Monday, August 18, 2003
But those who have changed their minds will recall that they did not do so on their first visit. Then, on the contrary, they probably saw confirming evidence of their suspicions. Fat old men slumped asleep in the boxes, their stiff shirts buckling; their wives more interested in the clothes and faces in the other boxes than in the stage performance; souldful creatures needing haircuts standing in the back of the orchestra, or squatting on the floor, in self-conscious poses of rapture; on the stage a fat screechy woman pretending to be a demure little country bride, a little man with a potbelly and short jerking arms impersonating Don Juan, a chorus of aging painted ladies, and men with ridiculous matchstick legs in tight hose, making tired clumsy gestures at acting now and then; while the orchestra tootled and tinkled without cease one monotonous kind of sugary noise; that, in all likelihood, was his first impression of one of the miracles of human inspiration, Mozart's Don Giovanni.
Sir Thomas Beecham once said that Don Giovanni has never had an adequate performance - that is, a trope of singers capable of singing it, and an audience equipped to hear it. The run of singing artists does not produce in one generation enough voices to match Mozart's demands. The people who fill an opera house on any night are - people; some wonderful, some ordinary, some stupid, some insufferable, some dragged there by wives, some coming there to prove they are intelligent, some coming out of habit, some to tell the folks back home that they saw a New York opera, and some who love Mozart as they love the sunlight, and who are willing to endure all the coarseness and failure of another performance for the sake of the shafts of lovely light that despite all will break through now and then.
As performers and audience cannot usually rise to Mozart, the rabbi and his congregation cannot usually rise to Moses. That does not mean that the law of Moses is less sublime than world opinion acknowledges it to be, or that the forms of popular worship it has inspired are not capable of carrying its message down the years. The fact is that the synagogue, for all its human weaknesses, has done so. Every synagogue at every service has worshippers to whom the words and the ceremonies are transfusions of strength and intelligence; perhaps a few, perhaps many. The visitor's quick look cannot go inside their heads and hearts; in the good phrase of the jazz addicts, he does not dig what he is seeing.
-Herman Wouk
This Is My God
The above quotation from Herman Wouk's excellent book struck a chord with me. It made me think of all those New Age quick-fixers looking for enlightenment in a can. Read the newest by Shakti Gawain, think pure thoughts, buy the right flavor of incense, wear the right color crystal, and you too could walk the path of the Buddha - never mind that the Buddha went through all manner of privation before getting what he got - we can skip the tough part. Well, you can't. Depth in any human endeavour, whether mental, spiritual or physical comes from hard work and dedication. The greater the goal, the more sacrifice required to get there.
That's what's always bothered me about the modern "less filling" brands of "think nice thoughts" custom-made for the busy life religion. How much depth can there really be in something created by someone looking to produce product accessible to all that comes in a colorful cover and retails for under $12? Not much I'd warrant, but folks are quick to give up on the stuff that's lasted for thousands of years because it takes a bit of work to get through to the meat.
I remember when I first started to get into the martial arts. Visions of Bruce Lee and Kung-Fu theater dancing in my head, I spent many days down at the school learning the forms from an authentic Chinese fellow along with the rest of the granola-heads in Cambridge, Mass. Lots of Zen paperbacks were on hand. Meanwhile, the excercise was far from strenuous, tailored more for earning money for the instructor (nothing wrong with that in and of itself) than for producing martial-arts experts. But don't tell that to the students. Everyone knows only two things: That Tai-Chi translates into "Supreme Ultimate" and that nothing ever comes quickly. That second part sounds like it could be a good thing, but in reality it only plays into an unscrupulous instructor's hands since everyone's full up on the stories of the young students who spend 20 years slaving away just to get "master" to throw them a crumb...even if the crumb never comes. So there they all are, lightly waving their arms in the air, figuring tough work is doing ten deep-knee bends and imagining that using their inner eye to watch their blood circulate is going to make each of them a monster of self-defense, that if they just stick with it all that arm-flapping will lead to a higher spirit-connection with the universe.
Shaah, right. As if. Nothing of value comes cheap, or often without a lot of pain as well. Yeah, I know we've all heard stories of guys with weight-lifter's bodies who have never set foot in a gym, naturals at sport who don't even need to practice, and yes, maybe there is someone out there who, on waiting for the bus one day was suddenly struck - WHAMMO - with a transendental view of the spirit-world. Maybe he happened to be wearing the right colored crystal that day, attributed his enlightenment to that, wrote a book and made millions convincing hordes of dupes they could achieve the same thing.
Fact is, you likely aren't any of those people. I know I'm not. It would be nice to fully appreciate Mozart, though, wouldn't it?
Sounds like someone is STILL bitter about his tai chi days. Dude, your instructor was merely opening the door, it was up to you to walk the path. Its interesting that you chose the "hard" path over the "soft" one.
Snort! Yeah, he made me very aware of the door that lead out of his school to the path that lead elsewhere - a little poorer and a lot wiser.