This is a great story, a great book - Steve Lopez is a LA Times reporter who sees a homeless man, Nathaniel Ayers, playing his violin in a freeway tunnel on his way to work. He needs an idea for a story, and decides to stop and see if this might be one. He is captivated by the character and the contradictions he encounters in Nathaniel. Nathaniel is playing a violin with just two strings. Yet, somehow, he is producing music - and as Steve gets to know him, the mystery of how truly gifted he is, and how he came to be living on the streets and playing in a tunnel is slowly unraveled. It is a journey not to be missed - it is real, but astonishing, to follow the progression of events (I won't spoil it by telling you!). At the same time, Lopez manages to meet and talk with members of Nathaniel's family, as well as friends and teachers from his earlier life.
A few key facts won't hurt: Nathaniel suffers from schizophrenia; he once studied music at Julliard; and his anchor to sanity seems to be music. Lopez is a reporter with a nice family and a nice house. He loves going after a story, and he loves wrapping up the loose ends and moving on. But with Nathaniel, it is not that neat, and it is not at all easy for Lopez to know what is coming. It is a dance, and a roller-coaster ride; it is costly , it is not easy, it is not familiar and it is not comfortable.
So while the role of music in Nathaniel's healing is huge and soul-satisfying, I like to remember that the unlikely friendship between these two men also played a leading role. The strength of that connection allowed them both to grow far beyond what they imagined possible, each in his own way. For Nathaniel, well, a universe has opened up - or so it seems to me, to us. Yet there is no pretense in this book, no imagining that only good things will follow. It is that real.
In conclusion - read it!!
The Soloist was featured by the libraries in Philadelphia and that is how I knew about it. Steve Lopez was once a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
I found this video , on youtube with the real Steve Lopez and the real Nathaniel Ayers - celebrating Beethoven's birthday, I think. It was so cool to see them that I decided not to look for the movie trailer after all.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Music and human survival
I just came across this quote:
from a welcome address by Karl Paulnack of the Mankato Symphony Orchestra in Mankate, Minnesota. I highly recommend that you take a minute, when you have a minute, to read the entire address. I will be late for work because I did this!
But I am struck by the power, the beauty, and the truth of music. And, I think that this address represents a turning point for me in how I view music in my life.
I will soon be posting a review of a book about a homeless schizophrenic man whose only real anchor to beauty and sanity is music. The book is "The Soloist". I think that his story captures a truth that we can all recognize. By a very strange coincidence, I stumbled across this quote just now, and the truth of it struck me even before I read the entire address. Once I did, I realized that music can not be peripheral in life... Which is GREAT!!! I now have a good excuse to move what was once labelled "Art and Entertainment" into center stage!!!
Happy Tuesday!!
I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds.
from a welcome address by Karl Paulnack of the Mankato Symphony Orchestra in Mankate, Minnesota. I highly recommend that you take a minute, when you have a minute, to read the entire address. I will be late for work because I did this!
But I am struck by the power, the beauty, and the truth of music. And, I think that this address represents a turning point for me in how I view music in my life.
I will soon be posting a review of a book about a homeless schizophrenic man whose only real anchor to beauty and sanity is music. The book is "The Soloist". I think that his story captures a truth that we can all recognize. By a very strange coincidence, I stumbled across this quote just now, and the truth of it struck me even before I read the entire address. Once I did, I realized that music can not be peripheral in life... Which is GREAT!!! I now have a good excuse to move what was once labelled "Art and Entertainment" into center stage!!!
Happy Tuesday!!
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Leaving the Saints - Escape from intellectual captivity?
Margaret Beck's memoir, "Leaving the Saints" is very much a personal account of difficult life that is still unfolding. In my opinion, it was written in the midst of a healing process that had not completely taken hold. Margaret Beck is the daughter of the late Hugh Nibley, the highly respected chief apologist of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. As the book opens, Margaret is confronting her father in a carefully staged drama. He is, at the time, in his nineties and has recently been released from the hospital. He is clearly physically frail. Mentally, he is a wall. She has raised once again her allegations that he sexually abused her as a child. He completely rejects this – he denies that any such thing could have occurred. She has asked a friend to hide and listen in (in the next room) because she wants this conversation to be her evidence. The lack of trust goes back a long time, it would appear. Still, one of them must be wrong, but neither one will give an inch.
How can this be? Shouldn't we expect more, from two clearly intelligent adults who supposedly had a firm moral upbringing? I suppose that this is one reason that I continued to be interested in the story. I wanted to know more about these two individuals – who they were, how they got to this point, and how the tension would be resolved.
What we find out is this: Margaret was raised, and later married, in the Mormon church. She speaks as someone who is now outside the church, because she is – in the course of her memoir she describes what it was like to breath the intellectual air of Harvard University, where she and her husband have gone to pursue graduate studies. While at Harvard, she begins to examine her beliefs and those of her church with a new lens of rational thinking – it is her own personal enlightenment. Her husband and good friend is with her and they are both seriously questioning parts, at least, of their former faith and its doctrinal basis. Which is to say, they have serious doubts about the basis of their entire lives.
The trouble arises when Margaret becomes pregnant and it is clear that the child will have Downs' Syndrome. At this point, the couple decides to leave Harvard, where abortion would be expected, to head back to Utah where the kind of support they will need is assured. While there, Margaret eventually ends up teaching at Brigham Young University. And this, it seems, is where the troubling signs that she has noted along the way with LDS leadership and control are shown to be true indicators of serious trouble. I won't include the details here – but after several incidents where it appears that doctrinal conformity is valued above actual scholarship, the damage is done – both to Margaret and to the reader. I say damage because the implication is clear and damaging. Margaret presents herself as one who is seeking the truth. She continues to try to piece things together, to make allowances, and to assess what is really going on here. But in reality, the only facts she presents are her own reports of what happened. And this is the nature of a memoir – people get to tell their own story. Period.
But I was disappointed. I felt set up and let down, because I thought that someone as scholarly – both from an upbringing among the intellectual elite of a major denomination, and from her own academic credentials - as Marget Beck would enrich her personal story with witnesses, references from verifiable sources, and corroborating accounts. But as she tells it, it is all inside, hidden from public view - so there is none of that.
Ultimately, I was disappointed in Margaret because I wanted her to be a heroine, or at least to solve the mystery for me - but instead she was a real person with many doubts and weaknesses, learning to speak the best version truth that she can access. And there are wounds to heal. She is sure that the abuse really happened. Her father never gives an inch in denying that. It is remarkable to me that there is so little movement towards a point of reconciliation about this, as if forgiveness, compassion, and love for one another were not even in the picture. But these are very difficult, they take time, and they require honesty and bold love (see Dan Allendar's book for more on that!). So we, as readers, are left with doubt, and with more questions than we had at the beginning.
I must say that I have not read many “leaving the faith” stories – usually I identify more with those trying to find a sensible way in...so I am grateful for Margaret's account of losing her early convictions and continued seeking, all the more so because there is no apparent tidy resolution at the end. Just more questions....One of them being, can you really trust someone who would treat her own father like that, in his old age – regardless of the past???
How can this be? Shouldn't we expect more, from two clearly intelligent adults who supposedly had a firm moral upbringing? I suppose that this is one reason that I continued to be interested in the story. I wanted to know more about these two individuals – who they were, how they got to this point, and how the tension would be resolved.
What we find out is this: Margaret was raised, and later married, in the Mormon church. She speaks as someone who is now outside the church, because she is – in the course of her memoir she describes what it was like to breath the intellectual air of Harvard University, where she and her husband have gone to pursue graduate studies. While at Harvard, she begins to examine her beliefs and those of her church with a new lens of rational thinking – it is her own personal enlightenment. Her husband and good friend is with her and they are both seriously questioning parts, at least, of their former faith and its doctrinal basis. Which is to say, they have serious doubts about the basis of their entire lives.
The trouble arises when Margaret becomes pregnant and it is clear that the child will have Downs' Syndrome. At this point, the couple decides to leave Harvard, where abortion would be expected, to head back to Utah where the kind of support they will need is assured. While there, Margaret eventually ends up teaching at Brigham Young University. And this, it seems, is where the troubling signs that she has noted along the way with LDS leadership and control are shown to be true indicators of serious trouble. I won't include the details here – but after several incidents where it appears that doctrinal conformity is valued above actual scholarship, the damage is done – both to Margaret and to the reader. I say damage because the implication is clear and damaging. Margaret presents herself as one who is seeking the truth. She continues to try to piece things together, to make allowances, and to assess what is really going on here. But in reality, the only facts she presents are her own reports of what happened. And this is the nature of a memoir – people get to tell their own story. Period.
But I was disappointed. I felt set up and let down, because I thought that someone as scholarly – both from an upbringing among the intellectual elite of a major denomination, and from her own academic credentials - as Marget Beck would enrich her personal story with witnesses, references from verifiable sources, and corroborating accounts. But as she tells it, it is all inside, hidden from public view - so there is none of that.
Ultimately, I was disappointed in Margaret because I wanted her to be a heroine, or at least to solve the mystery for me - but instead she was a real person with many doubts and weaknesses, learning to speak the best version truth that she can access. And there are wounds to heal. She is sure that the abuse really happened. Her father never gives an inch in denying that. It is remarkable to me that there is so little movement towards a point of reconciliation about this, as if forgiveness, compassion, and love for one another were not even in the picture. But these are very difficult, they take time, and they require honesty and bold love (see Dan Allendar's book for more on that!). So we, as readers, are left with doubt, and with more questions than we had at the beginning.
I must say that I have not read many “leaving the faith” stories – usually I identify more with those trying to find a sensible way in...so I am grateful for Margaret's account of losing her early convictions and continued seeking, all the more so because there is no apparent tidy resolution at the end. Just more questions....One of them being, can you really trust someone who would treat her own father like that, in his old age – regardless of the past???
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