Sufi Elvis: How Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Made Islamic Music Global

by Sam Buntz

If one man can lay claim to being the Elvis of Pakistani Music, that man is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. August 16^th marked the 20^th anniversary of his death, provoking tributes in the Indian and Pakistani press but little to no reaction in Europe and America. Yet Khan’s impact on Western music is significant. He was the crucial influence on Jeff Buckley, whose album Grace is one of the milestones of ’90s alternative rock. Nusrat collaborated with Peter Gabriel and Eddie Vedder, while Massive Attack remixed his songs and The Red Hot Chili Peppers sampled them. When Thom Yorke sings “My fake pla-a-stic love!” on “Fake Plastic Trees” from Radiohead’s The Bends, Nusrat is fully present within that italicized “a.”

Buckley paid one of the highest possible tributes to Nusrat’s group, writing, “I’ve seen Nusrat and his party repeatedly melt New Yorkers into human beings… These men do not play music, they are music itself.” Not only have Nusrat’s wildly liberated yet somehow perfectly controlled vocals left their mark on American and European rock and pop, they still bear revolutionary and subversive potential in Nusrat’s home country, Pakistan. In recent years, singers in Nusrat’s tradition—Sufism, the mystical side of Islam—have been assassinated and shrines to Sufi saints have been bombed. Spiritual love songs apparently seem threatening to the purveyors of rigid dogma.

Nusrat was a Qawwali performer, the unchallenged master in an incredibly popular genre of South Asian music. His albums are still a perfect discovery for the solitary, collegiate music geek, to be encountered during late night Apple Music perusals or filed under a bent “World Music” card in a used record store.   (This was my experience). When listening to music in other languages, you often sense a cognitive gap. While you intuitively grasp certain dimensions of it, your lack of immediate lyrical comprehension blocks your ability to fully investigate its inner texture. While that gap still exists, Nusrat’s music gives you the illusion that it does not. Qawwali has a direct, driving, and thunderous emotional force, the capacity to convey extremities of joy that are simultaneously stormy and gentle. It’s a feeling distinct from and superior to mere happiness.   The songs are effectively hymns: they whirl the listener out of a set sense of individuality and into a state of being called wajd, or mystical ecstasy. Through this transformation, the goal of Qawwali is ultimately to unite the soul with God.

The Khan family has a six hundred year history in Qawwali. Young Nusrat’s father, Fateh Khan, did not want him to follow in his footsteps—he wanted him to become a doctor.   Fortunately, he gradually loosened up after realizing Nusrat’s potential. After the elder Khan’s death, his son had a dream: his father appeared and touched him on the throat. Nusrat began singing, struck with divine inspiration, and then awoke singing. In the afterlife, Khan senior had changed his mind about his son’s career choices.

It did prove to be a lucrative career choice. Within the next thirty years, Khan and his Qawwali party traveled the globe, from the United States to France to Japan, where the rotund Nusrat became known as “Singing Buddha.” He worked with Buckley (who wrote an essay on Khan and also interviewed him) and became a visiting professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Yet cultural exchange was not always a smooth process. When Nusrat’s music featured during a jail riot sequence in Oliver Stone’s ultra-violent Natural Born Killers, Khan registered his displeasure: “When someone uses something religious in that way, it reflects badly on my reputation.” (The incident is but a paragraph in the annals of the West’s insensitive treatment of the cultural traditions of others.) Notably overweight, Khan died of a heart attack in 1997. His nephew, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, carries on the Khan family legacy and continues performing throughout the world.

The reader may find all of this confusing: if you listen to news reports about Islam, you often hear the generalization, “Islam is against music.” After all, Cat Stevens stopped performing once he converted (though in recent years, he’s been willing to pick up the guitar and play “Peace Train” again). The authority making this statement can range from a conservative American pundit to an ultra-orthodox imam. Regardless of who says it, it is not actually true. There are Islamic musical traditions, often associated with Sufism, throughout the world, from West Africa to Central Asia. Qawwali is the South Asian version, invented 700 years ago by the great Indian poet and musician, Amir Khusro. (Certain Indian sources state that Khusro based Qawwali on inner melodies heard during mystical communion with God). Typically using tabla and harmonium (an addition brought by Christian missionaries), Qawwali singers perform songs that praise God, Muhammad, and other saintly figures, like the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali.

Strictly speaking, a “qawal” is a saying of the Prophet, but the songs can take forms other than the lyrical recitation of such sayings, often cloaking mystical yearning for God in the form of romantic love (as on certain George Harrison tracks). In a religious culture where alcohol is strictly forbidden, the lyrics of many qawals at first seem to be about debauchery: odes to drunkenness and hashish smoking. But, in the context of Sufi poetry, the vocabulary of these songs actually refers to transcendent, divine intoxication—being drunk on love, in other words. The Qawwali attitude towards religious orthodoxy was best expressed by the 18^th Century Sufi, Bulleh Shah, who wrote these lyrics, still sung in Pakistan and India today: “Burn the mosque, burn the temple, but do not burn the human heart, for there God is residing.”

The music is paradoxical, both deeply traditional (using the verses of Shah, Khusro, and other poetic giants) and extremely improvisatory. Adherence to poetic discipline unexpectedly sets the soul free.   Nusrat’s “Tumhen Dil Lagi Bhool” (included on the greatest hits collection, Rapture) is a prime example, both full of longing and apocalyptic. We feel a sense of love reaching consummation and of revelatory destruction, the rending of the veil. Buckley’s description is accurate: “I heard the clarion call of harmoniums dancing the antique melody around like giant, singing wooden spiders… Then came the voice of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Part Buddha, part demon, part mad angel… his voice is velvet fire, simply incomparable.” When Nusrat sings solo at the climactic point of the song, he sounds utterly possessed, transported beyond the human world. He generates moments of musical splendor and sacred fear without needing to think about them first—they delight in their own happening.  At such moments, Buckley’s observation that Nusrat has become music is indisputable.

Unfortunately, in Pakistan, Sufism and its musical traditions are under attack. An assassin murdered one of Nusrat’s contemporaries, Amjad Sabri of The Sabri Brothers (after Nusrat’s, probably the most famous Qawwali group in Pakistan). The historic Shahbaz Qalandar Shrine, site of numerous Sufi musical gatherings, was also bombed, killing over 100 people. To feel threatened by music—especially music that is wholly religious—seems bizarre. But Sufism, in many of its forms, destabilizes intolerance.

When listeners are swept into wajd, that state of ecstasy, their gender doesn’t matter: women, caught up in the spirit, will dance publicly at Qawwali performances. The Shahbaz Qalandar Shrine featured Lal Peri, a club-wielding female individualist who made her home on the premises. With its basis in a direct experience of God, Sufism threatens the rule-oriented imams, who are more concerned with the proper length of one’s trousers (ideally, they should imitate the length of Muhammad’s trousers) than with actually getting to know God. A gathering where both the musicians and the audience attain transcendence—without the permission of the imams—renders legalistic orthodoxy superfluous.

At the same time, the legacy of Sufism is so deep in Pakistan that it can’t be destroyed. Even today, one of the most popular TV programs in the country is Coke Studio, which showcases Sufi music (and, yes, it’s produced by Coca Cola—cultural imperialism has a sunny side, it seems). Also, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead recently performed with a Qawwali group in India, led by the Israeli-Sufi Shye Ben Tzur. The experience was captured by Paul Thomas Anderson’s documentary Junoon. Despite the tremendous indifference of the secular and Christian West, these traditions soldier on as best they can and still gain some degree of acknowledgment.

Of course, the United States hasn’t helped bring tranquility and human-heartedness to this state of affairs. Support for the Pakistani authoritarian, General Zia ul-Haq, during the Cold War did not leave the most beautiful legacy. Zia adopted stoning as the punishment for adultery and shored up fundamentalism, even if he did contribute to defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. The drone policy hasn’t done much to tamp down the lure of extremism either: flying death robots tend not to evoke the most cuddly feelings.   Someone like Nusrat, representing the “better angels” of Pakistani culture, actually does demonstrate a more enlightened way. A path of ecstasy and divine love, Sufism is, in the words of Rumi, “no caravan of despair.” Despite violence and persecution, the Qawwali performers who succeeded Nusrat still continue to offer free passage on their caravan of hope.

 

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Maximum Novelty: Doritos Locos Tacos and Fruit Loop Shakes

by Sam Buntz

At first, the traditional semi-circular silhouette of the taco is visible. But, as the lights come up, you notice something…different.

It’s the coloration: a brilliant orange. Not the natural, beta-carotene-charged orange of a carrot. This is otherworldly—like a glowing tube seen in a cartoon nuclear plant. It’s certainly artificial… therefore, a product of human artifice… therefore, an artifact… therefore, an object of art.

How many man-hours, how many sweat-beads of ingenuity were sunk into this carefully constructed, lab-tested foodstuff? You wonder. All you can say for sure is, “A lot.”

You move closer and notice that the art object has three dimensions. It is stuffed with iceberg lettuce, shredded mild cheddar cheese (a less radioactive shade of orange than the shell), and crumbled institutional beef, technically fit for human consumption. You wish now to move beyond the visual, to experience this taco with your other senses.

You reach out.

You touch it.

You are somewhat like John Hurt curiously approaching an extraterrestrial egg in the first Alien.

Immediately surprised, your hand recoils. Some kind of… substance… has left its traces on your fingers.

Should you lick your fingers? Almost automatically, without thinking, as though conditioned, as though reflexively, you do.

They taste of cheese powder, with a solid streak of umami cutting through. It’s familiar.

The flavor, you recognize, is classic nacho cheese. The original.

You bend over and wipe the remainder of orange umami paste on your socks. There is no napkin.

Against all logic, against perhaps the testimony of your own tastebuds, you decide to eat the whole thing.

The novelty of the object, in addition to its full-bore chemical assault on certain key brain areas (courtesy of the umami cheese powder), compels you. The mere newness of the thing outstrips its goodness. Quality takes a backseat, is rendered irrelevant. The novelty is all.

The aura of two brands, conjoined mystically into one, hovers palpably around the taco. You think you can even feel its energy, its special warmth—a sign of life like the inner heat of a newborn rabbit, nestled in straw.

An image out of your long-forgotten high school English class comes back to haunt you… You can see someone, a male figure at the end of a dock, reaching his arms across the water towards a green light… The artificial brightness of the green light is of the exact same quality as the orange of the taco. There is something almost… lurid about it. Perhaps the bio-luminescent bead that dangles before the jaws of an angler fish has something of the same lurid luminousness. A light leading you on, towards… what?

You eat the taco quickly. So quickly that you don’t even taste it. Scratch that. You don’t eat it so much as consume it, in the fullest sense of the word. You imbibe its brand-name aura and feel the warmth, the light, the life settle in your stomach and spread through all your veins and arteries and nerves, fizzing out of your pores.

And then, like that, it’s gone. The product has been inhaled. It is now being digested, and with digestion, a certain leaden-ness settles in the limbs. Gravity feels like it is pulling you down with more insistence than usual.

Before you collapse into a stupor, you feel like you need dessert. And you recall seeing an ad for a new milkshake containing a multi-colored, ostensibly fruit flavored breakfast cereal, mixed and mashed directly into the shake.

As you drive to Burger King, your education haunts you again. You recall the writings of the renegade priest and archaeologist Pierre Teilhard DeChardin and the work of the psychedelic-apologist Terence McKenna. You read both of these writers on your laptop during an “Introduction to New Media” course in college—not for the course, of course. Just out of a strange personal impulse.

DeChardin theorized that all of creation was moving towards a final moment of Christ Consciousness, when the whole world would become charged with the presence and knowledge of God. DeChardin called this event “The Omega Point” (referencing the Biblical notion that Christ is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega).

Somewhat later, McKenna, a lover of psychedelic chemicals like psilocybin and DMT, claimed that humanity was advancing towards a point of maximum novelty. Eventually, we would attain a state of infinite novelty, infinite complexity—whatever that might be. Apparently, it involved entering into hyperspace.

These MSG-addled thoughts rise and flow and ebb in the brain. It occurs to you that a Dorito taco is certainly novel. So, of course, is a Fruit Loop milkshake. Yet, this increase in novelty and complexity hardly seems related to the manifestation of Christ… It’s novelty for novelty’s sake. It’s as though we’ve had all the real ideas and are scavenging what’s left—strange ramshackle combos, pieced together like idols made of bones and beads and feathers.

Bugs smash against your window, lazy miniature suicides, as you drive towards Burger King on a humid Sunday.

Yes, there is certainly much novelty in the world. It grows more novel and more complex day by day. The weight of the world, the worry and fret, compounds along with the novelty…

Suddenly, you pull your car onto the shoulder of the road and park. You breathe heavily, on the verge of a panic attack, as traffic streams by.

Wait! Hold on! Everybody… STOP! It’s not there, it’s not ahead of you! It’s somewhere back there, not at the beginning, but before that. Somewhere before time, before the first, “Let there be light.” Everyone! We need to stop! Freeze! Put down that e-cigarette! Put down that taco! Put down that gun!

But the arrow of time, loosed from its quiver, continues to sail into perfect cloudless blue.

Marionettes

by Sam Buntz

[Note: the pompous, condescending, politically oracular voice of this piece annoys me now that I re-read it.  I would much prefer writing about books or pop culture or music. So, sorry.  But, on principle, I have erased nothing.]

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this quotation from the Russian writer P.D. Ouspensky: “The marionettes failed to understand the danger that threatened them and could not see that the very same wire which pulls the villain with a knife in his hand from behind a bush makes them turn and look at the moon.”

Ouspensky wrote that sentence during the Russian Revolution. He was observing his society’s massive complacency—buffered by the casual assumption that Russian civilization would continue on its usual course—when, in fact, the Bolsheviks were already destroying its foundations. Everything was in violent transition. Ouspensky said that the experience of national revolution and ensuing chaos convinced him that no one was really in control; we like to kid ourselves and assume that there are boundaries in the world, institutions and sources of authority that can’t crumble, but our world is as unstable and perishable as that reflected in a single drop of dew. If it’s supported by anything, it’s held up by a kind of persistent collective wish—a wish for permanence. The illusion gets itself taken seriously and becomes, for a while, a fact.

The foregoing paragraphs seem to be gearing up for a typical assault on Trump. But that wouldn’t make much sense: to imply that American society is filled with “marionettes,” tricked into looking at the moon and away from Trump, would be insane. People who are willing to agree with a Bill Maherish generalization like “Americans are stupid!”—an applause line Maher has been weakly using for the entirety of his career—would probably mindlessly assent to the claim that we’re ignoring Trump’s attempts to undermine democracy. But they would be wrong. Obviously, nothing is more discussed right now: everyone’s attention is on Trump. He is the only acceptable national topic of conversation, aside from March Madness. Rachel Maddow waves non-revelatory 1040 tax documents in the air, and rambles about Russian Oligarchs, while the Republicans wildly scramble to find a new way to make Trump’s claim that Obama wire-tapped him sound plausible. Today, the new excuse was: “Wait—maybe the British did it?”

But those issues—Russian conspiracies and wire-tapping plots—can’t be the villain with the knife in Ouspensky’s metaphor. They need to be the moon. After all, these conspiracies are primarily sport: I’m not sure how many liberals really believe that Trump is going to be unveiled cavorting with Russian prostitutes on video, or how many Republicans really believe that President Obama is personally overseeing a Deep State conspiracy to undermine Trump. Both of these ideas seem more recreational than not: they’re political fun n’ games, despite how we may froth at the mouth while playing them.

So, the knife-wielding villain needs to be somewhere else in this picture—the malign actor who will enter the play and shatter our pre-conceptions of how it will turn out. We dread his entrance in part because it will shake us into consciousness of the fact that this is not a world in jest, but a world in earnest (to borrow from Frost). The thing that hovers in your peripheral vision, that makes you swivel and adjust your head to put it out of mind, still remains annoyingly and resolutely there—if in the margin and a bit blurry.

Turning and looking at the moon, in Ouspensky’s sense, can take many different forms: for instance, you might figure that you don’t need to waste time campaigning in Wisconsin, or you may distract yourself from real problems by tweeting about the ratings of a reality show you formerly helmed. Variety is infinite. At any rate, it’s funny: the fact you are most eager to ignore may be the fact that is, ultimately, of the most crucial interest to yourself and your condition.

I think that fact is (probably) North Korea.

News stories about North Korea’s nuclear and ICBM programs are odd business. They are always on the front page of the New York Times. They are highlighted and discussed on cable news shows. The media seems to be doing its duty with regard to this issue… Yet, somehow, no one really wants to talk about it. Aside from a few of the more aggressive and military-oriented voices on Fox, talking heads generally deflate when it comes to this topic. It is just now forcing itself on our consciousness. It remained in the penumbra for literally a decade: three different presidents (Clinton, Bush, and Obama) failed to deal adequately with North Korea… Of course, Bush invaded Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction and shrugged when North Korea began testing actual nuclear weapons. Their legacy of ineffective action and inaction is left, hair-raisingly, to Trump.

All that moon gazing is finally bringing us to a moment of reckoning. Rex Tillerson said today that the U.S. isn’t going to open talks with Kim Jong Un—North Korea simply needs to back down or risk a pre-emptive attack on its nuclear capacity. At the same time, The New York Times recently reported that our ability to launch such a pre-emptive attack is in grave doubt: it’s impossible to know where the North Korean government is storing its nuclear stockpile and missiles, and tracking the movements of the country’s leadership is equally imprecise. One of the most terrifying quotes I’ve read on the question came from President Obama. The Times reported that, last year, he told his staff that he would launch an attack to kill the North Korean leadership and destroy their nuclear stockpile—if it could be done. But it couldn’t. This was disturbing because it demonstrated how insanely high the stakes really are.

I’m certainly not writing this to advocate war with North Korea or to criticize Tillerson’s approach (I say Tillerson’s approach because, realistically, I’m not sure we can say that Trump has an approach—this is an issue where it seems like Secretary Tillerson and General Mattis really are being forced to play Atlas and keep the sky from falling). I’m aiming merely to observe our evasive attitude of mind, and ask if our attention is even in our own control. After all, Ouspensky’s metaphor strongly implies that it isn’t: our minds are born along by vast currents of history, that can either keep them afloat or dash them on the rocks, without taking their volition into much account.

I am, however, a “concerned citizen.” The North Korean situation concerns me. Montaigne once wrote, “Do not worry about how to die: you will know how to do it well enough when the time comes.” I’m curious to know if we have a better plan than Montaigne’s to offer to countless civilians in South Korea—and in the North—or if armed confrontation and appalling mass-death are the inevitabilities they increasingly appear to be.

Eat Together: A Movement

A parable:

A long time ago, the gods and demons gathered together to discuss to whom they should give their offerings. After some debate, the demons decided to put their offerings in their own mouths. But the gods, being wise, served the offerings to one another.

***

In America and in the world today, there is obviously much disagreement and conflict. When has this ever not been true? The history of the human race is a tragically bloody and murderous record.

Yet, we all acknowledge that it’s become easier to isolate ourselves within our respective ideological bubbles, to never hear voices from outside. Many of us rarely have sustained encounters with people whose life-situations are different from our own. Regardless of one’s political beliefs, it’s clear that there’s a civic emergency in America. Too often, people talk past each other, scream at each other, and can’t really see each other. They see labels, see the bearers of despised ideas, and can’t discern the human beings lying behind them. It seems clear that we need more opportunities for unhampered personal encounters—for people to simply meet each other, talk with one another, and share a meal, on neutral ground. Starting a national “Eat Together” movement would be one way of providing such an opportunity.

The various members of a community, from all walks of life, would gather for a shared and totally free meal on a weekday night (perhaps Wednesday or Thursday). That’s it—no agenda. Just food and people. The organizers would not attempt to convert anyone or give political lectures, while, at the same time, the participation of volunteers from all religious and secular organizations would be much desired in organizing and providing these meals. While additionally fulfilling the function of a soup kitchen, Eat Together would actively seek the participation of everyone, from every conceivable background. Its volunteers would not try to reform or convert others to any cause. They would simply serve.

But those who are eating can and should talk about whatever they want. They shouldn’t feel pressured to start a political dialogue, or avoid politics, or talk about any specific topic, or eschew any specific topic. They should simply be together, and interact organically. Words like “dialogue” or “conversation” shouldn’t even be used in promoting the event. The basic message—“Eat Together”—will be the movement’s entire mission statement.

To give credit where credit is due, the practices of one particular community inspired this initiative. In India, the Sikhs have long held open meals with no proselytizing agenda. Tourists to the Golden Temple in Amritsar in The Punjab are likely familiar with this custom: Sikh communities operate a communal kitchen called a langar, offering free vegetarian meals, acceptable to members of all the major religions of India and to those of no religion. While many Sikhs are not vegetarian themselves, they want to offer food that caters to the dietary needs of Hindus and Buddhists and which fulfills the Halal obligations of Muslims.

The Eat Together Movement should observe the same practice in America, in order to bring as many people together as possible. By not serving meat, the movement more easily accommodates Halal and Kosher diets, not to mention explicitly vegetarian religious groups and individuals. Again, this is not to proselytize for vegetarianism or any other cause, but simply to make the meals as widely acceptable as possible. (It shouldn’t be too difficult to provide vegan and gluten-free versions of the meal, as well.)

In addition to the non-proselytizing nature of the movement and the vegetarian menu, there is another important point. People who participate in the event should not try to sit with those they already know, but simply occupy the next available set of seats, sitting next to whoever happened to arrive before them. They can’t self-sequester into religious or ethnic groups within the dining hall. That would abnegate the movement’s purpose. It’s possible that families and single people could eat in different sections, but it would be crucial to deftly assure that all seating arrangements facilitate interactions with people who aren’t in one’s own group.

Eat Together meals could be held anywhere, in any facility sufficient to accommodate a group of the expected size (a gym, a school, etc.). Letting a different religious group or organization offer its own facilities on alternating weeks might be a viable method, as long as they strictly adhere to the “no proselytizing at meals” discipline. A volunteer committee comprised of representatives from different religious congregations and secular organizations would be highly helpful and likely necessary in setting up the meals.

Also, if one were to organize Eat Together meals in a large city, it would be well to ensure that the venue does not fall entirely within the bounds of a neighborhood defined predominantly by one ethnicity or religious group. Meals should be held close to borders and dividing lines, to bring in as many people from the opposite sides of those lines as possible.

Again, the meals will be free, relying on volunteers and on voluntary donations. However, donations won’t be aggressively solicited. Rather, on the way out, people who’ve appreciated the meal, and want to show their support for the movement, can drop money into a collection box.

Breaking bread with another person is one of the most fundamental and natural steps towards establishing friendship; this seems to be a cultural universal. Traditions of communal feasting and hospitality towards strangers exist across the world, in virtually every society. Further, sharing food together is the most natural expression of human unity, an affirmation both of diversity and of the oneness underlying that diversity. If we could create a new tradition like this in America—or even internationally—it would be a major step towards relating to each other in a less fraught manner.   The Eat Together Movement could help us to see one another, respect one another, and ultimately know one another.

The Cubs and America: Safe at Home at Last

by Sam Buntz

The tension was a relief… I’m talking about the World Series, Game 7.

I’m not sure why I felt so invested in the Cubs’ performance. They’re not “my” team, and I hadn’t followed them during the regular season, though I wished them well in a casual way.  Joe Maddon is from the area where I grew up—Northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal region—so I was hoping that the Cubs would get their shot.  It’s gladdening to see someone from a low-key area manage to achieve notable things on the world stage.  First, Poconos resident Fetullah Gulen gets accused of fomenting a coup by the Turkish government, and then Hazleton native Maddon achieves the unthinkable.  Nice.  Not a bad year for NEPA…

Yet, while watching Game 7, I found myself involuntarily retracting into a posture of anxiety—not quite a fetal position, but rather the indrawn curl you assume when attempting to quiet a stomachache, huddled up against the arm of my couch.

Now, my emotions obviously couldn’t be compared to those of a devoted octogenarian Cubs fan, gasping the final triumphant breath of his earthly incarnation, as he watches Kris Bryant nail that last throw to first—Bryant smiling helplessly as he whips the ball to Rizzo. Of course, I have no clue what that kind of devotion (comparable to St. Francis of Assisi in its willingness to endure the darkest stretches of poverty and chastisement) feels like. I can’t imagine: the long-tended ember, courting extinguishment for so many decades, yet maintained with cussed resolution, suddenly flaring up within the breast…

Personal qualifications aside, I still felt the tension… Lester’s wild pitch… the sudden shelling of the previously invincible Chapman… Rajai Davis’s home run… the seventeen minute rain delay… The fearful vibe subsumed me, and the bloody, half-gnawed fingernails of Cubs and Indians fans were, for the final few innings, my own.

Yet, as I said at the beginning, this tension came as a strange relief. I was under the pure spell of American Baseball magic, swept blessedly out of the fever and fret that have so characterized 2016. Baseball, this autumn, was not just my own, but The Republic’s choice method of escape.

From the redwood forests to the gulfstream waters, people were tuning out of the NFL, and tuning into the MLB post-season. Now, this can be dismissed or over-analyzed into something sinister by critical theorists. I can imagine a cultural observer staring at the blazingly white faces in the stands at Progressive Field and Wrigley, and noting that Caucasian America seems to be letting off the steam generated by its prolonged Trumpist freak-out, indulging in a bit of nostalgia for the “good old days”—the crack of the bat, the peanuts and hot dogs, the women in the kitchen, the black and brown people safely disempowered, the red-faced Indians’ logo perfectly acceptable. It would be wildly easy to launch such a critique. On a website like Salon, it’s surely the default mode of interpretation. And there’s probably a little truth to it, when applied to some of the bad guys out there. But, speaking for myself, and most Americans, it’s—no pun intended—off base.

The main reason is this: baseball doesn’t feel like something old, actually. Or, it does and it doesn’t. It feels like it’s existed forever, and things that seem eternal don’t simultaneously seem old. For example, I’ve never looked at the sun and thought it appeared a bit ragged and shot-in-the-ass today, a little corny and out-of-date. The same goes for baseball—it’s timeless.

So, during the World Series, the sport wasn’t merely functioning as a nostalgia trip, returning us to the pleasures of an earlier and supposedly simpler time via a heroic contest between two storied, down-on-their-luck franchises. It was primarily a method of escaping from time, from the messy world of presidential elections, of “telegrams and anger” as E.M. Forster put it (though Forster’s telegrams have been duly replaced by tweets.) As rage swirls around us in dangerously widening spirals, it makes sense that Americans should seek liberation from the uncertainties and random outrages of history. Besides, as far as ugly nostalgia for a whiter America goes, baseball isn’t an example—without a generous immigration policy, a huge percentage of the players on the field wouldn’t be there, for starters.

There’s something special and transcendent about the very shape of the field. A rectangular field or court is a straightforward, rigid thing, a reflection of the metaphorical “grid” on which we all compete for survival.   But a diamond—while admittedly still rhomboid and therefore a cousin of the rectangle—suggests a different way. There’s something leisurely and free about the shape of the game, about the way it’s coordinated in time and space. The slowness of baseball, while oft derided, is also part of its appeal. Not too much slowness—but a sweet light trot. You de-pressurize, you zone-in instead of out. When things get hairy, the tension isn’t the tension of mortgages and job applications. It’s a pleasurable kind of tension. You hang out with the game. It just happens.

As George Carlin pointed out in a famous routine, there’s something nice about the fact that baseball’s goal is coming home. He said, “In football, the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy, in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing his aerial assault with a sustained ground attack, which punches holes in the forward wall of the enemies’ defensive line. In baseball, the object is to go home, and to be safe. I hope I’ll be safe at home, safe at home…”

That’s how America felt, for a few minutes on November 2^nd, just before 1 a.m.—safe at home.

Except for the Indians’ fans, obviously.

The Everyday Inferno: An Appreciation of Nathan Hill’s “The Nix”

by Sam Buntz

In 2016, a truly realistic writer is, inevitably, also a satirist. It is impossible to squarely depict today’s reality without exploring the richly hued and giddily horrifying dimensions of contemporary chaos—in other words, without charting how the world seems to be satirizing itself. Norms and standards of character, social conventions and order—none of these customary features of Henry James’ cosmos seem to draw near the heart of the matter in the 21^st Century.  They are but so many china tea cups patterned over with delicate designs, all cracked beyond repair, disposed casually in the gutter beside an empty package of Jacked Jalapeno Doritos.  A grotesque age, manufacturing grotesque (yet somehow still empathetic) characters on an awesome scale, demands a less circumscribed mode of representation. Only the all-out, the full-on, the unchained, can satisfy.

Nathan Hill has integrated that chaos into an exquisitely crafted book, plotted with all the care of a 19^th Century novel. On all levels, The Nix satisfies. It has the world-building and attentive workmanship of Charles Dickens and John Irving (as reviewers have already noted), mixed with a strangely intimate approach to character, unexpectedly reminiscent of Virginia Woolf (one of Hill’s favorite authors, according to a recent interview).  Hill doesn’t use Woolf’s steam-of-consciousness technique, and his book has more momentum and sparkling oddity than the volumes of the Woolfian canon—yet, like Woolf, he places the reader scarily close to the minds of characters who would normally, under the impress of a less-skilled author’s pen, slip across the page as objects of momentary ridicule.  (Among these are the video game addict “Pwnage” and the colossally bratty student/plagiarist Laura Pottsdam). First and foremost, however, Hill’s saga is extremely funny.

The Nix tells the story of Samuel Andresen-Anderson, an English professor and non-writing writer at a college outside Chicago, and Faye, the mother who abandoned him when he was eleven years old. When Faye shows up on the news, having thrown gravel at the Republican governor of Wyoming (an apparent amalgamation of George W., Ted Cruz, and Trump), Samuel agrees to help her while actually plotting to write a searing tell-all about his mother, this “maestro of being awful.”

Of course, Samuel’s plans regarding the tell-all don’t proceed as expected, and he finds himself the subject of an academic witch-hunt led by the aforementioned Laura, while receiving aid in his quest from “Pwnage,” a comrade from a World of Warcraft-esque computer game entitled World of Elfscape. (Hill was once addicted to Warcraft and the harrowingly comic details of gaming addiction ring with authenticity—an awful rock-bottom realness). Samuel’s search for the truth about his mother’s life eventually leads him back to the riots at the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and beyond. Along the way, we see how long pursued objects of desire can grow in illusory intensity—a problem besetting both Samuel and Faye—and note that perpetual national outrage distorts the truth and destroys the possibility of empathy.

Hill’s primary characters, Samuel and Faye, are sympathetic and carefully developed: in the end, they have the reader’s heart. Yet a spirited madness overtakes Hill when he draws his secondary characters. Sublimely outrageous, they tend to glow in our memories, outlined brightly. Laura, for one, brings a negative gusto to the book, an admirable zeal in her badness. Both a hyper-modern idiot and a strange kind of genius, she is cartoonishly entitled, yet doesn’t read like a flat caricature—Hill throws in odd details that grant her an unexpected four-dimensionality.

We learn about Laura’s byzantine schemes for cheating her way though school, and grasp her dismal psychology: “She never felt as secure as she did in dressing rooms rejecting clothes for not being good enough for her, breathing in the deep, gluey smell of the mall.” (There is indeed something “gluey” about the odor of malls). But, suddenly, Hill will throw a detail at the reader which makes Laura’s character open up, like a moment in which Laura sits throwing paper clips up in the air, watching them scatter across a small patch of the floor: “She thought if she could practice this enough she could achieve perfect paper-clip symmetry. She could toss them in such a way that they’d go up and down as a single aggregate lump.” Somehow, within the aggregation of damning details about Laura, this makes her one of us. Her instant of distracted humanity—playing the kind of silly personal game we nearly all invent in vacant moments—makes it clear that she isn’t just a cartoon.  Laura is simultaneously a hilarious and disturbing character because she appears both exaggerated and totally life-like.  It’s a disconcertingly familiar sensation when you live in America these days: whether on TV or in the street, we confront personalities that are both wildly grotesque and recognizably human.

The Nix’s observations on the contemporary media landscape are especially cutting. After Faye assaults the governor, cable news recklessly magnifies the fiasco: “A logo is made: Terror in Chicago.  It whooshes to a spot next to the anchor’s ear and flaps like a flag in the wind […] The news displays a map of Grant Park on a massive touch-screen television in what has become a commonplace of modern newscasting: someone on television communicating via another television, standing in front of the television and controlling the screen by pinching it with his hands and zooming in and out in super-high definition. It all looks really cool.” This sounds fairly satirical, yet it’s the literal truth. (Tune into Shepard Smith’s show on Fox News, 3 P.M. every weekday). Hill has a gift for seeing modern absurdity afresh, for showing us its features outside of their accustomed light.

But the book does much more than satirize entitled students, the chronic glibness of social media, and Caligulan entertainments like the show Man vs. Food. It offers up all of this insanity in order to reckon with it—which is a nice change of pace from the all-too-common tendency to wallow in meaninglessness. If one is permitted to offer real wisdom and insight in a novel in the 2010s—and one ought to be—I would suggest that The Nix manages this feat.

The key lies in the book’s epigraph, the famous Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant: a king orders a group of blind men to touch an elephant and then explain what they think it is. Each man touches a different part of the elephant—trunk, leg, ear, and so on—which leads them to fight about their varying interpretations. In a novel that deals with our pervasive cultural outrage, the perspective implied by this opening quote couldn’t be more appropriate and necessary.  It suggests that our perspectives on reality—whether channeled through the blinders of a specific ideology or a personal wound or obsession—are limited, but that we can sense, if we make a patient effort, the contours of the whole. Beyond this ceaseless turmoil, Hill suggests that something as small as uprooting an invasive mustard plant—engaging in a local effort towards the Good—might point the path towards peace.  (To find out what this mustard plant bit is about, you’ll need to read the book).

In some ways, his perspective is similar to George Saunders’, though expressed on a much larger canvas than that of the Saunders miniature: corrosive observations mingle wondrously with compassion. While the book has been compared frequently and understandably to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, I found Hill’s observations and insights to be more profound and less narrowly targeted. Franzen wrote an ambitious and well-crafted novel on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but his characters seemed to be essentially the same person, whether bird-watcher or rock star: the unsympathetic sufferer drowning in viscous national malaise.  (Albeit, Franzen probably intended this; nevertheless, it fatally undercut his openly Tolstoyan ambitions).  By contrast, Hill’s characters are distinct—and, while they suffer, they suffer extraordinarily and colorfully, transforming under the pressure in ways that seem uniquely fitting and true. The ending of Freedom did not seem quite so true, I think (though the scene with a wedding ring encased in a turd has a grisly way of getting itself remembered).

I note all this not to digressively bash Franzen—not the world’s worst writer, by any means—but to indicate The Nix’s unique strengths and place it correctly within the landscape of contemporary literature. It didn’t strike me as a mere “promising debut,” but as a fully achieved work and, if I may be so bold as to venture a prediction, a modern classic. Its craftsmanship, characters, and societal scope should earn it the same sort of massive acclaim that The World According to Garp received upon its release.

At one point, a character in The Nix jokes about writing a 600 page novel that only ten people will read. But the book has already garnered more readers than that. It is rightly calibrated for our time and for all-time, giving us a means of following up on Italo Calvino’s advice in Invisible Cities: “The inferno of the living […] is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

This is the quest of The Nix: to navigate the Inferno, to give its characters space, to teach them to endure.  Whether they learn this lesson will be left, of course, for the reader to discover—yet, the book manages to give us space, in the process, and aid us in our attempts to reckon with our world and see its madness plain.  In an age in which much of our attention is lost to this hectic inferno of distraction, reading The Nix provides an island of stillness and sanity in the midst of the waste.

Kissing Icons, Swinging Censers: The Ancient Vibes of Eastern Orthodoxy

by Sam Buntz

The censer swings… and swings. The censer keeps swinging, persistently, throughout nearly the entirety of this Eastern Orthodox Church service in Central Connecticut—indeed, throughout the recorded history of Christendom. The censer emits little puffs of incense, beseeching the altar, partitioned from the congregation by a barrier featuring paintings of saints. (The first official Christian martyr, St. Stephen, adorns one). Altar boys and assistant priests pass in and out of the swinging doors fixed in this barrier; there is constant activity—things are happening. It’s a performance of color and sound and matter-in-motion, with a sense of silence and stillness lying behind it. You might not understand 75% of what’s going on, but the believers believe in its efficaciousness. They stand in hallowed expectation, waiting to be fed God.

The priest sings the Gospel reading; in fact, with the exception of the homily, the entire service is sung in English with bits of Old Church Slavonic thrown in. Parents hold their children up to kiss icons—images of the Virgin Mary (in Eastern Orthodox parlance, “The Theotokos” or “God Bearer”), Christ, and the Saints. Christianity, which we normally find so familiar—such a known quantity—suddenly appears foreign. After all, the faith began in the East, and here, at a Russian Orthodox Church, the East seems strangely close to the West. Much of what the average Catholic or Protestant accepts as Christianity is certainly present, but there is more—the fullness of the service, the amount of activity and imagery, attended by a chorus of crying babies brought by young families (youth is in short supply at most other denominations these days, though not this one), is impressive, and to a passing observer such as myself, a little intimidating. What’s happening? Suddenly, the priest flaps a white cloth about twenty times over the altar. Why?

(I’ll explain later).

This brief dip into Orthodoxy helped me gain some perspective on Christianity—on what it is and what it does for people. G.K. Chesterton lamented the skeptic’s lack of fair-mindedness towards the Christian Faith, stating that we tend to take it for granted as something ordinary, the wearily trod province of church committees and spaghetti dinners. But, he argued, one could see it more clearly if one first de-familiarized it: “It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika.” (The swastika, at the time Chesterton wrote this sentence, was still a peaceful Hindu and Buddhist symbol, and hadn’t yet been stolen by the Nazis).

Sitting—or, primarily, standing—at this Orthodox service, I saw Christianity as such an Eastern faith. Atmospherically, the experience was oddly closer to being in a Hindu Temple than it was to being in, say, a liberal United Church of Christ service… An Eastern Orthodox Mass has the feeling of an ancient, almost Shamanic rite—of something magical and timeless. (I don’t mean to wallow in exoticism, but it’s hard to deny that it’s part of the appeal.) Here, bread and wine are transformed into the flesh and blood of a God, and dispensed to people who are made mystically one with that Deity by partaking of His very being. While this basic purpose is the same as that of Catholic Mass, the presentation has a distinctly pre-Vatican II feeling. (A congregant told me that the Eastern Orthodox mass is closer to the Tridentine or Latin Mass than to the current Catholic version). It is proudly unreformed, and its antiquity is palpable. This is attractive: Eastern Orthodoxy offers a historical connection to the origins of Christianity, and folds to a millimeter the distance between Christian and Christ—time past is time present and time present is time past, to paraphrase a T.S. Eliot line. Naturally, all true believers want to be as close as possible to the living reality of Jesus and the Apostles, to a way of life instituted not by the ever-conniving human intellect but by the pure breath of God. A Protestant fundamentalist can do this by trying to reconstruct true Christian life from a close reading of the New Testament—but an Eastern Orthodox lay person looks to a tradition of ritual and shared experience that claims to go back to the very beginning. Only Catholicism can make a similar claim on historical continuity (though, again, it seems a bit more reformed these days). In the mists of the past, the Mass eludes the sense of being a merely human innovation.

Many of the members of the congregation I visited were former Catholics or Episcopalians, searching for a connection to a venerable tradition, mixed in with a fair amount of ethnic Eastern Europeans. Since Eastern Orthodoxy has a historical pedigree, and since it is both less reformed than Catholicism and less overtly hierarchical (there is no Pope and no doctrine of infallibility), one can feel the peculiar magnetism of its aura. If you were present at the creation—at the origin—you have a strong claim to be the bearer of Christ into the New World.

But why was I there? I’m interested in all religions, and have attended numerous services—from a Sikh Gurdwara to a Swedenborgian reading group to Buddhist and Sufi meditation sessions to Hindu puja—but hadn’t previously been to an Eastern Orthodox Mass. This seemed like an unfortunate gap, given its strong claim to being the original Church. Also, aspects of its inner life—its spirituality—were highly intriguing: on the whole, Orthodoxy has been more open to the mystical life than Catholicism and Protestantism, despite the great mystics of both those traditions. Books like The Way of a Pilgrim and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov further contributed to my interest, as did the sayings of an Eastern Orthodox sage, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, who offered this striking and rather cryptic observation about prayer and Orthodox ritual to the philosopher Jacob Needleman: “In prayer one is vulnerable, not enthusiastic. And then these rituals have such force. They hit you like a locomotive. You must not be enthusiastic, nor rejecting—but only open. This is the whole aim of asceticism: to become open.”

So—why did I go? Anthony Bloom, vulnerability, Dostoevsky, the way of a pilgrim… Is that a coherent explanation? I think it adds up to one. I wanted to see a portion of the past made present—receive a material impression that there’s something eternal underneath this changing flux of dreamlike appearance. I wanted a little evidence that you can’t really bury the human need to make contact with Eternity under diodes and wires: people will proudly revert to the ancient ways.   Also, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to see if I could enter, if for a second or two, Bloom’s state of vulnerable receptivity to experience. I liked his depiction of prayer: clearing out a space, emptying one’s self of ordinary human thought and emotion, so that a higher influence could enter. It gives a sense of what seekers are likely looking for in Eastern Orthodoxy: an open space in the midst of modern noise, a place where your ear might be able to catch a higher tone.

But, unfortunately, I’m not really a morning person, and my brain was haphazard with irrelevant thoughts throughout the ritual… Additionally, while I’m not what you would call a “skeptic,” I’m not sure I could bring myself to a point where I could feel anything sincere as I kissed an icon or received the Eucharist (I refrained from doing either, out of respect). In order to do it, I would have to shift my stance towards reality in a fairly radical manner… But, nonetheless, I was impressed by the experience.

The form of the Quaker service I went to a week before could be succinctly summarized in one sentence: “The congregation sits in silence, and when someone feels like the Spirit has moved her, she speaks.” (I enjoyed this, and, in many respects, it seemed closer to my own wavelength.) But one could spend multiple volumes detailing the nature of the Eastern Orthodox Mass and Liturgy. There was a long period in which the priest flapped a folded white linen over the altar—there were many flaps (as mentioned earlier). A friendly lay person told me later that the original purpose of this was to ward flies away from the Communion wine.  Yet, even without flies around, the practice remained in place… Mundane gestures take on a mood of sanctity when repeated in a devout manner, I suppose.

To further explore the contrast: Quaker worship intends to connect you to an immediate sense of divine presence—an Eternal Now, in which revelation can still happen.   Eastern Orthodoxy does the same thing through nearly opposite means. It also feels timeless, because it’s been going on forever with its relatively unreformed approach. But it tries to connect you to the Spirit by placing your attention on a heavily symbolic ritual, whereas the Quakers try, mystically, to allow you to open your attention to the Spirit without reliance on any external aid. Both techniques have just claims in their favor, though they lie on opposite ends of the spectrum of Christian practice.

In the midst of the gory mess that we call history, the rituals of Eastern Orthodoxy provide an escape hatch for their devotees, connecting them to Eternity. Many souls in the modern world can’t accept the notion that everything we see and experience is sentenced to the cycle of birth, decay, and death—and neither can I. There must be something that transcends… An ancient tradition like Orthodoxy symbolizes, in my eyes, an ongoing counter-movement beneath the bustle of time—the swift but silent footsteps of Divinity through the ages.