Christmas is winding
down now. Another year. Traditions are passed and appropriated and
adapted into something that has a bit of affinity with the experience you
enjoyed as a child. Materialist,
certainly. Pressure builds to a satisfying
but always imperfect release. An odd
indoctrination. A house full of people
who did not grow up with the Christmas tradition all adapting without
difficulty to the notion of “gift exchange.”
A time in the middle of the Western calendar to stop and insist that the
family comes first. You can harness a
ritual like that for good.
Music on this day could be about new. If I had time I could search out new versions
of old feelings. Rather, the impulse is
old versions of old feelings. Play them
out loud the night before and then play them out loud again on Christmas
morning. I want the same predictable CDs
I played the last six years in a row.
They’re still sitting in the same part of the cubby blow the Wi-Fi where
they were left last year. One thing that we must hear is the Nut Cracker Suite, by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
We have a version that is narrated and by the British
Actress Prunella Scales, coupled with her natation of Rimsky-Korsakov's “Christmas
Eve Suite.” I think the oral depiction
helps for children and stimulates their memories with her schoolmarm
seriousness. Ostensibly I play it to evoke
the holiday, indoctrinate the children and invoke something majestic for my
extended family who are wandering around. But
essentially, it is really for me.
The story of an annoying older brother who ruins things on
the big day. Immediately accessible. Everything
is safe. The parents are kind. The children, affluent. The fire is warm and the home is refined. The kids all have their presents from Herr Drosselmeyer. The terrible, turbulent world of nineteenth
century Russia is out in the cold, somewhere else, out beyond the dark, for the
evening. And everything is possible and
plausible, because the vehicle is a dream.
And when the late nineteenth century Russian mind dreamt it seemed
fated to float down south, down river to the sepulcher. Along the Volga River to Sebastopol and past
Odessa and on along the brine to the last, holy home of the Tsar, to
Constantinople where legitimacy stemmed from.
A city fallen and perhaps still deeply attractive and repulsive because
Istanbul was the home of the Caliphate, not a Caesar.
The “Orient” so close
it must be addressed, but so far away that it is fantastic and dainty. Written in 1892, as so much was about to
change. Cast between the faltering
Turkish Empire and the anti colonial movements that would remake all of
Asia. Before the days when Asians or
Europeans could put a name on what it was being done. Before “Orientalism” and the objectification
of East, that exotic other, was diagnosed as such.
Russians more than any other Europeans knew a thing or two
about Asia. They who were actually
subdued and ruled by Mongols in their legends and in their blood. Russians who acknowledged the majesty and
power of the Near and Far East. They
feared it. Surely they knew better than
any European power about confrontation with the East. 1892 was a precious pirouette, like something
from this ballet. By this time in
history Russia was falsely confident about their waxing Western European
superiority. By 1904 a newly westernized
Eastern power would reacquaint Russia with the power of the East and help to foster
a revolution that would end the days of Tsars and change the way the world
would view Russia, and nobility, forever.
Listening to the “Arabian Dance” now. How spacious and utterly seductive it is. As
long as we’re being unabashedly “Orientalist” we can confess that thoughts turn
to the late Peter O’toole who didn’t live quite long enough to see this year’s Christmas. Forgive me.
There he is now, riding across the desert as Lawrence with the two Arab
boys to convey the fall of Aqaba. “Get
these boys a glass of water.”
Sitting, writing in the frozen Moscow winter how alluring
“Arabia” must have been. Was “Arabia”
what lie beyond Istanbul? If that is
what follows . . . If that is what lies next.
If that were the magnet that drew the world’s Muslims, the millions of
whom surrounded your (far)-Eastern European world, then you would need go and
see Arabia, wouldn’t you? Certainly
you’d be there when you were dreaming. You’d
necessarily float there at night and the accompaniment would have to be this Phrygian
mode mystery, moving you along, slowly.
Refined, mysterious, as though the plodding logic were beyond
question. Continuing across a blood red dusk, endurable only with water and sunset and opiates.
The journey continues, as only dreams can, in a flash,
across ten thousand miles of “the orient”, further from the minor-mystery of proximate
next-door danger and allure of Islam, to the utterly fantastic world at the end
of the earth. A world that few if any had
really ever seen, but everyone knew existed: China. The “Chinese
Dance” is quite a different feeling from “The Arabian Dance” that
proceeds. There is nothing to worry
about here. No plodding sadness, but rather
a harmless teeter totter bass line and soaring flute and we’re introduced to something
lovely, refined and utterly harmless sitting positioned in a glass case: the China of 1892. The Sino Japanese War with its inglorious
defeat for China, still two years off.
The Boxer Rebellion, a flailing act of rebellion still seven years
off. China, rather a lovely cloisonné Chinoiserie. Tumbling acrobats, medicated, subdued,
evocative. Life, certainly Chinese life
appearing: 人生如梦[1]
I think of one of my many Russian heroes from that time, the
anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin. One of
the remarkable cadre of elite Russian gentry from the late nineteenth century,
who were so remarkably gifted and educated almost as a function of opposition
to the desperation that the other 95% of the Russian population endured. Kropotkin would have been in exile in England
in 1892, having dramatically escaped in 1876 from St. Peter and Paul’s prison
in St. Petersburg.
As a young man, Kropotkin would have garnered a sense for
the “Orient” quite different from the Faberge egg of Tchaikovsky. In 1864, Kropotkin had lead a ‘Lewis &
Clark’-like scientific expedition into the heart of Siberia, driving all the
way to the Songhua River, in far eastern Asia, the main tributary to the
Heilong River, that flows into Haerbin China. This was the soil from which his ideas of
justice and equality sprang from. What a
ferocious world, he must have rode through.
Some other time I will have to visit Russia. Some other time I will have to consider
unpacking all the misperceptions and simplifications that operate when one
thinks of that country, that veritable civilization. It is the continental inflection of China. A yellow, dusty world drawn reluctantly to
the brine not at all unlike the Middle Kingdom.
Ah but this has already taken longer than I thought. For now I leave you with the final movement, ‘Waltz
of the Flowers.’ Contemplative, fluid,
and far too beautiful to last longer then an evening, or a season. But here we are over 120 years later, and it endures.
The message is conveyed despite all the difference of revolution, and
hot wars, and cold wars, and stereotypical prisms to refract with a turn and
spin, impossibly here in my Faberge Beijing Christmas of 2013.
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