I had a highly complicated scaffolded reaction to a spring cleaning talk that I’m attempting to unravel. It led to a revelation, and that I’ll try to unravel too. It took place in a series of metaphors – which made me happy, because I have trouble with stark simplicity. The metaphors laid out in synagogue yesterday situated the concept of housekeeping to an egg within an egg – fine in itself, as it went from messiness to holiness in a single jump. I delighted in that lofty jump, although I came to a roadblock with the structure that Rabbi Flam sketched out.
How to convey. Listening to the rabbi’s first mention of housekeeping – this is the season of removing flour, crumbs and junk from the kitchen and cleaning the home for Passover – I felt slightly queasy. Order = holiness? Here, we part. If you’re Venus, I’m Mars. I’m simply compositionally different. But something spoke to me. As I was cleaning kitchen shelves this morning, listening to a comedy news show and reflecting on how Jews clean with a feather for Passover, about my mother, about the history of housekeepers, mental hygiene and the like, I came to certain clarities about my own nature.
I looked at my curated notion of decorating – the piled magazines on a bronze table, books on the wooden antique bench, the stacks of travel pamphlets, the drawings, boxes, etc. The proliferation of contrasting patterns, the color. Curious photographs. My structure has its own particular structure.
This paradigm of my house – all those wandering rooms filled with bright, conversational curiosities – also resembles my mind. Having given up the fiction that I might become a neatnik, or “organized,” I can only thin and balance this thriving chaos, the paradoxes and prisms of thought where voices and objects are somehow part and parcel of each other, part of a metaphor that contained the banal and cosmic, in synagogue and in my mind and hasn’t quite thinned out yet.
The extremes of capitalism require a lot of forgetting, the erasing of suffering experience. Satisfaction is calling, it is immediate, exists in the present and demands our full attention. We can pull along conflict for only so long, for it will sure get in the way of our satiation.
In Los Angeles, I had to forget that entire tent city I’d seen five minutes before arriving at a gorgeous art space, Hauser and Wirth, forget the waste spaces of highway with people like driftwood, to get to the art. The scale of homeless population reflected the west – vast, long vistas I wasn’t prepared for. We’d landed an hour earlier. Welcome to confusion.
The art, fortunately, didn’t exclude life – Annie Leibovitz’s retrospective was excessive and marked by raw vital messiness, mostly of another era of culture clash, the 70s, both seemingly more violent and more innocent. The humanness of desire and struggle was poignant, marking a swath of human history. In the maelstrom was music, drunkenness, ecstasy, sadness, communion.
It took me a while to get onto the thing about LA – the wastespaces and no-places are the thing, and the places where people gather to eat, drink, play are little happenings.
Tending towards extremes myself, I was convinced by evening that a great tent-like restaurant where we can all gather and eat together would solve America’s arid abstract polarization. If everyone could eat sparkling food, quit the virtual on-line highways and dig into the pleasure of our common earthiness, wouldn’t we be better off? The name of one tent-like restaurant, Bavel, may stem from Babel and while it’s evolved cuisine, it’s also a big tent with a mezuzah on the entry wall, staffed by hip Asian bartenders, women slugging bread dough in the kitchen, the whole all array of hipster humanity, where old Jews can come in for a bowl of hummus and foodies can choose crudo scallops with pomegranate molasses, citrus and serrano oil. All the flavors were a revelation; it dissolved the day’s tensions.
One could argue that a meal, a one, is another powerful present that allows us to go on. And we discussed over dinner, aren’t these accomodations akin to survival techniques of people in truly repressed regimes and camps? The open consciousness scoops up what it can.
Last week we endured the Cohen hearings and two blanketing snow storms, along with our local Poets Resist. My conditioned instinct is to laugh – poor poetry! — only to be replaced by a memory of our reading’s bright presence. It was neither a blip nor a weak , not an insertion, interruption but a solid thing standing on its own alongside the forces of nature and politics. In the melodramas and storms, it was rather steady, unforced and unmannered, the ongoingness of poets reading and singing people they hope are listening, but singing nonetheless in the space their words create.
I think of the different tones and approaches taken by our nine poets: the whispery, the off-slant, the eloquent wit, the darkly ardent. The open pleas, the laments. The open door to tenderness. The eight-minute slot per poet added to an intensity of poets concentrating their meaning and audience listening hard to what they had to say. That focus ensured that the words left their mark.
Thank you to Peter Covino, Tina Cane, A.H. Avant, Amy Pickworth, Marcia Ranglin-Vassell, Rosalynde Vas Dias, Erin Perfect, Joanna Brown! Thank you, Riffraff for the emotional and physical space!
Home, for Syrians exiled by war, is gone, irretrievable, a lost paradise just as it is, at the same time, a place forever unattainable and mythic. Listening to concerts this week by Kinan Azmeh, the Syrian clarinetist and composer, I was reminded of the mystical desire of Arabic love poetry. The object is unattainable. The wonderful paradox is that in evoking absence, art walked right in and created presence.
Azmeh’s music, presented by Community MusicWorks at local centers, evokes wistful longing with sighs, bends, microtonal wavering and high solemnity of Arab string exhortations — and Kinan’s clarinet wrangles with clarity and fading memory. The feeling is raw, open and shared. Mohammed al Shawaf, a recent immigrant, jumped up spontaneously to read his own poem gathering at Dorcas Institute, a resettlement organization. I scrawled down some of the lines as Kinan translated it into English. It’s about a nightingale who was encountering a displaced poet (apologies for the scrappy transcription!).
“Nightingale, I saw your sad face from the East…Are you a refugee like me? How did you leave heaven on earth? Everything is different, everything destroyed. Did you bring anything from home? You have awoken my feeling…. I promised you, Damascus, I would never forget you.”
The unexpected continued to pop up. Azmeh described how he composed part of a suite, 139th Street, melding Arabic and Hispanic cultures. But while Kinan opened the door to merengue in his Harlem brownstone, klezmer walked onto the stage. He dedicated the wonderful Syrian Wedding piece to “all the Syrians who managed to fall in love during the past eight years. In spite of barrel bombs, chemical attacks, utter destruction. Love is one human right no one can take away from us.”
Last week I presented a project that seemed unlikely to exist and equally unlikely to succeed, but it managed to do both. It was a live poetry performance called Mirrors. In spite of the simple title, every time I tried to explain to the people I’d enlisted to read, we all got tangled up. Three groups of four pairs, with ten-minute breaks for discussion — too much information! Just dive in! Which we did.
I chose bits of writing from observant feminist/literary scholar of Torah, Avivah Zornberg, whose verbal pyrotechnics and all-around genre-bending work I’ve long admired. I placed these powerful excerpts of midrash opposite a selection of my poems. Zornberg’s dense text, out of context, next to my dense text … a case of heightening complexity to obtain clarity?
The idea was to put them side by side and let the sparks fly. They’re not one-to-one correspondences, more like juxtapositions, points of departure, spiky soul mates. Zornberg’s probing of the unconscious of a Torah passage, her eliciting of emotion inside discontinuities gaps and white spaces left room for my poetic eruptions about existential condition.
Did they tango? Well, yes. Rumblings, premonitions, regret, amazement, praise – voices were liberated in the room, a choral celebration of the many.
It was a big personal experiment. I brought all my energy, then right afterwards collapsed into a miserable cold. I’ve been out most of the week. The work was ready but it took a lot of energy to be ready. I spent the week recovering from my readiness. I am renewed, ready to be ready again.
Thanks to Alan Flam, Louis Gitlin and the Soulful Shabbat contingent!
Kinan Azmeh is an existential wanderer and a supreme musician who finds homes around the world. He was riding the New York subway, just back from a musical tour in China, when he described the genesis of a piece he’ll perform, along with the MusicWorks Collective, during his upcoming residency at Community MusicWorks.
Azmeh’s composition The Fence, The Rooftop, and the Distant Sea began with a moment. Years ago, Azmeh was sitting on a rooftop in Beirut, Lebanon. He was staring out past a fence at the distant sea. As his mind skimmed the waves, he entertained a series of images from Damascus, the hometown he’d been separated from. How far was home, or how close? He used a mental map to reconstruct ways of getting from his parents’ house to the opera house, where the traffic lights would be, which corners were where. Later, he composed music for the four-sectioned piece in which two characters turn over the complex notions of what is home, when you have it, when you lose it, how you recreate or reconstitute it.
“In the beginning of the piece, the search for home is complicated and fraught,” he says. “As the music continues, one realizes the best are simplest memories; the music ends almost in the form of a lullaby.”
It’s an extraordinary and consoling resolution that he shares in concerts for audiences widely and happily varied – at refugee camps for Syrian and other displaced people, at schools, at prestigious spots like Carnegie Hall. Azmeh’s musical meditations on home/not home have been the product of discontinuity, years of reflection, radical turns of life both by choice and by fate.
Born in 1976, Azmeh began studying clarinet at age six in Damascus. After studies in high school, he left Syria to study at Juilliard School in New York. His musical reach was always inclusive. He was at home with classical greats: “Bach, Mozart and Brahms weren’t staples on the Syrian radio. But as a child I drank it in. Mozart is equally mine. It didn’t matter if he was Austrian or German, he was Syrian too.” In New York, he won prizes for virtuoso playing, performed with the Syrian National orchestra, Daniel Baremboim’s West-Eastern Divan orchestra, Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road. He plays with City Band, a consortium of creative musicians who cross borders and integrate different musical genres.
“Bach, Mozart and Brahms weren’t staples on the Syrian radio. But as a child I drank it in. Mozart is equally mine. It didn’t matter if he was Austrian or German, he was Syrian too.”
When the Syrian uprising began, it caused Azmeh tremendous suffering and an inability to return home. The pressure crushed his creative juices: he couldn’t pick up the clarinet for a year. “What was going on was way deeper than the music I was trying to make. The need for the arts was too complicated for me to address, no less reflect on.”
Azmeh eventually came back to his own tool for self-expression — his playing and composing. “I decided to use it as loudly as possible. Even though I realize it’s a soft form and I realize the limitations of it.”
The haunting refrain, “What is home?” came up again in 2017. Azmeh found himself unable to return to his adopted country, United States, when President Trump issued a travel ban on Syrians, and he was on tour. He felt the outrage, double sting, and fear of being exiled again. This was an irony for someone like Azmeh, who believes so staunchly in the openness of cultures, the shared vocabularies of music. “I don’t see barriers or much difference between musical genres. Of course there are different musical vocabularies, but at heart, it’s all the same.”
Essentially, Kinan Azmeh feels most at home when he’s playing music, and the powerful emotion he conveys through the heart of his instrument. The clarinet is close in sound to the human voice, and Azmeh’s playing is informed by familiar folk musics, for instance, klezmer, Greek, Turkish, big band jazz. He can blow off the roof or go silky and soulful. Listen to the meditative care with which he describes playing a wind instrument: “When I play one note, I feel the reed vibrate. There is sound coming out of silence. Every time I play I’m giving birth to something. I’m fighting silence when I start breathing, then when the breath stops, the sound stops.”
Ultimately, Azmeh’s immersion in music and experience of exploring identity has led to wisdom in liberating oneself from strictures. He tells a story of escaping labels: “First I was called a young clarinetist from Damascus. Then when I wasn’t young, I was a clarinetist. Then a musician from Damascus, then a Syrian musician. The next step would be a musician. Yo-Yo Ma said to me, ‘there’s just one additional step to take: you become a human.’”
Interview by Jill Pearlman
Interview done for Community MusicWorks and shared from its blog. For information about Kinan’s residency March 27-30 in Providence, please visit http://www.communitymusicworks.org
“And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you.” Most of us can hear Martin Luther King’s thunder and cadence from his speech in Memphis the day before his death in 1968. He knew – a voice was whispering in his prophet’s ear, an angel pressing against his heart – that he would not be crossing the finish line. Moses, the prophet who led his people out from a narrow place of oppression, also was open to the terrific presence of destiny; he, like King, only saw it from the mountain top.
Those of us who are still here: we are still, always arriving. We’re not in the Promised Land, that’s for sure. All we can really do, is to be in the becoming. Still, always arriving. We’ve been still, always arriving since we left the ennui of Paradise. We throw questions, try to dominate, cure. We try to stare down the enemy though, as if in a mirror, we’ll see our own face in its acts of aggression. Learning to love the questions themselves, rather than the answers relaxes the drive to conquer. As King said, mental freedom, illumination can move things.
Today also on the Jewish calendar: Tu B’Shevat, festival of the trees. Today trees are sheathed in ice in New England. The sap is there, held in tension, in suspense, waiting, always arriving.
I am happy to see my poem, Armageddon Blues, in the winter issue of Salamander. The poem is full of irony and tenderness for the challenges of everyday life in times of siege. The unthinkable seems to suck all the energy out of the room. I see certain personal hallmarks: I play with dialog and dialectic, two voices, two positions in this extended address (which is one sentence). I explore a subject of continuing fascination: the ways that art speaks, with fragility but force, to macro political forces. And in order to insure human values along with survival, the necessity to guarding one’s own place of beauty and goodness.
In spite of my jaded self,
wearing Ecclesiastes as a badge
sewn onto velvet sleeves,
I laugh.
The sky knows no
calendar. It doesn’t give
a whiff for New Years.
But damn, those clouds,
puffed sweetly across the sky
seem new. They’re tipped
in mauve on a sky cleansed and blue.
The horizon of our gentle city
is pressed with elemental
shining cubes.
Nothing new under the sun?
Of course. The old cranky sage,
if scratched, would admit this:
Goodness is recycled.
