Chapter One

This email exchange between Eve Beglarian, in New York, and Linda Norton*, in Berkeley, took place in March and April 2017.

Collaborating is my natural state of working. Every piece is a collaboration. “Pump Music” is about a love affair with the hand pump at Wanagan’s Landing. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is a collaboration with a long-dead British guy [William Blake]. Whitman was collaborating with all of America. He is most fully himself when he is embracing the whole country in some amazing oceanic enthusiasm. 

It maybe sounds corny to say this straight out, but I really do feel that art is the mechanism for bringing us together, for bridging the gulfs that exist between us. For me, the core experience of making something is making a bridge between me and not-me, so I guess it makes sense that collaborating with others would feel like the natural extension of that. The people I’ve worked with are not me, but as we work together we find a way to think together, to make something new together, and that intimacy, that bridging of the distance between us gets embedded in the work and brings texture and meaning and depth. There is wonder and energy in the distances between us, and if I have the humility and the confidence to know my own strengths and weaknesses, I can then be open to the strengths and weaknesses of others. I think my most important strength is my comfort with being a beginner. It means I don’t have to defend myself. Every real collaboration starts from ignorance: we don’t yet know what we can make together until we make it.

The first time I worked with Lee Breuer, a fresh young conscientious stage manager had been assigned to the project, and that first day she said to Lee, “Please let me know your prop list as soon as you can so I can get to work on gathering what’s needed.” And Lee said to her, with a certain amount of heat, “If I knew the prop list I need on the first day of rehearsal, we would have no need to rehearse.”

One of the interesting things about the WPA is that it expanded an individual artist’s work into different fields: Eudora Welty was hired to make photographs of River Country Mississippi; John Lomax, the ethnomusicologist, collected ex-slave narratives. Part of what I like about the WPA metaphor is that it expands the idea of a composer's job way beyond sitting in a room writing music. I'm doing documentary work of some kind. Investigative reporting? Anthropology? But from the perspective of an artist, not a journalist or social scientist. So the outcome becomes “In and Out of the Game” instead of a monograph or an article. 

This next project takes that urge a step further. It will be based on women’s stories connected to Vicksburg in different moments: Civil War 1860s, Jim Crow 1910s, Civil Rights 1960s, Trumpistan 2010s. There’s a huge amount of reading and research for the older stories, and interviewing and building relationships for the more recent ones. The reading and research and interviewing and relationship-building doesn’t look like composing, but it sets me up so that eventually a piece will come. The materials for the music aren’t musical materials; they’re stories and relationships.

I never traveled more than a week totally alone. I set it up as parallel solo days. My partner and I separated in the morning: one person kayaking, one person driving (and one person biking, if there was a third). However many of us there were, we always gathered in the evening to camp.

Be careful of too much alone time. Build in time to hang out with people at coffee shops/cafes, libraries, bars, churches, AA meetings, whatever your thing is. This will deepen your project. Leave time for the unexpected. You will meet people, they will want to tell you stories, and you will want to hear them.

On my whole four-and-a-half month trip, I never felt unsafe physically. People told me they thought I was insane, but I traveled completely unarmed until a man gave me a super sharp knife in southern Illinois. I had it with me, but never came close to needing to use it. I wonder if being a middle-aged woman maybe made me safer, because I wasn’t perceived as a threat to anyone. I don’t know. But I don’t think you need to have any fear at all. It’s a pilgrimage you’re doing, and you will be protected because your aim is true.

“The River Project,” “Lighten Up,” this new Vicksburg Project, they are all part of the same big project, really. Going down the river sort of changed everything for me.

The artists of “Lighten Up” are all answering questions about community, about politics, about spirituality: What is an American Dream you can actually sign on for? What is the place of God in human life, and the place of an individual life in the divine unity? People are addressing those questions in very specific places, in response to their own visions and their unique communities. They are doing the real work of art.

They are my role models.

I don't have the same sense of place they have. I am a rootless American, part of the global elite when you come right down to it. I've traveled the world. I can go anywhere I want. Compared to them I am rich and deracinated. For me to emulate them directly would be false and ridiculous. I have to figure out how to use my own characteristics with honesty and humility.

I think my obsession with the South, its hold on me, is because I feel that the unresolved contradictions of the American experiment are so much clearer there.

For me, Vicksburg is a "thin place," a place where the pain of racial violence and white supremacy is right on the surface. During the Civil War, Lincoln said, "Vicksburg is the key!" He was talking about its strategic importance as the last holdout on the Mississippi River. But it's more than that, I think. The whole place was cleared and built by slaves. Thousands of people died there fighting over slavery. Thousands more were killed because they were black. That reality is palpable; it's in the ground and in the air and in the water. Everything is right on the surface there in Vicksburg, in ways that are hidden or obscured in Los Angeles or even Pittsburgh (thinking of August Wilson, of course.) Because it's so palpable, there's a possibility that the keys to healing and reconciliation might possibly be forged there.

Poverty Point is certainly a thin place…in a different way, of course. But when you go there, when you climb up the giant bird mound and face the immensity of the west and feel the protection of the Mississippi River twenty miles behind you, it’s perfectly clear that a whole community of people created a culture and a relationship to the land there, perhaps as long ago as when Abraham was entertaining angels in Ur. You can feel it still. Human culture and physical geography are much more intertwined than we generally acknowledge, and places hold emotions for millennia.

When you're an outsider, a traveler, maybe it's easier to commune with the ghosts of a place.