An American Opera in Prose

By Harold C. Hayes

An American Opera in Prose replaces music with the prosody and imagery of language to create episodes in which the chance encounters and conversations of diverse characters converge upon one emerging theme: the wisdom of bringing a biological perspective to the problems of life. The author applies the rigor of philosophical thought to problems he sees as fundamental to our time, in a style more shamanistic than professorial.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450033565

Harold C. Hayes

Harold Hayes grew up in an Air Force family (his father was a Tuskegee Airman), and lived on the east and west coasts of the U.S., and in Japan, France, and Germany. He graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in philosophy and served in the Peace Corps in Thailand. He has an M.A. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a concentration in medical philosophy and medical psychology. A member of the International Academy of Arms and the U.S. Fencing Coaches Association, he currently owns and directs Pacific Fencing Club in Alameda, CA, and teaches fencing at Mills College in Oakland.

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AN AMERICAN OPERA IN PROSE

FAIR COPY

Harold C. Hayes

Copyright © 2010 by Harold C. Hayes.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

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CONTENTS

ACT ONE

The Café

ACT TWO

Sun’s Story

ACT THREE

The Exegesis

ACT FOUR

The Arcanum

ACT FIVE

A Desperate Question

ACT SIX

In the Park

ACT SEVEN

At Small’s Table

Scene One: By Fire

Scene Two: Before the Night

ACT EIGHT

There Was a Time

ACT NINE

A Dance in the Street

ACT TEN

Perchance to Dream

ACT ELEVEN

The Symposium

Scene One: Prelude

Scene Two: Symposium

ACT TWELVE

Home (A Soliloquy)

Jubilee

PREFACE

The present work is philosophy masquerading as fiction. I will avow that from the beginning, in order to relieve the reader from discovering, gradually and unexpectedly, that the entertainment to be gotten from the story will at least be matched by the effort required to read it. It is a didactic work. Why an opera? Because opera is extravagant. It has great freedom of conception. While it has its plot, the opera is devoted to its episodes, because there is where the music is. And the music is the point. The present work is episodic, but there is no music—only words, words: prose, of a sort.

I have indulged, responsibly, I think, in the art of language, as a composer would indulge in the art of music. In opera, why do the characters sing, when they could, as well, speak? Because it is opera. Though the characters in the present work do speak, I have allowed them the extravagance of language wherever they have wished to have it, as a musician might condone (and revel in) the extravagance of song. I have allowed them some redundancy, so that ideational themes might be explicated in various colorations, as musical themes might develop through the voices and devices of various episodes. Not every opera is for everyone, and the present work, alas, may not be for everyone. But I hope to have reached a level of theme that is universal enough to deserve the interest of a readership inclined to think philosophically about things.

And what is philosophy? The German philosopher, Nicolai Hartmann, once wrote, The life of both the individual and the community is not molded by their mere needs and fortunes, but also at all times by the strength of dominant ideas. Ideas are spiritual powers. They belong to the realm of thought. But thought has its own discipline and its own critique—philosophy. Therefore, philosophy is called upon to include within its scope the pressing problems of the contemporary world and to cooperate in the work that needs to be done.[1] I agree with this.

Though I have not undertaken a formal critique, I have taken care to exercise due discipline in composing a cogent thesis. That said, I have, however, kept more to the artistic than to the expository genre, in the interest of making a more readable book. Accordingly, I have tendered this thesis in an emerging, adumbrated state, like the themes implicit in life’s very own episodes. My thesis is about the American condition as I understand it, and I mean to point directly at the two-thousand-pound bison in the parlor: the endemic sorrows that have always trailed our nation’s prosperity. There is an alternative to those sorrows, I believe, and I hope to do my part toward discovering it by offering, not a solution or a programme, but some terms—merely terms—in which to think.

I began this book at the time I did, for personal reasons: it was a time for return to vocation. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford University, and as a graduate student at the University of Toronto and in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I didn’t pursue the vocation that usually follows such preparation, which would be teaching in the academy. As a way of life, that could have its charms, but I had lost confidence in the Western intellectual tradition, which, despite the truly remarkable achievements it has produced, did not advise effectively against monstrous debacles of human behavior, represented most prominently by slavery, colonialism, holocaust, and world wars. Perhaps I was expecting too much of so much. Be that as it may, I opted out and chose a profession in which I could occupy myself with concrete, practical work. I took the required courses and examinations and became a fencing master, a coach. In that learned profession I have had some success, which isn’t relevant to describe in this place, except to say that in teaching a wide variety of people to perform technically and creatively in the face of constant, absolute, and immediate reality checks, I have learned a great deal about personality, performance, and perspective.

Having reached a point of maturity in that profession, I felt again the calling I originally had, for philosophy—only, my idea of the philosophical vocation had evolved. I still could not, authentically, fold my work into the existing library of academic tomes and periodicals—no matter how much I admired their rigor and insight—despite their failure to instruct. I needed another voice, to harmonize with the persistent voices in my memory, the voices of my ancestors, who spoke frankly of this world, the world where we all live. I heard those voices carried in my parents’ words, and in the words of my aunts and uncles, and of family friends, the closest of whom happened to be among that unique group of individuals known as the Tuskegee Airmen, of whom my father was one. These are thoughtful people, and about as realistic as one can be—realistic about the American condition, realistic about performance, realistic about reality, which is sometimes around the corner from the place where power is swarming. About what would I write, philosophically? About the concerns that are implicit in the deep structures of personal and social consciousness, to indicate them yet again, as every generation has to. For me, this has been more the work of a shaman than a professor.

It was only natural that I should turn to art for my instrument, because the dominant idea of the culture in which I lived during my formative years was freedom. I was party to layer upon layer of obstruction of freedom, and layer upon layer of consequences in lives. But I was witness also to the complete exercise of freedom—made even more precious by its general obstruction—in art, especially music, dance, and literature, and in the crafts of the home. I was witness also, indirectly, to perseverance in exercising the immanent personal freedom to excel, in the face of vile genius dedicated to one’s failure. That perseverance, and the knowledge of excellence with which the men and women of the colored portion of the segregated United States Armed Services brought themselves and one another through the war, is exemplified in many things, including art, such as helped bring the whole country through the war, in the form of jazz and swing, and plain truth discourse.

By coincidence, the present work was completed during the many months leading up to the election of the forty-fourth president of the United States. The enormous geopolitical and economic zeitgeist of that time drew my attention daily to the radio and other forums, and intensified my interest in defining a perspective from which divergences of political designs from fundamental necessities of life would appear as obvious as those necessities themselves. It would seem that detecting exactly such divergences is about the most reliable vigilance a population can exercise over public policy when crafted information and focused beguilements are offered to them by the higher machinations of party and oligarchic government, to assure them of political designs from whose creation they are systematically excluded. If political power is ever malignant, its first design must be to obfuscate the obvious. Any number of people can be herded to any destination in a twilight of vague concepts and relinquished vision. It remains perennially for the philosopher to work at grounding the concepts of public discourse in the realities of life as actually lived, and for the artist to work at causing us to know, and to see that life, as actually lived. If there is a common ground upon which we all exist, it certainly must be life itself. The present work is meant to be a reminder of that reality, and certainly an admonishment to take heed of it in all choices—in other words, to maintain fundamentally a biological perspective in personal and public policies.

H.H

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank the following friends for their patience, encouragement, and helpful comments on reading the early stages of the manuscript for this work: John Burke, Marci Dillon, Kathleen Gillis, Barbara Jones, Patrick Jones, Regina Stadnik, and Emily Vanderlaan. Thanks especially to Dr. Marion Dietrich for extensive comments and treasured fellowship throughout the creative process. Responsibility for the philosophical content of this work is entirely my own.

ACT ONE

THE CAFÉ

We enter the café and begin immediately to enjoy the place, because it is a good café—well-designed, and well-made. It is the universal, archetypal domestic common, the café found on all the continents, in all the lands, of Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, the Eurasian subcontinent, the Pacific islands, the Atlantic Islands. It has all these characters, while it is located in the great American metropolis, at a certain address, in a certain building, on a certain piece of land—land immemorial. We may have food. We may have drink. We may make ourselves comfortable for a while.

Our Character is seated at a table. It is his table. He spends a great deal of time at this table, where he writes and sometimes meets and speaks with people. He brings his work with him in a scuffed but well-made leather briefcase each morning about an hour after the café opens. He eats breakfast here and reads the newspaper as he drinks his coffee. Then he takes out a few papers, the previous day’s work which he has printed out at home, and reads them over, making corrections and notes with a .5-mm pencil. He might step out for a while after looking over these pages, leaving everything tucked into the briefcase on the chair where he will find it upon his return, under the watchful eye of the cashier.

Our Character likes very much to walk a few blocks near this time in the morning and sit a while in the park, or stroll around its paths, then return to the café, turn on his portable computer, and work until well after lunch. During lunch, of course, the café becomes quite busy. In his corner, our Character is hardly noticed. He is engrossed in his work, and works at ease—almost, it might seem, at leisure. He types awhile, sits back awhile, sips a little coffee, or water, or lemonade in the summer (a cognac in the holidays), then resumes on the computer. He keeps a plain screen.

He is not at the café every day, though he is there most days except Sundays. When he is not at the café, he may be at a library or somewhere else altogether. In the late afternoon, close to evening, he leaves and walks home. A few days a week he returns later, eats a salad or a dessert, and works further, unless there is conversation, as there frequently is, this being a favorite meeting place for academics and artists, a place where you bring your houseguests for a couple of hours on one of your evenings out with them, after a concert, or on an afternoon for a good long talk. If conversation comes his way, generally he willingly joins in; it is something he likes very much to do, for though he is solitary, he is at bottom gregarious.

Our Character is an African-American man, heavyset, dark-skinned, with strong eyeglasses. He has a short beard, just past a stubble, and not much longer hair. He wears wool. Even in the summer, his pants are wool of light weight, with a cotton shirt striped with braces. Especially in the winter, he wears a sport coat of dark wool tweed, if not a felted Scottish woolen sweater of comparable warmth. Though he is undoubtedly an active individual, he has about him a sedentary quality.

One quiet morning, we enter the café and take a seat at one of the tables. Because there happens to be no one else in the café at this time, we notice him. He is working: typing, pausing, typing more, and so forth. We watch him a little. He looks our way. We nod and smile. He nods. He doesn’t smile. We turn our attention to our conversation, you and I, and glance over at him from time to time. We become curious about what he might be working on. Part of that curiosity, we discover in our quiet conversation about him, is envy. Wouldn’t you like to have leisure to work on something for any length of time you wished, in a comfortable café like this—perhaps working on a novel or an essay or a piece of freelance journalism? Does he actually have that kind of situation?

Unknown to us, unknown to him, unknown to anyone, a fateful moment gathers like a flock of predatory crows upon the day, and in its midst we begin to move as if according to the steps of an arcane dance. Something is about to happen. The crows of the moment raise an excited noise; we hear and know nothing, neither he nor we. As we speculate about his work, it occurs to one of us: why don’t you ask him? All becomes quiet. This is supposed to happen. Excuse me, sir. Are you a journalist? The crows exult in a noisy flurry of sudden flight, straightaway into the distance to diminish beyond the horizon of hours eternal. In the café, we are alone.

Our Character looks up from his work, assesses us with interest until the last crow is gone, and confides, I’m doing the work. He looks at us, allowing the sound of his words to soak into our minds. He watches it happen. I’m doing the work.

How am I supposed to know what the work is? But I do. Of course I do.

No sooner did he say that, than I knew what he was talking about, by the way he said it, like the salt in pass the salt. The work. I understand. We both do.

And yet, there is more to say. He says, There’s work to do.

I say, What’s the work?

He says, Man, that’s the question. We have a laugh. Then his demeanor slides easily into a calm seriousness as he continues. "That’s what’s fundamental, and that’s the first thing