"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do."
— G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"
Do we suffer from a dearth of mystery in our modern world?
The question comes to mind as I wonder if much of the contemporary unhappiness we see all around us might not be attributable to a misplaced belief that we humans are capable of understanding everything under (and beyond) the sun. The prevailing secular worldview in the West places tremendous emphasis on reason and logic. As religious observance falls to levels not seen in the United States since the early 1800s, it seems that a kind of ill-defined “belief” in science is taking religion’s place.
The challenge with this approach to making sense of life, though, is that science was never developed to shape a world view.
Science is a tool for exploring our world, for answering specific questions about the observable universe.
It is most decidedly not a philosophy.
Science is great for asking (and often answering) “how” something works; it is not so good at answering “why” that something exists in the first place.
The very beginnings of the Judeo-Christian worldview that defined our culture until recently (and still casts a long shadow over it) start off with the Garden of Eden, in which mankind’s hubris at eating from the Tree of Knowledge leads him to imagine that it will make him like God.
Sophisticates have mocked this biblical tale for centuries now, and with science making an overwhelming case for evolution via natural selection, the notion of proto-parents Adam and Eve is not one that many people believe in - not even most Christians and Jews.
But the Israelites - and those who followed them, the diasporic Jews and the early Christians - did not teach that the Bible was a literal history. In fact, at the time, outside Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War,” there were few histories as we understand them today. (And few residents of ancient Israel would have had access to Thucydides anyway - or even known who he was.)
For most of Jewish and Christian existence, those who accept Scriptures as the inspired word of God understood that much of the Bible is allegory. That what is important aren’t dates and places, but the lessons imparted.
This is true for many other holy books in other faiths, too.
And what is consistent across most faiths isn’t just an acceptance of, but an overt embrace of mystery: That some things are knowable, and some things aren’t. They might frame it or understand it as God’s role vs. man’s role, but it amounted to the same lesson: Some mysteries are eternal.
Following the Renaissance and the explosion in our modern sciences, many things that were once mysteries have become knowable. Planets are not chariots of the gods, but large rocks like our own Earth (or gas giants, like Jupiter). Illness is caused by microscopic bacteria (and submicroscopic viruses), not exposure to night air.
And yet, for all our impressive gains in our knowledge, certain things remain unknowable. In fact, in an observation echoing Socrates two millennia ago, the more we learn the more we find out we don’t know.
How did the earliest life develop from primitive amino acids (which are common throughout the cosmos) into self-replicating, self-contained cellular beings? Why do galaxies rotate much faster than their observable mass would seem to indicate they should? Heck - even now, why do some viruses mutate rapidly (SARS-CoV-2, influenza) when others (polio, herpes) remain stable over thousands of generations?
But overriding all those specific questions - some of which may someday be known to our children and grandchildren - is the biggest of all: Why is there anything? Why our universe (or multiverse or omniverse)?
One need not believe in religion in order to accept mystery, of course. Making peace with the mysteries endemic to existence is no more than a decision, a way of approaching life.
As the Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton points out in the quote atop this piece, the difference isn’t so much between believers and nonbelievers as between poets and chess players.
This divide is perhaps most clearly delineated in pop culture in the “Star Trek” vs. “Star Wars” worlds.
“Star Wars” embraces mystery - most famously in the amorphous “Force” that permeates all life, binds all sentient beings together. It is never very clearly explained, but is accepted as nevertheless quite real. One guesses that poetry is big in rebel-held areas.
“Star Trek,” on the other hand, is largely a rationalist universe, personified by Mr. Spock, the chess-playing Vulcan science officer whose only devotion is to logic. When religion does occasionally make an appearance in the Star Trek universe, as with the Bajorans on “Deep Space Nine,” their faith in the Prophets is eventually explained as a misplaced and childlike devotion to another, more advanced species.
Every alien species - even the dreaded Borg - are eventually wholly understood and explained. Romulans, Klingons, Ferengi. There is no mystery; all is knowable if not already known.
In the Star Wars universe, all kinds of alien races show up that the humans interact with but don’t attempt to understand: the Jawas and Tusken Raiders of Tatooine, the Rodians (including Greedo, the bounty hunter) and the Gungans (Jar Jar Binks), among many, many others.
None of these literally hundreds of various (fictional) races in Star Wars are explained: They’re simply accepted as part of life. The humans in the Star Wars universe have made peace with the fact that the aliens are, well, alien. They trade with them, make alliances and war with them, but don’t particularly feel the need to understand them. (Not so different from the way the British and French interact in our own world.)
There are far fewer races in Star Trek - mere dozens, compared to the hundreds in the Star Wars canon. Which makes sense if you operate in an environment where mystery is viewed with suspicion. Why even introduce something you don’t have time to explain?
Perhaps these different approaches to making sense of life are part of the reason why “Star Wars” has become so much more popular than “Star Trek”: We intrinsically know that mystery is part of human existence.
The beauty of the Judeo-Christian worldview - and that of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and any belief in a higher being - is that mystery is inherent to the world. Our experiences, our senses tell us this - there are certain things that mortals simply cannot wrap our minds around.
And that that's okay.
Catholic writer Father Ron Rolheiser once wrote that our inner, unsatiable longings arise from the fact that we are finite beings living in an infinite universe. Our minds are simply incapable of comprehending the full scale of our universe (or, for believers, the God who created the universe).
Denying this can only lead to frustration.
When one accepts that mystery is part of life, learns to appreciate it, ah, then the beauty of life is truly accessible.
Of course, it takes a certain humility to accept mystery, a modesty that is not particularly in alignment with our current popular culture.
Still, perhaps a certain, targeted humility will suffice if we want to make peace with our place in this great, unknowable universe.
While sailing from France to the United States for a post-war lecture tour in 1946, novelist Albert Camus - a man of no small ego when it came to his writing - found himself mesmerized by the patterns of foam in the wake of the ship as he sat on the stern one evening:
“A slender moon gives the sky a light without brilliance which lights up the turbulent water with its reflection. Once again I look, as I have for years, at the designs that the foam and the wake make on the surface of the water, this lace which is incessantly made and unmade, this liquid marble ... and once more I look for the exact comparison that will hold for me this marvelous flowering of sea, water and light that has escaped me for so long now. Still in vain. For me, it’s a recurring symbol.”
Three years later, on a voyage to South America, he revisits his inability to describe the wake of a ship:
“After dinner, conversation, but I look at the sea and try once again to fix the image that I’ve been seeking for twenty years for these patterns and drawings made on the sea by the water thrown up by the stem. When I find it, it’ll be finished.”
And so while Camus was frustrated by his inability to solve the mystery of a ship’s wake, and not entirely at peace with it, he seems to have accepted that this mystery remained unknowable.
Maybe that is enough for all of us.
Shortly after I was hired as a copy editor at the old Oceanside Blade-Citizen in 1991 or ’92, the powers that be found out that I had written most of the unsigned editorials during a previous gig at the twice-weekly Chula Vista Star-News. I don’t remember the details, but somehow I became the opinion pages editor at a 35,000-circulation daily.
At the time, my duties basically involved editing the local free-lance opinion column each day (except Saturday - we had no Opinion page on Saturday), selecting the syndicated wire columnists and cartoon, reviewing the letters to the editor - and coming up with an unsigned editorial for Sunday.
Bill Missett, the oldest of the Missett brothers, was the editor in chief of the B-C. Tom Missett - who was, I think, the second oldest (and I apologize to their brothers Jim and Jack if I got that wrong) - was the publisher. In other words, Bill’s boss.
I’m sure that dynamic, of having to answer to your kid brother, was weird enough. But Bill was a bleeding-heart liberal, while Tom was a staunch conservative. I quickly learned that we only ran one editorial per week because finding even one issue on which they agreed was no easy task.
It was during this period that the Vista Unified School District became the center of a national media feeding frenzy when three openly evangelical Christian candidates were elected to the school board, and one of them said he wanted to have creationist books added to the school libraries as supplemental reading - and offered to donate said books.
Shortly after the election, the teachers’ union announced a recall effort around the issue of evolution. They argued that the new school board was going to replace evolution with creationism in the district’s curriculum. (That idea was never even proposed by any of the board members. The more relevant issue was that the new board majority wasn’t as keen to keep handing out raises when the district’s finances were rather iffy - but evolution is a better marketing campaign than raises. And it was only after the recall that we learned that, in fact, the recall effort was organized and launched the night of the original election, before these folks even had been sworn in.)
While the Blade-Citizen had not endorsed any of the evangelical candidates leading up to the election, we nevertheless opposed the recall on principle - namely, these people had barely taken office, had made no new policy decisions, and the voters had just elected them.
Monday morning after our editorial listing our reasons for opposing the recall was published, I received a phone call from one of the union officers. He immediately began yelling at me to the point I was holding the phone 4 or 5 inches from my head to keep my eardrum from being blown out.
For the first few minutes of this tirade, I kept cool - calmly replying, “Well, we don’t think they’ve done anything yet ... uh huh, uh huh ... yes, but we believe we should give them a chance ... uh huh, uh huh ... we think we ought to honor the voters’ wishes” and so on.
This seemed to infuriate him even more, and he started laying in with profanity: “I’m so sick of you bleeping Christians thinking you can shove your bleepity bleep religion down everyone’s throats.”
That just flipped my switch. We hadn’t even touched religion in our editorial, as it was irrelevant to the topic at hand.
That, and I don’t much care for being cussed out.
So I lit back into him with all the vehemence my Irish DNA and two years of listening to my Air Force ROTC drill instructors could bring to bear. I questioned his parentage, his manhood, his intelligence, his suitability to be around children in the classroom - pretty much his very humanity.
Oddly, this didn’t have the calming effect on him one might assume (although it probably occurred to him at some point in this exchange that perhaps he had miscalculated in assuming I was one of those peaceful evangelical Christian types).
By now, the managing editor, Rusty Harris, is rapidly dialing my extension so I’ll hear the ringing of an incoming call and put this caller on hold. I don’t even notice. Finally, Rusty - an easy-going but half-deaf Oklahoman by way of Texas, with the drawl to prove it - came over and gently took the telephone receiver out of my hand and placed it in the cradle, ending the call.
I looked around and noticed the entire newsroom is staring at me - and not particularly disapprovingly, either. After all, I’d done what every journalist has dreamt of doing - telling an annoying reader to take a long hike off a short pier, only not nearly so politely.
“Am I in trouble, boss?” I asked Rusty, fully expecting I might get fired for what was, after all, a pretty substantial loss of professional decorum by a senior editor.
“Jimbo,” Rusty said in that drawl, which I still miss. “Even I could hear every nasty thing he said to you across the room, and I didn’t even have my hearing aid turned up. We don’t pay you enough to put up with that kind of abuse. Now, you should have simply hung up on him - but no, you’re not in trouble.”
Then he turned, smiled his wicked smile he saved for appropriate moments like this, and said, “But I don’t think you’ll be winning the company Phone Courtesy Award this month.”
If I get to a point in life that I find myself downsizing my music collection to the bare essentials, the LPs will be limited to Basie and the Beatles. (The Sinatra reel to reels are also permanent keepers.)
It was the Beatles who first ignited my passion for listening to music - albeit a half-decade after they broke up (and only because a friend who heard me raving about a new Wings release pointed out, “You know, Paul was in another band before Wings”).
And it was hearing Basie in his final San Diego concert in the early 1980s which led me to four decades of writing about jazz and blues, Basie who opened my ears to music beyond the Top 40 rock and soul I’d been listening to up to that point. (And that only because my mom insisted I take the free tickets she was offering me, and my buddy Pardo who took the tickets from my mom, thanked her, and hauled me and our other roommate, Big Dan, to the Zoo for the concert - but that’s another story.)
One of the most popular acts of the Big Band era, Basie was also one of the few Big Band survivors still touring, recording and, well, creating when the Beatles hit the scene. The beauty of Basie’s particular genius was that he could adapt his band to a wide variety of settings without ever losing the essence of the Basie sound. When Basie backed Sinatra, it was as much a Sinatra session as Old Blue Eyes’ classic recordings with the orchestras of Axel Stordahl, Billy May, Gordon Jenkins or Nelson Riddle. And yet, it was also very much a Basie outing. He could go into the studio with Sammy Davis Jr. and help create an album that just dripped Sammy - but it was also a wholly Basie session.
And it’s not that his band was a bland chameleon that could fit in anywhere. As mentioned, there was a definite Basie “sound.” I think it was more that his arrangers and players were so confident, so comfortable in their abilities and talents, that, yeah, they’ll back Tony Bennett or Ella Fitzgerald, and adapt to each singer’s style - without ever worrying about losing their own identity.
Basie was riding at his highest post-World War II peak in 1966. His third and final album with Sinatra had just come out - “Sinatra at the Sands,” considered one of Frank’s finest recordings, with Quincy Jones handling arrangements for both the singer and the band. He’d also just done an album with Sammy Davis Jr., and another with soul singer Arthur Prysock. In ’63, he’d paired up with Ella Fitzgerald; the next year, with Sarah Vaughan. Basie’s was the band that singers came to.
And the Basie band wasn’t a group of unknowns - these guys were often stars in their own right, men who led their own bands, but came back to Basie to recharge, re-energize. Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis on tenor saw was a giant on the jazz scene; Sonny Payne as supple a drummer as ever sat behind a kit.
But if Basie was riding high in the mid-’60s, the Beatles were riding even higher. They were the hottest band on both sides of the Atlantic, bigger than Elvis, who had proven to be bigger than Sinatra - the original teeny-bop star.
And the Beatles were not only ruling the charts, they were writing most of their own songs - songs that were becoming cultural staples.
For this project, Basie turned to Chico O’Farrill as arranger - a band leader in his own right, a native of Cuba who worked primarily in the idiom of Latin jazz. It seemed an odd approach, to hire an Afro-Cuban maestro to adapt rock ’n’ roll for an iconic American big band.
As usual, though, Basie knew what he was doing.
“Basie’s Beatles Bag” is likely the greatest album of Beatles music by another artist. True, Booker T. & the MG’s issued their re-creation of “Abbey Road” as “McLemore Avenue” (the street in Memphis where the Stax studios they recorded at were located) in 1970, but that stuck fairly closely to the Beatle’s own original arrangements.
O’Farrill and Basie approached each song on “Basie’s Beatles Bag” as if they were simply reading the sheet music. It’s a re-imagination, not a re-creation; homage more than tribute.
Trading the vocal refrains between the trumpets and saxes over an initially restrained rhythm section on the opening track, “Help,” sets it up as a Swing Era flag-waver. Basie takes a couple bars on piano, then O’Farrill starts playing the brass and reed sections off each other.
And while Basie rarely played organ on record (despite having grown up playing organ to provide background accompaniment to silent movies in his teens), his opening vamp on “Can’t Buy Me Love” turns Lennon-McCartney into pure supper club magic while Norman Keenan’s walking bass lines provide just the right punctuation before the horns take over the lead.
The trombones and tenor saxes harmonizing on “Michelle” atop Basie’s plinking out the lead on piano brings out new sides to the song that I doubt Lennon or McCartney even imagined were there.
Muted trumpets take the opening theme on “A Hard Day’s Night” before the trombones and tenor saxes add some punch. Twenty years earlier, this would have been a ballroom fave among dancers.
“Yesterday” is by many accounts the most covered song in history. While never straying from the famed melody, O’Farrill still manages to completely reinvent it. Basie’s theremin-like noodling on Wurlitzer organ underpins a relaxed yet haunting vocal by Bill Henderson. It is by far the most interesting cover of “Yesterday” I’ve yet heard - the best version not recorded by Paul himself.
These are just my own personal favorites from this album: It also includes “I Wanna Be Your Man,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “All My Loving” and more.
If I ever get 5 minutes with Paul McCartney, the only question I want to ask him is “What did you and John think when you heard ‘Basie’s Beatles Bag’?”
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