Some Monks, an Out-of-Tune Piano, and a Drunk on an Accordion

Every human gets it

My first job in China was teaching English at Shanxi University in Shanxi, Taiyuan. You’ve probably never heard of Taiyuan, but it’s a city larger than Chicago. Much larger.

For their final exams before the New Year’s break in several of my classes, I typed out the entire transcript of the movie, Dead Poets Society, and handed copies out a couple of weeks before the exam.

Study this, I told them. The test will be on comprehension.

On the day of the exam, I turned off the lights and showed them the movie. Because they had studied the transcript beforehand, many of them would be able to understand the dialogue perfectly and the rest would get most of it.

Dead Poets Society is the movie that popularized the Latin phrase, carpe diem. Seize the day. When it finished, I turned on the lights and said, OK, now here’s the test: go and make your lives extraordinary.

Of course, they loved that. Easiest test ever!

Little did they know...

The really extraordinary thing was that, after I’d given the test, and even though it was finals week, I spotted students, who weren’t even my students, around campus reading copies, heavily annotated with, I’m assuming, explanatory notes in Chinese, of the transcript I’d typed up of Dead Poets Society. How about that!

Director Peter Weir on the set with Robin Williams as Mr. Keating and the cast of Dead Poets Society

Just a day or two before everyone left for the New Year holiday, and after I’d given the exam, a half dozen or so of my male students stopped by my on-campus apartment in the Foreign Teachers’ Building. They wanted to take me to a famous Buddhist temple near Taiyuan, climb to the top of the small mountain behind the temple, share a bottle of wine they had with them, and shout “YAWP.” Of course, being Chinese, they were bringing food as well.

Sure, I said, and off we went. The temple was very large and mostly empty, as I recall. We walked along tree-lined walkways and over little stone bridges all the way through to the back side of the temple and then followed the path leading up to the top of the mountain. There was no one else up there. We opened the bottle and passed it around and ate the food and shouted YAWP and then it started snowing—one of those snows where it’s still kind of warm and the flakes are huge and unhurried. The snow was thick enough we could no longer see all the way down the mountain and so we were suddenly in our own little world of muffled white in all directions, above, and below.

I think there was a second bottle of wine and so we drank that and talked and eventually headed back. But, the snow had covered the path by then and in no time we had lost the trail.

We weren’t dressed for jumping from slippery rock to slippery rock and so we had to zig-zag back and forth across the mountain as we searched for a passable way down. Every time we had to double back, our collective patience wore a little thinner. No one was talking anymore, let alone yawping. At last, we arrived at the bottom of the mountain and there before us was a dark mass rising up out of the snow—the temple’s wall.

The snow was falling even heavier down here it seemed and we could only see a short distance down the wall. There was no opening visible in either direction. So we picked one and began walking. And we walked and we walked and we walked, and the wall, unperturbed, kept pace. No doors, no windows, just this 15-foot blank wall on our left, the color of a dark red rose, that disappeared in the snow ahead and disappeared in the snow behind. I began to wonder whether we’d accidentally stumbled on the Great Wall of China, but they said no, that that was still much farther north and we hadn’t gotten that lost.

So we continued walking. The snow was getting deeper and the air was getting colder and the sun was dropping lower in the west and still, nothing but blank wall. You guys should have brought more food, I grumbled. We may end up having to eat whichever one of us dies first just to stay alive.

Those of us who had wanted to turn left in the first place had begun reminding the rest of us of that fact when we came to a small tree that had taken root next to the wall and grown up beside it.

Look, I said, stopping and addressing my students, it would be too cruel for us to survive the mountain only to perish here just inches from civilization. I’m going to try to see over the wall.

So, pressing myself between the tree and the wall I made it to the top and looked over. It was a roof at eye level. I pulled myself the rest of the way up. The wall was actually the back wall of something like dormitory rooms for the temple. There was still no one in sight. It would be easy to get down on the inside.

I waited, crouching on the roof in the twilight as my students came up one-by-one the same way I had. With the snow still falling gently around us, the little group on the ground got smaller and the group on the roof got larger. And somewhere in there we began to hear the sound of monks chanting.

It was truly beautiful. You couldn’t tell which direction it was coming from, or how close they were, or how many. It was diffuse all around us as if it had a celestial source and was floating down with the snow. Even after the last student had pulled himself up, we remained crouching on the roof, listening to the snow falling softly through the universe. I noticed I was smiling and I glanced around at my students and they were smiling, too. They had aced their final.

I imagine what had happened was they had been sitting in their dorm room after watching Dead Poet Society discussing this scene:

Or, perhaps, this scene:

and one of them had the idea to go to that mountain and shout YAWP and let’s see if Mr. Nay-ar-san wants to go, too, which, of course, he did. And so we had sounded our barbaric yawp from the rooftop of the world and now, crouching in the falling snow on the rooftop of the temple, we were listening to the world answering back in the native tongue of all humans—music.

A few weeks earlier, I’d been invited by a different group of students—this one, all female—to a church there in Taiyuan to attend a Christmas Eve service. This was the mid-90s and a Christmas Eve service in China was still a novelty. The church was packed and there was a huge crowd out front. Soldiers were deployed both inside and outside the church.

We arrived and went up the steps and entered the large, tattered building, which, architecturally, was clearly a church. One of the ushers saw me and came over to tell us that there was a pew up front—the front pew, in fact—reserved for foreigners and would I like her to usher me there, now?

Ewww, I said. Sit with the foreigners? No thank you. They all look the same and they smell funny. I’ll sit with my students, please. And so a place was found for us.

There was an old upright piano sitting against the wall at the front of the church. An old man came out and sat down and began playing Silent Night, Holy Night. The piano was badly out of tune and the old man was playing like chord….chord, chord, chord………. chord….chord, chord, chord……….

The ushers went through and handed candles to everyone sitting at the end of a pew and lit them. When all the candles had been handed out and lit, they turned off the lights in the church. The old man never stopped. The same song over and over: chord….chord, chord, chord………. chord….chord, chord, chord……….

Then a door at the front of the church on the left and another on the right opened and an extremely old choir member slowly emerged from each. They were wearing white robes with red stoles that hung in a long vee down the front. Each was carrying a burning candle.

From the doors behind them, two more choir members, also ancient, emerged. They, too, were wearing white robes with red stoles and carrying burning candles. And behind them, two others. And then more.

Slowly, the two processions made their way down the side aisles toward the back of the church, the standing room only crowd, perfectly hushed, making way for them—the old man: chord….chord, chord, chord………. chord….chord, chord, chord……….

When they reached the back of the church, the two processions turned toward each other. They met in the center, turned again, and slowly began to make their way up the center aisle toward the front of the church. And still there were choir members emerging from the two doors, but they were younger than those who had gone first.

At the front of the church, the processions split and ascended the stairs on either side and began filling in the choir area. And more choir members were still emerging from the two doors and solemnly following in two long lines that snaked through the crowd the course laid out by their elders. Finally, the choir’s youngest members, roughly the age of those I’d come with, emerged, wended their way through the crowd, and took their positions with this very large choir.

The piano fell silent. The choir director came out and faced his choir. Then, in the warm glow of the candles, the choir sang that beloved classic, “Silent Night, Holy Night.” And it is a beautiful song, but, Lord, how many times... But, it was well-rehearsed and they sang it in Chinese and with reverence, which can’t be translated and doesn’t need to be. Their many voices filled the nave and even the soldiers positioned around the church were no longer scowling menacingly into the crowd. Their faces had opened up and they were just kids taken with the beauty of a worship service on Christmas Eve.

When they finished, they sang it again. And then again, and what was happening was the reverence was giving way to joy. You could see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. They were being swept up. It’s the same in every language.

Everyone had been handed a small piece of paper as they entered the church on which were printed the Chinese lyrics to the song and at one point the choir director turned around and brought the whole congregation in and the old man on the piano joined in, too. The whole church, bathed in candlelight, joined its voices into one—the unity swelling with the joy of Christmas until the church could no longer contain it and the music burst out of the church and flew up into the night sky until it was high over Taiyuan.

Christmas joy has no natural limits, of course, and there was so much of it pouring up from that church that the joyous music, ascending high above the rooftops of Taiyuan, began to spread out over the city. It continued to spread until it covered the whole city, and then it continued to spread until it blanketed the rooftops of the Buddhist temple with joy and good will and it continued on, spreading over the mountain where we would soon be sounding our barbaric yawps and it kept spreading until it covered all of Shanxi province and still the joyful music continued to grow. It soon spread over all of China and then Korea and Japan and over Mongolia and into Russia, and it kept spreading, up over the Himalayas and down across India it continued to grow spreading across Iran and Iraq until it reached the birthplace of the holy infant so tender and mild and it continued to spread beyond Bethlehem. But, as it passed over Gaza, it foundered on the agony of the Palestinians.

One Palestinian child’s cry of terror is more powerful than the joy of a whole church full of Christians celebrating the birth of a child in Palestine. The joy was discharged from the music and destroyed. The music, impotent, plopped on the ground like a garbage bag full of dirty diapers. The sublime thing was destroyed in the land of the destructive creed before it could reach Europe; the West heard shit.

The destructive creed gained absolute power in Russia in 1917. In the bacchanalia of terror and destruction that ensued, there was also music. Compare the following with the music I heard in Taiyuan.

There was an investigator at Yaroslavl regional CheKa, a former plumber. At first he “worked well, then started drinking.” An accordion-player was his drinking buddy. He would get drunk and interrogate the arrested. And to beat boredom he would bring his friend along. While he was interrogating, his buddy played the accordion... He was illiterate and could not write a proper report, only: “WIHTE EXECUT.”¹

Humanity and the destructive creed are incompatible. The destructive creed must itself be destroyed.

1. Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923, Serge Melgunov, Ch. 11, That epic scene of CheKa reality was recorded by one of the former investigators of the same Yaroslavl regional CheKa, who was jailed in its basement with the author of the article "Sketches of Life In Prison" in the “CheKa” almanac...