Desert Islands, Fathers, Essential Music

Sunday, September 29, 2002

Esther Mackintosh wrote me a great note about her father the other day. He was a farmer - as was mine - and Esther's father had memorized a good deal of poetry so that he could always have company as he slopped the hogs, milked the cows, and went about the daily routine on one of those farms like I grew up on - a little of everything - "diversified," I learned one day in 4-H. I don't know how it was for Esther's family, but what went on in North Dakota west of the Missouri had more to do with survival and making maximum use of too-little land where it didn't rain enough. So, we grew a bit of wheat for cash, but mostly feed grains (barley and oats), a bit of corn, and alfalfa or sweet clover. We milked cows, separated the milk from the cream, fed hogs ground barley and skim milk, kept chickens, and made do from cream check to cream check for the few necessities - and paid the bigger bills by selling the hogs and the wheat - but, of course, you could never depend upon the wheat. Nor could you depend on a price for anything you sold, but that's an old North Dakota story, where there's high hopes for this next-to-the-last-day of September. We had a delegation of farmers and political leaders in Cuba this past week. Castro stopped by and ate some pasta, had lunch with North Dakotans and praised them for our leading high-school graduation rate and the high percentage of high school students who go on, and bought some peas. There's also a chance we'll be selling them seed potatoes again, as we did before the Revolution. If the visiting farmers and politicians talked about the what poetry and music North Dakotans enjoy, it didn't make the news.

​Esther Mackintosh is Vice-President of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, the organization created a quarter century ago to help those of us who work in public humanities, especially the volunteer citizen members of boards, learn from each other. We have also come together in order to lean on Congress from time to time in order to continue the national commitment to the life of the mind and spirit. The leadership of the Federation includes Gail Leftwich, who serves as President, and Jamie Doggett, a Montana rancher who serves as the Chair of the Board of the Federation. I count all as kola, friends - and more, they are indeed fellow travellers, committed to nothing less than a grand national revolution, a nation that both subscribes to and practices the ideal of the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the mid 1960s, to wit, "The humanities belong to all the people of the United States." Just how much Esther, Gail & Jamie think about and work for this end came in wonderful notes this past week.

They would have nothing less than the best of what some fifty-five states and territories do with a few federal dollars - and at our best, we in state humanities councils bring together citizens like Esther's father to talk about what the poems they recite while mucking out the hog barn mean, what they say about life worth living or death with dignity - the big humanities questions.

I thought about Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet, "On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven," the other day when I was traveling back and forth in a CT scanner getting mapped for radiation - "blued and tattooed" in preparation for daily treatments. I thought about how great it would be if they had some great music in the place - or a way to play a CD one brought in so one could listen while getting the chemo or radiation. Seems to me that it might make those daily does a bit easier to take if one could hear a rousing rendition of the choral finish to Beethoven's Ninth, for example.

It took a long time for the academy to recognize Millay - in fact, she was long gone before she got into most anthologies. She still isn't in many of the snootier ones. Born in 1892, she was gone a couple of years before her sixtieth birthday - 1950. Her poetry is online in many places on the Internet - including one of my favorite places to visit: click here for the home of the Academy of American Poets. Here's Millay's sonnet on music -

Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fary-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds; oh, let me live,
Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun.
Music my rampart, and my only one.

Well, Edna, music is indeed a rampart. Perhaps not the only one, but a great one. 'Twas once something of a rage to have famous folks bring their favorite music to programs entitled some variation of "Desert Island" - if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island, and you could bring but five albums (CDs, whatever), what would they be? Why?

I would have to have some Beethoven - it would have to be the Ninth. Beethoven finally finished it in 1824 - but that was after 25 years of thinking about how to set Schiller's "Ode to Joy" to music. God help me, when the chorus finally breaks through with the full song, my spirit soars -

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Joy, fair spark of the gods, ... ...
Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Be embraced, Millions!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Take this kiss for all the world!
Brüder über'm Sternenzelt
Brothers, surely a loving Father
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Dwells above the canopy of stars.
Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?
Do you sink before him, Millions?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
World, do you sense your Creator?
Such'ihn über'm Sternenzelt!
Seek him then beyond the stars!
Über Sternen muss er wohnen.
He must dwell beyond the stars.

So, kola, what music would you take with you to the desert island - why?

If you've a mind to, listen to the last four minutes of Beethoven's 9th. It brings tears to my eyes and a sweet swelling to my chest every time I hear it.

'Tis small wonder that Debussy said of the work — please note, cause this may well contain the most exquisite praise ever offered a fellow artist (it will be in quotes):
“It is the most triumphant example of the molding of an idea to the preconceived form; at each leap forward there is a new delight, without either effort or appearance of repetition; the magical ​blossoming, so to speak, of a tree whose leaves burst forth simultaneously. Nothing is superfluous in this stupendous work."

Think I'll do a greeting card along those lines — how about one for college graduates: "May your life's work be stupendous but never superfluous."