Welcome to July. Yes, June has now past and we have one less month of summer. FINALLY. Is it just me, or did June take FOR-EV-ER? May seemed like a blur in comparison. I’m also glad to say that we’ve past the half-way marker for summer. Hopefully, August will rush towards us like a freight train.
One downside to July is that several friends decided to be absent for the entire month. It’s very rude to just leave me without your company. You know who you are. Just because you have to do your “internship” that’s “required” for you to “graduate” and have a “career” in the “future”. What about me, huh? I wanted to hang out with you guys, ya know?
In other words, I hope you guys do really well. I’m sure you will.
Last week, I saw a local production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” with Karen and Andy and absolutely loved it. It’s one of my favorite Sondheim creations, and the Beavercreek company recreated it very faithfully. It’s a show that pushes against your brain in ways you don’t want to be pushed. For example, there’s a stirring monologue delivered near the show’s conclusion. It’s spoken in Italian by one character while the other characters translate it piece by piece into English:
“Please, I beseech you. We are the hopeless ones, the lost ones. We live our lives in exile. Expatriates in our own country. We drift from birth to death, despairing, inconsolable. But! Through you and your act, we dare to hope. Through you and your act, we are revived and given meaning. Our lives, our acts are given meaning! Our frustrations fall away. Our fondest dreams come true. Today we are reborn through you.”
It resonates with you, doesn’t it? Until you understand that it’s a monologue delivered by Giuseppe Zangara, would-be assassin of Franklin D. Roosevelt, to convince Lee Harvey Oswald to kill John F. Kennedy. Yes, the “assassins” in the show are men and women who killed or attempted to kill U.S. Presidents. On one level, you’re disgusted by the characters in the show. Several of them are completely insane, while others are consumed by anger and bitterness. These are people who wanted to destroy other human beings simply because they were powerful or famous. But Sondheim doesn’t let you hate them completely. He makes them funny. He gives them deeply moving and heartfelt ballads. He portrays them as people, rather than as footnotes in a history book. He makes them real, and whether you like it or not, you’re forced to see yourself in them. They wanted to be loved, to be respected and remembered, and to know that they mattered as people. Their actions were inexcusable, but their minds were not so different from any other American. It’s a great show, if it’s ever playing in your neighborhood, but an open mind is essential to enjoy it.
I just got back from Mammoth Caves with my family. Very cool place. I’ve wanted to go for years, but distance and cost restraints have prevented it. This year, things fell into place and we could do it. There is something about caves that appeals strongly to me. Even though thousands and millions of people have gone through a passage before me, it still feels like I’m the first one to explore it, and I’m seeing something no one’s ever seen before.
That being said, I hate tour groups. With a passion. Nothing ruins the feeling of exploration like 2 babies crying, 3 toddlers babbling nonstop, and 4 elderly tourists from Japan taking a picture every few seconds.
The weirdest part of the tours was how many different nationalities there were in the group. Of languages I definitely recognized, I heard Norwegian, French, Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese. I also know there were at least a few more, but I couldn’t pin them down. I consider myself a tolerant person, and I’m really not xenophobic, but being surrounded by so many foreign people irritated me for some reason. It was like I was mad that these people were on my property. Never mind the fact that I’m about ¾ descended from immigrants of various nationalities. I still felt like they were invading my country. Of course, the tour guide was not helping this. She kept going on about how the caves were part of “OUR parks” and she was proud to show us “OUR beautiful resources”. The way she phrased it made it almost sound like the foreign tourists were being deliberately excluded.
Or…. maybe I was just imagining things out of my irritation at being surrounded by strangers.
I’ve been trying very hard to make headway on memorizing my recital songs. I have 15 all together, and I know I have only 4 or 5 of those down pat. This is a problem. I think my main problem is that I never learned to memorize things verbatim. Learning songs from musicals is not the same thing, because there’s a plot that goes beneath the music, and that pushes my brain forward. Whereas all of my songs that remain un-memorized are in foreign languages. Italian isn’t that big of a deal for me, but French and German are next to impossible. Imagine trying to memorize 3 minutes worth of nonsense syllables where the letters on the page don’t quite match the sounds that your mouth is supposed to be making. Then multiply those 3 minutes by 10.
I understand, of course, that the sounds I’m singing do mean something, and I have the literal translation in front of me when I’m trying to memorize. But my brain can’t handle understanding the translation while still working towards memorization. I never learned how to do that, and I know that after graduation I’ll never have a need to learn like this again. So it’s discouraging.
The latest book on my reading list is “Fathers and Children”, also known as “Fathers and Sons”, by Ivan Turgenev. It’s a Russian novel written in 1862, and it’s really got my brain moving. For a book written almost 150 years ago, it stays very relevant with the issues it addresses.
One of the main things that are emphasized is the relationships between different generations, and the tensions and difficulties that arise from their differences. The younger generation will always view the one before it as backwards and old-fashioned, and it’s never really true. Yes, new ideas come up, new viewpoints are introduced, but that doesn’t mean the ones that came before are now worthless.
One of the sayings I’ve heard in the Cedarville music department is that music is the only intellectual system where new ideas don’t completely displace the old ones. We still use Romantic stylistic choices in our compositions even though the Romantic period ended a century ago. We adapt new ideas and old ones to create, and we don’t throw away compositions from previous musicians because they’re outdated.
In Turgenev’s book, the fathers of the main characters, Arkady and Bazarov, are both desperate to relate to their sons. The two friends have adopted a nihilistic worldview, which was pretty new at the time, and their fathers want nothing more than to be respected by their sons. Yet every attempt seems to only drive more wedges between them.
This is the sort of book that gets my mind in a funk I can’t get out of. Right now, I’m the newest generation. The world lies before me in a limitless expanse, and I can do anything I want.
Flash forward 5 years. I’ve settled down to a job. Maybe I’m married, maybe not. I’ve got a place to live, my life is now being set into order, and….. That great expanse that stretched out before me is now a narrow line. Oh, there are places where I can branch off my line. I could quit my job and try something new. I could move to a foreign country. But it would eventually just turn into a narrow line again. And the next generation looks at me only to scoff and say, “I’ll do better. I’ll outdo everyone that’s come before me! The world is my oyster!” As an interesting bit of trivia, it is very rare for an oyster to naturally produce pearls. If you were to take three tons of oysters from the ocean, only three or four would have pearls that were perfectly spherical.
I’m just saying.
Is it odd that I never had great ambitions? Maybe an occasional desire to be an astronaut, but that was one of those “when I grow up” wishes that 10-year-olds make. I’ve never had it in my head that I could succeed on Broadway, or get past the first round on American Idol, or get into a prestigious school. I’ve had my modest upbringing, I’ve had my friends, and I haven’t really reached further. I don’t really want to.
But I still can’t squash the need in my mind to be remembered. It’s a fantasy, really. The name Michael Jackson will be well known for at least 100 years. The name Ludwig van Beethoven has resonated for 200 years and will likely continue till the end of Western Civilization.
The name Evan Felmet will be known by maybe 10,000 people in my lifetime. After my death, assuming I live to be around 90, that number will steadily dwindle till perhaps 50 or 60 years later, when the last of any possible immediate relatives has died. Then the only chance it will be spoken aloud is if someone wanders by my tombstone and, out of boredom, takes the time to figure out the span between my birth and death dates.
And that’s assuming I live to 90.
I’d have to say my main ambition that goes very long-term is to live to be 89. I was born in 1987, and I always was sad that I missed the bicentennial. So, I want to live to see July 4, 2076. I think the tricentennial is going to be pretty cool.
See? Nothing fancy. I’m not reaching for the stars, I just want to live for awhile.
Hmm… the last half of that section had absolutely nothing to do with “Fathers and Children”.
That sounds like my cue to call it a night! 1737 words and 4 pages worth of blogging. I’d say I’m done.
