I’m home now. Back in a place where the big things are more or less stable and the attention is on the details. Living with my parents, I am cradled in comfort and security. There was no initial rejection; it was a completely natural reversion. I had created a world in my mind – one of peace, abundance, and comfort – as something to look forward to upon my return. And now I am living as if I am in that world. I bought a sandwich for $8.39 without flinching. I gently manoeuvred the car back to the right side of the road when my Dad pointed out that I was driving on the left without assessing the could-haves. I left my wallet out in public places fully expecting it to be there on my return. So far I haven’t been disappointed.
But I am expecting, as the weeks go by, for this fog to lift. I will start to feel strong emotions again, rather than a gentle baseline buzz. I will note aspects of my life here that feel emptier, despite all of the abundance, because I have lived in a place that in many ways was more nurturing.
My last week in Cape Town gave me a good sense of closure. The CD release for Khoi Khonnexion’s Kalahari Waits was very well-attended. Many people said very nice things, including the group, who has seen this as a defining moment in their ten-year history. We sold dozens of copies, and since then more have been sold to South Africans and people all over the United States and in Europe. Several press pieces have come out about it, all of which have been positive. Soon, for U.S. customers, the CD will be available on independent music site CD Baby. If you are interested in a copy, however, the best way is to speak to me about it.
After the release I had a farewell party and jam session at Tagore’s in Observatory, where I had played the out-of-tune piano several times a week for loose change over the summer. On Tuesday, Glen, Jethro and another friend took me to the airport. There we ran into the outgoing national Minister of Arts and Culture. He already knew Glen and Jethro, and we had a few minutes to kill before our planes took off. He wanted to buy a copy of the CD, but we didn’t have one with us. Then he showed us a new songbook he had helped put together for schools. He proudly pointed out which songs he had written, and performed them for us right there in the check-in line. A touching note to leave on.
As a musician, I often think about the process of assimilating experience and moving forward. Somehow, by some psycho-physio natural selection, my fingers go from fumbling a melody one hour to nailing it the next. From weak chord voicings one year to more harmonically rich ones the next. I think it’s a big part of what keeps me going – my ability to see that I am, slowly but surely, moving through some sort of terrain.
It is the moments when I doubt this progress when I feel the most fear and uncertainty about myself as an artist. Preachers use the same rhetoric and logic today to attack homosexuality as their predecessors used to defend slavery not long ago. Hundreds of civilizations in history have collapsed due to overpopulation and environmental degradation, but the same mistakes are being repeated. Does that mean it is possible for me to lose all the lessons I have learned while in Cape Town?
I am working under the hopeful assumption that my experiences have become part of my tapestry – lessons learned on an unconscious level will stay with me as long as they stay true. But I think it would help to condense into a list some of the lessons I can extract now in immediate retrospection:
1. My biggest barrier to understanding people is my own notions about them.
2. I can’t not be an artist. When I came to Cape Town, I had decided that I could succeed more as an academic. I soon learned that this was irrelevant. My core impulse is to create, and if I ignore that, I will not be happy.
3. For everything that I’m good at, there are a million people who are better. So stop dwelling on it.
4. There are as many ways to listen to music as there are styles of music. I can shamelessly practice as many as I want.
5. People in developing nations are caught in a complex love-hate relationship with America. Meanwhile, Americans don’t know they exist.
6. Poverty doesn’t have to be about feeling sorry for yourself.
7. Money can destroy relationships.
8. Relationships can destroy money.
9. Artists are the guardians and destroyers of myths.
10. Comfort is placatory.
11. A lot of people are struggling with what modernity requires them to believe. Many First Nation people struggle with the antagonism between the wisdom of their traditions and what modernity requires them to believe.
I think these lessons I am learning are part of being a global citizen. There is a growing body of people who are educated, financially stable, and mobile. These people live in a global village, and so have added power and added responsibility. I grew up in the place where I am now, the small town of Huntington, West Virginia, where many residents have lived for generations and generations. I knew that the opportunities I was looking for didn’t exist here, but at times growing up it was hard to imagine not being tied to this place. Now I am joining the ranks of other global citizens, and learning what that means. At the same time, by taking myself farther from my familiar context, I am learning what it means to be a West Virginian.
At Michigan I first learned to be proud to be a West Virginian, because I saw West Virginia’s uniqueness and I had to dispel others’ ignorance about it. In Cape Town, most people didn’t know it was a separate state from Virginia, but they also didn’t know the stereotypes that aren’t worth knowing. So it was tabula rasa for me, and I had to make a first impression. Natural beauty, strong culture, isolation, and economic woes were usually my talking points. And I would usually end up talking about dependence on coal and explaining mountaintop removal, which was always met with incredulity. When I was flying in to Charleston, I sat next to a businessman from California who was coming here for vacation. It felt good to be a local again.
Like the Zen cycle of awakening, I am now back at the exact spot where I started, but with my eyes a little more open. There is so much to explore about this place and my relationship with it. Now that I no longer find myself in Africa, it’s time to find myself where I am.
Thanks to all of you for reading over the past year. I have appreciated your feedback and support. I welcome you now to help me re-narrate this year by sharing your own reactions to my experiences and the lessons I have learned. With our complementing and conflicting perceptions, we can start to get a glimpse of something true…
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Ch. 14: The New World
Classes are out for the term, and yesterday I had my one and only exam – a piano practical. For the previous few days I had put all my energy into preparing for it, and so when it was over I felt like celebrating. My official business with the University of Cape Town is now complete, except for nagging the administrative offices to put Jazz Ensemble on my transcript (I registered of it at the beginning of the term but they never got around to entering it into the system). This exam marked the beginning of a two week period of tying up loose ends before my departure on 9 June. This is the part where I start thinking about the practicalities of getting and being home. Kind of exciting.
It was with this on my mind that I went into a performance of Dvořák’s 9th Symphony (“Symphony of the New World”) by the university’s Symphony Orchestra last night. I sat there with a South African friend, a few meters from the cello section, letting Dvořák’s melodies wash over me. This symphony was based on the Czech composer’s visit to “The New World” in the late 19th century, and the themes are modelled on American folk styles – especially African American spirituals and Native American music. Hearing this in Cape Town, it occurred to me that this symphony, and its title, probably evokes a sense of exoticism for those who have not visited America. Perhaps it functioned more this way before America’s pop music took over international airwaves, but I’m sure even in that audience last night there were some people with the thought in the back of their mind, “So, this is what America sounds like.” I’m guessing this because I found traces of that thought in my mind.
I’ve been out of touch with my homeland now for eleven months, and I’m wondering what it will be like when I get back. Will I suddenly remember, in a rush of disappointment, all the things I was happy to leave behind in July? The hyper-consumerism, the technology cult, the de-emphasis on personal communication, the pursuit of the meaningless? More likely, this will come bit-by-bit, but my first sensation will be one of return to comfort.
I’m also wondering how this experience will look as it is disappearing over the horizon of my past. What will I miss about being here? The diversity of people and experiences? The musical gatherings? The individuals I have come to know? The bond I have with the friends that I have made here is becoming more tangible as it is about to be broken. I wonder if I’ll ever see them again.
I think, experience-wise, what will stick out most in my mind will be my time with Khoi Khonnexion working on our recording project. We’ve finished all the recording, mixing, mastering, and album design, and we’re now in kind of a limbo stage. We still haven’t exactly come up with all of the money to pay the manufacturing company, but we’ve already given them the master and the CD design, and we’re confident that by the 5th of June, when we receive our 1,000 copies, we’ll have raised enough or be able to invest enough to pay them. It’s exciting to think that in just a few days we’ll have the finished product in our hands. It has been a creatively challenging and fulfilling project. Both the form and the content are new territory for me – indigenous consciousness in Southern Africa, expressed with sounds that, for the most part, lack what I have come to learn to be the basic elements of music. It has involved a lot of experimentation, and the result is something quite fresh and, I think, compelling. I have learned so much about possibilities in the arts, and the people I have met through the project will serve as models for me as I try to carve out my path as an artist.
One of these people is local visual and musical artist Brendon Bussy. He went to school for visual art, and then started making money doing interesting projects that came his way, and even more interesting projects that reflect his own voice as an artist, but aren’t as financially rewarding. Right now he has what he describes as a “pizza delivery job” managing the production of a boxed set of South African documentaries, which will be manufactured in the thousands. In his spare time he finds ways of incorporating local indigenous musical styles into his mandolin playing, makes field recordings, and beta-tests electronic music software. He lent me a pair of speakers for the project, and showed me how to mix a piano so it sounds like shattering glass.
And there’s Isa Suarez, a French composer who spends much of her time in Cape Town. Her latest project is working with choirs of school kids, developing songs about their views about the world, and performing them on minibus taxis as they travel throughout the city.
Manfred Zille is a German-born artist who came to Cape Town during the apartheid struggle. His work was banned when he painted portraits of government officials and invited the public to add their commentary, graffiti-style, to the canvasses. These canvasses are now owned by the South African National Gallery.
The biggest inspiration to me has been Garth Erasmus – visual artist and member of Khoi Khonnexion. He too got his start during the time when the revolutionary task was to make the nation “ungovernable” by the apartheid system, so that it would collapse on itself. He stencilled tributes to recent victims of the regime’s violent tactics on the walls of the city. After apartheid ended, he began the quest for healing in his work, focusing specifically on his Khoisan heritage. He began research into indigenous history, and found his way to indigenous instruments. He began to create them as sculptures, and soon was taken in by their sounds. He also has taught himself the saxophone, and has the largest record collection of free jazz that I have ever seen – libraries included. From Garth I have learned about personal authenticity in artistic work, putting process over product, and integrating artistic vision with personal mindset. Garth is one of the most compassionate, understanding people I have known, and he seems to cultivate this in his artistic work.
So when I go back to the New World, I will have to keep my memories of these artists and their work alive. In America I found I had a crisis of cultural identity, but I have learned that there is a lot to explore in my own background, and I hope to use the models of these artists to go about it. No longer a fish trying to define water, I will go home having seen what my culture is not, which will bring to light what it is.
It was with this on my mind that I went into a performance of Dvořák’s 9th Symphony (“Symphony of the New World”) by the university’s Symphony Orchestra last night. I sat there with a South African friend, a few meters from the cello section, letting Dvořák’s melodies wash over me. This symphony was based on the Czech composer’s visit to “The New World” in the late 19th century, and the themes are modelled on American folk styles – especially African American spirituals and Native American music. Hearing this in Cape Town, it occurred to me that this symphony, and its title, probably evokes a sense of exoticism for those who have not visited America. Perhaps it functioned more this way before America’s pop music took over international airwaves, but I’m sure even in that audience last night there were some people with the thought in the back of their mind, “So, this is what America sounds like.” I’m guessing this because I found traces of that thought in my mind.
I’ve been out of touch with my homeland now for eleven months, and I’m wondering what it will be like when I get back. Will I suddenly remember, in a rush of disappointment, all the things I was happy to leave behind in July? The hyper-consumerism, the technology cult, the de-emphasis on personal communication, the pursuit of the meaningless? More likely, this will come bit-by-bit, but my first sensation will be one of return to comfort.
I’m also wondering how this experience will look as it is disappearing over the horizon of my past. What will I miss about being here? The diversity of people and experiences? The musical gatherings? The individuals I have come to know? The bond I have with the friends that I have made here is becoming more tangible as it is about to be broken. I wonder if I’ll ever see them again.
I think, experience-wise, what will stick out most in my mind will be my time with Khoi Khonnexion working on our recording project. We’ve finished all the recording, mixing, mastering, and album design, and we’re now in kind of a limbo stage. We still haven’t exactly come up with all of the money to pay the manufacturing company, but we’ve already given them the master and the CD design, and we’re confident that by the 5th of June, when we receive our 1,000 copies, we’ll have raised enough or be able to invest enough to pay them. It’s exciting to think that in just a few days we’ll have the finished product in our hands. It has been a creatively challenging and fulfilling project. Both the form and the content are new territory for me – indigenous consciousness in Southern Africa, expressed with sounds that, for the most part, lack what I have come to learn to be the basic elements of music. It has involved a lot of experimentation, and the result is something quite fresh and, I think, compelling. I have learned so much about possibilities in the arts, and the people I have met through the project will serve as models for me as I try to carve out my path as an artist.
One of these people is local visual and musical artist Brendon Bussy. He went to school for visual art, and then started making money doing interesting projects that came his way, and even more interesting projects that reflect his own voice as an artist, but aren’t as financially rewarding. Right now he has what he describes as a “pizza delivery job” managing the production of a boxed set of South African documentaries, which will be manufactured in the thousands. In his spare time he finds ways of incorporating local indigenous musical styles into his mandolin playing, makes field recordings, and beta-tests electronic music software. He lent me a pair of speakers for the project, and showed me how to mix a piano so it sounds like shattering glass.
And there’s Isa Suarez, a French composer who spends much of her time in Cape Town. Her latest project is working with choirs of school kids, developing songs about their views about the world, and performing them on minibus taxis as they travel throughout the city.
Manfred Zille is a German-born artist who came to Cape Town during the apartheid struggle. His work was banned when he painted portraits of government officials and invited the public to add their commentary, graffiti-style, to the canvasses. These canvasses are now owned by the South African National Gallery.
The biggest inspiration to me has been Garth Erasmus – visual artist and member of Khoi Khonnexion. He too got his start during the time when the revolutionary task was to make the nation “ungovernable” by the apartheid system, so that it would collapse on itself. He stencilled tributes to recent victims of the regime’s violent tactics on the walls of the city. After apartheid ended, he began the quest for healing in his work, focusing specifically on his Khoisan heritage. He began research into indigenous history, and found his way to indigenous instruments. He began to create them as sculptures, and soon was taken in by their sounds. He also has taught himself the saxophone, and has the largest record collection of free jazz that I have ever seen – libraries included. From Garth I have learned about personal authenticity in artistic work, putting process over product, and integrating artistic vision with personal mindset. Garth is one of the most compassionate, understanding people I have known, and he seems to cultivate this in his artistic work.
So when I go back to the New World, I will have to keep my memories of these artists and their work alive. In America I found I had a crisis of cultural identity, but I have learned that there is a lot to explore in my own background, and I hope to use the models of these artists to go about it. No longer a fish trying to define water, I will go home having seen what my culture is not, which will bring to light what it is.
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