Holy Week-Tuesday

There’s an aphorism that both rings true…and doesn’t. “It’s better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener during a war.” In a complex world this wisdom captures a kind of blunt realism that keeps people safe. Yet, it’s not completely consistent with spiritual principles that challenge conventional wisdom. Stories of scripture are often told by clergy members or scholars in ways that are religiously inspiring (but inconsistent with people’s lived experiences). It’s for this reason that I prefer, alternate ways of being told by cultural story tellers such as Robert Fulghum of Everything I Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten fame. Fulghum writes in, Maybe Maybe Not: Second thoughts from a Secret Life one such story:

“It is the year 2050. In a large Eastern European city -- one that has survived the vicissitudes of more than a thousand years of human activity -- in an open square in the city center -- there is a rather odd civic monument. A bronze statue.

     Not a soldier or politician.

     Not a general on a horse or a king on a throne.

     Instead, the figure of a somewhat common man, sitting in a chair.

     Playing his cello.

     Around the pedestal on which the statue sits, there are bouquets of flowers.

     If you count, you will always find twenty-two flowers in each bunch.

     The cellist is a national hero.

                                    * * *

If you ask to hear the story of this statue, you will be told of a time of civil war in this city. Demagogues lit bonfires of hatred between citizens who belonged to different religions and ethnic groups. Everyone became an enemy of someone else. None was exempt or safe. Men, women, children, babies, grandparents -- old and  young -- strong and weak -- partisan and innocent -- all, all were victims in the end. Many were maimed. Many were killed. Those who did not die lived like animals in the ruins of the city. Except one man. A musician. A cellist. He came to a certain street corner every day. Dressed in formal black evening clothes, sitting in a fire-charred chair, he played his cello. Knowing he might be shot or beaten, still he played. Day after day he came.

To play the most beautiful music he knew. Day after day after day. For twenty-two days.

His music was stronger than hate. His courage stronger than fear.

And in time other musicians were captured by his spirit, and they took their places in the street beside him. These acts of

courage were contagious. Anyone who could play an instrument or sing found a place at a street intersection somewhere in the city and made music. In time the fighting stopped. The music and the city and the people lived on.

                                    * * *

A nice fable. A lovely story. Something adults might make up to inspire children. A tale of the kind found in tourist guidebooks explaining and embellishing the myths behind civic  statuary. A place to have your picture taken. Is there any truth in such a parable other than the implied acknowledgment of the sentimentality of mythmaking? The real world does not work this way. We all know that. Cellists seldom become civic heroes -- music doesn't affect wars.

Vedran Smailovic does not agree.

In The New York times Magazine, July 1992, his photograph appeared. Middle-aged, longish hair, great bushy mustache. He is dressed in formal evening clothes. Sitting in a cafe chair in the middle of a street. In front of a bakery where mortar fire struck a breadline in late May, killing twenty-two people. He is playing his cello. As a member of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra, there is little he can do about hate and war -- it has been going on in Sarajevo for centuries. Even so, every day for twenty-two days he has braved sniper and artillery fire to play Albinoni's profoundly moving Adagio in G Minor.

I wonder if he chose this piece of music knowing it was constructed from a manuscript fragment found in the ruins of Dresden after the Second World War? The music survived the firebombing. Perhaps that is why he played it there in the scarred street in Sarajevo, where people died waiting in line for bread. Something must triumph over horror.

Is this man crazy? Maybe. Is his gesture futile? Yes, in a conventional sense, yes, of course. But what can a cellist do?

What madness to go out alone in the streets and address the world with a wooden box and a hair-strung bow. What can a cellist do? All he knows how to do. Speaking softly with his cello, one note at a time, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, calling out the rats that infest the human spirit.

Vedran Smailovic is a real person.

What he did is true.

 Neither the breadline nor the mortar shell nor the music is fiction.

 For all the fairy tales, these acts DO take place in the world in which we live.

Sometimes history knocks at the most ordinary door to see if anyone is at home. Sometimes someone is. Most everyone in Sarajevo knows now what a cellist can do – for the place where Vedran played has become an informal shrine, a place of honor. Croats, Serbs, Muslims, Christians alike – they all know his name and face. They place flowers where he played. Commemorating the hope that must never die -- that someday, somehow, the best of humanity shall overcome the worst, not through unexpected miracles but through the expected acts of the many.

Sarajevo is not the only place where Vedran Smailovic is known. An artist in Seattle, Washington, saw his picture and read his story. Her name is Beliz Brother. What could an artist do? She organized twenty-two cellists to play in twenty-two public places in Seattle for twenty-two days, and on the final day, all twenty-two played together in one place in front of a store window displaying burned-out bread pans, twenty-two loaves of bread, and twenty-two roses.

People came. Newspaper reporters and television cameras were there. The story and the pictures were fed into the news networks of the world. And passed back to Vedran Smailovic that he might know his music had been heard and passed on. Others have begun to play in many cities…

Who knows who might hear? Who knows what might happen?

Millions of people saw Vedran's story in The New York Times. Millions have seen and heard the continuing story picked up by the media.

 Now you, too, know.

Tell it to someone. This is urgent news. Keep it alive in the world. As for the end of the story, who among us shall insist the rest of the story cannot come true? Who shall say the monument in the park in Sarajevo will never come to pass? The cynic who lives in a dark hole in my most secret mind says one cellist cannot stop a war, and the music can ultimately only a dirge played over the unimaginable.

But somewhere in my soul I know otherwise.

     Listen.

Never, ever, regret or apologize for believing that when one man or one woman decides to risk addressing the world with truth, the world may stop what it is doing and hear. There is to much evidence to the contrary. When we cease believing this, the music will surely stop. The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history. In my imagination, I lay flowers at the  statue memorializing Vedran Smailovic -- a monument that has not yet been built, but May be.

Meanwhile, a cellist plays in the streets of Sarajevo.”