Requiescat in Pace

Marvin Rabin

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great

Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history

Through corridors of light where the hours are suns

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields

See how these names are feted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life

Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

(Note: The writer of this blog wishes to re-post the following, as a tribute to Marvin Rabin, who has just passed away. It was originally published in this blog on February 18, 2013.)

The Open World of Marv Rabin

Want to see a guy go from his mid-nineties to about age fifty in thirty seconds or less?

Marvin Rabin does it, unbelievably, just by talking about music, his lifelong passion and profession.

Interesting what you know and don’t know about adults when you’re a kid. Rabin was the founder of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra; he was imported—OK, lured—to the UW from Boston. So I figured he was from a musical family, a long line of cultured, genteel, well-heeled patrician people.

Wrong, his father was a store keeper, and didn’t play an instrument. But his father, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, did realize—vaudeville kept a lot of musicians fed and shod. Remember, the talking picture hadn’t been invented, and that meant every movie house had a pit orchestra. So his father put a violin in young Marvin’s hands, which changed his life and a lot of other lives.

Mine, for example. When Rabin believed in you…

But wait…

Rabin believed in EVERY kid, which is to say that he was always looking for that special talent, or spark, or curiosity that made a kid unique. Nor was he just a music teacher, a conductor, an educator; he came to music relatively late, having gotten a Bachelor’s degree in history and political science. He wanted kids to grow up and develop and keep developing through their lives, and if that meant music—great.

“Don’t commit closure,” he told me once, and as you can see, he’s still banging that drum.

But it’s a message that’s worth spreading, and that I may have heeded. My brothers didn’t play an instrument, went into their careers of journalism and law, stayed there, and have done well.

They haven’t, however, been a musician, a nurse, a teacher or a writer. And if I’ve had four professions and moved to a foreign (in a domestic sense—it’s like being pregnant in a virginal sense…) country and learned another language, well, to what do I attribute it?

Hours of practice at the cello.

It does something to you neurologically—something that was discovered only in the last twenty years. Musicians’ brains are different, wired differently. Significantly, the same areas of the brain that are activated in speaking and comprehension are activated when playing an instrument. Giving a kid a cello is really giving him a second language.

And like language, it can be done both singly or in a group. So every Saturday for four years in High School my father would drive me in the green Buick Skylark to the Humanities Building. For many of those Saturdays, Marvin Rabin would be charging down the halls shortly before 9AM, shouting “Sharon!”

Sharon Leventhal, now a fine musician, then a fine musician and concertmistress of WYSO. Which meant she stood up, gestured to Emily Auerbach who tweeted an A, and tuned the orchestra—winds, brass, and finally strings.

He was mercurial and temperamental. Yes, he could throw a temper tantrum, explode, rage. But it was always followed by an impassioned appeal—he knew we were great, he knew we had it in us, he couldn’t stand our not giving our best.

“HOWIE!” Rabin would shout, and the orchestra would cringe. It was Howard Metzenberg and Shostakovich Fifth, which Rabin didn’t much like but everybody else did. And Howard played the contrabassoon, for which there is a gorgeous solo in the Shostakovich.

It was almost comical, almost a personal thing going on between them. The solo was never right, the phrasing wasn’t there, the notes cracked, Howie entered at the wrong time or got the rhythm wrong. The orchestra would tense just before the solo—how would Howie screw it up this time? It was unbelievable that there was any new, fresh disaster to be found in the solo, but Howie never failed in mutilating it in new and terrible ways.

Until, of course the day that Howie—perhaps having practiced that week?—played it perfectly. The orchestra stopped spontaneously and cheered, Rabin leapt off the podium and bounded to Howie, the two embraced.

People have commented on the anti-aging effect of music, how musicians go on and on. Certainly Rabin is just the same—his voice as much a viola as he is a violist, the hands always in movement. When he talks about playing an instrument, he lifts an unseen viola under his chin—he’s playing even as he speaks.

He was one of two great musicians who had a message for me—you’re good, this can be your life if you want it, don’t give up, believe in yourself.

“That was a miracle,” he told me, after learning that I had put together the recital with Gunnar in three months, after years of not playing.

It may have been, but if so, who had performed it? Myself, of course—you don’t do that without a lot of practicing. Gunnar, who was always not flowing but flooding with encouragement.

And WYSO and Marvin Rabin. It was the one beacon in my life during those black years, those years in which I thought I fooled everybody around me, all those people who were so discerning about everybody else and so mistaken about me.

Rabin never stopped believing. Years later, I used to play music with a fine pianist who lived up the street. And for the first time, I worked out the frustration and neuroticism that had plagued me for decades about music and the cello. I dropped it all and played.

The best playing of my life.

Was it Marvin Rabin, up there, still passionate, still encouraging, still finding the unique and wonderful in all the others and me?

Maybe.

Or had just I listened at last?

Interview – Marvin Rabin from Loyola University on Vimeo.

The Vivid Air

He’s a gay guy from perhaps the most homophobic country in the world—Jamaica—and he won an award named after the slain activist from a country that could also be the most homophobic country in the world—Uganda.

Well, Jamaica is in the news lately, since a transgendered teen, Dwayne Jones, was shot, stabbed, beaten and then run over by a car last weekend. Right—that’s pretty homophobic. But what’s even worse is that Jones’ father had driven him from the family home, and joined the group of neighbors who drove him from the neighborhood.

So he was living, this 16-year old kid, with three others in a derelict house in Montego Bay. He went to a party, was dancing, and someone noticed his feet, which were abnormally large for a woman’s. He tried to run; he didn’t get away.

What’s behind the persecution? Well, there’s a law dating from 150 years back banning sodomy. There was a tradition in colonial times of sodomizing black slaves as a form of punishment. There are the usual right-wing fundamentalists who have whipped up the masses in places like Uganda—remember Scott Lively? But Jamaica has found a native ingredient to toss into the usual stew—and that’s hate-mongering reggae singers.

Things are so bad for gay people in Jamaica that a lot of them are fleeing—or trying to. That’s what Maurice Tomlinson did when a local newspaper outed him; he immediately began receiving death threats. So he escaped to Canada, where he married his soul mate, Tom Decker.

“In Canada I have a husband, in Jamaica I have a good friend,” he said recently, when he also revealed that he’s had three death threats since the local Jamaican press published the news. So he no longer goes to bars or even parties—he’s under a modified, self-imposed house arrest.

The good news is that he won in 2012 the David Kato Vision and Voice Award. And that has given him, he says, a place at the table; with that, and the support of his organization…well, let him tell the story:

I was able to be a part of the first ever legal challenge to the Jamaican anti-sodomy law before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, successfully challenged Coca-Cola for their support of homophobic murder musicians in Jamaica, launched a constitutional claim against Jamaican television stations for their refusal to air a tolerance-themed ad in which I appear, confronted the government of Trinidad about its atrocious immigration law that bans the entry of marginalized groups such as the disabled, homosexuals and sex workers, and also traveled the world to share with other LGBT advocacy groups the hard-won skills I developed as an activist. It was also AIDS-Free World that nominated me for the David Kato Vision and Voice award. I simply could not have achieved my advocacy successes without them by my side. So I publicly thank AIDS-Free World and hope my successor has an equally supportive organization or group to call 'home.'

So who, you might ask, is David Kato?

Kato was the first openly gay Ugandan, a teacher, a man who had lived for six years in South Africa, which was more liberal. Returning to Uganda, Kato made the decision to come out, did so at a press conference, and got jailed for a week because of it. This, however, didn’t stop him—he went on to become one of the founding members of SMUG—Sexual Minorities Uganda. In 2010, he gave up teaching, and worked full time as an activist.

But the year before, he had attended a UN human rights conference. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

According to a series of confidential cables written by a Kampala-based United States diplomat and later released by WikiLeaks, Kato spoke during a November 2009 United Nations-funded consultative conference on human rights. During the conference, Kato spoke on the issue of LGBT rights and the anti-LGBT atmosphere in the country, but members of the Uganda Human Rights Commission "openly joked and snickered" during the speech, and a rumor circulated that David Bahati MP, the leading proponent of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill, had ordered the Inspector General of Police to arrest Kato, causing Kato and other attending members of SMUG to leave the conference immediately after he finished the speech. Bahati then made a "tirade against homosexuality" to the conference, resulting in massive applause and Martin Ssempa, an Evangelical Christian cleric, pounding his fist on the table in agreement.[7]

And then, a local newspaper published his name and address—as they did of a hundred other persons—in an inflammatory campaign to out gay people. (How inflammatory? If memory serves, one of the banners read, “HANG THEM!)

Kato took the newspaper to court—he won, and got a $600 settlement.

He never got to enjoy that 600 bucks; he was murdered shortly afterwards. But even after death, the insults continued. Back to Wikipedia for a description of the event:

Kato's funeral was held on January 28, 2011, in Nakawala. Present at the funeral were family, friends and co-activists, many of whom wore t-shirts bearing his photo in front, the Portuguese "la [sic] luta continua" in the back and having rainbow flag colors inscribed onto the sleeves.[19] However, the Christian preacher at the funeral preached against the gays and lesbians present, making comparisons to Sodom and Gomorrah, before the activists ran to the pulpit and grabbed the microphone from him, forcing him to retreat from the pulpit to Kato's father's house. An unidentified female activist angrily exclaimed "Who are you to judge others?" and villagers sided with the preacher as scuffles broke out during the proceedings. Villagers refused to bury Kato at his burial place; the task was then undertaken by his friends and co-workers, most of whom were gay.[20] In place of the preacher who left the scene after the fighting, excommunicated Anglican Church of Uganda bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo officiated Kato's burial in the presence of friends and cameras.

Right—that’s one you’d remember!

And who, by the way, is excommunicated Bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo, and why is he excommunicated?

Well, he’s a theologian who studied at Union Theological Seminary and was ordained at St. John the Divine. He’s an LGBT activist who got into a scrap with the archbishop, who turned around and excommunicated him.

 Homosexuality is illegal in more than 70 countries, but that’s the least of the problem. What’s truly scary is that there are places in the world—Russia, Jamaica, Uganda—where LGBT people live very realistically in fear for their lives. And there are people like David Kato and Maurice Tomlinson who—against all odds, despite the churning stomachs, the sweaty palms, the dry mouths—find the courage to stand up, speak out, tell the truth to power.

Women and men who leave the vivid air, as the poet said, signed with their honor.