We just had an e-mail report from an old friend of ours who moved to New Hampshire some years ago giving us a vivid report of his Christmas activities, which appear to have been composed of equal parts mud and Zoom. The first was caused by a marked warming period with steady rain falling upon, and rapidly melting, two feet of fallen snow. The second was caused by Covid XIX. (If the awful monarchs of history rate Roman numerals, why not other plagues?). He had spent a good deal of annoying time hopping about on Zoom in search of religious services. But he added this: “When I complained recently about Zoom to my 90-year-old friend in town, she said, ‘It's what we have just now’. I hope that someday I can attain to her wisdom.”
Well, me too. We had a fairly Zoomed Christmas, as we have had a fairly Zoomed last half year at least, and I have griped about it a lot. But the remark of our friend’s friend has set me to thinking about just how helpful Zoom can be, as well as to try to categorize the functions for which it works more satisfactorily, and less so.
In 1961 O. B. Hardison, an important literary scholar who died too young, and a one-time director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, published an important book entitled Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama. It had long been understood that the medieval European religious drama (often called the “miracle plays” from their typical content or “mystery plays” because they were sponsored by the misters, or trade guilds) exercised a defining influence in the development of the secular drama of the Renaissance, the Age of Shakespeare. Specifically, the birth of modern drama is supposed to have occurred not in the stable in which Jesus was born but in the tomb in which his body was laid. One of the liturgical embellishments of the Easter services was a little dialogue, slightly reshaped from the gospels, between an angel assigned to the burial site and the women (often called the Marys) who had come to visit the tomb. The women, we may presume, were equally surprised by who was in the tomb (the angel or angels, Luke reporting two) and who wasn’t (Jesus). The following colloquy ensued. It is usually called the “Quem quaeretis trope” after the Latin of the angel’s first two words.
Angel: Whom are you seeking in this tomb, O followers of Christ?
Women: Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified, O heavenly ones.
Angel: He is not here; he is risen, just as he foretold. Go, announce that he is risen from the tomb. Alleluia
Here I must get a bit technical. This little dialogue was supposedly performed against the background of the melisma of the final syllable of Alleluia, the all-purpose biblical ejaculation of praise and triumph. Melisma is the musical term for extending a single sung syllable over several notes. You may not be familiar with the term, but you certainly have experienced the phenomenon in the great cantatas, grand opera, and Hank Williams. Please pass the chee ee ee ee se, sort of thing. As the singers extended the final -a-of “Alleluia” over many notes, some monks performed the mini-play with the dialogue given above. That final unemphasized vowel was pronounced with the neutral sound of -uh- that punctuates the oratory of poor public speakers. Prefaced with a d you get duh, an international signal of idiocy. The symbol for the vocalic sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ɘ, and its name is schwa. I always wanted to teach a course entitled “The Western Drama from Schwa to Shaw.”
Having squandered most of my allotted words setting up a bad joke, I must be brief in concluding. Hardison went further in discussing the religious origins of the stage.. According to him, the Mass itself was a drama. At the time I read the book that claim seemed to me a trope too far, so to speak, and I could not agree with it. My experience with Zoomed eucharists has only confirmed my original judgement. Any spectacle—that is, a thing to be watched, like a play, movie, or athletic contest, can be more or less successfully Zoomed. Vital, communal, participatory and interactive events more complex than Face-Timed conversations are different matters.
I well know, however, that there are differing opinions. As I was pondering this topic there appeared in the Times an opinion piece by Esau McCauley entitled “You Can’t Meet God over Zoom.” Though I was somewhat dubious about his title, probably the work of a newspaper editor, I was in general agreement with his drift. But a few days later McCauley’s thesis was disputed by two correspondents in the letters column. A Lutheran pastor thought that Zoom enabled an entirely new kind of spiritual experience for his small congregation, and a Jewish lady explained that Zoom sometimes allowed for the gathering of a minyan, the minimum number of congregants needed for a communal worship service, which sometimes proves difficult to round up in actuality as opposed to virtuality.
But if my belief is more than mere prejudice and a defensible rule of thumb, the exception proving it was a lovely Christmas Eve Zoom with Luke, Melanie, and their two youngsters in Montreal. The Canadian border has at times during the pandemic been as forbidding and confining as the old Berlin Wall, and we haven’t been able to have tactile contact with this family for far too long. So Joan and Luke contrived a customized “Service of Lessons and Carols,” structured around a four-part reading of the gospel Nativity legend distributed among the four adults, the parts interspersed with choral interludes from more or less familiar carols. Both families gathered about a laptop and a piano, and simply dived in. From what I have observed, only practiced professionals equipped with high quality earphones can achieve tolerable choral music on Zoom, and from the technical point of view our international warbling was a disaster. But in fact most amateur carol sing-alongs are disasters, and this one was only a little further along the spectrum. But we didn’t care a whit. We were not trying to compete with the Trapp family. The music was not the goal, but the instrument of achieving the goal. Instead of being an unsatisfactory religious service, it was a triumph of family fun. And after all the elderly friend of a friend in New Hampshire was certainly right. Zoom is what we have just now. So deal.
