As the Faculty Adviser to the Kennedy School chapter of the National Honor Society, for the past fifteen years I have proudly supported student efforts to bring our people together for our annual benefit concert. In addition to community building–in and of itself an invaluable undertaking in our age of disconnection–it gives the young’uns an opportunity to flex their organizational, management, and leadership muscles. The whole kit and caboodle is a pain in my arse. But it’s a nurturing and nourishing pain in my arse.
This year, students voted to raise funds and awareness for Human Rights Watch. Sweet lawdy the folks over at HRW have their work cut out for them these days!
But no longer! Dear reader, I am pleased to report that as a result of our concert on Wednesday, violations of human rights are a thing of the past. Rest well friends, gone are the days of tyrants. Mission accomplished. On behalf of NHS, you're welcome!
Snark aside, if only for a moment, this year’s concert was extra special for a couple reasons. First, the Director of Human Rights Watch in Europe and Central Asia, Hugh Williamson* joined the affair with his esteemed colleague Juliane Kippenberg. They graciously shared insight and inspiration with our audience.
This concert was also special because I mustered the gumption to perform. Generally, I’m not particularly inclined to play live. I love love love to play music, usually alone. Sometimes I collaborate and record music. But mostly, I feel like I should leave live music performance up to the professionals. Alas, my performance on Wednesday confirmed that feeling.
But a couple forces conspired to encourage me to share a song at the concert. First, some students asked me if I would perform. I told them that while tempting, the whole thing makes me terribly insecure and anxious. One of them reminded me that I regularly opine about the wisdom of insecurity and the importance of grappling with anxiousness as a path towards liberation. Touché.
Then there’s the synchronicity of it all. I recently recorded a song based on a poem by Osip Mandelstam. Mandelstam was a Soviet Jew, a bolshevik, and a victim of communism. Disillusioned by communism as practiced by comrade Stalin, he composed this in 1933:
The Stalin Epigram
Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meows, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
After the murder of his confidant Sergei Kirov in 1934, during the dark years for Soviet Jews, Stalin internally exiled Mandelstam to the sullen city of Voronezh. Stalin’s impulse was to execute Mandelstam, but the cultural titans of his generation interceded on his behalf. In isolation, presumably fearing for his life, Mandelstam continued working. Perhaps Mandelstam felt protected by his elite allies; equally likely, he saw the writing on the wall, sensed the inevitability, and took to writing poetry that, in retrospect at least, reads like a death wish. He penned a poem that was translated into english by my friend, Joshua Weiner. A translation? Josh might have us call it version.
Mandelstam: Voronezh, 1935
a version
A wave, another wave, wave breaks wave with wave rising to crest to strike the moon with the hopeless rage of a slave; soldiers of a sea without depth, new city of waves, without sleep digs its trench in the truth. And through shadows of foam and ash you can see the swelling bulwark crash, its battlements like teeth chewing the air where mistrusted loyalists disappear and stone cold eunuchs deal parcels of poison under the sultan's wall of flesh.
Surely the “sultan” is Stalin, who was soon to launch the Great Purge. No one was safe, let alone vocal critics influential in elite circles. In the winter of 1938, Mandelstam was plucked from internal exile and sentenced to five years of re-education in a Siberian gulag. He was being held in Vladivostok where he wrote to his brother, 85 years ago this week. “My health is very bad, I'm extremely exhausted and thin, almost unrecognizable, but I don't know whether there's any sense in sending clothes, food and money. You can try all the same, though. I'm very cold without proper clothes.” This would be his last letter.
He was dumped in a mass grave. He was 47. I’m 47.
In loathing Putin, though not lamenting his recent assassination of his “mistrusted loyalist” Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a tip of the hat to my poet pal Josh, and in memory of Osip Mandelstam, I recorded this song. It’s a version of Josh’s version, brought to life by the (in)famous Brothers Kondziolka on sax and drums and my dear MeganWife on vocals. The soundscape was cleverly constructed by my friend, former student, and producer, Brian Trahan. I played it at the concert.
Which brings me to another reason Wednesday night was special. My man Trahan, who I taught in Chicagoland USA 635 years ago, but who is now living and working in Berlin, closed out the benefit show. This guy. My guy! They don’t make guys like this guy anymore and that’s a doggone shame. Because my boy is better than buttered bread. I’m a fanboy. Follow his work, you’ll surely see why. He’s got a new album coming soon and it brought me joy this week to share him with my school community.
So that’s really what I was thinking about most this week. Just focused on bringing the community together. Anxious about performing. Lamenting Osip Mandelstam. Grateful for music. Another concert in the books. Another poster on my office wall.
Uggh, Okay. When I sat down to write this morning, I had a whole other agenda for this newsletter. It’s a modest proposal which I now must keep short. Y’all ready?
Hey adults! Why are our social engagements so desperately boring? And don’t tell me it’s because you’re tired. 90% of the time people tell me they’re tired, they mean something else. Bored. Anxious. Aloof. Frustrated. Overstimulated. Scared. Tired?
But I’m tired. I’m tired of dull-ass adult gatherings. Can we please gather with a purpose other than shoving food and drink down our sad, old guzzles? Enough! I’m bloated. Uggh.
Why don’t adults host performance evenings? Ya know, just for fun? Everyone comes with a poem, a song, a joke. Could be an original, a translation, a version. Read a passage of your new favorite book. Tell a story about your first breakup. Whatevs. Let’s make more space for each other to take creative strides. Please and thank you.
Happy Friday!
-DL
*Wanna know how cool Hugh is? As if committing his working life to human rights ain’t enough, he is the only two-time guest on For a Living. If you want to hear about what a Human Rights Watch Director does for a living, you should check out this conversation. If you want to learn about the curious and compelling work of worker priests, you can listen to Hugh here. But that’s the podcast, and as I wrote about last week, that’s all in the past.
I’m learning how rituals that mark time matter to me. So this year, I am carving out an hour or so on Friday to sit quietly before my family wakes to write about what I obsessed about that week. If you enjoy this weekly reflection, please subscribe so I can send it to you every Friday.