The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) is often cited, but rarely quoted. Many people who mention him believe they know what he is all about in his advice to princes, in general, and the ruler of the Florentine Republic, in particular—Lorenzo “The Magnificent.”

From Left: Piero de’ Medici, Father to Lorenzo de’ Medici; Nicolo Machiavelli

“Machiavellian” is defined by Webster’s Collegiate dictionary, 10th Edition, as “suggesting the principles of conduct laid down by Machiavelli: specifically: marked by cunning, duplicity, or bad faith.” Dictionary.com describes the adjective, in part, as: “…political expediency…placed above morality and the use of craft and deceit to maintain the authority and carry out the policies of a ruler…characterized by subtle or unscrupulous cunning, deception, expediency, or dishonesty.”

Before we take these definitions as final and complete, perhaps we ought to look at Machiavelli’s words and judge for ourselves, keeping in mind he and Lorenzo lived 500 years ago in a city state surrounded by other often hostile city states, including The Church’s Papal States, and emerging nation states such as Spain and France, and “barbarians.”

The Secular and Papal Estates (in dark purple) of Italy at Year 1500 C.E. (please click on the image for clearer detail)

I have excerpted a good many of Machiavelli’s conclusions and advice to his prince, all based on the world as it had been and was in the 16th Century. I think one can see, with careful reading, many lessons relevant today, for human nature has not changed, merely the forms of government containing humans. One may certainly disagree or at least debate whether Machiavelli’s philosophy of man is accurate or correct, but surely this remains a matter of opinion. (See the end of this article for a question to you, the reader, in this regard).

Chapter III: Concerning Mixed Principalities:

Chapter V, Concerning The Way To Govern Cities Or Principalities Which Lived Under Their Own Laws Before They Were Annexed: In republics there is greater life, greater hatred, more desire of vengeance, and the memory of their ancient liberty gives them no rest; so the safest way is wither to extinguish them or go live with them.

Chapter VI: Concerning New Principalities Which Are Acquired By One’s Own Arms And Ability. This chapter is considered by some to show the heart of his world view and advice to Lorenzo. Here are two paragraphs from this chapter:

Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), a powerful priest who opposed Lorenzo's liberal rule

“Those who by valorous ways become princes…acquire a principality with difficulty, but they keep it with ease. The difficulties they have in acquiring it arise in part from the new rules and methods which they are forced to introduce to establish their government and its security. And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.

“It is necessary, therefore…to inquire whether these innovators can rely on themselves or have to depend on others: that is to say, whether, to consummate their enterprise, have they to use prayers or can they use force? In the first instance they always succeed badly, and never compass anything; but when they can rely on themselves and use force, then they are rarely endangered. Hence it is that all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed. Besides the reasons mentioned, the nature of the people is variable, and whilst it is easy to persuade them, it is difficult to fix them in that persuasion. And thus it is necessary to take such measures that, when they believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by force.”

Chapter VIII, Concerning Those Who Have Obtained A Principality By Wickedness: A prince occupying a new state should see to it that he commit all his acts of cruelty at once so as not to be obliged to return to them every day, and thus, by abstaining from repeating them, he will be able to make men feel secure and can win them over by benefits.

Chapter IX, Concerning A Civil Principality: A wise prince must adopt a policy which will insure that his citizens always and in all circumstances will have need of his government; then they will always be faithful to him.

Chapter XII: How Many Kinds Of Soldiery There Are, And Concerning Mercenaries

Piero de' Medici (1472–1503), called Piero the Unfortunate, was the Gran maestro of Florence from 1492 until his exile in 1494. He was the oldest son of Lorenzo de' Medici, and older brother of Pope Leo X.

Chapter XV: Concerning Things For Which Men, And Especially Princes, Are Praised Or Blamed

Chapter XVII, Concerning Cruelty And Clemency, And Whether It Is Better To Be Loved Than Feared: Since love depends on (the prince’s) subjects, but the prince has it within his own hands to create fear, a wise prince will rely on what is his own, remembering at the same time that he must avoid arousing hatred (emphasis added).

Chapter XVIII: Concerning The Way In Which Princes Should Keep Faith

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) was an important Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. His most notable work, shown here, is “The Birth of Venus.” The Medici family gave him political protection under which he produced other masterpieces [click on the image]

There you have the essence of Machiavelli’s world view, his view of man, and his advice to rulers. I ask you to consider whether your view of man is that he is:

Whatever your view, it will influence the advice you would give to a ruler, if you were called upon to do so.

Both men wrote about man’s struggle between the realm of the intellect and the realm of the senses, among many other important subjects.

Hermann Hesse (1887-1962)

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)

In Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game Hesse shows the intellectual life, the life of the mind and of reason, is an insufficient life, an incomplete life.

The Glass Bead Game, sometimes titled Magister Ludi, was instrumental in gaining Hesse the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946. The Prize eluded Kazantzakis, although he was nominated several times and had influential supporters. He lost out to Albert Camus in 1957.

NK is the more passionate of these two writers, and I have a special place for him in my heart, where I think my soul may be located; and, I have a special place for Hesse in my head, where I think my mind may be located.

Here is a poem inspired by Nikos Kazantzakis and Zorba:

The Dance

Between man and woman
Between young and old
Between and among one’s many inner voices

Of the electron in its field of probabilities
Of the earth among its solar neighbors
Of the pen across this page

The Dance is the fundamental unit
The atom of the Ancient Greeks
And Zorba is Its Prophet –

“Did you say — Dance!?
Come on, my boy …”
—
NOTE: The final quote is from the movie ”Zorba the Greek” with Anthony Quinn famously playing the main character.
—
Source for bibliography of Hermann Hesse’s work
Source for bibliography of Nikos Kazantzakis’s work

The Waste Land is “a modernist literary masterpiece,” written by T.S Eliot, the winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature, and “one of America’s greatest poets.” I have now finally read it, but don’t know if I will read it again.

From the 16-page Introduction to the 2005 Barnes & Noble Classics Edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Other Poems:

A first-time reader confronted with The Waste Land must determine, at the outset, how to read the poem: how to assimilate it and make sense of it. It is, of course, ‘modern,’ so one approaches it with the same understanding of modern aesthetics that one brings to Picasso’s cubism, or Stravinsky’s symphonies, or Diaghilev’s dance.”

Pablo Picasso: Femme assise devant la fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse), 1937

Continuing from the Introduction:

One allows that the apparent chaos of the work, the difficulty, the excess, is in some way mimetic of the dazzling and sometimes incoherent world outside; and also that things will not be presented in a neat, clear narrative structure, because anything too conventional or too easily accessible would be consequently trite—one must work hard to glean important insights from the modern zeitgeist.

We are to believe, according to the writer of the Introduction, Randy Malamud, that to be clear about what one is presenting is likely to be trite, if it is about the “modern” world. A further inference, perhaps implication, is that in order to make chaos clear one must present it chaotically.

Modernists believed that that the more complex a text is, the more it is likely to do justice to the complexity of the world outside [outside of what?-RP], a world that in the space of one generation is awakening to cinema, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, world war, and so forth.

T. S. Eliot, Painted by poet Wyndham Lewis. Durban Art Gallery, Republic of South Africa

The first four lines of The Waste Land read:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

This seems to me a polite and scholarly version of another famous Howl.

The first lines of Howl by Allen Ginsberg read:

I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix

Poet Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997)

I find Howl accessible and moving; whereas, I find The Waste Land interesting and sometimes lyrical, but generally impenetrable. This is, in large part, because I am not familiar with all the works of literature that are quoted or alluded to, nor can I understand the passages in French and German. I feel myself tending toward a kind of reverse snobbery with Eliot, and with the editor of this volume.

To be clear about my snobbery I see Eliot as, and appealing to, the ivory tower intellectual, who is self-conscious of this appellation and that it should apply to him or her. Eliot did have the experience of the nervous collapse and cure, and a miserable marriage, but his poem refers to other written works, not enough to real life. It is an abstraction of life.

Ginsberg’s poetry, whether or not you like it (or him), boils up from the earth and the guts of a man, not solely from his nervous system. I feel that Ginsberg has more power, readability and accessibility in his howl against his 1955 world than Eliot’s ‘howl’ against his post-war world of 1921.

What say you?

The Englishman Eric Blair (1903-1950) used the pen name George Orwell. Renown for his novel 1984, he also wrote other novels, essays and commentary.

Someone long ago told me the essays of George Orwell are among the best in this form of writing. So I bought, lost and bought again a book containing his major essays, but hadn’t read them with my full attention until recently. The foreword in my copy of the book is by Bernard Crick, a student of Orwell’s work and one of his biographers. Here are excerpts from this foreword:

Orwell chose to write in the plain style… (because) he thought it the best way to reach the common reader and to convey truths… His chosen public was… the lower-middle class who had only had secondary education, together with the self-educated working class. Although he was fully conversant with modernist, even futurist literature (as shown by his good understanding of and sympathy with Joyce’s Ulysses (and) Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn…), he deliberately avoided… those devices of modernism which… had begun to make the modern novel inaccessible to the common man—books by intellectuals for intellectuals, needing a university degree in English Literature to be understood.

In Crick’s George Orwell: A Life, he puts Orwell’s 1984, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia in the company of Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathon.

As I went through Orwell’s essays I came to Inside the Whale, a three-part essay with Henry Miller featured in parts one and three. Part one begins with:

Henry Valentine Miller (1891 – 1980), American novelist and painter. Known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. (Wikipedia)

When I first opened Tropic of Cancer and saw that it was filled with unprintable words, my immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed… Nevertheless, after a lapse of time the atmosphere of the book… seemed to linger in my memory in a peculiar way. A year later Miller’s second book, Black Spring, was published. [Note: Tropic of Capricorn, mentioned in the foreword, was published after Black Spring]. By this time Tropic of Cancer was much more vividly present in my mind… My first feeling about Black Spring was that it showed a falling-off… Yet after another year there were many passages in Black Spring that had also rooted themselves in my memory… (R)ead him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. ‘He knows all about me,’ you feel; ‘he wrote this specially for me.’ It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely and implicit assumption that we are all alike… In Black Spring there is a wonderful flashback of New York, the swarming Irish-infested New York of the O. Henry period, but the Paris scenes are the best, and… the drunks and dead-beats of the cafés are handled with a feeling for character and a mastery of technique that are unapproached in any at all recent novel. All of them are not only credible but completely familiar…

Orwell volunteered as an infantryman for the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist uprising. He joined the militia of the non-Stalinist Workers Party of Marxist Unification. He was shot in the neck, near Huesca, on May 20, 1937. Image: On the Aragon front at Huesca: Orwell is the tallest standing figure; Eileen Blair is crouching in front of him (March 1937).

Orwell has much more to say about Miller and his writing and the times they both lived in. Of the major differences in the works of these two writers is that Orwell was explicity “political” and Miller was adamantly non-political. Miller didn’t care about the Spanish Civil War except to see it as evidence of man’s stupidity; Orwell was present in the war zone. Also, I can’t remember one earthy four-letter word in Orwell’s writing (other than, possibly, ‘hell’ or ‘damn’), whereas Miller’s pages are replete with four-letter references to bodily functions and parts.

Another difference in the men was in their personal lives. Orwell lived only 46 years and married when was 33. He was, however, unfaithful to his wife. “I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and I also treated her badly, and I think she treated me badly, too, at times, but it was a real marriage, in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together and she understood all about my work, etc.” (from Crick’s biography). The couple adopted a child and ultimately separated but didn’t divorce. His first wife died when he was 41, and Orwell married again, to his lover and from his sick bed, two months before his death.

Miller lived 89 years, married five times, and had countless other liaisons including with the famous (some will say infamous) Anaïs Nin. His relationship with Nin in a ménage à trois that included his wife, June, is detailed in Henry and June: From a Journal of Love, by Nin.

But then, Eric Blair did spend one and one-half years in Paris during the period Miller traveled there with his wife before moving, alone, to live there. Also, Blair was in contact with people similar to those Miller lived with and wrote about. In a biographic sketch for an American reference book, Blair wrote: “… After my money came to an end I had several years of fairly severe poverty during which I was, among other things, a dishwasher, a private tutor and a teacher in cheap private schools.” And in the preface to an edition of Animal Farm, he wrote: I sometimes lived for months on end amongst the poor and half criminal elements who inhabit the worst part of the poorer quarters, or to take to the streets, begging and stealing. At that time I associated with them through lack of money, but later their way of life interested me very much for its own sake.” [Both quotations are from citations end-noted on page 104 of Crick’s biography]. Orwell later, in 1933, published Down and Out in Paris and London, his first full-length work. It is a story in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities.

It seems not unlikely, then, that two such different persons could find affinity with each other as writers. In the index of Crick’s biography of Orwell, there are 16 pages listed that contain the name of Henry Miller. On page 202 Crick writes:

(Orwell) carried on reviewing novels all that year (1936)… and he entered into a brief but revealing and mutually respectful correspondence with Henry Miller whose Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring he had grown, after initial doubts about the former, to admire greatly… Orwell admired Miller for his rhythmical English, his frankness and what he saw as his control of fantasy.

The library is at Big Sur, California, on State Highway 1, three hours drive south from San Francisco. From L.A., going north, the total drive time is about 6 1/2 hours. Miller fell in love with the rugged, isolated region on his first visit in 1944, and promptly decided to move there. Upon his arrival Miller wrote, “Here I will find peace. Here I shall find the strength to do the work I was made to do.”

When I saw mention of Henry Miller in Crick’s foreword to the Essays, I remembered I recently bought two of Miller’s trilogies but hadn’t yet read some of these six novels, and hadn’t re-read those over which I had pored for the sexy parts when I was an adolescent.

In Tropic of Cancer Miller recounts a time in Paris, around 1928, when he was traveling with his wife June (whom he fictionalized as “Mona”). Mona loved the writing of the Swede, August Strindberg, who had spent some difficult years in Paris. In 1930 Miller went to Paris, alone, to write, without friends or money or a place to live. In a depressed state Miller passed by Pension Orfila at 62 rue d’Assas where Strindberg spent six months in 1896.

In those days, when I first knew her, she was saturated with Strindberg. That wild carnival of maggots which he reveled in, that eternal duel of the sexes, that spiderish ferocity which had endeared him to the sodden oafs of the northland, it was that which had brought us together…

A diary Strindberg kept at this time and later published under the title, Inferno, made a strong impression on Miller:

After leaving the Pension Orfila…, I began to reflect on the meaning of that inferno which Strindberg had so mercilessly depicted… It was no mystery to me any longer why he and others (Dante, Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to Paris. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love…

Statue honoring August Strindberg by Carl Eldh, located in Tegnérlunden Park, Stockholm

Well, at the time I was reading this, about the connection between Miller and Strindberg, I had gotten an assignment to help an Italian woman improve her spoken English (in Stockholm!), and she lives across from a park where there is a great statue honoring Strindberg. One day, having arrived for my regular appointment earlier than usual, I wandered the neighborhood and found the Strindberg Museum which includes the last place he lived and worked in. I later visited the museum, bought a book of some of his plays, in English, and toured Strindberg’s old apartment, on the 4th floor of a building on a hill overlooking downtown Stockholm.

To my utter surprise and delight I learned that Strindberg revered the German writers Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller, as well as the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. These were my father’s heroes, about whom I heard much and, in the case of Beethoven, whose music I have heard from my earliest days. There are two small plaster busts of the writers in Strindberg’s study, and the death mask of Beethoven on a wall.

There was always a heroic picture of Beethoven in my father’s home. How often did I hear “Beethoven got me through The Great Depression“?

Death Mask of Ludwig van Beethven (1712 - 1773)

Next, to read the five plays of Strindberg I bought:

The Father
Miss Julie
The Dance of Death
A Dream Play
The Ghost Sonata
 
 
 
 
 

The book Selected Letters of T.E. Lawrence, discussed here, is more revealing of his character than is his most famous work, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

He also wrote and published The Mint during his subsequent service as an ordinary airman in the newly-formed British Air Force (1918). TEL preferred to be known upon entering the military service, first as “A/c (aircraftman) Ross,” then, finally, T.E. Shaw. (He had been in the diplomatic service, not the military,  during his Arabian days).

He lived like a monk in many respects. He abstained from sex, engaged in self-flagellation (he had at least one male friend flagellate him, during a limited period), deprived himself of all comforts except for recorded classical music and endless reading, drove himself in his work beyond the capabilities of most men, denied his own talents to others, engaged constantly in self-deprecation and tended toward depression, often contemplating death.

After his Arabian days, which lasted around two years, he continued government service as an aide to Winston Churchill. As Secretary of State for the Colonies (1921-1922) Churchill played a large role in determining the fate of the territories that had been detached from the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The photograph to the left shows him during the Cairo Conference (1921), walking with T. E. Lawrence. The conference was concerend with establishing the government, ethnic composition, and political boundaries of Iraq and other portions of the Middle East. ([Source].

Left to right: Winston Churchill, Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence in Egypt, after World War I. Bell and Lawrence helped to create the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan and define the outline of the modern state of Iraq.

Before entering any government service, TEL was an accomplished archaeologist, specializing in ancient crusader castles in the Middle East. He had a wide-ranging knowledge of artifacts and history, grounded originally in his education at Oxford University. He retained throughout his life the friendship and admiration of many of his classmates and fellow scholars, and inspired others to his friendship including many powerful and otherwise famous figures such as: George Bernard Shaw (no relation) and, especially, his wife Charlotte Shaw; Lady Astor, Ezra Pound, Noël Coward, Sir Edward Elgar, E. M. Forster, Robert Graves, Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Hardy (his correspondence was only with Florence Hardy), E.T. Leeds, Eric Kennington, King Hussein of the Hejaz, Sir Hugh Trenchard, Lord George Lloyd, and Gertrude Bell.

His origins were difficult. He was one of five boys born to his unmarried parents. His parents were lovers and his father left his wife to live with his new family. His parents never married and, through this and other circumstances, TEL’s family name was always uncertain—hence his changing his last name at least twice, and finally, legally, to Shaw.

Lawrence’s mother, Sarah Junner Lawrence seemed to TEL as controlling and unpleasant to be with, but he was conscientious, in his many letters to her, in buttressing her seemingly low self-confidence as she worked in China as a missionary for many years. The above link will show the origins and makeup of the Lawrence family.

After his Arabian and Foreign Office service he joined the Air Force as a common airman, wanting to be as anonymous as possible and wanting to be in touch with “real work.” He was bounced from the Air Force because of the unavoidable publicity forever following him, so he then joined the Army which he hated. He finally was reinstated in the Air Force where he designed and tested “flying boats,” creating a whole new tool of warfare.

Above is a portrait of “Colonel T.E. Lawrence,” 1919, by Augustus John. “Colonel” was a working rank granted to him while working as a diplomatic and intelligence officer, despite his not being in the military. And, it gave him status with the Arab leaders he was working with in the British effort to defeat the Ottoman Turks.

All through his military service he wrote and received many letters to and from notables of all kinds, and ordinary servicemen he had befriended over the years. He occasionally socialized with Lady Astor, the G.B. Shaws and other luminaries, always dressed as a common soldier or airman.

As his many years in the air force drew toward a close, and as he contemplated doing very little afterward, he felt more and more oppressed by the volume of letters he received, feeling a moral obligation to answer them—and answer them he did with great depth, humor and insight. But this conscientiousness took an enormous toll on him, about which he constantly complained. As he was leaving the military service he sent out postcards to all his correspondents that he would not be writing much any more.

After mustering out of the Air force in his mid-forties, feeling quite old and used up, “as a leaf fallen from a tree,” he retired to an unplumbed cottage he had purchased years before, and occasionally rode his motorcycle, when he could afford the petrol expense. He was an avid MC rider through his service days. Here he is with George Brough, the manufacturer of his bike.

He died following a crash on his motorcycle while avoiding hitting two bicyclists on the country road he was speeding down.

In recent years I have come across many references to the book Answer to Job, by C.G. Jung. Job is a gentile man in the Book of Job of the Hebrew Bible.

I am not a student of the Bible, Christian or Hebrew, although Moses was my Old Testament hero in Sunday School at the Fourth Avenue Methodist Church in Brooklyn, around 1950.

4th Avenue Methodist Church, Brooklyn, 1983

I sometimes hear the phrase “the patience of Job” but, until reading this book, I was unaware of the story that gives rise to this phrase. But what could be so important about the story that C.G. Jung would write a book about it—published when he was age 77—calling it the only book of his he would not change? Further, a learned Jungian Scholar, Edward F. Edinger, wrote a companion book explaining the implications of Jung’s assertions in Answer to Job about Yahweh, God, Jesus, Mary, Sophia, Satan, the female and the male principles, the conscious and unconscious in man, St. John and other Biblical persons, and other items of historical, religious, mythical, philosophical, and psychological interest. His book is Transformation of the God Image: An Elucidation of Jung’s “Answer to Job.”

As Alan Watts points out in his lecture  “Who is it Who Knows There is no Ego,” all the words and  concepts used in this essay are created and used by Man to distinguish among imagined parts of the undifferentiated Whole so he (Man) can do things with them and to be less frightened of the unknown. With this in mind, I will boldly summarize Jung’s book:

I place these quite imperfectly formed words and thoughts in front of you in the hope of stimulating you to read at least the Jung book; but the Edinger book will clarify and modernize some important portions of Jung’s language and its translation from the German. Also, you will get insights into the precepts and work of Jungian psychologists.

Last, as I read through both books I was reminded of soulfully poetic passages along similar lines (as distinct from Jung’s academic approach) in Nikos Kazantzakis’s autobiography, Report to Greco:

Now for the first time since the world was made, man has been enabled to enter God’s workshop and labor with him. The more flesh (man) transubstantiates into love, valor and freedom, the more truly he becomes Son of God….

What a fearful ascent from monkey to man, from man to God!

I have always liked the music of this composer, born in Russia and ultimately a citizen of the USA, achieved shortly before his death.

I once presented to an informal discussion group his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, in my opinion. The piece is a set of 24 variations on the twenty-fourth and last of Niccolò Paganini’s Caprices for solo violin, which has inspired works by several composers. The 18th variation in Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody was made popularly famous in the romantic 1980 film Somewhere in Time.

Here is the pianist Mikhail Pletnev, playing the 18th variation and succeeding variations to the end of the piece; and, here is a biography of Rachmaninoff.

Why am I writing about this here?

At the 30th birthday party of my wife’s son, Max, I met his aunt whom I hadn’t previously met, and learned she was a singer with Sofia Kyrkokör (Sofia Church Choir). She invited us to attend, the next day, Sunday, at Sofia Church in Stockholm, an a capella concert of Rachmaninoff’s All Night Vigil. I had not known of this piece and was intrigued. So Eva and I attended. The group of singers also included the Sofia Vocalensemble.

The All-Night Vigil, Opus 37, is an a cappella choral composition by Sergei Rachmaninoff, written and premiered in 1915. It consists of settings of texts taken from the Russian Orthodox All-night vigil ceremony. It has been praised as Rachmaninoff’s finest achievement and “the greatest musical achievement of the Russian Orthodox Church”. It was one of Rachmaninoff’s two favorite compositions along with The Bells, and the composer requested that one of its movements (the fifth) be sung at his funeral. The title of the work is often translated as simply Vespers, which is both literally and conceptually incorrect as applied to the entire work: only the first six of its fifteen movements set texts from the Russian Orthodox canonical hour of Vespers.

1 Come, Let Us Worship (Psalm 95)
2 Praise the Lord, O My Soul (Greek Chant)
3 Blessed is the Man (Psalm 1:1)
4 O Gentle Light (Kiev Chant)
5 Lord, Now Lettest Thou (Kiev Chant)
6 Rejoice, O Virgin (Hail Mary)
7 The Six Psalms
8 Praise the Name of the Lord (Znamenny Chant)
9 Blessed Art Thou, O Lord (Znamenny Chant)
10 Having Beheld the Resurrection
11 My Soul Doth Magnify the Lord
12 The Great Doxology (Znamenny Chant)
13 Troparion: Today Salvation is Come (Znamenny Chant)
14 Troparion: Thou Didst Rise from the Tomb (Znamenny Chant)
15 O Queen Victorious (Greek Chant)
[Source: Wikipedia]

I am no expert, to be sure, but I felt this was a very modern piece, more western Europe than eastern Europe sounding. The solo chanting was very wonderful and appropriate to the venue, a large open space in the main room of the church (I don’t know the proper name) with a high, vaulted ceiling that contained and presented the singing perfectly, without echoes that competed for my ear’s attention.

The church was well-lit and decorated simply in what appeared to be art deco which was popular at the time of this church’s construction.

Rachmaninoff was a great pianist as well as composer, and his music was a staple in the household of my youngest days before World War two, in San Francisco.

It was fulfilling to hear more of the great man’s work, and executed so lovingly and well.

…to fully reveal that which the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan repeatedly told his government, to no avail, and at the cost of his job.

Craig John Murray was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002-2004. While serving in that nations’ capital, Tashkent, he accused the administration of Uzbekistan President Islom Abdug‘aniyevich Karimov of human rights abuses. Murray repeatedly complained to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office that intelligence linking the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to al-Qaeda, suspected of being gained through torture, was unreliable, immoral, and illegal. He described this as “selling our souls for dross”. Murray was subsequently removed from his ambassadorial post on October 14, 2004. [Source]

Craig Murray has chronicled his saga in the book Murder in Samarkand, which I have recently read and which has prompted this article.

Murray’s main point is that the USA, from 11 September 2001, was so intent on fighting “the war on terror” that its government tolerated the kind of official behavior in Uzbekistan which it declaimed against under Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—that is, repression, torture and atrocities on its own people. Further, the then government of the United Kingdom fully supported the USA position and was complicit in consciously ignoring violations of human rights, under the United Nations Charter including, especially, the use of torture to gain “intelligence.”

The British government has denied this, to date.

REPORT OF THE UN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS, February 2003—Mission to Uzbekistan: Civil and Political Rights, Including the Questions of Torture and Detention and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. [Please click on the report's title, above, to access it in MS Word and PDF format)].

Karshi-Khanabad is an airbase in south-eastern Uzbekistan. Between 2001 and 2005 the United States Air Force used the base, also known as K2 and “Stronghold Freedom”, for support missions against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. [Source]

The USA ended its official relationship with Uzbekistan in late 2005 when it “closed its air base in Uzbekistan that was used for Afghanistan operations, a shutdown ordered by Uzbek President Islam Karimov after the United States joined calls for an international inquiry into the authoritarian leader’s handling of the Andijan uprising.” [Source]

The Andijan massacre occurred when Uzbek Interior Ministry and National Security Service troops fired into a crowd of protesters in Andijan, Uzbekistan on 13 May 2005. Estimates of those killed on 13 May range from between 187, the official count of the government, and 5,000 people, with most outside reports estimating several hundred dead. A defector from Uzbekistan’s secret service alleged that 1,500 were killed.

Calls from Western governments for an international investigation prompted a major shift in Uzbek foreign policy favoring closer relations with Asian nations. The Uzbek government ordered the closing of the United States air base in Karshi-Khanabad and improved ties with the People’s Republic of China, India, and Russia, all of which supported the regime’s response in Andijan. [Source]

The unrest in the Ferghana Region has a lot to do with its minority Tajik population which were then (possibly still are) repressed and labeled, at various times, as Islamic extremists. Some observers claim that the repression drove some Tajiks toward extreme Islamism. But there is no doubt that at least a small fraction of Tajik-Uzbeks belong to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

The region’s ethnic politics are complicated by the fact that the Soviet Union purposefully changed the borders of the “Soviet Republics” of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as you can see from this tortuous border around the Ferghana Valley.

[Source of Map. Please click on the image for clearer detail.]

For a variety of reasons the designers of the Soviet “national delimitation” in Central Asia discriminated against the Tajiks, having deprived the newly formed republic of Tajikistan of the two most important centers of Tajik urban culture, Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as regions of Fergana, Surhandarya and Khwrazm which were awarded to Uzbekistan. The majority of population in Uzbekistan are Tajiks. In the words of William Beeman, professor of anthropology at Brown University: “The Tajik situation in some ways resembles that of post-colonial Africa. Tajiks have been given an impossible piece of territory with disparate population and have been forced to make a nation out of it.”

The majority of Tajiks live outside border of what is known as Tajikistan today.The largest number of Tajiks are living in Uzbekistan, where the majority of Tajiks are forced to be registered as Uzbeks (the Tajiks on the official Uzbeki data, make about 4% of the population of this republic), but the real number of Tajiks living in Uzbekistan believed to be over 50 percent (11-14 millions) of the population.“ [Source]

I offer, in closing, these observations and sources regarding the Republic of Uzbekistan:

[Image Source]

…(N)on-governmental human rights watchdogs, such as IHF, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, as well as United States Department of State and Council of the European Union define Uzbekistan as “an authoritarian state with limited civil rights” and express profound concern about “wide-scale violation of virtually all basic human rights.” According to the reports, the most widespread violations are torture, arbitrary arrests, and various restrictions of freedoms: of religion, of speech and press, of free association and assembly. The reports maintain that the violations are most often committed against members of religious organizations, independent journalists, human rights activists and political activists, including members of the banned opposition parties. In 2005, Uzbekistan was included into Freedom House’s “The Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies. [Source].

Press Service of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan

Governmental Portal of the Republic of Uzbekistan

President Visits Ferghana Region

Dictator of the Month, December 2006

US slams Uzbek election as unfree, unfair and laughable [January 12, 2000]

No, I’m not talking about your alimentary canal.

When your doctor (or Doctor Mom) checks to see if your “glands” are swollen, it is your lymph nodes that are being checked—and they are not glands.

The lymph nodes, located throughout your body, are part of a lymphatics circulatory system which runs in parallel and in collaboration with your venous blood system, as distinct from your arterial blood system.
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Venous Circulatory System∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙∙Lymphatics Circulatory System

[Please click on the images to see the detail more clearly]

So what do these lymph nodes have to do with the maladies I cite at the top of this page? They are protecting and defending your body by sensing, attacking, immobilizing, killing, and flushing the remains of the bad critters that have invaded your otherwise pristine flesh. When thus engaged in dealing with the alien invaders, the lymph nodes ramp up their activities and become swollen with lymphatic fluid which contains the disease-eating organisms of your body—the macrophages (literally, big eaters) and other defensive cells.

But, when the lymphatics system doesn’t work properly, bad things can happen—the sewer backs up. The result is a swelling of various tissues, a condition most commonly called lymphodema. There are other names for more serious problems associated with the dysfunction of the lymphatics system..

A macrophage attacking infectious organisms

I was reminded of all this, having remembered about “lymph” only vaguely from my biology classes in high school, by my friend Helena Janlöv-Remnerud. Helena is a trained nurse, entrepreneur, teacher and authority in lymphodema therapy. Because we have a mutual friend in the USA, we met several years ago and found we had interests in common.

What is lymphodema? And why does a person with this condition need therapy? So glad you asked.

The simplest way to describe lymphodema (or, more scientifically, lymphodoema) is an abnormal swelling of the limbs and other parts of the body. The most extreme example of this condition outside of a hospital will be the person whose legs seem like those of an elephant, hence the term elephantiasis, used in unusually serious cases where parasitic worms have invaded the lymphatics system, a disease usually found in the tropics.

Most commonly in the temperate zones, lymphodema is the result of acute trauma to the body, including deep surgical operations such as for cancer, and due to the effects other diseases such as diabetes.

Helena has had, for a number of years, her own lymphodema clinic in central Stockholm and is currently preparing for a move to a larger, multi-specialty clinic near a major medical center just north of the city center: Olivia Rehabilitering (click on “Lymfödemrehab” to see Helena’s clinic).

Your body’s immune system organs

I attended an open house for the clinic which will open for business in early 2010, and received a guided tour and lecture on the subject of Helena’s expertise. She likes to use the metaphor of a sewer system to describe the lymphatics system. This analogy appeals to me, my having been trained in public health and perceiving the hidden sewer systems of our cities and towns as the platform upon which we are able to successfully build our civilization. Think of the great water and sewer works built by the Ancient Romans.

In helping this layman understand her metaphor, Helena told me:

The lymphatic fluid takes all the waste products away from your tissues. As it moves toward its final destination in the blood stream, it passes through the analysis stations of the lymph nodes where bacteria and other harmful micro-organisms are detected. An alarm goes off in the lymph nodes that signals the production of warriors to attack them. The residue will be taken care of by the cleansing processes of the bloodstream: the liver, the kidneys and the spleen. All the output of the lymphatic system is poured into the venous blood system at two large veins under your collar bones, the subclavian veins. As the blood passes through the kidneys some waste products are done away with through bladder and the urine. When the blood passes through the liver other waste (like toxins) are discarded of through the bowel. The spleen mainly takes care of old erythrocytes (red blood cells); it also part of the immune system.

Helena recently delivered a paper to Svenska Ödemförbundet (Swedish Edema Association) on lymphoedema assessment and management in an Australian clinic she visited, which you can read in English, here.

Another question you might ask is: how can the lymph fluids circulate if there is no “heart” attached to the system? There is peristaltic action in the lymph vessels, but another vital method is through the movement of your body, especially the legs. This is one reason why walking is so important for your health—to keep the lymphatics flowing and flushing out the poisons and infectious residue from your body.

What I hope to leave you with is an appreciation for a seldom mentioned system of your body that deserves equal billing with your blood system.

Ask your doctor about it.

The words “great” and “greatest” appeared several times during my research into Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), both on the Internet and from books that I own.

Why was I looking for references about her? Because I had come across her name yet one more time, recently, causing me to go over the tipping point, not able to resist getting to know her better.

Last week a friend had given me a book, What to Listen for in Music by the composer of quintessentially American music, Aaron Copland, and in the foreword by Alan Rich was a reminder that Copland had been a pupil of Boulanger.

Leonard Bernstein congratulating Nadia Boulanger, after she became the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a full concert, February, 1962. [Secondary Source]

Most simply put, she can be considered “the greatest” because she was teacher to so many renown composers and performing artists, some of whom were great teachers in their own right—Aaron Copland, for one.

These are some of the American students of Nadia Boulanger:

Although Leonard Bernstein’s name is linked for many reasons with that of Nadia Boulanger, he apparently was not a pupil of hers. But, he was a pupil of a pupil of hers: Walter Piston.

Boulanger, in 1928, rejected as a student one of America’s most important composers, George Gershwin. “What could I give you that you haven’t already got?” she asked him. [Source]

I most recently saw Boulanger’s name while reading Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, by Noël Riley Fitch. Beach was the owner of the famed “Shakespeare & Company” bookshop in Paris to which Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound and many other writers of the 1920s and 1930s gravitated, along with musicians and other artists. Several of these musicians and future composers were in Paris because of Nadia Boulanger, thus offering the creative and disciplined influence of these two remarkable women who apparently never met each other. In chapter seven of her book, Fitch offers these anecdotes:

Aaron Copland (1900-1900)

Most of the regular customers of the bookshop were writers, but among them were four composers: Satie, Antheil, Virgil Thomson, and Aaron Copland…Copland, who had joined the lending library [of the bookshop] had time to read [Sylvia’s] books in spite of being worked “terribly hard” by Nadia Boulanger, the great French teacher of musical composition to more than a generation of American composers…Because of Stravinsky, Ravel, Schönberg, Strauss, Satie and the music school of Nadia Boulanger, young American composers went to Europe, particularly Paris, to complete their professional education. In America, musical training was predominantly Germanic and old-fashioned, but in Paris, according to Copland, Boulanger knew “pre-Bach to Post-Stravinsky…cold.”

Although only the names of male composers have entered this narrative so far, Nadia Boulanger was teacher and mentor to a number of women in the field of music. In A History of Classical Music, on which I commented previously, the author, Barrymore Laurence Scherer writes:

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)

During [Ruth Crawford's] European travels she was embraced by such pre-eminent musical figures such as Bartók, Honneger, and Nadia Boulanger…Among Nadia Boulanger’s American students were other women who achieved positions of distinction as composers, among them Marion Bauer (1882-1955) and Louise Talma 1906-1996). Bauer…had learned French from her parents; when introduced to Boulanger…in 1906, she offered to give Boulanger English lessons in return for lessons in composition, and thus became Boulanger’s first American student.

But, what was it like to study with Nadia Boulanger; what was so special that the most talented people sought her out? We can get a glimpse from Philip Glass.

Around a year ago I bought the book Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism, edited by Richard Kostelanetz. I have been fascinated with Glass’s music for almost two decades, especially since having viewed and bought the film Koyaanisqatsi, for which he wrote the musical score. The film has no spoken dialog. “In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means ‘crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living’” [Source]

In an early chapter of the book we learn that Glass went to study with Boulanger in 1963, at age 26, because a musical colleague whom he admired had studied with her. Glass had already completed his studies at the Juilliard School of Music.

(Transcribed from an interview by Ev Grimes)

Boulanger wasn’t interested in the music I had written…I started studying first species counterpoint with her again…I studied counterpoint and harmony with her for over two years…

She had a variety of techniques that she was teaching. They included score reading, counterpoint, harmony, figured bass, and analysis…With Boulanger, nothing was theoretical; it was all practical. The rules of harmony she could describe in a few sentences, but you could spend years writing it, because to her the difference between technique and theory was that technique was practice. Harmony is practice, counterpoint is practice—neither is theory…

You took three classes with her a week…[The] Black Thursday class…was a special class…[Y]ou were asked to that class; you couldn’t request it. She put together six or eight students…It would start at nine o’clock and would go till noon. The subject of the class was announced at the beginning, and we rarely accomplished it…When we left the class, we would sit in the café across the street. No one would say anything; we would have our coffee or a beer, then we would part until we got together the next week. No one would say anything [repeated]. It was totally demoralizing in one way. We all knew we were either her best students or her worst students, but none of us knew which ones we were…

One can read more of Nadia Boulanger and her teaching goals and methods from these sources:

List of students and others associated with Nadia Boulanger

[Click!]