Tim and Nick drove to Lisbon over the weekend to see Jacob Collier in concert at the Meo Arena. He is the latest musical genius, plays all the instruments, including the audience, whom he converts into a giant choir.
He is a phenomenon, and people are amazing by his "playing" the instrument that is the audience,
The beauteous Cape Town City Hall
I was about 12 or 13 (more than fifty years ago) my dad and I went to a Symphony concert in Cape Town where they gave everyone at the door something to play a beat with, a wooden spatula, clappers, a paper cup to use as a drum, for example. At a certain time of crescendo the members of the audience had to participate by tapping their little "instrument", which was so exhilarating! Then the audience was divided into three and we were all taught a simple series of notes, and then suddenly we were all singing this beautiful harmony, the amazing sound rising to the magnificent high roof beams of the Cape Town City Hall! My dad and I spoke about it years later, this astonishment of being a part of such a grand melody.
The phenomenal Bobby McFerrin
McFerrin demonstrates this common human ability beautifully in a talk he gave at A World Science Festival event. He gives an audience four notes of the pentatonic scale and everyone is intuitively able to grasp how it works On top of that, the audience just naturally knows how the scale continues, above and below the range he gives them. Bobby McFerrin says that this works with audiences anywhere in the world! Which surely speaks to a profound collective unconscious that all of us share.
If only crowds always worked in harmony to do good.
Nombulelo students at the school
where I taught.
When we had the twin babies in 1992, I had been teaching at a black school in Grahamstown for ten years, where I was a head of department. After my maternity leave my headmistress kindly arranged my timetable so that I had time to go home mid-morning to breastfeed the babies. I was happily driving our old VW bus down the hill towards the town, anticipating seeing and feeding my beloved little ones, when I saw a boy dressed in school uniform in the road, shouting and looking distressed. I slowed down, thinking something was wrong with him, only suddenly horrified to see him take careful aim and throw a massive rock straight at my car, and the look on his face was actually one of enraged hatred!
A VW bus like ours
With this terrifying realization, I drove on, but as I came around the corner, there were hundreds of school students streaming towards me, all armed with rocks, pelting me, mass manic hysteria! As rocks bombarded the car and broken glass showered over me, my mind went into self-protection mode, and I remember actually voicing to myself, in some little calm part of my head while everything went mad around me, "I have four children, I want to live! I have four children, I HAVE to live!" And so I put my foot down on that accelerator, scrunched down in my seat, ducking the missiles of rocks and glass, and drove through the crowd as fast as I could!
I just carried on driving, once I was through the mob, blood pouring from my face and hands, past the police station, not a thought to stop there! I just needed to get to Tim's office, where I half-fell out of the car, made my shocked way up the stairs, only to find he wasn't there! I sort of slid down the wall in one of those movie moments, and wailed. A very surprised man came out of the office next door, took one look at me and ran for Tim, who went into dealing with a crisis mode, put me back in the beaten-up car and took me to the doctor, where a nurse gently vacuumed glass shards from my hair and carefully extracted them from my hands. The doctor examined the iris of my left eye which had been scratched by a passing shard but would recover.
When Tim examined the car he found that the babys' car seats both held rocks, and every window in our family's sunshine yellow bus was smashed except for one tiny triangular side one. There were more than 20 rocks scattered all over inside the car, and it frankly looked as though a bomb had hit it. Amazingly I had survived!
The students who had stoned several cars, of which mine was the first, were from another school than the one I taught at. They had just attended a hearing in the town for one of their comrades and it had not gone well, so they took it out on the white people in their cars coming down the hill.
So this is why I couldn't go to the concert. I really am uncomfortable in crowds. Also some other experiences have reinforced my deep aversion. Like that mass hysteria in America which has just changed the future of the world forever.
My mother.
And so now I prefer clouds. I will concentrate on the beauty, Truth and Beauty, as Keats reminds us. I think of my mother when I gaze at beautiful clouds.
When I was 8 my mother took me to England for several months while she and my dad sorted out the future of their relationship. My brother went to boarding school and my sister was 21 and a nurse already, with her own little flat. It was such a strange time. I both flourished and declined. School was easy, everyone loved the little girl with the funny accent, and I won all the swimming races in the unevenly heated public pools, I had a little garden of my own, and there was the magical hypnotism of television, sometimes. (South Africa only got television when I had already left school, it was banned by the oppressive Nationalist Apartheid Regime.)
Me and my siblings last year in England.
But I longed for my dad, crying myself to sleep some nights, and I wanted my siblings, and my best friend Trish, and all the familiarity of home. After we had been in England about six months my dad gave my brother one of the newfangled AKAI tape recorders for his birthday. They were enormous things, with huge reels like film reels.
My brother immediately set about making a tape for us, so we would hear his voice and my sister's and my dad's. When we received it in the mail, we had to go to a store which sold tape recorders in order to listen to it. I remember my mum and I standing next to a demo tape recorder, in front of everyone, although we were oblivious to them, listening to the sweet voices of our beloveds. I remember being surprised to find our cheeks wet with tears.
Me and my dad.
The thing about England was that almost every day, it rained. While my little garden grew well with all that water, I really missed being outside constantly in my own country. I remember asking my mother, when I was absolutely frustrated with the weather, "Is the sky EVER blue here, like it is in South Africa? Just blue wide sky as far as the eye can see?"
Clouds with trees.
So she told me that we would go for a walk, and we went along a path and up a hill where there was a view, and we looked at the sky. The big wide sky, with scudding clouds. There were little blue bits, but mostly clouds. She told me to maybe think that clouds make a sky quite interesting, especially if you know what kind of clouds they are. And then proceeded to teach me the names of all the different clouds, which I still look at every day and name to myself.
Seascape with clouds
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