The Economist June 4th 2022 Culture 77Buddhist bubblegum
Music for
procrastinators
A
rthur russell was a perfectionist. He
could never decide when something
was finished. When the musician died of
aids-related illnesses in 1992, at the age of
40, he had released only three solo albums
and was barely known beyond New York’s
experimental arts scene. But his apartment
was overflowing with stacks of boxes con-
taining notebooks, letters, handwritten
scores and nearly 1,000 tapes of recorded
material. His music spanned genres as dis-
parate as disco (under the aliases of “Dino-
saur L”, “Indian Ocean” and “Loose Joints”),
folk, pop and country.
As a teenager he ran away from his
home in Oskaloosa, a small Iowan town,
after his father found drug paraphernalia
in his bedroom, and the youngster ended
up in a Buddhist commune in San Francis-
co. There he found peace for a while. He
gave up drugs, enrolled in a community
college to finish high school and took part
in fire-walking rituals. At the commune he
also studied North Indian classical music,
received lessons from a member of the San
Francisco Symphony Orchestra and, in be-
tween chores, practised his cello in a clos-
et. (He loved the way the sound reverberat-
ed in a tiny space.)
He grew tired of this in time and moved
to New York to focus on his music, yet the
mantras he learned in the commune never
left him. He was more interested in the
meditative process of making music than
the finished product. Repetition and echo
are themes that recur in his songs. Listen
to “This Is How We Walk on the Moon” for
an introduction to his oeuvre.
Incompleteness is desirable, wrote
Yoshida Kenko, a Japanese monk from the
14th century: “It is only a person of poor
understanding who wishes to arrange
things in complete sets.” Musical procras-
tination was where Russell found his bliss.
Never satisfied with his output—when
praised for a song, he would immediately
declare it was terrible—the composer was
always changing the beat, fiddling with ar-
rangements, seeing what would happen if
he did things slightly differently. Sound
was all-consuming for him, and his music
has a boundless feel.
In a documentary about the musician’s
life released in 2008 Russell’s boyfriend,
Tom Lee, described how the composer
liked to set his keyboard up in front of a
huge fish tank in their apartment so he
could hear the sound of the water while he
tinkered with his work. He loved jogging
with his Walkman too, music blaring as the
city droned around him. Russell developed
throat cancer but every evening he would
sing one of his songs, “Love Comes Back”,
to Mr Lee. Philip Glass, a fellow composer,
thought Russell could “sit down with a cel-
lo and play and sing in a way that no one
else on this earth has ever done”.
When melancholy strikes, pop on some
headphones and listen to Russell’s loop-
ing, lulling, sweet songs while you walk
the streets as he once did. Start with “That’s
Us/Wild Combination” and be reminded,
ever so gently, that “it’s a big old world/
With nothing in it”. Your to-do list is never
going to be finished. Everything is imper-
manent. But you may as well “push up and
be part of it all”. Listen to the works of an indecisive,
brilliant composer
home
entertainmentBanishmentNo place like home
O
vid wasbanished to the outer reaches
of the Roman Empire in 8adfor what
he called carmen et error—a poem and a
mistake. The exact nature of his transgres-
sion is disputed, but the suffering he en-
dured hundreds of miles from Rome is not:
on the shores of the Black Sea, he spent his
final years writing about the pain of being
separated from his beloved city.
As the ancient world’s best-known de-
portee, Ovid is often invoked by those who
write about displacement. They look at his
outpouring of nostalgia—in its original
meaning of homesickness—and his de-
scriptions of sadness. He wrote in one let-
ter, for example, about feeling dismem-
bered by exile, seeing himself as a meta-
phorical Mettus. (The character in Virgil’s
“Aeneid” was torn apart by chariots after
betraying Rome.) “A part of me”, he wrote,
“seemed wrenched from my body.”
Given Ovid’s status as a famous exile, it
is unsurprising that William Atkins’s new
book about the subject makes good use of
him. In “Exiles: Three Island Journeys”, the
author takes the Roman poet as his “guid-
ing spirit”. But while his literary forebear
will be known to many readers, the same
cannot be said for the three people whose
footsteps he decides to retrace.
The trio were all sent to remote islands
in the late 19th century by different imperi-
al powers. Louise Michel was exiled to New
Caledonia in the Pacific for her role in the
short-lived Paris Commune, an insurrec-
tion brutally quashed in 1871. Dinuzulu ka-
Cetshwayo, a young Zulu king deemed a
threat to British colonial interests, was dis-
patched almost two decades later to St Hel-
ena, the South Atlantic outpost where
Napoleon Bonaparte had been held. And
Lev Shternberg, a Ukrainian-born anti-
tsarist who had previously languished in
jail in Odessa, was shipped to Sakhalin, an
island off the east coast of Siberia.
Although life in these far-flung places
was supposed to cure them of their per-
ceived troublesomeness, it actually did lit-
tle to dampen their resolve. On her return
to France, Michel resumed campaigning
and writing and was detained again for her
commitment to revolutionary ideals. Di-
nuzulu, back near his ancestral homeland,
reinvigorated his people’s desire to oppose
colonialism. As a result, he was sent into
exile once more, dying in 1913 at a farm inExiles: Three Island Journeys. By William
Atkins. Faber & Faber; 320 pages; £20