I spent last week in the Yucatan, getting up before 4:00 a.m. practicing yoga, meditating and chanting in Sanskrit on the beach facing the rising sun—with the setting full moon behind us.
My return to New York felt like a continuation when, Tuesday evening, I saw Philip Glass’s opera, Satyagraha, at the Met, a meditative experience sung in Sanskrit. Instead of a story line, the opera consists of series of tableaus representing the movement Gandhi led in South Africa up until 1914—where, as Glass says in his notes, “Almost all the techniques of social and political protest that are now the common currency of contemporary life were invented and perfected.” The opera is an anti-drama: instead of building to a climax, the final act is gentle and quiet. featuring a transcendent solo by Richard Croft as Gandhi (this is the best example of his “Evening Song” I could find on the Web; I don’t know who’s singing it).
My return to New York felt like a continuation when, Tuesday evening, I saw Philip Glass’s opera, Satyagraha, at the Met, a meditative experience sung in Sanskrit. Instead of a story line, the opera consists of series of tableaus representing the movement Gandhi led in South Africa up until 1914—where, as Glass says in his notes, “Almost all the techniques of social and political protest that are now the common currency of contemporary life were invented and perfected.” The opera is an anti-drama: instead of building to a climax, the final act is gentle and quiet. featuring a transcendent solo by Richard Croft as Gandhi (this is the best example of his “Evening Song” I could find on the Web; I don’t know who’s singing it).
The irony was not lost on me that while non-violent protest was being celebrated in as august and mainstream an institution as the Metropolitan Opera, Mayor Bloomberg was preparing a vicious, military-style crackdown on the sleeping denizens of Occupy Wall Street. Interesting, too, that the opera’s staging made abundant use of projected text throughout, as the Occupy protestors did yesterday, on the Verizon monolith near their mammoth march on the Brooklyn Bridge (interview with the creator of the projections here).
Well the good news is that we can no longer continue to wage war against other countries since, in recent times, our excuse has been that we were liberating the masses from regimes that suppress human rights and free speech. If this were happening anywhere else, the righteous U.S. would be intervening. The question now: who’s going to step in and liberate us? Canada, perhaps?
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Another OWS hero: retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Shaw, arrested in uniform. If you missed it, read the story here.
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