October 20, 2023

Stop posting that Leonard Bernstein quote

Sharon's Weekly Head Dump

The only certainty in life is death and taxes, and also the fact that any time a horrible thing happens in the world, someone will post That Leonard Bernstein Quote.

You know the one:

It’s beautiful, it’s affirming, it’s provided comfort to many people after terrible tragedies, and on some level I totally agree with its message. But over the years, as The Quote has gotten trotted out after every outbreak of violence, every mass shooting (why are there so many), every declaration of war (ditto), I’ve come to dread the words “This will be our reply…”

It feels like The Quote has become a social media formality for musicians in much the same way that mealy-mouthed Notes app screenshots are now de rigueur for celebrities. A bad thing happens, every conservatory graduate posts “This will be our reply…”, and then everyone continues with their lives, satisfied that they Did Something About the Situation.

I think The Quote, on a very surface level, helps to resolve the cognitive dissonance all artists feel when faced with our own helplessness in the face of meaningless cruelty. Art and the creation of it exists in a perpetual paradox: art is, fundamentally, unnecessary to life and existence, and yet it’s one of the things that gives existence meaning and makes life worth living.

I touched on it in my little rant about talent, but art doesn’t serve any utilitarian purpose: it doesn’t feed or shelter us. Before you go “But Sharon, music is a billion dollar industry, paintings and sculptures go for millions, authors get rich from book deals, etc.” I would like to emphasize that I am talking about art separately from capital, as succinctly described by my friend Isaac:

The energy and ingenuity that goes into making art—choreographing and rehearsing a dance, or splattering a canvas with paint, or mulling for months on the exact words to set in poetry like jewels in gold, or any number of existentially pointless activities we place under the umbrella of the arts—was, arguably, evolutionarily meant for us to spend determining which plants could nourish us and which could kill us, escaping the jaws of predators, convincing other members of our species to procreate with us instead of murdering us for our hoard of tasty plants, etc.

The radical miracle of art is that it defies the notion that life is purely about survival. It’s remarkable that in every time period and place, human beings have been eternally called to expending their precious time and energy on creating, expressing, and finding meaning, and I think that is so goddamn beautiful.

But here’s the thing: art requires peace from conflict, and it requires people to be alive. (Yes yes, I know war inspires its own art, like Guernica and the War Sonatas, but I don’t think “It might inspire someone to make art” is ever a justification for the existence of senseless violence—and in fact one could argue that making art about war sucks up the brilliance and talent that could otherwise have gone into making art about other things—and in any case people can’t make art about war if they’re actively fleeing conflict or don’t survive it.)

In fact, art requires a lot of things. It requires people to not only be alive, but to be safe and housed and fed and well, so they can focus on things further up Maslow’s Hierarchy. It requires society to collectively value expression over domination. It requires us to live in complexity: to reject the easy binaries of us vs. them, good vs. evil.

War and mass murder aren’t random evils that spring up in a vacuum. They’re the logical endpoint of the everyday evil that lies in thinking that other people are less deserving of life and safety, of thinking that retribution is the same thing as justice, of thinking that it’s even possible for anyone to have the authority and wisdom to decide who gets to be considered a full person.

I can’t speak for Leonard Bernstein, but I suspect he knew all this, which is why it’s extra tragic that the “This will be our reply to violence” quote gets so taken out of context.

The Quote comes from an address that Leonard Bernstein made at a fundraiser for the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York (yeah I know, real catchy name) after the assassination of JFK. It is both apolitical and intensely political; while it doesn’t draw partisan lines, Bernstein speaks of Kennedy’s “reverence for the life of the mind” and “the honor in which he held art”—phrases that feel radical as we still, unfortunately, live in an era in which science is twisted to suit political ends, books and ideas depicting the complexity of humanity are being banned in schools, and arts education is being gutted across the slate from early learning to higher ed.

There is an entire beautiful section of Bernstein’s speech that I never see quoted by people posting The Quote, and the crucial (to me) part goes as thus:

Learning and reason: precisely the two elements that were necessarily missing from the mind of anyone who could have fired that impossible bullet. Learning and reason: the two basic precepts of all Judaistic tradition, the twin sources from which every Jewish mind from Abraham and Moses to Freud and Einstein has drawn its living power. Learning and Reason: the motto we here tonight must continue to uphold with redoubled tenacity, and must continue, at any price, to make the basis of all our actions.

It is obvious that the grievous nature of our loss is immensely aggravated by the element of violence involved in it. And where does this violence spring from? From ignorance and hatred—the exact antonyms of Learning and Reason. Learning and Reason: those two words of John Kennedy’s were not uttered in time to save his own life; but every man can pick them up where they fell, and make them part of himself, the seed of that rational intelligence without which our world can no longer survive. This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.

This is the part that I think people miss when they post The Quote; it’s not that art is some noble singular bulwark against violence, but that art serves as a handmaiden of something greater. Bernstein argues, and I agree, that violence cannot exist in a mind or a society that prioritizes space for Learning and Reason in their truest forms. Art itself cannot singlehandedly convince warlords and nations to lay down arms; art is what happens when people make the active choice to prioritize Learning and Reason.

The section of the speech right before the “This will be our reply” bit is also especially crucial. (Bolding is mine.)

We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same.

I said earlier that the idea that retribution is the same thing as justice is a root form of evil, and Bernstein criticizes the urge to seek vengeance—something I’ve unfortunately seen a lot of, not only this past week but essentially every time we see heinous violence in the world.

I also emphasized “Our music will never again be quite the same,” because the terrible irony is that The Quote is often used to justify people’s artmaking going on the same way as before.

The desire to create beauty in response to suffering and tragedy is, in itself, beautiful and innately human. And art can be a valuable safe house, a refuge to remind us of the good of humanity. But deploying words like this out of their necessary context, making them hackneyed and useless, so that one can wash their hands and go back to whatever they were doing, is actively disrespectful and harmful. Using “This will be our reply to violence” as a flimsy suggestion that one’s art is not only relevant, it’s actively helping the world!, is intellectual laziness. It’s a pretty way of not engaging with painful complexity, of not contributing anything useful.

Play your music, write your poetry, make your art. Don’t let war or violence stop you—every act of creation is, after all, its own small miracle and the antithesis of destruction, and I meant what I said about art making life worth living. But don’t perpetuate the idea in your mind that making art automatically eradicates inequity or injustice or suffering—artists must also answer the call to be people who participate in the world, who have their own power, however small, to uphold the pillars of Learning and Reason. Artists are, in many ways, the best people to nurture open-mindedness when lesser minds peddle scare tactics and “they’re out to get you” rhetoric, to preach for the richness of a complex world when others choose to simplify everything into “us vs. them,” to demand peace and understanding when loud but empty vessels shout that we should shoot/bomb/nuke the “enemy.” Recognize your power and use it.

If nothing else, stop posting that ####ing quote.

P.S. I realize that by going, let’s ask for peace, stop fighting and let’s listen to one another, etc. I am becoming the human embodiment of a Prius plastered in “COEXIST” bumper stickers. It’s not so much that I believe world peace is truly attainable, Miss Congeniality style, so much as it is that I believe that humanity is fated (in a tragically beautiful way) to a sort of eternal Sisyphean struggle: most of us will always be doing the harder work of seeking openness and understanding while there will always be a few who drag us down into conflict and close-mindedness. We may never get close to the ideal, but we have to try anyway, because the moment we collectively give up, we’re lost and will be nothing more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.

More helpful things

It’s not news that I process some things best through satire, and The Onion delivered, as it always does, with its brutal FAQ about current events:

Q: Am I allowed to be sad for all of the victims?
A: Absolutely not. You have to pick a side.

Q: What’s been the international response?
A: People across the world have contributed an outpouring of infographics.

Q: How has the United States responded?
A: U.S. leaders reminded Americans that their nation has a responsibility to be a frothing worshipper at the altar of death.

I also do appreciate and cherish when people create space for beauty and goodness in hard times, and Talia Lavin’s “All the Things I Want” is a poetic, sensory journey of yearning for impossible things.

A podcast recommendation

Those of you who have gotten this newsletter for a while might have noticed that I never recommend podcasts; this is because, to the frustration of my many friends who send me interesting podcasts, I generally don’t listen to them.

It’s not that I’m anti-podcast (although seriously, there are too many) so much as it is that they’re basically my least favorite way to consume information, which I blame on a little quirk of my brain. For some reason I have a harder time parsing human speech (in whatever language, not just English) than, say, music (it’s not a hearing issue) if I’m not giving it my full attention, and even then I miss or mishear things all the time. So the only time I can listen to podcasts is when I can totally focus on them, and there are very few times in my day when I can just sit and listen to a podcast without doing anything else.

(Also, I apparently read way faster than most people, so I’m generally used to swallowing up info-dense articles and books pretty quickly, so audiobooks and “let’s learn about a thing” podcasts are intensely frustrating to me because the rate at which information is being conveyed is so slow. People have suggested that I listen to podcasts at faster speeds, but one, why would I want to listen to chipmunk voices, and two, then I just run into the aforementioned problem with parsing human speech.)

Anyway, I’ve had more time the past few weeks to slot some podcasts into my life, and have really been enjoying Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics.

I started with Haynes’ retelling of The Odyssey to a live audience, which I highly recommend to anyone regardless of how well you already know The Odyssey. Haynes is a remarkably funny storyteller but also deeply insightful and analytical, particularly when it comes to how women in ancient stories are depicted and given (or denied) voices.

I’ve been slowly going through the individual episodes devoted to notable women of myth (I feel very validated in my “Clytemnestra did nothing wrong” stance) and genuinely am having a great time. I looooove Greek myths and I especially love when smart feminist scholars provide more insight and context to these stories I’m so fond of (which, so often, are actually objectively horrifying).

In fact, I’ve been enjoying Haynes’ podcast—with her blend of wicked humor and accessible historical analysis—so immensely that my little shoulder devil is now going “Psst, what if you started a podcast like this telling music history stories?”

No! Bad shoulder devil! I normally don’t even listen to podcasts and I hate listening to myself, and I just said there are too many podcasts! I blame all of you—yes, you, I am passing the buck here—who have told me how much you enjoy my text-based music history storytelling, and the industry professionals who have repeatedly told me that I would be great at podcasts. Look at what you’ve done, putting these wicked sinful thoughts in my head.

[sprays self with water like a misbehaving cat]

Other good reads

I enjoyed and appreciated this investigative piece by Erin L. Thompson on the issue of human remains—predominantly from Indigenous and colonized peoples—being held in major museums.

And one of the handful of bodies still on display at the museum is “Copper Man,” who died in the 6th century, when a mine shaft collapsed on him. Now, his body is part of an exhibit on early technology, lying in a narrow display case labeled “Mining and Smelting,” with a piece of the copper ore he was searching for perched on a ledge just out of his reach. With his braided hair and ankle bindings of fur and wool, Copper Man, one of the world’s best-preserved mummified bodies, was a sensation when he was discovered and put on display by a series of entrepreneurs in Chile and New York. J.P. Morgan, then a member of the museum’s board of trustees, purchased and donated the remains to the AMNH in 1905.

Representatives of the Atacameños, the Indigenous people who live in the area of Chile where Copper Man was found, have been asking for his return since at least 1991. In 2007, they successfully reclaimed and reburied several ancestors from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. But the AMNH has dodged requests for Copper Man with a long series of delays and excuses. Once, they sent a fiberglass replica of the body to Chile instead of Copper Man himself.

On a totally different topic, I am such a sucker for delightful news bonbons about the French and their various forms of baguette anxiety, and this piece was right up my alley:

Still, I perfectly understand why Parisians may be anxious. Baguettes are heaven, and must be protected; and no, those sold in British supermarkets, with crusts the colour of cornflakes and soggy insides, are not right at all. The French baguette is at once sweet and salty, the former the result – I believe – of the soft (low-protein) European wheat from which the flour is milled (this also absorbs less water, which means the loaf is drier and rises less). Its gorgeously resistant crust and open crumb, with finger-sized holes, makes it so wonderful to eat, these contrasting textures requiring nothing else in the devouring, not even a knife. Except, of course, I often put butter on mine.

(I hate to sound basic and Frenchpilled, but it’s totally true that a real Parisian baguette, bought fresh from a neighborhood boulangerie and eaten immediately, is beyond delicious—American supermarket baguettes are such shoddy, pathetic simulacra that they’re downright offensive. I’ve found some neighborhood bakeries in LA that make damn good bread—some so good that I get yearning texts from out-of-town friends about it— but still, nothing compares to the platonic ideal of a true French baguette.) 🥖