How To Lament, Part 6
The Neo-Lament Revival
Ok, smartypants, so how do you lament?
Again, luckily I don't need to reinvent the wheel. The "revival of lament" has been going on internationally for over 30 years. The forerunners of this movement are a group of Finns, who have revitalized the lament of the ethnic Karelians. Rediscovering the lament in the early 90s, they began teaching later that decade and formed the Society of Lamenters in 2001. Since then, different factions of this movement have taught thousands to lament in workshops.
In America, James Wilce has documented this revival:
‘‘You must have visible tears,’’ says James M. Wilce, an anthropology professor at Northern Arizona University who studies lamentation, or what he calls ‘‘melodic wailing’’ with words. Wet cheeks are the minimum: In some places, funeral keeners throw themselves to the ground, sway their bodies or beat at their chests. These age-old, songlike wailing traditions are found worldwide — one ethnomusicologist studying in Egypt has noted that modern mourners raise their clenched fists skyward in the exact posture depicted in ancient tomb paintings — but they’re disappearing from most places. Not so in Finland, where an organization that Wilce studies runs instructional workshops on lamenting as the Karelian people of the region have done for centuries. These three-day classes add a modern twist: Rather than being performed solely at a wake (by what Finns call a ‘‘cry woman’’), impromptu requiems are devoted to all manner of emotional hardship, from divorce to illness. How to Lament, NYT
The Finns teach several important literary and musical tools: improvisation, "a descending melodic phrase of for or five notes" (the all important "tumbling strain" of Curt Sachs), alliteration, and a very metaphor heavy kind of secret language that was particular to the Karelians. The Karelians, perhaps more than others, thought laments were primarily a way of communicating to the dead.1
Wilce also stresses varying between improvisation and script, ‘‘Keep coming back to the tonic center,’’ Wilce says. "Go on for five minutes or five hours — it’s up to you." I've pointed out this particular creative process as a kind of "Jewish ethnopoetics" crucial to some of the most impactful creative work of the 20th century and I also pointed out it has parallels (origins?) in how folks approached the idea of “what a song is” in the Ancient Near East.
Catharsis
Key to this neo-lament movement has been the idea of catharsis, and its uses in a therapeutic context. In the Karelian context (which I know nothing about) this may be a central focus, but in the laments we've studied in this thread, well… it's complicated.
They certainly can be cathartic, a good cry is a good cry, but I don't think that is the whole story. Even Wilce says this in the context of Karelian lament, “Originally, he says, the tradition wasn’t about emotional healing.” Greeks don't go on revenge killing sprees after catharsis. Jewish lament texts, to me, seem to agitate and intensify emotion, not diffuse it. And, as we saw with the lyrical analysis, therapeutic consolation isn't offered or expected in laments.
The desire to pull back from grief, to think it can be escaped or made sense of, is perhaps a modern bias and is the beginning of the end of lament. To say the lament is therapeutic catharsis, as if grief is an aberrant illness one needs to be cured of, is to ignore how the lament permanently changes us with its worldview. The Jewish lament is not blues, but if we ask, “Are the blues (or rebetika, flamenco, etc) about being healthy?” we can begin to appreciate the dynamic here.2 I'm not sure what lament is exactly, but I don't think it can be explained or contained by the contemporary framework of therapy.
Democracy
And, if I can be a jerk just one more time...
Another key value amongst some in the Finnish lament revival is the idea that the lament should be taught to anyone. In our current age, we've been encouraged to confuse democracy with capitalist notions of a "free market," and therefore we see any kind of exclusivity as undemocratic and snobby.3 While the Finnish lament may have been a more widely available tradition, one key characteristic of the Jewish lament is that the lament is definitely not done by just anyone, but by women, and specifically women who had seen a thing or two in their lives,4
Gamliel further observes that most often the office of the wailing woman was associated with older women. It seems that a woman who had seen something of life, who perhaps had experienced loss herself, was deemed qualified to lead the community in wailing. As one interviewee said, "the wailer begins to wail when she gets along in years, when she begins to understand life, to understand sadness." Keeners, Claasen
The source of a head mourner's skill lies in her sorrow… Istir used the Judeo-Tat term derd to refer to her "sorrow." Derd refers "very roughly, to profound acute and ongoing sorrow..." Goluboff
What we can do, and what fulfills the true democratic nature of the lament, is to learn how to listen.5 This is not passive consumption, which is deadly to the lament and can even be considered rude or disrespectful. Listening to lament is a skill and can be considered a crucial contributor to one its most important characteristics: antiphony.
Antiphony-the technique of call and response-is perhaps the single most identifiable gesture of spiritual dramaturgy and is common to many religions - Veretski Pass, liner notes to Klezmer Shul
But later hired women mourners were employed. The words of lamentation were sung in a particular mourning tone, and almost everywhere they were sung in alternation. This fashion prevailed as early as the time of the Babylonians. An unpublished fragment from Ashurbanipal's library which describes a royal entombment carries these words on the reverse side: "The wives lament and the friends answer." Music & Worship in Pagan & Christian Antiquity, Quasten, Johannes
Modern audiences are either completely immobile or enact a cliche of dionysiac frenzy. In both forms they are trained to not get in the way of the performance. Before Yiddish audiences were trained to be proper consumers, they were much less passive.6 Even in less anarchic forms, call and response can be found in the delicate interplay of gesture, dance and music, as it is in flamenco.7 I've also pointed out how Greek village music exists in a much larger context and relies on highly intricate active participation by its audience, of which gesture is a key component.
A cliche in klezmer instruction is that musicians have to always be ready to adapt to the tempo and dynamic of the dancers, (curiously, the image often invoked in this context is an older women). But it is curious that no one ever actually does this.8 I suspect this cliche is a corruption of a much more meaningful relationship. The emotional energy loop between band and dancers is the point, and the medium that makes this possible is the silently shared understanding of the language of lament.9
How to do this is still a question that needs creative responses. Introducing dance, gesture or vocal instruction in the context of lament and in terms of call and response could be a powerful way for audiences to connect with the music.. Perhaps we need to invent some sort of third category beside musician or audience (lets call it neo-badkhnism) to assist or model this. After all, the badkhn himself, so crucial to the lament culture, was just another in a longer line of evolving cultural roles.10
My own strange, practical suggestion is to consider the use of prosthetics. Raising one’s hands in dance is just a tough sell for Americans, but give them a bottle or a frilly baton, and they are more likely to do so. Also, this culture may thrive better not amongst atomized anonymous audiences, but in small regional “courts.” Consider them like musical bands, but for audiences (and probably composed mostly of local musicians anyway). Most cities already have something like this, but they are disorganized and unnamed. All they need is a banner.
My guess is that if the audience can do their part, the lament will emerge naturally. The next post will take us into practical particulars.
This pre-pre-history of the lament and its relationship to the dead deserves clarification. Briefly, In the Karelian example, and as is implied by some other Ancient Near Eastern evidence, lament is almost entirely composed of the practice of speaking to the dead, either helping them on their journey or telling them to not come back! In one rare quote there is a sense of reviving the dead (note the body/spirit switcheroo):
The Babylonians had already understood this interpretation. In the final lines of Ishtar's Journey to the Underworld, for example, we read, “In the days of Tauz play me the crystal-like flute, on the... instrument play me his lament, you men and women, who mourn, so that the dead may arise and breathe the fragrance of the sacrifice.” Here the spirits of the dead are summoned by music. This was the essential purpose of music in the cult of the dead among the Mediterranean peoples.
I do think there was a general association with music-making and the dead in the Near East, which survives in current cartoon depictions of dead people playing harps. Music & Worship in Pagan & Christian Antiquity by Quasten, Johannes (whom the quote above is from) has the best explanation of this I’ve found but lacks any Jewish connections.
That association btwn dead/music may have spread (or originated) in Africa and become part of the ancestor/music dynamic that Kristina Gaddy identifies in her recent book on the banjo. Obviously this is wild speculation and more research is needed.
This may also be where the female (non-narrative) and the male (narrative-heavy shamanic hero-journey (think Orpheus)) approach to death diverge. This male shamanic direction is where I think Ted Gioia is going in his most recent online book, “How to Raise the Dead.” This was brilliantly explored earlier in The Death and Resurrection Show.)
A psychological parallel can be found in James Hillman’s The Dream and the Underworld, which argues against heroically bringing dreams up from the underworld by interpreting them for therapeutic purposes. “All my emphasis on the underworld and my insistence upon maintaining the dream as an underworld phenomenon is to keep the depth of the dream intact.”A fuller examination of his understanding of psyche with the historical lament would be useful.
See my post on the elusive inclusive same sex dance post for more.
See also “Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about….” Baldwin
Our own biases against the role of the audience deserves attention. The Sufi prioritization of Sama (“listening” see “Shema”) is a reminder that this bias is not natural.
The involvement of the audience was total and fervent. Crying, always part of an evening at the Yiddish theater, was cathartic for the bone-weary workers who made up most of the house. Laughter at characters with familiar problems was just as prevalent as tears and helped immigrants recognize their own strength and motivation to hold on–even to succeed.
Patrons ate and drank, exchanged loud remarks, and unabashedly cheered and hissed. Sometimes they openly jeered actors who lit cigarettes or cigars on stage on Friday night, even while the protestors themselves were obviously not observing the Sabbath either. Occasionally, patrons yelled out advice, particularly at critical points in the many plays about family conflict. One man was so moved by Jacob Adler’s performance in the The Jewish King Lear, that he ran down the aisle shouting: “To hell with your stingy daughter, Yankl! She has a stone, not a heart. Spit on her, Yankl, and come home with me. My yidene [Jewish wife] will feed you. Come Yankl, may she choke, that rotten daughter of yours.” Yiddish Theatre in New York
I tried this once with a famous local musician and ooh boy did I get the stink eye.
Another reason not everyone should lament is that the role of the lamenter incurs burdens not to be taken lightly. "Weeping, wailing women communicating emotions of grief, mourning and loss [were] not easily controlled and can thus be seen as a threat to the state's ability and power to preserve order." (Calling the Keeners, Claasen) The lamenter brings bad news and they need history and status in the community to counteract the pending ostracization of the old pagan threat they pose.
The subversive and possibly pagan roots of this role can be found in the badkhn’s predecessor, the letsim. Usually translated as clown, it’s fuller definition includes “self-styled nihilists” and other aspects which hint at the heretical.