concert

Jan. 13th, 2025 08:28 am
hudebnik: (Default)
Yesterday we took the train into Manhattan to attend a concert. In person, physically in the same room with the performers, which hasn't happened often in the past five years. The concert in question was the world premiere of Sequentia's "Gregorius: the Holy Sinner", a sung-spoken-harped rendition of Hartmann von Aue's 12th-century tale in Middle High German (with English supertitles, which was good because I could only make out an occasional few words in the German).

It's a strange and disturbing story. (The following is all from memory, and I may have some details wrong.)

The Duke and Duchess of Aquitaine have twins, a boy and a girl, who grow up beautiful and healthy and well-behaved. But the mother dies in childbirth, and the father dies of illness ten or so years later, leaving the twins in the protection of the Duke's advisors and one another. Still, they step up to the plate: the twins support, love, and protect one another admirably. The Devil sees this idyllic situation, grows jealous, and as they reach puberty, inspires the boy to have sex with his sister -- not a big stretch, as they've been sharing a bedroom and everything else all their lives, and neither is terribly clear on the whole incest-taboo thing. The girl is surprised, but goes along with it, and after the first time, they discover they enjoy it and keep doing it. Naturally, she gets pregnant, and by the time she starts to show, they've figured out that they're in serious trouble, both with God and with the public. She arranges to give birth in secret, under the supervision of an advisor's wife, while he for penitence goes on a long pilgrimage or crusade or something. Their son, named Gregorius, is beautiful and healthy, but can't be kept around, so the girl and the advisor's wife put him in a box with silken cloths and an ivory tablet explaining his story, put the box in a boat, and push it out to sea.

Gregorius is found by fishermen and raised jointly by a fishing family and an abbot. Being of noble (albeit anonymous) birth, he gets an education at the abbey, and the abbot sees a career for him in the priesthood, but he also hears tales of knighthood and chivalry and leans that direction. At one point he discovers by accident that he's a foundling; he's ashamed, and goes to the abbot to announce that he's leaving to seek his own fortune, perhaps become a knight, and escape his mysterious past. The abbot fills him in on as much of the story as he knows, gives him the silken cloths and ivory tablet, and sends him off on a boat, which he directs to go "wherever the winds may blow us".

Naturally, he ends up in Aquitaine, where the now-adult Duchess is running things alone as best she can (her twin brother having died of heartbreak on his pilgrimage), but under pressure from a neighboring noble to marry him. She doesn't want to, so he invades with military force, laying waste to the countryside and its people. Gregorius, not realizing that this is his homeland and its Duchess his mother, decides to join the resistance; he trains long and hard, becoming a brave and skilled fighter, meets the neighboring noble in single combat, bests and captures him, extracts his promise to leave Aquitaine alone forever after, and saves the day. Gregorius is celebrated throughout the land, the Duchess meets him and notices that his silken robe looks awfully familiar, almost like the cloths in which she wrapped her baby... but no, that's impossible. They get married, and have great joy of one another.

But Gregorius knows that he's the child of incest, and spends some time every day re-reading the ivory tablet and ruminating on his shame in secret. A maidservant sees him doing this and reports it to the Duchess, who finds the ivory tablet, realizes that she has now had sex with not only her brother but her son too, and tells him the whole story. Gregorius assures her that no sin is beyond redemption if you're truly penitent, but this is a big one and it will take a lot of penitence, and obviously they can never see one another again. Gregorius goes off to become a hermit, while she becomes the most penitent Duchess imaginable.

Gregorius finds a fisherman who offers to "help" him in his penitence by taking him to a bare rock in the middle of the ocean, locking his legs in irons, throwing the key into the ocean, and leaving him there, saying "if I find this key in the deeps of the ocean, I'll believe that you're without sin." Grigorius is left with no food, no shelter, no clothes but a hair-shirt, and only a bit of water from a slow spring in the rock.

Seventeen years pass; the Pope dies, and there's a great conflict among the powerful interests in Rome, each family wanting its son to be Pope. Two senior clergy, on the same night, dream that God tells them to find a holy hermit named Gregorius in Aquitaine and make him the Pope. So they set off to Aquitaine to do that; unfortunately, Aquitaine is a big place, and God didn't give them precise directions. They end up at the home of a fisherman, who seeing their rich clothes figures he should treat them well and profit from them. He offers to cook them a fine fish that he's just caught that day, and while cleaning it for them, finds the key he had thrown into the ocean years before. Abashed, he tells them about the hermit he left on a rock, and all three set off in a boat to find him.

For some reason, the clergy expect to find a handsome, well-dressed man with clear eyes and blond hair. They don't, as Gregorius has been living on the grace of God for seventeen years and looks like hell, but at least he answers to his name. He doesn't believe their story, and says he'll believe it only if the key to his leg-irons turns up by miracle; the fisherman pulls out the key and unlocks his legs, they take him back to shore and presumably give him a bath and some clothes. On their trip back to Rome, Gregorius heals a bunch of sick people with his touch, confirming that yes, he really is the right guy. Before they reach Rome, all the church bells in Rome start ringing of their own accord to celebrate his arrival. He's installed as Pope, and quickly develops a reputation for exceptional skill at comforting penitent sinners.

One of those is the Duchess of Aquitaine, who is still tortured by the shame of her double incest. She goes to Rome to confess her sins to the new Pope (who I presume took a different name as Pope, so she doesn't know it's Gregorius). She's been through the wringer in the past seventeen years too, and he doesn't recognize her until she tells her story. He strings her along for a while:
"Do you know whether your son lives?"
"No."
"Would you recognize him if you saw him?"
"Yes, certainly."
"If you saw him, would it be with joy or with sorrow?"
"With the greatest of joy."
"I have spoken to him, and he said his truest friend was you."
"You have spoken to him?"
"He is near. Would you like to meet him?"
and so on. Eventually he reveals himself, they're joyfully reunited, and they never part again. I presume they're not "together" as husband and wife, since that would look really bad for a Pope.

I guess one moral of the story is the usual Faustian "no sin is beyond God's forgiveness, if you seek it sincerely." A more troubling moral is "no matter what suffering you're going through, or how little you've done to deserve it, it's all part of God's plan and all for the best." Or, perhaps more troubling (and definitely not what Hartmann meant!), "all their suffering was self-inflicted through shame at breaking religious taboos; if they hadn't believed in God and penance, they would have lived perfectly happy, healthy lives, aside from perhaps producing some badly-inbred children."

The performers were Benjamin Bagby, who's been doing this sort of voice-and-harp performance for forty-mumble years; Jasmina Črnčič, a young Slovenian singer/harper; and Lukas Papenfußcline, a young Brooklyn-based singer who goes by the stage-name Leiken. The original poem survives in several 12th-13th-century manuscripts, but without music, so Bagby reconstructed a plausible repertoire of melodic and modal gestures found in Hartmann's 14th-century successor "Frauenlob", whose poems do survive with music. Most of the time there's one singer at a time, with or without harp, but occasionally two or all three singers in parallel 5ths and/or octaves (an early form of organum known to have been used in church music in the 12th century, IIRC).
hudebnik: (Default)
The Jim Crow era included a lot of laws, legal procedures, and extralegal procedures (like lynching -- think Emmett Till) predicated on the fear of black men raping white women. Which is ironic, because historically it's been far more common for white men to rape black women. Indeed, almost every black American is descended from one or more acts of white-on-black rape (whether involving actual physical force or simply enormous power imbalances). But "predatory black man raping innocent white woman" was an appealing image that justified racial segregation and oppression in the name of protecting the innocent.

For the past few decades, there hasn't been so much talk about protecting white women from rape by predatory black men; instead it's been about protecting children from sexual abuse by (male) gay adults. Which is ironic, since most gay adults aren't pedophiles, and most pedophiles aren't gay. But pedophilia and homosexuality are both non-majority sexual behaviors, so it's easy to define them both as "sick, perverted", and then to equate the two. "Predatory gay man raping innocent child" was an appealing image that justified homophobia in the name of protecting the innocent.

More recently, the lurking threat has shifted from gay people to trans people. The concern seems to be that straight men will pretend to be trans women in order to sneak into public women's bathrooms, where they'll rape the innocent, defenseless women in those bathrooms. This is ironic, because IIUC, most trans women are "straight", in the sense of being more sexually interested in men than in women; a woman is several orders of magnitude more likely to be raped by a straight man than by a trans lesbian woman.

But that's about "real" trans women; the worry is about straight men pretending to be trans women (with the unspoken assumption that all trans women are really straight men pretending; that nobody could really disagree with one's upbringing on such a fundamental issue as gender.) And why would a straight man pretend to be female? Obviously, in order to commit rape; it's not clear how pretending to be female helps with that, but they're both non-majority sexual behaviors, so one must lead to the other. "Predatory straight male cross-dresser raping innocent properly-dressed woman" is an appealing image that justifies legislating certain people out of existence in the name of protecting the innocent.

Of course, I don't know of a single proven case of a straight man dressing up as a woman to sneak into a public women's bathroom and commit rape. It could happen, but it seems like a lot of unnecessary hassle. If you're willing to commit the felony of rape, a social taboo -- or even a misdemeanor law -- on men entering women's bathrooms isn't likely to stop you. Why go to the trouble of putting on a dress, stockings, makeup, and high heels when you could just walk in? If you guess wrong, there are several women in the bathroom, and they start beating you up, you can run faster without a dress and high heels.

This fascination with rape in "socially conservative" cultures justifies not only oppressing blacks, oppressing homosexuals, and oppressing transsexuals, but even oppressing the innocent women they're supposedly protecting. For example, many conservative Jewish, Moslem, and Christian sects are so concerned about men raping women that they require women to cover most of their bodies to prevent inflaming the men around them into uncontrollable lust. It might seem more obvious to expect men to control their own lust, but I guess that's unrealistic. To stay on the safe side, unrelated women and men can't touch, converse together, worship together, even look at one another for fear the men will turn into raging sex monsters. And women can be beaten, locked up, and killed for failing to take the measures mandated in the name of protecting them from being raped. I guess it's appealing for some men (think Donald Trump) to think of themselves as so oversexed that they can't control their sexual urges and shouldn't be expected to. The titillating fantasy of being "overcome by lust in the moment" applies across genders: we've all heard stories of sorority girls intentionally getting drunk to lower their sexual inhibitions and increase the likelihood of being thus "overcome", but I think only alpha-males use the fantasy of being "out of control" as a means to control other people.
hudebnik: (Default)
I was walking the dogs yesterday morning and a garbage truck pulled up beside us. "Odd," I thought, "this isn't trash day." But it was the day before Pesach, and all the orthodox-Jewish houses in the neighborhood had a lot of stuff to get rid of before Saturday night. Perhaps to the relevant rabbinic authorities "in a trash barrel outdoors" doesn't count as "out of the house". Anyway, apparently the NYC Department of Sanitation is willing to do some extra pickups for this purpose.
hudebnik: (Default)
... Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Talents, the sequel to The Parable of the Sower. And I think I have a better idea of what the quasi-religious-leader protagonist is getting at. Her religion is a (not necessarily unique) solution to a set of equations or imperatives or syllogisms or something:

Humanity should survive.
For humanity to survive, it needs dreams and a future bigger than "survive".
(Similarly, for any individual to survive, that individual needs dreams and a future bigger than "survive".)
Space colonization is a big enough, expensive enough dream that the protagonist won't live to see it happen, and that's a feature, not a bug. It's also romantic enough to stir the imagination.
Space colonization will never be profitable, so we can't rely on the profit motive to do it; we need something irrational like a religion.

I think this book touched me more than Kindred because of my own history with religion. I imagine the following dialogue (which does not appear in the book) between two of the characters:
"I had to think of the child's best interest."
"You've got a lot of damn gall deciding on your own that it's in her best interest not to know her mother."
"You've got a lot of damn gall deciding on your own that it's in her best interest not to know God."

Neither of these people is objectively wrong. Indeed, both of them are self-evidently right in their respective frames of reference, and in that frame of reference the other is deluded by superstition and blinded by power. One could say that the "mother" relationship is objectively demonstrable, while the existence of "God" isn't, but to somebody to whom the existence and properties of "God" are self-evident, that argument makes as much sense as "my hovercraft is full of eels".
hudebnik: (devil duck)
You've received a great deal of attention, both positive and negative, for applying your faith-based conscience to your job. There's nothing wrong with applying your conscience, and all the experiences that have made you who you are, to every part of your life, including your job. Indeed, that's an admirable quality, and probably part of what got you elected to your office in the first place.

But you've been confused by a homonym -- two different concepts that happen to share the same spelling and pronunciation, like the noun "dog"[1] meaning a four-legged animal and the verb "dog"[2] meaning pester or bother. As County Clerk, you're probably called upon to issue dog licenses; when you do so, are you authorizing the licensee to pester and bother people, or to own and keep a four-legged animal?

In this case, the confusion is between "marriage"[1] in the eyes of God and "marriage"[2] in the eyes of the State. These two concepts have seldom been identical, but they overlap enough to be confusing. A couple married by a priest/minister/rabbi/imam/whatever who hasn't been empowered by the State to conduct marriages are married[1] but not married[2]. A couple married by a justice of the peace are married[2] but perhaps not married[1].

Members of minority religions have had to accept this fact for centuries. The Catholic Church says (said?) that a person who has been married and divorced cannot be married again; the U.S. Government and most or all of its States disagree. Islam and the Church of Latter-Day Saints, from their founding, allowed and even encouraged polygamy; the U.S. Government and most or all of its States disagree. You've been fortunate, most of your life, that as a member of the local-majority religion, your religious notion of marriage matched the legal one pretty closely, but now that's no longer true.

Fortunately, nobody is asking you to state that a couple can be married[1] in the eyes of God, which is a matter of faith-based conscience; you're being asked, as part of your job, to certify that they can be married[2] in the eyes of the State, which is a simple, objective, legal question.

If you insist that legal marriage[2] in your county must conform to your religious/conscientious notion of marriage[1], you are also fighting for the right of a Catholic clerk to refuse marriage licenses to people either of whom has been married before, and the right of a Mormon clerk to issue marriage licenses to people who are still married to someone else, and the right of a racist judge to refuse to marry people of different races, and the right of a Dexterian judge to refuse to marry left-handed people (remember, the courts have long held themselves incompetent to second-guess whether someone's claimed religious views really are religious views, so anything goes here). You are saying that the State and Federal governments have no place defining marriage at all, and everything depends on whoever happens to hold a local office this month. Are you sure you want to go there?
hudebnik: (devil duck)
Palm Sunday service, just after hearing a lesson about Pilate and the high priests, puts a lot of emphasis on religious leaders manipulating governmental leaders and mobs to accomplish their own ends, and cowardly politicians deflecting blame from themselves by saying "it's the will of the people!"

Or as [livejournal.com profile] shalmestere put it, "a veritable symphony of dog-whistles."

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