Words Without Music: A Memoir (27 page)

On our way to Bombay, clear across the country, there were some very long train rides. Once we arrived, we found good accommodations at the Salvation Army. For thirty rupees a day a couple could have a room and three (vegetarian) meals. If you counted the four p.m. tea—which we never missed—that made four meals. The energy and beauty of Bombay attracted us, and we decided to stay on for a few days.

By good luck, JoAnne was hired to play a part in an Indian film. No doubt her blond hair and obvious Western appearance got her the job. That went on for a week, while I happily strolled around on my own. The Salvation Army was on a little street right behind the Taj Mahal Hotel, where the Beatles were said to be staying. I was also told that Raviji was there, but I didn’t look him up at that moment because there was a huge amount of security around the hotel that arrived with the Beatles. I guessed that I wouldn’t even make it to the front desk. Nearby was not only the Prince of Wales Museum, which had a beautiful collection of Indian miniatures, but also a number of antique stores, where sure enough, I found a set of three
thangkas
for sale at a ridiculously low price. Nowhere in India had I found anyone who understood their value, the Tibetans being such fresh arrivals.

Once the film work was over, we booked passage on a liner from the fleet of Messageries Maritimes, a French company that had a line of ships that traveled between Vietnam and France, Marseille being the first European port. The ship had only two classes, cabin and steerage. The cabins were taken up entirely by ourselves and men who had served with the French Foreign Legion. We found them to be odd but friendly, and a hard-drinking bunch. There were no Frenchmen among them. The stories I had heard—of men escaping their past by giving up their normal citizenship and identity and joining the Foreign Legion—were, as far as I could tell, completely true. However, for the four or five days we spent together, they were very good company. The Indian passengers were all below deck and seemed to be overcome by seasickness the moment they boarded the ship. In any case, we didn’t see them until, five days later, we arrived in Europe.

In contrast to our outbound voyage, the route back was very straightforward. We crossed the Arabian Sea, through the Gulf of Aden, which took us past Yemen, Somali, and Djibouti then up the Red Sea to the Suez Canal. We passed Alexandria, Egypt, and crossed the Mediterranean Sea, docking at last in Marseille. I don’t remember any day stops at all on the way. From there we traveled by train to Paris, staying there only a few days to collect our belongings and repack our bags. The timing was good and we left for Le Havre a few days later, where we began, at last, our long transatlantic passage back home.

KATHAKALI AND SATYAGRAHA

T
HE FREQUENT TRIPS TO INDIA LASTED UNTIL 2001, WHEN MY SECOND
family of children, my sons Cameron and Marlowe, began to arrive and brought a temporary end to the journeys that had taken me all over the country. My first visit to south India had come in 1973 at the invitation of David Reck, an American composer living and studying in India, who took me to the state of Kerala to see the Kathakali, the classical Indian dance/theater. The highlight was an all-night performance of three plays from the
Ramayana
, an epic text that consists of fables and historical stories of the gods and the philosophy of ancient India. It was the first time I attended a play that began at six or seven o’clock at night and ended at seven o’clock in the morning. The next time I saw an all-night performance would be when the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented Robert Wilson’s
The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin
in December of the same year—perhaps just a strange, if unlikely, coincidence.

Kathakali is what we would call multimedia theater: it is music, it is dance, it is storytelling. It is performed in several ways: one performer sings and tells the story, accompanied by a musical ensemble, and at the same time the dance company acts out the story as it’s being told.

The theaters themselves were humble beyond belief. They presented the play outdoors, in the courtyard of a temple, on a wooden platform. The curtain was held up by two men holding the ends of a piece of rope. When the cast was ready, they just dropped the rope and then the performers would be seen on the stage. By the time I got to see the performances, they had electrical lighting, some of which was just neon light. It was not the most beautiful lighting—often there were people holding lights—but it was lit. There were also all kinds of torches that would give light onto the stage. The costumes were extremely colorful. They looked like paintings of traditional images of the Hindu princes and gods. To do costume changes, they would raise the curtain. Every night they told three stories, each lasting roughly three to four hours, with hardly a break between them. The show began when it got dark and would go on until morning.

In the early 1970s, there were very few Westerners present. Mostly it was village people. Everyone in the village would sit on the ground to watch the play. They didn’t pay much attention to us. If you had to take a nap, you would go into the bushes and sleep for a few hours. When you came back, the performance would still be going on. We were told in advance what the stories would be. From the reading I had done in the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata
, I already knew a lot of the stories. But there were far too many of them, and I rarely knew beforehand the ones I would see on stage. Still, I could understand much of it. The best place to see the performances was in the Kathakali Kalamandalam’s (the Kathakali academy) home village of Cheruthuruthy, which I would visit on three separate occasions over the next twenty years, staying each time for several days.

While the Kathakali Kalamandalam is a professional theater company, its members are drawn from the people in the countryside—it’s hard to imagine somebody growing up in a city like New Delhi and then going to become a Kathakali singer. When you see the traditional Kathakali in India, you realize that the people who live there get their knowledge of their history through this theater: that is where it’s taught, in the stories that are told and acted out, and it remains very alive to them.

When I asked if I could see how the children were taught, I was invited to go to the music lessons. The morning after one of the performances, I went to a clearing—virtually in the jungle—and I saw twelve or fifteen kids, all little boys, sitting down in a row. In front of each was a big stone, and each had a stick, and they were learning to keep the rhythm by hitting the stone. The teacher had a stick and a stone as well, and he was teaching these very young kids—four, five, six years old—to play the rhythms very regularly, until they got the beat. I watched them closely for quite a while. Some of those boys would become part of the company and would eventually learn to play the drums, sing, or dance.

Ah, this is where it starts, I thought. The fabric of the music is strongly percussive, with drums playing all the time, and the rhythm is very intricate. It has to start somewhere, so they start with that. I never saw any music lesson more arresting than those little boys with their sticks and stones.

The Kathakali traditionally has the same four elements found in Western opera—text, image, movement, and music, just like
Rigoletto
. It becomes very clear how theater and opera must have evolved—by telling religious stories in front of people, as an historical spectacle. In this way, the tradition and lineage of these stories has been kept alive. Every generation performs them and perpetuates them, but they do them, inevitably, with variations.

In India, the characters in the stories of the Kathakali theater might be Arjuna and Krishna. In villages in the mountains of Mexico, where the Wixárika people do not speak Spanish—only Indian languages are spoken there—they present spectacles in which they tell the stories of their gods and spirits. The storyteller, the
marakame
, is accompanied by people playing violin and guitar as he sings and acts out the stories with his hands. Certain groups of people are designated to wear ritual clothing—very colorful wide-brimmed hats with all kinds of feathers and white clothes with flowers. They make all the clothes themselves. In a country like Mexico, where fire is such an important element, the storytelling takes place around a fire, with the fire almost acting as the stage. There might be two or three hundred people sitting within a fairly small area, and there might be four or five people telling different stories at the same time, dancing around different fires in a kind of stylized folk dancing. Like the Kathakali, it goes on all night, until sunrise.

Once you see how these performances are done in India or in Mexico, you understand that you are close to a tradition that has been handed down from generation to generation. We are talking about hundreds, more likely thousands of years.

MY SECOND VISIT TO KALIMPONG, IN 1969,
had enormous implications for me. During my morning walks on Ten Mile Road, on my way to see Tharchin or Geshe Rimpoche, I had begun to notice a small rug shop with its owner at the door. Soon we were nodding to each other, then exchanging greetings, and finally, he invited me into his shop for tea. His name was Mr. Sarup and we struck up an easy friendship, not once referring to the rugs that were hanging down from the ceiling of his store.

One morning Mr. Sarup asked me if I had a little time for him, that he had something to show me. Our conversation had been very general about life in our two countries, and the state of the world—that sort of thing. I had no idea what he had in mind, but I agreed to come by his shop the next day in the late afternoon. When I arrived, he led me a few streets away to the local movie house. It was not very big, containing perhaps one hundred seats, and showed a film only on the weekends. Mr. Sarup told me he had arranged a special showing for me, which turned out to be a newsreel, a short piece in which a small skinny older man dressed only in a dhoti—a simple linen covering that men wore from the waist down with its ends tucked in at the waist—walked with a wooden staff toward the ocean. A huge crowd surrounded him. He waded into the ocean and dipped the ends of his dhoti into the water, then held it up for all to see. His energy and concentration were electrifying. I knew, even with his simple gestures, that something monumental was taking place.

“That’s Mahatma Gandhi,” Mr. Sarup said, “and this is a newsreel from the Salt March, also known as the Salt Satyagraha, in 1930. By harvesting the salt from the sea and refusing to pay the salt tax to the British raj, Gandhi was demonstrating his nonviolent protest.”

I was stunned by what I saw. I was in awe of the man. Suddenly I needed to know everything I could about him. By this time I was beginning to know my way around India, so I went back to New Delhi and began my study of Gandhi at the National Gandhi Museum and Library. Over the next ten years I visited various ashrams in India where he had lived and worked, including the most well-known, Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. While in Ahmedabad I was the guest of the Sarabhai family, who at one time had been the owners of the Sarabhai Textile Mills and, at that moment in time, were Gandhi’s adversaries in disputes over workers’ rights while remaining supporters of his ashram. I came to know them through their interest in American avant-garde dance and music, learning that Merce Cunningham and John Cage had been guests as well.

On a subsequent visit, I went to Gandhi’s ashram in Wigram, near Hyderabad. During that ten-year period, I was actively seeking out persons who had known him and been with him during his marches and Satyagraha activities. I managed to find one of his staunchest supporters and co-workers, Vinoba Bhave, who was then living in south India. I wanted to meet him and went to see him. He was then in his late seventies, still very alert, and most kind and helpful. It was still possible in the 1970s to meet quite a few people who had known Gandhi and who had been close to his work.

At the time it never occurred to me that I might one day turn my hand to an operatic work about Gandhi, but from 1967 until I wrote
Satyagraha
in 1979, I was in India every other year, and on every trip, there was a Gandhi element. This total immersion in Gandhi’s personal history was a great help in making the opera, for which I had been, consciously and unconsciously, preparing. Almost all the details that would appear on stage could be traced back to my research over the years since I saw the film clip with Mr. Sarup. I think the fire that was lit that day had begun much earlier, with what I learned from my mother about social responsibility. I would guess that a hint of it also came from the Quakers, when I lived with them in the summer at their camp in Maine. I wasn’t a Quaker, in fact, I never went to a Quaker meeting, but I knew them as highly moral people—I don’t know any other word for it.

The power of morality is not something that is talked about much these days, especially among contemporary people. But when we look at it from the point of view of commitments, and when we see how the Buddhists treat making and keeping commitments as a form of morality, then we can come to a better understanding of Gandhi’s work and how it continues to reverberate with us.

FOUR PATHS

O
VER A PERIOD OF ALMOST SIXTY YEARS, I HAVE TAKEN UP
the study and practice of four traditions: hatha yoga, following Patanjali’s system; Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism; Taoist qigong and tai chi; and the Toltec tradition of central Mexico. All of these work with the idea of “the other world,” the world that is normally unseen, the premise being that the unseen world can be brought into view. Though their actual strategies and practices are vastly different, these are brother and sister traditions, which reflect a common goal.

To some degree, some things can be understood, if not learned, by reading texts and memoirs of traditional practitioners. However, these uncommon kinds of studies and practices have proven to be best guided and stimulated by a direct encounter with knowledgeable and skilled teachers. In fact, developing in music follows the same pattern. Great teachers in music—and I can list personally four: Nadia Boulanger, Mlle. Dieudonné, Ravi Shankar, and Alla Rakha—teach in an identical way, that is, one-on-one sessions with their students who then have to master techniques a step at a time through intensive personal application.