Epilogue
Is it fair to call this an epilogue when the greatest story of my life is, in fact, only getting started? Perhaps, so long as one story's epilogue can become groundwork for the next story's transformation. And what better a place to lay groundwork for a musician's story than the Dominican Republic? As children's author Junot Diaz wrote in Islandborn, the D.R. is a place so filled with music that "there's more music here than air!" People I met everywhere had a relaxed sense of peace and harmony, and indeed, there were musical venues and dancing all over the place. It really was a perfect place to celebrate the musicality of life and to revel in my triumphs up to this point.
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In Santo Domingo, I rented an apartment and cooked breakfasts every day as a way of relaxing. I explored the city's playful parks, ate dinner with a local host family, attended a Unity church in Spanish, and heard a concert given by Venezuelan singer, Estelita del Llano. And yet, in addition to all the hygge shared with these new friends, one of the most pleasant experiences of all was swimming at Juan Dolio beach.
The Meeting of the Two Worlds
Santo Domingo's colonial city center is filled with some of the oldest monuments in the hemisphere (the oldest cathedral, the oldest fortress, the oldest sundial, etc.), which date to the early 1500's. Santo Domingo, being the oldest surviving European colony in the Hispanic world, represents the first meeting (el encuentro, in Spanish) of Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas. Chinese and Japanese immigrants didn't show up until the 20th century.
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When I looked for music venues, one event stood out above all others: a weekly music and dance party every Sunday night in the ruins of San Francisco Monastery. I couldn't miss it! The monastery ruins stood a few blocks from Chinatown near where my apartment was. So I enjoyed my time exploring the city until Sunday came.
Human Civilization and the Arts
Many of my travel goals over the last decade were related to learning about indigenous peoples: the K'iche Mayans in Guatemala, the Mapuche in Chile, the Aztecs and Zapotecs in Mexico, the Incas and Jalq'a in Bolivia, the Miccosukee in South Florida, and the descendants of ancient traditions in Scandinavia, Greece, and China. Indigenism, I had learned, was not something restricted to a few cultures in the world, but was a part of all peoples and all regions, whether the ancient ways are still practiced, or whether they have been lost over time.
In preparing my trip to the Dominican Republic, I began reading Miguel Sagué-Machiran's autobiographical epic, Canoa: An Indigenous Dream River Journey. In it, the author describes his trip canoeing down a river, experiencing a series of vivid spiritual dreams about his indigenous Taino ancestors. This book was the perfect inspirational reading material while I explored the island! The Tainos, I learned, inhabited the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the author's native island of Cuba. In Santo Domingo, there is an underground chain of caves that, according to legends, was where the Tainos took refuge when the invading Spaniards came. To me, these caves seemed to be a metaphor for the fact that Taino culture (like many indigenous cultures in the New World) was forced to remain hidden for two dozen generations before finally coming to light in our modern consciousness.
In preparing my trip to the Dominican Republic, I began reading Miguel Sagué-Machiran's autobiographical epic, Canoa: An Indigenous Dream River Journey. In it, the author describes his trip canoeing down a river, experiencing a series of vivid spiritual dreams about his indigenous Taino ancestors. This book was the perfect inspirational reading material while I explored the island! The Tainos, I learned, inhabited the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the author's native island of Cuba. In Santo Domingo, there is an underground chain of caves that, according to legends, was where the Tainos took refuge when the invading Spaniards came. To me, these caves seemed to be a metaphor for the fact that Taino culture (like many indigenous cultures in the New World) was forced to remain hidden for two dozen generations before finally coming to light in our modern consciousness.
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In Canoa, Sagué's describes having grown up hearing beautiful songs in his neighborhood that had been inherited from ancient Taino music and dance traditions dating back hundreds of years. As a musician and art teacher himself, Sagué explains how he began incorporating music and art into his Taino spiritual group called the Caney Circle, which though based on Taino traditions, aspires for the same kind of universal spiritual truths that many other contemporary groups are seeking (including New Thought philosophers).
One passage in particular impacted me profoundly: Miguel Sagué describes one of his visions, in which he witnessed the archetypal birth of human art in a cave: a man takes paint originally made for protecting his face from insect bites, and uses it draw creative images on a cave wall. For the first time in history, the author explains, the human soul could communicate through art! This led to the first artists began taking bows and strings originally made for hunting and used them to make music; they took ordinary words and made poetry; and they took their ordinary body movements and stylized them into drama and dance. Sagué's description of the result is absolutely incredible:
One passage in particular impacted me profoundly: Miguel Sagué describes one of his visions, in which he witnessed the archetypal birth of human art in a cave: a man takes paint originally made for protecting his face from insect bites, and uses it draw creative images on a cave wall. For the first time in history, the author explains, the human soul could communicate through art! This led to the first artists began taking bows and strings originally made for hunting and used them to make music; they took ordinary words and made poetry; and they took their ordinary body movements and stylized them into drama and dance. Sagué's description of the result is absolutely incredible:
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"Yes, I indeed was witnessing the first successful attempts by humans to accurately express and share the most intimate aspects of the human soul. And this could not be done previous to the invention of the arts. At the same time, I was witessing nothing short of the actual birth of spiritual expression itself. Only through this powerful new medium did humans first find an effective manner to experience the Divine as a group. Within the communal experience provided by the group participation in music, dance, drama, sculpture, painting, poetry and other arts, human beings were given the power to manifest themselves as truly spiritual beings."
-Miguel Sagué-Machiran, Canoa: An Indigenous Dream River Journey, p. 279 |
Reading this book had nearly as great an impact on me as re-reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha during my college years and reading Deng Ming-Dao's Seven Bamboo Tablets of the Cloudy Satchel during my journey through China. It opened my eyes even wider to the importance of all art forms in uplifting the human soul and giving our lives meaning. Indeed, it helped me redefine my goal in working with children and teens: to help them understand music and theatre as treasured elements of our universal human heritage and as a way of creating meaning in life through creative expression and deep appreciation. All these insights, of course, came from daring to descend into the caves and then return.
Dancing Upon the Ruins
Exploring the caves in Santo Domingo made me think of the tall rock formations in Meteora, Greece, where monks would isolate themselves from the outside world by building monasteries into rock formations and hermitages inside the caves. Monasteries in China, too, were built into the mountainous rock formations, and some then occupied spaces dug into the ground to give the impression of being deep within a cave. Indeed, being inside these monasteries and experiencing the chanting and incense felt to me like being in a kind of archetypal spiritual cave, in the sense that when I emerged from that experience, I felt I was returning to the world with a new, enlivened perspective.
The San Francisco monastery in Santo Domingo, perhaps, had once felt like that to its devotees. Nowadays, it lies in ruins. And as I wandered through these ruins, I thought about the encuentro, and how the world was instantly thrown into turmoil by the meeting of the two worlds. I thought of how, from an indigenous perspective, Old World religion seemed to represent a kind of broken promise: church leaders preached salvation to the indigenous people, while in fact the same leaders contributed to the oppression and marginalization of their sacred ways. A broken promise. This was highly symbolic, considering that the monastery, too, now lies in a state of ruin.
The San Francisco monastery in Santo Domingo, perhaps, had once felt like that to its devotees. Nowadays, it lies in ruins. And as I wandered through these ruins, I thought about the encuentro, and how the world was instantly thrown into turmoil by the meeting of the two worlds. I thought of how, from an indigenous perspective, Old World religion seemed to represent a kind of broken promise: church leaders preached salvation to the indigenous people, while in fact the same leaders contributed to the oppression and marginalization of their sacred ways. A broken promise. This was highly symbolic, considering that the monastery, too, now lies in a state of ruin.
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Sunday evening came. What I had waited for finally arrived: amidst the ruins of San Francisco monastery, Dominicans of every shade along the continuum of race gathered together to participate in an extravagant music and dance party. Crowds filled the monastery corridor and the adjacent streets, while the Dominican merengue group, Boyné, took the stage. The music started, and people began to intermingle, laugh, dance, and sing. For a brief moment, it seemed as though the faces of poverty and the spirit of abundance joined as one and shared what food and drink they had as they celebrated. Everyone was smiling and enjoying the moment together. Stars of providence lit the clear sky above. I didn't have a camera with me, but the YouTube video below is of the same event:
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Imagine a colorful river of people joining together and dancing upon the ruins of a fading century. I felt as though the image of the river and of people dancing in the Jalq'a tapestry had come to life before my eyes! Only, instead of feeling still and ancient, it felt jazzy and modern. Dominican merengue and folk music filled our hearts and moved our bones. It was a feeling of hope and of happiness that went beyond anyone's own personhood. The burden of seriousness and self-importance was finally released. We were just people in the river of life, flowing as one, unconcerned with our destination but merely enjoying each other's company along the way. It felt as though, for this moment at least, we had emerged from the cave of history and begun to make music together.