RELIGIOUS PURLISRING

...meeting at Nairobi in 1975 said, why have so many African leaders held power for 20 years without ~lecti0ns and why -~ have so many refugees fled "independent" African countries...

...3) teaching and meditating with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist, scholar, and founder of Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado...

...As investigator and critic, he is not condescending, even in making severe judgments, so that one accepts his testimony and even his lay sermons as elements of a real life...

...God knows it's only you that have power over me, you and--no one else . . . . " which indicates that Chopin's simultaneous love for Konstancja, hopelessly idealized, was superficial and inconsequential indeed...

...Each of these experiences is described in successive chapters, with perceptive commentary on American life and reflections on the history of Jewish and Christian spirituality, along the way...

...M. Gavoty's chatty biography evokes only superficially the sexual and spiritual flux that Chopin, George Sand, and their contemporaries could never resolve, and that inevitably left its mark upon their arts...

...Indeed, the parts of Sand's lntimate lournal devoted to Marie are as impassioned as Chopin's expressions to Tytus, and the women's relationship was probably the most fulfilling of Sand's life...

...But, like earlier biograj)hers, Gavoty forcibly links this extreme mother-figure idealization with Chopin's fierce possessivehess of Tytus as indicated in the September 18, 1830 letter: " . . . I know that I love you in vain--I should like you to love me more each time...

...Ir was a quiet Sunday afternoon, and when I opened the door, two young men and a young woman asked if they could come in and talk to me about Krishna...

...2) learning to "sit" at a Zen meditation center...

...Critical, yet sympathetic, firm in his indictment of the inanities of the counter culture, yet attentive to what that culture says about the corrtext in which it grew, Cox has written one of the best books I know on contemporary America...

...I don't know why I'm afraid of you...

...Choir# BERNARD GAVOTY Scribner's, $14.95 [452 pp] ROY CHERNUS It is perhaps inevitable that our responses to Frederic Chopin's music should be conditioned by the socialpsychological matrix of his life...

...In turning East, Cox respects what he cannot be a part of, and acknowledges what he cannot fully understand...

...In a later volume, perhaps, Father Mooney might discuss in greater detail the need of communicating to the Third World our human rights traditions of First Amendment protections against government...

...And as Mr...

...A book that begins, in other words, as a modest treatise on a contemporary religious phenomenon, the postsixties turn toward neo-Orientalism, ends with an eloquent plea for American Christians to change their ways--to put their spiritual lives on the ~ine, if not in the lion's den...

...But Solange proved to be no strong protectress like George, whom Chopin so desperately needed for stability against the impinging reality around him culminating in the revolution of 1848...

...I know that you still care for me, but I'm always so afraid of you--as if you were some sort of tyrant over me...

...Similarly, a discussion of the va, lue of meditation is followed by a lament for the loss of "the idea of the Sabbath or a stated time to cease, to do nothing, to allow what is to be" and a call for a patient rethinking of the Western tradition, where the functional equivalents of meditation periodically appear...

...To the gentleman biographers of Chopin like Casimir Wierzynski and Arthur Hedley the torrid homosexual sentiments of these letters have been an embarrassment which they implausibly explained away as a transferral of his frustrated love for Konstancja Commonweal: 283 Gladkowska to Tytus or as a misleading translation of the "highly colored" Polish...

...Deprived of the insights into his strangely inverted relationship with George Sand which her .letters to Chopin would surely have revealed (she destroyed them), we still have his suggestive correspondence with Polish compatriot Tytus Woyciechowski...

...After looking at the fifteen-year-old nee-Oriental movement, within the history of our long fascination with the "mysterious East," Cox makes this final judgment: "The greed of an acquisitive society and the pace of industria~ l production have created a mindset in which a pale, spiritually uprooted Orientalism is bound to have an appeal...

...Herbert Weinstock, who in his biography insists that Chopin was never overtly conscious of any homosexual inclinations, concedes that this'passage is "one of the most shadowed glimpses into his ambivalent emotions...

...The search for true spirituality is, of course, resisted by a~lmost every force in our society and even by the church itself...

...The whole question of these prominent traits in the lives and music of so many composers has been virtually ignored by musical scholars...

...that is why I scribble on so much paper...

...And I won't let you abandon me . . . . Give me your mouth, to end this letter . . . . " Unfortunately, this and all of Chopin's other confessions to Tytus remain ultimately "mysterious" to M. Gavoty...

...Their lives span not some idealized past, but our own fractured times...

...His "education" went through three phases, as investigator, as participant, and finatly as disciple: (1) attending lectures and worship services, reading tracts and scriptures, at one of the fifty centers for Oriental spirituality in Cambridge, Massachusetts now renamed "Benares on the Charles...

...What gives it a particular force is the manner of presentation, one that may be familiar to readers of Cox's The Seduction of the Spirit: The Use and Misuse of People's Religion (1973...

...In the midst of this confusion, he preaches biblical faith and "grace," defined here as the possibility of change...

...As one speaker at the W.C.C...

...Green has shown, French high cul, ture, in which milieu Chopin lived and worked most happily, was from the early nineteenth century on dominated by almost overt homosexuals like Balzac, Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, and de Musset, all intimates of George Sand...

...It is a book about "a journey which began as a tour and turned into a pilgrimage," written with great skill and intelligence, filled with insights into the current state of .the nation and informed by a wide range of precise knowledge of psychology, literature, and politics, as well as theology...

...Every biography of Chopin I have read, including M. Gavoty's, has evaded or denied his crucial homosexuality and dandy-aesthete sensibility...

...the business of America is business," Cox says, "and that includes the religion business...

...hunting, digging, and finally eating peyote, under observation from a psychiatrist and the ancient Huichole Indians in San Luis Potosi State, in Central Mexico...

...There are also some curious omissions in ehe Sydow-Hedley edition of Chopin letters (present in the older Opienski-Voynich edition, however) such as the following from the October 5, 1830 letter to Tytus: " . . . Give me a kiss, dearest beloved...

...and (b) the generation immediately preceding ou~s, ,~hich produced its own great modeb for spirituality: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simona Well, Dorothy Day, Camilo Tortes, Martin Luther lOng...

...But the Eastern path accommodates itself to America by ignoring much that is valuable in the Western ethical and religious tradition and by sacrificing what is most elemental to Oriental religions as wel=L Appropriating what he can, Cox makes, nonetheless, some concrete suggestions for an authentic spirituality, based upon concepts familiar to East and West and upon a recognition of the wisdom of both traditions: the need for sangha and friendship, and, by implication, for congregation...

...Evidently, Chopin and Sand each lived mainly in the worlds of their own fictions throughout their relationship, and they separated when Chopin acquiesced in Solange Sand's challenge to her mother as the center of control and love...

...They carry all the alteged handicaps to belief that we do, yet they manage to be Christians...

...Both the men shaved their heads, except for a small ponytail at the hack...

...9 . . You are not the master of your thoughts---I am...

...the need for dharma and gospel--not for dogma, that is, but for a direct enCommonweal: 281 counter or relationship with another person's life, through story...

...Although he hated letter-writing, this too helped disburden Chopin of otherwise repressed emotions...

...They wore bright saffron robes, simple bead necklaces and sandab . . . . Only later on did I learn that their names were Harry, Denise and Michael [the first from a Protestant, the second from a Jewish, and the third from an Irish Catholic background...

...the leading counterrevolutionary force of the century...

...Later, by way of comparison, Cox visited and chanted with the monks at the Benedictine Priory in Weston, Vermont, rediscovering in his own heritage elements of spirituality that he had previously neglected...

...They introduced themselves as Bhargava dasa, Krishna Kumari, and Caityagnru dasa...

...For Americans, it involves giving up our personal and nationa.1 quest for economic supremacy, based upon profit, and for military invulnerability, based upon the threat of mutual annihilation...

...From the start of their ten-year affair, George Sand was almost exclusively a nurse-mother to Chopin--as she had previously been to Jules Sandean and Alfred de Musset~ratber than a lover, and her concurrent lesbian affair with the actress Marie Dorval has long been recognized by French scholars...

...JOHN B. SHEERIN Commonweal: 285...

...For so constricted was Chopin by his effeminacy and neurasthenia that he dared not act upon any sexual or patriotic impulses, but rather sublimated them in his music...

...The idea for the book, Cox tells us in the opening paragraph, "began the day Harry, Denise and Michael knocked on my front door...

...In the present biography, M. Gavoty rightly affirms that Chopin loved Konstancja "Not as a woman, but as a shadow or, rather, as an idea, as an excuse for music and nostalgia...

...Just as he in fact loved Poland, for all the legends to the contrary...

...About Chopin's music M. Gavoty offers only the most flatulent rhapsodizing--hardly attributable to Martin Sokolinsky's translation, I would think...

...Tu~JJ~l East: The Promise a#d Peril of the New OrJeJ.ta/ism HARVEY COX Simon and Schuster, $8.95 [492 pp] MICHAEL TRUE Turning East is a deceptively simple record of a Protestant minister's attempt to understand the turn toward neo-Orienta| religions by a significant number of young American adults and the rejection of "liberal" Christianity and Judaism that the movement implies...

...Whey know about Darwin, Freud, Marx, contraception, imperialism, and ennui...

...The text reads at times like a good novel or a convincing autobiography, never slick or "confessional," in the maudlin style that has come to dominate much religious writing, never vague or sentimental, even in his de, scriptions of intense religious experience...

...It is an eclectic style, combining journalistic survey and personal commentary, theological reflection and critical evaluation...

...This casual meeting led, with the help of Cox's students at Harvard Divinity School, to a serious investigation and, ultimately, to the author's fascination for and appreciation of what many Americans have found in nee-Oriental (with an emphasis upon nee-) religions and what the implications of that are for a believing Christian...

...As guides, we have the example of people from two historical periods with particular relevance to our own: (a) the first Christians, whose preChristian culture resembles our own post-Christian era...

...A discussion of Buddhism, for example, leads into a commentary on the limitations of Western psychology, with its emphasis upon "the ego, the id, the psyche, the secret-me-inside-with only peripheral interest directed toward the integral enmeshment of the self in its society, the cosmos, and the immense traceries within which it lives...

...Andr~ Maurois has suggested in his biography of Sand that Chopin and Delacroix, both sensitive, aristocratic dandies, were much closer to each other than to Sand, and Chopin's letters indicate that the two spent a great deal of time together...

...They were all members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, better known as the Hare Krishna movement, and I asked them to come in...

...and the need for Jesus--guru and teacher-as one who is able to impart spiritual guidance, because he or she has been through the process already...

...Decidedly not the case with Bach's or Stravinsky's music, for example...

...The especially marked dandyism in nineteenth century French literature and twentiothcentury British literature has been illuminated in Ellen Moers's The Dandy and Martin Green's Children ol the Sun, among other excellent culturalpsychological studies, and there is at least as prevalent a tradition of dandyism in music...