HANK BRODT HONORABLE MAN

 

 

display inside the library doorway

I struggled inside self all day yesterday in a minor way. It takes a lot to make me turn the key in the car's ignition. Necessity only. Seven o'clock Monday evening at the library in Sparta a man talking of his experiences as a Polish Jew in his teens subject to the hatred of European Christians in the early 1940s. It was the ones identifying themselves Nazi actively, consciously terrorizing the Jews of Europe. The other Christians were complicit, not necessarily by aggressive action, but in the hatred. Europe still has some Jews, like North Carolina still has descendants of the Cherokee in the southwestern corner. Over a lifetime I've read quite a lot about the holocaust, have seen documentaries galore, read histories, memoirs, fiction, plays and poetry concerning the time. I've known a woman with the numbers tattooed on her arm and two men who were successful in their attempts to stay out of sight of Nazis and collaborators. One dyed his hair blonde. In the late 1960s I saw Peter Weiss's play in New York, The Investigation. It was script from trials in a German court 1964-1965, of 21 people active in the Auschwitz camp, 1941-1945. It was surely the most powerful stage or film performance of my life. I don't think there was ever a laugh, the theater was full, and it was Broadway. It was long. It amounted to witness after witness telling their experience at the will of the accused. Mournful is what it was. I was so empathetic with the Jewish people in that time of my life, still am, I identified with them in a very, very, very minor way that was a hundred percent major in my own feelings. In my college years I knew a great many Jews from working in the bookstore. Jews read books. Intelligent conversations I valued. People I valued, always will. I am of the belief that it is important the stories of that time be told, generation after generation, as long as hate continues to wither the human heart.

 

hank brodt

 

I questioned going to hear the man talk unto the last moment. Picked up the keys twenty-five minutes to seven and went out the door, leaving it open for Caterpillar, who was enjoying the outdoor air, to go in as she wills. I like allowing my pets their own will, as long as it's not dangerous, like chasing cars, biting. I like my dog or cat not to be a replica of my mind, but itself as much as possible. I find allowing my pets to be themselves much more interesting for me and for them than requiring obedience. In like manner, I want to be allowed to live my life by my own decisions within the realm of my control by decision making. Personal autonomy is what I call it. I believe it is important as a birthright, human, animal, bird, fish, reptile, bug, tree. I value it for myself and value it for others. I cannot with conscience deny for someone else what I value for myself. I cannot believe other people for whom an empathetic feeling is not even a consideration. I have a hard time believing somebody can run a knife down the belly of a deer corpse hanging by its back legs and watch the guts fall out. In my heart the animals have exactly the same value as we super-egoic humans. This aspect of my nature is where my empathetic attitude toward Jews comes from. It's the same with the Indians. They call themselves Indians. Why would I want to call them Native Americans? They're insulted by that. Indian means the enemy. It's not insulting; it's the truth. I feel the same  toward the rabbit grazing by the side of the road. It starts, in my heart, with a belief I live by that all living beings are holy. I cannot believe people who claim alliance with a religion and a "belief" in God can be zealous about denying others a right to existence, by one's own individual will. When I say I can't believe them, I mean I never believe anything they say. They are liars living a lie. I see no truth in them. Herein is the core of why I have no use for religion. It's only good for its original purpose, power of the few over the many. Christendom gave itself to the dark side over Jews with zeal. Christians around the world didn't care what happened to the Jews same as they didn't care what happened in Rwanda. The photographs in LIFE magazine when I was in the 6th grade burnt tattoos into the child's brain. I still see them. I couldn't stop looking at them. I saw that each one of them had a life like I did, going along unconcerned, then a corpse on a pile because the Christians went nuts again.

 

hank brodt

 

I chose to drive to town to honor the man by listening to him. I wanted to hear his story. I've never heard anyone talk of his experiences in concentration camps. I've read, saw films, documentaries, but had never heard someone in person talk. Jews tend not to talk about Jewish matters with outsiders for an abundance of historical reasons, literally in the millions. He said that he spoke so those people whose lives had been destroyed by the worst among us would be remembered as valid and honorable persons in their autonomous selves. It took me back to being in the audience at Peter Weiss's play, seeing, hearing Hank Brodt tell in an hour his story it would take a lifetime to tell. He took me by association to a poem I looked up this morning by American poet, Anthony Hecht, from his book, The Hard Hours, the poem, "More Light! More Light!" The quotation marks are in the title. I'm sure it's easy to find online. It is the down and dirtiest, hardest to read of any poem in my limited experience. I can't even write out a brief few sentences to suggest what it's about. It's too horrid for me to repeat and I don't want to bring you down any more than I already have. It was the story of an atrocity, the kind that curls the toes, callouses the mind and bruises the heart. I'll put here the last verse. 

 

     No prayers or incense rose up in those hours

     Which grew to be years, and every day came mute

     Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,

     And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.

 

 

hank brodt

 

This poem is as close as I have found in writing to the profound hopelessness and hatred as the Jewish people of Europe truly suffered. Hank Brodt is the name of the man talking at the library. I felt profound respect looking at him while he spoke of that time. The part that struck me deepest, I feel like, was speaking of the hatred received at every turn, only hatred, revulsion in other people's eyes. He didn't say it, but I was thinking, Christians. Even people who were friends before the furor. Only hate everywhere you turn. Not just you-piss-me-off hate, but murderous, I-want-to-see-you-dead and I could get away with killing you hate. I watched him as he talked, thinking, this is truly an honorable man. He survived the unspeakable, for no crime, and is able to speak it rationally. A woman I knew in Charleston with the numbers on her arm stayed home out of sight, never went anywhere. When her husband, a writer, Robert Marks, had visitors, she stayed in the kitchen and smoked cigarettes. I was thinking if Hank Brodt could let himself, he could drift into such a condition. It must be a constant mental effort to stay out of such a condition. I thought about asking at the end how it felt when you're taken up without recourse knowing there is no turning back. I didn't want to put him through it in his mind. I could have sat and had conversation with him for hours, but couldn't break through the crowd that piled in around him. My energy was gone and I was ready for bed. Parked here at the house, I opened the car door, sat sideways in the seat with feet on the ground, sat there and looked at the landscape across the road, the bright yellow asters in flower. Sat there and gazed without thought at the green bank without seeing it, like it was a stage background and nothing was happening on stage. I sat on the side of the seat feeling I could happily fall asleep sitting in the car's open doorway, take a little nap. It felt like my energy went away, all but that needed to make it to the house far enough inside to fall down on the bed. Slept straight through for ten hours. Woke ready to start a new day. Something way down deep within was stirred. I want now to reread Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, the story of a Polish Jew who survived the camps. A powerful, intelligent book. I took it off the shelf when I picked up Anthony Hecht's book this morning. A good time to reread Bellow and Hecht. Most often I get Hank Brodt's name mixed up in my mind with Max Brod, Kafka's biographer. I find it odd that Hank Brodt lived Kafka's The Trial and The Castle in everyday life. I can't help but wonder, wouldn't it have been better to die than to survive? I believe I'd rather be a ghost drifting out of a smokestack across the sky than the one standing on the ground seeing it. Or so I like to think, not having the decision to face.

 

asters

 

 

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LUCAS PASLEY TALKS ABOUT OLD-TIME MUSIC AT THE LIBRARY

lucas pasley

Thursday evenings, Alleghany Library features a music show or a talk on a given topic, a presentation. This week, old-time musician, local music historian and high school English teacher, Lucas Pasley, played the fiddle and talked. He talked about songs with stories in them. He used examples of songs that were favorites of the musicians in the county past and present, all of them common songs people who listen to the music know well. He talked of one told by a man without remorse, the story of the time he shot little Sadie down, never tells why, never mentions regret. Story songs are abundant in old-time music. One of my favorites stuck in the front of my mind the whole evening, the Stanley Brothers' Come All Ye Tender Hearted. Carter Stanley loved those old mournful story songs of extreme sorrow. This song was tattooed in the front of my mind the first time I heard it. Sometimes I like to listen to it for hearing Carter sing it as only he can in his hyper-emotional dispassionate voice. Sara Carter of the Carter Family had that quality in her voice. In the time before electricity, before the modern world, the people in the old way appreciated other songs besides love songs. Love song was one of the genres Lucas covered last night in his talk, the first of a series. The people before pop culture and advertising liked love songs, too. They also liked songs that made you cry. The people of that time honored all the emotions in their songs. Before marketing. Marketing changes things. Contemporary Chinese writers are not afraid of sorrow. A Chinese writer can wade you through some deep, wrenching, painful sorrow. They write about the other emotions too. Artists tend to like to appeal to all the emotions. There is still a niche in pop culture for sad songs, every once in awhile when it's a feel-good story. I still remember the popularity of the Country Gentlemen's, Taking Mary Home.  

 

with daughter Lenke

with daughter hazel

Lucas brought up the story in the Wreck of Old 97, pointing out the line, Scalded to death by the steam, a notable line. I can't think of any song I've ever heard with so graphic a climactic scene. The song is told visually. Lucas unveiled the story behind the event itself, the engineer an hour behind schedule when it was imperative he arrive at the next stop on time. It seems unrealistic now, but this was the time before safety regulations. A few years ago we had a news story of a commuter train engineer in a northeastern city who took it into a curve way too fast, absent minded out of control. In the old days they sometimes wrote current events into a song. Pop Stoneman sang a classic song about the Titanic. Bob Dylan sang a classic song about the Titanic. There were several songs in the old days of a guy killing his girlfriend because of a roving eye or she was pregnant. We still have plenty of stories of guys killing girlfriends. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols killed his girlfriend and later himself. In this time we have so many songs of every variety that most of them we never know about. There is not enough time to know about all of them. We hear pop radio and figure that's it. I see mention now of bands from the Sixties that were supposed to be the Best, and I never heard of them. And I see mention of bands from the 70s, the punk era, that were supposed to be the Best. Never heard of them either. These were bands you'd have to be a New York dj in that time to have heard them. I've caught myself again making out like we people were different in the old time way. We were different then from what we are now, but culturally, the nature of our education about the only difference mentally. In the old days education was learning how to figure things out. Education now is largely memorizing details for the test. I see education making that big a change again. Emotionally, we're not much different, except now we inhibit emotions as a rule. We still live by our emotions and interpretations. The same things still happen, though in a greater variety of ways. Looking at movies in our time as songs, the variety is endless, and we have more songs recorded now than movies. The major difference between the music before electricity and after is the changes were slower then and songs people heard were far fewer than now. It cannot be said the songs were better then or now.

 

 

lucas pasley

lucas and hazel

  

Lucas invited his two girls, Lenke and Hazel, one at a time to accompany him on the fiddle with their guitars. Both girls have been holding guitars since before they could pick the strings or make chords. They liked to hold the instruments and feel a part of the music as tiny kids. They live in a world of old-time music, daddy practicing, musicians coming by to jam, both parents participating in jams, going to fiddlers conventions in the summer, daddy collecting field recordings of music in the county. It's fairly predictable that both girls will be good musicians of whatever music they want to play. Lucas will have a family band in his near future. He has been collecting old tapes made of local musicians at jams since the late Forties, early Fifties. He has uncovered some treasures. Clifton Evans went around visiting musicians in the county he knew, banjo and fiddle players. He took his guitar and reel-to-reel recording machine. Lucas came into his tapes. A man named Dick Finney was known to have made tapes at jams. Somebody has his tapes. From what I've heard they are loaded with treasures. Lucas is putting the songs from these tapes into his computer and from there he can put them on a website he has created. He's told me he has been putting together a collection of Alleghany fiddlers and another collection of Alleghany banjo pickers. He's looking at the label, Field Recorder's Collective, a non-profit label that is making old-time mountain music available by people who have never recorded commercially. Lucas's collections will be a major contribution to archiving the music of our county. Lucas keeps his archiving activities ongoing through his life as husband, father, musician, teacher, home repair handyman who restores his house while living in it. And he's teaching his kids to make music. He's taking care of the county's music, present, past and future.

lucas and hazel

 

lucas

Lucas is so busy keeping everything going he's engaged in, he doesn't have time to seek publicity for himself. Few people know of his involvement with making the music of this county accessible on cd, both commercial and homemade. People in the county not connected with the school system have never heard of him. He strikes me a case of somebody doing something important for the county, its history and its future, and not many know what he's doing. Then we have the clique of people patting themselves on the back taking credit in the name of "gonna" and nothing happens of any value beyond cosmetic. Lucas is a teacher his students never forget. Going by the way he gives a talk at the library, I get a feel for how he functions in the classroom. Lucas takes passionate interest in whatever is holding his attention at a given moment. His interior excitement shines through when he talks. It doesn't make him an obnoxious missionary, it makes his talking fun for him and interesting to the listeners. He gives pertinent information when he's talking about a song's history and interpreting its story, conversationally, information that amounts to stepping stones he puts down one at a time to help us follow his interest. Lucas doesn't need praise for his contributions to the community. He believes the county's music needs archiving. He's somebody who does what he sees needs doing instead of talking about it. There was a time I believed the county needed a weekly radio show of its own music on the local AM station. There hadn't been one in probably fifteen years. Rather than try to talk other people into doing it, I went to Dudley Carpenter to teach me how to dj, learned as I went and put on a radio show for seven years until the station closed. Lucas and I are like-minded in the way that we would rather do what we see needs doing and go on than tell somebody about it, You-know-what-you-oughta-do? Lucas has a deep interior life. I don't know his spiritual beliefs, but it appears to me he is guided by real values. He doesn't fold and quit, like me, he keeps on a-keepin on and gets er done.     

lucas pasley

 

 

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