You’ve probably seen the beautiful mobiles of Alexander Calder; you may very well have a plastic or cardboard mobile in your home. The principle is simple enough: a counterweight on one side of a hanging balance, supporting on the other side a collection of shapes which are free to spin and move in the air currents.
I love these things.
Years as a musician have established the mechanisms of daily practice; I’m good at doing something every day, rain or shine. Once I became aware of the crisis of climate change I determined to use this capability in service to the planet. Starting in 2010 my first ritualized daily “seva” was The Climate Letter Project: a Letter To The Editor of a newspaper or magazine somewhere in the world on the subject of climate change, every day. I did that for four years. It was the counterweight that balanced the rest of my life.
But it burned me out. I stopped, and spent a year and a half working on The Climate Message, an online “video collage” of musicians, dancers and poets making artistically-crafted statements about the urgency of climate change. And that was great.
I continued producing benefit concerts twice a year for 350MA.org, and that’s great, too (our fifteenth concert is coming up in June and it’s gonna be fantastic). But by the summer of 2015 the gotta-do-something-every-day itch hadn’t been scratched for a long time. My “mobile” had no counterweight.
So.
Facing the traffic
On Labor Day 2015 I began Man With Sign. It’s as simple as you can get: me, a sign, a song, an hour, an intersection.
Every weekday morning, regardless of weather, I rise at 7 AM, make myself a cup of coffee, pour it in a travel mug, and walk to a heavily-trafficked intersection near my house, arriving at Roosevelt Circle around 7:30. At rush hour it’s entirely congested: a captive, but steadily changing, audience.
I have two signs, which I attach to a metal post (property of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) with a light bungee cord. The first, made of painted wood, simply states “CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL,” and the other, made of two-sided cardboard, alternates between the somewhat hectoring “IGNORANCE IS NO EXCUSE” and the more philosophical, “THINK IN EONS, ACT NOW” (my take on “Think Globally, Act Locally”).
And while I stand, I sing. I’m a singer by profession, a music teacher, a servant of beauty; my work is the transmission of songs and melodies from the past into the future. People come to me to learn a style of music (Indian classical singing) that has roots in a mythic past, a style of music that is intertwined with an ancient and complex civilization. I’ve been doing daily practice my whole adult life, coordinating my voice with the drone of the tamboura and working out scales, patterns, interval jumps, repertoire, and all the other responsibilities of the working musician.
People wave and raise their thumbs approvingly. They sometimes clap, pump their fists, honk their horns. I get my picture taken every day. And sometimes they tell me things as they go by. They tell me I’m an idiot, a hero, a loser, a role model, a fucking libtard, a good man. I’ve been given packets of chemical foot warmers on a cold morning (helpful hint: if you live where there’s still winter, this is a very thoughtful thing to give from your car window); I’ve been given come-to-Jesus tracts (the classic Chick Tract on Global Warming); I’ve had people toss money at me (when it’s possible, I toss it back — I don’t want your millions, mister). One man pulled over, beckoned me to his window, and handed me a jar of honey. “It’s from my own hives,”he said, “I’ve been saving it for you.”
When I first began, on the day after Labor Day, 2015, I sat on the nearby bridge, holding the sign so the rush-hour drivers on the SouthEast Expressway could get the message. But a couple of police encounters later, an officer told me, “Go down to the intersection and stand there. If you’re there it won’t be a problem, but here you could get into trouble.” So I went another couple of hundred feet to the big rotary, and it’s there I’ve made my stand ever since. While occasional State police officers talk to me, they mostly seem to think me worthy of nothing more than continual ignorage (#WhitePrivilege, I know).
Is it Art or Activism?
Yes.
At 8:30 I pack up my signs and walk home, crossing the flow of oncoming traffic, climbing over the guard rail, and walking down the slope and across the street to my house. Once I’m inside I make breakfast, wake up my wife & daughter, start my day.
I write about each vigil, complete with a description of the day’s practice routine, a few paragraphs of reflections on the world and its possibilities, and a brief video clip of some music. You can find me on Facebook: Man With Sign.
Have two samples from a few weeks ago. I’m verbose, polysyllabic, logomachic. If you like that sort of thing, then these pieces are just the sort of thing you’ll like. If not, please skip.
Got myself out of bed and up and running without incident. Wife and daughter are in India for a family function, so it’s just me and Dog. Returning to the bedroom I noticed that she’d shifted and was now lying exactly where I’d been sleeping — perhaps the combination of extra warmth and ManSmell made it a place of greater comfort for her. I made my coffee and suited up for the cold (15F), grabbed my signs, and got to Roosevelt Circle by 7:27.
Two people took my picture. Guy in Truck said, “I’ll post this on Facebook, and you won’t have to stand out here any more.” To which I replied that I was already on Facebook, and this was the beginning of my 78th week. A Woman In Car took my picture and asked my name; I gave it. I’m a public figure now. I told her about Man With Sign…perhaps she’s reading this now. People waved and saluted; a bicyclist and I exchanged greetings. And a guy in a Red Car honked and made an exaggerated thumbs-down motion. If Climate Change Is Real, why is it cold today? And if world hunger exists, how did I manage to have a sandwich?
Practice today was decided before I slept last night — no raga work this week. Instead I’m going to explore chromatic approach tones to various arpeggiated structures. This morning I began with the neighbor tones of a major triad, then expanded the superstructure to encompass a dominant ninth pentad. Each of the tones in this group was approached by semitones from above, from below, and encircled either before or after the primary tone was sung. This exercise makes very stringent demands on the ears; when the central tones are well fixed it’s possible to hear the neighbor tones providing more than one kind of tension at the same time — a melo-harmonic zeugma in which the same note flickers from one role to another even in a quarter of a second. It began triggering my synaesthetic capabilities, and I started to “hear” these approach tones visually, as bursts of differently colored light.
This perceptual polysemicity did not need closed eyes; standing in the chilly sunshine and waving intermittently to traffic, my mind was providing a separate theater for a dazzling light show in which different chromatic shades transubstantiated into one another. When I messed up a particular passage, the lights became muddy and opaque. Usually the visual analogues for musical experience emerge when I’m composing or improvising; when I’m lucky I get them onstage, where they provide avenues of expression that I hadn’t hitherto considered. Wiggly lines, geometric figures, bursts of retinal pyrotechnics with a background like the phosphene displays you can access easily by pressing your eyelids. Today’s practice was like selecting hundreds of tiny elements for a stained-glass window.
The daily routine continues: wake, vigil, teach, work, play, eat, sleep. And greater wheels turn everywhere, their constant revolution so ultra to our quotidian that recognizing them requires ceaseless commitment. The unfolding of America’s political collapse is riveting theater, playing out in real time for all of us — and it would be hilariously improbable if we saw in a movie or read it in a book. The unfolding of Earth’s environmental collapse is likewise happening before our eyes, with the difference that most of us — even those who are engaged in the struggle to prevent it — need to avert our gaze if we are to sustain ourselves for the daily struggles that form our lives.
It’s too much to tolerate; too intense a glare for the naked eye. Standing at the roadside, reminding people that IGNORANCE IS NO EXCUSE, singing chromatically-inflected arpeggios, I’m just as much a “denier” as the guy in the red car, honking his horn and giving me a thumbs-down.
There’s no exit from this work; I know I cannot complete it or even inhabit its responsibilities fully, but neither am I free to abandon it. It’s insignificant…and crucial. You do what you gotta do.
Well, the only one with music that we know about at the moment, anyway.
“You keep standing here every day. And you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna go to work.”
The speaker is a Guy in a Comcast van — off to spend a day installing cable television in people’s houses, presumably. I call back, “Hey, I work, too!” but it feels defensive and pointless. I shoulda kept my mouth shut. Just a few seconds before this fellow, another Man In Van (this one from a local dry-cleaning business) gave me the finger as he went by.
Now I know that Comcast Guy just sees me once a day at most, and that en passant. So what does he imagine I do? Collect welfare checks and lie around the house eating Lobster Thermidor? Does he think I spend all day out there on Roosevelt Circle? Does he think I’m asking for money?
As I was walking to my post this morning a couple in a compact car held out a dollar bill; I smiled and said, “No, no! I’m out here to raise awareness, not to raise money!” I held my sign so they could read it. Okay; they drove on.
Does Comcast Guy have a certain level of background resentment against anyone whose job isn’t existentially deadening? Because I’m a music teacher, which means that my job is a *relief* from the looming terrors; I get to spend my days helping people find their voices, find their artistry, find their way in the intersectional thicket of sound and structure and expression and survival.
No matter. He’s gone.
I woke this morning and came downstairs to make my coffee; my mind was a little foggy, but it was okay, the power of ritual being strong. I set up the computer to do a tedious data-transfer process before I went out the door; this week I’m shifting a lot of information from one place to another, and I like it best if that happens while I’m out of the house. Carrying coffee and signs, fending off unwanted dollar bills, I reached my post at 7:28.
Mostly waves and friendly gestures this morning, beyond the contrarian voices already mentioned and another chump who felt driven to make a thumbs-down gesture, alerting me to his derision with a brief honk. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Singing was spent on chromatic passagework outlining and ornamenting secondary and tertiary dominant progressions. Sung against the drone these present a fascinating challenge, since the intervallic role of each note shifts depending on what chord it’s part of — this means I can flip back and forth between singing the sargam names relative to the tamboura, and those relative to the root of the current chord. The objective is to hear root fifth-wise root motion while singing chromatic sequences, building to resolution on a tonic triad. I set a constraint in action: four notes per chord, each sequence to be made entirely from half- and whole-steps.
Gradually I encompass two octaves, navigating up and down through the imagined chord sequence (A7-D7-G7-C) with constant motion in these small increments. I experience the same synesthetic chromaticism as I did yesterday, only even more intensely; each note in the sequence displays its intervallic descriptor (on the movie screen inside my head) in a different color, and the same interval is differently colored depending on what chord it’s embellishing. I wonder if other people experience the same thing when they do this.
There is plenty of darkness, toil, and danger in our world. A hundred years ago it was a given that someone my daughter’s age could expect that a measurable number of her playmates — even those of the richest and most privileged — would not live to see adulthood. We have built a civilization that has laid many of those traumas to rest — and now, just as we were hoping to relax and enjoy our sunlit days in song, we discover a devil in the details.
Those pesky CO2 molecules. We take carbon from inside the Earth — and move it outside. All that carbon, so slowly accumulated from the sunlight that fell on ancient trees and vegetation, now released into the atmosphere.
Perhaps Earth’s scientists will make a genetically-modified algae that can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere in prodigious quantities. Perhaps they can make it shit diamonds while they’re at it. That’d be nice.
I’m a music teacher. Every time I teach someone a song or a passage or a technique or a new pathway to awareness, I’m participating in the intersection of two of the oldest human behaviors — behaviors so ancient they antedate our species. Learning and singing. Every song is the descendant of thousands upon thousands of other songs, flickering in and out of existence, perpetuating themselves by reproducing inside human minds and throats. We’re just the vehicle, the transmissive medium.
Yeah, I’ve got a job.
“Only when love and need are one, and the work is play, for mortal stakes /
Is the deed ever truly done, for Heaven, and the future’s, sakes.”
Climate Change Is Real.
Man With Sign
Woman With Sign
Occasionally people join me; if you’re North of Boston and feel like dropping in, let me know. (I have extra signs and will bring them along!)
I have a one-week vacation from the vigil at the end of August, and I take a break over the holidays. This year I got sick and took another week off before hitting the roadside. Don't worry on my behalf: this is an act of conscience, not a mortification of the flesh.
When I went on a concert tour in India in early 2016, my wife Vijaya did the vigils, every morning for two weeks.
I’ve made friends with some of the pedestrians and we’ve had nice conversations while they wait for the bus. Some drivers greet me every day. And every so often someone thanks me because they feel more empowered to speak out about climate change and what it means for our posterity. Which is what I’m working for.
Last year I was in the bank, paying a visit to my money. One of the bank managers came over and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Senders. I was wondering: is that you holding a sign on Roosevelt Circle every morning?” I admitted that this was so. “Can you help me?” he asked, “I need to know how to talk to people about climate change. I know it’s real, but I’m not sure how to bring it up in conversation.” And the two of us spent twenty minutes going over some of our “elevator speeches” to make it easier to bring up climate issues without fumbling. That’s what I’m working for.
A Facebook friend told me, “Because you’re doing this, I felt enough courage to put a sign up on my cubicle at work that says ‘Climate Change Is Real,’ and now I talk about it with my co-workers every day.” That’s what I’m working for.
I was riding home from my teaching job in Boston, and a man seated across from me on the subway was looking at me knowingly. Just before he got off, he turned to me and said, “How long do you spend out there each day?” I told him I did an hour a day, and he said, “Thank you for making a stand.”
When I was touring in India, I brought up climate change not just at every concert, but at every interview I did. Sumana Ramanan wrote an extremely sympathetic piece in The Hindu:
“Riyaaz” means “practice.”
Every weekday for the past seven months, come hail or hurricane, Warren Senders has stood for an hour on a roadside in his hometown in the Boston area in the U.S. carrying a placard with a warning about the dangers of climate change. But he doesn’t stand idle as he executes what he calls his “daily act of conscience,” an initiative he has dubbed ‘Man with Sign’. The khayal singer, versatile musician and social activist uses this time to do his riyaaz ....
“If I were a specialist in polar bears, I’d be talking about polar bears,” he says just before his first recital in India, a baitak at Mumbai’s Volte Gallery in Worli, last week. On a one-week concert tour of India, Senders performs again in the city tomorrow. “But because I know enough science, I can see that it’s not just our biodiversity that is in danger from climate change but also our human cultural diversity,”says Senders. “Social justice musicians’ songs are all about these issues. That is not my training. I can’t sing songs about climate change because the khayal idiom itself does not permit that. But that is not an excuse. It just means that I have to find a different way.”
More recently I’ve begun incorporating some of this material into my performances, in a combination of music and spoken word which I call Singing The Long Now.
Anyone who knows me recognizes that the inspiration and motivation behind this particular work comes from one man’s example.
WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. — Pete Seeger pulled his black Toyota Highlander into the Staples parking lot here and plucked some signs from the back seat, including one with “Peace” spray-painted in large orange letters. With that, he slung his banjo over his shoulder like an old musket and marched toward the intersection of Route 9, a bustling six-lane thoroughfare, and 9D, the “Hudson Valley P.O.W.-M.I.A. Memorial Highway.”
But before the 89-year-old folk singer flashed his antiwar signs to passing drivers from this no-man’s land — a patch of green about an hour north of New York City on the Hudson River — he bent over again and again, picking up litter.
“This is my religion now,” said Mr. Seeger. “Picking up trash. You do a little bit wherever you are.”
The lettering on the banjo reads, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
You do a little bit wherever you are. And that’s the counterweight that lets the rest of my life — teaching, singing, family, garden, dog — continue in motion. It’s been 85 weeks now.
Each weekday morning, I stand on the edge of the road — and the Anthropocene.
I face the traffic — and the facts.
Climate Change Is Real
Man With Sign
See you in Washington!
WarrenS
SciCli Blogathon: April 22-28, 2017 (all times are Pacific)
Support the Daily Kos SciCli blogathon during the April 22-28 week of action promoting the April 29 People’s Climate March with stories on how science and climate change are affecting our lives and our planet.
If you’d like to march with other readers of Daily Kos, visitConnect! Unite! Act! (7:30 AM Pacific) for march locations. Send navajo a Kos mail or leave a message in the comments.
On April 29, let’s march for jobs, justice, and the climate!
Climate Hawks Vote is hosting a training for leaders of the climate movement who are considering running for office on April 30, the day after the People’s Climate March.Read more about the training at People's Climate March next Saturday. Run on Sunday.
We’re seeking to elect leaders willing to take on the greatest challenge facing the next few generations of humanity. Too many Democratic politicians consider climate to be just another issue bubbling below the surface of top priorities, and too many advocates are willing to excuse Democratic politicians who tout their states’ coal and oil resources. We need aggressive, progressive champions of climate justice—climate hawks.
The Republican Party is so deeply entrenched in denying the existence of climate change and protecting the fossil-fuel industry that if a Republican climate hawk were to emerge, we would look hard at a Republican’s willingness to buck leadership as well as the Republican’s position on climate.
We work to engage and educate voters, advocate on climate change in general election contests, and back climate hawks in Democratic primaries. We engage and train younger climate hawks interested in running for office. And we work on campaigns to mobilize the American people and our elected officials to act aggressively to end greenhouse pollution and build a renewably powered, just society that is resilient to the threats of a changing climate.
We need bold progressives to run for office who will lead on climate, and stand in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s climate denial and the fossil-fuel industry agenda.
At the training we'll hear from grassroots leaders who have gotten elected themselves and made major progress by stopping fossil fuel projects, advancing renewable energy, and helping their communities deal with climate disasters. And we'll be joined by some of the top progressive political strategists and trainers in the country.
This training is for you if:
- you are considering running for office yourself in the next one to three years,
- you want to help a friend run for office,
- or you want to learn how a local electoral strategy could help your campaign.
Engaging in local politics is a critical part of the climate movement, whether we're fighting for divestment, no new fossil fuels, or solutions like community solar and green building policies.
Organized by: Climate Hawks Vote and Lead Locally, with
350 Action
AllofUs
Blue America
ClimateTruth.org Action
Communities for a Better Environment Action
Democracy for AmericaFood & Water Action Fund
Friends of the Earth Action
Netroots Nation
Oil Change USA
Progressive Change Campaign Committee
Progressive Democrats of America
#VOTEPROCHOICE
Working Families Party
Food & Water Action Fund
United We Dream Action
Note: This training is available for RSVP both in DC and online. See climatehawksvote.com/training for more details.
