Category: Culture

I have an old friend from the 1970s who is now in federal prison after being convicted on federal tax fraud charges. It was a messy case, with accusations of bilking investors, money laundering, perjury, and obstruction of justice. A former chairman of the North Carolina Republican party and former aide to the late Sen. Jesse Helms also was swept up in the case. How did my friend get there? He came from a very rich family — his family owned a Southern textile company — and he never lacked for anything.

When I knew him he was in his late teens. He was reading Tolkien and wearing funny hats. But after Tolkien, he read a lot of Ayn Rand. It changed him forever.

His father was an old-fashioned textile magnate who believed that his company had a duty to the community. His son — let’s call him Powell — acknowledged no such duty. Powell, aided by the family fortune, I assume, set up a textile business in Haiti, then the poorest country in the Western hemisphere with annual per capita income of $360. Powell was lionized in a 1987 article in the Washington Post, which saw in him some kind of heroism for doing business in Haiti. “If unions come, I go,” he is quoted as saying.

In 2002, he wrote an article calling the Bahamas “a Libertarian paradise.” The business that was caught up in federal fraud charges was operating out of the Bahamas. While in federal prison, he wrote a manifesto about the corruptness of the American justice system. He believes that he was set up and that he is a victim of the government.

I’d give credit for the following quote if I was sure who wrote it. It was a blogger, I believe, who goes by the name Kung Fu Monkey:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

There you have it. Kung Fu Monkey also shows much insight in contrasting Tolkien with Rand, because their fiction has had pretty much the opposite effect on culture.

And now along comes a study from the University of Buffalo which found that reading fiction increases empathy. Young people who read Harry Potter books identify as wizards. Those who read vampire books identify as vampires. But here’s the gist of it:

The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. [Keith Oatley]

Psychological expertise. There you have it. But I think you have to read widely — many, many good authors — to develop psychological expertise.

Those whose view of reality is proudly empirical do not recognize such a thing as psychological expertise, because its insights are not falsifiable. That is almost certainly true. But the fact that something is not falsifiable does not prove that it is wrong. To empiricists, English majors are just babbling when they sit around and analyze stories and characters. But there is a method to it. Harold Bloom at Yale, for example, has a very well developed literary method. Camille Paglia was one of Bloom’s students, and it was this kind of method that she used in her brilliant book Sexual Personae. Empiricists despise that book. English majors and other lovers of fiction find it rich with cultural insight.

I don’t buy the proposition, by the way, that reading fiction increases empathy. Some fiction diminishes empathy and gives people permission to exercise their predatory instincts. There are good stories, and there are bad stories, which affect us for good or for ill.

“Someday someone is going to do a psyche profile on you and discover what’s behind that switch that allows you to go from the personable Captain we all know to a cold tactician in an instant,” Oz said quietly.

“I don’t enjoy getting into one firefight after another, but when some corporate marionette tells me to surrender my crew and all their freedoms, I get a little irritated.”

— Randolph Lalonde, Spinward Fringe

The most mentally healthy way I could find to deal with the intolerable summer weather was to stay indoors and read. Though I read some non-fiction, mostly I read escape fiction. What’s escape fiction for, after all? I also did 99 percent of my summer reading on the iPad and Kindle. Because I’m cheap, and because I wanted to sample the quality of the many free, self-published books that are available, I’ve been reading a lot of free books. The appearance of a great many free books was something I expected with the cost of digital publishing approaching zero. What the business model is (if any) for giving away books, I don’t know. But I’ve found two or three excellent new authors from reading free e-books. To my disappointment, lately I have found no new authors that I like through the paid-for, legacy publishing system. I’ve spent $9.99 on several books that weren’t worth reading.

My newest discovery is Randolph Lalonde, a young Canadian writer who I believe is entirely self-published, and most of whose books are available for free. He’s also prolific. I’d love to know how he supports himself. His Spinward Fringe series is as fine a space opera as has ever been written. His plots are tight and thrilling, the characters are appealing, the villains are plausible, the technology is fascinating. His dialogue between the characters is brilliant and witty. His characters have depth, and mystery.

I believe I’ve also spotted a new trend in science fiction. Science fiction writers think more rigorously about the future and the human condition than they are usually given credit for. That is the real value of science fiction, and it’s a large part of what makes a classic. As for this new trend, there are no doubt those who would say that it’s only a lefty political bias of the authors, and that I share that bias. I would disagree. Science fiction — at least good science fiction — always is a profound reflection of reality. A good author has a good model of the present-day reality in which human beings live, and he uses his imagination to roll that model forward and project where it might lead in the future.

There has been a libertarian streak in science fiction for decades. Robert Heinlein certainly showed that streak. And then there is Ayn Rand, though she is not considered a science fiction writer. In any case, in this older libertarian vision (as in Ayn Rand’s Russian childhood 100 years ago), it was the government that threatened human liberty. In the new libertarian model that I detect in today’s science fiction, it is corporations that are correctly identified as the threat to human liberty. Only government, through law and regulation, can protect people from the power of corporations. In Lalonde’s Spinward Fringe, there is a legal officer on the flight deck. Corporations are the villain. The few remaining free peoples in Lalonde’s universe have governments and formidable weapons — to protect themselves from corporations.

Those who think more clearly, who see more clearly, whose models of reality are based on reality rather than some ideology or “faith based” system, clearly see the corporate threat. Others are stuck in the 1960s, still suckling their worn-out copies of Atlas Shrugged.

Speaking of Ayn Rand, I have never adequately defended my reasons for despising her. I was able to get through Anthem, because it is short and is more of a metaphor than a sermon. But I have never been able to get more than a few pages into Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged without flinging them aside as unreadable. That is not a political reaction. It is purely a literary reaction. I don’t know why it is, but authors whose philosophies I despise reveal themselves very quickly, as though their complete philosophy is holographically contained in only a few paragraphs of text. The rhythms of their writing hurt my ears, like the rhythms of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, or the rhythms of a speech by Adolf Hitler, or the rhythms of a family quarrel heard through the thin walls of an apartment. I cannot read Ayn Rand simply because my ears cannot take the sound of her sermonizing rhythms. Consider this sample of text that I Googled up, from Atlas Shrugged:

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?”

My ears hurt!

In my view, bad ideas and bad thinking simply cannot be contained in the natural rhythms of the English language, of which iambic pentameter is the quintessence.

I sometimes forget that not everyone was an English major who is familiar with these terms. Iambic pentameter, also called “blank verse” when it is unrhymed, is the language of Shakespeare. It is considered to be the natural rhythm of the English language. You hear it in prose as well as in poetry. Native speakers of English commonly talk in blank verse — or at least in iambic rhythm — without realizing it, simply because they are speaking English. Good writers in English write in iambic rhythms most of the time, totally without thinking about it, because they have an ear for English. Bad writers use choppy, jarring rhythms that sound like bursts of machine-gun fire, or celery on a chopping block. It’s the rhythm you’d get if you killed a nest of snakes with a hoe.

This leads me to Dalton’s First Postulate of the English language, expressed here for the first time: To lie in iambic pentameter is almost impossible, but if a lie is forced into iambic pentameter, the lie will be transparent. Lies and iambic pentameter are like matter and anti-matter: If you put them together, they will explode. The language of lies is the language of hectoring and scolding and ax-grinding and belittling. And yes, I sometimes use those rhythms when I am tearing into liars and distorters on Internet forums. I hate the sound of my voice when I do it, but that is the purpose of those rhythms, to scold and hector. These hectoring rhythms, this ugly way of using language that liars must use, also make a simple and reliable propaganda detector. It is very difficult to express a lie in beautiful language. Right now I can’t even think of an example, but I will look for some.

Now look again at the quote from Ayn Rand above. Instead of saying the words, just substitute the sound “dah” for each syllable and read it aloud to hear only the rhythm. She has used some iambs (“Is this what you consider evil?”) — it’s almost impossible to not use iambs in English. But listen to her chop when she sermonizes: “Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return.” I fling books aside as soon as I hit a sentence like that. I don’t let people talk to me that way.

Read these Ayn Rand quotes in a sing-songy voice:

His effort in return!
Bang-bang! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!

The degree of his reward!
Rat-a-tat! Tat-tat! Tat-tat!

The best that your money can find!
Bang-bang! Rat-a-OOM-pah! Bang-bang!

It’s no accident that these rhythms sound like the in-your-face chants of a protest march, which happens to be one of the ugliest sounds that human beings can make, as far as I’m concerned, right up there with hell-fire sermons.

One of the things that mystifies me about why people like Ayn Rand is why they let someone talk to them like that, hectoringly and scoldingly. My only theory is that they crave authority, or someone to look up to, as Ayn Rand sneakily puts it.

Try this at home. Read aloud any longish paragraph randomly selected from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, in my opinion, was the greatest writer of English prose of the 20th century. Then after reading the Tolkien, read aloud the above paragraph from Ayn Rand. Did one of them hurt your ears? Was one easy to read, and the other hard? One of them is trying to sell you something. The other is on a quest for truth. Can you tell which is which, simply from the sound of their language?

Some say that the U.S. captured a UFO like this, reverse-engineered it, and built a new one like it. [Image from The Disclosure Project Briefing Document]

One of the many wonderful things about being retired is that you don’t need a job, so you no longer have to care whether people think you’re crazy. Ridicule has been used for decades to prevent serious discussion about UFOs. Reports are that airline pilots see UFOs all the time, but they don’t talk about it, because it’s a quick way to end one’s career.

The official story about UFOs, of course, is that they don’t exist. The unofficial story is much more interesting than that. For those interested in the unofficial story, there is no better source than “The Disclosure Project Briefing Document.” It’s 500 pages long, and it rounds up all the best unofficial information that is available. When the document was compiled in 2001 by Steven Greer and Theodore Loder, their hope was that the document would lead to congressional hearings. That never happened, though there was a presentation for the National Press Club.

The briefing document contains interviews with, and in some cases sworn affidavits by, people who have knowledge of UFOs. Mostly these people are retired military types, or engineers or contractors who have been employed by the military or military contractors. The strength of this compilation is that it is based on the testimony of dozens of people who witnessed things that happened from the 1940s up until the early 1990s. Their testimony fits together extremely well and tells a clear, consistent story. Here are the key elements of that story:

Though UFOs have visited earth for a long time, there was a surge of UFO activity after World War II. This was because of the detonation of atomic weapons, which are of great concern to the extraterrestrials. UFO appearances became very frequent, and they were concentrated around military installations. The extraterrestrials corrected the problem pretty quickly, but, early on, the guidance systems of the UFOs were affected by our radar systems, and quite a few UFOs crashed. Crashed UFOs as well as dead ETs (and a few live ones) were captured by the military. Projects for reverse-engineering UFOs have been going on since the late 1940s.

Control of these “black operations” by the military was very quickly taken over by small, powerful groups of people who kept everything secret. Several people testified that President Dwight Eisenhower was very interested in and concerned about UFOs but that as early as Eisenhower’s presidency the elected government lost control to private interests. Many think that this was the basis of Eisenhower’s sharp warning about the military-industrial complex in his last speech as president. Since Eisenhower’s era, the elected government has been kept in the dark about UFOs and UFO technology. The military-industrial complex owns it all. Many presidents, including John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, have been aware of the existence of UFOs and have tried but failed to break through the secrecy of military-industrial black operations.

UFO technology is based on anti-gravity propulsion powered by zero-point energy systems (basically, free, unlimited energy that permeates the universe). The military-industrial complex have reverse-engineered these technologies, but they are kept secret in the interest of power and profit. Some UFO technologies have been put to use, however, including miniaturized integrated circuit chips, lasers, fiber optics, and materials such as Kevlar.

UFOs are reported to have frequently interfered with the operation of atomic weapons and their delivery systems. UFOs have repeatedly shut down ICBMs. Some say that ETs ordered the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to stop nuclear testing and told both countries that no more detonations of nuclear weapons would be permitted.

There are very few areas in which the testimony of these multiple witnesses is contradictory. One such area is how ETs communicate. Then again, as many as 25 different species of ETs have been reported, so maybe this varies from species to species. Several witnesses say that ETs communicate only telepathically and that humans can “hear” them if the ETs want to be heard. One report says that ETs do talk, but that communication, especially on technical matters, is difficult and requires help from a linguist. Some witnesses say that they worked with ETs on duplicating ET technology. Reports of direct communication with ETs and engineering help from ETs peter out after the late 1950s. There is no testimony that would answer the question whether ETs stopped cooperating with humans, or whether the secrecy around that cooperation has been more successful. Reading between the lines, though, it seems to me that a fair assumption would be that cooperation between ETs and humans had broken down by the 1960s because the ETs did not like the direction in which earthling black operations were going.

No one has testified that ETs are hostile, though several witnesses have expressed concern over what could happen if the United States continues with the weaponization of space and continues to build systems that are intended to shoot down UFOs outside the earth’s atmosphere.

Multiple witnesses have testified that we earthlings have long possessed the technology to end our reliance on fossil fuels and clean up the earth but that we don’t, to protect the profits of the oil and coal industries.

Some witnesses speculate that there is growing pressure inside the black operation cartels to go public. Younger members of the cartels, it is said, tend to view matters differently than older cold-war types like Dick Cheney. These younger members, it is said, also are less sympathetic to the oil cartel and are more open to making the now-secret technologies available to benefit the earth’s ecosystem. These younger members understand that they are being complicit in the destruction of the earth’s ecosystem if something doesn’t change.

I personally am pretty satisfied with the story that emerges. It makes sense to me. But a few things still don’t make sense to me. If the ETs are displeased with the black cartels that have taken over in the name of humanity and kept everything secret, then why don’t the ETs bypass the cartels and take their case directly to the masses? In 1952, the ETs appear to have made such a threat, during a dispute with earthlings. They overflew the Capitol.

Multiple witnesses say that there are only about 40 people on earth who know the whole story. They have no right to keep this from us. Neither the truth, nor the technologies they are hoarding, belong to them.

Radio telescope, Arecibo, Puerto Rico

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832

It is no big secret that, for years, the government has been paying academics to try to predict — and presumably prepare for — contact with intelligent life from outer space. Back in 1992, when I was in San Francisco, a friend from Boston was staying with me temporarily. One day his dad came to town unexpectedly. My friend’s dad was an economist, on the faculty at MIT. When my friend asked his dad what had brought him to San Francisco, his dad said that actually he was on his way down to Stanford for a government-sponsored meeting of academics from many fields. They were to brainstorm the consequences of encountering intelligent extraterrestrial life.

This week, another such study was released to the public, this one done mostly by Pennsylvania State University and NASA. You can download a PDF of this report at this link.

There was some mention of this report in the popular press, with the usual spin — silly photos of aliens, with stories focused on the most extreme scenario. Examples here.

The report divides its scenarios into three categories — beneficial contact, neutral contract, and harmful contact. In the category of harmful contact, the report describes a scenario in which extraterrestrials come to earth to destroy us because humans are so destructive. Humans must be prevented from destroying their own planet and from venturing out into space and destroying other planets. That’s the scenario that got all the attention in the popular press.

Since the early 1970s, I have been fascinated with the question of intelligent extraterrestrials and why they would come to earth. This is because I saw a UFO in 1972. No, this wasn’t just a blinky light in the sky, the kind of thing that leads to most UFO reports. This was much bigger and much clearer than that. I was with a friend. We both saw the same thing. This was in eastern North Carolina, around sunset but well before dark. We saw a huge object just over the treetops, less than 300 yards away. This object was as long as a football field and appeared to have the shape of a cigar-shaped tube. It was hovering, moving very slowly, and making no sound at all. There were no exterior lights, but there were what I might call portholes along the side, with interior light showing through the portholes. As we watched, the object made a kind of rotating maneuver just above the treetop level, and then it took off into the sky at an impossible, breathtaking speed, making no sound.

It was as though this object’s gravity was suddenly reversed and it fell into the sky, falling upward, accelerating at a geometric rate as it fell. Nothing built by humans could possibly accelerate like that. And it did it silently.

“Rational” types always say something like, “Oh surely you just saw Venus rising.” That is silly, because I did not see a small light in the sky. I saw a huge object, quite close. It would make just as much sense to say that that Boeing 747 parked and loading over there on the tarmac, its interior lights glowing through the windows, is Venus rising. I believe my own eyes.

I do, of course, recognize that, though what I saw is sufficient to convince me that we have extraterrestrial visitors, to everyone else it’s just another UFO report, proving nothing. But I am not on a mission to convince anyone of anything. I only long to understand what I saw, and what it means.

It amuses me that reports such as the one from Penn State and NASA have to say things like this:

“Humanity has not yet encountered or even detected any form of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), but our efforts to search for ETI (SETI) and to send messages to ETI (METI) remain in early stages. At this time we cannot rule out the possibility that one or more ETI exist in the Milky Way, nor can we dismiss the possibility that we may detect, communicate, or in other ways have contact with them in the future. Contact with ETI would be one of the most important events in the history of humanity, so the possibility of contact merits our ongoing attention, even if we believe the probability of contact to be low.”

They have to say, I guess, that we have not detected any form of extraterrestrial intelligence. But having seen what I saw, I skip past the question “Are they out there?” to “Why are they here?” Let’s do some reasoning. This reasoning won’t apply to those who have never seen a UFO and who have not seen what a UFO can do. I only claim that this reasoning is valid, then, for myself, because I have seen a UFO and am satisfied that, not only do they exist and possess stunning technology, they’ve been here for some time.

The question then is, why are they here? And what are they doing? Since it has been almost 40 years since I saw this UFO, I think I can safely rule out the possibility that they are here to cause harm. If they were here to cause harm, surely they would already have taken action. So two broad scenarios remain: They are here to be beneficial, or their presence is neutral. Since they have not revealed themselves (at least to the masses), it is possible that they never will. But it is also possible that they are following some kind of protocol to gradually make themselves known and to give the people of earth time to adjust to the biggest culture shock that mankind will ever know.

If I have seen a UFO, then it seems very likely to me that other people have seen them as well and that thus some UFO reports are true. If I and others have seen them, it seems reasonable to assume that governments know about them. I can only speculate about how many people in the government actually know what’s going on and why they keep it secret. Perhaps they are following a protocol, and perhaps the development of reports such as the Penn State / NASA report are part of that protocol, work that must be done on the earthling side to prepare the population.

Since there is intelligent life on earth, and since there is at least one intelligent species capable of traveling to earth, it seems reasonable that there are probably many intelligent species out there. If there are multiple civilizations, and if we have evidence that they have protocols for the induction of new planets such as earth, then it seems likely that there is some sort of galactic government. If there is a galactic government, then there are galactic laws, and earth is subject to those laws. I can just hear the libertarians moaning!

That, I think, is where we are. Earth, for decades, has been going through a process of being studied and prepared for induction into some kind of galactic federation.

Can it be legal under galactic law to destroy a planet’s ecosystem? I doubt it. Can it be legal under galactic law for earthlings to build spaceships and venture out into our own solar system and beyond and do whatever we please out there? I doubt it. It seems reasonable to suppose that, when a civilization attains a level of technology that permit it to violate galactic law — such as destroying planets, our own or someone else’s — then that civilization must be made aware of galactic law, and galactic law must be enforced. I am not by any means the first to imagine such a scenario. I am only doing my best to reason sensibly from a few facts that I am convinced are true.

Having thus reasoned, I am now going to speculate, to dream a little.

It amazes me that human beings have such different dreams. Some libertarians, for example, have a dream of a libertarian utopia. Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal, recently donated $1.25 million dollars to start developing artificial islands in the ocean where libertarians can have their utopia — with no minimum wage laws, no building codes, and all the weapons they want. I see this as sheer madness, a dream of a more primitive state in which poor excuses for human beings are free to exercise their predatory instincts without restraint. What further proof do we need that earth is the mental institution of the universe? Don’t like government? Don’t like laws? Here you are, then: Check out these new volumes of galactic law!

I have a different dream. That is that our incredibly ignorant, violent, backward species will, in my lifetime, get some sense knocked into it. We will learn to see our planet in perspective — a fragile oasis of life in a galaxy that is mostly empty, cold, and dark. We will learn that we can’t get away with exploitation — exploitation of our planet and the other life on it or exploitation of our own species. Ignorance and deceit will no longer succeed as a political strategy.

The power structures of earth will be turned upside down. Religions will be widely recognized as obsolete and tossed into the dustbin of history where they belong. Earth’s economy will be completely transformed — I can guarantee that that huge spaceship that I saw in 1972 was not burning fossil fuel. All the benighted political forces that want to drag us backward, to gain power and satisfy their greed by lies, by appealing to ignorance and to black-hearted religions, will be neutralized. To some people, it will be the worst thing they can imagine, the worst thing that ever happened. Their strategy for exploiting this planet, for increasing their power, for pursuing their greed, for spreading their ignorance, will be defeated, overnight.

That’s my dream. I hope I live to see it.

This is the best BBC mini-series to come along in years — amazing cast, including Maggie Smith, lavish budget, great scripts. It was shown on British television last year and is now available on DVD, and from Netflix. A second season is in production for broadcast this fall.

It’s set in Yorkshire starting in 1912. The plot and subplots involve the Crawley family as well as their servants. It’s awesome television, not to be missed.

YouTube: King’s College Choir

An article in a recent New Yorker magazine made me even more appreciative of the choral tradition of the Anglican church, not to mention more glad that I had the opportunity to sing in the choir at an Episcopalian Christmas service last month. The article is in the Jan. 10, 2011, issue: “Many Voices: Blue Heron brings a hint of the Baroque to Renaissance polyphony.” The article is available on the New Yorker web site, but a subscription is required.

The article is about some newer choral groups who have been exploring the same historical terrain as the Tallis Scholars, who have been around since the 1970s. The article contains this rather intriguing line: “Likewise, the austere allure of the Tallis Scholars is inseparable from the Anglican choral tradition, which owes much to Victorian values.” This reference to Victorian values is left unexplained, but I assume it means that, even though the roots of Anglican music lie deep in the past, in the Medieval monastic tradition and in the Golden Age that occurred during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, Anglican music nevertheless was affected by the theological — and musical — emphasis on the more personal forms of salvation that marked the 19th Century.

I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church, the music of which largely comes from this 19th Century tradition. My first organ teacher was a Moravian and organist at a small Moravian church. I sometimes substituted for her when she was on vacation. Though not as ancient as the Anglican musical tradition, Moravian music reaches back a century or two earlier than the Baptist tradition, to the time of J.S. Bach.

It is strange that, though I’ve been singing since I was a child, and though I used to accompany small congregations, I had never been in a choir until last month. I’m thinking that I’d like to do it again at Easter. The YouTube videos to which I’ve linked here capture some of the thrill of singing in a choir, especially the many YouTube videos of King’s College Cambridge. Practicing the organ was always such lonely work, usually done in dark, underheated churches. But practicing with a choir is a very different thing.

When rehearsals started in November for St. Paul’s Christmas program, I almost convinced myself that I’d never learn the bass parts for 45 or so pages of music. I wasn’t alone, though. Everyone in the choir, including the professional section leaders, had lots of work to do. But then something stunning happens at the final performance. Not only did the members of the choir know the music, they’d even memorized most of the words. At last they could take their eyes off the score and watch the director. And no longer is the director playing the role of the kindly tyrant. With the director’s back to the congregation (which was packed for the Christmas service), they can’t see that he is smiling at us, winking at us, gesticulating when his hands and arms are insufficient to communicate with us. Suddenly we are totally under his control, attentive and obedient. Every voice starts precisely on the beat. When he requests a crescendo or a ritardando, he gets it. We hold the last note, forte, nearly out of breath, the power of the organ supporting us, but not until the director makes a little chopping gesture with his hands do we stop, all precisely together. The sound reverberates through the church. I dare to shift my eyes off the director now and see that members of the congregation are smiling. We almost had them on the edge of their seats. Choral music does that to people. Sometimes, listening to an organ, especially an infectiously complex fugue by J.S. Bach, I find myself hyperventilating in sympathy with the organ and the huge amount of breath it is expending. Choral music, too, pulls us in somehow. It makes us want to sing with other people. When the choir comes up for air, so does the congregation.

Recently, after watching the movie Winter’s Bone, I was trying to explain to a friend the distinction between the music of the high church (the Anglicans) and the low church (pretty much everybody else). Despite the differences, these musical traditions have much in common, and both are wonderful. Part of the appeal of Winter’s Bone was the soundtrack, with a completely unexpected and beautiful performance of the very low church “Farther Along.” I sang along with it, in harmony. I’m linking to that as well.

Low church and high church — both are rich, beautiful, and deep. Even a pagan must pay his respects.

YouTube: The Tallis Scholars sing Thomas Tallis

My new Episcopal hymnals, ordered from Amazon

YouTube: Farther Along, from the soundtrack of Winter’s Bone

Ken by the solstice fire

The winter solstice was at 6:38 p.m. Eastern time on December 21. Ken and I observed the solstice properly with a fire followed by a hot meal and wine.