The Garden of Tears

            I seldom miss an opportunity to see the sung-through stage adaptation of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." New York? Boston? I'm there. When my son took a semester abroad in London, we saw it there. I've seen it in high schools.

            I seldom miss an opportunity to write about it either.

            I'm aware some people are -- I will not say emotionally stunted -- left us say, rather, deaf to the show's appeal.To those I can only point to the health benefits alone. It's important to take your heart out every once in a while and give it a good cry.

            The film version of "Les Miserables" (directed by Tom Hooper, starring Oscar nominated actors Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway; also Russell Crowe, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, among others), is a good opportunity to do just that.

            The film scores some hits and suffers some misses. The quality that makes it worth seeing it on film is the same thing that carries the stage production -- it's an incredible story, a transcendental fable of injustice, crime, god, love, revolution and death. All the big questions. It's a workout for your heart and your brain.

            America has never had a national writer like Victor Hugo, a world figure who published "Les Miserables," a novel the size of an encyclopedia filled with both French history and the ordinary life of his country, especially in Paris, where the feats of daring criminals -- a sidetrack that doesn't make it into the stage version -- were lovingly recorded as if they were superheroes. The universal themes are there as well -- rich and poor, honor, morality, faith and suffering. In Hugo's novel young men vie for the honor of dying on the barricade for a cause. And yet its home truths are, well, close to home. On his death bed hero Jean Valjean reminds us "that to love another person/ is to see the face of God."

            The novel is set in a France that's both post-revolutionary and pre-revolutionary. The 1789 Revolution in which the poor stormed the Bastille and liberals of the middle and upper classes threw out the king is 40 years past; but France has once more fallen on hard times. It has a king, plenty of decadent aristocrats, and hordes of suffering poor -- for whom the term "les miserables" was invented. As the heroic street kid Gavroche explains: we had an old king, now we have a new king; they're the same. Paris is a smoldering caldron of tension, waiting for a spark.

            Meanwhile, we have crime and punishment, but no justice. Rural peasant Valjean has been sentenced to prison for stealing a loaf of bread to save his sister's child from starving. It's hardly an isolated case. There's a whole underclass of prisoner-slaves. The movie opens, appallingly, with hundreds of these wretches hauling on ropes to tug a gigantic man-of-war into dry dock while guards look down on them. They're all part of what today would be called "the system."

            The landscapes are different but the questions are still with us. In what country is the gap growing alarmingly between rich and poor? What nation has guards on its borders to keep out the poor? What country imprisons the largest percentage of its poulation?

            Valjean is patrolled from prison, but hounded as an "offender" and driven off from town to town.  He is saved by the intervention of the "true Christian" bishop who invests some surplus ecclesiastical silver in his reformation. Valjean turns to God and uses the bishop's silver to open a factory, becoming both a great success and the mayor of his town -- dressed to the nines, fawned over by the class of people who once despised him, and living a lie: it's one of the tale's great ironies.   

            However, he fails to intervene and save one of his factory workers (Fantine) from the same kind of devastating injustice that almost destroyed his life, because he's frightened and distracted by the arrival in his town of the prison guard, Javert, who may recognize him as the prisoner who jumped parole. He encounters her a couple of great songs later (she sings "I dreamed a dream": "...I dreamed that life would be so different/ from this hell I'm living now") as she's practically at death's door and about to be dragged off to jail by Javert for rejecting the abuse of a wealthy man. Abandoned by a lover "who took my childhood in his stride," Fantine is supporting an out-of-wedlock child. If she goes to prison, the child will die.

            Javert, the doctrinaire servant of the state, shrugs his shoulders. Valjean intervenes, takes her in, promises to send for her child. In the show's first-act emotional climax a dying Fantine is told by Valjean her daughter Cosette "will live in my protection/ Your child will want for nothing."

            "Monsieur," she replies in a final cri de couer as her soul shuffles off its mortal coil, "you're heaven sent!"

            We weep. I know I do. (Though, frankly, this comes off better on live stage than on screen). All children should have "protection." In making this vow, Valjean embraces the meaning of his life and becomes the man that his successful "monsieur le maire" could never be. 

            Valjean cannot save all his country's suffering children, but he goes off to save Cosette.          You know Cosette needs help her innkeeper/criminal guardian is portrayed in the film by Sasha Baron Cohen.

            Circumstances have caused Valjean to reveal himself. He and Javert have an explosive face-off in which Javert reveals his origins, "I am from the gutter too," and Valjean begs for time to help "a suffering child," but is rejected ("You must think me mad!/I've hunted you across the years/A man such as you"), before overpowering the policeman and making his escape.

            On stage this entire sequence is overpowering. The film dances around the characters, rather than pulling back and letting them stand as the archetypes -- they could be wearing ceremonial masks in the Japanese theater -- they are: Compassion versus Duty.

            After rescuing Cosette, Valjean flees to Paris to "go to ground," as the criminal/innkeeper puts it, hiding his identity to give the child a loving but closeted upbringing. Hugo's plot puts Valjean on ice until his role in the third-act climax, a narrative weakness that only the story's lavish and deeply stirring political story, with its new cast characters, succeeds in overcoming.   

            The action moves to the street of Paris, where we confronts the rags and haunted faces of les miserables, the student revolutionaries, the now-urbanized criminal gang of the former innkeeper, the inevitable Javert now backed up by ranks of uniformed "national guard." Taking center stage, young revolutionary Marius, estranged from his bourgeois family, falls in love with Cosette. The gang betrays Valjean's hiding place to Javert.

            And just as the rebel students take to the barricades to rouse the city's poor to a new revolution, all the strands of the story come to a head in a musical collision song (for which I'm unable to of a forma term; perhaps a sextet) called "One Day More."

            The many-sided "One Day More" tops any "Broadway" musical number I've ever seen. Playing the cast recording in the car while bellowing out as many "sung-over" lines as I could fit in, I used to have to pull off the road to keep from killing myself. The number climaxes, at least for me in Marius's decision: "My cause is here/ I'll fight with you!"

            Valjean plans to escape to London, dragging along the unwilling Cosette. Both young lovers are pulled apart by competing demands. The gangster's urban chic daughter (Eponine) declares her own hopeless love for Marius, for whom she sacrifices herself "when the bullets start to fly." Believing they "will see the people rise," the revolutionaries defend the barricade against the soldiers of the state. Javert spies on the rebels, is caught, and is saved from execution by Valjean, who has snuck into the barricade to save Marius for Cosette.

           The student leaders has warned, "Have you asked yourself what price you might pay?" Wounded when the barricade is overrun, Marius is about to pay it when Valjean drags him from the killing ground by some underworld heroics -- dragging the wounded man through the Paris sewers. This leads inevitably to another confrontation with Javert. But since Valjan has already spared Javert's life, Javert faces what proves to be a fatal crisis of faith. An insight: Javert, a believer, was on the wrong side. He should have stuck with his roots. I peg him as an anarchist in his next life.

            "Lez Mis" is a romantic tale, but not an easy one. The deaths of the young revolutionaries raise one of history's persistent questions: Is it worth giving up your life for a cause? Miraculously preserved, Marius sings: "oh my friends don't ask me/what your sacrifice was for..."

            There's more. When Valjean crawls off to a convent to die and not shadow the young people with the "scandal" of his criminal past, the newly married young people find him: all his secrets come out -- and all is forgiven.

            The reprise of the revolutionary anthem finishes the show as all its characters (both living and dead) sing about the better world to come. But does that "next world" mean "with God?" Or a new world after the revolutionary cause of justice -- "liberte, egalite, fraternite" -- has been achieved. That's the way the film, making spectacular use of its resources -- long barricades, flags waving, triumphantly smiling people -- plays it.

            "Beyond the barricades," this anthem asks, "is there a world you long to see?"

            You better believe it. Absolutely.

            We long for it, but we just don't see it.

Flower Day

         Like men everywhere who make a beeline one day a year, generally at the last minute, to give their business to a retail opportunity generally ignored with great success the rest of the year, I made a stop at a florist yesterday.

            I was reminded of the day's significance at the hospital that morning, where I went for my monthly treatment and discovered that people were handing candy to one another in a sort of reverse trick-or-treating: the candy comes to you, you don't have to go out and beg for it.

            Candy is dandy on Feb. 14, but for most of us it's "say it with flowers."

            Most American household do not ordinarily have fresh flowers in the house in February; or, possibly, any other time. It's interesting, then, that almost without exception everyone knows the drill on the February folk holiday. The expression you use to warm the heart of that someone special on this one universally recognized occasion is the gift of blooming plant life.

            That notion of "someone special" came to me this morning also by way of that hospital visit from the person who was about to draw my blood. The phlebotomist decided that the act of accepting one of those "bite-size" candy bars from a smiling but silent man about half her size deserved some comment.

            "Happy Valentine's Day," she observed, smiling warmly as a gesture of characteristic benevolence. Youthful, though not necessarily young, the phlebotomist had one of those "big" personalities that seems naturally to connect with everyone she encountered.

            "Oh yeah," I replied. "I'd already forgotten."

            What I meant was I had thought about the approach of Valentine's Day the day before, and the day before that, and vowed to do something about it. But now here it was, the single day each year when you could be absolutely sure the florist would be crammed, and so far I had done absolutely nothing.

            "Sorry," she teased. Her demeanor showed she was not sorry. "I guess you have to do something now."

            She followed this teasing observation with the implied question, "...if you have someone special."

            There must be something special about a nearly universal custom that pleasures us or it doesn't persist. Yet how do you know if you're obliged to take part? Are you supposed to give flowers today to -- your spouse? your sweetheart? your lover? The friend of your heart? All of the above?... Someone more deeply connected to your own heart, it seems, than the connection suggested by the word "friend." 

            So the phrase "someone special" does the trick.

            I replied to her implicit question that I have been married to someone for "a good many years," one of my new favorite circumlocutions.

            "But she's still special," concluded the health care who was about to take my blood.

            [Could that substance be analyzed, I wondered, to determine qualities such as truthfulness?]

            [Yes, the technician said, looking up from a computer readout, you have been married a long time.]

            "Yes, she is," I said, agreeing with my care worker's assertion.
            She punctuates our happly little dialogue by sticking a needle in my arm.

            I bleed. In fact, I bleed flowers.

            The only reason I don't buy flowers at some ridiculous rate during the cold, dormant time of year is that I do buy them at a ridiculous rate during the warm, growing season, under the impression that I will able to keep them growing.

            If you live in the northern hemisphere and find yourself (once again) enduring a predictable but largely unpleasant period of time called February -- the longest shortest month of the year -- a custom that encourages you to acquire growing, flowering, colorful hunks of glorious nature is likely to have some momentum behind it.

            We all have someone special. (Or someones; children, parents?)

            If no one is currently occupying that role for you, buy some flowers for yourself.

Buddha on a Rope Bridge, New England in the Cold

News from opposite ends of the earth. Eastern world first:

            Our favorite globe-hopper Sonya (I'm prejudiced, she's our daughter) is crossing a footbridge made of rope and wood over a brown river in Laos. It's one of those bridges that sway and bounce whenever you take a step. Think Indiana Jones. The river isn't that wide at this point -- outside one of those French colonial cities that attract tourists -- so if the bridge collapsed and you fell in you could make your way to shore. And it's not filled with nasty creatures. Still, it's wide enough that it's a lot easier to cross over on a bridge than get soaked fording it.

            Crossing for the first time you quickly realize it's better to step on the wood rails rather than on the rope, to reduce the bouncy feedback. But still, if you're a tourist, you're new at this, so you walk cross carefully. Slowly.

            Sonya is halfway across when two Buddhist monks appear on the other side. Barefoot, saffron robes, shaven heads. 

            Courteous as all Laotians are, they wait patiently for the foreign visitor to cross before they begin their own transit.

            Sonya and her traveling companion have encountered the monks before in their week in Laos. Mostly young -- many Laotian men spend a couple of years as monks before transitioning into adulthood; it's Buddhist higher ed -- the monks rise before dawn and proceed at a ceremonial pace through town seeking alms. The Laotians wait patiently for them, sitting in front of their houses on woven mats with a beaker of rice. The monks announce their presence at the corner, then walk slowly down the street stopping to receive a pinch of rice before each household.

            Everyone is patient in Laos. No one ever shows anger. No one expresses strong words or emotions, even when Sonya tries to draw English speakers into conversation about the tragic years during the Vietnam War when Americans bombed their country and destabilized their government. Cluster bombs dropped by American planes still go off in the fields, decades later, causing injuries.

            "Those were unfortunate times," she says, digging for a reaction.

            "Yes," she is told. "That was unfortunate."

            No one ever expresses any interest in learning that a visitor is an American.

            She reaches the other side of the bridge, eventually. The monks bow. A few words are exchanged. One of the monks appears to desire to extend the chance counter a little longer rather than go on his way over the river. She waits for him to say something more.

            Finally:"You want cigarette?"

            Sonya's take in recounting this story: who knew monks smoked?

            Meanwhile (my favorite transition) in the Western world, things grow difficult when Nature delivers one of her timely reminders of the limits of human control over our man-made environment. The winter storm called Nemo was forecast with great accuracy, even in the timing. In Massachusetts motorists were sternly warned to stay off the roads, public transportation was shut down in Boston Friday afternoon, and workers were sent home early. With all this pre-storm wisdom afloat, I made my advance preparations for some serious indoor time: wine, DVDs, and pastries from our favorite bakery.

            But a funny thing happened Friday night during the third or fourth hour of thick snow and high winds: the power went out. We sat in the dark, waiting. It did not come back on.

            I was not in a patient, Buddhist frame of mind as Anne and I went to bed under three quilts. I could not imagine one good thing that would happen on the morrow in a house without heat or electricity.

            In the morning it was 15 degrees out doors and 45 indoors. When it's that cold indoors, it feels warmer outdoors because you're layered up like a mummy and, it almost goes without saying, you're shoveling snow. However, as one of our long-shoveling neighbors observed, you'd liked to go inside afterwards and have a nice cup of tea.

            That didn't happen, at least in our house, but other good things did. The neighbors who have a gas range invited us in and made us strong cups of coffee. Man does not live by bread alone; he needs coffee. They also warmed our spirits with a few rounds of a highly imaginative board game using picture cards apparently designed by a surrealist, presided over by their charming elementary school daughter.

            But things went downhill after that when, exhausted from shoveling, we went back indoors, used our working phone, and discovered that nothing was open in the city of Quincy: no restaurants, no motels. The sense of isolation was deepened by concern over the state of the roads, which you were not even allowed to use them until later that day. Cold food, cold house, cold bed?

            In the end we were rescued by an open-house invite from another neighboring couple who had heat in their house because of an old and arcane boiler no one could explain; and by simple good luck. While we were drinking wine and our friends were engaged in dinner preparations that included barbecuing steak and tuna on the deck, a little flicker of early evening brightness in the living room, as if a star had flown into the room, materialized into a light bulb. The power was back.

            It took another three hours for it to come back on our street, but that was still in time for us to begin heating the house before going to bed.

            Many, many others in Massachusetts, tens of thousands, were not so fortunate.

            In the end we suffered very little. The anticipation of being cold and going without power for an indefinite time -- for me, cold is the nemesis; if it were summer I could have sat outdoors under the stars, though my wife would have been cursing the mosquitoes -- was the worst of it. Some frigid hours on Saturday gave me a taste of it. With no alternative heat source, no fireplace, no wood stove, I found the helplessness paralyzing.

            But in the end the hardship was neither long-lasting nor terrible. No one was bombing our country. Our children were safely living their grown-up lives elsewhere. Sonya had crossed that footbridge to the other side of the river.

            A Buddhist perspective would no doubt serve me better during a time of discomfort and anxiety than my native Western self-centeredness. I'm not patient; I get upset too easily. Like most human beings of a certain age, I'm pretty good at controlling my outward behavior, but not so adept at mastering my inward thoughts and emotions.

            Human suffering, Buddhism teaches, is caused by attachment. If you're not "attached" to events or emotions, they can't bother you.

            But attachment is another word for "caring."

            Laos, while poor, is beautiful, clean and "very cheap" to live in, Sonya says. But she wouldn't want to live there. Too much of who she is was simply on ice there. It's life in neutral.

            We're Americans, born to the pursuit of happiness, to expressing ourselves, to standing up for our "natural rights." We care, sometimes very passionately, about what happens to us, and (hopefully) to others. We want to believe that our little, ordinary, transitory lives are meaningful. Our lives are a roller coaster; we go up and down. When bad things happen, as they inevitably sometimes do, we suffer.

            It comes with the territory. As does the detachment of the East.

Wicked, Wicked Way of Talking

Almost any occasion provides an opportunity for the good citizens of Massachusetts to celebrate the local lingo.

            I find the latest example both funny and curiously uplifting: The much-shared digital sign outside a small town grocery to warn everyone to get a head start on their panic buying in anticipation of the latest much-ballyhooed weather event. "Wicked Stawm Comin'".

            What's not to like about this way of screwing around with standard English to put a Massachusetts stamp on the fixation of the moment?

            First, and foremost, this cut-to-the-chase warning uses the regional intensifier of choice for anything important enough to merit our attention: "Wicked."

            We are speaking of a "wicked" bad storm here. If it were merely just another blizzard, why bother to pay attention?

            For example, the prospect of all those political ads for a third Senate election in the last three years? It's wicked annoying.

            In everywhere America, almost anything a speaker finds agreeable or even just OK earns the denomination "cool." In Massachusetts, if you mean it, it's "wicked cool."

            In mining the connotations of its w-word, the local vernacular struck linguistic gold. The word draws on the region's Puritan roots, when the word was a straight forward and oh so serious judgment of acts or personages influenced by the forces of evil. Think of the mindset behind the contemporary usage "evil doers." That's the solemn, black and white view of the universe that predominated when Puritan Massachusetts led the league in witch hangings.

            We still trade on that bygone celebrity by building a local industry around the "Salem witches." Only we don't think they're wicked any more. We think witches are wicked fun. They figure in dark-side entertainments like haunted houses and local color stories focusing on eccentric characters who worship nature.

            By the time Hollywood got around to recognizing the word's potential, as in "The Wicked Witch of the West," we were already skipping through poppy fields of high camp. As a character, or caricature, in the merry old land of Oz, the Wicked Witch was wicked fun.

            We still recall her campy nastiness in contributions to the Pop Hall of Fame Quotations like "I'll fix you and your little dog too!" Or, "What a world, what a world... Oh, my beautiful wickedness!"

            There's something wickedly cunning in Midwestern sci-fi wizard Ray Bradbury's title "Something Wicked This Way Comes," though of course that line is a borrowing from MacBeth. Shakespeare's own time, which birthed the Puritans, took "wicked" wicked serious too, burning witches and heretics, and disembowling traitors.

            But by the 20th century English speakers were so relaxed about the word that wicked increasingly became a sly reference to behavior that was a little naughty, perhaps even shocking, but in its naughty pursuit of pleasure appealingly "cool."

            As in "My Wicked, Wicked Ways," the title of the autobiography of actor Errol Flynn, wicked became a code word for thumbing one's nose at conventional moral standards. Sometimes it was simply  an in-word for an ironic point of view. It's hip or, again, cool, to have a member of the opposite sex say something on the order of "must you be so wicked, Reggie darling?"

            Hollywood icons, urbane bigshots, decadent aristocrats -- and almost any British speaker -- played at turning around ordinary meanings of value words to suggest superiority, detachment, boredom, dispassion, or weary superiority to the claims of conventional values and ordinary Joes.

            But nobody exploits the cool, ironic, knowing resources of the w-word like native Massachusetts speakers. Here the word has been totally democratized in the home of those who invented "wicked awesome" decades ago.

            The expression has since gone national, you hear all over in the entertainment media. Each new generation of college athletes make free with the nomenclature's heady potential as if they invented it. Along with, say, drinking and sex.

            To get back to this latest sign of our times, in the land of the constantly rising or falling barometer, the weather is a particularly apt subject for the "wicked" intensifier -- hot, cold, awful, and various banned adjectives I don't want to use here.

            That leads us to the sign's brilliant second term, "Stawm." Only Massachusetts could come up with anything quite so wicked smaht. It's a word that both gives a warning, references the region's history of snowy disasters, and yet puts the newcomer in its place. Once you're localized the monster "stawm," you're almost ready to pat it on the head and give it a bone.

            I know I couldn't have thought of that. Try as I might, when it comes to regional patois I'm still a New Yawka.


 

Listening By Half

            For a week or so I've only been half-hearing things. This is because one of my ears, the left one, periodically gets stopped up with earwax, and my efforts to unclog it invariably fail wetly.

            These efforts are not very aggressive because I fear like death the possibility of puncturing an eardrum with too pointed a clearing effort. So, following the instructions on the box, I squirt some water into my ear canal through a fat plastic hypodermic-like arrangement, a kind of squeegee in reverse, sucking up water into the tube and then pushing it into the canal, which for the above reasons I'm not even sure is a good idea.

            What if some of the water actually made it through the canal and flowed inward. Couldn't that lead to water on the brain? (Don't sailing or surfing or kayak enthusiasts, for instance, have "water on the brain"?)

            So not surprisingly, these efforts fail and I go about half-hearing the world. Does this make me vulnerable to one-sided arguments? Am I more polarized than usual? When I listen for the deeper song, am I missing half the notes? When I make certain that as we are walking down the sidewalk my wife walks on my right side so that I have some possibility of taking in her shrewd commentaries and apposite observations, am I assigning her "right-hand" status, a lordly prerogative (according to the Episcopal Nicean Creed I memorized as a child) that I doubt I am entitled to? Does this make her my right-hand woman?

            It is puzzling that the ear in which I am prone to losing my hearing, for hopefully brief periods, is always the left one. As anyone who knows me can attest, I am passionately attached to voices from the left. I cannot say for sure what tomorrow's issue will be, but I can already tell you I'll be listening to the left.

            Only I'll be hearing it from the right ear.

            One way to correct this imbalance,  I suppose, is to take a hard look at myself in the mirror. Matter will smartly re-arrange themselves there so that my left ear is on right -- a principle I know to be true but don't really understand. So if I spend half a day in front of a mirror, will that balance out my one-sided hearing? However, I have always suspected the mirrors are distorting the truth, or at least lying to us a little.

            So I resign myself to hearing only one half of what's going on out there. If I heard any more -- on, for instance, subjects like gun violence: if I were forced to take in all the sound and fury from those defending their god-given right to own machine guns -- I would probably want to shoot myself in the head. Then both ears would be equally useless.

            I can only take in so much. It's not really much of a relief, most of sound and fury does force itself into the one working ear, but sometimes it's a little more peaceful. I go into that slack-faced neutral state of mind you sometimes notice on people when they are "tuning you out." I tell myself I am compensating by "tuning in" to my inner life.

            But then we try to watch something British on TV and I find myself querying, annoyingly often, "What did he say?"

            And so, in the end, I take myself, as I must, to the great clearer of ears, that goddess of sound in the nurse practitioner's office who has remedied my halfway status in the past. When she pours the water, somehow it goes where it needs to and the waxy barriers inside my ear canal crumble. Last time we got together around the subject of my left ear, I recall, it took twenty-four dosings, a stunningly protracted siege, before victory was finally declared.

            This time -- what did I do to deserve such good fortune? -- only three.

            Then she says, "Now let's do the other. As I always say, you can't just change one headlight."

            So now I'm a car.

            Happily, the other "headlight" clears up after only a couple of dosings.

            Later, lying on my couch in "vacant or in pensive mood," I realize how lucky I am to be hearing, period. The wind blows. I hear it.

            After last week's single digit temperatures...,

            The roar of the wind sounds like... spring.