Obvious vs, Oblivious (cont. from last blog)

The camera tells a story of distraction and of a frenetic world that doesn’t have time for beauty. In a place of transit, like a train station, a place deemed a mere antecedent to the all-important workday, we are not as open to the flutter of wings from the confused lark flitting about the tunnel columns, nor are we inclined toward the flash of fugues flying around the newsstands, nor toward the sprite that throws off those bright ribbons out into the concrete caverns from his miraculous horsehair wand.
Hey, sorry, but we have places to go… things to do. Can’t be bothered with that right now. Straight ahead. Chop chop.
I think I’ve figured out that old conundrum about “If a tree falls in the forest, will it make a sound?” The answer is “No.” If there is no capacity to process vibration into cognition (by an ear and a brain) then the sensory effect called “sound “ simply does not occur.
Likewise, the answer to the question, “Is it art if no one even stops to acknowledge its existence.” is, again, a resounding “No.”— at least not for those millions constantly checking their watches and Blackberries (and their ears at the door) as they scramble toward their next appointment with destiny.
But the answer is also a resounding “Yes!”— yes, that is, if the artist herself is cognizant and, maybe even, transported by the act of making the art. Unlike a tree falling in the forest, a musician has ears and can be, therefore, a packed arena all unto herself. If musicians didn’t feel this way, they wouldn’t enjoy practicing as much as they do. Sometimes, even for Joshua Bell apparently, only the four-year-old boy being dragged along struggling to get a peek at the man making the magic sound seems capable of acknowledging the remotest possibility of beauty amongst the newstands. Nothing personal, Maestro, ‘twas ever thus.
The true maestro, doesn’t mind. She knows that the rose blooms not for the odd passerby that might stop to take a whiff, it blooms because the earth and the rain and the sun and the mystery of DNA compel it to bloom. Music was meant to be shared but it is the way of the cosmos that the elements of beauty, the remote field of poppies, the melancholy call of the last loon on the lake will always be present even when the eyes (and ears) meant to behold their beauty are not.
Sadly, in these addled, highly conditioned times, such faculties may not be present even among a crowd of thousands. Offering one’s art to the world is not for wimps. Still if I’m to settle for only a couple of patrons on a given day, God and myself will suffice.

Nothing is Obvious to the Oblivious

One of the better articles to come out of American journalism in recent years was Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer Prize winning piece exploring the highly subjective nature of our appreciation of art. It was entitled “Pearls Before Breakfast” (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.htm) and it was more than an article, really. It was an experiment designed to highlight the psychological elements at play that impact our capacity to be inspired by the world.

The question to be answered: could clear and present artistic brilliance be recognized by an educated populace if it were showcased outside its conventional venue of celebrated auditoriums during the distracting hustle-bustle of the usual business day?

The set up: Have an indisputably fine violinist play for tips in a D.C. subway station and video tape the response of over a thousand passersby.

Stacking the deck in favor of recognition of artistic brilliance:
1. The “busker” chosen for this experiment was world-renowned concert violinist Joshua Bell— whose playing Interview Magazine once gushed "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." When composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score for “The Red Violin”, he credited his success to Bell, who was the soloist on the project. He said, quite simply, Joshua Bell "plays like a god."
2. The music chosen for the performance is widely recognized as some of the greatest music ever written. Example, the ditty Bell decided to start with was "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect.” 19th century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann concurred "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind." If Brahms dug it, it deserves a listen Like Chaconne, all the pieces Bell chose to play (i.e. Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria") were arguably immortal. Joshua Bell would leave nothing to chance.
3. . The instrument Joshua Bell chose for his performance was his 3 1/2-million-dollar Stradivari, hand-crafted during the master violin maker’s “golden period”. In Weingarten’s view, “No violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.” If the performance didn’t resonate with the audience, the artist certainly couldn’t blame his tools.

Stacking the deck in favor of non-recognition:
1. The performance was staged at the L’Enfant Plaza Station “against a wall beside a trash can” in D.C.— not in the ostentatious trappings of, say, The Kennedy Center.
2. Bell was dressed not in black tie and tails but a long sleeve tee shirt, jeans and a baseball cap.
3. The time was rush hour, 7:51 on a Friday, a time when the pressures of the work day have already lodged themselves firmly in the typical commuter’s mind— profoundly effecting his ability to perceive anything outside the chronic drama of his own little everyday story.

Still, you would think that most people couldn’t help but be struck by the electricity of genius ping ponging around the walls of that station that morning— what with Bach, Bell and Stradovari coalescing so spectacularly on those immortal Ides of January early on a frosty morn. But, alas, the camera tells a different story. (cont.)

Derrik's Adventure Continued

Jordon accepted the challenge. "I needed to bring lots of recording gear with me: mics, mic stands, a Mackie mixer, two good stereo mics, a DAT machine, cables, lots of DAT tapes and blank CDs. Just packing all the gear was a huge project. I had to fit everything into two boxes, along with my clothes, my looper, and a small amplifier for the violin." Senegal has a different kind of electrical system than the U.S., so he also had to take lots of voltage converters. He didn't have room for a laptop, but was assured that he would be able to use a travel buddy's Mac.

Jordan would use Garage Band, the Apple recording program bundled with all Mac computers, to record, edit, and master tracks and burn CDs for the musicians. No problem – except that he'd never learned to use it. But, hey, studying a software manual is a good way to pass the time during a long flight to Africa.

The plan worked better than Jordan could have imagined. Not only did he make numerous CDs for musicians during his ten days on the ground in Senegal, including Pape Sahko, Barou Sall, Moise Agnessa, Massamba Diop, and the Sobobade Drummers, he made life-long friendships, as well.

It was an exhilarating experience, Jordan recalls. "First I met singer and kora player Pape Sakho… I'll never forget the look on his face as he listened to a recording of his music for the first time." Once Pape started showing his CD around to his friends, other musicians asked Jordan to record them, too.

Soon, he was too busy to sleep. "I wrote music from 12 midnight until about 3 in the morning every night. The malaria medicine I was taking helped keep me awake – I was only getting about three to four hours of sleep a night."

At the end of the week-and-a-half trip, Jordan paid his new Senegalese friends for their musical contributions and brought the original compositions he'd scribbled in his notebook back home to Vermont.

It's not surprising that this musical goodwill ambassador would make the right connections to keep his African project on an upward trajectory. Even his kids helped. "Upon arrival back in the states, my daughter introduced me to her high school classmate Helen Kerlin-Smith, a recently adopted orphan from Ethiopia." The sixteen-year-old became essential to the project, contributing soaring vocals on three of the cuts in her native language of Amharic.

Jordan's stepson had introduced him to a school chum, Milad Sourial, some time before. As luck would have it, Sourial had been made music producer for a feature film called "Desert Flower," based on the life story of Waris Dirie (due in theaters next February).

The daughter of Somali desert nomads, Waris was subjected to the cruelest inflictions women can experience in that country. As a girl of thirteen, she escaped and found her way to England, where she worked as a cleaning woman. After being "discovered" by a photographer, she eventually rose far above her brutal beginnings, becoming a supermodel, a James Bond girl, a U.N. special Ambassador, and a best-selling author.

When Sourial played Jordan's CD for Dirie and the film's other producers, it helped crystallize their vision. They recently made Jordan musical co-producer. Meetings are scheduled for June to work out contract terms and budget details.

Jordan started with a high risk-idea – haul a ton of recording equipment to Africa and do a ton of trust building, improvising, and recording over the course of twelve days. Bring home the results, see what you've got, and one way or another keep moving forward.

From such acorns, mighty oaks grow. It's incredible where talent, perseverance, and good intentions – plus some well-deserved amazing grace – can take you. Just ask Derrik Jordan – or Waris Dirie.

In the meantime, the irrepressible Jordon is not resting on his laurels. He has recently accepted a commission to write a piece for the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and has just won the Shakuhachi Chamber Music International Prize for 2008.

"SuperString Theory Goes to Senegal" is available at www.derrikjordan.com.

Derrik Jordon's African Adventure

I met Derrik Jordan at the Harmonizing with Humanity positive music festival in Phoenix this past March. I missed his solo performance of original pieces but was impressed with the string work he lent to other artists' performances (electric violin is his first instrument). His playing was sensitive, generous, and supportive – no ego, no agendas.

Late one night, relaxing in the lobby of the hotel, we talked about music, the world, and teaching (we're both part-time "music mentors"). I found Jordan to be amiable and engaging, in keeping with his collaborative style on stage. When he told me about the making of his latest CD, "SuperString Theory Goes to Senegal," I realized that his gracious approach to music and life has been as important to his success as his talents as a violinist, guitarist, songwriter, singer, and percussionist.

The story began when Jordan joined some fellow teachers on a cultural exchange tour called The Senegal-American Project. Jordan is a devotee of World Beat music – he has written, performed, and produced a double CD of Brazilian-inspired tunes called "Braziliance" and won top honors for the 2002 Reggae Song of the Year from Just Plain Folks, the world's largest songwriter organization. He has journeyed to Brazil, Trinidad, Ghana, and Senegal to fine tune his World Beat chops.

He knew his second trip to Africa was an opportunity to record with some great Senegalese musicians. But he also knew that he would have to plan the project carefully, like a safari into uncharted territory. First, there was the issue of establishing good faith with the musicians. Jordan wanted to avoid any whiff of the controversies that accompanied Paul Simon's "Graceland" project.

"I saw the problem as me being a white American guy," Jordan says. "How was I going to be able to build trust with these Africans who might not believe that I had their best interests at heart? I worried that they would think I was trying to rip off their music."

If he had been David Byrne, with the backing of some big music corporation, he could just offer irresistible sums of money and lawyer up if misunderstandings surfaced later. But this would not be Jordan's way, even if he had such means at his disposal. He envisioned the perfect win-win situation: He would offer to make CDs of the local players' music, gratis, then invite them to play and improvise with him and record the sessions. The plan required a huge leap of faith on several levels, and the execution would be challenging.

(Next: Derrik Jordon's adventure continues with a fascinating conclusion.)

The Big Oooh...

This is it.
This is what Eckhart Tolle was talking about. "You have all this important stuff to do," you're ego stews," but you're stuck in the grimy showroom of the Big O Tire store waiting ad infinitum for a set to be put on your car. Your ego would love to highjack your equanimity and get all indignant and irritable because once again "real life" has ground your "real life's purpose" to a halt. But you've been down that dead-end street before and are determined to show that committee of neurotic reactionaries that like to run things in your head (when given the chance) that you're a big boy now and can transcend the slings and arrows of mere circumstance.
And so you notice the air slipping in and out through your nostrils. You feel the weight of the clipboard resting on your thigh... the cool of the fan on the back of your neck. You recall the saying you once noticed on the wall of a Zen Center on the Marin Coast. It said, "Drinking a cup of tea, I stop the war."
Therefore, being a pacifist at heart, you drink in the sunlight glinting off the tile floor, careening off the hubcap displays. You feel the warmth of your body. Hear the rattle of the fan overhead. Take note of the psychological trick of comparative value. This moment is just as valuable as any other— in fact, more valuable than most because you're actually aware of it, You can actually see through the oversized primary-colored lettering on the store front window the pastel retro-fashions on the manikins in the second-hand boutique across the street. It's all there for you— the colors, the sounds, the smells.
No longer trapped in the everyday world, you can peer into it from a vaster dimension called being. Soon the everyday world becomes more like an interesting, innocuous diorama. Emersed in the Big Om that permeates the Big O, you can imbibe of this world without being drowned in it.

Abandon All Hope…for something better

These days, it being an election year, we hear a lot of talk about hope. Little wonder. With the dollar on the verge of free fall. Financial “behemoths” like Countrywide and Bear Stearns needing white knights and government intervention to avoid collapse and dire warnings that it’s already too late to save the world from the ravages of global warning (and even Eliot Spitzer down the tubes in disgrace), “hope” seems as rare and valuable a commodity as the gold we are now supposed to invest in. I can understand the sentiments of the scraggly bearded man in the cartoon who carries the sign that reads., “Abandon hope. The end is near.” In fact, I agree whole-heartedly with the first part of the message. By all means, abandon hope! Hope is part of the problem.

Think about it. The concept of hope is rife with fear and helplessness. It’s full of desperate longing for intervention from some outside force beyond one’s control because the intrinsic belief of the hoper is that his personal influence on the situation in question will inevidably be insufficient.

Charles Fillmore, the cofounder of the Unity movement said that hope was “intellectual faith” and therefore “subject to doubt”. If you want to awaken the laws of attraction, you have to be centered in the kind of consciousness from which an unwavering intention can spring. Once you are, you'll know that your fondest desire is a foregone conclusion. The soul-grounded faith that Fillmore is talking about makes the shallow mental faith of “hope” seem tepid at best.

Whether you are a true practitioner of almighty “faith” or are simply relegated to the feeble stirrings of “hope,” revolves around your definition of “you.” You must know that your intentions are part of an evolution much larger and more powerful than the humble trappings of your personal persona. Are you a microscopic bug at cross purposes, in the cross-hairs of a hostile world, or are you a microcosm of a universal law operating at full-force in the universe? If it’s the latter, what law are you the expression of? The one that goes, “Isolated, half-steps are doomed to failure.” or “ There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”? Again, if it’s the latter, are you truly living like an idea whose time has come? Are you an actor who won’t take no for an answer? Are you a uniter, a motivator, a skillful coordinator of people who share the cause you cherish? Are you “creativity and determination” personified— always learning and adapting, always moving forward? If so. then what you call “you” is not a lonely voice in the wilderness but a tsunami— the fabled irresistible force that cannot fail to save this planet. And, if such is the case, then that “you” is a godsend. And I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say, thanks for being you!

In a recent interview on Bill Moyer’s journal ex- reporter Sarah Chayes was asked if the natural skin care product cooperative she’d founded in Afghanistan as an alternative to the opium trade could really hope to survive the violence, corruption and warlord mentality of that country. Her response was. “I don't think that hope is relevant. I think determination is all that counts. You just have to try. It doesn't matter if you hope you're going succeed or not. You have to keep trying.” No Hamlet-syndrome here, no idle speculation, just the undeterred facilitation of outcome. A dream coming true.

In an interview in Common Ground, Deepak Chopra expressed it this way. He said, “I don’t believe in hope. I think hope is a sign of despair. You know, only people who are in despair use the word hope. You have to be in a state of consciousness that is beyond hope and despair, which means a state that is creative, peaceful, not melodramatic, not hysterical, anchored in sobriety and in touch with your soul. Transcendence means beyond hope, beyond despair, beyond pleasure, beyond pain and yet still being conscious of choices you can make that are creative. The best way to change the future is to be fully in the present and to practice intention.”

Be fully in the present. The present is the solid ground upon which we construct the fulcrum of intention that can move an entire planet. It’s the bedrock beneath the shifting sand of conventional wisdom, recent studies, over thinking, current statistics, pundits, and the testimony of “expert” witnesses.

It’s the job that needs to be done and the doing of it. Period.

So quit your skylarking about whether you’ve got a chance in hell (or not) and just put your shoulder into the task until success is yours. No doubt, along the way, you will encounter many amazing happy “accidents” but rest assured that when all those uncanny unintentional consequences slip into place, they will have been lubricated by the continual flow of deliberate intention combined with good old elbow grease. The immutable law of attraction is simple. It’s faith in action. Nothing more. Nothing less.

(original image can be seen at dpad.gotfrag.com)

The Nature of Heaven

One of the most rewarding things I do for a living is teach English as a Second Language to adults part-time. Adults understand the value of education so the feeling in the class of hope determination and gratitude is often palpable. It makes for favorable working conditions no matter how old and crumbling the facility we are in.

One of the lessons I enjoy teaching is a reading lesson that centers around a true story of a four year old girl named Desiree dealing with the recent death of her father. She doesn’t really understand the concept of death so when her father’s birthday rolls around she asks, “How can we send Daddy a birthday card?” her grandmother comes up with astute idea to tie one onto a helium balloon and release it to the heavens. Airmail to the Pearly Gates, as it were.

The girl picks a balloon with a picture of The Little Mermaid on it, they attach her birthday greetings with the request that “Angel Dad” send Desiree something back for her birthday. They let the balloon go with the adults, no doubt, clinging to the desperate hope that a deepening understanding of the situation will somehow dissolve Desiree’s expectations of “return mail” before her next birthday comes around.

What happens? The mermaid balloon, released in California, catches a jet stream and is express mailed to a little lake in Canada four days later and 3000 miles away where an old hunter is hunting ducks. He finds the balloon and takes it home to his wife who buys a present and sends it to Desiree explaining that Desiree’s father wanted the couple to go shopping for him since there are no stores in Heaven. What followed was a heart warming relationship with the couple filled with letters, phone calls and visits that helped tremendously to ease the little girl’s transition into life without a father. The name of the small body of water the balloon landed in? Mermaid Lake.

Some might say it’s too bad there isn’t really a heaven from which the father could correspond. But maybe there is. It’s just that the real Heaven may be subtler that the one described in catechism. I like the Buddhist teaching story that describes hell as a bunch of people at a big table that's groaning with delicious food that no one can eat because the handles on the forks are so long they cannot be used to feed one’s self.

Heaven happens when the people at the table discover that they can use the forks to feed each other. God is not some Dark Lord that taunts us with desires in a world incapable of fulfilling them. She is the intelligence required to understand how common interests are served through selfless action. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that heaven, contrary to popular belief, “is spread out over the Earth”. We are its exalted or fallen angels depending on our attitudes and behaviors from moment to moment.

So when I receive those meager checks for teaching English to my beloved students, I don’t complain because I know that somehow, perhaps at this very moment, I am getting my reward here in heaven.


See an enlarged version of the above image at www.paulscharffphotography.com/ capebeauty.htm