A Quickening of the Heart: Crossings into the Republic of Love, Reflections on Laurie Anderson’s The Republic of Love by Wanda Sabir

 

A Quickening of the Heart: Crossings into the Republic of Love

Reflections on Laurie Anderson’s The Republic of Love
by Wanda Sabir

Official promotional artwork for Laurie Anderson & Sexmob, The Republic of Love Tour, Curran Theatre, San Francisco. Promotional art: folkYEAH!/ATG.

I am so excited to be at this Laurie Anderson concert!

That is what I wrote before The Republic of Love started at the Curran Theatre Friday night.

I am no longer leaving myself behind. I am making myself happy. Making plans, doing the work, taking care of myself—all of me.

When I think about the whole day now, though, I realize the performance had already started before Laurie Anderson walked onto the stage. Or maybe I had already entered the ritual before I entered the theater.

Friday morning I was in a Spirit Rock course with Jill Satterfield, Anxiety: It’s Not All in Your Mind. One of the practices we did was alternate nostril breathing. I had known about the practice before, but I had never really practiced it this way. This time I didn't have to count.

That was liberating.

Usually, when I am doing one of those counted breathing practices—inhale four, hold seven, exhale eight—my mind gets involved. Was that seven? Did I inhale for four? What number am I on? Suddenly I am managing the breath instead of breathing.

This time I could just breathe through the right nostril, pause, exhale through the left, reverse, and follow my body instead of numbers. Releasing the counting took me out of my head and brought me back into my body, which was the whole point.

Jill also defined mettā in a way I had never heard before. She said mettā literally means “a quickening of the heart.”

I like that so much.

Usually we learn mettā through the familiar phrases: May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be free from suffering. Those are beautiful wishes, but language can become mechanical if we aren't careful. A quickening of the heart is a feeling. Something moves. Something responds.

After the workshop I went to my weekly acupuncture appointment. I have been going for a couple of months now, and I asked my practitioner, Is this working?

Oh yes, she said. You look much more relaxed.

Maybe it was the four hours today, I told her.

She laughed.

I hadn't eaten enough, though, and that is another thing I need to put back into my schedule now that autumn is here. The autumn equinox had just passed. The season was turning. Taking care of myself also means remembering to eat. Spiritual practice does not replace lunch.

This body needs food. It needs water. It needs breath and rest.

And I am especially grateful for this body right now.

This is my blue year, dedicated to my kidneys, and it is also my Gratitude @ Five year—five years since my cancer surgery.

I even bought a blue car in December. I am literally swimming in water on wheels.

I had received a chronic kidney disease diagnosis, and that frightened me. Then my numbers changed. Within a remarkably short period of time, I was no longer in that category. My testing was normal, and months later it was still normal.

Wow.

The body is magnificent—its ability to heal, recover, rejuvenate and restore itself.

I don't have any illusions that I will live in this house forever. None of us will. But I am so grateful to be living here right now in this flesh body. I am grateful to my kidneys. I am grateful to my heart, working hecka hard every minute to keep this entire operation together. I am grateful to my lungs, to the ancestors, to the earth and air and water and fire, and to all the feelings and matter that went into my literal manufacture.

And that manufacture isn't finished. Every day I have to eat. Every moment I have to breathe. This body continues to be renewed and restored for as long as it can carry me.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Someone said, “Thank you is a prayer.”

I love that.

Later I was on the bus and BART heading from the East Bay into San Francisco, listening virtually to a CIIS Public Programs event that was actually happening live in San Francisco at that very moment: On Weaving Ritual into Everyday Life: An Evening with Tracee Stanley and Niralli D’Costa. Stanley was talking about her book Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit and about bringing ritual into ordinary life.

I wasn't physically sitting with the audience, but I was entering San Francisco while they were gathered there. I was moving toward the Curran while listening in real time.

There was even a guided meditation.

I thought that was wonderful. Who expects to be on a bus and BART heading toward a concert while simultaneously participating in a meditation and a conversation on ritual taking place in the very city you are entering?

Tracee Stanley talked about releasing distractions and reclaiming our attention. She talked about creating our own rituals and about the importance of ritual at transitions.

Thresholds. Doorways.

At every threshold, pause and ask:

What do I want to carry forward? What do I want to leave behind?

I really liked that.

I was literally in transit while listening to a conversation about transitions.

We are always crossing something, aren't we?

Life isn't a straight line. It feels more like an intersection of cosmic ideas—as small as a grain of sand, as large as the rock I love that attracts the waters of my heart.

I think about portals too. Ancestors are portals. Memories are portals. Art can be a portal. Places can become portals. To me a portal is a place of transmission. Knowledge, memory, love, grief, story and presence move through.

As the bus carried me toward San Francisco, the sun was setting, and I happened to look out the window and see the moon.

Oh my goodness. Look at the moon.

She was full, big and beautiful, an orangish color against the evening sky. I hadn't gone looking for her. I just happened to look up.

The moon returns inside while Anderson plays her virtual violin. The Republic of Love. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

That is attention too, isn't it? Maybe that is also ritual: noticing what has arrived.

By the time I reached the Curran, I was still listening to Tracee Stanley and Niralli D’Costa. Stanley talked about dharma as that which nourishes and sustains us and asked us to look at our lives—jobs, careers, commitments—and ask, Is this nourishing and sustaining? She spoke about personal and collective dharma, gratitude rituals, geography, noticing who shares the spaces where we live, and even growing an ancestral herb.

I have to think about that ancestral herb. What would that be on my motherline? What did the women grow, cook with, steep, rub on the body, keep near the house?

All of that was entering the theater with me.

I had not been to the Curran in decades. I remembered coming there when I was a student at UC Berkeley studying Ibsen in Comparative Literature. We were reading a collection of his plays, and I came to the Curran to see either Hedda Gabler or A Doll's House. I honestly don't remember which one now, but when I walked into the theater Friday night, that younger Wanda walked in with me.

This is what I mean when I talk about places as portals. You enter a building and another time becomes present.

I looked up at that gorgeous ceiling and chandelier. The columns, paintings, red carpets, blue, gold. I took pictures and zoomed in so I could really see the details.

Inside the Curran Theatre before the performance. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

I was seated in the accessible seating, and I really liked my chair. It was more comfortable and much easier to get up from. The drummer was partially obscured from where I sat, but I could see most of the musicians.

Accessibility has become part of the way I participate in media now because of my audio description training, and The Republic of Love struck me as an extraordinarily accessible performance.

Laurie did not depend upon one sensory pathway to communicate an idea. Huge images appeared behind her. Words moved across the screen, sometimes repeating. Laurie read the words aloud. She named people and told stories. Image, text, speech, sound, music and body were all working together. There were multiple ways into the piece.

And the musicians were phenomenal.

Laurie was joined by Sexmob and guests, and these were not musicians sitting quietly behind a storyteller. They were part of the storytelling. Steven Bernstein was on trumpet; Briggan Krauss on saxophone; Doug Wieselman on guitar and woodwinds; Tony Scherr on bass; Kenny Wollesen on drums and percussion; and Mazz Swift and Christina Courtin played violin and sang. Laurie herself was another percussionist of sorts with all her electronics.

The sound was huge.

Steven Bernstein on trumpet with members of the ensemble. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

I couldn't see Kenny Wollesen well from where I was sitting, and I also couldn't see Mazz Swift from that part of the stage, but I could certainly hear all that was happening. The musicians moved between instruments and textures so fluidly that sometimes I wasn't even sure where a sound was coming from. Wieselman moved between guitar and woodwinds, including that wonderfully deep clarinet sound. There was also this huge saxophone—or what looked huge from where I sat. Swift and Courtin's violins and voices added another whole layer.

And then there was this long, haunting trumpet solo.

Steven Bernstein had been onstage just behind Laurie playing trumpet throughout the evening, so I knew who he was. What surprised me was where he suddenly was. Somehow he had moved over to the part of the stage that was harder for me to see. I don't know how he got over there.

The stage had gotten dark, and at first he was almost a silhouette. Then that eerie, echoing trumpet stretched out into the theater as the light came up around him. It was hecka beautiful.

When the solo ended, he moved back toward the ensemble.

Later, near the end of the concert, I watched him take on another role, cueing and directing the musicians as the sound gathered momentum and the photographs and names moved across the screen behind them.

That was one of the things that made the ensemble so phenomenal. They were not only strong individual players; they were shaping the movement of the whole piece together.

What a band.

At the beginning Laurie also showed us some of the people who were going to be part of the discourse—thinkers, artists, teachers and beloveds whose counsel she would draw upon in constructing this Republic of Love.

I don't want to call them “voices” because that isn't quite what they were. Some may have literally appeared through recordings or songs, but many didn't. I think of them as a council.

Gertrude Stein. Bob Dylan. Allen Ginsberg. Pema Chödrön. Her husband, Lou Reed. Her dog. Friends, teachers, artists, beloveds. Some living, some dead.

They offered counsel.

What principles would need to be present in a Republic of Love?

Maybe every republic needs a declaration. We have a Declaration of Independence. What would a Declaration for a Republic of Love say?

Laurie gave us some possibilities.

We don't rank love.

I loved that.

She spoke with Chicago pride about the Pope—“Bob”—and challenged the idea that love should operate in concentric circles: family first, then neighbors, then city, then country, while everybody else sits farther and farther away from the center.

No.

We don't rank love.

Then there were the three rules Laurie and Lou Reed arrived at:

Don't be afraid of anyone.

Get a really good bullshit detector.

Be really, really tender.

Sounds like the beginning of a constitution to me.

And maybe that first principle is not telling us that fear never appears. Fear is part of being alive. The question is whether we let fear govern us.

We can respond in fear, or we can respond with love.

I like with love better than “out of love.” People have justified all kinds of things by saying they did them out of love. To act with love asks something different of us. What quality is present in the action? Is there care? Tenderness? Recognition of another person's humanity? Are we helping, or are we simply reacting to our own fear?

Laurie told a story that gave this idea a body.

She was in Frankfurt after performing a solo show. She went back to her hotel and tried to go to bed, but there was something happening downstairs. She got dressed again and went to investigate. When she reached the gathering she realized she was underdressed. People were in elegant evening clothes, but it wasn't exactly a party. They weren't down there dancing.

She asked what was happening.

It was a fundraiser for New York firefighters after September 11—to help replace equipment lost in the response and to help the firefighters and their families.

Frankfurt. New York. Across an ocean.

Something terrible had happened in one city, and hearts quickened in another.

That story stayed with me because Laurie had also been talking about borders. National borders were closing, she said, barriers were being erected between countries, and yet cities remained connected to cities. As an artist she doesn't necessarily think, I'm going to Germany; she thinks about the city she is going to. There is an urban circuit, a cultural network carried through music, dance, fashion, film and the visual arts, almost like a Silk Road that artists travel. It is important, she said, to keep that circuit open.

I love that.

And the Frankfurt story shows what can travel along that circuit besides art.

Care can travel. Compassion can travel. Love can travel city to city.

Imagine how different our responses to suffering might be if the first question were not, What force can we deploy? but, How can we help? What does this person, this community, this nation need? What would it mean to respond with love instead of allowing fear to decide what happens next?

Pema Chödrön was also one of the people pictured at the beginning. I was right when I first thought the image was of a woman. I know her work—I have her books and her Compassion Cards—so recognizing her among Laurie’s council delighted me.

Later Laurie shared a teaching from Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche about practicing how to feel sadness without actually becoming sad. We don't pretend the suffering isn't there. There are too many terrible things happening in the world for that. We acknowledge them without allowing sadness to swallow us whole.

Maybe that belongs in the declaration too.

Then there was the technology.

Wow.

Laurie touched her body and I heard electronic sound amplified from her gestures. I immediately thought: Hambone.

That was hecka important to me.

Hambone is us. It is an African and African American body-percussion tradition, the body carrying rhythm when perhaps there was no drum, or when the body itself was the drum. Laurie was riffing on that tradition. She had mechanized it, electronically amplified it, sent it through circuitry, but I could hear what was underneath.

The body as percussion. The body as instrument.

She mechanized Hambone, but she didn't erase it.

That was us in there.

Then she played what looked like an invisible violin, but she really was playing through electronic circuitry. I didn't know that either.

Laurie Anderson playing violin. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

She is such a genius.

Meanwhile, all through the concert I was going back and forth with AI on my phone.

Who is this?

What did she mean by that?

What is SI?

I knew what AI was. SI was new to me, so I looked it up: Synthetic Intelligence.

Who wrote “Language is a Virus”?

So there I was consulting artificial intelligence in real time while Laurie Anderson was onstage talking about synthetic intelligence, automated language, William Burroughs and Gertrude Stein.

Talk about a loop.

Laurie called Stein a kind of mother of AI, while I was asking AI what Laurie meant by SI.

That's funny.

And somehow it fits.

Technology in Laurie's hands didn't remove the body. It amplified it. A touch became sound. Gesture became music. The invisible violin became audible. And an African diasporic body-percussion form could still be heard beneath electronic circuitry.

She also introduced Mazz Swift, whom I began researching during the performance. I became fascinated by their work with Sankofa and ancestral music: going backward to retrieve what is necessary for the present.

Fetch it.

That is Sankofa.

Go back and get what we need—not nostalgia, but resource. Memory. Spiritual technology.

I realized Laurie was doing something like that all evening too. She was fetching people, teachings, memories and stories.

She told us about her uncle Allen, who came back from the war in France traumatized, before PTSD had been named that way. As a child she heard him screaming night after night. France became, in the imagination of young Laurie, the place where something terrible had happened to her uncle.

And then one day, after years, he stopped screaming. He came downstairs. He went out. He got a job and eventually married and had a family.

That story stayed with me.

What crosses a threshold with us?

Sometimes we get to choose what to carry. Sometimes we don't. Trauma crosses too. Memory crosses.

But so does life.

Laurie kept changing the scale of things. One human being. A family. A city. A nation. The entire Earth.

There was that huge image of the planet rotating. Earth—giant, magnificent, and yet home.

She sang about home.

There was water too. Rain on glass. Rain on trees, almost a glade. And then floodwater.

The flood sequence was long, and I thought about Mississippi, New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. I didn't take pictures during that part. I didn't want to live with those images afterward.

Sometimes witnessing is enough. You don't have to possess everything you see.

Later there was openness again, something that felt like hope. Not pretending the flood didn't happen, but not drowning forever either.

Earlier that day Jill had given me that definition of mettā: a quickening of the heart.

After the concert I saw a man I think I had also seen earlier in the week near the Opera House. His body is permanently bent over, almost as though he is bowing to the earth. He cannot look straight ahead. His eyes necessarily face the ground.

It was cold.

I wondered where he was going and whether he had shelter, and I sent him a little mettā.

Not a mechanical recitation. A quickening of the heart.

I had seen him. Something in me responded.

Maybe that is citizenship in a Republic of Love too.

On my way toward BART I heard people talking about the concert. Years ago you could recognize who had attended the same performance because people carried programs. You saw that program in somebody's hand and immediately knew: Oh, you were there too!

And I would start a conversation because, of course, I do those things.

Now we don't necessarily have that physical object identifying us as part of the temporary community, but I heard people talking, and The Republic of Love was still moving through the streets.

The concert had ended, but it hadn't stopped.

At the end of the performance, Laurie brought everything back into the body.

She invited us to do Tai Chi.

Twenty-one movements.

The whole theater was moving: people in front, people farther back, people upstairs in the balcony where I had once sat in the late 1970s. Bodies moving together.

Laurie talked about the forms and how Lou Reed, who practiced Tai Chi seriously, had helped give the complicated movements simpler names that were easier to remember. One became “carrying the pizza.” Another carried the reminder: have no weapons.

And there was something else in what she was teaching that stayed with me: you don't have to know a practice perfectly before you begin.

You can go through the motions. You can rehearse the movement.

At first it may feel unfamiliar, even artificial. But if there is sincerity there, if the practice resonates with your heart, repetition changes you.

I think of that as embodied rehearsal.

The body can practice something before the mind is completely comfortable with it. Eventually what felt borrowed begins to belong to you.

That is what had happened with my breathing that very morning. I practiced the form until I could stop thinking about the form and simply breathe.

Mettā is like that too. We begin with words somebody teaches us—May you be happy. May you be safe—and perhaps one day the words become more than words. The heart quickens.

Maybe tenderness has to be rehearsed too. Maybe not ranking love takes practice. Maybe nonviolence takes practice. Maybe responding with love rather than allowing fear to govern us takes practice.

A Republic of Love would not exist simply because its citizens agreed that love was a good idea.

We would have to practice living there.

My day had begun with breath practice designed to take me out of my head and into my body, and the performance ended with an entire theater practicing movement together.

Final bows at the Curran. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Afterward I turned to one of the security women standing nearby and told her how lovely it had been. She said Laurie had done something similar the last time she was there.

“You've seen her before?”

Oh yeah.

And immediately I thought: Oh my goodness. She might come back.

Return.

I think about returns a lot lately. Endings that aren't always endings. Doors that close and then open again. Artists we encounter more than once. Places we return to carrying different versions of ourselves.

I first encountered Laurie Anderson's Songs from the Bardo maybe six years ago during one of the Sunday gatherings I was attending. A therapist whose husband had just died chose not to cancel her presentation, and the gathering became a reflection on death and how death isn't necessarily something to fear. Someone in a breakout room mentioned the bardo and Laurie Anderson and shared information in the chat. I was doing what I always do—looking things up while listening—and encountered those gorgeous images from Grace Cathedral and Laurie's work.

Oh my goodness, so beautiful.

That work stayed with me. It opened a discourse with my soul about death, impermanence and the other side.

I have had my own close encounters with mortality since then, so I have fewer illusions. But I also have a lot of gratitude.

Before I left home Friday evening, a package had arrived in the mail.

bell hooks.

Communion: The Female Search for Love.

It was the last book I needed to complete the trilogy with All About Love and Salvation: Black People and Love. I couldn't even get the stiff packaging open because I had to leave for the concert.

And then I went to something called The Republic of Love.

Come on now.

Sometimes the ancestors are not subtle.

bell hooks talks about love. Martin King imagined the Beloved Community. Thích Nhất Hạnh built Plum Village. Pema Chödrön teaches compassion. Mingyur Rinpoche teaches a relationship to suffering that does not require despair. Cornel West connects justice and love. Laurie Anderson gathers a council.

Different traditions. Different languages. Different forms.

Yet sometimes I think the good people—the people who pay attention, the people of conscience—keep arriving at some of the same places.

How do we live together? How do we stop abandoning one another? How do we stop abandoning ourselves? How do we remain tender? How do we remember? How do we pay attention?

Late that night I finally crossed back into the East Bay. It was windy and hecka cold, and we had quite a while to wait for the AC Transit bus.

The driver had gone away to do whatever he needed to do during his break. Then he came back while there was still time left before departure and opened the doors so we could sit inside.

The heater wasn't on.

It didn't matter.

It was so much better than standing out there in that wind.

Such a small kindness, yet that is what love looks like too. Someone notices that other people are cold and opens a door.

There was that threshold again, but this time it wasn't metaphorical. A door opened and we stepped from the cold into shelter.

And now this whole weekend continues. Tomorrow I am going to the Monterey Jazz Festival, and then I will drive back and go hiking at Point Lobos.

More music. More landscape. More crossings.

The autumn equinox has just passed. The full moon was hanging over my journey into San Francisco. John Coltrane's centennial birth week is here. I am in this flesh body that has carried me through illness and recovery and five years of gratitude, and I am not leaving myself behind anymore.

I am making plans. I am going places. I am feeding myself—literally and otherwise.

I am alive, and it feels like a good time to be alive.

Maybe gratitude itself is a portal. Maybe “thank you” really is a prayer.

And maybe every time the heart quickens toward another being—an ancestor, a stranger, the moon, a musician, a bus driver, a teacher, a tired miraculous body, this beautiful Earth—we find ourselves crossing another threshold into the Republic of Love. The band heads to Santa Cruz Saturday night to a sold-out engagement.