Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

It is impossible to conceive of a human creature more wholly desolate and forlorn than Eliza, when she turned her footsteps from Uncle Tom's cabin. Her husband's suffering and dangers, and the danger of her child, all blended in her mind, with a confused and stunning sense of the risk she was running, in leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered.  Then there was the parting from every familiar object,--the place where she had grown up, the trees under which she had played, the groves where she had walked many an evening in happier days, by the side of her young husband,--everything, as it lay in the clear, frosty starlight, seemed to speak reproachfully to her, and ask her whither could she go from a home like that? [Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852), Volume 1, Chapter 7, “The Mother’s Struggle”.]

Novels:

• Jan Chosen Bays, Jizo Bodhisattva:Guardian of Children, Travelers & Other Voyagers (Shambhala, 2003).
• Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011): told in the collective first-person voice of young Japanese women shipbound for the United States as picture brides in the early twentieth century, this short novel “captur(es) not just images but sensations, not just surfaces but the essence of what lies within.”
• Péter Nádas, A Book of Memories: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): a “novel of consciousness.”
• Clare Clark, Beautiful Lies: A Novel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012): “A captivating tale of truth and memory,” this novel “is about the kaleidoscopic nature of reality,” asking “What is truth – and what is Maribel’s truth?”
• Louis Begley, Memories of a Marriage: A Novel (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2013), “while concerning itself with the search for truth in the most private spaces, also addresses the larger question of how anyone ever goes about finding the truth.”
• Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones: A Novel (Little Brown, 2002): the protagonist is a murdered fifteen-year-old girl telling of her life from heaven.
• Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2015): “. . .  Parmar gives truth and definition to the character of a woman whose nature was as elusive as her influence was profound. She has caught the phantom.”
• Victor LaValle, The Changeling: A Novel (Spiegel & Grau, 2017): “. . .  LaValle does more than his share of truth-telling, about the anxieties and ambivalences of modern parenting, the psychological value of the stories we tell ourselves and our children, and the rigors of survival in urban America.”
• Roxane Gay, An Untamed State: A Novel (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, 2014): “When Mireille finally does return to Haiti, much stronger and intent on avenging her own ‘death,’ her target is not her captors but her father. She wants to break him with the ‘whole, filthy truth of my kidnapping, even the parts I hadn’t told Michael.’ But her humanity overrides revenge: ‘When I looked into his face, all I saw was an old man who made a terrible, weak choice and had to live with it for what remained of his life. He did not deserve the truth of how I died.’”
• Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2018): “. . .  a clever comedy of manners set in Manhattan as well as a slowly unspooling tragedy about an Iraqi-American family, which poses deep questions about free will, fate and freedom, the all-powerful accident of one’s birth and how life is alchemized into fiction.”
• Sarah Hall, Burntcoat: A Novel (Custom House, 2021): “In practice, Hall seems far less interested in the terrifying things human creatures might do to one another than in examining their fragility, dwarfed by some impersonal looming fate: exile, a cyst, a virus.”
• Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety: A Novel (Doubleday, 2022): “Atkinson vividly conjures the post-Great War London of a century ago, a vast stinking metropolis still teetering between the old world and the new. It’s also a place so bent on burying its mass trauma in a sort of collective, hectic hedonism that one character wonders whether they weren’t ‘following some instinctive compulsion to restock the human race. Like frogs.'”
• Sevgi Soysal, Dawn: A Novel (1975): “The ingenuity of ‘Dawn’ lies in its chorus of wounded, weary, angry voices from all corners of Turkish society.”
• Laurent Mauvignier, The Birthday Party: A Novel (Transit Books, 2023), “is a thriller with an intense focus on its characters’ interior worlds.”
• Jessica George, Maame: A Novel (St. Martin’s Press, 2023): “. . . dark moments commingle with light ones, exactly as they do in real life.”
• Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot: A Novel (Viking, 2024): “The young women in ‘Headshot’ have driven a long way, many of them, to Reno for a national 18-and-under championship. Some have slept in their cars. The novel follows eight of these boxers, fight by fight from the semifinals on, in chapters divided into short sections.”

Poetry

A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
"How did you lose your leg?"
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, "A bear bit it off."
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.

There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc
Saying amid the flames, "Blessed Jesus" --
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.
[from Edgar Lee Masters, “Silence”]

Brandon Leake is a young man who has written and recited poems that cut to the core of Truth in his life.

• About his sister;
• About his mother;
• About his father;
• About his newborn daughter.

Other poems:

• Maya Angelou, “A Brave and Startling Truth”
• Maya Angelou, “Woman Work”

Books of poems:

• Adam Zagajewski, True Life: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023): “When Zagajewski was a child, his Polish family was expelled from his birthplace by the Kremlin of Putin’s predecessors. The poet died in March 2021, a couple of years after the publication of ‘True Life’ in Polish, and a year before the Russian invasion. His work, resembling Lviv in its multiple, interpenetrating layers of memory, remains an international model.”

From the dark side:

• Edgar Lee Masters, “The Circuit Judge”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Early Billie Holiday, 1933-1944: This iconic African-American jazz singer stands out for her distinctive voice, and her life story. “. . . the raw emotional pull of her music was the result of a desperately chaotic lifestyle that the singer seemed unable to control.” For her, “the 1930s was a time of emergence.” These early recordings tell her story before decline was obvious in her voice. 

José James captured Billie Holiday’s spirit, albeit with a velvety baritone voice, on his album “Yesterday I Had the Blues: The Music of Billie Holiday” (2015) (50’). 

VRï is a Welsh chamber-folk trio whose work reflects a quality of pathos in Welsh culture. “'The chapel tradition sits on Welsh culture like the Berlin Wall . . . And it's still there.' On one side of the wall, the old Celtic joys of fiddling, dancing and carousing, together with a trove of traditional songs and stories every bit as lavish as those of Scotland and Ireland; on the other side, dark chapels built like power stations, formerly vibrant and warm with song, but now increasingly empty and strewn across the land like the gravestones of a faith that seemed so unshakeable. It's a bittersweet divide.” Their albums, “Islais a Genir” (A Sung Whisper) (2022) (57’), and “Tŷ Ein Tadau” (Our Fathers’ House) (2018) (43’), reflect that dual quality of joy and sadness, cutting to the core of life. “When we think about how to defend a marginalised culture or minority language, we often think in terms of struggle. This is perfectly understandable, and a certain amount of struggle is often necessary: the struggle to be heard and to be accepted underpins a whole host of human rights movements, linguistic revivals and political causes. But there is a flipside to the difficult battles and hard-won gains, which is, to put it simply, joy.” 

Poorly acted, Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Master Singer of Nurenberg) (1867) (approx. 240-295’) (libretto) can come across as a four-plus-hour piece of insufferable nonsense, a vehicle for Wagner’s music (which is not the best in the operatic repertoire anyway). However, in this 2011 performance from Glyndebourne, Gerald Finley as Hans Sachs, and the entire cast, deliver a compelling interpretation that elevates this opera and by comparison transforms it into the greatest vehicle for the illustration of human values of all operas. The storyline begins with a typically Wagnerian premise: a man has decided that his daughter Eva is to be given in marriage to the master singer who wins a singing contest, as judged by the members of the local master singers’ guild. She may refuse to marry the victor but then she may not marry anyone. Her suitor and love interest, an at-first too-eager Walther von Stolzing first appears creeping around inside a church during a service trying to ask her whether she will “say the word” and become his wife. He is informed of the singing contest, and off we go. Stolzing has not been designated a master singer but he appears at a guild meeting to audition for that distinction. Master singer Beckmesser, who wishes to marry Eva, serves as the “marker” who will determine whether Stolzing is worthy of the title master singer. Of course, the audition – which Stolzing sings brilliantly – is deemed a failure, ending his hope of ever becoming a master singer. The story’s protagonist Hans Sachs – a master singer, poet, and cobbler by trade – is incensed at the injustice, and at the foil Beckmesser. Remember, though, this is opera, so there is no such thing as never. Stolzing appears at Eva’s home, and the two decide to elope. As they prepare to elope, Beckmesser appears with his lute and performs a pitiful love ballad while Sachs cobbles a shoe, each strike of his hammer mimicking a mark with Beckmesser’s chalk during Stolzing’s audition. The third act opens with a despondent Sachs and the revelation of a depiction of his deceased wife and children. Stolzing, who has slept the night at Sach’s home, awakes after having a dream which he then puts to poetry and music. Sachs devises a plan for Stolzing to perform his song at the Midsummer’s Day festival (that day, of course), where the community will adjudge him a master singer, and he will win Eva’s hand. Beckmesser makes a fool of himself with another pitiful song, and then Stolzing triumphs with his song. Here are links to performances of the complete opera: Prohaska, Lorenz & Müller (Furtwängler) in 1943; Schöffler, Suthaus & Scheppan (Abendroth) in 1943; Stewart, Kónya & Janowitz (Kubelik) in 1967; Weikl, Heppner & Studer (Sawallisch) in 1993; and (Jordan) in 2017. Below are some of the values illustrated in this opera:

• Truth: Having lost his young family, Sachs appreciates the pain of others. The story also reveals the Truth of Stolzing’s and Eva’s romantic love.
• Intuition: Great art is not a matter of simply following the rules of composition; it must speak to the heart.
• Honesty: Great art is also honest.
• Art and Beauty: to Wagner, as is obvious from lyrics in the final scene, this was a story about the art of music.
• Praxis, Tradition and Unconventionality: By balancing conventionality and unconventionality, great artists take art forward. No doubt Wagner saw himself as a living example of that.
• Transcendence: A line in the final act asks what is the difference between a beautiful song and a master song. It is the transcendent quality that takes art beyond its conventions.
• Passion and Amore: Stolzing’s and Eva’s romantic love for each other
• Suffering, as represented most directly by the untimely death of Sachs’ young family
• Empathy and Compassion: Through the loss of his family, the suffering of others has become exquisitely palpable to Sachs.
• Authenticity: though talented, Stolzing writes and sings from his heart, in stark contrast to the foil Beckmesser.
• Humility: Beckmesser presents its antithesis.
• Self-awareness: again, Beckmesser presents its antithesis.
• Mentoring: Sachs mentors Eva and Stolzing, and also his apprentice David, whom he promotes to journeyman near the end of the opera – OK, so he beats David with a. strap on occasion but this is nineteenth-century Wagnerian opera.
• Perseverance, Faith and Miracles: Though he has been told that he can never become a master singer, Stolzing writes and sings his song, with considerable help from Sachs. David the apprentice also perseveres, and triumphs.
• Wisdom: Stolzing represents this virtue most fully, in this opera.
• Triumph: The opera’s opening chords announce a theme of triumph, which also closes the opera. 

The haunting inner voice of the Afghan Rubâb:

• Mohammad Omar, with his playlists;
• Rahul Sharma, Humayun Sakhi and company, “In the Footsteps of Babur”
• Homayoun Sakhi, here, here, and with his playlists;
• Rashim Kushnawaz, with his playlists. 

Philippe Gaubert, flute sonatas “are mainly of a melodious, lyrical nature. The sometimes romantic, orchestral colouring is a challenge for the piano accompanist. Their style is clearly neo-romantic and impressionistic.”

• Flute Sonata No. 1 (1917) (approx. 15’)
• Flute Sonata No. 2 (1924) (approx. 16’)
• Flute Sonata No. 3 (1934) (approx. 13’)

Other works:

• Max Reger, Aus meinem Tagebuch (From My Diary), Op. 82 (1904-1912) (approx. 130’)
• Ezra Laderman, Interior Landscapes I (approx. 12’)
• Laderman, Interior Landscapes II (approx. 15’)
• Laderman, Partita for Solo Cello No. 2 (approx. 17’)
• Laderman, Partita for Violin (1990) (approx. 20’)
• Daron Hagen, Orson Rehearsed (2021) (approx. 62’) (quasi-libretto) “is the psychological, emotional, and spiritual journey taken by the American actor, polymath, and creator of Citizen Kane Orson Welles, as he finds himself on the threshold between life and death.”
• Eleanor Alberga, The Soul’s Expression, for Baritone and String Orchestra (2017) (approx. 13’): “A darkly pithy quotation from George Eliot’s Adam Bede links each poem and provides a foil to the rapture within ‘Blue Wings’ and hope in ’Roses’. Languor occupies Brontë’s ‘The Sun Has Set’, while unanswered questions on the mystery of the soul posed by Barrett Browning conclude a work marked by a romantic sensibility and richly variegated string textures.” The work features this poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
• Line Tjørnhøj, enTmenschT (2018) (approx. 59’) “intricately weaves together the stories of two ill-fated couples to delve into the mysterious nature of the true self. Against the backdrop of the early 20th century and the tumultuous devastation of two world wars, this haunting and virtuosic song cycle reveals unexpected and thought-provoking insights into the human condition.”
• George Lloyd, Symphony No. 7, “Prosperine” (1959) (approx. 50’): “Lloyd never puts a foot wrong here in terms of emotional truth. Nothing seems too sought after: the high spirits of the first movement, the elegant beauty of the second, nor the dramatic progress of the 20-minute, agitato finale.”

John Minnock sings jazz tunes, some of them apparently original, with a plaintive quality like no one else’s, evoking the Truth of a life as it is lived. When he accompanies Minnock on saxophone, David Liebman brings to mind the singer’s inner life, as on these albums:.

• “Right Around the Corner” (2018) (44’);
• “Herring Cove” (2020) (55’); and
• “Every Day Blues” (2016) (45’).

Albums:

• Various artists, “The Many Loves of Antonín Dvořák” (2021) (238’) offers: an insight into the composer’s internal life through a selection of his works.
• Hayes McMullen, “Everyday Seem Like Murder Here” (2017) (62’): in his late sixties, McMullen’s blues sound like a black sharecropper in the Mississippi delta of the 1960s.
• Linsey Alexander, “Live at Rosa’s” (2020) (52’): “The son of sharecroppers, Alexander picked up the guitar for the first time at age 12, influenced by Rosco Gordon, Chuck Berry and Elvis as well as blues, country and early rock-‘n’-roll. After toiling as a hotel porter and bicycle technician in Mississippi, he pawned his only guitar to pay for his bus ride north to hook up with a lady he’d met in Memphis.”
• Jesper Sivebaek, “Ta’ Mig Med” (2021) (41’) presents songs for classical guitar by Kim Larsen.
• James Beckwith, “SE10” (20210 (61’) evokes a slice of life in SE10, the postal zone where Beckwith lives.
• Benyamin Nuss & Billy Test, “Mia Brentano’s Summer House” (2022) (67’) presents images from a life.
• Sachal Vasandani & Romain Collin, “Still Life” (2022) (45’): “'I feel like this music is intense ... in a quiet way,' Vasandani said. 'The truth is we’re both calm and even-headed, but this is a tough time for all of us, and we put it into our music.'”
• Angeline Morrison, “The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience” (2022) (51’): “The haunting opening track, Unknown African Boy (d.1830), was the first song Morrison wrote for the album. 'I learned that slave ships regularly passed by the Isles of Scilly and several were wrecked. A local newspaper article of the time listed some of the items washed up on shore: palm oil, elephant tusks, boxes of silver dollars and gold dust, and the body of an unknown ‘West African boy – estimated age around eight’. The boy is buried in St Martin’s churchyard, Isles of Scilly. I wrote this song from the perspective of his mother.'”
• Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith, “A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke” (2016) (66’), is an album following a path set by Smith in the 1960s: “Smith’s performance aesthetic signaled the arrival of a confident and original voice. He could craft mournful melodic lines that suggested the folk music of his Mississippi Delta youth, before quickly steering into rough-sounding yet controlled smears of notes. Then, in the midst of an improvisation, he would allow stretches of silence to enter his phrasing. In contrast to New York’s consistently in-the-red style of free-jazz, Smith and other AACM figures also experimented with world music instrumentation and modernist chamber composition in between passages of fiery blast.”
• Alvin Youngblood Hart, “Big Mama’s Door” (1996) (49’) and “Territory” (1998) (47’): Hart sings realistic country blues on these albums.
• American Patchwork Quartet, “American Patchwork Quartet” (2024) (54’):  “Mirroring America’s cultural mosaic, APQ stitches together a story that’s both intricate and resilient. The fabric of their music is genuine—it neither feigns tolerance nor presents an overly-embellished image of unity. Instead, each carefully chosen piece dives deep into America’s patchwork soul and shares the joys, sorrows, and unwavering hope of a nation crafted by shared dreams and diverse histories.”
• Sonya Cohen Cramer, “You’ve Been a Friend To Me” (59’) is a poignant collection of folk ballads. It “reveals the full arc of her musical life through collaborations with her aunt Peggy Seeger, uncle Pete Seeger, Elizabeth Mitchell, Daniel Littleton, and the folk-fusion group Last Forever. While shaped by the roots of her family tree, the radiating and clear sound of Sonya’s voice is distinctly her own.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Paul Simon, “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War” (lyrics)
• Blaise Siwula, Nicolas Letman-Burtinovic & Jon Panikkar, “Truth”

Visual Arts

• Willem de Koonig, Woman IV (1953)
• Norman Rockwell, Faces of Boy
• Isaac Levitan, Portrait of Nikolay Panafidin (1891)
• Vincent van Gogh, Landscape with Couple Walking and Crescent Moon (1890)
• Paul Cezanne, Self-Portrait (1875)
• Ivan Kramskoy, Head of an Old Ukranian Peasant (1871)
• Nicolas Poussin, Self-Portrait (1650)
• Rembrandt van Rijn, Study of an Old Man in Profile (1630)

Film and Stage

• The final scene in "Witness" illustrates the power of Truth. An Amish child has witnessed a murder in which law enforcement officials are complicit. When the corrupt officials are about to harm the child, the peaceful men and women of the community bear witness to their choice. Circumstances conspire to make Truth more powerful than evil.
• Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: presenting three days in the life of a “middle-class widow-and-mother who supports herself and her teenage son by prostitution each afternoon, in her depressingly tidy apartment”.