom of Jordan – except sheep – and felt disbelief contort my caffeine-deprived features.

“Worry not. We will find,” and the waiter scurried away to be replaced almost instantly by Nazeeh.

“Today we go to Petra,” he announced, rubbing his hands together.

We drove first to Moses’ Spring. This marks the spot where the Israelites found themselves dying for lack of water following their flight through the Sinai desert. Carrying those stones covered in the Ten Commandments was thirsty work. God told Aaron to strike a rock with his rod of office. He did so. Water gushed forth – and continues gushing to this day.

Nazeeh approved of my reverence towards history. “It looked better in the past,” he said. “About 15 years ago, the government built this roof” – he gestured upwards at the ceiling, constructed like the dome of a mosque – “and this pool” – he indicated the rather grotty and stagnant receptacle into which the water trickled. “But still special place.”

I agreed and we carried on.

“Do you know why we say ‘Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’?” Nazeeh asked suddenly, peering through the windshield at the drizzle and mist.

“No.”

“Because our kings are famous for going on the Haj. Haj, Hashemite. Travel to Mecca, you understand?”

Before I could respond, we pulled into a vast empty parking lot.

“Here you have different guide,” said Nazeeh. “I am not allowed to walk with you into Petra but I know this man. He is very good. Respectful. You ask him many questions and he tell you answer. Do not forget to give him tip. I think 10 Jordanian dollars fair. Okay?”

“Okay!”

“And here is snick.” He thrust a carton of apple juice and three Swiss rolls into my stiff fingers, then handed me over to the new guide.

The next thing I knew, the guide said, “I help you up,” and there I was seated on a horse, face on into frigid wind and stinging rain, trotting towards an apparently impenetrable rock wall rising from the gloom several hundred yards distant.

“At least I don’t have to walk,” I thought, the jacket and scarf I’d bought in Dubai providing little protection against the onslaught. “Maybe the cold will be easier to bear on horseback.”

I spotted an opening in the cliff and looked forward to getting out of the wind.

“I help you get down,” said the guide pulling me from the horse just as I started to feel comfortable. There are some things about foreign countries I’ll never figure out.

We entered the winding 1500-metre Siq, a narrow gorge that provides the only entrance to the fabled rose-red city of Petra. It winds between rock walls up to 200 metres high.

The Siq was first discovered by Edomite farmers who ventured down to carve tombs from the sandstone. Later, when the Nabataeans realised the Siq was the unique means of ingress, they founded a city, a stronghold to keep them safe from their enemies. Unfortunately, there was no water – no springs – wells were dug in vain – so the place couldn’t withstand a siege.

The guide pointed out the runnels the Romans carved into the stone on either side of the narrow defile. Once they’d figured out how to pipe water from Moses’ Spring, Petra became perfectly secure and many years went by before some nimble villains managed to block the spring and mount a successful siege.

The cold receded as we walked between the massive walls, swirling with colour and twisted into shapes that resembled fish and elephants. Beneath my feet, the stone was rutted by the wheels of Roman chariots. Carvings of camels laden with goods and surrounded by groups of people reminded me Petra was a major stop on the Silk Road, part of the King’s Highway and, in antiquity, the biggest place between Damascus and the Saudi desert.

Suddenly I heard a strange sound – the clip clop of horse’s hooves and the dull spinning of wheels. I couldn’t believe my ears. The guide said nothing as we both looked expectantly ahead. Moments later a horse-drawn, Roman-style chariot came briskly into view, driven by a man standing up to better control the reins. Horse and driver sped by us like a dream.

I experienced the weird sensation of being transported back in time and felt almost dizzy with it. A thousand years – two thousand years – could have been whisked away by the wind. I could be standing in any of the last two hundred centuries. Not a single sign of the 21st century intruded.

“Gypsy man,” said the guide and walked on.

Just when I thought we’d wander the Siq forever, we rounded a final curve and the famous Kazmeh, or Treasury, rose before me. Its name comes from the Bedouin belief that Pharaoh hid his treasure here while pursuing the Israelites from Egypt. I guess it was slowing him down.

The Treasury wasn’t as red as I’d expected but the weather was so grey and dull it leached the colour from everything. The place was swarming with Bedouins, donkeys, camels, horses and ragged children selling rocks and silver jewellery.

With a few notable exceptions, the area was more of a ruin that I’d expected, too, more like a Bedouin camp than the noble remnants of an ancient city. The guide pointed out that Petra covered 25 square miles and that the Bedouins, for a fee, let visitors ride their donkeys or camels to the more distant sites. Not having realised the place was so large, I had only a few hours in which to explore.

I marvelled at a Cave of Many Colours and a theatre, the only one in the world carved completely from stone. The Romans added arches and black walls.

By this time I was so cold I was shaking, with blue lips and chattering teeth. My body had gotten used to much hotter climes and was registering a distinct protest.

The guide noticed my distress.

“You need warm,” he said. “Maybe Bedouins help.”

With my Pashmina scarf wound around my neck and head so as to leave only a slit for my eyes, I followed him, head down, watching only his feet, my brain empty of anything but the all-encompassing cold.

“You sit here,” the guide said at last.

I shook off my scarf and did a classic double take as I gratefully sank onto an old piece of carpet placed in front of a blazing campfire. A group of men sat around it. Their dark eyes stared at me from weathered faces. Most of them remained opaque, obsidian, shuttered windows on a world I’d never know. A few lit with the sparkle of slow smiles.

Someone handed me a tin cup full of steaming tea. It was amber, a little cloudy, and a pungent scent rose with the steam.

Heaven became a seat on the ground in front of a leaping fire surrounded by Bedouins, permeated with the strong smell of camel and donkey, jingling to the sound of bells and harness.

A very large man, the leader perhaps, came and sat down next to me, giving me a sidelong glance as he lit a long thin pipe.

We sat in silence. He looked straight ahead and I sipped my tea, which turned out to be delicious and deliciously warming. Then the man reached into his robes and pulled out a handful of coins.

“Very old,” he said, holding out his palm covered in what, indeed, looked like very old coins, gold and silver, glinting in the light from the fire and ragged at the edges, imperfectly stamped circles.
“Roman, Greek, Nabataean,” he went on, moving them around so I could admire the imprinted Caesars and other kingly heads. “I find in – you say fast flood?”

“Flash flood,” I supplied, ever the conscientious language instructor.

“Yes. Flash flood. Very valuable. For you, only 200 American dollars. Worth much more. Usually I sell for one thousand American dollars, but no visitors now. Only you. So I make special price.”

I nearly laughed out loud. To begin with, I had no American dollars and certainly not 200 of them. Even if I did – and wanted coins – I had a vague idea that most countries had laws banning the export of antiquities. And the thought did cross my mind that these might be clever reproductions.

“Sorry,” I said. “I am a Canadian and a teacher. I have very little money. And I don’t collect coins.”

The man grinned, revealing a mouthful of black and broken teeth. “That’s okay. You buy my coins and when you go home you sell for many thousand dollars. You help me, I help you.”

“No, I’m sorry.”

He smoked for a while. No one spoke and the wind whistled through the rocks.

“One hundred American dollars,” the man said finally. “Bad for me but very good for you.”

“No, I’m sorry.” I replied, starting to feel uncomfortable. My guide stood in the background, ignoring me.

A few more minutes passed. The Bedouin man sighed and cleared his throat with a coarse liquid bubbling of phlegm.

“Twenty-five dollars,” he said. “Best offer. I get almost nothing and you go home, become rich in your country.”

Inspiration filled me, a result of the blessed warmth. I gave him a huge smile. “But this is terrible,” I said. “Look at these coins.” I brushed my fingers over them where they still lay in his outstretched palm. “So beautiful. So old. You must not sell them for $25 – that would be a crime. You wait for a few days. Soon a rich American will come. He will pay $200 – maybe even $500 – and be happy. You, too, will be happy. And the American will love the coins, which is good because these coins were made to be loved. You do not want to sell them for a song to a silly Canadian woman who does not understand their importance.”

The old man grinned and returned the coins to the depths of his robe. I looked up and saw that his companions were also grinning, as was my guide.

“Bring this woman more tea,” the man ordered. And it was brought.

A little later, the guide delivered me back to the parking lot where Nazeeh was anxiously pacing in the drizzle.

You okay?” he demanded. “You gone very long.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just cold. The guide helped me get some tea from the Bedouins.”

Nazeeh looked as appalled as if I’d told him I engaged in exotic dance, semi-clothed, and then sold myself to the lowest Bedouin bidder.

“Get in car,” he said, scowling at the guide. “We go to lunch now. And I explain you Jordan.”

We squealed away, tires spitting gravel at the forlorn guide left standing in the rain.

Nazeeh and Me

************************************

In Jordan, perhaps because my pace was slower and my impressions more personal than they had been in Egypt, I began to learn about the political situation in the Middle East. Its reality appalled me as did the extent of my ignorance about the Palestinians, their predicament and their struggle.

I expected to be met at the Amman Airport, assigned to a tour group and loaded onto a bus. Instead, an ingratiating young man named Maher picked up my suitcase and introduced me to Nazeeh, the driver of a private car he indicated I should enter.

Panic descended. I couldn’t afford the luxury of a private car and driver! Would I be presented with a huge bill a week hence and then jailed because I couldn’t pay it? Or was this another of Bashir’s manipulations and I’d be expected to provide payment of another more carnal sort? Did I mention that the humiliation never ended?

I grabbed Maher by the arm and dragged him aside. “Where is the group?” I asked. “I am on a group tour.”

“No group,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“People afraid. No group.”

Great! Had a war started during the last fortnight? One I hadn’t heard about? Just as in China, we didn’t receive ‘hard’ news in the UAE and I didn’t imagine Egypt was big on it either.

I decided the only thing I could do was be totally honest. “I think there’s been a mistake,” I said. “I should be in a group. I can’t afford a private car and driver.”

Maher gave me such a withering glance I almost patted the top of my head to see if I’d sprouted horns.

“You already pay,” he said.

Nazeeh, meanwhile, stood stolidly to one side, face expressionless. He told me later he’d been overcome with a “very bad feeling” and dreaded the week to come. As did I, still uncertain there wasn’t a catch somewhere that I’d missed.

We drove in silence to my hotel and woodenly arranged to meet in the lobby the next morning at 9:00 a.m. This unpropitious beginning was followed by one of the most amazing weeks I’ve ever lived through. That evening, however, the enchantment had not begun. Before falling into troubled sleep, I scrawled, “No face cloths and no women employees in Jordan.”

After a breakfast of tomatoes, cheese, hard-boiled egg, Tang and coffee, Nazeeh appeared promptly, seeming a little more relaxed than the previous evening. Tendrils of communication and friendship – of understanding – started to hesitantly close the distance between us and bind us together.

My first surprise, as Nazeeh announced we were heading for Mount Nebo, was the swift realisation that Jordan, too, is the Holy Land. Barren hills, caves, sheep, shepherds and olive groves dominated the landscape interspersed with the black oblongs of Bedouin tents, difficult to spot against the dark rock walls beneath which they sheltered.

“They refuse to live in one place,” said Nazeeh.

We drove the King’s Highway, a formal route designed so the King could travel in safety and relative comfort. In reality it was torturously winding and constantly assaulted by high winds. No wonder the ancients called out, “Make straight the way of the Lord;” a vain command, I thought.

Nazeeh let me off in an empty parking lot. I climbed to the mountain top and gazed across the desolation on the other side. Just beyond the farthest hills lay Jerusalem. One God, One Father, Over All read the stone markers left by the Pope in 2000, along with a refurbishment of Moses’ grave.

I ran into a group of school children, the only other visitors of any kind I encountered throughout the week. They obligingly took my picture in front of a twisted cross – seemingly fashioned of barbed wire – perched on the edge of the precipice.

“People is frightened,” explained Nazeeh. “Bad war in Iraq. They think Jordan dangerous. But we are not at war. Even so, we suffer. Jordan is very poor country. We do not have oil. When no tourists come, we suffer. Get more poor.”

It occurred to me for the first time that a war has more victims than I’d known. Not just the innocents shedding their life’s blood in Iraq, but also the innocents in Jordan losing the life blood of tourist dollars.

Karak Castle, bastion of the Crusaders, stood high on a hill. We stumbled upward through a series of dark draughty tunnels to reach the top, where a gale nearly knocked me down again. The cold breath of God scouring the hatred – it’s not quite gone, I think – there’s still a mournful sound to the wind – the ramparts forming a dreadful Aeolian harp, harsh frets strummed by the chill bony fingers of the ceaseless wind.

Suddenly I saw a soldier on a step beneath me. Was that the glint of armour and a helmet? The thrust of a spear? Yes! I averted my eyes to dispel the glare. When I looked back, the soldier was gone. A ghost? An after image of the eternal warrior? Whichever, it’s a brief picture only, no spirit remains.

I turn to Nazeeh. “Did you see a soldier down there?”

Nazeeh shrugs. “No soldier. No man. Just a shadow from long ago.”

After lunching on traditional milky goat stew in a deserted restaurant, we set off on the long drive to Petra, the tendrils of friendship growing stronger and more confident of survival.

Nazeeh has six children, aged 19 years to 6 months, two boys aged 19 and 18, two girls aged 15 and 8 and a baby boy. The baby is a delight, he says, but the teenagers refuse to listen to him when he tells them hard work and adherence to Islam are the only ways to get ahead. They defy him! They hurt his heart! He hopes they don’t ruin their lives as there are no second chances in Jordan.

I remark on the natural caves yawning from the bare hills we pass as well as the stone cairns dotted here and there. I ask if people live in the caves as they do in the Troglodyte caves of France.

“Not any more,” replies Nazeeh. “Only sheep and goats stay there now. Good, safe place for animals.”

The cairns are property markers, he explains, which makes me think of the Inuit people who used stones to mark their travel routes. We’re ingenious creatures, we humans, making adroit use of whatever’s ready to hand.

The little town of Petra appeared as we rounded a corner, clinging to a series of steep stony promontories. Spinning past the Cleopetra Hotel, I looked up into a glorious sunset that pulled a vast palette of subtle colours – orange, ochre, sienna, yellow, mustard, coral, moss, purple – from the rocks and sand.

“Look! How lovely!” I breathed.

“Your eyes are beautiful,” Nazeeh said solemnly.

“What??”

“Your eyes have beauty so you can see beauty. No have beauty behind eyes, no see beauty in sky.”

We’d come a long way from the airport.

Day Moon

Piglet

October 20, 1955 - March 19, 2003

Picture taken March 16, 2003

in Guangzhou, People's Republic of China

*************************************

The face of night turned inside out,
Peering pale into day,
Out of its realm, out of its depth,
Wan and pale as camellia petal past its prime.

An incongruity in the heavens –
A gash out of the blue –
Through which night’s outrider slips,
Herald of darkness in a world of light.

Like your death, dear heart,
That burst upon us through
Some terrible rent in the fabric of things,
Too soon, too soon,
Casting shadows for substance,
Trailing gloom where once sparkles grew.

How shall I endure this ghastly inversion?
How accustom myself to such an altered sky?

No matter.
It’s all words – images and metaphor –
Searching for surcease, for a way out
Of the vast emptiness your passing left,
Yearning for any rag end clue
To where you might be now;
How to reach you. How to touch you.
Any talisman will do.

Your bones are insufficient for the purpose.
Crumbling fragments in a silken bag,
Cold as points of driven hail,
Too ivory white, too incomplete for impressions,
They speak not.
They move not.
They’re simply naught, nought, not.

The golden circle of my wedding ring gleams and glints
Amongst those sharp shards of potter’s clay
With the same futility the silver circle of the moon
Expends as it tries to brand its face,
A bizarre tattoo,
Upon the blazing blue of noon.

Two crosses and a wooden cat settle deep,
As ineffective as my love – or my regrets –
Or any other holy totem I can conjure.

You are gone. Irretrievably.
And no day moon, no desperate invocation,
No burnished cross
Leaps with the reflected flame
Of your extinguished light.

And yet ... and yet ...
I hear you in my head;
My thoughts sometimes glimmer and flare
With a strange glory,
Ignited by the ancient hope
Of a son that shines forth in darkness
And in whose radiance you, too, my love,
Retain a sure and certain substance.

Here to Learn

Piglet and Annie, January 2003

Guanghua, Suburb of Jingzhou

Hubei Province, Central China

****************************************************************************************

How could I have missed

The crucial moment when

Your school let out,

When you passed the final test?

What did you learn that I missed?

What last lesson

Brought you to so sudden a conclusion?

An Honourable Estate

October 1974

*****************************

In firelight.
when lace falls
from quiet fingers –

Painting stick men
on misty windows –

Feeling a thousand years young
on those mellow-warm
Neon sidewalk summer nights
with soft darkness wings
above the sad city trees –

To light a candle in the room.
watch the shadows live and dance
and die again –

Crowds,
lonelier than old diaries
or finding faded ribbons,
seeing faces I have been -

The times
just to be myself
when thought breezes
sway the
silver webs of my mind –

You are the silver dewdrop
on every silver web.

Song From Long Ago

Annie
and Piglet
1974
*************************
A song for the years
I spent sitting, scared,
Collecting people

As life went by
Mirrored in the windows
of other eyes.

Through borrowed sadness
and stolen sunshine,
While the Queen of Spades
drew lines in the sand
with her sceptre
I built busy card towers
in the wind.

A falling of leaves,
a breaking apart,
a lost-time later,
I got up
and walked away with you;

Watched the cards scatter
like frightened mice
dissolve into dawn’s white veils.

For every good-bye leaves a hollow,
Every sunbeam’s a shadow of love –
All the towers wash away with the tide.

What Next?

It’s 4:00 a.m. by the castle clock. The dark world outside my window has an exhausted sound – as well it might after two days of lashing rain and tearing wind. And Saint Patrick rules the roost today. Lucky him.

After the Healing Service, my parents waited in vain for the Homecare Person to come and help my Dad into bed. Finally my Mom managed it with only one hitch when my Dad’s exhausted legs simply gave out and he sank helplessly to the carpet. Mom summoned the neighbour again. Disaster temporarily averted.
Dad woke up at 1:15 and decided he wanted something out of his bureau drawer. Instead of calling Mom, he got out of bed and proceeded across the room with his walker. Once more, his legs gave out. At this point, he did call Mom but she couldn’t find the strength to haul him up off the floor. Neither of them could figure out what to do so Mom brought a blanket and pillow and tried to make Dad comfortable. There he lay until Homecare Person showed up at 10 the next morning.

I note the top court in Iraq has found Tareq Aziz guilty of the 1992 murders of 42 traders who were rounded up over two days, given a brief trial and executed hours later. Tareq will spend the rest of his life in jail.

This reminded me of Amna, one of my students in the UAE. Her grandfather was a leading Iraqi businessman elected by his peers to the presidency of the Chamber of Commerce, an independent body with no remuneration attached to its leadership. In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein changed tradition by turning the Chamber into a government department. Amna’s grandfather resigned and went to Mecca with 19 of his friends, partly to remove himself from the situation and partly to renew his spirit. When the group returned to Baghdad, they were arrested at the airport, taken to Kangaroo Court at high noon, and hung en masse two hours later. Amna’s family blamed Saddam personally for the deaths but I wonder if there was a middleman, a hatchet guy, who might soon appear in court.

Or is killing 19 people not enough to count as mass murder? Is there a cut-off point?

In other news, I read that Hillary Clinton has called the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank “unhelpful.” How incredibly profound! What searing commentary!

I also note that certain western newspapers have started referring to “the recent Gaza conflict where it is thought 1300 Palestinians died.” It is thought? What would be the outcry if wording changed to the “recent Gaza conflict where it is thought 13 Israelis died”? The fact that four of them were killed by friendly fire seems to have been lost in the race to avoid charging the Israel with war crimes.

Or what if the papers said, “As a result of the thousands of tin-pot rockets Hamas has fired into Israel since 2001, it is thought 20 Israelis have died?”

As a matter of fact, Human Rights Watch estimates that 1,434 Palestinians, 960 of them civilians, were killed in the recent “offensive.”

Finally, my kidney infection is back – if, in fact, it was ever gone.

Ye gods and little fishes!

Karl Paulnak and Music as the Food of Love

************************************************

Growing up on the west coast of Canada, it was often hard to believe art – music, writing, painting, dance – had any real significance. My own hunger for it – my delight at words, the exhilaration of music, the beauty of magically melded paint – seemed almost an aberration, as did my compulsion to write.

It was not the fault of my parents, who brought us up to appreciate the arts, especially music and literature. When I was 10, my Dad used to bring words home in his pocket. He’d hand me a slip of paper, giving me 24 hours to use the word in a sentence. Words like ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘ostentatious’ passed from hand to hand.

We also played a poetry game. Each armed with an anthology, we could read up to four lines of poetry and the opponent then had to guess the author. I was 15 before I finally beat Dad with four lines from Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe.

I’ll never forget reading that poem for the first time in a collection I received as a Christmas gift. A wonderful thrill of horror went through me as the meaning of the last verse hit home:

And so every night-tide
I lie down by the side
Of my darling – my darling!
My wife and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

So – in my home and in my heart – the arts were paramount. In the outside world, however, they were negligible and I came to believe my obsession – the way I gravitated to and found meaning in art – was freakish. I enjoyed popular music – find me a person who grew up in the 60s and early 70s and did not. I became addicted to books. But I didn’t observe much encouragement for fledgling artists or any societal consensus that what they did was worthwhile. They were considered crazed – although not in a dangerous way – and definitely not in touch with the real world. There seemed to be general agreement they were wasting their lives and would certainly never make any money.

I had to go to France to learn how absolutely untrue – and unfounded – this generally North American outlook is.

My re-education began at the Musee National de Prehistoire at Les Eyzies on a day of gentle rain and mist. By the time I made my way through the infernal roadworks and construction (travaux), only 45 minutes remained until the place closed for lunch. I didn’t mind since examination of prehistoric tools and remnants isn’t anywhere close to number one on my list of interests.

I took in a series of quick impressions, starting with the Pebble Culture of four or five million years ago. Human life developed out of the Rift Valley in Africa, the only qualities distinguishing us from other animals at this point our use of tools and our propensity to wander for reasons other than hunger. Is an irresistible urge to travel one of the foundations of our existence? I wondered hopefully.

I saw primitive implements clumsily pounded out of thick rock, basic weapons and food mashers, hide scrapers. Gradually, over thousands of years, the tools became more refined, crafted from denser, harder stone – arrowheads, flints and spears. More thousands of years went by as tools became finer and smaller still.

Then, suddenly, needle and thread appeared, the first necklaces made of pierced pebbles and the first animal figures roughly chiselled from stone. How marvellous to observe our innate urge to create, adorn, beautify. As soon as our food and shelter requirements are under control, we start decking ourselves out in fancy clothes and jewellery, we attempt to draw pictures and sculpt images of what we see around us. The divine in us beginning to shine through and take shape?

More millennia pass away and our tools and implements are intricately crafted, more specialized and sophisticated, as is our jewellery – bracelets and earrings make their entrance – my own vast earring collection takes on new meaning! – and our use of colour in artwork becomes more subtle. We also begin to ritualize the burial of our dead, entombing them in rough cairns of piled stone. Because we now revere and cherish the fact of our existence, have a glimmering of its uniqueness, and know instinctively that our souls live on somewhere – somehow – and we must honour the shells that once harboured them?

I emerge onto a terrace with a lush green valley below, more hole-pocked rock wall above me and ditto opposite on the other side of the valley. Birds singing, twittery twit tweet teroo. A cool breeze. I try to mentally efface the present-day structures and the traffic, to imagine being a cave woman walking out onto this ledge, earrings set in motion by the breeze, the fire and the only safety I know behind me, the trees of Eden Valley below and the rising cliff opposite. Do those openings harbour friend or foe? Will there be good hunting in the valley today? I sense no lurking danger in the breeze and the birdsong uplifts my soul. I inhale deeply of the prehistoric air and know I love my world. Know I have to honour the deep impulse to capture and celebrate its beauties in song, in story, in painting. Know, too, I have to explore its terrors and darkness so they can be looked at in the light of day.

I drove on to Lascaux with these exciting ideas percolating within. Hitherto, I’d thought cave paintings were a kind of doodling cave people engaged in to alleviate boredom on days when it rained or nights when they couldn’t sleep, that they’d been preserved by the merest chance and were just a primitive way of scrawling, “I was here.” I had no expectation of further epiphanies, no clue that I was about to be blown almost literally off my feet.

Because the carbon dioxide we exhale had been slowly eradicating the paintings at the original Lascaux, the French government built an exact replica nearby. You’re not allowed to descend alone but must go on a guided tour. I dutifully bought a ticket and waited in a holding pen for the adventure to begin.

Immediately, we were in a different world. Dark and shadowy, lit only by the lantern held aloft by the guide. The shapes of animals emerged from the gloom, rippling across the rock walls like a reel from one of those early flickering films. We were filled with awe, silent before the wonder.
The guide explained that this was “The Louvre” of prehistoric man, the paintings created between ten and fifteen thousand years ago. There’s evidence that artists practised – sometimes for decades – before they painted on the walls of the Lascaux Cave. They worked hard to use the rock in such a way as to give an almost supernatural illusion of movement. Only the best work went into the cave. Artists had apprentices so they could pass on and improve on what they’d learned. Artists dreamed and toiled and painted here, with joy and dedication, for FIVE THOUSAND YEARS.

So many emotions – huge ones – coursed up from my feet – from that living rock – to my brain, I thought I’d explode. I couldn’t contain them. Art is one of the most basic human drives, I thought, as basic as the need for food and sex. It’s inescapable and ineradicable in all places, times and conditions. Without it, we are only half alive. Without it, we will die as surely as we would through starvation or failure to reproduce. I felt my existence had been justified, my value as a human being confirmed, as if I was in the midst of that bush which burns but is not consumed.

I was so exalted I nearly crashed my rented Twingo as I drove out of the parking lot.

Then, of course, the years went by and that zenith of perception, of flaming glory, faded. As usual, the world is too much with us, too full of cruelty and injustice, of war and rumours of war.
My brother, Tickles, a well-known and respected Canadian jazz musician, struggles to earn his living. In many cases, musicians are paid no more than they were 20 years ago, and in others, less. Our Conservative government continues to cut funding for the arts and eliminates tax deductions for artists.

It’s hard to remember that

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

Then, last weekend, Tickles gave me a copy of Karl Paulnak’s Address to Freshmen at Boston Conservatory. Another Vancouver musician forwarded it to Tickles with the message: Just in case you ever feel that what we do is meaningless or trivial.

Paulnak begins by explaining how he became a musician, then continues:

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you – the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinettist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture – why would anyone bother with music? And yet, from the camps we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art: it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen: many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival: art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

Paulnak goes on to describe his reaction, as a resident of Manhattan, to the 9/11 attacks. He found he couldn’t play the piano and wondered:

Does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went though the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighbourhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang We Shall Overcome.... The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Paulnak concludes by saying:

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell: being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer: I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor or physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music, I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government or a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.