(book review, West Coast Review of Books, 1981)

The Healing Energies of Music by Hal A. Lingerman (Theosophical Publishing House)

“Music as physical, emotional and mental therapy.”  The author, a self-described minister, counselor and teacher, tries to show how one can be a better person by listening to “certain pieces of music, played with timing and good taste,” and by avoiding the music that hurts his plants.  To illustrate this to us he begins with an “incident” from Greek history in which an enraged man, sword in hand, is reduced to lamb-like gentleness with a single chord plucked from a lyre.  If you believe that, then this book might be for you.

Lingerman’s approach is based around a strange mesh of the bible, astrology, sixties-style mysticism, and what are apparently Theosophical ideas of Sound and Light that are never really explained.  The music is not explained technically at all, but rather in terms of what instruments are good for the physical, mental, spritual and soul “bodies.”  Compositions, too, are categorized this way:  the physical body, for instance, benefits when it hears marches, fanfares, “Oh What A Beautiful Morning,” Liberace, the soundtrack to “Born Free”, and Johnny Cash.

He then drifts into how we can control our moods with music.  To release anger we should beat our rugs to “Ride of the Valkyries;” or calm down to the strains of Bach or Andy Williams.  Lingerman, again, recommends Johnny Cash because “the tremendous outpouring of feeling” on his live prison albums (perhaps the cheers after “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”?) are “testimony to the basic longings of mankind, no matter how seemingly distorted, for some ineffable union in the Spirit.”  Lists of music are provided for our various moods.  Interestingly, lust or physical attraction is not one of them.

It gets really hazy after this.  Apparently, we are all either air, water, fire, or earth; maybe a combination thereof, and must carefully select our music accordingly.  He does this for us, with a mixture of religion and pop psychology—all based on the idea that we can know our exact temperment (which can never be changed).  He tells us which composers had which temperments.  Apparently, we are supposed to stick listening-wise to those composers with our own temperments.  If we don’t, who knows what could happen….

The man’s approach is patronizing in the extreme.  We cannot make any decisions for ourselves musically without his guiding light.  He tells us to first take the dust off our stylus.  To say thank you, literally to say “Thank you” to the music for playing for us.  He tells us what to play for our kids (“Scheherazade” and “Tubby the Tuba”), what to play for our fetuses, why we should not play Beethoven and Tchaikovsky after one another (it could upset us), or play much Tchaikovsky at all (it will upset us).  That rock music irregular rhythms (irregular?) will hurt us as well as our plants—except, research shows, that of the Beatles.  That digital recordings are not as therapeutic as regular recordings.  That listening to international music helps make us “planetary citizens”:  the American selection is an album each of Navajo songs, “negro” spirituals, and “American Civil War Songs of the North and South” as sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

I could go on and on.  Though the “light” selections go from “Whistle While You Work” by the above named choir to the Captain and Tenille and Barry Manilow, and that “the ‘Sound of Music’ is one of the greatest pieces of music ever composed,” the classical selections in general are very good, by many and varied composers.  But we are given Stravinsky’s “Firebird” but not “The Rite of Spring;” Liszt’s “preludes” but not the “Mephisto Waltz.”  And there is no jazz listed or even mentioned at all.  Too many rhythms, too many time changes, too much threat.  He gives you music as heroin: clean off your needle, say “Thank you” and float away into the euphoric nothingness of “The Sound of Music.”  This is not therapy.  It is escape.

(unpublished essay, 2008)

Back when I was in my first semester as a college freshman I took a public speaking class. For my final speech my topic was on the very hip topic of why we shouldn’t have dropped that Bomb on Japan. I put a lot of work into it, and my arguments were pretty adamant, and even though my delivery was mumbly and nervous, the writing was no doubt sharp and self-assured. It always was.

But I wish I had known ahead of time that the popular, liberal, mild mannered little instructor—one of the most beloved teachers in the school—had been a rifleman in one of the divisions scheduled to hit the beaches in Kyushu, the planned first phase of the final defeat of Japan. Let’s just say he didn’t agree with my speech. It was the only time all semester he had raised his voice in class, maybe the only time ever. All his calm public speaking demeanor caved in. I remember his angry “Bullshit!” About how he and his buddies had all considered themselves dead men. How the bomb had saved his life and the lives of thousands of soldiers from the suicidally fanatical Japanese who, every man, woman and child of them, would die in defense of their emperor. You could hear the fear, repressed these past thirty years, filling his mind. He was visibly trembling, his voice cracked with emotion and constrained outrage, a total what-the-fuck-do-you-know moment. The class sat in shocked silence. After a minute, maybe two, he collected himself and was teacher again. He even regained his sweet charm. I returned to my seat. The other students looked away; some of the girls smiled wanly. Oh man.  I felt like the Bomb had been dropped on me. And I deserved every kiloton of it.

He gave me a generous B. But that was the end of my public speaking career.

(Unpublished essay inspired by images from Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral Train, 2000)

I was eleven years old.  Just done a report on Bobby Kennedy. Irish Catholic on my Mom’s side and raised that way, we adored the Kennedy’s. Went to bed knowing he’d won. Woke up and went out and picked up the paper. A tiny item on the front page mentioned he’d been shot. There was fear in the house. That inchoate, lightning bolt fear—Not again.

He was dead sometime that afternoon.

I’ll never forget the funeral train. Its televised passage took days crossing the country; gut-wrenching, tear-streaked days of despair and patriotism and just regular people crowding unbeckoned by the trackside, silent. They prayed, saluted, cried, or just watched. Very very still. Town after town. Village after village. Rockwell’s America, Faulkner’s America, Robert Johnson’s and John Philip Sousa’s America. One after another.

Months later we visited the grave site, as we had his brother’s earlier, who had then lay under an earthen pile. Now John was protected by solemn concrete armor, while his brother, the frail one, lay still under a heap of earth, covered with flowers and marked with flickering candles. Mom shushed us kids, and prayed silently.

Sometimes something is torn out of a kid, and never replaced.

(from a lost draft of a letter written in 1992 that disappeared from my neophyte fingers into the bowels of my C drive to be rediscovered much later, 1992)

The violence never came near our place, though the building I work in was right in the thick of things. Indeed, I was one of the last people to get out of the building before it got caught up in the rioting, mobs of Mexicans and Salvadorans, for the most part, swirling about looting and burning. Someone looking down from the roof of the building watched as a huge black guy drove up, got out of his car and smashed in all the windows of the Bullock’s Wilshire department store with a sledge hammer, then got back in his car and drive off. The locals  just swarmed in, stealing everything:  dresses worth thousands, art, jewelry. It’s an original Frank Lloyd Wright designed building and beautiful, but a warren of the obnoxious rich and it’s hard to feel too much pity but it’s always a shame to see such an architectural masterpiece so stricken. The next day— actually three days later, the area was a bit of a no mans land for a while— it’s windows shattered and tattered remains of drapes fluttering in the breeze, shit and rubble and broken up furniture strewn about the sidewalks I thought of those old WW1 photos of the stoven-in Clothe Hall at Ypres in Flanders, gutted by the German artillery. But then it’s always good to see things in the light of history; it gives them a certain perspective they otherwise lack— a three dimensionality if I may….  

You actually saw parts of town that are no more— the burning in the areas about where you had yer little accident were incredible— vast, like fire bombings in WW2. Hollywood Boulevard took a hit, too, and they stole Madonna’s bra, which is probably the reason that she had photos taken fucking that dog [probably not, actually.].

(2011)

We were in St. Charles County this summer, driving along the Mississippi River through a hellacious thunder storm. It was pretty exciting. We’d been driving along a little county road for miles and miles, which at one point led us out onto a gravel road that went for miles through the marshes, and the plan was to take this little ferry back across the river into Illiinos and enter St Louis from the east, crossing the giant bridge there with the arch aglow in the twilight. Seemed very romantic.  The rain put an end to that. The wind was blowing hard and the river was bucking and foaming and the ferry,  just  a little two car thing, was tied up at the dock. We drove on, slowly, and when we entered St. Charles County I got a creeped out feeling. I know a guy locked up there. He was a real hip cat in the day….popular college DJ, member of a hip noisy band, he knew everybody. He worked where I worked and was well liked, made quite a presence. Then came the crack up…we watched him disintegrate. Who knows why. The real world is harsh but you can’t hide in the underground all your life. Well, he got weird, lost his job, his wife left him, he headed east, wound up in St. Louis and it all went completely to hell from there. He rotted in a St Charles jail for a couple years. He was rotting there that blustery day we drove along the river. Gave me a weird feeling. It lifted soon enough. The bed that night felt good and I slept deeply. When we passed through St. Charles County again the next day it was sunny and I wasn’t creeped out at all. Kansas City beckoned with a night of blues and barbeque, and we drove straight west to get there.

The whole cephalopod universe is so amazing. That fantastic communication system of the squid. The intelligence. Especially of octopuses. It has always seemed so sad to me that they are constrained by such a brief life. If only they could have delayed sexual maturity a decade or so….with that brain the implications are astounding. Alas, I imagine the nature of their reproduction strategy precludes that from ever happening, it’s just the one quick shot and then death. But if only…..

Sigh….

I must learn not to ruin my whole day in ruminations over critters with whom I haven’t been close enough to exchange christmas cards since the pre-cambrian.

(2004)

This morning in front of our place on way to work I stepped over a column of argentine ants (the omnipresent little black fuckers). I stopped, briefcase in hand, and reached down and stuck a finger gently in their midst. They swirled about it, confused. Once some had clambored aboard, I stood up and stared at my digit intently, hoping one would bite me, as I read late last night that they actually do have a tiny, if ineffectual, bite. They never bit. Then I happened to notice a neighbor staring at me…. The life of an amateur myrmecologist is a lonely and misunderstood one.