The drill was easy. You stood somewhere, anywhere, in the chapel. The loudspeakers, mounted on stands and divided into eight groups of five (one for each of the vocal types: bass, baritone, tenor, alto, soprano), made an oval in the apse. The music began. Eleven minutes later, it ended. Between “performances,” you listened, if you so chose, to three minutes of chatter among and between the choristers. Then the tape resumed. The idea for this continuous loop is as simple as can be. You start by listening to ordinary secular life, which then ends and miraculously gives way once the first sonorous bass voice sings “Spem,” and life of a different order begins. The gap between the chatter and the music might have provided the biggest jolt of all. Over the course of my twelve fourteen-minute cycles, I heard a full range of uninteresting exchanges, gossip, pleasantries (what Yeats called “polite meaningless words” in his poem “Easter, 1916”) among the singers: “That line there got me messed up”; “In the end, where we turn the page from 19 to 20, we always get that wrong”; “Oh, you’re back?”; “We’ll do our very best and then give you a breather … and there’s water”; “His last moments were spent recording Spem in alium”; “Hmmm”; plus noises of throats clearing, pages turning, a man humming, a tuning fork, a yawn, and pure vocalise. I felt I had entered into a meandering John Ashbery poem, with many frequencies of speech flowing right along. We were not so much hearing as overhearing this prelude to the concert.
A helpful guard told me to position myself at the music stand of the first bass singer, toward the room’s entrance. At the end of the three-minute chitchat, that singer’s voice ever so gently intoned “Let’s rock,” which was—as I learned once I had moved around the circle many times—simultaneous with other singers saying things like “Okay, let’s give it a whirl” and “Let’s give it our best shot. We’ve worked very hard.” The sudden transition, virtually unprepared for, from the ordinary or the secular to the transcendent or the divine took place in an unheralded moment. The only equivalent I can think of is Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, a film of a Chekhov production that never actually saw the light of day. The movie begins with stage actors emerging from the subway and the street and walking into the theater for rehearsal. They chat on the largely vacant stage, and then, without so much as a curtain rise or a “Let’s start now,” they transport themselves, and us, to the world of nineteenth-century Russia. The recent Globe performances of Twelfth Night on Broadway did the same, in this case taking us to Shakespeare’s fictive Illyria and his actual London, but stage music alerted the audience to the main event.
At the Cardiff installation, Tallis’s music existed in space as well as time. You stood at one end of the apse or the other, or you stood in the middle of the floor. The term “surround sound” never seemed more appropriate. Better still, you moved from speaker to speaker to experience the individual voices one at a time. Best of all, you stood between speakers, between baritone and tenor or between alto and soprano. Or you performed some combination of all of the above. The possibilities were almost infinite. You would not hear the same rendition twice if you wanted a different one. Not everyone sings at once. And they are all singing to us, as well as to one another. Moments of vocal silence punctuate the experience. The music could hit you frontally, laterally, or from behind, depending on your location.
Listening, you became undistractedly aware of the other people in the room with you. At a concert venue—pop or classical—you usually sit or stand facing the stage, the pit, and the performers. Even if you are waving your arms, singing and dancing along with the music, taking photographs on your iPhone, you focus on the stage. At the Cloisters, in the 360-degree installation in which everyone is moving around slowly, you became as visually alert to your fellow human beings as you were musically alert to Thomas Tallis. I kept thinking of the French verb for attending a performance: not attendre, but assister à. Somehow the attendees assisted in bringing the music to life; we were all handmaidens to the performers inside the boxlike speakers.
The visible cast of characters, my fellow listeners, was both various and generic. Diversity was not much in evidence. More women than men had come to the Cloisters, either because it was a weekday or because that’s what women do. Sensible shoes, plus fifty or more shades of black and gray, predominated. Both men and women wore parkas, jeans, and tweeds: vibrant scarves from Burberry and Liberty accented sober colors. Almost everyone was white and middle-aged or beyond, except for one young, hand-holding lesbian couple and a total of four small groups of teenagers. One trio peered in at the entrance and then made a hasty getaway. Another quartet came in, whispered to one another, snapped photographs on their cell phones, and skedaddled. They could not adjust to the old music or the fact of slowness—the patient, plodding movements of the adults—and even the technology of the installation did not hold their attention.
The adults performed a far different ritual, all variations on the idea of slow attentiveness. They seemed to take their cue from a stone statue of Saint Joseph twenty feet above us on the wall. He sits with his right hand cupping his cocked ear, as if waiting for sounds, any sound, to waft upward. Down below, the living audience began their advance into receptivity. Most visitors stayed for one circuit of the piece and then took their leave. Some stayed for two. Two women who had entered the museum with me stayed for three cycles. Almost everyone assumed a look and a posture of concentration. Some came in search of tranquillity; others were clearly delighted to have encountered it. Everyone began with a short pause at the entrance, unconsciously acknowledging the passage from one realm to another, and then moved in and through the apse.
Eventually, some sat with bowed heads and closed eyes, either slightly bent over or steadily upright; others gazed into space with eyes wide open but obviously not focusing on the visible surround. I took a photograph of two men on a bench, both balding and gray, but also a pair of yin and yang. One, with his hands on his knees, looked worried. The other, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes open, emitted a sense of grateful contentment. Was this the peace that passeth understanding or an effort to achieve it? The listeners seemed to be contemplating either the ecstasies of the world or its sorrows. Gentle glances and modest smiles predominated. There was little talk; you could see people occasionally speaking to one another, but of course neither human speech nor muffled footsteps could be heard over the music from the speakers.
My second trip was on an even bleaker, cloudy December morning. The apse was lit; the crucifix was glowing. Illumination poured from the high windows; the faded wall frescoes supplemented the color of the human costumes. The real illumination came in the form of sound, not light. Reverberations from the speakers bounced around the room itself. Because Cardiff did not mass all the parts of one voice in one place, the timbres are dispersed, creating a more harmonious, organic experience. The voices came both as individuals and in groups: a reedy tenor, a plummy alto, a sonorous bass, the children.
I became aware, more than on my first visit, of the opposing forces of inundation and uplift, of being surrounded and pierced, of being absorbed while also absorbing. We heard individual voices, plus antiphony—call and response across the space—and, taken as a whole, in the center of the room, the full force of Tallis’s polyphony. Just as the music is a composite of soloists, so also the audience is a community of strangers. I was alone in the crowd, but I was also a part of it.
My two visits put me in mind of the American poet Amy Clampitt, whose extraordinary letters I edited a decade ago. She describes a transcendent moment at the Cloisters in a letter to her youngest brother, Philip, dated March 17, 1956:
After a while, when the music changed to something else, I was mildly aware that while this was going on I had—perhaps for no more than an instant, but there is no measuring this kind of experience—entirely forgotten my own existence. It is the sort of thing that has happened to me a few times in my life, but always before in moments of great excitement and with a kind of incredulity surrounding it l
ike an iron ring. This time there was no iron ring, no excitement, no surprise even, but a serenity so complete that I hardly thought about it just then, I simply took it for granted. Possibly this is what is supposed to take place at baptism—but if baptism it was, it wasn’t of water, but of light. By this time it was late afternoon, and with the reflection from the river so bright that you could barely look at it directly, the whole hilltop, the whole world was fairly brimming with radiance. I walked around for a while, looked at the people, and walked to the subway, rather tired, and yet rested too, and pleased with everything.
This version of grace, an epiphany that came to Clampitt in the form of light as Easter weekend was approaching, led mysteriously some days later to her beginning to write poems for the first time since adolescence. Forgetting her existence, getting out of her very self, was a vocational and spiritual transformation of the highest order.
For the final go-round on my second visit to the installation, I stood still in the center of the apse, eyes closed, in tadasana, yoga’s “mountain” pose. This is not easy to do for eleven minutes. The body sways, then it doesn’t. First you begin to lose and then regain your balance. The secret, I discovered, is to keep weight in your heels. Paradoxically, the effort of not moving makes you break a sweat. My experience, analogous to Clampitt’s but not as intense, also left me both tired and rested. Until the end of the motet, the whole ensemble has sung together only twice. The noble last movement begins with the word “Respice,” sung by all the voices, and the entire chapel resounds with the fullness of the music. The conclusion is a long exhaled chord. Human harmony symbolizes cosmic harmony. The music of the spheres has come down to earth and lifted us up.
As I left the museum after my second visit, I felt two inches taller. And I said to myself, “You’ll never experience anything like this again.”
I hope I may be wrong.
NOSTALGIA
Nostalgia is the balm of fear.
—DAVID MCGLYNN
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.
—PETER DE VRIES
As he lay dying of cancer in Boston, John Updike composed a sonnet series that ranks with his best writing in verse, and even prose. Clear-sighted, sober, but witty (unlike many deathbed works), the poems acknowledge feelings of wonder and appreciation. The poet looks at his surroundings in the hospital—the equipment, the noise, the doctors and nurses—and he also takes a backward glance at his early years as a schoolboy in Pennsylvania. Here are the second and third sonnets in the sequence titled “Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth 12/13/08”:
Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you,
scant hundred of you, for providing a
sufficiency of human types: beauty,
bully, hanger-on, natural,
twin, and fatso—all a writer needs,
all there in Shillington, its trolley cars
and little factories, cornfields and trees,
leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.
To think of you brings tears less caustic
than those the thought of death brings. Perhaps
we meet our heaven at the start and not
the end of life. Even then were tears
and fear and struggle, but the town itself
draped in plain glory the passing days.
* * *
The town forgave me for existing; it
included me in Christmas carols, songfests
(though I sang poorly) at the Shillington,
the local movie house. My father stood,
in back, too restless to sit, but everybody
knew his name, and mine. In turn I knew
my Granddad in the overalled town crew.
I’ve written these before, these modest facts,
but their meaning has no bottom in my mind.
The fragments in their jiggled scope collide
to form more sacred windows. I had to move
to beautiful New England—its triple
deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets—
to learn how drear and deadly life can be.
Shillington gave Updike all he needed as an artist. Like James Joyce, who fled Dublin but never truly escaped from it, Updike had to get away to realize that he had met his heaven, ordinary and imperfect but sufficient to his needs, at the start of his life. His hometown nurtured the artist as a young man. For such sustenance, Updike was always grateful.
These sonnets are a product of what I can only call intelligent, rational nostalgia. (Nostalgia can be rational?) And they provoke a set of questions both literary and personal. As life lengthens and the future shortens, it makes sense for us to take backward glances. Even younger people with long lives to look forward to are susceptible to the temptation and charm of nostalgia. As I was giving a talk at a university last year, I realized—way too late to change my topic—that an audience filled with undergraduates was precisely the group least likely to appreciate an older person’s obsession with the distant past. And yet I had a moderate success. I made them laugh. Better still, afterward, a pleasant nineteen-year-old sophomore said he found the talk thought provoking. “What are you nostalgic for?” I asked.
“When I was a high school sophomore, my track times were so much faster than they are now,” he said wistfully.
More recently, I chuckled when I heard the announcer for a college radio station say to his audience, “I’m now going to play a bunch of late ’90s indie rock that’ll make you nostalgic if you’re, like, between twenty-five and thirty years old.” His tone combined the appropriate doses of earnestness, world-weariness, and old-fashioned amazement.
Why do some people look to the past? Why do others refuse to? What are the pleasures of “nostalgia”? The word itself has its etymology in the Greek nostos (homecoming) + algia (pain), but the condition is more multifaceted, combined of equal parts of homesickness, self-indulgence, sentimentality, and an alertness to the genuine, confected, or merely imagined pleasures of former times and ages and different places. In Updike, and many others of us, the pleasure, not the pain, of remembering predominates.
The word, if not the condition, is modern, coined in 1668 by Johannes Hofer as a translation of the German Heimweh (homesickness) to describe the depression he witnessed among Swiss mercenaries longing to get home following service abroad. That its coinage coincides with the beginnings of the ages of Enlightenment, and then of romanticism, suggests that words both come out of their historical circumstances and affect subsequent conditions. They respond to cultural stimuli and then create new feelings, or new articulations of older ones. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym distinguishes between two nostalgias, a “restorative” version, a longing for return to the favored place, and a “reflective” one, which is all about irreparable loss. But today, especially in post–World War II America, the original pain of nostalgia has often been replaced by the diluted pipe-dream pleasures of casual, lolling trips down memory lane.
I used to think I was the kind of person who relished, if not reveled in, nostalgia. I didn’t necessarily long for the good old days, but I enjoyed thinking about them. Looking back made me smile, even chuckle. People who become historians must have a similar temperament. Now I am not so sure about which direction I want to look in. And I have begun to think about nostalgia itself, what it means, what it promises, and what it denies.
The first epigraph to this chapter gives one explanation of nostalgia through a grammatical sleight of hand. Everything depends on whether we construe “balm of fear” as what a linguist would call a subjective or an objective genitive. Either nostalgia is the medication that dissolves anxieties, the salve that rubs clean our wounds, or it is what fear itself has doled out to trick us into a momentary release from fear, a condition all the more toxic once it triumphs and overwhelms us. Either nostalgia placates, or it deceives. My second epigraph, from Peter De Vries with his tongue only partly in cheek, reminds us that styles of remembering and forgetting always ch
ange and that the good old days were never what we thought, that every presumed golden age yearns for the one before it. Think of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, with befuddled, myopic, aw-shucks Owen Wilson borne back against the currents of time, learning as only a naive American can that all paradises are lost or that they never existed.
The prototypical homesick person was Homer’s Odysseus, cast up on Kalypso’s Ogygia and yearning for Ithaka. When we meet him, in book 5 of the Odyssey, he is gazing out at the sea, crying for wife and home, for a person and a place. Odysseus makes it back, of course. (So does Agamemnon, but with disastrous consequences.) Ruth, in the Old Testament, is also a mythical exile, but as a literary figure she is most touchingly rendered by Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn.” There is no biblical authority for this portrayal. Keats, born after the invention of the word, makes “nostalgia” an appropriate condition for his sad gleaner. The original Ruth would not have known the meaning of the word, even in her desire for the land of her Moabite tribesmen. Exile and displacement are eternal; nostalgia is a modern phenomenon, not a biblical one. Keats’s Ruth has a romantic disease.
Other nostalgias direct us not to specific places, or even to people except secondarily, but to a time, to the past. We long for our youth, which Robert Schumann depicted musically in Kinderszenen, his piano suite originally called Leichte Stücke, “easy pieces.” Schumann then changed his mind, and his title, when he realized that neither the pieces themselves nor the period to which they referred were as easy as we sometimes pretend.
Music is the perfect conveyor of nostalgia. Composers can resolve their chords, offer lulling harmonies; performers can soothe us gently. Ned Rorem once suggested provocatively that music makes us nostalgic for the future; that is, it makes us look forward to auditory resolutions. Music makes us cry. The visual arts seldom do this, if only because language, like sound in general, has a stronger hold on our deepest feelings than objects we see. Nostalgia means melancholy without pain, a penumbra of chronic, thoughtless homesickness, a bland watercolor wash of feelings, or a bittersweet longing for auld lang syne that might not have been so good in actuality. Think of the weepy parlor songs on either side of the so-called Gay Nineties that evoke distant times and places (“On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” “School Days,” practically anything by Stephen Foster), or even—continuing with music—those sentimental twentieth-century songs that anticipate a better future, in tunes that to today’s ears sound quaintly sweet, even though the words themselves may prefigure or intimate tragedy. Think of songs from World War I (“Till We Meet Again”) and World War II (“We’ll Meet Again”), whose virtually identical titles match their virtually identical sentiments. Death is not mentioned. The boys marched off to war; many did not return. The music allows us to remember the pieties and harmonies of what we idealize as simpler times. Cheerful tones mask the likelihood of destruction.
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