A Magic Night at the Gardner Museum January 17, 2012
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Saturday night, January 14, 2012, my wife Linda and I seemed to be in Venice, but we were in Boston. We were at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, or Fenway Court, as it was known during Isabella Stewart Gardner’s lifetime. She was a woman of drive, imagination and spirit. She loved art. The museum was designed to emulate a 15th century Venetian palace and was opened to the public in 1903.
Saturday night was below freezing and Linda and I parked on Palace Road, walked in the dark around the corner only to find the street was lit up by a stunning glass building–the new wing of the Gardner Museum. People were hurrying into the vast foyer dressed for the grand opening. As a former Artist-in-Residence at the museum, I ‘d been invited.
Everything was welcoming and well organized. Our coats were taken and we walked down a glass hallway and could see the outside trees lit up stretching towards the stars. Waiters and waitresses in black shirts greeted us carrying trays of tall glasses of white wine. Suddenly we were at the Courtyard, the heart of the original museum. I’d never come in to the Gardner Museum this way. I was disoriented. All around me were the stone columns, statues and an ancient sarcophagus. The courtyard stretches up four floors to a glass roof. The Venetian walls look as if a great cloth of orange and white has been rubbed in them. Your eye goes up to balcony after balcony. The courtyard itself was filled with ferns and flowers of all sorts, small trees, sculptures from ancient Rome and a quintet of young people playing flutes. There was the scent of the flowers and the earth. There are mysterious shadows and the lovely cacophony of people talking. It had the magic of a palace in Venice long years ago where you were surrounded by beauty, elegance and light.
In the courtyard, the quintet played baroque music, while on a balcony, an oboist played modern solos.
We walked up the marble stairs into the Dutch Room, a room I’ve visited since my twenties. There’s a self-portrait of Rembrandt which he painted when he was twenty-three. Rembrandt wears a dashing hat and cloak. His black eyes are full of wonder, mischief and surprise. Nowadays Rembrandt’s surprised because instead of looking across the Dutch Room at another of his paintings, “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee”, he looks at empty frame. On the morning of March 18th, 1990, two robbers dressed as policemen bound and gagged the guards and stole thirteen artworks including “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee” and also Vermeer’s “The Concert”.
We visited many of my favorite paintings: Titian’s “Europa” showing Zeus as a bull flying off with Europa on his back, Botticelli’s “The Tragedy of Lucretia” and John Singer Sargent’s El Jeleo, which is so alive you can almost hear the Spanish music.
Everything that night was astonishingly beautiful. The voices, the people, the paintings, the scent of the garden, music and sculpture everywhere. We joined several hundred people in the new wing for a delicious, inventive supper. At quarter to eight Linda and I climbed to the new concert hall, which is shaped like a tall box with seats on all four sides. We were on the third of four tiers. The stage floor level had two rows of seats and each upper tier just a single row of red seats.
Before the concert began, Ann Hawley, director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, welcomed us all. She was greeted with a great ovation, for this new building was Ann Hawley’s vision. Hawley struggled long and brilliantly and to date has raised one hundred and forty five of the one hundred and eighty million-dollar goal.
The third tier was high and we looked down on the Borromeo String Quartet. Surprisingly, each of the members of the quartet had a laptop instead of musical sheets. They played Schoenberg’s String Quartet No2, Opus 10. The music for my untutored ear was freeing, strange and full of sharp shadows. The soprano, Mary Elizabeth MacKensie, sang, “I feel the breeze from another planet.” Listening to the music I had the feeling that Schoenberg was exploring something we haven’t yet caught up with.
The second half of the program was Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-Flat Major. Amazingly, Mendelssohn composed this when he was sixteen. Eight musicians played violin, viola and cello. The music, as the program said, “portrays Mendelssohn’s talent for painting music dappled with light and shadow.” It was playful and it builds and builds and builds. At the end there was an explosion of applause.
We descended the stairs after the concert and again were greeted with waiters this time holding trays of champagne and—and platters of warm donut holes. The warm donut holes were genius!
Before we went out into the cold night, I ducked into the men’s room and I heard someone saying the Patriot’s had scored two touchdowns. I liked that because Isabella Stewart Gardner would attend the Boston Symphony concerts wearing a headband bearing the words, “Oh You Red Sox.” (In red letters, of course.)
We in Boston are so enriched by two wonderful artists–Isabella Stewart Gardner and Ann Hawley.
Christchurch, New Zealand December 7, 2011
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Have you ever walked into a city and found all silent? Last Sunday night Linda and I arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand. We walked downtown and aside from a few Japanese tourists there was not a soul. There was a fence around much of the downtown area, which is called the Red Zone. It was a tall wire fence you could look through. The restaurants were closed, as were the shoe shops and clothing stores and offices. No one was serving soup, pizza or coffee or buying newspapers. We could not see a single human being. No doubt there was a cat or two and mice, but we didn’t see even those. There had been a great earthquake in February that had shaken the downtown and miles and miles beyond. We turned to go back to our bed and breakfast and the sun was setting so there was a lovely yellow glow over all this eerie silence. Six hundred buildings had been taken down and we heard another six hundred had to be taken down, and thousands and thousands of homes were destroyed. It was like a war zone. Sad.
The next day we went back and found a small shopping area. A single store like the old Jordan Marsh or Filenes had reopened. The windows were filled with story scenes like Peter Pan. They were like the Christmas windows of years gone by at Jordan Marsh. And in this little area there were coffee shops, clothing stores and appliance stores that were open. They all looked bright. We finally realized the stores were the great steel containers used on ships. Part of the steel was cut away and glass was put in and the containers were painted orange, red, green, blue and black. Some of them were stacked one on top of the other. People flocked to these and to the kind of Jordan Marsh store. It was heartening to see these people coming back after such a devastating earthquake. There was a great sense of life and hope.
Moments in Africa November 1, 2011
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Elephant in Kruger Park
A breeze that frees us as we ride in an open-air van through the Kruger National Park in Africa. I sit feeling the warm breeze and have no responsibilities other than to feel the breeze and I must repeat this to myself over and over and over, since it is my tendency to carry invisible worries. I often carry the past as if it were great rocks in a sack on my back. But in the breeze I let go of the sack. I imagine being as empty as I was before I was born. Empty and free. I am empty and let go of all of the past and the present and the future.
What was I before I was born? I was not. I was not even free for I was not, though perhaps I was in the mind of God. Sitting here in the breeze as we move along in the van looking for elephants and lions, I am free in the breeze. Now we pull over to watch a giraffe only a few feet away. The giraffe is the most elegant of creatures; the giraffe walks with an ease, a grace, a fluidity in which there is no haste. It is a royal creature. We move along now in the breeze again, and the grasses are blond and a couple of feet high and I’m drawn to the grasses. They remind me of the high grasses in Wyoming just two weeks before. Imagine coming home and people saying, “What did you like?” I liked the grasses. I liked the breeze and the grasses. They were the best.
Safari Van
On another day in Johannesburg we go into a cathedral. It has a high ceiling and it’s crowded with people who are beautifully dressed. We have stumbled on a birthday celebration and mass for Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu. Years ago I was briefly in South Africa and it was a time full of fear and danger for all blacks. But now there is freedom. There is trouble, there is danger, but there is freedom. The atmosphere in the cathedral is electric. It’s a mixture of blacks and whites. You can feel their joy in what’s happened, and they focus their joy on Desmond Tutu. There are times when the African dancers get up and sing and dance and Desmond Tutu himself dances. Tutu speaks and he laughs and giggles and we all sing Happy Birthday.
In the pew to Linda’s left there are two very beautiful young black African women. At the end of the ceremony Linda exchanges a few words. The African women each hug her. We feel like dear friends although we don’t even know one another.
Dinner on the Train
Africa. We are on a night train in Africa. We sit in our compartment and Africa seems endless. There are endless mountains and vineyards. It gets to be night and there is a full moon. We sleep and we tumble on into the night in Africa. We wake and say to ourselves, Africa, we’re in Africa.
We might just as well be in a movie for all is done so well. Linda and I are escorted to table number three in the dining car. Millie is the name of the man in charge of the dining car. He has a great broad front. He is blustery but courteous. He says he has been in this job twenty years. Africa. Africa. One night in Africa the moon is sufficiently low that suddenly there is blackness and stars above us, the African night sky. Two things I had wanted to do was to see the stars against the black sky in Africa, and to stand at the edge of the Cape of Good Hope and watch the swirly, wild seas and imagine those sailors the last many hundreds of years who have braved the seas. And imagine also the ships that have been torn apart and gone down and all those sailors who we will never know crying out and gone, they’re gone on the wild Cape of Good Hope. Africa, free, we are in Africa. We are in Africa.
Let’s Be Open to Possibilities for Peace May 4, 2011
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I’ve been reading Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, online. A columnist, Gideon Levy, wrote an article recently on leaf blowers. Levy said that leaf blowers would soon be banned in Jerusalem by law. Levy went on to say Israelis are upset by leaf blower noise but are not upset by the fact that the Africans who will be sweeping the streets will be paid substandard wages. He also said Israelis are not upset that Israel is a brutal occupying power but are upset by the noise of leaf blowers.
Levy expressed his opinion. I rarely hear or read anything critical of Israeli government policy in the US press. But this is a time to speak up. There may be a chance for peace. Levy wrote on May 1st about the two Palestinian camps uniting, “Why is it that every time there appears to be a chance for positive change, Israel . . . is quick to hunker down beside its rejectionism. Why?”
Levy is clearly frustrated with Israel and the US being so quick to reject any chance for peace. He concluded his May 1st article saying, “The days go by, a year passes, but the song remains the same.” Rejectionism.
It’s time to be more open to the possibility of peace.
A Challenging Performance Space February 17, 2011
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Last week I was in Long Beach, California to tell my story FORGED IN THE STARS to a NASA gathering called Project Management Challenge 2011.
I arrived a day early and was astounded to see the place where I would tell my story. It was like a vast warehouse. There were to be 1,500 people to be sitting at round tables, twelve to a table, which meant the people in the very back so far back that they would see only tiny figures up on the stage.
I calmed down a bit when I had my tech rehearsal in the afternoon. The sound people were very warm and knew their business well. The manager of the building was willing to turn off half of the lights. He was unwilling to make it totally dark because that could be a big safety problem. I was to perform the following morning and relaxed by going to a pizza place across the street. I felt very welcomed there. I had my spaghetti with clam sauce and talked to the manager who had become my friend the day before and I was able to sleep well.
The next morning the NASA people arrived in the vast space at seven thirty in the morning. There were talks and then a panel and then finally at eight forty in the morning I was introduced by Dr. Ed Hoffman. He agreed to ask people to stand up and stretch. That was wise so as he introduced me they could all stretch and move and then it was turned over to me. The lights were turned down a bit and that was a signal that something different was happening. I began the story and as I began to relax I realized the people in this vast room were listening. There was a great sense of quiet. A strange thing happens to a performer. Something inside seems to grow so that even people in the very back seemed well within reach. It’s a strange mystery that a power just overtakes one.
At the end I was delighted of course with a standing ovation but even more delighted to talk with Buzz Aldrin who was the second person to step foot on the moon. Lewis Peach who’s been a great help arranging all my NASA performances, told me Buzz had been weeping during some of the story.
Buzz is a very warm man. He’s tan and gives no sense of being eighty years old. He was telling me about a science fiction story he’s creating and in addition to that he told me about books he’s writing and lectures he’s thinking about. Here’s this man who went to MIT and became the second person to step on the moon and is still delighted to be alive and creating.
I left Long Beach a little sad because I was leaving warmth and blue sky behind but I was excited that this challenge turned into a wonderful experience.
Powerful Voices February 15, 2011
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Elizabeth Bradford, one of the great figures in Marshfield, Massachusetts lived to be over a hundred. She had a deep powerful voice and I imagine it had the resource of Samuel Johnson’s.
I like to think of the unusual voices I’ve heard through my life. My mother had a ringing voice. She used the rhythms of language in an extraordinary way. She would lift up her hand and a single word would be like the beginning of an opera. My father’s voice was a charcoal voice. My dad’s handwriting was precise and elegant and he used words in the same way, but his voice was more dramatic than his writing. He was a natural actor.
I’ll never forget President Kennedy’s inaugural address. It was on a cold winter day. Kennedy looked so young and vigorous and his cut into that cold air in a thrilling way. Kennedy, like my parents, had the sense of the drama of language. As Kennedy gave the speech there was a sense that he loved doing it, he loved the drama of being President, of being in front of a great crowd. Beginning. In a sense this was his music.
I remember reading that before Kennedy’s great Berlin speech, he was saying to the general that the speech he was giving was dull. In the short time before arriving Kennedy had changed the speech. After he gave the Berlin speech he said to Kenny O’Donnell, “We’ll never have another day like this.”
Martin Luther King’s words ring out through our lives. He of course came from a tradition of black preachers. He reminded us that words can lift us up. In the case of both Kennedy and King they were in a sense political opera at its best. Both of those speeches were given out in the open. There was no opera house to contain them. Instead the ceiling was the sky, which seemed so right. Both of them calling us to go beyond the ordinary, to be daring, to laugh, to be open, to be alive.
Ah the voices that ring out through our lives.
J. D. Salinger June 10, 2010
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I was in high school when I read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I was astonished. Holden Caulfield was saying everything I felt. I wondered how in the world Salinger knew these things.
In college a friend of mine and I went down to New York to find old Salinger stories. We went from bookstore to bookstore in search of New Yorker magazines that had Salinger’s stories about Frannie and Zoey. I loved everything Salinger did including his Nine Short Stories. They were different from anything I’d read.
And then Salinger disappeared. He was living quietly in New Hampshire and there he died a few months ago. I admire him keeping silent.
Imagine Salinger resisting the pressure to get bigger and bigger, to make and more money and to become more and more famous. He turned his back on a cultural idol.
Bravo J. D. Salinger.
Launch of Atlantis May 20, 2010
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I was telling Forged in the Stars, at a NASA Master’s Forum in Melbourne, Florida last Wednesday, May 12. The Forum is a chance for NASA scientists and engineers to pass on knowledge to younger NASA personnel. It was an international gathering and they were a wonderful audience for my story.
On Friday Forum members were bussed to Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis. It will be nice to see, interesting if not particularly exciting. On the two-hour trip I talked to a thirty-six year old aeronautical engineer, Ruediger Suess from Germany. Ruediger is fascinated with the dream of going into space. “I asked a man once,” Ruediger says, “to tell me who influenced his life most. The man thought a while then said, ‘myself when I was seven’.”
“Ah,” I say, Picasso said his task was to get back to imagining the way he did at five. The mind of the dreamer.
The traffic was very heavy because the shuttle missions are down to three today and two in the fall. Before leaving the bus we were told if the countdown gets to nine minutes it’s a go.
There’s a big crowd on the Indian River where we’re going to watch the launch. The sky is pale blue and high above while birds are circling. Effortlessly circling. It’s hot but a good breeze stirs the Indian River. There are hundreds and hundreds of people; some filling the stands, some in long lines for pretzels or hot dogs, some milling others picnicking. They are colorfully dressed. Pink hats, baseball caps, straw hats and white hats. Two hours drive by. The wind is strong. Is the wind so strong they won’t lift off?
Nine minutes to launch. The hot dog lines vanish. The stands are full. The grass area in front of the Indian River is crowded. That’s where I stand. Doubtless the astronauts’ families are worried now. At a time like this they’d remember the Challenger exploding after seventy-three seconds after launch.
Three minutes to go. Over the loud speaker: “Ladies and Gentlemen, would you
please stand for The Star Spangled Banner.” We all stand and turn to the flag, which is blowing in the stiff wind. A woman sings the national anthem over the loud speaker, “Oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave?” Star Spangled Banner. Is this not about reaching for the stars? I’m suddenly very glad to be here.
Sixty seconds to go on the big countdown clock. We are all looking across the river towards the launch tower, which seems close but is probably six miles away.
Countdown!
Ten seconds to go. Spontaneously we all count down aloud, “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.” White smoke billows on the right and left of the launch tower, and then there is an intense white light shaped like a candle. Now a streak of white light and I am so moved I cry out. The white is the most brilliant I’ve ever seen. The white fire sends the Atlantis shuttle up extremely fast. The thunderous sound grows so loud I cover my ears.
I am astonished at how deeply I’m moved. Shaken. Overcome. It is as if the light of the launch had gone through me, through all of us. As if that light has gone through time. Perhaps the molecules in our bodies remember when they were part of the fire of stars.
The white smoke curves. The shuttle is out of view. A final cheer. The astronauts are headed safely to the International Space Station. We in the crowd turn and
Space Shuttle Endeavour
hurry to our buses and cars. We are no longer one. Ordinary life is back. It’s disorienting. For a moment we were welded into one.
On the ride back on the bus I talk to a young NASA employee named Katherine. She has a very responsible job but she tells me she’s leaving it in July.
“Why?” I ask.
“I’ve always dreamed of going to places I know nothing about. I’m going to teach science to seventh grade students in Korea. It’s time to act on my dream.”
I tell her of some of my dreams and say, “Do me a favor, Katherine. Some time write me a poem about the stars in Korea. Send it on a postcard. I’ll send a postcard back with a poem about the stars in Marshfield.”
Katherine gets out her notebook and writes down my name and address. “I want to go everywhere,” she says.
I laugh and say, “You want to go everywhere?”
She smiles and nods.
Everywhere includes the stars. Katherine wants to go to the stars but isn’t that what this is all about?
Workshop on Cortes Island, British Columbia May 18, 2010
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Come to my storytelling workshop at the Hollyhock Retreat Center on Cortes Island, August 14-19, 2010. Hollyhock is one of the most beautiful places on earth. You’ll have a chance to nourish your creativity in an atmosphere filled with humor and appreciations. My exercises are whimsical, deeply considered and they reveal the storyteller in everyone.
Everybody and everything has a story. In fact, we are filled with stories. These stories can be memories of events, characters, places and moments in our lives.
When a memory is called forth, the storytelling is often fresh and interesting; the details are sharp, as is the sense of place, characters and the event itself. These forgotten memories are at the heart of good storytelling. I’ll draw your memories out with what I call Sparks.
The workshop is not just for storytellers. The secret is we’re all storytellers. The workshop is open to anyone: ministers, poets, an actors, a builders or students, salesmen, storytellers, educators – anyone interested in the creative process. Come! It will be a wonderful experience in your life. We will also have two writing times. They will be optional.
Songwriter and storyteller Mandi Kujawa from Banff, Canada will assist me in helping you use sound, rhythm, repetition, song, movement and imagery to tell your story.
For more information or to sign up for the workshop, visit Hollyhock’s website.
Participants’ comments after taking one of Jay’s workshops:
“After the workshop was over, I felt so alive. A part of me for which there’s little time in daily life had been given space to waken and bloom. This experience confirmed that I had an important story to give voice to and gave me confidence I had the writing skills to do it.”
-Jennifer Farley Smith, Writer and Storyteller
“. . . the laughter of people and the sound of Jay’s voice, I knew this was going to be one of those special moments that life brings. It was magical and never to be forgotten.”
-Lesley Dowding, New Zealand Storyteller
“What could be more spiritually refreshing than being in an intimate group of storytellers next to the beauty and energy of the sea? Jay is a master at setting the boundaries for a safe environment where you can feel free to explore and take chances”
- Dee Kimbrell, Storyteller, Author, Workshop Leader
“This is the place to come to grow my craft in a safe, fun community. We laugh, sing, weep a bit and share.
-Betty Kornitzer, Unitarian Universalist Minister
Van Gogh April 14, 2010
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There are some artists who follow you through life. Van Gogh is one of those artists for me. When I was in college Van Gogh’s letters opened up a world. I loved his intensity, his love of color, literature and life. He inspired me. I wanted to create but that seemed a dream, an impossibility. In time I broke away from my job and began to write assuming I’d be a novelist. I spent the next seven years as a caretaker on a beautiful salt-water marsh and was telling my children hundreds and hundreds of stories. I’d found my path, a path that has allowed me to explore the beauty and the pain of life.
Ten years ago I led a workshop in Provence with my friend Doug Lipman. Van Gogh’s letters drew us there.
Last Friday, April 9, my wife, Linda and I took the train from Paris to Auvers-sur-Oise, the last place Van Gogh lived and painted. We get off the train and see trees are just blooming and the tulips are out. Van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise on 20 May 1890. I imagine the trees would have been fully green when he arrived and the forsythia and tulips would have passed. Linda and I find much in the village unchanged from Van Gogh’s time. There are flowers everywhere. We have a café crème at a tabac and the young man who brings us the coffee would have delighted Van Gogh. “Americans,” the server laughs, “I love Americans.” He is joyful as a clown and bounces with life.
Staircase to Van Gogh's room
At the visitor’s center we see a short video showing some photos of Auvers in the1890′s and paintings Van Gogh did at Auvers as well as short phrases from his letters. He wrote of the beauty of the country and his love of art and life. “It is so difficult to be simple,” Van Gogh, wrote which is poignant because he was living in a dark bedroom on the third floor of the Ravoux Inn. The bedroom was just big enough for a bed and chair; the walls were unpainted and cracked. The stairway to his room was very dark and we could almost hear Van Gogh’s footsteps as he left to paint each morning and return at night. He wrote that he hoped any portraits he did would look like apparitions in a hundred years. “Painting,” Van Gogh wrote, “is becoming more like music and less like sculpture.” This is the voice of a vibrant artist. But then he writes of the threat of being uprooted and says, “I did not need to go out of my way to experience sadness and extreme loneliness.”
This man who gave the world such beauty shot himself in Auvers on 27 July. His brother Theo was at Vincent’s side in that dark bedroom at the Ravoux Inn when Vincent died at one-thirty in the morning on July 29, 1890.
Church at Auvers by Van Gogh
After the visitors’ center, Linda and I walk up the curving road to the village graveyard. Vincent and Theo are buried side by side in very simple graves. The fields surrounding the graveyard are as they probably were in Van Gogh’s time. The green wheat is a foot high; there is the smell of tilled earth. Spinach is growing. The sky is blue and the silence is broken by small birds.
After a picnic of cheese, tomato, baguette and a flan for dessert we walk down the hill and stop by the church, L’Eglsie D’Auvers, which Van Gogh painted. There is a funeral going on inside and we wait until it is over. Mourners leave wiping tears away. They’re sad and so am I. Sad Vincent Van Gogh’s life was so lonely and so hard. I’m also deeply indebted to him for his letters, his inspiration, his paintings and his life.
