Listening to a Concert

Alone this morning, I was eating my breakfast to the music of Keith Jarratt in a recording of his Köln concerts from 1975. At the end, I listened at least as attentively to the applause.

That the recording producers included the several minutes of applause pointed up the contribution of an audience to a concert. This particular audience began, as the music ended, with the usual random clapping that built in a kind of crescendo, then transformed into a synchrony for a time, finally ending in a long, tapering sound of individuals merging their enthusiasm in white noise, a fading afterglow of emotional experience.

A performer has to be moved by such appreciation expressed by his audience. He had just completed his improvised concert, ending it as the music itself called for its own conclusion. In his heart and his fingers, the expression was complete. Whether or not he was anticipating the audience response, he had done his part. The afterglow was his heartbeat, gradually returning to quiet.

In my recording library I have thousands of tracks, pieces of music I’ve accumulated over the years, Many of the pieces (mostly but not all classical) I know by heart, and in my head I’m singing along with them as they play in the seclusion of my home. Mostly these days, I play my music when I’m alone; for some reason I hear it better without other people present, unless I’m intentionally sharing something with someone who I’m confident will listen, and get it just as I do. (Music played for atmosphere in a social occasion is different.)

Attending a live concert is another thing altogether. I’d much rather share that experience with someone I care for. To hear live music alone, I’m simply another pair of ears (and hands) in an anonymous crowd. I can participate in the experience of performance and audience, but it lacks the intimate welling of shared emotion that seems to need, like sex, another tuned-in soul.

Still, the experience of listening to a particular recorded concert such as Keith Jarratt’s Köln performance, or the memorial tribute to George Harrison, “Concert for George” in 2002, even in recording, is emotionally distinct from studio recordings. One can visualize the presence of an audience even if it’s only a sound recording. One of my favorites from many years ago is Wes Montgomery, playing with the Wynton Kelly Trio at the Half Note Club in New York. The live nightclub ambiance takes me there, where I can visualize the room and the player-audience relationship. I have a studio album of Roberta Flack that cries out for the same ambiance, for she began her career in the music world playing at Mr. Henry's Restaurant, on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, and her voice simply fits that kind of environment. 

A more recent artist, Eva Cassidy, who reminds me of Roberta Flack, also began her career in clubs in D.C. I’m lucky to have a live album of her at Blues Alley in 1996, shortly before her death.

For some music that I grew up with listening to recordings, I don’t miss the sounds of the audience. I’m not sure how I would react to Rachmaninov or Sibelius in a live recording. They are simply too familiar to me. Of course, I’d jump at the chance to hear them at Hill Auditorium, even in performances by the University Philharmonic. The acoustics in my living room don’t compare with those in such a hall. And I’d stand and shout “Bravo!” along with everyone else at the end.

I'm grateful that my hearing loss affects music less than speech; even though I lose the high notes from a violin, for example, my brain seems to fill in the missing vibrations.

Music is not just music. A live concert or a polished studio recording makes a difference, but whatever the genre, it’s a gut experience that’s up there near the top of my life experiences.

Eating is an Intimate Act

(This essay appears in my book Confessions and Memoirs, and was written in 2000.)

Since I decided to stop eating meat about seven years ago, friends and acquaintances have occasionally asked me why. It’s been difficult to explain sometimes, especially when I want to be true to my feelings. To say, “ethical reasons” is often enough for those who distinguish between, say, health reasons or ecological reasons or “moral” reasons. But for those who ask in order to understand me better, it feels both complicated and vague. It’s hard to put into words.

A recent discussion over dinner in a vegetarian restaurant with some members of a meditation sitting group helped me clarify what not eating meat means to me. One member of the group said that she had refrained from eating meat for a number of years, but then became aware that many creatures on Earth live by killing other creatures; it is a fact of life, a natural phenomenon, and by no means “wrong.” Because humans have been mostly omnivorous for millions of years, eating meat cannot be considered unnatural. All creatures die. The important thing, she said, is to have compassion—to not cause unnecessary suffering. The way animals are treated is of much greater importance than whether their flesh is eaten. Another member of the group concurred, saying that our bodies have developed to digest meat, and we obtain greater nourishment from a mixed diet.

I could not dispute the point that much of life is sustained by killing other life. Even plants are often killed in order to feed non-carnivorous creatures. From the broadest viewpoint, Life feeds upon itself, and we all end up providing nutrients for succeeding generations of life forms. To choose to eat only certain foods is to draw an arbitrary line somewhere—on this side is acceptable; on that side is not. Different people draw the line in different places.

I’m not comfortable with “arbitrary.” Perhaps it’s only my fastidiousness, but I need a reason for choosing, even if it makes sense only to me. These days, I’ve tried to find deeper reasons than rational logic or gut responses. So I let the question go for a while and waited for that deeper answer.

“Eating is an intimate act” simply presented itself to me one day. It’s true for me that eating is more than stuffing nourishment into my mouth. I’ve always valued mealtime as a social event. I dislike eating alone—something important is missing. Still, sharing the experience with someone else seems only part of it.

Since I’ve been meditating, I’ve had occasion to be with others during mealtime when our instructions were to “eat mindfully,” to be conscious of what we are doing, rather than talking or reading or listening to music or watching television while we eat. In that frame of mind, it’s clear to me that my relationship to the food I eat is one of the most intimate experiences I ever have. Mundane as it might seem (since we do this every few waking hours, day after day), we take food into our bodies in an incredibly close and intimate way—by chewing it up into a semi-liquid mass. Our food is transformed from a life-form to an unrecognizable, nearly homogenous, mush. To be mindful of that fact is to acknowledge something profound. It not only recognizes the part that other people play in the growing and processing of our food (which means in the maintenance of our very lives), it also recognizes the intimate sharing of life-forms in the process we call Life Itself.

If I am to be in that degree of intimacy with another bit of life, I want the relationship to be one of compassion and love. It is not “beef” I eat, but an individual, once conscious creature not greatly different from me. I cannot bring myself to think of that creature as having suffered for my benefit. True, others have come to a place of comfort by being mindful at that moment of the sacrifice made by the creature whose flesh is being consumed. Thanking the animal could be a sacred thing. 

Someone at the dinner asked me if I could imagine circumstances in which I might eat meat. I had to admit that I couldn’t categorically rule it out. If my own survival depended upon it, I might. Just as I must admit that if I were caught in a war, I might kill another human being. Under either circumstance, perhaps, I could acknowledge both the necessity and my gratitude to the creature who enabled my continuation.

But while I have a choice, it is to protect all creatures as much as I can. I cannot justify killing a sentient creature when I could so easily spare it. I do not want to turn away from awareness of what I do. I used to do just that: when I began to think about eating or not eating meat, long before I made my decision, I remember thinking, “I don’t want to think about it, for if I do I will feel guilty.”

Some people claim that plants have feelings, too. My response is perhaps weak: I haven’t seen convincing evidence of that. If it should turn out to be true, I’ll have to re-examine my stand, I suppose. Our technology is advanced enough to produce food from inanimate chemicals, if need be. 

 The important thing for me is to assume responsibility for my actions. More and more I am identifying myself as part of something greater, and no more deserving than any other being. That animal I would eat deserves to live, but almost never has the choice. I’m not smart enough to make such a decision for other people, but I’m the only one who can make it for me.

With what I know about life, and with what I’m beginning to know about the deepest part of me, I choose compassion.

November 28, 2000

From Confessions and Memoirs

Us and Them

This was written in 2001, and just re-discovered. Can't think of a thing to change...

Since the September 11 disaster, I’ve been trying (as most people have, I suspect) to get a handle on how to fit all that into my life. I spent nearly twenty years studying community and how it enhances personal and social life. I discovered that the experience of "community"—what I call that sometimes-sudden awareness of deep connection among people—is very much like what mystics and teachers have described for centuries as "spiritual." I’ve recognized that in order to try to describe this feeling of profound connection, there’s a tendency to apply it to the group in which it appears. We identify with particular people. A concomitant tendency is to then exclude everybody else. The stronger this sense of community, the stronger the definition of its boundaries. Our instinctual need to categorize things in our environment then creates a concept of "us" versus "them."

It was pretty obvious on that day and immediately following it that many Americans felt personally attacked. Partly, that was a reaction to the assumed intention of the hijackers to hurt us as a people. "Us and them" became instantly prominent in descriptions, discussions and commentary about the event. Our survival instincts took over, and identifying the threat meant in a significant way identifying the enemy. If I think someone hates me, I am apt to focus on how he is different from me and how I can protect myself from this "stranger."

Politicians and media voices, of course, lauded the "uniting of Americans against the common threat." Patriotism became a positive value again after rather languishing for thirty years in the wake of an unpopular war. American flags began to fly all over the nation. This was not community in the sense of the word that I had sought to understand for the past twenty years. Perhaps, though, as someone said, it’s merely the other side of the coin.

No, I think not, although it’s easy enough for me to succumb to the emotional pull of "circling the wagons." My adolescence during World War Two was a mish-mash of romantic feelings as my hormones responded to a brave new world full of sex and battles. Even today, the feet in my head respond to martial music. Still, the deepest part of me, the part I am struggling to know better, the part that I believe is my real salvation, recognizes that connection knows no borders, no flag, no particular group even. There is no "us" without a "them," and there is, in the larger sense, no "them."

No wonder I’m lonely. The part of me that wants family, close friends, and intimacy reminds me every day of what I lack. It’s like that need to eat, even when I know I’ve had enough. That love affair with chocolate that’s so hard to resist. That tug in my gut when I see the swirl of long hair or the accidental, momentary meeting of eyes. Or the urge to belong. It’s not that I don’t have these things. I have more than enough to eat. I indulge myself with luxuries. I am cherished, without a doubt.

If my hunger isn’t really for these things, then, what is it? If "belonging" is really just the surface, what is beneath it, hidden from me, that I long for? Am I just another Citizen Kane, looking at a snow-filled ball of glass and murmuring, "Rosebud?"

I remember a time in my early childhood, one of those random moments that find a niche in one’s memory for no particular reason. I was with one or two other children, examining the heavy wires running down the side of a house and disappearing inside. We knew enough to avoid touching the wires themselves, but somehow I was drawn to the white, cylindrical insulators that held the wires to the building. I said that they looked like something I knew, something to eat, that I couldn’t identify. Another child suggested "potato." No, not potato.

That’s all there is to the memory. Years later, recalling that moment and my question, I answered easily, "marshmallow." At the time, evidently, I had had only a single experience with the soft, sweet confection. I remembered only the appearance and the pleasure. I knew it was something wonderful, but I couldn’t identify it.

That’s what this feels like. I’ve glimpsed something, just a few times, actually, that is outside my semantic universe. Once or twice, when I’ve been alone, I’ve suddenly and briefly "known" something very important. Where I fit. What I am. And then, just as quickly, it has been gone, leaving a memory as amorphous as a dream. And a number of occasions, in quiet moments among other people, usually after times of excruciating intensity in the group, I’ve felt something similar. A sense of well-being, of intimate connection, a rightness beyond anything I could put words to.

There’s no way this sensing can fit into a war. Like most people, I’m good at distancing myself from people and situations that are difficult to handle. I turn my back on other people’s suffering when I don’t know what to do about it. I clutch my comforts around me and avert my head and my heart.

James Baldwin, the writer of The Fire Next Time once told an interviewer, early in the civil rights struggle, "Liberals feel guilty—instead of . . ." It struck home for me then, and it still does.

Maybe I’m haunted, not by my glimpse of some utopian dream of community where we will all know true intimacy and trust and connection, but by my own inability to abandon my defenses and be what I dream of having.

 

Donald Skiff, September 28, 2001