Enjoying Music: John Kuzma

When I arrived at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1975, I wanted to take music theory classes even though I was a biology major. I needed special permission from the department chair, to demonstrate that I was not just a student trying to get arts credit without being a serious musician. I brought in a pile of ignominious but serious compositions, and convinced him to let me in.

There were two choices for music theory: the established professor Roger Grove, and the young new organist John Kuzma. We were assigned at random to the two professors. At first, I ended up in Grove’s class. The class was utterly silent and the only way I can describe Roger Grove is that he was grim. How, I wondered, could anyone enjoy music in this kind of setting? Then the assistant discovered that I was in the wrong room and sent me downstairs to Kuzma’s class.

Then one morning we all heard that Roger Grove had been shot by his wife. All I can say is, it could have happened to a nicer guy.

What a difference to be in Kuzma’s class! He was really excited about all aspects of music. Though he taught us the basics of music, he was open to our creativity. I remember the whole class singing a song I had written for voice and piano. It was a horrible song (Carol Winston, you played piano while I sang it, and know what I mean) but nobody laughed at it. Kuzma pointed out some of its many flaws to me personally. I spent many hours composing bad music during my years at UCSB.

 

John Kuzma was particularly passionate about choral and organ music and conducting. He went on to compose some significant youth choral works. I got back in contact with him about 2008 and he sent me some of his CDs. He remembers me as smart (not, you will note, as a good musician).

John Kuzma took a whole quarter going through the songs of Schubert’s Die Winterreise and showing us how the Schubert’s music related, in detail, to Müller’s poetry. It was an experience that opened my eyes forever. I owe this dimension of my life to John Kuzma. I used many of his ideas in my novel Meet Me in Strasbourg. 

John Kuzma died recently from a slow degenerative nerve disease. He dictated his email to me through his wife. He was 75 years old. A good life. I’m glad I had a chance to thank him before it was too late. I encourage anyone reading this to thank someone in your life before it is too late.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part four. Famous Nature Walks: Petrarch and the Great Mt. Ventoux hoax

I first heard about the Italian poet Petrarch’s famous ascent of Mt. Ventoux in southern France (April 26, 1336) during a high school humanities class. Petrarch supposedly presaged the Renaissance by making this artistic, as opposed to religious, pilgrimage. Some people have called him the first mountain climber because he made his ascent for no reason other than to see the view. An earlier monk (Jean Buridan) had ascended it on his way to see the Pope at Avignon, to make meteorological observations. And other people had probably climbed this mountain for strategic or economic reasons. Petrarch said he met a shepherd on the lower slopes of the mountain who claimed to have been the only person to have climbed the mountain, and he said it was just a bunch of rocks and not worth the effort.

How different it is today. Thousands of people hike, bike, or drive on this mountain. Its steep incline is a famous point on the Tour de France.

Many scholars have concluded that Petrarch did not climb this mountain at all. It was all a hoax.

Here are some reasons for believing the ascent of Ventoux to be a hoax. Petrarch mentions precisely nothing about the natural wonders that he would have seen all around him. Foremost among these is the wind. Ventoux means “windy.” The mistral winds average 90 kilometers an hour for 240 days a year. Mt. Ventoux sticks up into a mass of cold air that moves from the north to the Mediterranean. No mention of it. Also, Mt. Ventoux is famous for its white limestone cap visible from a great distance. No mention of this either. A lot of the bare limestone has resulted from deforestation, which might not have been as extensive in the fourteenth century as today. But most mountains in France have been deforested, and yet few have such visible summits. Certainly there would have been something that Petrarch might have noticed, had he actually been there.

Perhaps most of all, Petrarch made his entire ascent and descent in one day, then went back to the inn and wrote about it before supper. Might we suspect Petrarch, not noted for physical prowess, to have exaggerated his vigor a little bit? Conveniently, he had no eyewitnesses other than his little brother.

Instead of Petrarch being an early Thoreau or Muir, he was actually writing in the tradition of pilgrimage fiction, a tradition that began before Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and has continued long after C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. Petrarch wrote about how he kept taking descending trails, hoping to find an easier path, only to have to climb back up and do it the hard way. This, he said, is a symbol of how, when we choose the easier path in life toward spiritual salvation, we have to keep starting over and over again. Bunyan could have done no better.

So if Petrarch is to be remembered today, and taught about in humanities classes, let it least be for something he actually did or wrote, and not for the Mount Ventoux hoax.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part three. Jesus

In the past, great religious leaders did a lot of walking. More recently, they have preferred limousines and jets paid for by rich donors who think God wants them to do this. Mahatma Gandhi did a lot of walking. In 1944, a back country preacher named Guy Howard published his biography, Walkin’ Preacher of the Ozarks.

Jesus of Nazareth walked everywhere during his short ministry on Earth. He gave the impression of wandering aimlessly—at least, he did not explain his itinerary to his disciples. He wandered in the desert, and took his disciples north into Galilee, the country-bumpkin part of Israel where he was born. He briefly rode on a donkey, when he triumphally entered Jerusalem on his last Passover.

Can you imagine how different Jesus’ impact would have been on his listeners, and on history, if he had ridden around on a horse and preached down at the people, with his sword sticking out?

He certainly gave the impression of poor planning in his walks. He did not arrange for his disciples to have enough food for them to eat, and wouldn’t you know it, he was leading them right through Samaria. Samaria was the place with the remnants of the northern kingdom who worshipped in a way Jerusalem Jews considered unholy. Righteous Jews did not want to even be in Samaria, much less get caught there without food. The disciples went off to find food, leaving Jesus alone at a well.

We see now that Jesus had planned it this way all along. A woman came to the well to draw water. She noticed Jesus did not have a bucket and wondered if he would like a drink. He offered her living water, which confused her. He surprised her by telling her about her past: she had had a succession of lovers. It couldn’t get much worse for a righteous Jew—having a personal conversation with a Samaritan woman of loose morals. The disciples were not pleased. Long afterwards, Christians realized that Jesus was teaching them, and the Samaritans, something important about how God does not look down on certain cultures of people.

Jesus summarized his whole way of life as not just walking, but walking on narrow, difficult paths. It is on such paths that you learn about the world and about yourself. Can I, in fact, complete this path, and more, can I learn from it and enjoy it? “Enter in at the narrow gate,” he said. “For the way is narrow and the path difficult that leads to life, but the way to hell is smooth and wide.” I preached a sermon on this topic to a bunch of Boy Scouts about 1969, when I was a scout myself. We were camping and hiking in the lower Sierra Nevada mountains.

As a botanist who walks nearly every day, I can tell you that the easy roads are mostly bordered by weeds; to find the beautiful wildflowers, you need to hike the narrow trails.

Nancy's War: The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part three. Peace or War: It Can Get Really Personal

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. The first novel, Nancy's War, is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc, then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

 

 

We hear about war and its casualties all the time in the news. As I write this, the United States is at “war” (undeclared, solely at the discretion of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth) with Iran, and supports Israel in its strikes against Lebanon. We hear and forget the numbers but it gets personal when I meet and talk with Iranians and Lebanese, some of whom live in France where I do. I hear about their family members who died in American and Israeli bomb strikes. I also remember, years ago, hearing the story of an Israeli air strike on a Palestinian home of a man who was not a terrorist. His daughter was excelling in school and wanted to be a doctor so she could help people. A minute later, her blood was dripping from the ceiling. It gets personal.

Seldom has war been a more personal issue than it was between Nanyehi (later Nancy Ward) and her cousin Tsiyu Gansini, also known as The Canoe. He was such a dedicated warrior that he wore war paint every day and was instantly ready to defend Cherokee interests against those of other tribes and of the whites. He believed the only way to withstand the whites was by war. To accomplish this, all the tribes that had long been at war had to unite together, something he worked hard to achieve. He was the enemy of the Muskogee tribe, until it was clear that their interests were better served by uniting with them against the whites. Rice clearly takes the side of Nancy Ward, but he puts words into The Canoe’s mouth that make his viewpoint seem irresistible. Rice gets inside of his mind. The Canoe’s slogan was, We are not yet conquered.

Nancy Ward, however, realized that the white path of peace and the red path of war were separate but often parallel, sometimes intersecting: sometimes war was necessary to obtain peace. But she compromised when she thought the Cherokee tribe would benefit, even if it meant becoming more and more culturally white herself. She married the white man Bryan Ward (see the next essay), and encouraged their daughter to marry a Virginia government official. Nancy Ward released a white prisoner who promptly ran to warn white outposts of The Canoe’s impending attacks. This caused her cousin’s war plans to fail ignominiously. He had reason to hate her. He considered her the prostitute of the white man—especially since the white prisoner she released may have been her lover. Her slogan was, Our cry is all for peace.

Peace or War? Rice clearly chooses peace, as did Nancy Ward, but sometimes the choice was not clear. Rice speaks through the voice of The Canoe with sympathy.

Rice weaves in some of the brutalities that white armies took against the Cherokees, such as pulling up all of their cornstalks to starve them out of their villages. This was one of the reasons that The Canoe fought until the bitter end, when his entire Chickamauga nation consisted of just a few villages in the mountains of Georgia.

Nancy's War: The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice. The Cherokee Joan of Arc

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. The first novel, Nancy's War, is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc, then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace.

 

 

Nanyehi, who only later became Nancy Ward, was an unusually brilliant child, and wandered a lot in the forest, hence her name Wanderer. When she was about seventeen (remember that number), she married a young warrior named Tsula (Kingfisher).

About that same year, 1755, the Cherokee tribe (in southern Kentucky and northern Georgia) went to war with the Muskogee tribe (in southern Georgia) in a dispute over hunting territory. Part of the white image of Natives is that the tribes were always at war. This was, however, no more true of the Cherokees and Muskogees of Nanyehi’s time than of the English and French of Joan of Arc’s time. And it was partially the fault of the European invaders. The tribes had reached an uneasy truce about which one had which territory for hunting and agriculture; but as the whites took over land, going westward from the Atlantic, they displaced eastern tribes into the territories claimed by other tribes. Among the warriors who had to fight was Tsula.

Nanyehi was not the kind of girl to stay home when her husband went to war. And she did not just tag along and fix lunch for him. At the Battle of Taliwa on the Etowah River, she was right up at the battle front with him. Cherokees and Muskogees both had guns, but they were not rifles. The guns had long barrels but no rifling. on the inside to give the bullets more deadly accuracy. When she saw Tsula shot, Nanyehi did not collapse into helpless emotion. She grabbed his gun and started running and shooting and yelling. Legend has it that some of the Cherokees had already turned back in defeat until they saw her and followed her example, giving the Cherokees the victory. She became a war hero, like other women before her, and perhaps the youngest Cherokee war woman. She was, in fact, the last war woman when she died in 1822.

Rice described the Battle of Taliwa, Tsula’s death, and Nanyehi’s transformation, in terms too dramatic and colorful to actually be true, but he was unabashedly trying to get into Nanyehi’s head by doing so.

The stories of Joan of Arc and Nanyehi are similar enough that one could imagine that the Nanyehi story was a recycled Joan of Arc tale. Both Joan and Nanyehi were seventeen when they became heroes, a lone girl leading an army of men to victory. But there are good reasons to believe that Nanyehi’s story was not just a retelling of Joan of Arc. The main reason is that the historicity of Nanyehi was widely-held in the Cherokee tribe long before there had been enough Christian instruction to make this possible (especially since most missionaries to the Cherokees were Protestant, not Catholic). There are many other differences. For example, Joan was a virgin while Nanyehi was a mother. Joan was burned at the stake, while Nanyehi remained a hero for the next seventy years.

The story of a lone girl leading armies of men is irresistible. An early example is the probably fictional Chinese story of Mulan. But like much fiction it may have a little bit of truth in it. There is no shortage of military heroes who were women disguised as men. But everybody knew Nanyehi and Joan of Arc were women.

Human history has mostly been the story of men abusively ruling over women. But sometimes women have fought back and commanded the admiration, and even the obedience, of men.

Nancy's War, the Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice. A Little Cherokee Girl Comes of Age

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. The first novel, Nancy's War, is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward.

 She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc (as explained in the next essay), then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

Before she was the great Nancy Ward, she was the little girl and then the young woman Nanyehi in her village of Chota. Chota was a large village, and the closest thing the Cherokee Nation had to a capital city. The leaders of the tribe—including her uncle Attakullakulla—lived there. Nanyehi’s name translates roughly wandering rose, which is what she was like, wandering everywhere and looking closely at everything, and turning up in surprising places, like a wild rose. The little animals, such as insects and birds, talked to her, but the big animals hid from her. Also, she was aware that there was something important, something about her, a secret that the grown-ups were not telling her.

Then, in the novel, Nanyehi took a trip with her uncle Attakullakulla to Charles Town, the biggest English city near her Cherokee village. She was twelve years old, just on the cusp of becoming a woman. Attakullakulla had been to London years before. Little Nanyehi had a lot of things to learn all at once on that trip. In this part of the novel, Rice confronts us with the numerous differences between Cherokee and white society, through the eyes of the little Nanyehi. It is typical, in white novels, to treat Natives and other people of color as primitive and inferior. But that is not how Nanyehi saw it. Rice introduces these things through her eyes, not his.

For one thing, Nanyehi could not understand why white people always did things the hard way. Instead of planting corn with a digging stick, they would hack all the vegetation away and plow the ground. Instead of having trails that curled among the trees, they cut the trees down and built straight roads. The white world was a world of straight lines, while the Cherokee world was curves. And instead of having a few people in small villages, where nature could process their wastes, the whites built big cities, and stored their wastes in porcelain chamber pots until they could dump them in the street. Nanyehi was astonished at how filthy the streets of Charles Town were, in contrast to Cherokee villages that were cleansed each year during the Green Corn Festival. Many other things Nanyehi saw that were, to her view, very humorous, such as wigs, which she thought were scalps. As Nanyehi saw it, the whites worked very hard to create a world inferior to the Cherokee world.

For another thing, Nanyehi could not understand slavery. Natives sometimes had slavery, but not as brutal and absolute as white ownership of black slaves. She was particularly puzzled at how whites calculated slavery based on blood quantum: a half-black, half-white person was a slave if the mother was black, and so on down the generations. A seven-eighths white person could be a slave in a matrilineal line. How could a white person have a slave as a half-sister? This made no sense to the Cherokees, in whose society a slave could either become free or whose enslaved status was not hereditary. This is a question Rice also addresses in his short novel Plantation Odyssey.

Most relevant to Nanyehi’s story, she could not understand why whites suppressed their women. In Cherokee society, women’s opinions were important and part of the process of government. Her uncle had been to England and was puzzled that Parliament had no women. Nanyehi was to be perhaps the most important woman leader of her tribe.

Just at the time Nanyehi was reaching puberty, she was also learning about the strange and dangerous white world just beyond her village. She learned just how dangerous it could be when a white man tried to kill her and her uncle.

It was at this time that the large animals started showing themselves to Nanyehi, including the white wolf. This was the secret that the adults only now told her: the white wolf of peace was her spirit animal. She was to spend her long life in search of peace for her people, and never quite finding it, as explained in another essay.

Rice does not say whether this trip really occurred; he used it as a device to present the ideas that Nanyehi had to process as she was growing up. Rice does not preach what he thinks is right about slavery and the role of women. He presents the ideas through the eyes of a confused little girl.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part three. Epic Journeys

A lot of the celebrated epic journeys in human history have been on foot. The alpine ice man Ötzi was beginning such a journey when he was shot in the back with an arrow five thousand years ago. These journeys show up in literature and movies a lot. One recent example is the movie Revenant with Leonardo di Caprio.

I will tell you about one such journey you’ve probably never heard about, from the 1959 French movie La Vache et le Prisonnier (the cow and the prisoner). We think of Nazis as keeping prisoners in special camps, such as the one in The Great Escape. But there were so many prisoners of war that the Nazis had to literally “farm out” their prisoners to farms and ranches in the countryside. German farmers, rather than soldiers, kept the prisoners from escaping, which they could not do anyway since their only garments marked them as prisoners. This was the same thing that the American army did with German prisoners in sending them to agricultural work camps in California. I grew up across the street from the ruins of one such work camp in Lindsay, California.

One prisoner in the movie had a brilliant plan. He took a cow from the farm where he was interned, got a map, and decided to walk back to his home in France. The German farmers who watched him did not care very much if he escaped. The only enthusiastic Nazis were the officers. But the prisoner had an excuse: he said he was taking the cow from the farm where he was imprisoned to another farm; that is, it was part of his work to take the cow someplace else. He had one humorous mishap after another until he finally got on the train to Strasbourg. The movie was famous enough in France that many cows were named Marguerite in honor of the cow that helped the man escape.

Many epic journeys are on foot. I tell about more of them later. The more on foot, the more epic the journey.