SING A SONG OF SICK PANTS: Music in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint

There was never any secret about it: The title of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint is a pun. Kingsley Amis, in Haper's Magazine, April 1969, observes:

...of course, the title is a pun, and the book is a complaint against this and that much more than an account of a complaint in the psyche or anywhere else.

Of course it is. It is a complaint against (read "protest")  as much as it is a complaint (read "sickness"), a clear statement of which appears between the title page and the text:

Portnoy's Complaint ...A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature...

We cannot miss the pun. But complaint has a third meaning. And in this third meaning lie the delight, the humor, and the grace of this book.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists among its definitions of complaint, "a plaintive poem, a plaint." The earliest occurrence of the word is from 1368, Chaucer's "Compleynte of Pité." In the "Franklyn's Tale" of 1386, Chaucer talks of the Franklyn's wife alone, at home, while her husband travels in England. "She moorneth, waketh, wayleth, fasteth, pleyneth;/Desir of his presence hire so distreyneth."1  Among her activities she "pleyneth;" Chaucer uses the verb to suggest a sad song of love in the absence of a lover. F.N. Robinson, in his introduction to Chaucer's Short Poems, observes that "the theme of love-poetry, from antiquity down, has often been the sorrow or grievance of the unaccepted lover, and this sentiment found natural expression in the complaint...the poet speaks in the first person and appears to be the lover."

Such a complaint is Surrey's "Complaint of a Lover Refused" (1557), in which the rebuffed lover "laments the unresponsiveness of his mistress."

Love, that doth reign and live within my thought,

And build his seat within my captive breast,

Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought,

Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.

But she that taught me love, and suffer pain, 

My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire

With shamefast look to shadow and refrain,

Her smiling grace converteth straight to ire.

And coward Love then to the heart apace  

Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk and plain,

His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.

For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pain.

Yet from rny lord shall not my foot remove;

Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.

This "complaint" takes the form of a  sonnet, a formalized vehicle: 14 lines, a strict rhyme scheme, usually in iambic pentameter, as is this one. But that it is a complaint merely suggests that the speaker is "love sick," that he seeks relief from his distress. And it is here that the sickness and the lament and the song all blend.

In Portnoy, whatever its surface appearance, the language is stylized. Roth says of it that the book "is a highly stylized confession...that bears about as much resemblance to the drift and tone of what a real psychopathologist hears in his everyday life as a love sonnet does to the iambs and dactyls that lovers whisper into one another's ears..." And while the "complaint" as sickness and  lament is immediately evident, the song requires real listening.

The book takes the form of a monologue sung by a distracted male who "speaks in the first person and appears to be the lover." Lover to whom, how and why are questions that echo through the book. But a lover he is.

That it is musical is suggested by the many uses of music. Rhyme is the most obvious. In his fascination with his mother, Alex quotes from her yearbook:

Sophie Ginsky the boys called "Red,"

 She'll go far with her big, brown eyes and her clever head. 

Rhythm is another obvious technique. He remembers the cheers the boys, in high school, used to send up from  the stands after the losing football games:

Ikey, Mikey, Jake and Sam,

We're the boys that eat no ham.

We play football, we play soccer--

And we keep matzohs in our locker!

Aye, aye,aye, Weequahic High!

and

White bread, rye bread,

Pumpernickel, challah,

All those for Weequahic,

Stand up and hollah! 

He is inspired by his hero, Norman Corwin and his celebration of V-E Day, On A Note of Triumph. He thrills to its music. ""Just the rhythm can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army..."

He is a child of the Second World War; he knows all the service hymns: "The Marine Hymn," "The Caissons Go Rolling Along," "The Song of the Army Air Corps," the Song of the Navy Air Corp. "I can even sing you the song of the Seabees," Alex says proudly.

But it's not just the simple rhythms and rhymes of school cheers and popular songs that Alex invokes. He sings sophisticated poetry. He and the first of his three shiksas, the Monkey, drive towards Lake Champlain. On an impulse, the Monkey asks Alex to pull over so that she can perform fellatio. He does; she does. And in the relax time following, he recites his "dirty poem" to her: Yeats' "Leda and the Swan."  The Monkey is puzzled by it. But on repetition, the Monkey "takes hold of my hand, draws my fingers up between her legs..."Feel. It made my pussy all wet."
"Sweetheart! You understood the poem!"
"I s'pose I deed," cries Scarlett O'Hara. Then, "Hey, I did! I understood a poem!"

More subtle is the melodiousness of the monologue. A shriek, yes. But that it shares anything with music/poetry is hard put for most to sense. Noise is irregular; music has a pattern, a regularity of pitch, of phrase length, of volume.  Portnoy, after all, is talking to his psychiatrist. "I'll sing you a song," he says to Spielvogel. But his "song" is hardly the sweet, melifluous sound of Wyatt or Surrey. "Enough being a nice Jewish boy," he wails," publicly pleasing my parents (beat) while privately pulling my putz (beat)"

If we do not recognize the poetic music of this passage, it's because we are put off by its content, not for lack of its music. In the repetitive plosive [P] there is alliteration. Furthermore, the parallelism of the adverb-participle-noun sequence is apparent (publicly/privately, pleasing/pulling, parents/putz.) The contrast of public and private activity is underlined by the contrast between parents and putz. The rhythm is simple: dactylic trimeter, the last foot of each line truncated. Finally, the choice of the word putz is necessary. Try substituting  prick, another one-syllable word beginning with the same sound and with the same denotation. All the overtones are wrong. Putz, a Yiddish word, is soft and unthreatening. Its non-Yiddish cousin has an edge to it; it pierces, wounds, draws blood. It's like calling a young boy "a pisser" rather than "a pisher."  Putz is to prick as pisher is to pisser.

Roth revels in repetition. The plosive p's in the selection above are, perhaps, a dramatic example. But alliteration comes easily to Roth. The Monkey's "favorite line of English prose," says Portnoy, is "Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint."  There are five feet in this expression; three of them downbeats with an [F] sound. The alliteration and the rhythm reinforce each other.

Alex remarks to Dr. Spielvogel that Jewish parents make their little boys believe that they are "...brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before..." And still later, he describes himself as "a brainy, balding, beaky Jew, with a strong social conscience and black hair on his balls."  Palpitating in Bubbles Girardi's kitchen, he sees a picture of Jesus above the sink and labels him "the Pansy of Palestine. In a pageboy haircut with a Palmolive complexion."  So Roth uses alliteration and rhythm to produce the "song" he sings to his psychiatrist.

Alexander Portnoy is angry. He rails against being shoved into the Jewish box, where everything is categorized as Jewish or goyische (his spelling).  "It turns out that there is just a little bit more to existence than what can be contained in those disgusting and useless categories," he screams. And then his diction shifts into a quasi-liturgical mode. Roth deliberately uses a phrase identified with praise of God: "he-who".

While the prayerbook says:

"Blessed art Thou, o Lord, our God, who has sanctified us with thy commandments..."

Roth sings

...instead of crying over he-who refuses at the age of fourteen ever to set foot inside a synagogue again...instead of wailing for he-who has turned his back on the saga of his peopleweep for your own pathetic selves, why don't you,sucking and sucking on that sour grape of a religion!

Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew!

It is coming out of my ears already, 

The saga of the suffering Jews!

Do me a favor, my people, 

and stick your suffering heritage

Up your suffering ass ––

I happen also to be a human being! 

This is the song of songs that is Portnoy's.

But if the scoffer in Portnoy makes use of Judaism's liturgy to express his anger, he also uses it to deal with his fear. In the hospital, his mother awaits the results of a biopsy. And he ruminates:

...that word that sounds to my ear like Hebrew, like b'nai or boruch -- benign! Benign! Boruch atoh Adonai,  let it be benign! Blessed art thou, O Lord Our God,  let it be benign! Hear O Israel, and shine down thy contenance, and the Lord is one, and honor thy father, and honor thy mother, and I will I will I promise I will --only let it be benign. 

It is a song, a poem, a plaint. It is certainly not a novel or an autobiography. Roth, himself, talks about this book as "chunks of material of varying shapes and sizes piled upon one another and held together by association rather than chronology."It is a "psychoanalytic monologue."  The reader knows nothing of the circumstances of the meeting between Alexander and Dr. Spielvogel: where the doctor's office is, why Alex has gone there or when, how much the doctor charges, etc., any of the real and practical elements of the novel or biography. There is no plot; no character development; hardly even a theme. We hear the voice only of one person, Alex.

Almost at the final page, after he has failed in Israel to erect his own monument, after he has sung " 'Im-po-tent in Is-rael, da, da daah' " to the tune of "Lullabye in Birdland," Alexander Portnoy begins to hear his own voice; He says "maybe what I need most of all, to howl. A pure howl, without any more words between me and it."
Perhaps he is alluding to another singer who mourned the loss of his mother, Alan Ginsburg, in his own memorable Kaddish and who sang the dirge of America in his 1956 poem Howl.
Whatever overtones this monologue stimulates, Roth speaks with his own voice. Brendan Gill, in his 1969 New Yorker review of the book concludes: "Portnoy's Complaint is Roth's scream, and from now on, whenever he screams, it will have the sound of song."

Well, maybe. After 18 subsequent books, the scream is still heard. Alexander Portnoy has reappeared as Nathan Zuckerman, Peter Tarnopol, David Kepesh, even perhaps as Philip Roth. Yet not one of them sings with the voice of Portnoy. None of these super-stern anti-heroes could give us Sadie's litany for Alex:

Mr. Hot-Under-The-Collar

Mr. Hit-The-Ceiling

Mr. Fly-Off-The-Handle

Mr. Always-Right-And-Never-Wrong

  

Nor could they create phrases like "Hating Your Goy and Eating One Too" or "The Perfect couple: She puts the id back in Yid; I put the oy back in Goy."

 "In a complaint, which usually takes the form of a monologue, the poet commonly explains his sad mood, describes the causes of it, discusses possible remedies, or appeals to some lady or divinity for help from his distress."

That is a simple-enough definition for a college literature handbook. But Portnoy has no such simple set of emotions as to let him enjoy a "sad mood." Bi-Polar might better suggest its complexity and the difficulty of describing its causes. The divinity to whom he appeals, Dr. Spielvogel, can only in the final line hint at the existence of "possible remedies."

So while Roth has selected a Rennaisance convention to express Portnoy's attempts to sort himself out, the convention proves inadequate. It is too simple in too complex an environment; it is too subtle for our blatant tastes. We no longer sing ballads like the "Twa Corbies" while strumming a lute.We no longer hear phrases like "she taught me love" and "my hot desire." Now the songs electrify as the shock of electricity shapes their forms and delivery. Now four-letter words are common parlance. Portnoy screams, for he has a microphone held close to his mouth. All his music is amplified, his pain exaggerated. And it is not fourteen lines but 274 pages that he needs finally to allow Dr. Spielvogel his "punch line":

"So. Now vee may perhaps to begin, yes?"

THE TWINS - A 3-Act Drama

The difficulty is that we read the Bible. If we could listen to it as I suspect Jews of Biblical times did, we would find a very different experience. So let’s assume we are listeners and participants in one of the narratives -- the history of the twins, Jacob and Esau. We’ll soon see how the narrative leaves the printed page and becomes a musical with its own ritual (things that are acted out) and liturgy (the lines of the script).

The history of the twins begins with Isaac. Immediately we find our first point of entry: rhythm and rhyme. For he is introduced as Isaac ben Avraham. Immediately this phrase is followed by its twin: Avraham sired Isaac -- a redundancy since we already know that bit of information from the first phrase. But if we ignore the information and listen to the rhythm and rhyme of the Hebrew lines, we’ll hear a theme that repeats itself-- the theme of doubling (twinning). How appropriate for the story of a set of twins!

The next clue appears in the second verse. The information tells us that Isaac is 40 years old. Why specifically 40? Of course, 40 is one of those “magic” or representative numbers, like 3, 7 and 12. But more than that, it may be an echo of Abraham’s name. But you have to let your imagination loose for a minute. Think of the ancient Hebrew not as [Av-ra-ham] as we pronounce it today, but more like the sound of its Arabic cognate [Ib-ra-heem]. If we hear [Ab-ra-heem], it’s easy to hear the sound play between the word for 40 [ar-ba-yeem] and the name [Ab-ra-heem].

Let’s look further. In the third verse, Isaac pleads with God because Rebecca is barren. The verb is [va-ye-tar]. Then, surprisingly, when God responds to Isaac’s plea, the same verb appears but in a different form: [va-ye-a-tayr]. Maybe that’s the verb and maybe not. After all, the letters are the same in both cases. Only the vowels, the sounds, are different. But in ancient texts, there were no vowel markings (until the fourth century CE when the Masoretes filled in the blanks). So do we really know that the sounds of the verbs were the same or different? In any event, the verbs are designed so that the second provides an echo of the first. Repetition and variation of sound, a sure signal that we are in the presence of the spoken word.

So rhyme and rhythm -- sound and beat-- are drawing us into the telling of the narrative. More than just that. When God speaks to Rebecca (verse 23) He speaks in great rolling waves of sound, rhythm and information, all combined in two sets of two lines each. The first:

You have two nations in your womb,

Two separate peoples will issue from your loins.

and the second:

One people shall be mightier than n the other,

And the older shall serve the younger.

Even in the translation, we can feel the great power of the cadences. But in the Hebrew, the sounds, echoes, undertones and overtones are unmistakable.

The first:

Shnay goyim b’vitnaych

U’shnay leumim mi mayayech yepareydu.

The second:

U’l’om mi l’om yayamatz

V’rav ya’avod tza-ir.

The lines emerge as if from an echo chamber. The sounds and the rhythm of the lines carry forward the idea of nations and people, not boys or twins.

These verses are an answer to Rebecca’s question: Why me? [lamah zeh anochi]. Here is another sound device. That question will be repeated with variants when Esau asks rhetorically: “What does the birthright mean to me?” [llamah zeh li b’chora] (25:32) Later, Rebecca will again pose the question, this time to Isaac as she asks him to send Jacob to Laban in Padan-Aram so that her son doesn’t marry a Canaanite woman. For if he does, she says: “What good will life be to me?” [lamah li chaim] (27:46) Just as with the other questions, this last one is rhetorical, asked to indicate the speaker's emotional state. The similarity of question form, of rhythm, shows them all to have a liturgical quality that the listener responds to much as congregations today respond to parts of the kaddish.

lamah zeh anochi.

lamah zeh li b’chora.

lamah li chaim.

But liturgy always works with ritual. Soon we find these “questions” appearing at crucial times during the dramatic rite.

First Rebecca approaches God. She crosses a spiritual threshold when she comes into God’s presence. We do much the same at the beginning of the Amidah when we take three steps back and three forward, as if coming into the Presence. With kavanah we feel we have taken a step for which there can be no turning back. We have come into the presence of God. The liturgy and the ritual of the Amidah help develop the kavanah so important to that experience.

So Rebecca, crossing from the profane to the sacred world, uses the liturgy of the rhetorical question to help her experience this awesome moment.

Esau’s situation when he uses the liturgical question is somewhat different. Although he too crosses into a new territory, he is still within the secular world. As a man of the fields (a hunter) he is not comfortable close to the home fires, as is his twin, Jacob. Esau is a rough-and-tumble, heavily masculine being. So when he appears at the entrance to Jacob’s tent, he is entering a strange territory. For Jacob, who is a food gatherer and preparer, a “simple” or “mild” man, the figure of Esau is foreign. Esau barges into the tent, starved for food. In boorish, yet strangely stilted, language, he begs Jacob [halitayni na] for “some of that red stuff.” [ha-adom, ha-adom hazeh] He admits he is tired, and near death with starvation. He’s willing to give anything -- his birthright included -- in exchange for food.

Both Rebecca and Esau undergo what has been called a “liminal” experience, that is, something happens when a border or threshold, a limit, has been crossed. This border crossing needs some sort of liturgical signal as its accompaniment. Ritual and liturgy always occur together. The questions provide that signal. Later, Rebecca will cross the border from a devious backstage manipulator to an up-front petitioner as she tells Isaac that her life won’t be worth living if Jacob marries a Canaanite woman. And, of course, the crossing is accompanied by the liturgical question.

Jacob flees to Padan-Aram, to Laban, Rebecca’s brother. In doing so, he crosses several barriers. Geopolitically, he is entering foreign territory, no longer his home. Psychologically, he is crossing from childhood (where he does what his mother tells him to) into adulthood. These are thresholds, and to cross them he uses ritual and liturgy.

His first symbolic experience (28:10-22) is filled with ritualistic elements: the stone Jacob uses as a pillow, the dream (vision), the ladder (he approaches God as Rebecca had years before), and the Voice of God. Immediately upon experiencing this vision, Jacob uses the stone to set up an altar, pouring oil on it. He then names the place, liturgy accompanying ritual as a signal of the passage.

Arriving at Padan-Aram, Jacob immediately encounters another stone, this one covering the well from which the flocks must drink. The stone serves two purposes for the local inhabitants. It protects the water from dust, dirt, filth, and accidental falls. It also signals ownership: only the family of the owner can use it, no outsider without permission. But the stone is also a ritual object. It carries its echo from Jacob’s earlier vision. Now, when he removes it from the well head and waters Rachel’s flock, he is performing an ownership ritual which conveys much to Rachel, her family, and to us as audience/participants. Another liminal experiences has been successfully passed through.

Twenty years pass. Jacob has two wives, two concubines, eleven children, and large herds. He is a middle-aged, successful entrepreneur. Laban, suffering the loss of herds from Jacob’s deception, orders him to leave and return to Canaan. But when Jacob leaves surreptitiously, without performing the appropriate leave-taking rites, Laban pursues him, infuriated that he has violated a rite of passage. The pact they draw up is a symbol of a liminal event, deciding a border that neither of them will cross. Again a stone is used to set up an altar (31:45-46). A ritual meal is eaten and special words are said (31:51-53):

Here is the mound, and here is the pillar which I have set up between you and me; this mound shall be witness and this pillar shall be witness that I am not to cross to you past this mound, and that you are not to cross to me past this mound and this pillar with hostile intent.

These lines are contractual in their intent and liturgic in their sound and rhythm. the repetition and variation. The seal of authority for this contract is the final invocation of God:

May the God of Abraham [Acting for Jacob] and the God of Nahor [for Labam] judge between us.

Each names the place according to his own preference. Thus liturgy and ritual create an armistice between two hostile forces. Laban returns to Padan-Aram.

The dramatic elements of ritual (the stone, the altar, crossing borders) in this narrative, and liturgy (naming, using echoes of previous incidents, the rhythm and sounds of the langauge and the doubling so evident in the early part of the narrative) all these elements operating simultaneously on the listeners, involving them in the narrative performance much as modern audiences are involved in a film narrative.

But Jacob has a final threshold to cross, one that he has feared ever since beginning this journey: confrontation with his twin, Esau.

Immediately as he and his family entourage leave the precincts of his pact with Laban, we get signals that more important events are in the offing. Angels surround Jacob, and he names the place “Machanaim,” saying “This is God’s camp.” The twin uses the name listeners would have recognized as a dual form and for its Aramaic meaning of a pile of stones or an altar. The vision (ritual) is accompanied by the place naming (liturgy).

The procession crosses the Jabbok, leaving Laban’s territory, entering Jacob’s home region. But it is also Esau’s home, and Jacob fears the retaliation of his brother for ancient misdeeds. His fright is made clear shortly after the family cross the Jabbok. For it is then that Jacob meets a strange being the text simply identifies as a man. The fear takes the form of the wound he receives from “the man” as he stands alone. Jacob gives this figure his name, but when he asks for the stranger’s name in return, he receives the answer “Why do you ask my name?” Instead of telling him his name, the person blesses Jacob, a second blessing Jacob receives, this time without asking for it. The earlier blessing gave him control over Isaac’s estate and family. This one denies him control. This is a power play in which Jacob loses, as he had lost his strength in the fight. The man controls Jacob, knowing his name. By renaming him, he extends his control over the victim. Jacob takes the name the man gives him, thus putting himself within the man’s power.

So Jacob enters new territory, weakened spiritually by the name struggle and physically by the wound on his hip. And he has entered Esau’s territory. He is to meet Esau in open country. His brother is a man of the fields. So Jacob now enter’s Esau’s field much as Esau entered Jacob’s tent. The twins’ roles have been reversed.

The reversal is signalled by the reversal in their conversation. When Esau had rushed into Jacob’s tent, it was he who pleaded with his younger brother for food. The curtness of his brother’s remarks, a function of sound and rhythm, contrasts sharply with the volubility of Esau’s. Now, when the two meet in open field, it is Jacob who becomes the verbose one. He addresses Esau with the formality Esau had given him in the tent. Jacob addresses him as “my lord” (hbst), and when Esau objects to all the gifts, saying he has enough, Jacob responds with many words:

No, I pray you; if you would do me this favor, accept from me this gift; for to see your face is like seeing the face of God, and you have received me favorably. Please accept my present, which has been brought to you, for God has favored me and I have plenty.

By now, the third act of our dramatic rite is all but finished. The first act involves the announcement and birth of the twins . The second, some 20 years later, sees Jacob getting the birthright and Isaac bless Jacob, not Esau. The final act dramatizes Jacob’s life as an adult, his marriage, a growing family and eventually his forgiveness by his older brother.

Each act is accomplished by ritualistic and liturgic devices that involve us as audience in the action. And if the Greeks were correct, we partake of the catharsis provided us by the ritual and liturgy of the narrative.

Remember the old pedantic piece: It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game?

Yeah, right. Not in this age of bottom lines and payoffs.

But actually the way you play the game, in most games, decides whether not you win or lose but in fact whether you stay in the game or not. A game is played by the rules, or it's not played at all.

You can't move a pawn backwards in chess; you can't jump your own man in checkers; you can't bid 1 heart after 2 diamonds. If you do, you're out of the game. Period. That's how games differ from life, and that's why children have to learn the discipline of accepting rules if they want to play games.

But the fascination of games has more to do with the way they are a reflection of life than the way they are different. Chess is a battle for power. Monopoly™ is a fight for real estate. Bridge is a challenge to fulfill a contract.

But what is Backgammon? It's more than a fight or a challenge. It treads on the unknowable; it operates both with mathematical certainty and mystic darkness. It is a search for the balance between the individual and the community.

A backgammon board is a set of 24 triangles in alternating colors. It’s on this playing field that the struggle of backgammon is engaged. It’s grand principle is: the more you win, the more advantage your opponent has.

The game is played with counters, 15 for each player. (Fig. 2) There is a diabolic ingenuity to the number 15. It is an odd number, that is, not divisible by 2. But it is precisely that number 2 that is crucial to the play. For if you have 2 counters on a given triangle, your opponent cannot move against you.

I am getting ahead of myself. What one must do to dominate and destroy the opponent is to move all one’s counters from their initial positions to one’s own inner court, thence off the board.

But I’d forgetten to explain “inner court.” The board is divided into four areas: the set of six triangles to the left of the player is known as the inner court; the set to the right known as the outer court. So that each player has an inner and outer court. And one must return all one’s counters to one’s own inner court, finally off the board.

One more little item: the counters may move only in one direction, clockwise. There is no going back. One cannot go home again. Or rather, one must go home, always.

Of the 15, five are already in one’s own inner court, fully a third of the game is practically given you. Another fifth (3 counters) are placed just outside, in your outer court.

How easy, you think, to put over half the counters into your own courts! But so for your opponent. Everything is the same; everything is balanced. And, of course, everything is artificial. Which is to say, little in "life" is as balanced or as equal. But it's what you expect from a game: artificiality. Rules, conventions, only a single opponent. Nothing like "life," with its hurly-burly, its unpredictability, its demand for the bottom line, its jungle battle for survival.

I’d fogotten to tell you that one moves counters only by throwing dice. Such a small item to forget, but there is the diabolism of those dice! One has such choice in this game with 15 counters. Each can be moved independently or in pairs. But the apparent choice is mitigated by those dice. If one, for instance, rolls a 6 and a 3, one has the choice of moving one counter 9 spaces (triangles) (always, remember, clockwise) or two counters, one 6 spaces and the other 3.

So the dice determine that there is a mathematical dimension to this struggle: the matter of combinations of twelve things taken two at a time. The mathematician will write in thus: 12C2 and will point out that the chances of any one combination coming up will be governed by an immutable relationship.

To begin with, then, the game presents a number of mathematical elements:

• the outer and inner courts - (6 positions in each of 4 courts)

• the 12C2 dice throws

• the ability to use both numbers separately or together

• the 15 counters

• the single, clockwise direction of the counter moves. Actually, while you are moving clockwise, your opponent moves counterclockwise (from your point of view).

The center of the game is the tension between the number six and the number five. There are six die faces just as there are six positions in each court. But there are 15 counters set up at the beginning of the game in the following pattern: 2,5,3,5 (working clockwise from your opponent's inner court to yours). No one can distribute 15 counters over 12 spaces equally; there is always some imbalance: the tension between 5 and 6. (In Arabic and Hebrew, the name of the game is "6 and 5.")

So really, the game is not so predictable. That imbalance keeps the players from easily resolving the problem of getting one's counters off the board. It's that one single counter, that extra one that creates all the trouble. Sorry; getting ahead of myself again.

During the first stages of the game, dice throws usually evoke rather conventional and easily predicted moves. For instance, a 6/5 combination will move a counter from position 1 to 12 Or a 5/2 will move a counter from position 12 to position 17.

But each time a counter is moved, the decision about how to use the next dice throw becomes less conventional, more judgemental. For instance even though a first throw of a 6/5 combination may well mean a 1-12 move, the second one, although still suggestive of that same move, will mean that your opponent's inner court is left unthreatened because you have no more counters in it. Thus he is freer to move individual counters as rapidly as he can into his own inner court.

That's an example of the balance of this game. If you have managed to move both counters out of his inner court (giving you what appears to be a distinct advantage) that move has allowed him greater safety in moving his own counters. The more you win, the more you lose. And since the setup is perfectly symmetrical, that princple is equally true for your opponent.

I mentioned earlier that if you have two counters on a given position, your opponent cannot move against you. But if you should need or want to move one of those counters and leave only one on a positon, your opponent can capture that counter (if one or both dice allow him to land on that poisition). Once he has captured it, the counter is out of play until a throw of your dice allows it to return to your opponent's inner court, furthest from your court. Then the counter must start its journey home all over again. So it's that pesky single counter, the one operating alone, that 15th, that creates the danger, the risk, the vulnerability.

It's the young or sickly gnu or zebra, for instance, being stalked by a predator. As long as the animal has the protection of the herd, the community, the predator will not touch him. But out in the open, somehow excluded from the gang, he is fair prey.

The trick in Backgammon is to find one's way home, maintaining at least pairs of counters for mutual safety. If you can get to your home court in pairs (6x2), then those three single pieces are just add-ons, so that three of the pairs become threesomes. And the risk and individuality of the loners disappear.

Maybe you want to call it the "herd instinct," the ghetto mentality, the wagons in a circle, community. It's there in all of us: that desire for protection, for the security of the known, the tried and true. It works against the loner, the single oddity, the risk-taker, the out-lier. It makes us delight in ritual and habit and schedule.

Elements of balance and imbalance are everywhere. Boxing has the same features. A boxer's balance, his ability to dance on the balls of his feet, shifting weight easily from one foot to the other not only makes him a difficult target for his opponent to hit; it also provides the jumping off point for him to land a good, solid blow to his opponent's midsection or head or finally to his jaw. And landing a real hit not only injures the opponent but also knocks him off balance so as to be a target for more blows.

Ballroom dancing also depends on balance. But in this case, both partners try to avoid imbalance so as to sweep their bodies in rhythm with the music's beat. Imbalance brings in the element of chaos, destroys the working together of the parts, makes harmony and sympathetic vibration break down.

Still, there is that feature of imbalance that makes an individual. Balancing, working in harmony with a larger structure, staying sensitive to the rhythms and sounds of your context is part of that communal protection racket. That 15th counter, the one that throws off the balance of pairs, is also the one that stands out from the crowd. It is the one that refuses to accept the pattern. It is the one that questions the conventional wisdom that supports the pattern. Throw something off balance and one immediately wants to justify it. So its value, its power, its popularity is imnmediately questioned.

Both balance and imbalance have their necessary functions.

But it is not only the odd man out that unbalances the game. The player is always subject to the whim of the dice. If, when one of your counters is out of play, your opponent has all his inner court positions filled (each with two counters = 12 counters, so he still has three outside) you cannot reenter the game.

Eventually, of course, that "closed" court must open by virtue of the fact of the dice throws. If 12 counters "lock up" the court, only three are left in play. When these three have arrived at one's inner court, the player is ready to start moving his counters off the board. And since you cannot reenter the game yet, he has all the dice throws. But that advantage will quickly become a disadvatange; the next dice throw will most probably open at least one of the six positions, and so you throw the dice, hoping to enter into the open position. If you are really lucky, the dice will allow you to enter a position where only one counter stands, thus capturing that counter and putting your opponent in the same condition you had just found yourself in, another kind of balance. All because of the unpredictability of the dice.

This unpredictability is not all mathematical, not all a matter of the randomness of the throw. There is something dark, something diabolical, in the pattern of dice throws. Every player has known the feeling of the dice "running" against him or in his favor. Sometimes it seems as though, no matter what one does, the dice throw in his favor or disfavor. That's the real diabolism in the game: there must be some force controlling those throws if they come out in someone's favor time and time again. I hesitate to give it a name: God, the Devil, Fate, Nemesis, The Force. We've all heard such names given to who knows what. Perhaps it is the same field from which the idea of a poem is born. It certainly is not perceivable by human senses.

There is, therefore, a dynamic relationship between luck (the apparently random throw of the dice) and judgement (the decision one makes to move counters), "dynamic" in the sense that the importance of one or the other is always changing.

This matter of judgement is, of course, the distinctly human dimension to the game. Judgement involves experience, intelligence, and the ability to observe and learn from that observation. One quickly enough learns the conventional moves, those that obtain in the early stages of the game. But there comes a certain point at which one's almost automatic use of convention fails to meet the situation successfully. When that condition occurs depends on both the throw of the dice and the judgement of the player.

But when it does occur, one has passed into the second stage of the game. When judgement becomes more important than convention, the player must design a strategy for winning. Should he move as many pieces as rapidly as possible toward his inner court? But if that isolates one or more pieces in the opponent's inner court, will that plan cripple him? Should he leave a pair in position 12 so as to allow those further away some protection? As often as not, whatever strategy he decides on, like those in war, business, or lovemaking, fails because it cannot take into account the throw of the dice.

The dice throws can confound one in another way. There is a convention in the game that if one throws "doubles" (the same number coming up on both dice) one moves that number twice. If one rolls the dice so that two "threes" appear, he must move counters a total of four "three" moves, not two. But again judgement intervenes, for he may move one counter twelve spaces, two counters six spaces each, or four counters three spaces each. (But he may not move three counters four spaces each.)

So another element of unpredictability is operating.

Are you getting a sense of loss of control? You plan and scheme and manipulate, with a growing sense of security and, yes, let us admit it, greed and power. And then, with one throw of the dice, even if it is only one die landing on the wrong face, perhaps a one instead of a six, all the plans are dashed. You declare bankruptcy. There is not even any insurance money to start you up again.

Then there comes a second point in the game when one knows whether the strategy has worked. (Remember that that first point is when convention yields to strategy.) I called it the "critical throw." It represents the climax of the game, and starts the third and final stage of the game. After that, the winner has probably been determined, and all that remains is for the mechanical working out of the counters coming home to their inner courts.

These three distinct stages I call the introduction (where conventional moves are most common), the battleground (where strategy is worked out and judgement dominates), and, after that critical throw, the denouément (where the inevitable consequences of the previous moves play out).

I remember a horrible incident I learned about when I was still in elementary school. A neighbor, richer than my family, sent her daughter off to a girls' boarding school, a "good" school where the girls were shepherded and guarded and watched, so I suppose that the parents felt secure.

One night, as the girls were eating dinner in their dining hall, a powerful thunderstorm broke above the school. All at once, a bolt of lightening struck the brick chimney at the far end of the hall. The bricks were torn from their mortar and hurled down upon the girls below. My neighbor's daughter was buried beneath the debris, killed on the spot.

There it was:

the introduction: the parents, wanting a good education at a good school for the daughter, sent her to boarding school, and she was in the dining hall at mealtime -- all conventions.

the battleground: the storm, what to do to protect the occupants, the strategy, not to disturb the girls but to trust to the protection of the building.

the denouément: the thunderbolt, the loose bricks, the death of the girl.

It was a bad throw of the dice. Whatever my neighbor's strategy, that thunderbolt cancelled all plans. Perhaps it restored some kind of cosmic balance.

But what do we know of that curious method of decision-making: the throw of the dice? Why do certain combinations come up and others not? Is all governed by abstruse mathematical operations we only dimly perceive? Or is there some other erratic, chaotic element operating, something called karma, fate, nemesis, god?

A JEWISH EXPERIENCE

For a month -- it seemed a year -- I had listened to that strange, familiar nasal chanting of the Torah cantillation as my wife stumbled through her first struggle with the alien modes of middle eastern vocal music, attempting to learn three lines of one phase of one chapter in one book of the Torah. It was a tiny bit, those three lines, but in a Hebrew unlike much of what we had tried to master years ago in the Jerusalem ulpan. Different from the street Hebrew of policemen and shopkeepers in Israel, it was poetic and archaic, a style that made its learning and understanding all the more difficult.

I became interested enough to look at the meaning of the passage:

And the son of Aaron, the priest, shall put fire upon the altar and lay wood in order upon the fire. And Aaron’s 5 sons, the priests, shall lay the pieces and the head and the suet in order upon the wood that is on the fire which is upon the altar; but its inwards and its legs shall he wash with water; and the priest shall make the whole smoke on the altar for a burnt offering, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savor unto the Lord.

Long ago we gave up sacrifices, I mused. Even if I were to put that passage back into the entire portion so that the context could generate meaning, as I had always been taught, I would still learn almost nothing worth learning. True, I would know more about the preparation of the burnt offering; but so what? The question kept coming back: Why do we do these things? Why does my wife, assaulted on every side by the insistent demands of a busy suburban/professional life, spend time, exert energy, devote hours at a time to mastering an alien music, with no professional training, with little concern for the denotative meaning of the passage, so that eventually she can mount the bimah, clammy~handed, to read from a scroll she has never seen, to a congregation, most of whom know nothing of the passage, the cantorial tradition, nusach, trope, the peculiarities of sacrifice, or the theology and politics of the priestly clan? The reading, learned by rote, would last, perhaps, two minutes, after which she would sink back into the anonimity of the congregation, perhaps never again to make use of the much-studied technique that she had so laboriously mastered. Why?

That Friday night, at services, I listened to three women speak of three other women: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, their places in history, and the relationships they had designed with their husbands, their sons, and their parents. The discussion showed every evidence of thoughtful research, careful organization, and rehearsed presentation. Obviously, much time had been spent on this program, as well. But I could understand the reasons. The discussion was wide-ranging and probing, using new information and examining human relationships in ways I found useful for myself.

Then, Saturday morning, the Torah service. My wife's experience was repeated three times. And the Haftarah, longer than any of the Torah portions, demanded that same question: what makes any of these people, or any of us, take time out from the "daily rounds," as if some occult shabbat were forcing its way upon us, to do this exotic thing?

I asked the question. The answers were all reconstructed in hindsight: "She asked me; how could I refuse?" "Who else would?" "Well, someone has to."' "It's for Sisterhood, of course."' "I really didn't think I could, but I couldn’t say no." But all these answers were not answers at all. For, after all, one can and does refuse; and Sisterhood has many jobs; and there are always Georges around someplace. It occurred to me that the people I had asked didn't know, themselves. Did anybody, I wondered, really know what prompts a person to spend so much time this way? Obviously money can play no part. Power? Yeah, right! Influence? better to become a Board member. Prestige? hah.'

I could only go back into my own reasons for learning the Haftorah cantillation. It wasn’t exactly that I liked music; the music I empathize with is western: Bach, Bruckner, the Beatles...Perhaps in part it was that this chanting was dimly remembered from my own boyhood and while one can’t go home again, it's nice to try.

But only partly. More, I think, it was that challenge of trying to master a skill, of joining with others in a long tradition of masters, in blending that mastery with an appreciation of the complexities of the poetry involved; something in the order of participating actively in the Seder: "We are enjoined to relive the emancipation from Egypt in our Seders so that we can individually experience the exaltation of freedom."

And then I realized how well Judaism serves the contemporary human; how its very structure provides a space in which we can stretch ourselves in an effort to experience that exaltation. There needs to be a demand on us to fulfill the pieces of the ritual. That demand leads to the exaltation, and that exaltation makes all the effort, all the rote learning, all the anxiety worthwhile.

Today's mail brought a flyer from a brokerage house (they still think we have money!) inducing us to attend a "seminar" that will teach us how to invest wisely. It lists "The Five (5) Impactful Mistakes Made in 2008." I was struck by the second "impactful" statement: "How the media (Negatively) influenced Decisions in '08." So they've finally awakened to

the most powerful infuser of ideas and attitudes we have: television.

I wonder how many people think about living in television. I suppose that, even now that so much has been written about TV's influence on our lifestyle, many people still view the institution as an "entertainment medium." And, of course, on the most obvious level, it is. We watch whatever the latest fad is, and are titilated or horrified or fascinated or bored -- all normal reactions to entertainment. Once the show is finished, we forget about it and look for and at the next thrill.

On a slightly deeper, yet semi-conscious, level, we are aware of products. After all, THE major value in our society is consumption. toothpaste, pianos, coffee, hybrid cars....And we "know" that the ads display these products and encourage us to buy.

And some of us realize that the ads are selling a world, not a product. Drive a car and experience the thrill of racing. Eat a hamburger and become a BIGMaC. Shop for jeans and enter the tight-fitting jeans world, sexy, mod, cool, right. There is always a set of values tied to the purchase of the product.

But there are meta-values, values that are always present, no matter the specific product and its world. Speed, for instance, and motion are necessary to effective programming on TV. How often does a "talking head" sell products? It's not by accident that candidates for the Presidency every four years meet each other in a series of "debates." The format is confrontational. That's part of the "hard wired" aspect of the medium. Candidates would never win races if they appeared boring on the tube. The speed factor has a corollary: rapid alternation of attention, another meta-value. Simultaneity, rather than linearity, is part of this meta-world. Everthing is going on at the same time: skiing down a slope, thrilling music, voice-over talking about the advantages of SkiSky skis over others, closeups of smiling, hardened faces of the skiiers, followed quickly by a jump to the warmth-and-wine pleasure of the ski lodge that evening, throngs of adventure-seeking joy makers singing around the roaring log fire. Don't you wish you were there, wearing those same clothes, skiing those same slopes, living that same world? Being there, the simultaneous, tumultuous world with neither past nor future, that's tv.

So tv promotes a world. It is peopled by the adventure set, where entertainment is doing things, building structures, creating environments. But it is a synthetic world, a virtual world for most of us. We sit and watch while we are told that the active life is the good life. So that we are persuaded that, if we can't build bridges, write poetry, slam a homerun in the big leagues, we can at least buy the products of that world. If we buy a Dell, we can "log onto the Internet" for all the thrills that entails. If we can buy an SUV, we can careen down trails of roadways with no other cars in sight. The meta-values penetrate the products. So that there is a self-selection going on: only those products which can profit from the meta-values are those which are marketed. Speed, motion, rapid alteration of attention, simultaneity -- this is what TV makes us live, virtually.

All of this is vast: millions of TV sets, hundreds of millions of viewers, tens of thousands of products, billions of dollars, hundreds of thounsands of employees...

What a classroom! Only prob is: the bottom line is money, nothing else.