philosopher of paradoxes

One of my favorite books of the last decade is Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. Essentially, it� a collection of conversations between internationally renowned conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim and the late literary and cultural critic Edward Said.

The close friendship between the two men�hich began with a chance meeting in a London hotel lobby in the early 1990s�ecame an important symbol for our times. Said was a Palestinian-American and an impassioned commentator on the conflicts in the Middle East. Barenboim is an Argentinian-Israeli.

As Ara Guzelimian notes in the book� preface, Barenboim has taken many controversial stands on public issues, "fighting the lingering presence of anti-Semitism in Germany� cultural politics" and becoming an outspoken advocate for the performance of the music of Wagner�ong associated with anti-Semitism�n Israel. With the help of Said, Barenboim also became the first prominent Israeli musician to perform in the Palestinian West Bank.

The bridge-building continued in 1999, when the two men helped bring together Israeli and Arab musicians in Germany as part of a celebration of the 250th anniversary of Goethe� birth. The cross-cultural collaboration was subsequently repeated in Chicago.

In spite of this powerful symbolism, my interest in the book is not primarily political. Parallels and Paradoxes is a book of ideas about music and art�uge, scintillating and invigorating ideas that never fail to stoke the fires of my mind when I revisit it.

I� especially interested in Said because his mind seemed to work the way mine does�is, albeit on a much grander scale. (Talk about paradoxes: When I encounter great intellects like Said�, I feel dwarfed and enlarged at the same time.) In a memorial essay written just after Said� death, Barenboim gets at the heart of the man:

"Edward Said," he writes, "did not fit into any single category. He was the very essence of human nature because he understood its contradictions. He was both a fighter and a compassionate defender. A man of logic and passion. An artist and a critic. A visionary for the future with an understanding of tradition. He fought for Palestinian rights while understanding Jewish suffering?

"Edward was not only at home in music, literature, philosophy, and the understanding of politics, but he was also one of those rare people who saw the connections and the parallels between different disciplines, because he had an unusual understanding of the human spirit, and of the human being."

Music was especially important to Said because, as Barenboim puts it, "he understood the fact that every musical masterpiece is� conception of the world." These conceptions cannot be described in words, Barenboim observes, because if they could the music would be unnecessary.

We can begin to approach the meaning of music, Barenboim suggests, by following the lead of the great conductor Wilhelm Furtw�gler: "He understood that music is not about statements or about being. It� about becoming. It� not the statement of a [musical] phrase that is really important, but how you get there and how you leave it, and how you make the transition to the next phrase." [Emphasis added.]

Because life is also about becoming?/I>about moving in graceful transition from one moment to the next, rather than clinging to the moment just past or the memories of yesteryear�usic can teach us much about human nature.

"That is why I am sad about music education being practically nonexistent today in schools," Barenboim says. "Education means preparing children for adult life, teaching them�hat kinds of human beings they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way. To play music well, you need to strike a balance between your head, your heart and your stomach?What better way than music to show a child how to be human?"


I thought about all of this a week ago last Saturday as I sat in Sabbath morning service at Ohef Shalom Temple in Norfolk. I� not Jewish; neither were half the other people attendance. We were there for a special occasion: a celebration honoring music director Charles Woodward on the occasion of his 25th anniversary.

Like me, Woodward was born and raised as an Episcopalian, and as it happens he is also music director of St. Paul� Church in downtown Norfolk. Among the 500 or so men and women gathered in the Temple sanctuary were many parishioners from St. Paul�. Rounding out the crowd were several dozen professional musicians who have worked with Woodward over the years. After the Sabbath service, in fact, two of the most prominent performed to Woodward� piano accompaniment: JoAnn Falletta played the Andantino from Fantasia, Opus 145, by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and mezzo-soprano Robynne Redmon sang Gluckwunsch, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Earlier, the Temple choir performed Va, pensiero, from Verdi� Nabucco, which begins with the wonderful line, "Go, thought, on golden wings?

Through these selections, and through the music of the service itself, came overflowing expressions of love�or God, for humanity and, in particular, for Woodward, who was praised for his extraordinary talent and generosity. He is, said Rabbi Rosalin Mandelberg, the "consummate mensch."

It became clear to me that no one could be more devoted to their job. But it seemed to me, nevertheless, that Woodward� job must be tremendously challenging, first because he isn� Jewish, and second, because on a weekly basis he must shift from one tradition to the other.

Coming to the Temple job from outside the tradition was a challenge, Woodward told me last week when we chatted by telephone. But it� a role in which he� come to feel completely comfortable.

"I had always had an interest in learning about world religions, and when I was in college, I actually took a year of Hebrew. That certainly helped prepare me for the job. But from the first days, I felt it was my responsibility to learn as much as I could�o learn about the traditions, not only of the music but of the practice of the religion. Over the years it� been a process of study, learning from the rabbis and the cantors and the members of the congregation."

Woodward said he gradually moved from intellectual understanding to spiritual connection, in part because of his ongoing studies and in part because there is common ground between the two traditions: "There are so many elements in the Jewish tradition that speak to people in a very spiritual way, no matter what one� tradition is. There are prayers for peace, prayers for your fellow human beings, prayers for gratitude and blessing. There is a tremendous part that speaks to the soul."

Woodward said he was especially gratified to hear parishioners at St. Paul� echoing these sentiments the day after attending the service at Ohef Shalom.

"A number of people at St. Paul� told me that so many of the [Jewish] prayers resonated with them. It was just terrific."

It was, indeed. If there was a theme of the day, it was summed up in a reading from Isaiah, which also happens to be the verse that is engraved over the entrance to the sanctuary: "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples."

The beauty of the service, however, is that it was not simplistic in its call for unity. It was rooted firmly in respect and love for the Jewish liturgical and musical tradition. It was, in other words, a celebration of difference as much as it was a celebration of unity. But underlying this was a recognition that difference and unity are not mutually exclusive. If only we could remember this more often.

New Zealand painter Thornton Walker proves himself to be a master of illusions as he searches for the meaning of life through his works, writes Patrick Hutchings.

THORNTON WALKER fills the wide, white spaces of the Christine Abrahams Gallery with paintings that ask the Buddhist question: "What is the enduring body of reality?"

His paintings of oriental bowls on abstract planes, or on deliberately distressed canvas, are responses to this Zen koan. It has no answer. But Walker said to me - half in earnest, half in jest: "One reply could be, 'ceramic bowls' ", adding at once, "Not that they are real bowls, just paintings of them, 'ceci n'est pas une pipe', as Magritte put it."

The beautiful illusionary bowls manifest on surfaces of raked paint: God's thumbprint, the gravel of a Zen garden, or ploughed soil. They grow out of tillage.

One had always thought of the bowls as being centres of meditation: what is left after the total illusion of being has been almost evaporated. Now I think the bowls are the first things to come back from positive nothingness. This may be mere fancy, but it is reinforced by the artist putting his inscriptions on the canvases in mirror writing. This he borrows from his four-year-old daughter Polly who can write equally well either way.

Walker's backgrounds, as in The Enduring Body II, can be interrupted on the edges by ominous black, long clubs, bridge-like forms: or as in The Records (Breath) by breaths, thought-balloons without topics, suggestions of possibilities not yet manifested. The Records take their titles from the writings of the Japanese monk Basho Matsuo (1644-1694) whose book, The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, Walker has always about his studio.

The faintly eroded look of Walker's backgrounds alludes to this travel-wornness, perhaps. For the rest it is a function of the facture. The paintings' impasto surfaces, which are trowelled on with acrylic resin, crushed marble and earth pigments, are left to dry for 24 hours, then scrubbed and hosed down. The delicacy of the hyper-real porcelains belies the process of the manufacture of the paintings, in which they exert their irresistible attraction.

In the most recent Zen paintings there are large - almost golden-section - areas of the surface in a negative black. The negation of the negation in Doubts of One Kind and Another has the banishing of illusion itself called into question. Scratched, roughly inscribed, these bits of darkness visible are slightly disturbing, balanced as they are by illusionary bowls whose painted illusionistic-reality reassures us.

Walker is New Zealand born, and black is the colour of New Zealand light - or of its shadow - and black has become, in the works of fellow artists Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere, canonical. In McCahon, Hotere and Walker the colour behaves differently: but its uses have a family resemblance.

In the smaller of the galleries Walker continues his deconstruction of Picasso's La Flute de Pan. Pan and his flute have always been omitted, leaving only an architectural setting. This has now been erased, and we are left with, as it were, sea and wind-buffeted pieces of sailcloth with square windows cut into them, through which we see what may - or may not - be blue sea and horizon. Sometimes this illusion has itself been fragmented. In one painting blue areas conjoin, but vertically, leaving us visually flabbergasted. Even the earth's universal line of vision and division has been robbed of its irreducibility. In the Zen spirit, Walker, a master illusionist, leaves us with no illusions, here.

There are four self-portraits in the show, less self-flattering than angst-ridden, the painted ones less so than the engraved ones in Walker's recent Australian Print Workshop Fellowship exhibition. The painter's face in the looking-glass is the seeming of a seeming; or so it seems.

The West asks about the origin of being. In the Orient it is sometimes said to arise out of nothing. Being human gives rise to desire: it is by getting rid of passions that the person becomes enlightened, and escapes the wheel of eternal return. Salvation is into "plentiful nothingness".

But for both the East and the West, life is a problematic business. Metaphysical solutions are always a bit thin. Nirvana itself is, is found in, a moment in which being and non-being become identical: an ultimate paradox.

Walker's particular Zen balancing of is and is not reminds me of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote: "The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem" (Tractatus 6.521).

Thornton Walker's exhibition runs at the Christine Abrahams Gallery from September 18 to October 20.
Patrick Hutchings is a senior fellow in the department of philosophy in the University of Melbourne, a reader in the history of ideas, Deakin University, and a teacher of literature and philosophy in the universities of Edinburgh and California (Irvine).
Nora Choueriri '10's recent op-ed, "Christian Arabs ― An Oxymoron?" (Sept. 17) inspired me to write about another forgotten group ― the Arab Jews. Choueriri's call to remember that Arabs come in all faiths is welcomed in a world where being an Arab and Muslim is incorrectly and unfairly linked.

Jewish roots in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Morocco and every Arab country in between reach back thousands of years, predating the founding of Christianity and Islam. During the golden era of Arab civilization, Arab Jews made immeasurable contributions in science, medicine, philosophy, and poetry. The most famous Arab Jew was the twelfth century Abu Imram Mussa bin Maimun ibn Abdallah al-Qurtubi (Maimonides), whose contributions to medicine, philosophy and poetry are still glorified. His epic work Dalalat al-Ha'irin (The Guide for the Perplexed) is still studied not only in universities throughout the Arab world but all over the globe. Contributions by Abu al-Fadl ibn Hasda to government, Ibn Gabriol (Avicebron) to poetry and Al- Farj Yaqub bin Yusuf in the founding of Al-Azhar University have made permanent marks on the Arab cultural, intellectual and political landscape. The depressed Voltaire complained there was no genuine satisfaction to be had in this world.

Another great French thinker, Blaise Pascal, said man's greatest anxiety stemmed directly from alienation from God.

"Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things," Pascal said.

All our pleasures were sheer vanity, he said. The only good thing about this life was the hope that there might be another, better one after it.

Life seems to be a paradox. We suspect the best thing about the planet is humanity. But we also instinctively know the worst thing about the planet is the human race.

Half the world is starving while the other half seems to be desperately trying to lose weight.

Wonder and worry about life seem to mix loosely in all of us. We desperately need more wonder and less worry.

Theologian Anthony de Mello said our thinking minds could never make sense of the mystery of life.

"To make sense of it means waking up and suddenly realising there is no explanation you can give that would explain away all the sufferings and evil and torture and destruction and hunger in the world," de Mello said.

Carl Jung once wrote a paper on the synchronous nature of the universe. It was largely ignored.

Jung believed the universe was responsive and intelligent, and acted in the interests of its occupants.

"Most of us do not realise how powerful the Creator is," said philosopher William Inge.

"The thing is that God cannot be fitted into a diagram. He is rather on a canvas on which the picture of our lives are painted."

The Buddha said every present thought, expressed or not, either damaged or improved a person's life.

We regretted losing a purse full of money, but squandered thoughts that were infinitely more precious, he said.

Living in reality requires stepping outside the containers we are given.

The Jewish Talmud expresses the idea of hidden reality in the phrase: "Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, 'grow, grow'."

We probably discover the true nature of ourselves when we stop conforming to other peoples' models of what life should be.

None of us were born to live in fear or to make others live in fear.

Christianity argues we are all only once on this Earth, for a unique purpose. This is the power of individuality.

So Henry Thoreau has good advice: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you imagine. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will become much simpler."





There was a time when over one-third of Baghdad was Jewish, when the Shabbat songs of Damascus's Harat al-Yahud (Jewish quarter) subdued the muezzin evening call to prayer and when the songs of two brothers, Salah and Daoud Al-Kuwaiti, Jews and the fathers of modern Arabic music, could be heard in every Arab home. Many Arab Jews contributed to the founding of modern Arab states and actively fought for the liberation of their countries from Western domination. Yaqub Sanu was one of the fathers of Egyptian nationalism. Sassoon Eskell, member of the Iraqi parliament and former Iraqi Minister of Finance, was instrumental in liberating Iraq from colonial domination.

On the eve of the Second World War, there were nearly a million Arab Jews. Most Arab Jews were expelled and ethnically cleansed from their various homelands in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Within a few years, most Arab Jews found themselves in squalid and overcrowded refugee camps, known as Maabaraot, in the newly formed State of Israel. Hundreds of thousands of others sought refuge in England, France, the United States, and throughout South America. In the United States, the most notable Arab Jewish community exists in Brooklyn, New York where some 40,000 proud Arabic speaking Syrian and Egyptian Jews now live. Only a few thousand Arab Jews currently reside in the Arab world. Those who remain, most notably in Morocco, Yemen and Bahrain (the latter of which has an elderly Jewish member of parliament named Ebrahim Daoud Nonoo) are the relics of a once vibrant, dynamic and now mostly forgotten Arab-Jewish civilization.

Many Americans associate the Middle-East with images of terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing and the conflicts in Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, and between Israel and its neighbors. These images bombard our daily lives, and more importantly, shape the perspective of how we view the Arab world. The existence of Arab Jews and Christians is a constant reminder of the diversity, complexities and paradoxes which make up the modern Middle-East. The stories of these communities have been eclipsed by the aura of disorder which now engulfs the region. However, amidst this chaos are the stories of many civilizations made up of dramatic and dynamic stories of human beings which ought not to be lost through the sands of time.

Judd Robert Rothstein is a first year law student. He can be contacted at jrr257@cornell.edu. Guest Room appears periodically.