Jacques Brel is Alive and Here

What I listen to usually tells me how I am feeling and what I might be thinking. For almost four days now—during this week of the impeachment trial of Trump-- I have played the music of Jacques Brel. I had learned about Brel sometimes in the late 1960s when I took Renee to the Village production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Later, Judy Collins sang “Sons of” and “Marieke” on albums I owned.  This week via Alexa I’ve played Jacques Brel in his original French, though I do not speak French even a little fluently; listened to the original cast recording from 1968, and the later revival dating from 2016. Since I have over the years listened occasionally to the 1968 recording, I understood much of Brel’s original.

     Why Brel now?  The cynicism that drips from his lyrics seems appropriate to the time. In the White House sits a criminal, a misogynist, an anti-Semitic would-be King, and the news I hate to follow reports that the Republicans will exonerate him of all misdeeds though they have to know that he is guilty as hell is hot. Worse, I fear his re-election and the final loss of our democracy. Cynicism expresses disillusionment, disenchantment, a belief that deeds are effected by selfish self-interest at the expense of honest value; a disbelief in human sincerity and goodness.

     If you are at all appalled by the Republican Party; if you are at all terrified by the man in the White House; if you are concerned for our democracy; listen to Jacques Brel. He does not offer solace, but he will, like homeopathic tinctures, relieve some of the horrible pain of the times. Though the final song of the album and the production, “If we only have love” seems a prayer and I cling to it as an only hope. Though I have little faith.

22 January

The date is only 22^nd January and the time is approximately 5:00pm, but the skies have light in them yet. Only one month from the winter solstice and the world begins to be ready to come alive again.  We are not yet at the moment of thaw: Thoreau’s glorious cry, “Walden was dead and is alive again!” but we are getting closer. Oh, it is wrong to consider that in winter the earth is dead: even now outside my windows squirrels forage about for their meals and carry leaves up the trees to their winter nests. Birds sit impatiently on naked branches, but they sit nonetheless. Inside, I sit in a room lit only by the gentle fire on the hearth listening to Anne Hills’ album Bittersweet Dreams and typing what ought to become the most recent post. Soon it will be the longest day of the year.

     The dark comforts actually, though I am glad that there is yet light outside. The lack of light leaves the room at peace. Even the dimmed ceiling track lights would pierce to consciousness too directly. And yet, paradoxically, I have lit my current darkened perspective with the computer. As if I could not be alone or stay too long in the dark. I don’t know if the technologies--for me, the phone and computer--have inspired in me the desire to be always accompanied and in the world, or that the world has demanded that I be always in some company, even if that companionship is to be virtual.

     I awaken every day with anxiety and a discomforting queasiness in my stomach. I feel as if I am physically ill. The Trump reign has made the world more unsafe, more precarious, and I fear every day that he will destroy us physically as he has already poisoned the civil life of not only the United States but of the world. The stench that emanates from the White House pollutes not merely the air we breathe but the entire social fabric by which we live. I am soiled not merely by by the policies of his very corrupt administration but by his repulsive discourse. He is no more than a bully and ironically only the Democrats are prepared to confront him. Trumps’s policies and those whose agendas those policies support have endangered our lives and that of our children all for the sake of his engorged ego and their economic greed. He has cowered the Republican Party to align with his deceit and I am disgusted by their cowardices, by their incivilities, by their unthinking defense of Trump. This is not the party of Lincoln; we are not far from the fascisms of the mid-last century. The impeachment trial in the Senate is a farce organized by Mitchell McConnell, one of the most unprincipled man I have understood in American history.

     Another meaningless rant that changes nothing and only aggravates my further. The fire needs replenishing. And I should eat dinner. Listening to Judy Collins 3 and “Anathea.” It suits the time.

Stereo Speakers

Last evening and into today (when I continue to listen to the McGarrigle Sisters and now Pentangle) I appreciated the difference between dear Alexa and the speakers I used to own and for which in my more youthful days  I assiduously, almost religiously shopped. I remember walking into listening rooms where the salesperson (then, always a male) turned up the volume on a sequence of speakers in the acoustically designed listening space that was nothing like my living room. No matter which set of speakers I might purchase (and I purchased not a few over the years) in my home the music would not sound nearly as clear or as loud as it did in the store. Nevertheless, in my living room the volume could be turned up just below the level that would bring in the complaint of the neighbors  and I would feel contained and enclosed in the music. Drugs were not even necessary though then, though they were always welcome.

     Last evening, however, the music emanated from my Echo and though it played clearly and even in multiple rooms, it also played unidirectionally and narrow. The music didn’t surround me: rather, it came at me as did the laser beam of light from one of those technological pointers that speakers employ in public lectures or teachers use in classrooms. Last evening, I still loved the music but I missed the experience of being wrapped in it. I missed the speakers. No matter how high I now turn up the volume—and there were technological and physical impediments--the result was inevitably inadequate.

     I want to link this experience with the habit of late of people watching movies on their television sets, though I acknowledge that the size of the screens has been increasing regularly. Nevertheless, the television is not a movie screen nor is the living room a movie theater. Sitting in the cinema, even in alternative sites such as mini- even micro-cinemas (for example, the Trylon Micro-Cinema in Minneapolis) to view the screen eyes move out in a widening angle, but on the television and computer displays the eyes move into a narrowing field of vision. And of course, the sound quality even with home theater equipment cannot equal that of the cinema speakers. Experience is reduced in scope and intensity, I think.

     It seems to me that life has been steadily contracting. I consider the difference between reading the newspaper on the subways of New York and now reading it on a smart phone or tablet. I know how messy newsprint was and still is, and how getting to work required a quick washing of hands before heading to the office and desk. I enjoyed reading print copy of The New York Times, but even the Daily News could be read when properly engineered on the subway. How I loved the experience, then—folding the paper longitudinally to read both sides of page one, and then folding back the first page to reveal the left column of page two and on the opposite side the right hand columns of page three. Opening the folded paper and bending them back would reveal the right columns of page two and the left columns of page three. Then, the paper still folded laterally I would turn the page over to expose the inner columns of the next pages and proceed to read them in the same fashion! And so on and so on—until one reached the editorial and op-ed pages at the end of the First Section. And then to move on to the next sections. As for me, when I moved from New York there were only two sections of the Times.

     I am somewhat sad that the world has narrowed so dramatically. Mea Culpa, I click on my Times app on the phone during the day, though I still have the print copy delivered during the weekdays. I like the feel of the paper and the expansiveness of the pages spread before me on the dining table. And I detest the news.