There Goes the Neighborhood

By Tom Phillips

When one has lived a long time in one place, any kind of change is worrisome.  Home is ideally the most stable part of your world, but all around, other people are messing with it, never asking your permission.  Morningside Heights, where our family has lived for 35 years, is in a continual process of change, and nothing new happens without a frisson of fear.  Even the plunge in the crime rate, which began in the 1990s and continues today, is cause for concern -- it's one of the factors that have driven real estate prices to astronomical heights, and brought in a whole new demographic and life-style.

Some day, we'll reach the tipping point where the old neighborhood is no longer recognizable.  And it may be just around the corner.  A block and a half from our house is rising an ultra-luxurious rental residence, a colossus of conspicuous consumption.  And it's rising on the very grounds of our most hallowed neighborhood institution, the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.  They call it the Enclave.

In Search of Lost Boys

-- By Tom Phillips

Many years ago, as a graduate student in psychology, I took a course called Memory and Attention, from which I remember only one basic proposition:  memory is a function of attention.   We remember what we pay attention to. 

I thought of Memory and Attention recently as I read Volume Three of Karl-Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” the story of a middle-aged man remembering his experience as an adolescent boy.  And because Knausgaard is often compared to Marcel Proust, who wrote a hundred years ago, I went back and re-read the first part of “Swann’s Way,” the beginning of that earlier six-volume epic, drawn from Proust’s memories from the same time of life.   

What's striking in both is the quality of their attention, the amount of experience they can extract and retain from a moment – Proust watching the twin spires of the church shift their perspective in the waning sunlight, as he walks “Swann’s Way” in the little town where he apparently spent just a few weeks of his young life.  And of course the most famous extraction of them all – the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea, the subsequent descents into the subconscious, and finally the awakening of the whole remembered scene, the town and its environs, all the feelings that were bursting the heart of a proto-poet at a tender age. The past becomes present, memory and attention are one.

Marcel Proust --1887

Proust’s memories are those of a pampered, sickly boy growing up in the 1880s, in Paris and a summer home in the countryside  – a dreamer, a wanderer, and a voyeur, a mama’s boy who keeps company almost exclusively with adults – a linguistic prodigy, a painter with words who becomes intoxicated with shifting landscapes, changing light, elusive tastes and scents, and wonders at the more or less stable characters of his upper middle-class relatives, and what he sees as the predictable, fixed behaviors of servants, tradesmen and the peasantry.   

Knausgaard’s boy grows up in the 1970s on an island close to the Norwegian shore, where the forest is being torn away for middle-class housing developments and a garbage dump, and lives his life escaping from a mercurial, sadistic father.  He comes alive in comic books, soccer games, suicidal fantasies, outdoor arson, Beatle songs, biking, skiing through the woods, wolfing candy bars from the convenience store at the gas station, foraging in the dump.  He spends his time with his peers, who pick on him for being buck-toothed, pear-shaped, too smart in school.   But he doesn’t care, he says, except when he does, when his response is to cry.  

Both boys are weepers, attached to their mothers, of dubious masculinity in their adolescent years.  Both are obsessed with sex, and romance.  Both are turned on by smells -- Proust's boy by teas, soaps, flowers;  Knausgaard's by chlorine, gasoline, exhaust fumes.

As literary creations, both are authentic in a way that’s rare in traditional fiction or formal biography.   And the source of their authenticity is their origins in memory.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Advice to Millennials

-- By Tom Phillips

Many years ago, when I was 17, I remember telling my girlfriend in a panicked tone – I’ve gotta figure out something I can be great at – the world’s best.    It was beginning to sink in that my pro basketball dreams were going nowhere, and I needed a substitute.  What could it be?  Acting?  No, she said, not acting.  

A few years later I took my confusion to a favorite professor, who must have been feeling cynical that day.  What can I be, I pleaded.  His advice was to become the world’s leading expert in a field not many people were interested in – Spanish cookery, for example.  I scoffed at that.  Soon, I set out for San Francisco, where I hoped to launch my career as an idolized folk-singer. 

Fast-forward thirty years or so to middle age, when a colleague of mine, a celebrated TV journalist, asked me what I was doing with myself.   I described my modest position as a newswriter, and he looked at me in alarm.  “That’s a wasted life!” he said.   

Wounded, I rallied.  Wait a minute – That’s not all I do.  I play music, I teach, I’m a minister’s spouse, a father of many.  He quickly apologized, but I could see where his values lay.  He felt that anyone with any talent should use it to the utmost – and not let other, lesser goals stand in his way. This fellow had dropped out of college to pursue journalism, his health was awful and his personal life was an unholy mess.  But he loved his work, and he was very famous, and rich. 

I think of these exchanges because recently a 16-year-old granddaughter of mine repeated, almost verbatim, my teenage panic speech:  I have to find something I’m great at!  Volunteering in a hospital had soured her on the medical field, so she needed a substitute.  What could it be?  Acting? 

The world is awash in bad advice these days, and has been for some time -- maybe since the dawn of the industrial revolution, when the one-trick pony entered the ring, and people began to hear that they should decide early what they want to “be,” and narrow their focus.  The new role models were industrial tycoons, or scientists in search of a cure, or mad artists, or fabulously wealthy financiers. Today we admire relentless entrepreneurs like Mark Zukerberg, pasty zillionaires like Warren Buffett, super-athletes like Tom Brady and Tiger Woods, and actors and rock stars who barely went to high school.  They’re all great at something.  

It was not always thus.   Back in ancient times, the goal of education was “mens sana in corpore sano” -- a sound mind in a sound body -- and learning was physical as well as mental.  And the ideal was not greatness or “expertise” in one subject, but a broad competency – the ability to recognize the soundness of an idea in almost any field of knowledge.  Up until modern times an educated person was able to move between fields of endeavor – applying knowledge of the arts and sciences to create, to invent, to do battle, to think and act across the whole range of human activity.   Such “renaissance men” are rare today, but they still exist.

The Walking Cure 3: Circumambulation

Mecca -- Pilgrims at the Kaaba

-- By Tom Phillips

Circumambulation is the simplest and easiest form of spiritual exercise. It means walking around, usually around something, often a holy object or site. Every religion practices some form of it.

Hindus walk around the inner sanctum of their temples in concentric circles; Zen monks walk in a circle between meditative sittings.  A Jewish bride circumambulates the groom. Catholic priests walk around the altar, shaking incense from a thurible.  Even Protestants will walk a labyrinth.

The most circumambulated place in the world is the Kaaba in the Muslim holy city of Mecca.  During the annual Hajj, pilgrims circle en masse, symbolizing the unity of believers.

Anyone can circumamabulate. And almost anything can be circumambulated.   The very act of circling creates a sacred space, marked off for contemplation.

A Little Lear

At age fifty-eight, in the year 2000, I lost my long-time job writing the CBS Evening News.  At first I was confident I could reverse my fortunes and turn failure into success.  But as one scheme after another came up short, I began to feel rejected and depressed.  Then came what seemed like a brilliant idea.  The following is an excerpt from my memoir, "A Beginner's Life," published by Full Court Press
        
It was time for a radical re-think.  I racked my brains for something I’d be good at -- something that suited my talents, but I’d never had time to pursue.  Soon a gem of an answer appeared – Shakespearean acting!  I loved Shakespeare, had read or seen most of the plays, and could speak Elizabethan English fluently, if not accurately.  An actress friend of mine, Nicola Sheara, encouraged me.  She’d been around the New York theater scene for decades, had performed on Broadway, and said, “Sure, go ahead.  In two weeks, you’ll be in King Lear.” 

Two weeks later, I was in King Lear! 

Visions of glory danced in my head as I made my way downtown to begin rehearsals for the role of Gloucester, the king’s loyal friend, father of the hero Edgar and the arch-villain Edmund.  I landed the part at my first audition, which I attended with at least a hundred other hopefuls, at the American Theater of Actors on West 54^th Street. 

The Walking Cure 2: Three Rivers

Riverside Park, Manhattan

 -- By Tom Phillips                                           

Every walk needs a destination, and for me it’s usually the sight of water.  I’ll walk happily by the ocean, or around a lake or pond or reservoir.  But the best destination is a river – preferably a big river through a great city.  

The first sight of it inevitably brings a relaxation response, felt in the belly, released in the breath, and finally reflected in the mind.  That’s when thoughts begin to flow – not spilling over each other, but moving at an even pace, going somewhere.   

More than any other sight in nature, a river is a mirror of the mind.  The ocean seems endless, incomprehensible.  A lake or pond is hemmed in, like a small-minded person with a limited repertoire of thoughts and feelings.  A river is contained, but still open on both ends; you never know what will turn up in the stream, or where it will go.

Three rivers stand out in my memory:  the Thames, the Hudson, and the Ganges.

The Age of Melody

After watching the Grammy Awards on TV this week, I came away recalling some inviting rhythms (Daft Punk), biting lyrics (Lorde), and sweet voices (Kacey Musgraves) – in addition of course to the costumes and special effects.  But I can’t say I came away with a catchy new melody.  The age of melody is long gone.  After the golden era of song-writers like Gershwin and Porter, tunes took a back seat starting in the 1950s, displaced first by rockin’ rhythms, then by the lyrics of folkie songwriters.  In the age of the singer-songwriter, a tune was just a few repetitive notes to hang the verses on.  And in rap music, melody disappeared completely, as music got down to just the word and the beat. 

Someday, melody is going to make a big comeback.  That’s not because any of the above trends were wrong or not necessary.  It’s because melody is the element of music that says the most, on the most basic level.  It’s the musical statement that stands for the whole piece.  And it lasts longest in the memory.