by Ira Glass
In the book The Language Instinct, the psychologist Steven Pinker argues against the idea that language is a cultural artifact—something that we learn “the way we learn to tell time.” Rather, he says, it is innate. Language develops “spontaneously,” he writes, “without conscious effort or formal instruction,” and “is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic. . . . People know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs.” The secret to Roger Horchow and Lois Weisberg is, I think, that they have a kind of social equivalent of that instinct—an innate and spontaneous and entirely involuntary affinity for people. They know everyone because—in some deep and less than conscious way—they can’t help it.
8
Once, in the very early 1960s, after Lois had broken up with her first husband, she went to a party for Ralph Ellison, who was then teaching at the University of Chicago. There she spotted a young lawyer from the South Side named Bernie Weisberg. Lois liked him. He didn’t notice her, though, so she decided to write a profile of him for the Hyde Park Herald. It ran with a huge headline. Bernie still didn’t call. “I had to figure out how I was going to get to meet him again, so I remembered that he was standing in line at the reception with Ralph Ellison,” Lois says. “So I called up Ralph Ellison”—whom she had never met—“and said, ‘It’s so wonderful that you are in Chicago. You really should meet some people on the North Side. Would it be OK if I have a party for you?‘” He said yes, and Lois sent out a hundred invitations, including one to Bernie. He came. He saw Dizzy Gillespie in the kitchen and Ralph Ellison in the living room. He was impressed. He asked Lois to go with him to see Lenny Bruce. Lois was mortified; she didn’t want this nice Jewish lawyer from the South Side to know that she knew Lenny Bruce, who was, after all, a drug addict. “I couldn’t get out of it,” she said. “They sat us down at a table right at the front, and Lenny keeps coming over to the edge of the stage and saying”—here Lois dropped her voice down very low—“ ‘Hello, Lois.’ I was sitting there like this.” Lois put her hands on either side of her face. “Finally I said to Bernie, ‘There are some things I should tell you about. Lenny Bruce is a friend of mine. He’s staying at my house. The second thing is I’m defending a murderer.’” (But that’s another story.) Lois and Bernie were married a year later.
The lesson of this story isn’t obvious until you diagram it culturally: Lois got to Bernie through her connections with Ralph Ellison and Lenny Bruce, one of whom she didn’t know (although later, naturally, they became great friends) and one of whom she was afraid to say that she knew, and neither of whom, it is safe to speculate, had ever really been connected with each other before. It seems like an absurdly roundabout way to meet someone. Here was a thirtyish liberal Jewish intellectual from the North Side of Chicago trying to meet a thirtyish liberal Jewish intellectual from the South Side of Chicago, and to get there she charted a cross-cultural social course through a black literary lion and an avant-garde standup comic. Yet that’s a roundabout journey only if you perceive the worlds of Lenny Bruce and Ralph Ellison and Bernie Weisberg to be impossibly isolated. If you don’t—if, like Lois, you see them all as three points of an equilateral triangle—then it makes perfect sense. The social instinct makes everyone seem like part of a whole, and there is something very appealing about this, because it means that people like Lois aren’t bound by the same categories and partitions that defeat the rest of us. This is what the power of the people who know everyone comes down to in the end. It is not—as much as we would like to believe otherwise—something rich and complex, some potent mixture of ambition and energy and smarts and vision and insecurity. It’s much simpler than that. It’s the same lesson they teach in Sunday school. Lois knows lots of people because she likes lots of people. And all those people Lois knows and likes invariably like her, too, because there is nothing more irresistible to a human being than to be unqualifiedly liked by another.
Not long ago, Lois took me to a reception at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago—a brand-new, Bauhaus-inspired building just north of the Loop. The gallery space was impossibly beautiful—cool, airy, high-ceilinged. The artist on display was Chuck Close. The crowd was sleek and well groomed. Black-clad young waiters carried pesto canapés and glasses of white wine. Lois seemed a bit lost. She can be a little shy sometimes, and at first she stayed on the fringes of the room, standing back, observing. Someone important came over to talk to her. She glanced up uncomfortably. I walked away for a moment to look at the show, and when I came back her little corner had become a crowd. There was her friend from the state legislature. A friend in the Chicago Park District. A friend from her neighborhood. A friend in the consulting business. A friend from Gallery 37. A friend from the local business-development group. And on and on. They were of all ages and all colors, talking and laughing, swirling and turning in a loose circle, and in the middle, nearly hidden by the commotion, was Lois, clutching her white bag, tiny and large-eyed, at that moment the happiest person in the room.
SHAPINSKY’S KARMA
Lawrence Weschler
I was up late one night last fall, absorbed in Serge Guilbaut’s provocative revisionist tract How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, when, at eleven thirty, the phone rang. A stranger on the line introduced himself as Akumal Ramachander, from Bangalore, India. He was calling from Washington, D.C., he informed me in a spirited voice. He’d just been in Warsaw a few weeks earlier, where he’d had many fascinating experiences. He’d read a book I’d written on Poland, and could see that I’d given the situation there much thought. He was going to be in New York City later in the week, and would it be all right if we got together? It all sounded mildly diverting, so we set a rendezvous.
A few days later, on schedule, Ramachander appeared in my office—a youngish, fairly slight gentleman with short-cropped black hair and a round face. His conversation caromed all over the place (Gdansk, Reagan, Sri Lanka, Lech Walesa, Indira Gandhi, the Sikhs, Margaret Thatcher, Satyajit Ray, London); he told me that he was some sort of part-time correspondent for the local paper of one of those Indian towns almost no one in America has ever heard of. He’d taught English at an agricultural college but had generally been something of a drifter, he explained—that is, until recently, for he’d just discovered his true calling. “My destiny!” he insisted. “We Indians believe in karma, in destiny, in discovering the true calling for our lives. It has nothing to do with making money, this ‘making a living’ you have here in America. No, it is the spirit calling, and we answer. Not in some silly mystical way but as if the purpose of life were revealed—sometimes, as in my case, all-of-a-suddenly, like that! And this is what has now happened.”
And what calling, I asked him, had he suddenly uncovered?
“Shapinsky!”
And who, or what, I hazarded, was Shapinsky?
“Harold Shapinsky,” he replied. “Abstract Expressionist painter, generation of de Kooning and Rothko, an undiscovered marvel, an absolute genius, completely unknown, utterly unappreciated. He lives here in New York City, with his wife, in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, where he continues to paint, as he has been doing for over forty years, like an angel.” Ramachander scribbled an address and a phone number on a scrap of paper, shoved it at me, and continued, “You must visit this Shapinsky fellow. He’s a true find, a major discovery. It is my destiny to bring him to the attention of the world.”
I was somewhat speechless.
Ramachander was not: “You will see—this is an extraordinary discovery. As I say, I don’t care about money. What’s money? I do it because of my destiny.”
Well, at length Ramachander departed. (He was, he told me, headed for Europe a few days hence.) I tacked Shapinsky’s address and phone number to my bulletin board but didn’t get around to calling him right away, and then one thing led to another, and I pretty much forgot about the whole incident.
A few weeks later, at seven in the morning, the phone in my apartment rang me awake. “Hello, M
r. Weschler. Akumal here. In Utrecht, Holland. You won’t believe the good news! I took slides of Shapinsky’s work to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the curator there was amazed. He told me that I’d brought him the work of a great artist, that Shapinsky is a major find. I must tell you, I’m beginning to believe this is one of the great discoveries of the last five years. The curator was extremely supportive, and eager to see how things develop.”
Myself, I wasn’t really eager to believe any of it. I hung up and went back to sleep.
A few days later, the phone rang again—at ten in the morning this time. “Akumal again here, Mr. Weschler! Only, in London today. More good news! I visited the Tate this morning. Just walked in with no appointment, demanded to see the curator of modern art, refused to leave the waiting room until he finally came out—to humor me, I suppose, this silly little Indian fellow, you know—but presently he was blown away. He bows to me and says, ‘Mr. Ramachander, you are right. Shapinsky is a terrific discovery.’ I’m becoming more and more convinced myself that he’s the discovery of the decade. Anyway, he gave me the name of a gallery—the Mayor Gallery. James Mayor, one of the top dealers in London, Cork Street—Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, first-rate. I went over there, and he, too, was flabbergasted. He’s thinking about scheduling a show for the spring.”
I still didn’t know quite what to make of any of this; I assumed that it was all a bit daft, some elaborate fantastication, and, anyway, I remained too busy with other projects to take time to call and visit Shapinsky, if Shapinsky actually existed.
A few days later, the phone rang, again at seven in the morning, and, used to the pattern by now, I managed to preempt my new friend with a “Hello, Akumal.”
“British television!” Ramachander exclaimed, utterly unimpressed by my prescience. “I showed the slides to some people over at British Channel 4 and they loved them, and right on the spot they committed themselves to doing a special, an hour-long documentary, to be ready in time for the show at the Mayor Gallery. Did I tell you? A one-man show to open on May twenty-first, Shapinsky’s sixtieth birthday. They love the story, the idea of this unknown genius Abstract Expressionist and of the little Indian fellow and his destiny. They’ll be flying me back to New York in several weeks with a camera crew to re-create our meeting—Shapinsky and myself—and then the following month they’re going to fly Shapinsky and his wife and me to Bangalore, in India, so I can show them around my digs. This meeting of East and West, you see—that’s the ticket. So maybe I’ll see you in New York, yes?”
I set the phone back in its cradle, resolving to give the whole matter a bit more thorough consideration once I’d reawakened at some more decent hour. But just as I was nodding back off the phone rang again.
“The Ludwig Museum! I forgot to tell you. Just before Channel 4, I went to Cologne and showed the slides to the excellent lady in charge of the Ludwig Museum there. She couldn’t get over them. She can’t wait to see the show at the Mayor Gallery. Everyone agrees.
“I’m beginning to see it clearly now: Shapinsky is one of the top finds of the century!”
Several weeks later (I’d anticipated the visitation with a notation in my desk diary), the phone rang at my office, and of course it was Akumal, this time in New York, in Shapinsky’s apartment—I simply had to drop whatever I was doing immediately, he told me, and come see for myself.
So I did. The address on Seventieth Street, east of Second Avenue, turned out to be a Japanese restaurant. Off to one side was a dark entry passage behind a glass door. I pushed a doorbell and was buzzed in—a five-story walk-up; steep stairs and dim, narrow corridors. I could hear something of a commotion upstairs as I approached. Rounding the corner onto the fifth-floor landing, I was momentarily blinded by a panning klieg light: the tiny apartment was indeed overflowing with a bustling film crew. I craned my neck into the bustle. The foyer was almost entirely taken up by a single bed (the only bed in the apartment, I later discovered), which was covered with coats and equipment; the next room was an almost equally crammed kitchen; and just beyond that I could see into a tiny bedroom, which was serving as the studio. A very dignified and dapper-looking English gentleman had spread several paintings about the floor of the studio and was crouched down making a careful selection as the television crew peered over his shoulder. I managed to step in. In the far corner I spotted Akumal, who was beaming. Next to him stood a soft, slightly stooped, fairly rumpled, gray-bearded old man, wrapped in a moth-eaten wool sweater and puffing cherry-sweet tobacco smoke into the air from the bowl of a well-chewed pipe.
“Ah!” Akumal exclaimed, suddenly catching sight of me. “Mr. Weschler! I want you to meet Harold Shapinsky.”
Shapinsky looked up, mildly (understandably) dazed.
The dapper Englishman got up off his haunches, wiped his hands, gave one last approving glance at the paintings arrayed before him, and then looked over at Shapinsky, smiling. “Yes,” he said. “I think that will do. That will do superbly.”
“Cut!” shouted the film director. “Good. Very good.” The kliegs went dark.
“James Mayor,” Akumal said, introducing the distinguished-looking Englishman, whose identity I’d already surmised.
Shapinsky puffed on his pipe and nodded.
The cameraman asked if he could have Shapinsky and his wife stand by the window for a moment, and Mayor walked over beside me. “Most amazing story,” he said. “I mean, an artist of this caliber living like this, dirt poor, completely unknown—living in a virtual garret five stories above a Japanese restaurant I’ve been to literally dozens of times. Quite good Japanese restaurant, by the way, that.” Mayor is in his late thirties, trim, conventionally handsome, with a shock of black hair cresting to a peak over his forehead. “I must say, when Akumal brought me in those slides I was astonished,” he continued. “I mean, this art business can get one pretty jaded after a while. One gets to feeling one’s seen it all. You begin to despair of ever again encountering anything original, powerful, real. I haven’t felt a buzz like this in a long time.”
Akumal and the director of the film, Greg Lanning, joined us. Lanning explained that he’d now like to shoot a sequence of Mayor and Shapinsky talking together. Everything really was intolerably cramped. I asked Akumal if he’d like to join me for a little walk, and he agreed.
“Well,” I told Akumal outside, “you’ve certainly gone and caught my attention. But do you think we might slow down and wind this tape back a bit? First of all, seriously, who are you?”
“Ah, yes.” He laughed. “It’s been just as I predicted, hasn’t it? Wonderful destiny! Manifest destiny—isn’t that one of your expressions here in America? Manifest karma, if you’ll allow me. As I told you, I am a lowly professor of elementary English at the College of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore. I am there every day from eight to three, teaching my classes of forty students grammar, spelling, sentence structure, conversational skills—only, I’m on leave just now, as you can see.”
He was born in Bombay on the tenth of July, 1949, and his family presently moved to Calcutta. His father was a clerk in the army. His family was lower middle class, struggling to advance slightly higher, into the middle class proper. When his father and mother were married, they were so poor they couldn’t afford a single night in the fanciest hotel in Bombay—they couldn’t even afford tea there—so they went over and just rode up and down in the lifts. “That was their sort of honeymoon celebration. When I was growing up, there were six of us in two rooms.”
Walking and talking at a brisk clip, Akumal continued, “My parents are both polyglots—they speak five Indian languages each, I speak seven—and they would encourage my reading. Especially my mother: I remember coming upon her in my room one day; she was reading my copy of Death of a Salesman and she was weeping. I was very bookish. I almost went blind with all my reading. There was no electricity, and to save my eyes my father made a huge clamor and got electricity for the entire block. He was not able to complete h
is schooling himself, so he sacrificed enormously so that his children would be able to: he sent me to a fine school where I perfected my English. Eventually, I even managed to teach English for many years before ever going to England my first time, which was in 1980.
“I was especially in love with beauty. In India, even the poorest will adorn themselves with colorful saris or simple jewelry—you may be economically deprived, we say, but God has given you eyes in your head to see—and from a very early age I was entranced, mesmerized by the flowing movements of all those intense colors. One of my earliest memories in Calcutta was going to the fields not far from Fort William, along the banks of the Hooghly River. This was my art school. Because there, each summer, thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—of butterflies would gather, and I would run among them, chasing them, all those brilliant hues floating about. I never actually tried to catch any. It was just the swarming of all that color. And that was my initial association when I saw the slides of Shapinsky’s paintings for the first time. They reminded me of the butterflies back in Calcutta, and the rhythms of classical Indian dance, too—another great passion of mine. I knew I must be in the presence of a profound art if it could inspire associations like that.”
Akumal went on to relate that his family had moved to Bangalore when he was sixteen. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics and chemistry and mathematics from the National College in Bangalore in 1968, shifted fields and campuses and attained a master’s degree from Bangalore’s Central College in 1971. In addition to teaching, he wrote poetry in Hindi and fiction in English. In 1973, an early draft of an antiwar play of his somehow got him an invitation to Weimar, East Germany—his first trip abroad—and there he was “bowled over by Brecht.” I say “somehow”: Akumal was actually very specific—exhaustively so—about the circumstances, but my concentration had begun to buckle under the weight of his relentlessly detailed recapitulations. All of Akumal’s accounts are exhaustive: it’s not so much that he is incapable of compression as that he seems authentically dazzled by the particulate density of every aspect of his fate. Anyway, he returned to India and became something of a gadfly in Bangalore, one of the fastest-growing provincial cities in India, endlessly exhorting the editors of the local papers to expand their cultural coverage, especially of international film and literature. He haunted the British Council Library. He arranged for the first translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Kannada, the local language. He acted as a literary agent on behalf of various local poets and essayists. He managed to finagle a special four-page supplement on the films of the Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi during a Bangalore film festival in 1979. Zanussi eventually saw the supplement, and had Akumal invited to the 1980 Gdansk film festival, at the height of the Solidarity period—the first of several trips Akumal took to Poland. Somewhere along the line, he met Lelah Dushkin, a sociology professor at Kansas State University, who managed to arrange an invitation for Akumal to come to Kansas to lecture on Indian politics and cinema, so that early in the fall of 1984 Akumal found himself in Chicago, fresh from Poland (where he had just attended another film festival), en route to Manhattan, Kansas.
