Pictures and captions from India

Here are fifty+ pictures and captions showing our first couple of weeks in India and some of the work that ASM is doing. It’s been quite an adventure thus far. Click on the picture below to go to the photo album:

India One

Of AIDS education and office space

Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh, India

Our first full day in Srikakulam is drawing to a close and Deanna’s taking her turn going down to dinner. There are two volunteers from a non-profit in the U.K., Becky and Hannah, who are teaching English here, and we all usually have meals together. Since Mason goes to sleep before dinner is ready for the adults, though, one of us has to stay here with him while the other goes to dinner. The upside of not getting to hang with them, though, is that I get to check in with you and fill you in on my day.

From India One

Left to right: Hanna, Becky, Mason, a man I don’t know and Deanna

I’ve been provided with access to another of the guest rooms here to use as office space, and it has already proven invaluable in terms of productivity. As much as I love Mason, he’s not a boon to my to-do list, and having some quiet solitary space is a treat. The guest room/office is on the second floor of a four-story building, and the third floor has another just like it. The fourth floor is a water tank and the first is the pump house for it. It sits at the end of the palm-lined road that runs down the middle of the grounds and the view out the door next to my desk looks down that road to the gate. The breeze is frequent and sunlight bountiful. My favorite part of the building, though, is the mural of Gandhi and a small child on the fourth floor. The caption says “My life is my message.”

From India One

I have to admit, reluctantly, that having no internet access is also tremendously helpful in terms of getting things done. I have a full outbox to match my full inbox, but not being constantly interrupted by more incoming stuff allows me to deal with the innumerable things I flagged to get to later, but haven’t. Of course I dread the incoming data the next time I sign on, but for now I’m reveling in the productivity.

From India One

After a good morning session of catching up on stuff I spent the afternoon traveling to a high school in a nearby village with one of the staff members here, Mr. Somayajulu (yes, it’s quite a multi-syllabic country!). He was going there to give an HIV/AIDS awareness talk and asked if I wanted to tag along. HIV/AIDS education is actually a relatively small part of the huge work that ASM does, so it’s sort of a strange place to start telling their story, but it’s what I did today, so I’ll fill you in.

From India One

The principal was away and a science teacher was filling in on the administration duties for the day. She offered us chai and we spent a few minutes talking while we waited for the class periods to change. The school is small and rural and serves primarily the children of illiterate agricultural workers. We talked about their struggles and the difficult choices their parents have to make during the current harvest season about whether to send their kids to school or have them work in the fields. Many of the parents only have work for six or seven months of the year, during the planting and harvesting seasons, and the extra income provided by another laborer in the family is not easily lost.
We chatted (some in English and some translated back and forth to Telugu) about the irony that people from other countries are often fascinated by India, but the children here just want to go somewhere else, and Mr. Somayajulu told her a bit of my story and how I cam to be here. Then, when our chai was done and the students were ready down the hall, we rose to go. Translated through Mr. Somayajulu, this bright and capable woman who must have been almost my age told me that I was the first foreigner she had ever met, and asked if I would write down a few words to leave with her. In the hours since our visit I’ve been chewing on the fact that this teacher had never met anyone from anywhere but India. This is a world that is pretty far from my own in more ways than one.
India has a significant problem with HIV/AIDS. According to Mr. Somayajulu (citing a national AIDS organization, NACO), Andhra Pradesh, the state where I’m working, ranks number 2 among India’s 25 states. Intravenous drug use is not a huge problem here, comparatively, so only about 3% of infections arise from it. 91% arise from unprotected sex.

From India One

Today, tomorrow and the next day ASM staff will conduct workshops in ten area high schools and one workshop for youth who are not in school. They distribute informational booklets in advance, and the students did a good job answering the questions that Mr. Somayajulu asked them. The most impressive answer, though, came when he mentioned their good fortune at being in school and having access to this information, then asked what would happen to the kids who are working in the fields. A young man in the back enthusiastically responded “we’ll teach them.”
Because I’m a funny-looking foreigner, I guess, I was asked to speak for a few minutes at the end, and I took the opportunity mostly to congratulate them on being in school, which strikes me as not only smart, but wise, given that it is a long-term investment against a significant short-term loss. And I talked a bit at the end about the relationship between believing something is possible and making it happen. In a nutshell, I pointed out that if you have a dream but you don’t do the work to make it real, then it never happens, but if you don’t believe in the first place you’ll never do the work. Either way, the first step is believing, and the second is getting to work.
The great thing about speaking to groups like that, of course, is that I have to listen to my own words. That’s why I’ve always written songs about things that I don’t have figured out rather than things that I do. There seems to be a surfeit of songs about time, for instance, in my repertoire, because I have such a hard time apportioning mine in a way that feels right to me. Little did I know that all I had to do was move to a village in India without internet in order to work it out and get some things done.

From India One

the view from the office

Arthik Samata Mandal

Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India

From India One

As I write this note I am sitting under a ceiling fan in a simple room with concrete walls and screenless windows on a bed that is covered by a mosquito net. Mason is sleeping in his little tent/crib just beside the bed. The room is on the third floor of a three story building in the heart of the city of Vijayawada, where I am one of roughly a million people going about our lives. It is a pleasantly warm day, topped off by a lovely breeze, and outside I can hear the sounds of construction workers adding a floor to a building next door, though that consists mostly of the sound of masonry hammers and clanging rebar, and not so much of machinery.

From India One

I can also hear the sound of excited children’s voices. The little balcony overlooks a courtyard where literally thousands of children have been streaming through for the last three days to view a free Science Exhibition being offered by the Gora Science Center, which is part of an umbrella organization which also includes Arthik Samata Mandal, the organization I am working with here in India.

I’ll be blogging a lot in the next two or three months, so I should set the stage and explain why I’m here and who I’m working with. As part of the Rotary World Peace Fellowship, which I am honored to have received, Fellows not only pursue a masters degree in International Relations, Peace and Conflict Resolution at one of six partner universities worldwide, we are also funded to create and complete an Applied Field Experience with an organization in a location and field that we choose (subject to approval). I chose to work with a grass roots organization in rural India, where I am now and will be through most of February.

From India One

Arthik Samata Mandal is a Gandhian non-profit organization which works with poor and disenfranchised people in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. I am here to work with them and study their operation for the next ten weeks. ASM was founded in 1977 in response to massive destruction (10,000 lives lost) in the Krishna district caused by a cyclone and subsequent tsunami. Because all communications from the region were cut off, most of the outside world was unaware of the devastation there in the days following the disaster, and the people who were first to arrive there later went on to create ASM. They responded to the needs of the people they encountered, setting up emergency shelter and food stations, disposing of bodies, etc. The need in that area was great, and responding to one need led to the emergence of another. It became clear to Gora and his partner, J.C. Kumarappa, that their beliefs and values demanded that they become more involved in work that would alleviate the ongoing problems that made the people of this region so vulnerable to these kinds of disasters, rather than simply cleaning up the destruction when one occurred. They developed an integrated approach to development which seeks to address the complex interrelated causes of poverty and vulnerability.

Gora was a legendary social reformer and political activist who had worked with Gandhi in the fight for Indian self-rule, marched with him and was imprisoned with him. ‘Gora’ is a chosen name, created from letters in his first and last birth names. Last names have traditionally been associated with caste in India, and therefore have enabled discrimination by allowing people to automatically typecast each other, so Gora chose to create a new name as a way to avoid participating in that system. His wife, nine children and their descendants have since taken Gora as their last name.

From India One

Deanna, Mason and I arrived here a week ago after some travel adventures— we got sick in the opposite order that most people do when traveling to India: Deanna came down with a stomach flu on the day we were supposed to leave Australia and we had to delay our departure, and Mason and I soon followed suit; so we got sick and then came to India rather than coming to India and then getting sick. We’ve been living in the center in Vijayawada where the main office ASM is located, and will leave for a field office in two days. I’ll be visiting villages where the various projects are located in the coming weeks, documenting this work and helping out where I can, and we’ll be living in the small village of Srikakulam (not to be confused with a larger town by that name eight hours north of here).

ASM has such a broad mandate that it’s difficult to summarize their work. I’ll be outlining various aspects of it as I get to know it intimately in the next few weeks, but in short, they work with community development, education, women’s issues and economic development in disaster-prone areas of Andhra Pradesh. The economic, environmental and social issues here are extreme, and the work they are doing is clearly having a significant impact. I’ll be writing more about the details of this work in the future, so I won’t try to cover it all now.

From India One

Our life here is simple, as one might expect working with Gandhians. We don’t have hot water, a bath or a shower, but we can heat water in a five liter bucket, which is enough for both adults to wash ourselves, or one adult and some laundry. We live in a white room with a concrete floor, a bed, a desk, two small wooden tables and two plastic chairs, and usually at least one large gecko. There are no screens on the windows, but the breeze is usually blowing and there is a highly valued ceiling fan. In southern India, even winter feels hot to me (though the kids come to school in earmuffs and ski masks!).

From India One

We have fallen into a large family here. Most of the nine sons and daughters of Gora and Saraswathi Gora, and several of their descendants, work together and live together in a compound of various apartments, offices and houses. That means that Mason is swimming in adopted aunts, uncles and grandparents. Several of the family are prominent doctors, actually, in case anyone is worried about Mason’s health. The incoming president of the Indian Medical Association, Dr. Samaram, lives just downstairs. He’s the author of 195 books on health issues and is a bit of a rock star around here.

From India One

Soon we will head out to the field office, where we will be living for a while, and where internet will be unavailable. That will be another scenario again, but we trust it will hold good gifts as this one has, and it looks like we’ll be back and forth a bit anyway.

We’re well into a big adventure here, and so grateful to have the opportunity. So far, our experiences have been as rich as Indian spices, and we’re looking forward to many more helpings.

From India One

holiday giving article

Here is the final article that Bekah wrote. I think she did a great job (actually it reads much better than my unedited answers below). Kudos, Bekah.

An Interview

From blog pix

About a week ago I received an interview request from Rebekah Tucker, the Editor of Longwood University’s newspaper, the Rotunda. She sent a few questions along and I thought it would be appropriate to post the answers here. They are good and important questions, and I’m glad that people like Rebekah are wrestling with them, just as I am.

1. How did you start in your activism with PEG?

Actually, the PEG project kind of fell into our laps. We went to Guatemala on our honeymoon, not looking for a project, but while we were there we learned some things that led us to take action. We learned about the conditions that children were studying and living in and the lack of much government funding for education. We also learned how far US dollars can go in Guatemala, and it occurred to me that I have the opportunity, as a musician, to speak to thousands of people each year, and we might be able to raise some money to help out. Five years later we had raised about $100,000, which in Guatemala is a lot of money (we built a one-room school there for $2500 about three years ago).

I should be clear, though, that I don’t think we have to go to distant lands to find meaningful work to do. We just have to pay attention to what is in front of us and look for ways to be of service and have an impact.

One way to explore your own calling is to ask yourself three questions: first, what really winds you up? What frustrates you when you read the news, or gets you really excited? That’s another way of asking “what are you passionate about?” The next question is “What is one small thing you can do about it?” I choose the word ’small’ intentionally. Don’t start huge, just think of one small thing you can do and let that lead you to the next small thing. We can become overwhelmed and immobilized if we take on too much, but all big things are made up of small things. Doing something small is much better than doing nothing, and may even be better than trying to do something big. After you do it, you ask the third question, which is “What next?”

2. What do you feel are the benefits of working with the project (or any project like this)?

If you’re asking about the benefits for me, I think the main benefit is that it has been extraordinarily empowering. No one can tell me I can’t change the world. There are kids getting an education in Guatemala who likely would not be if it weren’t for PEG. When people start talking about “changing the world” there are always people who will roll their eyes and say that it’s naive to talk and think like that, people who argue that idealism evaporates with a dose of “real world.” They’re wrong, though. It may be naive to think you can *fix* the world, but it’s not naive to think you can change the world. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s naive to think you could possibly be in the world and NOT change it. Everything you do changes the world whether you like it or not. It’s just a question of deciding what matters, and which changes you are going to make.

One other simple answer to your question, though, is “Because it feels good.” Sharing what we have deepens our connectedness, and turning outside of ourselves can heal our isolation. It’s the right thing to do, but it’s not just about self-sacrifice; giving of yourself has deep benefits for you too.

3. What are some of the best ways you’ve found to spread the word to others about this project?

Part of what led me to take this on was the fact that because I was a performer I had a public platform to reach people, but the truth is that if you have something worth saying, there are always places to say it and people who are interested. Civic groups like the Rotary Club, Kiwanis or the Lions, church groups, school groups, various publications, etc.— they’re all looking for compelling stories. One myth about this kind of work is that you have to be somebody special to do it. You don’t. Or maybe you do, but you ARE somebody special. The famous Catholic activist Dorothy Day said “Don’t call us saints, we don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” I think what she was getting at was that if we leave good works to heroes, then that gets us off to the hook from actually doing anything. The work gets done by the people who decide to do it.

4. What advice would you give to someone who is looking to start a project like this, or give to a project like this?

I guess I’ll answer that in two parts. My advice to someone who is interested in starting a project like this is twofold: First, pay attention. Find mentors who are doing work similar to the work you’re doing and ask for their guidance. Study up on your topic and on how others have approached these kinds of issues, investigate what the main pitfalls are, some common errors, etc. Mentors will save you from making some mistakes so that you’ll have the opportunity to make other mistakes.

My other tip contrasts with the first one, though. Namely, go for it! If you wait until you have it all figured out, you’re an expert on the subject, you have the perfect plan, etc., you’ll never do anything. Jump in and make some mistakes and get some things done. A lot of people focus on the errors, and there can be some costly goofs in this kind of work. It seems to me, though, that apathy and inaction are much bigger problems than faulty models. It is true that in the worst case scenario you can make things even worse, but I think it’s also true that if you set out to have a positive impact and you’re fairly smart about how you approach things, you’re likely to have a positive impact.

In terms of giving, I think that’s great too. Not everyone is called to go into the field and spend their lives in community with poor and oppressed people, but there are a lot of other ways to be involved too. One of my favorite quotations is from Howard Thurman, who was a big influence on a young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He said “”Don’t just ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and then go and do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I like that a lot. I think what he was trying to say was that we have different callings. What brings you joy? How can you use that to make the world a better place? The answer may not be obvious, but if you keep chewing on it some creative possibilities may emerge. I know some guys who are passionate about cycling and they raised over $12,000 for PEG a couple of years ago cycling across Canada in a fund raiser. They had a blast, and they also had a huge impact on a school in the village of Chacaya, Guatemala.

5. Why do you feel it is important to give to those less fortunate, especially during the holiday season?

Honestly, I don’t use the term “less fortunate” much. Honestly, I’ve learned a lot about community and how to live a full life from people who have a lot less than I do materially. I think we’re pretty impoverished in the western world in terms of community— we’re n less fortunate in some ways, and ironically, we’re burdened by our comfort. Sometimes it isolates us and we end up lonely in a way that I rarely see in the third world (or “the two-thirds” world, as some friends of mine say— the vast majority of the people in the world live in what most people in the U.S. would consider abject poverty). Still, the poor are definitely less fortunate in a lot of ways, so it’s not really an inaccurate term. One of the main differences is that there is no ‘net’ for people living in poverty. I’ve got a credit card, and if things go terribly wrong for me, I can run up the bill, I can call the U.S. Embassy for help getting home, I can turn to my family, etc. Yesterday I squatted in the home of a hand loom weaver in rural Andhra Pradesh, India. It’s a mud hut with a palm frond roof. His whole family lives on about 80 cents a day, and if a storm blows the hut away, he can’t go to Home Depot and get building materials. If he gets sick, he simply can’t go to the doctor because he can’t pay the doctor. If he has no money, he has no food. On the other hand, he has a village where everyone knows everyone and helps when there is a problem. I think it’s important for all of us to know each other and to deal with each other compassionately. Caring about each other, learning from each other, saving all the energy we expend trying to avoid the harsh realities of our privilege— engaging with each other makes all of our lives richer.

The holiday season is about faith, arguably for everyone— though for some it is religious faith and for others it is faith that our happiness lies in ’stuff.’ I think that giving, in whatever way you feel called to give (money, time, compassion, etc.), deepens our connectedness with each other, and that is holy in and of itself. My own religious faith tradition teaches that this is also a very basic way in which we can be faithful to God, and in fact all of the world’s major religions teach that, so it makes good sense that especially at this time of year we should give some thought, prayer and action to these questions.

From blog pix

a hand loom weaver I visited yesterday

Hair Changing 101

It’s been some time since I’ve checked in, and much has happened in the meantime.  I’ve finished the second semester of my Masters program, Mason turned one, I’ve made trips to Newcastle and Canberra for Rotary, friends have visited from the U.S. and New Zealand, and yesterday Deanna had her thirty-fifth birthday, just to name a few. Crowding all of that our of our minds at the moment, though, is our upcoming adventure in India. We leave tomorrow, and I have much to say about that, but first, a bit of silliness that we need to cover in order to move on (in order to avoid quite a few “huh?!?!” comments later).

After over twenty years with long hair (my entire adult life) I took radical steps last weekend: I shaved my head.

I had been chewing on the idea for at least a couple of years. Partly because I was losing the battle anyway and comb-overs just never did it for me.  I like the idea of embracing change when it comes (though I do better with it at some times than others), so it seemed like the right course of action.

The particular timing, though, was due to the fact that I am leaving for India tomorrow to spend some time working with a Gandhian aid organization there, and though it is winter in India, the forecast low for tonight in the town we’ll be living in is 79 degrees.

More compellingly, we learned some interesting things about our lodging in recent email correspondences. We had been told that we will have a private room to share between myself, Deanna and Mason, and that we will have a private bathroom. Thinking about bathing our one-year-old, Deanna asked in a follow-up email whether the bathroom has a bath or a shower, and we learned that actually it has neither. It has a bucket and a mug. That is the normal way of bathing in India, apparently, and bathtubs are generally only seen in hotels. That’s fine with us, but it did provide a good reason to finally take the proverbial plunge.

My friend David Stuart makes documentaries, and he brought his camera and gear to my other friend Dave’s house where we did the deed. He shot this brief documentary (thanks David!).

Dave James, whose house we were at, is a semi-pro photographer, so things were well documented in stills as well (thanks Dave!).

We invited everyone at the party to have a go with the clippers, including 4-year-old Hani (with some spotting from Aunt Maree).

Several friends who heard I was going to do this expressed concern for how our one-year-old Mason would react, so we made sure that he saw what was going on and felt OK. The sound of the clippers seemed to scare him at first, but I stopped to hold him and laugh with him and let him know everything was OK throughout the process and he did just fine. He especially enjoyed patting my head when it was over. The next morning when he saw me he didn’t even look surprised. He reacted more or less like I had changed my shirt.

And on the whole, Mason’s reaction seems indicative of most of our friends’ and family’s, and my own for that matter:  I look a lot more like me than I expected to.  In short, it hasn’t been nearly as drastic as I thought it would be.

The whole thing happened rather spontaneously, so I didn’t have much time to organize a big fundraiser, but we did put the word out on Facebook that people could bid for my hair on Facebook. The money went to the non-profit that Deanna and I founded to support school and library projects in Guatemala, PEG Partners, and the hair went to an organization called “Wigs for Kids,” which provides free wigs to children who have lost their hair due to chemotherapy or other illness. We raised about $900, which in Guatemala pays for about three-quarters of an annual school teacher’s salary. Not bad for a few hours’ fun on line.

I’ve been really enjoying the new style, not to mention the very short showers. In the end, I guess the change is really representative of so many other good changes in my life lately. Much to celebrate.

As I write these words we have 21.5 hours to go until we leave, turning the page to another chapter which promises to be exciting, challenging and powerful. Being finished with my second semester of the masters program, I’m in the groove for writing, so I look forward to keeping this spot up to date as things unfold in India. Thanks for staying in touch.

Namaste,
David

The answer, my friend…

A few weeks ago I heard a man speaking about aid work. At one point, in the middle of a litany of problems in the world, he spoke of “countries where the winds of political change are blowing.”

I don’t know whether anyone else noticed what was happening through the plate glass windows behind him as he spoke, though: just as he dropped the tempest-as-politics metaphor a man walked into view in the background carrying a leaf blower, cleaning up outside while we sat inside listening. And there they were: the winds of change.

The contrast couldn’t have been much more stark: an older white man in an air-conditioned room talking about how we respond when the winds of change blow, discussing our reaction to the uncontrollable and unpredictable forces of political nature; and outside, a sweaty, dark-skinned man in his thirties making the wind blow, harnessing it to get the job done.

Maybe I should go on record here and say that I don’t actually think very highly of leaf blowers. Good old fashioned raking is good for me, doesn’t pollute the air and can actually get wet leaves as well as dry ones. And while I’m qualifying, I don’t want to pick on older white men or play into tired stereotypes. Actually, I’m seeing some particular older white men do amazing and visionary work these days. My point has more to do with the winds of political change. I think it’s important to realize that they don’t just blow, people make them blow.

The consequences of the distinction are notable, and significant in at least two ways. First, if we perceive the world as something that happens to us, then the best we can hope for is to react well. If we perceive the world as a space in which we move, however, our choices are much broader, and our sense of possibility much richer. We don’t just react, we act.

Perhaps more importantly, if we put the agency back into politics, i.e. we remember that movements and events don’t ‘just happen,’ but are chosen by individuals, then we are more likely to perceive not only the possibility of different choices, but also the humanity of the people involved in making them. That last part is particularly important, I think, and in a social context that so often tries to force complex reality into dichotomies— Democrat/Republican, Israeli/Palestinian, rich/poor, Christian/Muslim, us/them— it takes conscious intention to maintain a nuanced and human perspective.

When that ironic moment presented itself I almost chuckled out loud, but I caught myself, and I spent the rest of the day thinking about what it meant.

And what does it mean? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Eunice Shriver

Eunice Kennedy Shriver died yesterday.

To call the Kennedy family influential is kind of like calling Coca-Cola a pretty big company, and Ms. Shriver was born into that. She didn’t have choices in whether she had that power or not, she simply did. What she was free to choose was where to point that power, and most agree that she chose well in founding Special Olympics. The New York Times quoted a 1993 Newsweek article in their obituary linked above:

When the full judgment of the Kennedy legacy is made — including J.F.K.’s Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy’s passion for civil rights and Ted Kennedy’s efforts on health care, workplace reform and refugees — the changes wrought by Eunice Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential.

This is a video of a song I wrote for the Special Olympics a few years back, with a respectful nod to Mrs. Shriver.

Are we allowed to call this crawling?

Seeing and Being Seen

“He made us realize that dance is a way of seeing as well as a thing to be seen.”
- choreographer Margaret Jenkins, reflecting on the life of Merce Cunningham, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle

I came home from campus this evening and, after rolling around on the floor with Mason a bit, checked my email. There, along with a fair amount of junk and a few notes from friends, I found an article that Deanna had sent, informing me that the modernist choreographer Merce Cunningham had died.

Cunningham was, as the New York Times put it, a ‘revolutionary American choreographer.’ One could be forgiven for looking at that phrase and wondering how a man who was designing dance in 1776 could have lived so long, but clearly that was not their intent. Merce was undeniably modern, and a modernist, no less. His art was constantly surprising, and sometimes even shocking.

I don’t suppose that anyone who has heard my music or read things I’ve written would call me a modernist. Only a few who have sat up late at night talking politics and/or theology with me would brand me as a revolutionary. And, with the dubious exception of an occasional waltz, I’m a pretty bad dancer. It may be surprising, then, that I’m dusting off the neglected keyboard to write about Merce.

Merce Cunningham intersected my life in three ways, though, and I’m grateful for all three. The first was simply that he had lived for a time just a few miles up the road from my house in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was there, in fact, that the Merce Cunningham Company first performed. Merce was part of the Black Mountain College, a wildly innovative gathering of artists and thinkers who, in the fifties, made their home in the same little town in the Appalachian Mountains that I consider home now. Other bright lights of that experiment included Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, and on and on. I’m told that Einstein came to visit. I’d like to think that the same creative spirit that they tapped into and fostered is still swirling around in that valley like wine in a glass.

The second connection through my friend Polly Parker, who I used to go out with for an occasional lunch a few years ago. I enjoyed hanging out with Polly for lots of reasons, but one was that she had some great stories to tell. Polly, at the time I new her, was in her early nineties, and though she had been an abstract artist of some renown, had traveled all over the world, was a close friend of Zelda Fitzgerald’s, etc., she was also a ‘local.’ She had grown up right there in Black Mountain, and being somewhat of a rebel in her own youth, used to go hang out at Black Mountain College. She knew these legendary figures personally, and I enjoy imagining the conversations and adventures they must have had. So I’m grateful to Merce for being one of the people who inspired Polly, an artist who inspired me.

So with the legacy of Black Mountain College looming large in the local lore of my little town, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to see the Merce Cunningham Company perform in Washington, DC a couple of years ago when Deanna and I took a weekend mini-vacation in the capitol. We bought cheap balcony tickets and thoroughly enjoyed a strange and wonderful performance. I remember the dancers’ bodies jerking and twisting in strangely mechanical ways, interacting with evocative and intended awkwardness, but with exquisite control and intention as well.

The night we went to see him we were provided with iPods upon entering. They each had the same music on them, but they were all set on ‘random,’ so that the songs might play in any order. In one section of the performance, we were all instructed to start them at the same time, but as the dancers moved through the piece, each person in the audience was listening to their own individual soundtrack.

Much of the performance was thought-provoking more than beautiful. It didn’t just make me think, though, it also took me somewhere else, and I think that’s as good a test of art as any.

If we find something engaging, I think it usually engages us in one of those two ways – through the head or through the heart; either we are fascinated or we are moved. My favorite art does both, but given the choice, I’d take the latter. In fact, I would argue that art that doesn’t move us from one psychological space to another may not be art at all. Art may be poignant. It may be inspirational. It may be infuriating, insulting or baffling, but if there’s no reaction beyond intellect, I don’t think it can really be called art. Merce’s work, for me, was more fascinating than moving, but it was both.

Implicit in that idea, of course, is the subjectivity of art. It may move one person and not another. That interplay between audience and artist was one of the things that seemed to fascinate Merce Cunningham. He tried to involve the audience in the performance, and to introduce some element of randomness as well.

I confess, though, that the moment in the night that brought tears to my eyes was not during the performance at all. It was after the first curtain call. The moment that got me was when the principal dancer left the stage while the audience applauded and returned pushing a wheelchair with Merce in it, graceful and confident even in his infirmity.

What moved me was the communal celebration of a lifetime of art — of pushing the boundaries, seeking to connect and to challenge, asking, as the New York Times put it, “what if?”

There isn’t much sadness for me in the end of a long and authentic life. I celebrate Merce tonight, and I’m grateful to him for a fourth time. This time for the reminder of what a well-lived artful life looks like.