I was about twelve years old and in sixth grade at prison block number two, otherwise known as the local intermediate school. The building was square, nearly windowless, and soulless. It was the annual round of sex education, when school teachers round up the children and talk about one of the great mysteries of life as if it were little more than a mathematical formula. Of course, this is how they talk about everything. I remember dozing through classes on, of all things, Gothic architecture.

We had just switched rooms and gone back to our normal class schedule. I sat down at my desk in the room that was painted with somniferous combinations of baby blue and beige. The florescent lights heightened the devastating effect of the color.

And there it was on the board, under a list of ways to contract HIV, which in those days was more often carelessly called AIDS: Contact with Blood. It was written in white chalk, but in my mind it screamed red. Hints of Wozzeck. Das Wasser ist Blut!

I had always been a worrier. One or two doctors diagnosed me with something like excessive fears. My mother thought I had obsessive-compulsive disorder, but she could never convince a shrink of this. At different times different worries dominated my life, and on that day in the early nineties, I developed a new obsession: Blood. And AIDS.

From that moment on, every citing of blood or a blood product like a scab set me into panic mode. If someone got a bloody nose in gym class and it dripped somewhere, I was afraid. And the red stones in the terrazzo floor of the school gave me a great deal of anxiety. Is it a stone? Is it a spot of blood? I seem to recall staring straight down as I made my way through the hall so that I could avoid any possible spots of blood, which made for a scene not unlike Melvin Udall (played by Jack Nicholson) avoiding cracks in the sidewalk in the movie As Good as it Gets.

Finger food like cheeseburgers and pizza could make lunch a nightmare. I would eat these things with a fork and knife, quite content to deal with the curious looks of my classmates. It was a small price to pay if it kept my nerves a little bit calmer. But this is important: I wasn’t just warding off anxiety. I thought that I was in real danger, that blood could somehow get onto my hands, into my food, and into me. This was completely consuming; it was how I spent the majority of my days.

Pretty soon I had developed a whole system to deal with measuring the risk of infection from any blood that I had sighted. I asked one of the duly appointed sex ed teachers how long the HIV virus can live outside the body. He surmised fifteen minutes or so, which, like a true obsessive-compulsive, I formulated into a hard and fast rule.  (A recent Google search I conducted suggests that HIV, like any virus, is a parasite and cannot survive long without a host, but that the exact time varies with different circumstances.)

I also developed rules out of whole cloth. I have to back up a bit to explain this, though. In school, we would sit at our desks with our backpacks next to our chairs. One of my concerns was that a spot of blood, say, on the floor, could track from my shoe to my backpack to other places. In dealing with this, I developed the notion that blood, or germs contained in blood, could not “track” anywhere beyond the third surface.  Floor, shoe, backpack: anything beyond this was safe according to my way of thinking.

Other areas of concern were less clear. I was unsure, for instance, if the mixture of water and dried blood might reinvigorate any dangerous germs. I worried about this a lot when I practiced the trumpet, wondering if the condensation from the “spit valve” could be a factor in this. This is, of course, beyond absurd, but to someone who doesn’t have all the necessary information and is afraid to share his obsessions with anyone else, these things happen. It meant that at times I was afraid to practice my music, which was, I think, more painful than I realized at the time. There were also times when I was afraid even to reach into a freezer to get something. If I had been obsessing about AIDS, I would be concerned that germs could get from me into the freezer, where they could be preserved for future attack against some unwitting victim.

This was in the days before the internet, and I suspect that at the time one would have to have access to some pretty recent scientific studies to have gotten enough information to dispel these kinds of worries. The only alternative was talking to someone about my obsessions, which I was too embarrassed to do.

You might guess that this was time-consuming, and you would be right. I spent most of my class time obsessing about this, not paying attention to the teacher. Yet, I managed, for the most part, to get acceptable grades. The trouble is that the anxiety from all this created depression, and the depression created more anxiety, which caused more obsession. It was a vicious circle. The absence of windows in the school did not help, especially in the Winter, when I would get essentially no exposure to daylight. I’m pretty sure I had and still have Seasonal Affective Disorder—something that we didn’t discover until a few years later.

Eventually I became convinced that I had AIDS. One year my father decided to take the Christmas tree down on New Year’s Day. This is a good week before Christmas (i.e. the twelve days) actually ends, but this is how upstate Pennsylvanians think, so the tree came down. I wanted it to stay up. There’s something about the color in Christmas decorations that lessens the harshness of Winter, and now it was gone. I snuck away to the attic to cry. I was absolutely convinced that this would be my last Christmas, that I would be dead by the next year.

I feel the need to pause here and mention something. My parents are not responsible for this. They were seeing signs of depression and doing what they could, but about these specific obsessions I told no one. I was locked up like Fort Knox, afraid to share this with anyone. There is a difference between what you believe and what you know. I believed the thrust of all these obsessions, yet somewhere in my mind I knew it was all a bunch of crap—enough to be too embarrassed to get help. But the beliefs held sway. We’re funny things, we humans.

Back to being convinced of my own impending doom. This apprehension eventually shifted the focus of my obsessions from contracting disease to spreading it. This was a whole new ball game, and I don’t mean to sound self-righteous when I say that it was actually more frightening than my obsessions about my becoming sick.

Interestingly, I was never and have never been much of a compulsive. Besides washing my hands excessively, OCD has mostly manifested itself in my head and not in ritual. I could analyze until I was paralyzed. Some days I would lock myself in the bathroom so that I had a quiet place to think—to obsess, really. Inside my mind was constant chatter that was hard to keep track of. Sometimes I kept checklists to make this job easier. The sheer brainpower that I expended on this astounds me, and I wonder what opportunities I wasted by diverting so much energy into these useless ruminations.

I’m reminded of a scene from the movie A Beautiful Mind, which is about Nobel prize-winning schizophrenic Dr. John Nash. As the movie tells the story, he thought that there were messages embedded in newspaper articles, and he was looking for them. The movie depicts a frantic chatter in his mind as he sorts all this out. I have never been schizophrenic, but I can identify with that chatter. Noise, noise, noise. It’s enough to make you want to scream.

The most disconcerting factor in having lived through this is the complete uncertainty about where reality ends and the craziness begins. I have decided, after much reflection, that insanity is essentially a loss of perspective, and I think in my case OCD was a latching on to one or two ideas to the exclusion of others, which created a warped sense of reality and a gigantic mountain of anxiety to go with it. “There is no maniac who is not a monomaniac,” said G.K. Chesterton. I think he’s right.

But imagine the frustration. You know you’re not quite in touch with reality, but you can’t get back there, and because you know you’re being ridiculous, you’re afraid to tell anyone about what occupies your mind. So the suffering continues, untreated.

I have never told anyone about this particular set of obsessions. If you’re reading this you’re one of the first to know. Why am I writing about it now, a good twenty years later? About a month or two ago, something happened—I’m not even sure what anymore—that re-triggered a similar obsessive episode.  I saw blood somewhere, and it triggered all the old reactions. Those who’ve taken CPR courses talk about an interesting thing that happens: Years go by, they think they’ve forgotten it, and then one day they’re next to someone who goes down with a heart attack, and it all comes back to them in an instant. That’s what it felt like to me with these obsessions: There I was, totally blindsided, but nonetheless remembering my whole system and nomenclature for dealing with these kinds of things.

This has not been the only relapse, but something about it felt more severe than usual. I don’t know why. The scariest part, though, was not the idea that any germs might actually pose a risk to my health. Instead, there was a thought that sent shivers down my back: “Oh God, I hope I don’t end up like I was in middle school.”

I am happy to say that the worst is over, and that things are under control, but for the day or two when I wasn’t sure, I was genuinely frightened. My OCD has gotten more manageable with age, as I have learned how to keep things in perspective and see the big picture. Experience has also taught me not to worry so much. After doomsday scenarios fail to materialize so many times, you relax a little bit. (Knocks wood.)

I would never dare to tell anyone else how to solve their own problems, so what I have to say here applies only to me: Having tried it in my college years, I am not particularly fond of medication to treat this disorder. In my experience the medication turned off not only the bad parts of my psyche but many of the beneficial parts as well. I felt disconnected, unable to experience any emotion except a hazy indifference. It has been far better for me to work through the underlying causes and behaviors. Dr. Elio Frattaroli, in his book, Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain, offers the thesis that OCD is misdirected anger. I honestly can’t find any evidence against that, and generally speaking the more upset I am about certain things in my life, the more out of control the disorder is.

Many of my obsessions have revolved around life and death, as my present-day dull hypochondria attests. When I was child I was terribly afraid of death, but from my position now, still a good distance below the crest of the infamous “hill,” I can see that a lot of things in life are worse than death. I have come to the realization that something is going to get me eventually, and without becoming careless, I have relaxed a little bit. That much has done more for me than any kind of therapy could do.

I have learned, slowly, how to divert my mental energies into useful tasks. Part of my problem in childhood, I think, was that I was subjected to an enforced boredom. This improved when I got to high school and there were more activities available to me that an actual human would want to do. Moreover, my interest in philosophy, which bloomed many years later, might have usurped much of the energy I once put into worrying. There is great comfort and delight in reading some of the greatest minds in history as they struggle with the ultimate questions about life and yet come up short. A lot of people think this a waste of time; maybe I’m somehow perversely in an advantageous position to see how it is anything but a waste of time.

Along with this rambling personal story I suppose I have some useful things to say about OCD, but I have hesitated to comment on it publicly, and even much in my private life, because of the way I’m afraid people will react to it. I couldn’t care less if people think I’m strange. They already think that, and judging by the behavior of most of them I consider it to be a compliment. The real reason I hesitate is that many people jump to conclusions, as if being obsessive-compulsive is like being blonde. A blonde is always blonde, unless hair dye is used. But an obsessive-compulsive is not always employing the techniques of OCD to tackle the problems of life. I mentioned earlier my being disconcerted by the tendency of OCD to confuse the sufferer, to make reality hard to discern. However, in most areas, especially work, I can be ruthlessly realistic. I can make good decisions, raise worthy objections, and offer good suggestions. I’m also very good at sizing people up. But some people, seeing a certain obsessive tendency in my personality, discount most of what I say because of that. “Oh you know how heeee is,” I can hear them saying. Some have dared to intimate this to my face.

I often wonder, too, if people think that obsessive-compulsives are cold-hearted eggheads. They are lost in their own little world, after all. I have dealt with numerous misunderstandings because of withdrawal. People have been hurt by this. I am sorry. But they should know that I have been hurt more.  I really do have feelings, but often they have been bottled up in this strange methodology that can make me extremely quiet.  A friend of mine has a list of favorite quotations on Facebook, as many do. The first one on his list is, “You have shy/asshole confusion.” I can identify with the sentiments that would prompt someone to say that.

I’m tempted to say that many obsessive-compulsives have suffered far more than I have, but maybe that’s a hasty conclusion. We’re all very inventive in what we worry about. Judith L. Rapoport, in her fantastic book, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing, relates the story that many with this disorder look at the compulsions of others and say, “Why would anyone do that???” So I suppose the point is that the suffering is different for each of us, and there probably isn’t much point in trying to quantify it. I will say that I feel lucky that I have never really been house-bound by this disease, a fate that many others haven’t been able to escape.

Living or being with an obsessive-compulsive can be a maddening experience, especially if they like to worry aloud. You probably just want them to shut up. My advice is this: Don’t let them go on all night, but listen to them, and let them know that you are listening. I can tell you that nothing infuriates me more than feeling like I’m talking to a wall, especially when I’m feeling anxious. At the same time, I appreciate it when someone says, “Alright, we have gone over this enough now, and we have decided such and such.”  I value that, because it helps me to get a grip on the real nature of whatever it is that’s bothering me. It rescues me from deep within the forest of anxiety.

I am not entirely over my OCD, but at this point in my life I feel like I can truly live. In the Winter I take plenty of Vitamin D, and I’m even working on being awake for more of the daylight hours. As I get older, too, I feel like my personality gets younger. There is a picture of me at the age of six, on Christmas Eve in front of the tree, in which I am wearing a bony, dour, humorless expression. I could have passed for a Methodist minister. I was, in the words of my grandmother, “a little adult.” I am now working on being a big kid, and I have to admit that this wards off the kinds of insanity to which I am prone. (Can we admit that all of us except the most incredible people have their own kind of madness? Anger, lust, drunkenness, workaholism, anxiety, puritanism, politics. The list is endless.)

In the meantime, I will gladly borrow some useful skills from my struggles with OCD: the ability to concentrate on small things for long periods of time, the willingness to follow an idea to its logical, if absurd, conclusion, and the sensitivity to know when I’m tied up in knots over an insoluble problem, which is most useful. There is great freedom and joy in knowing what you can’t know, and that opens the possibilities for love.

1. Get a hair cut, or shave.  I don’t shave every day; instead, I keep my beard and the hair on my head at about the same length. Believe it or not, I use clippers without any guard. Sometimes I let this go a little too long, and then on a day when I’m feeling run down, I look in the mirror and notice that I look like a wooly mammoth, which is unbecoming of anyone professing to belong to the human race. I get out my clippers, my jaw line becomes discernible once again, and usually I’m in a better mood. Total time investment: maybe ten minutes.

Those who are recently shorn often look and feel younger, thinner, and more vigorous than their bushy counterparts. What’s more, I find it to be a better solution than dressing up, which can be uncomfortable. No matter how skinny I get, there is always a point on my hip bones where the trousers and the belt start to dig in, so taking care of my hair—one of the remaining unhappy elements of the human body that evolution has yet to take care of—is often a better solution to get me feeling better about myself again.

2. Clean your house.  I came home from work yesterday, took one look at the clutter that I allowed to build up over the past few weeks, and heaved a sigh of disgust. Sometimes life gets crazy and our homes become, more or less, a kind of pit stop. We throw things here and there until the clutter mounts up to poetic proportions. This makes our living spaces unlivable, so that when we are there we don’t have the hideaway from the rest of the world that we need. As with any overwhelming task, it helps to break it down. Focus on one area that you really need to use with a sense of peace. Need to get some reading or writing done? Concentrate on your den or office. Wish you could cook a big meal for friends? Focus on the kitchen and dining room.

I actually have a studio apartment, which changes the game completely, but makes the matter much more crucial. There is no such thing as picking up a mess and simply moving it to another room—one of my favorite techniques of yore. My problem du jour is the clothing pile from Hell.  Of course, instead of addressing this yesterday, I took a nap. I needed it. And no one sees my apartment anyway. But when it is clean, I actually get a sense of comfort from being there.

3. Take a long walk. I was tempted to make running an option here, since, as I have discussed before, its benefits are manifold, but walks have their own specific up-sides. I am thinking, in particular, of their ability to reveal heretofore unseen corners of the world to the observer.  The Fall is a really good time for this. Take the opportunity to enjoy the simple pleasures that nature offers, like John Adams did in the last episode of the HBO series about him. Yesterday I was walking along Pine St. in Philadelphia when I found a tree whose leaves had turned to colors of yellow and red so that it looked like the whole thing was ablaze. Against the evergreen shutters of the nearest house, it was a gorgeous site. I should have taken a picture.

These are the kinds of things you see on a walk that you often don’t see on the drive home from work, either because you’re tired or you have to pee or whatever. I have discovered new restaurants this way, too. One important thing: Walk slow. This is not exercise; it is not a task. It is leisure, and that’s ok. Not every important thing in life has to do with making money or taking care of your family. Your own self is important too. So, leave the house, and don’t tell anyone where you’re going.

4. Call an old friend. Forget social media. Pick up the telephone, or get on Skype, and listen to the sound of an old friend’s voice. Tell him your problems, your plans, your fears, your frustrations.  We only have so many true friends in life, and these days we tend to be spread out all over the place. There are people that I don’t speak to for months or years at a time, but when we get going again, it’s like we never missed a beat. Those kinds of friendships are great, and necessary.

It’s easy to get distracted by the people around us, but often these are not our friends but rather people who want something from us and are massaging us in an effort to get it. It’s good to be nice to acquaintances, but it’s important to know that they are not our friends. Stick to your most reliable five friends, and don’t be afraid to call them when you need to. If they are good friends, they will tell you when you are full of crap, when you are lying to yourself, when you aren’t being realistic, and when you are not giving yourself enough credit.

I remember getting ready for a recital a few years ago and complaining to a friend that it wasn’t going well, that I had no business playing in public, that I should do something else for a living, etc. With each finished beer my autobiographical commentary got worse. Then the recital came. He pulled me aside afterwards and said, “Now listen, everything you said was absolutely untrue.” I needed to hear this, and coming from someone who studied with one of the world’s best percussionists, it was encouraging. I needed to hear that. Stay in touch with these people, because chances are that many people in your immediate vicinity are mere operators.

5. Sing. Music in general is beneficial, even just listening to it. Better than simply listening is actively listening, and better than actively listening is actively making. When I was a kid, I would play the piano for hours after coming home from the windowless prison block that was labelled an intermediate school. Singing in particular is most beneficial because it forces your body to use more oxygen, which gets your brain fired up. I have dragged myself to my voice lesson, thinking that I was too busy, tired, sick—whatever—to go through with this. But on those days I usually leave completely refreshed.

You could sing anything, really—maybe a song by Johnny Cash or Ray Charles. I actually recommend art songs, and before you think this is too snotty for you, hear me (or read me) out. Many of these songs have melodies that anyone can identify with, along with texts that are as sagacious as the Psalms and not half as gory. They speak mainly of love and death—which is to say, of life. Many of them are translated into English. I’ll bet you can find many of them at imslp.org. Look for recordings on YouTube.  I recommend music by Faure, Schubert, Brahms, and Grieg, just for starters. There’s a lot out there.

So you’re not a real singer? Good! Remember the words of H.L. Mencken: Anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Excellence certainly has its place, but so does recreation. And you just might surprise yourself. You might be better than you realize.  Just don’t try Liebestod the first week.

Well, there you have it, a little arsenal of weapons with which to fight the principalities and powers of gloomdom. More tools to use in the discipline of rejoicing. All the best to you.

I have been thinking about this story in terms of my exercise habits. For three years I had a daily routine of running anywhere from three to eight miles a day. I usually looked forward to it, and when I didn’t I remembered the advice of Jeffrey Tucker: “When you don’t want to run is when you need to do it the most.” I clung to that maxim, and it always proved itself true, because the psychological rewards of running are equal to if not greater than the physical benefits. Depressed, tired, angry, frustrated, confused? Take a run. Clear your head. It works every single time.

Last winter I decided that this system that was working for me wasn’t good enough. So I threw the gym into the mix. The first trainer I met with there—the only one who seemed competent, quite honestly—got me into a routine that got me away from running pretty quickly.  I was doing all sorts of activities on various cardio contraptions, but no running. All was well for awhile, but lately I have felt growing dissatisfaction.

I am a cerebral person; I think for fun. “You think in your sleep, don’t you?” someone once asked me. It’s true. My father used to tell me to relax, but the truth is that this is how I relax: for me, tension is having to go through the motions of society, which, it must be admitted, doesn’t tolerate much original thought. When I think, I can be myself and by myself in glorious solitariness.

Running offers the creative space to allow this to happen, not to mention the endorphins to give my brain a little extra kick. When I run I think through the various problems of human interaction that we all face; I dream up solutions for the world; observe the way people interact in various kinds of traffic (which led me early on to the conclusion that John Nash’s Equilibrium Theory is nice but unworkable); and I even practice my music, usually concentrating on only a few phrases. In short, I get lost in my own little world, and it’s a wonder I haven’t gotten hit by a car. (Knocks on wood.)

In contrast: here is what my workout at the gym sounds like inside my head:

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

Eight.

You can’t think about much else when you’re counting. I get bored out of my mind, and there is no chance to get a good train of thought going. The occasional daydream happens between sets, but nothing long enough to be productive. Endorphins? Hardly. In gyms these days you can’t get a good rhythm established because the gym rats who live there slow everyone else down. (Do a set, play with iPod, talk on phone, play with iPod—all while three people are waiting.) It is not uncommon to wait for equipment while one’s heart rate goes straight to hell.

I usually finish up these workouts with some time on the gazelle, but with TVs and music blaring this is still no place to think. I don’t suppose I burn half as many calories as the machines claim, either. I can feel it in my body that I am not being challenged. The problem is the time crunch: Lifting weights and running takes a long time.

Interestingly I noticed something else recently: my leg muscles, in spite of doing two leg weightlifting routines a week, aren’t what they used to be. Maybe I’m just plateauing or something. Who knows? But I am developing the suspicion that I was actually in better shape in many respects before I started at the gym. What runs I have done recently seem to be slightly more difficult than they used to be.

I started at the gym to try to slim down just a little bit more. That worked to a limited extent for a short time, but then I got used to my new routine and compensated with my diet. Then as the muscle started to build up I started eating more to get more nutrients. But with that I also introduced more fat into my diet, which is hard to avoid unless you have your own gourmet cook. The long and short of it is that I’m only a little better off than I was before, with a little more muscle to show for it. I honestly don’t know what to do about all this, but I can say that I miss the long runs that I feel like I no longer have time for. (Seriously, unless you’re a pro athlete or something, if you spend more than two hours a day on exercise, you need to find some other things to do.)

Sometimes I think this debacle is the manifestation of a psychological disorder. I hate lifting weights, but I continue to do it because I am insecure about my image. Sometimes it seems like all I need are six pack abs, and everything will be fine. It’s the health version of “If I Had a Million Dollars.” But all flesh is as grass, and in the case of getting buff, one need not get anywhere near death before he meets with frustration. Old age will do. Even middle age is quite adequate.

But even in youth, what does it all mean? Beauty is skin deep. I think sometimes we chase after impossible, idealistic images and that many of our efforts come from unhealthy places. It takes a viciously puritanical diet to look like a fitness model. Is it worth it? It seems like a high price to pay just to show people what I’ve got every beach season. Vanity of vanities, and all that.

For me, on the other hand, the desire to run comes from a much healthier place. While the so-called Adonis complex is probably ill-advised, it’s nonetheless commendable not to be fat, and running is a good insurance policy against that fate.  Cardio-vascular health is important, too, and then there are the psychological benefits I’ve already mentioned. When I am running, my anxiety levels are more than manageable. Lately, however, I have been all over the place. I have reverted to psychological habits that I thought were well taken care of. Perhaps not. Believe me: OCD is much worse with no exercise. (I should have said “not enough cardio exercise,” or something like that. But I’m going to leave the poor choice of words in place. I think it reveals something about what my body is telling me about my current routine.)

For now, I am attempting a compromise: The two leg days at the gym are gone and have been replaced by six-mile runs. My leg muscles were frankly in better shape when I wasn’t lifting but I was running. I am retaining my upper body days at the gym, and when I’m feeling particularly adventurous may add runs to these days, but often due to time constraints I just do cardio exercises right there at the gym, while i yawn from overdoses of television. I hope this works. There are in fact benefits to weightlifting in spite of all my kvetching. Maybe if I stick with it a little longer it will all start to feel like it’s worth the effort.

I had been seeking some good wholesome, even spiritual, reading to put myself back together, to get rid of that feeling of being a disassembled jigsaw puzzle. But what should I read? Nothing I found in my own library or on Amazon seemed to be what I needed right now. Then a friend of mine gave me this book, The Intimate Merton—a selection of his journal writings from just before he entered the monastery in 1941 until his untimely death in 1968.

Merton was a monk of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance at the Abbey of Gethsemane near Bardstown, Kentucky, where he went by his religious name, Fr. Louis. He was born into a cultured family and spent a great deal of his childhood in Europe. He was a student at Oxford and Columbia and a gifted writer.

Merton is perhaps most famous for his confessions, The Seven-Storey Mountain, his story of conversion to Catholicism, which was published early in his life. This is how I first made my acquaintance with his work in college, but since then I’ve been unable to dig in too much to his other books, until this volume of journals came along.

He was no stranger to controversy. Even in the “anything goes” Sixties a monk was playing with fire by dabbling in Eastern religions. In about 1965 the Abbot gave Merton permission to live by himself in a hermitage separate from the rest of the monastery, which occasioned some murmuring amongst the more traditionally-minded. Documentation of irregular behavior—he did in fact fall in love with a nurse who cared for him after an operation and stayed in touch with her for some time—has almost certainly derailed any possibility of his ever becoming a canonized saint in the Catholic Church, though the Episcopalians celebrate a feast in his honor on December 10, the date of his death.

Merton was an honest soul, which is to say that he was a tortured one. His private journals illustrate constant agonizing over whether or not he was doing the right thing. This only seemed to get worse with age. Some people can’t stand indecision, but I think this is what makes Merton so readable. There is an intellectual humility that appeals to anyone who is not a self-assured jackass. Bertrand Russell seems to be his agnostic or atheist counterpart. It certainly isn’t Richard Dawkins. “Humility is more important than zeal,” Merton wrote on December 11, 1961.

Like many great figures of history, Merton’s work is needlessly circumscribed by the human tendency to shoehorn everyone into a category, to decide if he’s a This or a That—and then to embrace or oppose him accordingly. This does great violence to thinkers, even to many of the people we admire the most. Merton is often considered a darling of the Catholic Left, and certainly he was liberal about many things. But I wonder how many people who fixate on these things know, for instance, that Merton carved out his own path with respect to the reforms and upheavals that were taking place in the Catholic Church in the wake of the II Vatican Council. The point, I guess, is that he deserves to be taken on his own terms, like everyone else does. Off with the tyranny of intellectual collectivization!

As a musician, I found a number of journal entries that could be set to music. His recounting of the fire watch on July 4, 1952 is particularly stirring, in which he intertwines a description of the rounds of the monastery’s night watchman with a love song to God that serves as a precious mirror image of the work of St. Francis:

The night, O my Lord, is a time of freedom. You have seen the morning and the night, and the night was better. In the night all things began, and in the night the end of all things has come before me.

As an owl, this appeals to me very much. “The night,” says Merton, “was never made to hide sin but only to open infinite distances to charity and send our souls to play among the stars.”

Young Fr. Louis winds his way through the monastery, and eventually up to its peak, the steeple, from which he can seeing the rolling hills of the countryside, where he meditates on the beauty of creation and what he calls God’s unanswered question—hints of Leonard Bernstein?

Lord God of this Great night: do you see the woods? Do You hear the rumor of their loneliness? Do You behold their secrecy? Do You remember their solitudes? Do You see that my soul is beginning to dissolve like wax within me?

“It must be nice to sit around and think all the time,” some of you must be saying. Merton clears this up: solitude will force you to face all your faults, all the ugly stuff of life, in a very real way. I have heard as much from other monks. And look at all the distraction people indulge just to avoid having to think about anything. That’s what television is for, after all. In a very real sense, Merton, in all his solitude was more alive than many of us will ever be. This kind of life is not meant for everyone, but it’s the only way to live for those who are destined for it.

This is one of those books that changes the tempo of the reader’s life. It’s impossible to spend much time with Merton before he rubs off on you. I found myself cultivating little shelters of silence, slowing down my pace in general, stopping to enjoy little beauties that we’re usually tempted to dismiss as insignificant. And then I stopped needing the television to put me to sleep at night, and I’m even considering cutting back on the caffeine. Well, maybe I shouldn’t get too carried away.

More significantly, though, I have developed more of an aptitude for patience while reading this book. Most thoughtful people grant Merton a certain measure of respect, and yet his whole life seems unresolved. One of the debates which is had about him is whether or not he was ceasing to be Christian in favor of Buddhism toward the end of his life. (His journal entries do not bear this out, in my opinion.) His life is one big, aimless journey through the desert. In fact, Merton spends a great deal of time in his journals talking about Bl. Conrad, a Cistercian monk who was quite literally a wanderer. Conrad did not appeal to him early in life, but as he grew older he started to see the value of his story, and he ceased to expect his life to be a microcosm of the Whig Theory of History—a constant ascent uninterrupted by setbacks, detours, and even deliberate changes.

I have this same frustration. We all do, I suppose, and experience teaches us to chill out about it. “Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans,” John Lennon said. And that’s okay. We are meant to live life as human beings, and not as online dating profiles where everyone has a master plan to be well fed and happy into eternity, working in the amazing career that they envisioned for themselves at the ripe old age of nineteen while living in an eight bedroom house in West Chester.

The same concept applies to all of God’s unanswered questions. There are puzzles which we will never be able to solve, and other puzzles that we will assemble and put back together a hundred times in the course of our life. These are not failures; these attempts are some of the greatest joys of human existence. Certainty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it is hard to find someone who is certain who is not also an insufferable jerk. (Mea culpa.) So I am content with the questions and enough space to contemplate them all. As Merton himself said, “There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.”

Maybe this makes the most sense when we consider one final thing. Merton offers a meditation on the sentence, “Be vigilant, and you will see the salvation of God.” He makes an important distinction here: This does not be mean to be patient while you wait for the salvation of God to arrive. Rather, be vigilant, so that you can see the salvation of God which is already here and which we often miss because we aren’t looking.  How often do we waste energy actively looking for something when what we need is right under our noses, but we don’t see it because we aren’t looking in the right place? I suppose that an important part of humility is being willing to sit tight and allow the unanswered questions to answer themselves.

The stop sign sways on the electrical pole—it has its own rhythm. No metre—nature doesn’t have metre, but durations, like Messiaen, or ancient Greek music, or Bergsonian duration.

A mosquito bites my right index finger, compliments of all the recent rain.

A row house sits across the street, verdantly bedecked in bucolic splendor, even while the second story is covered in cheap gray siding, marring the beautiful maroon cornice.

Cars drive by vomiting noise from their radios. Sometimes they actually stop at the intersection, and occasionally one yields to a pedestrian.

The shadows lengthen early. Summer fades. Are those the last roses of the year over there?

Everything is transitory. Perhaps that is depressing. Perhaps not.

Maybe it’s even liberating. Maybe we are not bogged down by the material world after all.

Most people think of marching bands as being good only for football cheerleading purposes, and they are right. The problem is that band directors would also think the same thing were it not for the dreadful festivals known as band competitions. Each school shows up, plays its ditties, and is awarded points based on various subcategories which I will not enumerate so as not to bore you to death. The trouble with this is that for most band directors this is the be-all and end-all of their entire program, perhaps because they are trying to out-do the athletic coaches by being something they’re not. Students who do not put on the comical semi-military uniforms are often marginalized in the rest of the instrumental music program.

The average band student does not know any more about music than anyone else. If you want your child to be cultured you’d be better off sending him to the chorus or getting him painting lessons. Most band directors, however, are not going to bother with any music that can’t be degraded into a cheer or a raucous company front.

No, the purpose of marching bands is not to culture our children; it is to teach them to sit down and shut up and do what they’re told. Marching bands, as you may know, are based on military culture, and that’s pretty self-explanatory. It all dawned on me one day when I got back from a five-week retreat, where I, along with a number of others chosen from throughout the state of Pennsylvania, were chosen to explore our talents more thoroughly. We were treated like adults, we were told our expectations, and then we were turned loose. Amazingly, no one died.

I got back from that retreat two days before band camp started. There was, shall we say, friction, which came to a head. The band director told me to just “be a kid,” and then when I graduate I can go off to some music conservatory to “drink or smoke,” or whatever it is that I need to do to become a good musician. Bitter, much, Herr Direktor? The funny thing is that the last thing at a school that’s childlike is the marching band. It comes the closest to Orwell than any other activity I can think of. A wide receiver can break his pattern to make a big play, a forward can streak down the basketball court for a spectacular dunk, but a member of a marching band has his place, and better well stay in it. Each is turned into a human-shaped object.

Band kids are known for being dorks and wimps, and having been one, I think I have the right to say that this is largely true. What kind of timidity, after all, does it take to submit to such regimentation?

As a musician, I worry most about what marching bands do to the public perception of musical art. I once asked a band parent about their director. She replied that he’s really good, exhibit A being that he can combine the color guard moves with the marching band in really neat ways. Not exactly what I was looking for. You see, it’s fine with me if most band directors want to be stupid, but the problem is that it makes their students and their students’ families stupid. Most marching band members wouldn’t know Mozart or Beethoven if they came back from the dead and ripped the plumes off their little Viking helmets. This is a cultural poverty. Playing ditties does not make one musically educated.

Not all band directors are like this, but I have to say that most of the ones I’ve met are. In their defense, they’re the ones that fit the demand placed on them by the ruling booboisie. This situation is, in a way, helplessly circular—unless the band director has the imagination and the drive to re-shape the prevailing mentality.  I met one director in Maryland some years ago who told me that they play the five home football games each Fall, and then the clown uniforms go back into the closet. He ran one of the best programs in the state. No coincidence, methinks.

Something funny has happened this year. I have not had the annual band camp nightmare. I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining. I suppose I can only thank those teachers I’ve had who enabled me to get out of the marching band milieu. Maybe they indirectly taught me to resist the sadder societal trends in general. Marching band, after all, is the perfect training for an obedient worker who votes for Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke and all the while takes pride in his ignorance.

I have friends who are band directors, who are trying to be real educators and not just poor imitations of coaches. I wish them all the best. I, for one, however, am glad to be far away from it all.

I need a drink.

Advisory: Coarse language.  I’m tired of mincing words. Sometimes “excrement” just lacks a certain rhetorical punch.

Midnight Sunday night.  I just got home from a late dessert with a friend out on the “payment,” as they call it here in Philadelphia.  (That’s a sidewalk in standard parlance.)  This is a relative luxury, something there may not be much more of when the politicians in Washington get done with us, a subject that came up over carrot cake tonight.

Before I started this rant, I checked to see if any deal had been reached in the debt crisis.  Alas, none.  I feel quite strange about all this.  You know the world is screwed up when a philosophical anarchist is thinking in more practical terms than the politicians. Blame ought to be shared all around, but most infuriating to me is the smug self-righteousness of the Republican Party.  Cut, Cap and Balance should be renamed Sit Down and Shut Up.  This piece of hypocritical legislation is, alas, off the table.

The details of this particular story and of the past several generations are many and hard to keep track of.  I speak under correction, but indignantly nonetheless; we all know that this situation didn’t need to come to pass.  Here goes nothin’.

The Republican Party wants you to believe that it is now and has for a long time been the party of fiscal responsibility, “conservatism,” family values, and all that horse crap.  This is the party whose leadership, namely Richard M. Nixon, cut all ties between the dollar and gold on August 15, 1971, touching off one of the worst inflationary periods this country has seen.  ”We’re all Keynesians now,” quipped Tricky Dick, describing a most unfortunate turn of events that set the game clock on the middle class in America.

In the late 1970′s, Jimmy Carter, in a now infamous speech, warned the country that it needed to start living within its means, or there would be trouble.  Ronald Reagan, Boobus Americanus Secundus, came along, using what a late friend of mine called “verbal jujitsu” and said that Jimmy Carter didn’t want America to be great.  Reagan seemed to think that the laws of economics didn’t apply to us, that our Miltonesque shining city on a dunghill covered with snow had a birthright to greatness, and that we knew this was true, because, well, damnit, we say so.  And our military budget was the largest in the world.  And we spent God knows how much money on a stupid war against drugs. Etc.

But Reagan is hailed as a “conservative,” even a “libertarian,” which I find to be horrific, though to his credit, he does deserve polite applause for keeping his illegal wars of foreign aggression under a week in duration. The conservative movement of the 1970′s, a reaction against Lyndon Johnson’s soft socialism, culminated in one of the most financially disastrous presidencies up to that time.  I have to wonder if it was even necessary to outspend the Soviets in the arms race, as the conventional wisdom had it.  A sharp statesman would have found a way to make the Soviets think we were spending more than we were.  But you know damn well that some defense contractors were happier than pigs in shit with the way things were going.

Even when it came to monetary policy, the Reagan administration was a band of thieves.  Keep the interest rates low—that’s all they cared about.  The story is told—I believe it’s in Bob Woodward’s book on Alan Greenspan, called Maestro—about Fed chairman Paul Volcker, a Carter appointee, being pressed by the president and a close aide to keep rates low, i.e. pump more money into the system.  Volcker, in a testament to his character, resisted.  He was quickly replaced at the end of his term with Captain Printing Press.  Low rates stimulate the economy, said the administration.  Here’s the dirty little secret: the higher supply of money can also be used to pay for pet projects that no sane citizen would tolerate paying for with his taxes.  Inflation is an insidious, silent tax, levied on every dollar earned, spent, and saved in this country—and it is a regressive tax at that, because it affects the lower income levels the most.  But most people simply treat it as a fact of life rather than a factor of policy.

Skip ahead a generation, and we’ve got W. in the White House, the biggest megalomaniac since FDR. He made the Reagan and Johnson presidencies look like exercises in restraint, singing loud Te Deums of Why don’t we just bomb the sunsabitches?  Self-described fiscal conservatives credit him with cutting taxes, but again, the unpopular projects were paid for through monetary inflation.  And how much has that Medicare reform cost us? And the Every Child Left in the Dust Act? Bush II was a naive Wilsonian ideologue who rode the coat tails of the evangelists, the conservative Catholics, and the xenophobes (I use this last term in an unconventional, all-encompassing sort of way) into the White House. Or at least his close advisors were.  One wonders how we got from “No nation building” in the 2000 campaign to making the Middle East safe for dumbocracy.  These are expensive propositions, paid for by your retirement fund.  The tribal leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq thank you very much.

And here we are now, with a debt crisis, a Democrat sitting in the White House, and the GOP running the House of Representatives. This crop of elephants promised us in 2010 that they really meant it this time—they really were conservatives.  Small government this, fiscal responsibility that.  But even in the midst of this debt crisis, there are programs, sacred cows, that they refuse to touch.  Sure, Barack Obama, though he has compromised more than many thought he would, might be playing the same game, and we all know how expensive Obamacare will be, but he didn’t yammer on about small government in his campaign—quite the opposite, as we know.  What I wish to point out here is less the policy and more the hypocrisy of the Republican Party.  The GOP favors small government.  Ok, cut every non-essential, outdated portion of the defense budget.  Fat chance.  Stop chasing down drug users who are not committing violent crimes.  Ohhh but there might be something against that somewhere in the Bible.  Maybe it’s in Matthew 24. Et cetera, ad nauseam.

This is all a dog-and-pony show, my friends.  The Republicans don’t want a small government any more than I want to go country line dancing.  Their libertarian-flavored stance is a self-contradiction: If they believed government to be evil, they wouldn’t be so eager to exercise power when they can get it, and they wouldn’t so gladly be generous to fat cat contractors with the tax money of us mere proles.  I am reminded of the two-part question that Satan, as narrator, asks repeatedly in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (a fantastic book not so beloved by certain governments): 1) What kind of idea are you, one that compromises or holds firm when you lose? and, more importantly, 2) How do you act when you win?

Well, we have seen how the Republicans act when they win, and it can hardly be described as fiscally conservative.  If we could say otherwise, the present behavior of the Republicans might be defensible, even heroic.  But after years of pleading that politics is the art of compromise—and therefore we can’t be as conservative as we’d like—they have chosen the worst possible moment to pose as principled people.  I’m not convinced that John Boehner is the problem here; he may well have unenviable realities within his caucus to deal with.  But some people somewhere in the Republican party have chosen to thump their chests instead of beat their breasts, which is what they, along with the Democrats, should be doing.  They have both screwed us over, and—shame on us—most of us are dumb enough to believe it’s all one side or the other. The politicians feed on this Super Bowl mentality and use dire situations like this to score points with their base.

Compromise is a dirty word.  I myself hate it.  But someone needs to face up to the fact that this moment was arrived at through decisions that were made years ago.  If you dance with the devil, you have to pay the fiddler.  Well, dear reader, the violin case has been opened.  The real options here are limited, and all of them involve the implication that the political leadership of this country has been an abysmal failure. Wanna take bets on that happening?

To create electoral theatre, the leaders in Washington are playing with the future of this country. A default would send the dollar tumbling.  How far?  I doubt anyone knows, but in the inflationary days of the Weimar Republic, wheelbarrows full of Marks were required to buy a loaf of bread. Do you think the workers’ salaries rose at the same rate?  Hardly.  That spells destitution.  I’m no fan of social security, but why should old folks who have nothing left pay for this bumbling around?  I’m convinced that, from a practical perspective, it is an injustice. Starving welfare recipients with stubbornness is not the way back to Thomas Paine and John Locke.

Am I saying, “Raise, the debt limit?” Well, yes, if it’s what it takes to buy the time necessary to crash land rather than plunge directly into the ocean. We shouldn’t be in this mess, but we are.  The time for principle was eighty years ago, but every self-described fiscal conservative since Hoover has failed in this regard.  That milk has been spilled, the fat lady has sung, and it’s time to own up to it all. If the libertarian right insists on being brittle now, it will be broken forever. (Bulls of Excommunication from fellow libertarians can be sent to me via email. The tendency to orthodoxy is an affliction of the entire human race, even of the most freedom-loving.)

I get the impression that many on the libertarian right think that this is the dawning of a new age.  Good luck with that.  As much as I have advocated a stateless society, I have always felt that such an order would have to come from a foundation of ideas—a gargantuan task (laughably so, some smaller minds would argue), but all successful revolutions have been ones of thought and not of arms.  Violence and catastrophe only breed chaos, and more states. The dollar collapses and people live happily ever after in their little Agorist paradises? Uh huh.  I got some bridges for sale.  This week’s special: The Walt Whitman for two Diet Pepsis and cheesesteak.

Chaos breeds tyranny.  Always.  The nationalists will be whipping up fascist plans, and the Left Wing will be dreaming up socialist plans, and certain religious types will be chanting their epistles of theocracy from beyond the moat.  Who wins is anyone’s guess. Reason, surely, will not prevail; bread will decide the victor.  I forget who said that a hungry man has no principles.  ”We hold these truths to be….”  And the mob yells, Oh, shut up!

You think I’m over-reacting; I know you do.  When we read history books about the decline of civilizations, it’s easy to see the unhappy ending from afar.  Hindsight is a great benefit, and it also affects the imagination.  Look around.  The utilities still work. There are no ruins (except for the inner cities…).  Everything seems so normal.  I suspect that on the precipice of collapse many former societies thought everything was okay, too.  But ruin, like many fallings-out, comes both gradually and all at once.  Its approach becomes apparent, but the exact moment of its arrival is never certain, until it’s too late.

An important implication: This means that no one is in as much control over this as anyone might think.  More reason for the pols to stop fiddling. This, of course, assumes that they give a damn about us.

“Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.”—H.L. Mencken

For all of history, mankind has been grappling with the great questions that life poses.  Some are answerable, some unanswerable.  Through the millennia many seemingly insoluble problems have been dealt with, thanks, for example, to science.  Other puzzles, like the best means to organize society, seem hopelessly complicated.  But philosophers continue boldly to tackle the conundrums of human existence, betting on impossible idealism rather than settling for meaningless materialism.

Bertrand Russell’s summary of these human endeavors is a priceless tool in understanding the history, the meaning, and the possibilities of philosophy.  He was himself a philosopher, though I suspect he would never have presumed to take on that title himself.  Intrepid and yet humble, Russell knows what he knows and what he doesn’t know, as well as what can be known and by what means it can be known.  This is the mark of both intellect and maturity, not to mention that grayest of English vices: common sense.  You will not find any reductio ad absurdum in his work.

The writer makes no secret about what he thinks of any given school of thought, but he treats all arguments fairly, even those of the Medievals, with whom, one imagines, he would have the greatest differences.  He saves his delicious scorn and mockery for those who truly deserve it. Punctuated by his dry wit, all 800 pages of this book come to life, and one gets the feeling that philosophy is not mummified, that it really does matter.  This impression is helped along by Russell’s thorough treatment of world events alongside the philosophies that developed contemporaneously with them.  Sentiment, as Richard Weaver said, is anterior to logic, and sentiment often comes from circumstances.

One wonders if this book didn’t at least partially inspire Monty Python’s movie The Meaning of Life.  A Leibnizian moment occurs in the introduction, for instance, when God picks up a global earth and a cubic one, hefting one in each hand, trying to decide which one is best.  God chose the best of all possible worlds, Leibniz tells us, “and everything is a necessary evil,” one commentator added.  In the movie, the best world is the cubic one, of course, Cleese and Chapman, et al., being the delightful imps that they are, who bring us Panglossian delight.

Russell’s treatment of the philosophers is chronological, systematic, concise, and lucid—unlike this sentence.  It seems probable that all ideas were thought of by the pre-Socratic thinkers, and we have simply been arguing about them ever since.  In this company are atomists, relativists, socialists, and even a guy named Anaxagoras who theorized about a heliocentric solar system eons before Copernicus.  The major innovations of modernity have been scientific.  Our ability to create technology and understand nature has led to unprecedented health and wealth in our time.  The one purely abstract novelty in modern philosophy might belong to John Locke, who’s idea of tolerance was the basis of liberalism, though everyone these days, including liberals, seems to be faltering on this point.

After the empiricists and rationalists, I’ve found, much philosophy can be dense and downright indiscernible for the amateur reader like myself.  With these writers Russell does a marvelous job of crystallizing their work into a recognizable language.  With him even Hegel is not insurmountable.

I already mentioned the author’s common sense.  Good taste in thought often puts one at odds with the mobocracy, and I do think that pretty much anyone could find a reason to dislike Bertrand Russell.  This is why I like him, even though I also have some quibbles to add, all of which may well spring from my own shortcomings rather than the author’s.

Most crucially, Russell trusts too much in mathematical analogies to make points in which math has no business.  Arguments about infinite regress cannot be solved by pointing out that certain series of numbers have a beginning point.  It’s simply irrelevant.  I find, however, that most scientists are more satisfied by hard scientific facts than I am.  This is a mental disorder I’ve had all my life.  Ask my parents.  I was the brat who always asked why.  I was a walking infinite regress.  So be it.

Russell is very skeptical of private property rights, which might be why he can hail John Dewey almost without reservation.  God knows there have been monsters on this earth who have used their property rights to commit all kinds of unspeakable acts, but has anyone come up with a better way? It seems to me that we either have property rights, or a gang leader who beats anyone who doesn’t get in line.  All political philosophies, it seems to me, have a tendency to one way or the other, though one could argue that both succumb to the dark side of human nature.  We’re left to ask, I suppose, which approach succumbs the fastest.

A further thought about Russell’s views on private property rights:  John Locke developed the homesteading theory, which says that a man makes, for instance, an undeveloped plot of land his own property by mixing his labor with it, by fixing it up.  Russell says that this theory is no longer useful in modern society.  I disagree. I rather see the modern methods of trade and wage-earning as extensions rather than contradictions of the homesteading theory.  This is important: If we perceive the intimate relation of man’s work to his person, his rights to his acquisitions become more concrete. The homesteading theory helps us to envision this, and it is in any case true even if it isn’t useful.

Of all the figures considered in this tome, Nietzsche may well be treated the worst.  This is understandable, as Russell was writing in 1943 while the world was wrestling with the ghastly consequences of this philosophy.  But Russell, being something of a social democrat, goes too far, in my opinion.  No lie gains a foothold without some truth in it, and there is an element of truth in Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian stance.  There is, as Jefferson said, a natural aristocracy in humanity, and our refusal to recognize this, while it has not been as disastrous as other ideas, has been detrimental to our societal health.  The practical effect of egalitarianism in many places is that excellence is banned.  Saying this will get you branded an elitist these days, but that’s just sentiment driving logic—along with the assumption that elitism, as such, is necessarily bad.  All this is a small point in the vast landscape of the Nietzschean scorched earth, but I think it’s one worth mentioning.  Qui distinguit, bene docet.

I also think there’s more to Henri Bergson than Russell seems to believe.  We are running into the limits of logic. Just consider the developments in particle physics that have left everyone baffled.  The age of the syllogism is over, and Bergson’s picturesque language may offer a way out of this jam.  Bergon’s work seems to rely heavily on Hegel’s Absolute Idea.  He is a monist; he insists that all matter is one, that pieces are really a part of the whole, and that we use our intellect to cut them down into pieces.  Reality is like a chicken, and matter is like little bits of chicken that we cut with the knife of the intellect. (Do we then cook the bits in little pots? Sorry. Monty Python gets the best of me sometimes.) I think I have this right.  Corrections are welcome.

My sympathy for Bergson may be related to his language about time, which is put more in psychological than mathematical terms. (No wonder Russell, the mathematician, disliked him.)  ”This reminds me of the music of Olivier Messiaen,” I thought to myself as I read up on this.  Sure enough, a subsequent Google searched yielded up discussion of Bergson’s theory of time as it relates to Messiaen.  Bergson’s ideas would do a lot of good for our contemporary tick-tock, watch the clock society.

Bertrand Russell’s anti-war sentiments are made clear throughout the book.  Maybe it is his belief in the power of reason that drives this conviction. Those who think often feel less compelled to succumb to the barbaric urge to destroy one’s neighbor rather than to figure him out and negotiate with him.  There are still plenty of seemingly insoluble problems in our world, and the temptation to succeed by force is great when one is faced with a Gordian knot.  But if the history of philosophy is any indication, many of these issues can be solved peacefully if man can learn to think with his brain instead of his testicles.  Whether or not society can produce people capable of reading books like this one may decide the ultimate destiny of man.

Friday night saw the return of the Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra to Chris’s on Sansom St. in Philadelphia.  I knew Lars Halle way back when I had hair and hadn’t yet gotten off the trumpet. (Eleven years clean now, with only one relapse in June 2005.)  I was only too glad to reconnect with him and his ensemble when I moved to Philadelphia a few years ago. Lars drives the band from the drum set and surrounds himself with some of the best talent in the area.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if this is true, then classical musicians are a loyal lot, performing Bach and Mozart in as correct—and sometimes even inspirational—a way as possible.  There is value in breathing life into the dry bones of long-dead geniuses.  I do my best at it most days of the week.  But the jazz musician has what is arguably a higher calling:  making music on the spot.   A basic rhythm and chord progression holds the structure of the music together while a soloist improvises.  The virtuosity of the musicians may be the most obvious thing to the casual observer, but the musical inspiration is what I pay the most attention to.  It takes brains to do this, and also a capacity to yawp about the mysteries of the universe.  The greatest danger about historicism in art is that the artist will cease to have something to say, but as long as there are musicians who improvise, this is less likely.

I improvise a lot on the organ these days, but my initial instruction in this skill actually came from a jazz musician from Boston while I was a trumpet player.  He once brought down a house filled with hippies and atheists with a little tune called Everybody Ought to Know Who Jesus Is, played on his white baby grand piano.  I went into his studio one day and said I was tired of not being able to improvise.  He wrote out a blues scale, sat down at the piano, and turned me loose.  I remember two things he said from that lesson: 1) “Nothing’s worse than somebody who talks all the time but never says anything.” (I now save such blabbering for this blog.) 2) “I don’t care if you’re playin’ Johann Sebastian BACH! It’s got to groooooove!” From that day, I have never felt like I’m fully a musician unless I’m improvising.

There are musicians who can improvise so well that it sounds like a finished piece, except for the fact that the blood courses through the veins of the listener with more vigor, a sharing in the ecstasy of the performer.  They say that Bach could do this.  So could many French organists.  And no one beats these jazz musicians.  The student of music can always figure on a shot of new energy from hanging out with them.

The Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra is just as good as a major symphony orchestra, except that if you sit at the bar at Chris’s you’ll only have to pay five bucks to hear them.  If you want dinner the cover will cost you fifteen, but you’ve got a seat for the whole three hour performance.  The availability of spirits makes it even more enjoyable.  It’s not as crowded in the summer, since so many people are at the beach, but if you want a decent vantage point for one of these performances during the rest of the year, you better get there early.  Usually it’s standing room only.  This isn’t exactly the sign of a dying art form.  Some would take issue with my lumping jazz in with “serious music,” but they probably need to come out from behind their late 19th century fortress.  Even Richard Weaver thought that jazz was bad music and contrasted it mercilessly with Mozart, showing his ignorance of both styles.  Oh well.  We can’t all be right about everything.

Saturday night brought an experience even more contemporary and no less thrilling.  The Crossing, a choir that performs music of the 21st century, is in the middle of its Month of Moderns, which this year features a number of settings of text by and about Seneca, the Stoic philosopher of yore.  (Do all philosophers have names that begin with an S?)  This particular concert featured works by Kile Smith, a composer from Philadelphia, Kamran Ince, who spends much time in Instanbul, and Gabriel Jackson, resident composer for the BBC.  A review of the concert can be read here.

Kile Smith’s new work commissioned by The Crossing, The Waking Sun, comprised the first half of the concert.  Written for chorus and the baroque ensemble Tempesta di Mare, the third (on a text about Cupid), fourth (on a text about Tantalus), and sixth movements (a beautiful love poem) seem to me to be of particular beauty.  ”I am usually a grudging participant in standing ovations,” I told Kile after the performance, “but tonight I only wished that I were a foot taller.”  (Full disclosure: I am friends with most of the people involved in this performance.  This is not an “objective” review, but what review is?)  In the second half, Kamran Ince’s Theystes featured a gruesome text about cannibalism, and Gabriel Jackson’s Not No Faceless Angel featured a poem about death that was mature beyond the years of the writer.

Turnout for concerts by The Crossing is consistently solid, but Saturday brought a standing room only crowd, perhaps the best showing ever.  Unlike  some concert patrons, however, those who come to Crossing concerts are there not to be seen to but hear, to listen to the music.  They are intelligent listeners: Usually, in any crowd, there is one wiseacre who insists on applauding the millisecond a piece ends, even if it ruins the atmosphere of a performance.  These people want everyone else to know that they know when something is over.  This is one of the reasons that the classical music milieu annoys normal people. This doesn’t happen at Crossing concerts; the whole room is still until conductor Donald Nally has relaxed his posture.  What’s more is the constructive conversation that takes place at the post concert receptions—about the composer, the text, the sound of the choir, whatever.  Just as there are “C and E” Christians, there are “Messiah and Beethoven 5″ audiences; but the Crossing audiences are true believers.

As an audience member I find each of these concerts to be challenging, and usually I find myself wishing I could hear most of the pieces twice.  For awhile I thought I wasn’t paying careful enough attention, but I’m beginning to wonder if this just isn’t a factor of The Crossing and the works that they sing breaking new ground.  We are in a moment of musical transition.  The old forms are passing away, but new ways of writing are not yet settled.  If you pull out a Mass composed in the Renaissance era, there are certain technical and formal aspects of the writing that you can expect to see—a smaller ensemble for the Benedictus, repetition of Kyrie material in the Agnus Dei, etc.  The same kind of thing holds true for Operas, Oratorios and art songs.

But what The Crossing is doing doesn’t really seem to fit any of these molds.  Many of the texts are personally chosen by Donald Nally, who is a voracious reader.  And how should a composer tackle the poetry of Paul Celan or the selections of Seneca?  There is no canon for such a thing, and thanks be to God.  Many aficionados of music pride themselves on their understanding of harmony and of forms, but as I mentioned before, I’m more concerned about whether the musicians have something to say.  As long as this is true, music has a future, even with symphony orchestras.

But will we have the courage to cast off old habits that no longer work?

I have been in houses where the television is on all evening.  I’m sure in many places it’s never turned off, ever.  How can the people who live there know each other?  Love and affection cannot be created through osmosis, so when people sit silently watching something together, they don’t engage in the dialogue that is necessary to friendship.  Call me old fashioned, but I want to know something about the person sitting next to me.  I don’t mean the simple booboisie questions like “Where do you work?” or “How many kids do you have and what colleges did they get into?”  I want to know what winds someone’s clock, what gets him out of bed in the morning, what he wonders about when he’s got a whole five minutes to himself.  I want to know if philosophical questions annoy, confuse, or delight him.  It says a lot about a man.  Most people don’t have any patience for these things.  Maybe that’s why the television is on so much.  We are the people with nothing to talk about.  After all, the conversation about soccer practice, Harvard, and GPA’s only lasts so long.

It’s all a waste, really.  Hours of our lives get spent on having our brains distilled into a mucousy pulp.  Down the black hole of the technological dark ages we go.  People who spend their free time half asleep on bar stools make better use of their time.  Hangovers go away; televisions seemingly do not.

Do you recognize something of your own routine in what I’ve just described?  Does your husband spend every waking hour that he’s not at work obsessively watching sports analysis shows, or, more irrelevant still, news and politics?  I don’t intend to insult sports—in fact I myself enjoy them—but there is only so much staring at an idiot box before one becomes stupid.  Fret not, for I bring glad tidings of great joy:  you don’t have to spend your evenings trapped in front of the TV while letting the good stuff of life ooze out your left ear.  You can turn the television off, and live.  I have developed a number of ways to while away an evening so that the “waste” of time is actually constructive.

I did something recently that I hadn’t done in a long time:  the aimless road trip.  It doesn’t have to be long, but it does help to get far enough away from home to get lost and have to find your way back.  That is a glorious feeling, one that many seem unaware of.  When I lived in Lancaster County I used to take such trips in the golden glow of the evening summer sun.  It was a spiritual event.  You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a red barn in a valley bathed in the sunset.  I used to pass a number of tobacco farms in that part, and I would wonder how long it would be before the government turned these hard workers into criminals.

These road trips can be taken alone, or with a friend.  Two is the maximum number, I think.  Just the other night I called up a friend of mine, and we drove around the countryside for an hour or more, spewing forth on any number of subjects, most of which were highly personal.  Road trips are good for that.  It is ultimate privacy, and there is no one to interrupt the conversation as often happens in urban areas where everyone knows everyone.  There is something about road noise that soothes the soul and greases the wheels of the brain.  Many conundrums have been solved on windy, hilly roads to nowhere.  No widgets were made on this safari, but I think we are both better men for having taken it.

Maybe you don’t have a car, or don’t like to drive.  In that case I hope you’re not a teetotaler.  (I hold that hope for you in any case.)  One can then always engage in people watching.  Go to a restaurant—it doesn’t even need to be a good one, it just needs to serve alcohol—and get an outside table.  Sitting outside in the spring and summer makes up for any bad food one might eat.  Sit.  Eat.  Drink.  Breathe.  Watch.  You can learn a lot from watching the world go by.  I have pissed away entire evenings like this, the table conversation drifting between energetic banter and quiet contemplation.  The colorful characters come up and down the street, and the entertainment is free, with the price of your meal.  Do not invite any Christian Fundamentalist or Modern Liberal friends; they will ruin the evening by being serious about something.  By all means, discuss serious subjects, but don’t do so in a serious manner.  It tends to hide the truth of a thing.

Finally, there is always the evening dinner party.  I have a friend—let’s call him Thomas Mann—who occasionally invites me out to the Mann estate for an evening of eating, drinking, and discussing whatever’s on our minds.  His downstairs neighbor comes up and usually asks me what I’ve been reading, or what I think of some development in the current events department.  If a television is involved it is only to watch one to two short little things, and there are no TV aficionados there to hush us if we decide that the conversation in the room is more interesting than the pixels on the screen.  No holds barred.  All opinions listened to with respect (but be prepared to be respectfully, though possibly mercilessly, refuted).  Sounds bytes are highly discouraged.  The most wonderful thing about the chit chat at the Mann estate is that no one seems to be too eager to pack things into nifty little boxes; lingering questions are not a threat.  I’m a little less dogmatic, and therefore less of a jackass, than I used  to be, thanks to these delightful visits.  Throw in a little sherry and you have yourself one heavenly experience.

So there you have it, three ideas to use the next time you don’t feel like spending an evening hypnotized by technology. I think you’ll find that if you try these ideas, your partners in the crime of not being “good productive citizens” will become your true friends.  Note that conversation plays an important role in all these activities, and this is the glue that holds humanity together.  People who share ideas find common ground and ways to peacefully, and even respectfully, coexist.  People who do not have open discussions self-righteously shoot each other.  Oh hell, who am I kidding?  Most people would rather own a gun than a book.  Well, for the small minority of you who do try this out, enjoy, and may life be yours to the fullest.