Ah, vacation. Time off, a change of scenery, and no laptops tethering us to the cyberworld.

Just the world itself, out the front windshield of the mini Cooper.

(photo by Kathy Namba)

We headed for the western edge of the Gila Wilderness (first spot so designated in the country – thanks to Aldo Leopold and his forward vision) and spent the night in Glenwood. The next morning we hiked the Catwalk beside the river, made plans to return for hot springs and cliff dwellings and more, and headed for Tucson.

The little toy car forded the flooded road sections, and the two of us reveled in the sheer joy of being on a road trip.  We crossed country we’d never seen before and let the landscape steal our attention from thoughts of work and everyday life.

Even if you love your life, there’s something indispensable about leaving it behind for a while, giving your mind a rest from the one-thing-after-another aspect of it all. With a road trip the travel itself, the movement from one place to the next and the next, substitutes for plot. It’s enough just to look.

Part of what I watched for (besides cactus, which I’ve long been crazy about, and rock formations, a new obsession) – was the frequency of roadside memorials to friends and family lost at treacherous turns in the road. In New Mexico we call them descansos, the homemade markers that celebrate a life while they mourn its loss. They stand as a reminder that any stretch of highway offers a good opportunity to rocket out of this life.

But they do more than just put a shine on a sense of mortality; in a weird but charming way, they personalize the relationship between humans and the land. Render it more specific. Here, at this place, somebody left her body behind.

A loved body, in a lot of cases.

I couldn’t help but remember the story my uncle Rolland told of his great-great Uncle Stephen and Aunt Elvira, who ventured west in a wagon train, had a baby en route, and turned back – returned to Ohio – when a snakebite proved fatal for their infant son.

And it made me wonder. When you die, do you miss yourself?

No, stay with me. Here’s what I was thinking. You know how deeply we miss the ones we love, once they go? Even places, once we’ve been separated from them? I wonder if there’s maybe a moment in the midst of the act – the experience – of dying, when some part of you can look (sure, metaphorically) on the body, the whole self, being left behind, and just, well, plain, miss yourself. Not all that went with it; just that specific human body, written on by time and the weather.

Reminded me of that great Basho haiku, written on the occasion of the death of his young son (trans. Robert Hass):

The world of dew

is a world of dew, and yet –

and yet.

Then we got to Tucson and ate a lot of great food and slept in a great place and got back in the car and drove north to Gold Canyon and saw wonderful friends and drank some astonishing tequila and slept again and then we got back in the car and came home, to work and — yes — beloved everyday life.

Last time I promised more Siberia. Lucky you! There’s plenty of it to go around.

There’s so much Siberia, in fact, that it took Ian Frazier and two Russian pals five weeks and two days to cross it in a diesel-powered Renault step van. He wrote about the experience in a two-part article The New Yorker published last August.

Nearly anywhere Ian Frazier goes, I will follow. I first encountered his writing in Great Plains, his non-fiction account of the huge hunk of land (and its various denizens, human and otherwise) that makes up the American midsection. (Here’s a good interview with Frazier, discussing On the Rez, another of his books.)

Clearly, this is a man unfazed by size.

But if the American Midwest is big, Siberia occupies a different order of magnitude. All of the continental U.S. and most of Europe could fit in the broad swath of land – forty-six hundred miles wide – that’s loosely considered Siberia. It doesn’t exist, officially. Not as a political entity, anyway. But try telling that to the world’s largest forest, the vast expanse of tundra, and the miles on miles of steppe that comprise the region. Try telling that to the thirty-eight million Russians and native people who live there. (If you can find them.)

Try telling New Yorker readers about a landscape that foreign and that daunting – and you’d better have a few tricks up your sleeve to make it work.

My disinterest in Siberia notwithstanding, I read the article, “Travels in Siberia,” with absolute relish the first time through. And then I read it again, more carefully, to try to understand how Frazier manages to keep our keen interest while plowing through material that might more likely be encountered in a sixth-grade report.

The names of the mountains. The names of the rivers. The political borders. The climate, mineral reserves, transportation system, flora and fauna and history. Are you asleep yet?

Not if you’re reading the article. If you’re reading, you’re on the edge of your chair. The river does what? you say. No shit! How big are the logs? How cold does it get? Tell me more!

Because you are there, and that’s your buddy Ian pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of the place to you. He’s giving you some background information, weaving his presence, his agile intelligence, his wit, and his personal credibility into language that is both accessible and deftly structured for maximum pleasure.

If you give much thought to rhetoric – not just how to construct an argument, but, more broadly, how to structure any written work to persuade the reader to join your corner – this article is a goldmine of successful strategies.

The Ural Mountains, which cross Russia north to south from the Arctic Ocean to Kazakhstan, are the western edge of Siberia. The Urals also separate Europe from Asia. As a mountain range with the big job of dividing two continents, the Urals aren’t much. It is possible to drive over them, as I have done, and not know. In central Russia, the summits of the Urals average between one thousand and two thousand feet. But after you cross the Urals the land opens out, the villages are farther apart, the concrete bus shelters along the highway become fewer, and suddenly you realize you’re in Siberia.

In general, abstract facts are stingily allotted short sentences. Frazier saves his words for the tangible – what the reader can see, hear, feel, imagine – and varies the sentence length so that no paragraph feels overburdened with either fact or image. And he is constantly, constantly interjecting narrative: the obvious narrative line of his travels, and the oblique introduction of brief stories to illustrate ideas.

Makes me want to go somewhere. Kathy and I are headed to Tucson for a brief jaunt – springtime in the desert, all that jazz – but we’ve been kicking around the idea of a longer trip, too. We’re thinking maybe it would be fun to take a month and walk the Camino de Santiago across Spain.

In the meantime, I’m content to travel along with writers who can make me see and smell and feel the place they’re moving through.

Any recommendations of writers who have done that for you?

As many of you know, I’m fairly obsessed with stories that grow from place.  I’m fascinated by accounts from real people of feelings and events they experienced at actual, mapable locations, and I think that much of the subtlety surrounding our experience with — and knowledge of — a place can be captured in the sophisticated language of story.  (For these purposes, let’s call it “articulated memory”.  I’m making the distinction between these kinds of stories and the fiction I write.)  Telling a story about a place that matters to you will both call up and reinforce your feelings about that place, and privilege it above other, less evocative places in your memory and in your future actions.

One thing I like about story collecting is that it’s a mutual endeavor.  You tell, I listen – and then we switch.  There’s something satisfyingly democratic about it.  Even when the roles don’t shift, there’s a relationship that develops between teller and listener that has the potential to alter the content and nuance the understanding.

How much of that place-feeling can be captured biometrically?  Christian Nold is determined to find out.  He’s the principal investigator for a project that lands square in the intersection between art and geography, and the free-for-download Emotional Cartographies is a record of his inquiries and those of other, like-minded people.  Nold has worked out a way to link a simple biometric device – a machine that measures “galvanic skin response,” finger sweat as an indicator of emotional intensity – to a lightweight GPS unit.  He straps the apparatus to people willing to then walk through personally relevant landscapes, records the data, and uploads it to create a simple Google Earth map of the route and his subjects’ emotional arousal.

Described this way, his project seems geeky; sci-fi.  And, clearly, the potential applications of this data for commercial use have not escaped the attention of real-estate professionals, urban planners, marketing executives, and the like.  Nold has a different idea in mind.  In Emotional Cartographies, he relates that

People were using the Emotion Map as an embodied memory-trigger for recounting events that were personally significant for them. Sometimes these descriptions overlapped, while at other times they were unique. For them, the spikes were documenting not what we would commonly call ‘emotion’, but actually a variety of different sensations in relation to the external environment such as awareness, sensory perception and surprise. I suddenly saw the importance of people interpreting their own raw bio-data for themselves….

With Bio Mapping, people’s interpretation and public discussion of their own data becomes the true and meaningful record of their experience. Talking about their body data in this way, they are generating a new type of knowledge combining ‘objective’ biometric data and geographical position, with the ‘subjective story’ as a new kind of psychogeography.

You can see the idiosyncratic maps this process produces on his website.

ODDS

Want to learn more about how Google Earth can be used to create useful, customized maps for humanitarian aid, community projects, and similar purposes?  Check out the MapAction Field Guide, a 118-page, free-for-download how-to pamphlet.  Even if you’re unfamiliar with GPS, GIS, and all the other acronyms of today’s techno-geography, they’ll lead you through the basics of how to create a useful map you can share with others.

ENDS

One more thing:  an Albuquerque arts consortium is hosting what looks to be a very interesting series of events and installations this summer and fall.  It’s called LAND/ART, and there’s a two-day symposium late June, preceded by an appearance by Laurie Anderson and others.  Check it out here.

Me?  I try to stay away from the question — although occasionally I’m forced to take it on.

I’ve learned never to answer when it’s phrased (mostly by myself) in the form:  why the hell would you want to do something that…

Every once in a while someone comes along to remind us in a personal way of the value of art.  Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory, gave an address to freshman music students there as they embarked on their careers.  I’ll copy it below for anybody who needs a shot in the arm, a personal account of why to create art.  He’s talking about music, but it pretty much goes for any form.  And — in what I think of as an unusual twist for music — he describes how place, and circumstance (story, really), go into creating a particularly moving composition. Thanks to Sharon Kenny for passing it along.

Why do you write?

Welcome address to freshman at Boston Conservatory, given by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory.

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school—she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture—why would anyone bother with music? And yet—from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings—people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier—even in his 70’s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”

AWP in Chicago was terrific, but my favorite part of the whole thing was going home.

Maybe that’s because I had such a great trip back.  I was well enough recovered from the flu to ride Amtrak for the return journey, which meant getting to see a grand swath of the middle of this country.  Except for the (admittedly lengthy) dark portion of the trip, I kept my eyes glued to the landscape.

There are a lot of great reasons to ride the train.  High Country News – one of my favorite regional news journals – reported recently on a Department of Energy claim that train travel is 17% more energy efficient than plane travel, while emitting four times less carbon dioxide per passenger mile traveled.  It’s often cheaper, there’s a heck of a lot more leg room, and you can move around at your leisure.  I had a semi-reasonable dinner and a glass of wine in the dining car with some interesting conversation.

Yes, it takes longer than flying.  Much longer.  But the views can’t be beat.

I rode Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, which cuts west through Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas; corners through a bit of Colorado; loops through New Mexico; and then barrels across Arizona and California to meet the Pacific in L.A.  I got my fill of flat.  The Midwest is a mystery to me, and I saw long stretches of its fields, laid out in a strict geometry of right angles and neat furrows.  Punctuating the fields were little well-kept clusters of tall, narrow houses, broad barns, and trees kept like pets for comfort and protection.  Every so often the whistle blew and we pulled in to a station in a snug little town.

There was something terribly vulnerable to me about this landscape.  Houses sat optimistically perched on green grass and looked like they could be plucked up and flung away with no advance notice.  The neatness seemed a hedge against disaster, the prevalence of red (barns, roofs) a kind of cheerful superstition.  It seemed profoundly old-fashioned to me.  To me alone?  Or to me because I’m used to messiness and disorder, both in physical landscape and in social constructs?

I love that the train lets you see things at a level slightly higher than a car would, and takes you in much closer than a highway ever does.  It goes slower than a plane and faster than a bicycle.  If I wanted to know those places, I’d need to get off the train, walk around, talk to people, stay a while.  

I didn’t have time for  that, this trip.  But at least I know they’re there – and that I’m much more interested in them, in the ways people live there and interact with the landscape, than I knew before.

Which is a whole lot more than I could say for flying over.