Pokhara is a tourist’s dream; so many things to do, so many
activities to undertake, so many people to get to know.
We didn’t do that.
Instead, we took on Pokhara as an
outdoor delight, getting up and doing dawn walks (thank you,
jetlag!), hiking up a mountain (wherever you are, that’s the
adventure you’re having), hiding out in cafes getting work done
(deadlines are a thing!).
We even captured some of that in
pictures! First, we had two scenic hotels, both brilliantly
beautiful. The
first (Vagabond
Guest House) looked
in on a bird-filled courtyard; the second (Hotel Forest
Lake Backpackers’ Hostel) had a view of the lake:
Skies and landscapes were wonderful any time of day:
Hiking uphill has a lot to recommend it. To be honest, we only went
halfway up, but that was a couple of serious hours of “up,” and a
joyous hike of discovery, with fabulous vistas as the payoff:
Sunset deserves a chapter all its own, and we spent one relaxing
evening eating dinner by the lake, watching both the sunset and the
sociable strolling scene. Ssssssplendid!
Scenery was a recurring theme; the rice paddies and the home-thatched
roofs reminded us how hard people work.
We did take the cable car up the hill to Sarangkot, and got a great view of the
valley – but as you can see, the clouds rolled in shortly
thereafter and that was it for the big vista. Glad we did scenery
before lunch!
We did do a little bit of hiding out and getting the to-do list under
control. There are some mighty fine cafes to choose from, and the WiFi is bettter than what I have at home. (Ah, US rural internet,
what I don’t miss about you!)
In all, I’d recommend Pokhara as a destination -- for its beauty,
for its serenity, and for the chance to operate at the tempo of the
clouds.
Part
of the experience of a foreign country is getting to see the parts
that don’t make it into the guidebook, and one of the best ways to
do that is to take the bus.
No, seriously, take the bus.
We
took the bus from Kathmandu to Pokara, and a different bus back. Yes,
we went for the tourist bus; air-conditioning was non-negotiable.
Both trips were great. The one there was during the daytime and so I
have pictures. The one back, well, I didn’t take a night-cam; the
trip is written into memory, but not into shareable memory. Though I
did get a video before we left:
As you
can see, there are oooooooodles of choices among the bus companies. So many options, both
going and coming. Your hotel can help you make arrangements. Do you
get steered to a particular company? Yes, but it’s still cheap, and
you saved yourself stress.
So, why, you ask, should I take the bus, when I can get there
faster by flying? Answer: the sights! So many sights!
The mountains are beautiful, but they were more often green than
what I had in my imagination. So much beauty! But also, see the
snow-capped peaks in the back? Yeah, we were super excited to see
those.
The
bus stops every few hours for, er, the necessary. Bring your own
toilet paper. Also, practice your deep knee bends before your trip;
traveling you will thank you.
Happily, the bus also stops for breakfast. This was one of the
best meals I had, which is probably because I was ravenous. But
looooook at all those carbohydrates! With pepper and tasty stuff!
We did
a lot of window gazing. Much of Nepal seems like it is a
work-in-progress. Grotty roads and an emphasis on the cheaper side of
transport reflects the country’s ongoing work on infrastructure,
where aspiration has preceded achievement.
Yet,
to be honest, agriculture has beauty that’s separable but
complimentary to the vertical beauty of the mountains, and I admit to
a little touch of longing for home as we enjoyed the countryside.
So,
like I said, take the bus!
RESOURCES
To arrange for a bus, the easiest thing to do is just ask your
hotel to help arrange it. Ours was about $16 each direction. For a 5
to 7 hour trip. No, I didn’t drop a digit.
The feast of St Martin of Tours, on November 11th, is a
pivot-point in the year, the end of the harvest season and a time of
preparation for the Advent season. It was an occasion for processions
(often, at least in later periods, with lanterns!), for almsgiving,
and for renewal of spirit and devotional practice.
It was also tax
time; paying your Martins penny or Martinizins (Martin-tithe)
was a financial obligation that appears in numerous documents and
charters of the time. When I say numerous, I mean that just at the
Kloster of Mehrerau, for instance, at least 59 separate charters
detail the Martinizins; across Vorarlberg, more than 891 charters
require payments of one sort or another on that special day. (Thank
you, monasterium.net, for the ability to do multi-term searches!)
In the context of a
tertiary house like Thalbach in Bregenz in the 16th
century, Martin’s feast was a time for public devotion and renewal
of spiritual commitements. They no doubt liked the story of how he
used his sword to divide his cloak in half and share it with a
beggar. As a soldier, he had been riding warm and comfortable on his
horse through the sleet and snow, when he came upon a fallen man.
Concerned, he cut his cloak in two and gave one part to the supine
man. That evening, a vision came to him of Christ clothed in the
cloak remnant; the beggar he had comforted had been Christ himself.
17th c Stained Glass
image of St Martin at Wettingen, cc by Badener
The sisters were not
without need of charity themselves, since food supplies were
notoriously tight during this period; endowments did not yet fully
cover the sisters’ needs. Here, then, was a saintly hero whose
generosity might inspire the broader civic community to similarly
share provisions. And, of course, the feasting of end-of-harvest
season was a special reason for rejoicing. Roast goose was often a
special treat on the day, and was associated with the tale the a
goose had revealed his location when he was hiding to avoid
appointment as bishop. Plus, the fruit of the vineyards, the year’s
new wine, was often uncorked on Martinmas. Roast goose
(Martinigansl) and new wine (Heuriger) remain Austrian favorites today. Many
reasons to rejoice, indeed!
Thus it was when the
Sisters of Thalbach took on the task of learning the Roman Breviary
in 1595, adopting the Tridentine forms then newly mandated, they
chose their first (and therefore forever notable) performance to be
the Vespers of St Martin. Here’s a lovely performance of the
antiphon, “Dixerunt discipuli,” from the Vespers service for St
Martin:
The disciples said to
blessed Martin: Why do you abandon us, father? Or to whom do you
leave us desolate? For ravenous wolves will invade your flock.
(Ps:Dixit dominus)
Martin’s
disciples, realizing he is near death, plead with him not to leave
them. The “ravenous wolves” are a metaphor for corrupt or
heretical leaders who might harm the spiritual community once Martin,
their protector and spiritual guide, has passed. Martin here
serves as the pastor bonus, the good shepherd who safeguards
his flock through his vigilance. His disciples’ lament highlights
the saint’s transition from earthly protector to heavenly
intercessor. In medieval retellings and liturgical commemorations,
this scene reinforces Martin’s enduring care for the faithful even
after death. His memoria continues to protect against those
“wolves” through prayer and example.
As new singers,
then, this office was a good choice of where to begin. The music for
Vespers emphasized antiphons and psalmody. “Dixerunt discipuli”
is a typical antiphon in the seventh mode, centered melodically on
the fifth above G, with a narrow range. This would have been
eminently singable for new singers. Moreover, the gentle neumatic
layout, with two to five notes per syllable would have helped with
their memorization. Invoking Martin as protector in their first
celebration in a new-to-them practice of Latin chant devotions was no
doubt an auspicious beginning for what was to be a two-year learning
journey. But that is a story for another day.
REFERENCES
For a general
overview of Martin’s cult, see Yossi Maurey, Medieval Music,
Legend, and the Cult of St Martin: The Local Foundations of a
Universal Saint (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
For a review of
the growth of the St Martin liturgical tradition in Italy, see
Alejandro Enrique Planchart, “The Geography of Martinmas,” In
Western Plainchant in the First Millennium (Routledge,
2003).
If we believe that Hildegard von Bingen’s chant is monophonic, why
introduce a drone? Why add orchestration, those evocative instrumental roulades
that spin seductively around the modal home pitch as intro and as
formal “breaks” from the plainness of plainchant – but lack any
evidentiary basis in score, or word, or notated tradition? What is
chant to us here in this post-2015 environment that it cannot be
simple, or vocal, or unaccompanied?
I ask not because
it’s wrong – in fact, I find performances like those of the Harpa
Dei Choir and that of the St. Stanislav Girls’ Choir (Helena Fojkar
Zupančič, director) to be beautiful and compelling. Not authentic –
not striving for some kind of Hildegard-informed sense of how the
music should go – but nevertheless a compelling reading of the
tune with its vocally surging lines where any “up” (often arrived
at by leap) gets a counterbalancing descent, or at least some smaller
response in a lower register. Hildegard’s play with ambitus and
tessitura is well-displayed.
Yet part of me feels
suckered by these performances. For the Harpa Dei performance, the
gendered vocal shifts, the oooooo wooooo drones, the rubato; there’s
a richness that almost calls for a palette cleanser afterwards. And
for the lovely and compelling St Stanislav performance, yes, but…
But so much twang on the drone; so many instrumental moments of
disruption; the recorder as ethereal marker, but also as intrusion on
the beauty of the singing. It would be easy to pick either of these
performances out of a line-up. And yet they are in many ways typical
of the examples I’ve been sampling as I looked for musical
illustrations for class.
Why “all the
everything”? Why is chant gussied up and ornamented here in our
21st century world?
Maybe part of the
answer lies in what our ears have come to crave. We live in a musical
world where production is part of the storytelling, where even a
single voice is rarely left alone. Taylor Swift’s vocal is never
just Taylor Swift’s vocal. No, it’s reverberant, multi-tracked,
shimmering with harmonic overtones and studio polish that make
intimacy sound bigger. Our ears have become attuned to
layers, to sonic depth as a marker of emotional authenticity. In that
context, an unadorned chant feels exposed, almost too naked to
believe in. So we orchestrate it. We wrap it in drones and strings
and those warm and comforting ambient pads to make it “speak” in
the language we’ve been taught to find moving. But in doing so, we
reveal something about ourselves as listeners: that we can no longer
trust simplicity, that we need resonance – literal and metaphorical
– to feel that something is real.
By literal
resonance, I mean those add-ins, some performed, some generated in
production, that make a chant track “pop” when it comes up on
your playlist. When chant is accompanied by a drone, by strings, or
by an ambient pad (or a mix of all three, heaven forefend), it
physically resonates in a richer, more complex way. We like
that; it gives us “stuff to listen for.” We’ve got something to
munch on. The music feels fuller, more present, more “real” –
it fits our presumtive expectations.
In a world trained
on layered, produced music, a single, unadorned line might feel too
stark, too abstract to carry the weight of feeling or significance we
expect. Adding accompaniment or sonic “padding” gives the chant a
kind of interpretive or emotional amplification. In so doing, it
resonates with our expectations, our memories, and our cultural
conditioning. A pluffed-up performance mirrors the fullness we’ve
learned to hear as emotionally convincing.
We seem, in this day
and age of Swifties, less comfortable with the more period-informed
performances of the Early Music tradition. The unadorned chant still
lives in performances by the Oxford Camerata or the ever-popular
Sequentia performance by Barbara Thornton.
Voices alone, and
textures exploring the nuance of one voice against many voices
instead of one against a different kind of thing – a drone, or an
instrumental timbre: these are delicate, demanding performances that
invite us to dwell in a slower, more contemplative space to tease out
nuances (that word again) of gesture and meaning.
So our reality is
that there are options available. We can choose how we listen. We can
decide what we prefer.
And being an
informed and cultured society...
We prefer Taylor
Swift. At least, we do numerically. Here are the YouTube stats:
Oxford
Camerata: 4.1K
Sequential: 27K
Harpa Dei: 2.8M
St Stanislav:
584,979
Simple, vocal, and
attention-requiring performances are getting good listening numbers.
Hey, if I had that many readers, I’d be thrilled! But the bigger,
richer, layered performances, those are evidently the listening draw. By orders of magnitude. For every one listener drawn to the “pure” chant, nearly 700 are drawn to the modernized, multi-layered performance. We're talking a couple of good-sized concert halls (yay, early music fans!) compared to 40 football-stadiums' worth of listeners (yay, broad public!).
As I said before,
it’s not wrong. We like what we like, and I’m for anything that
puts Hildegard on more people’s radar. It’s just important to
recognize that when we drape an ambient pad across her vocal line, we
aren’t just changing the music – we’re revealing our own ears,
our own habits, our own desires for sound. Listening isn’t neutral;
it’s a product of training, memory, culture, and expectation. We’ve
been trained in ways that call on a soundscape that includes Taylor
Swift.
With Taylor in our ears, we have work to
do if we want to be ready to hear chant on its own terms. We have to
practice what I think of as a kind of auditory humility. We can try
to focus on our single line of melody. We have to resist the urge to
thicken it, to sweeten it, to make it “pop.” If we’re
attentive, we can notice how our own ears sometimes strain for
harmonic cues that aren’t there, how our imaginations fill in the
gaps with memories of orchestral swells or pop hooks.
That tension –
the tug between expectation and what actually sounds – is exactly
where reflective listening begins. It’s in that space that we can
start to hear Hildegard not as a Taylor Swift vocal needing polish,
but as a voice moving through space, time, and ritual, and hear
ourselves responding along the way.
In the end, of course, our ears can
carry both Hildegard and Taylor. The challenge – and the
reward – is learning to hear each on its own terms.
The brain is a wonderful interpreter. It can make meaning out of
almost-random bits of evidence and postulate an explanation that
makes sense in its own context.
Take space aliens.
The 1980s were full of them. Between E.T., Close Encounters of the
Third Kind, Alien, and all those late-night “documentaries” about
UFO sightings in cornfields, the world seemed brimming with cosmic
visitors. If you were a teen back then, you probably half-expected to
see a glowing spaceship land in your backyard, or at least some
suspicious lights over the local water tower. Those stories gave
shape to something deep in us: the need to explain what we can’t
otherwise understand. When faced with odd lights in the sky or
strange coincidences, the mind goes searching for narrative
explanations.
More recently,
however, space aliens are on the wane, at least in the circles in
which I run. (Medievalists don’t have a lot of time for space
aliens; we are more interested in the fabrication of data and
plagiaristic activity that came out over Christmas vacation a couple
of years ago. Best holiday ever, scandal unfolding in real-time!!!)
But me, I generated
space aliens all my own in a dreamscape this weekend. Cold. Clammy.
Tentacles everywhere. Space ships flying low over the civic stairs
that we were climbing. (Funny how one never descends the steps in a
dreamland).
And then I woke up.
And found this guy.
My little tree-frog
had gotten into the camper and was bee-bopping around looking for the
door.
Eventually, we
captured him and put him back outside in the colder and wetter world
to which he belonged.
But my tree frog
story is not, in fact, quite as pointless as it might initially
sound. As a story of how our brain works, it’s a reminder that
sense-making is built in. My dreaming mind took a few sensory
impressions – something cold and damp brushing my arm, a flicker of
shadow against the window as the window-shades clanked – and built an
entire alien narrative out of them.
So take that pause with your
data. Acknowledge that your brain might be overwriting the blurrier
boundaries of historical truth. Go back and triple
check those changes you thought you saw in the patterns. Are they
there, or are they an artifact of a ghost frog telling your waking
self a story that’s actually three parts unexpected nighttime
encounter?
If the data support
that insight, you’re golden. Please publish; your insights are
marvelous.
If they don’t,
accept that sometimes the brain sees patterns in clouds. But those
cloud-pictures – dragons, faces, ships with sails – come from
inside us. They don’t inhere in the cloud itself.
Being aware of what
is “pattern” and what is “artifact” is one of the reasons I
keep going back, and going back again to my primary sources. What
word was used? Does an object list of this kind of thing or that kind
of thing reinforce this change I think I see? Could there be another
explanation? (That kind of meticulous cross-checking work is
important, and not just an avoidance of the vacuum cleaner as my
household sometimes maintains!)
Mondays seem a good
day to check the stories you tell yourself.
And it can be quite
wonderful when historical stories come true.
Space aliens? Not
quite so much.
May you – may WE
ALL – have historical storytelling luck this week.
And may we all stick to
sources we’ve consulted directly!
Or perhaps
you’d like to dabble in a different perspective on the matter:
“Receptiogate” (“the official documentation site”):
https://www.receptiogate.org/
Administration wants
to encourage faculty-student interaction outside of the classroom, so
they require the faculty to spend two hours on drop-in office hours a
week.
Bwahaha.
Ask any faculty
member, and I’ll bet you’ll find they agree with me. Office hours
are the perfect time to submit travel receipts, catch up on
paperwork, and take care of email. They’re just a terrible time to
expect to see students.
Because students
almost never come. Too far. Wrong time. Too nervous. No identified
questions.
After all, who has
questions before lunchtime? Questions are a nighttime activity. You
know, after the faculty have already left campus.
If administration
wanted to support genuine interaction between faculty and students,
they would require things like:
1) Mandatory concert
atttendance – and the wonderful chit-chat afterwards when we’ve
all been moved to laughter or chills by the music in all its
performative glory
2) Mandatory shared
setup time. Before class even starts, when the projector’s
misbehaving and I’m untangling cables, students drift in and talk
about what they’re listening to, what’s happening in the world of
campus and beyond, or whatever else is on their mind. No grade
pressure, no formalities – just human contact with a purpose
dangling from a HDMI cord.
3) Mandatory
packing-up time. There’s nothing like unplugging the laptop from
its station to bring on a host of quick one-off questions from
students. (Some days I cynically wonder if more productive learning
happens when I’m packing up than actually happened during
discussion – there’s a lot of “aha” in those quick exchanges)
4) Mandatory text
capacity. No, I don’t give out my phone number to students – but
I do have students use a walkie-talkie app. They can leave voice or
text messages; I can respond asynchronously, again, by voice or by
text. This for me takes about 2 or 3 hours a week, since these can
become extended conversational exchanges. (Please please please don’t
tell me about the messaging app in your LMS. I live on a farm, with
all the absent internet that comes with that. The walkie-talkie app
takes two pennies; the LMS feed takes two dollars. Let’s stick with
‘Can I receive and respond?’ as our measure of tech success.)
5) Mandatory coffee
fetching. When I’m in my office, I can feel lonely. Head out to get
a cup of coffee from the lounge, and I inevitably bump into one or
more students, and those conversations can be rich, deep, and
meaningful. Those usually aren’t about course content – they’re
about the discipline, life experiences, and our place in the world.
You know, the stuff that carries forward in a forever kind of way.
6) Mandatory “big
deadlines.” There’s nothing like a deadline to clarify what could
use some support. And the problem with office hours is it is not only
the wrong time for interactions, but it’s the wrong space, too.
Better solutions come in the library, or in the hallway outside the
restrooms (we’re just being honest here), or on the sidewalk
between one space and another.
See, the problem
with office hours is the office. It’s not that setting aside
time for 1:1 with students is a bad idea – in fact, it’s one of
the most valuable aspects of a college education. And it’s not that
students don’t prize their access and the support it affords. They
genuinely do respond to faculty who care.
It’s the whole
idea that you can take all the ideals of academia, and put them in a
box (the office) and on the clock (at a reasonable time of day). Real
learning isn’t like that. Ideating and interaction both happen at
their best on the spontaneous edges of other kinds of activities.
And spontaneity
can’t be mandated.
But it can be
invited to appear.
True
Confessions:
Here’s my shout-out to the real and impactful student
moments—the ones that happen in the dining hall, the hallway after
class, or occasionally (miracle of miracles) in my office. They're real. I just
wish the last kind happened more often. And I’m not alone.
So, I’m working through my
memoria documents – charitable endowments for commemorative
services – for a paper I’m writing. These are two sets of
Charters from Bregenz, one cluster from the early 15th
century, and another from a century later, right at the start of the
16th century.
I’ll
save the big observations for the paper itself, but thought it
interesting that the documents are very clear, abundantly clear,
about many things. The donor wants this service and that one, done in
this order, with this personel. That’s the what
and the who. They
want their services done in this place and that one, by these
personnel. That’s the where and
the who. (“Who”
matters twice because payment depends on it).
In
these documents, we also know the why
and the how.The why
has been well-studied; memoria are services of remembrance for the donor and his ancestors and
descendents. The prayers given at the service help all these people
toward salvation, and so engage with a
different “who” than the question of who performs. The people being prayed for are
often named family, and include marital family as well as natal.
Sometimes, they include aunts and uncles, cousins (particularly those
in orders), and even second spouses. They include the dead and the
living, a point which has always struck me as a bit odd. What does it
mean to be praying in remembrance of someone who might themselves be
standing at graveside?
And
the how is clear. With crosses and processions. At graveside. With singing
and speaking and reading. With standing and sitting and bowing heads,
and all the other choreography of ritual. Or, as Ursula Speckerin
(1405) puts it in her own Alemannic dialect,
with
worship and beginning with proclamation, with singing and with
reading, with standing and with prayers, and with all other things in
the way previously prescribed. [mit
libtind (?) und begiengingt mit verkundung mit singet und mit lesent
mit stende und mit genbent und mit allen andren dingen in der wiscz
als vorgesteben stat.]
To
this, we add the gifts to the sacristan for the provisions for
service. There’s bread, and more specifically bread for the poor.
There’s wine for the service. There are lights – candles – not
just for the vigil, but for both masses as well. And there are bells,
bells for the vigil, bells to be rung at mass, bells to announce the
service.
All
these things are mentioned, for all these things have costs.
And
so we can run through the multisensory modalities of these memoria
services:
Sight:
procession, cross, lights, people
Sound:
singing, reading, reciting, saying, bells
Taste:
bread, wine, “Tisch” or food at table (improved over their
normal fare, in Ursula’s provisions)
Feel:
bowing, standing, sitting: all the embodied shifts of
orientation of an active quasi-choreographed worship
Smell:
???
The
documents I’ve looked at, I realized, are completely tacet on the
sense of smell. No mentions of incense or flowers or herbs or smoke
or any other proxy for smell. The closest we get is the bread and the
wine, placed on the altar and distributed to the poor, but the
memoria endowments, for all
their sometimes surprising specificity, don’t think to cover the
sense of smell. And yet smell is typically a key part of liturgy. Its
absence is striking.
I’m
not entirely sure what to make of that. One plausible answer is
because your incense for the censor is budgetted separately, and that
in paying the sacristan you have already covered “the goods”
necessary for the service.
But it is an interesting omission, and
speaks to the question of what goes without saying and what must be
specified when you’re seeking control of events-of-remembrance for
after your demise.
Smell, it seems, was so woven into the fabric of
ritual life that it didn’t need to be written down.
RESOURCES:
Bregenz,
Stadtarchiv Urk. 19. (Ursula Speckerin, 1405). Consulted via
monasterium.net. (A list of other relevant charters is available from the author.)
For
more on movement during prayer, see:
Cyrus,
Cynthia J. 2025. "Praying Before the Image of Mary: Nuns’
Prayerbooks and the Mapping of Sacred Space" Religions 16, no. 10: 1277. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16101277
Two
standard works on memoria are:
Geuenich,
Dieter, and Otto Gerhard Oexle. 1994. Memoria in der Gesellschaft
des Mittelalters. Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts
für Geschichte, Bd. 111. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Geary,
Patrick J. 1994. Phantoms
of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the end of the first
Millennium. Princeton:
Princeton UP.
