BZ INTERVIEW: AT UPDATE

Interviewer
BZ

IN. As the critic and religious editor here at Update we wanted an interview about your life

which we offer you this forum.

BZ. Thank you.

IN. You have said you have had many traumatic and dramatic epiphanies which have shaped and

changed your life. What is an early one, BZ?

BZ.  At ten I was playing the Thais Meditation at my  first violin recital; and feeling good at my

interpretation and went outside at intermission for a bit of air on Commonwealth Avenue,lined

with trees which always resembled for me the Champs Elysees.  There was one empty park bench

with college  football and guitar players around me. I attempted to sit down. A woman spoke in

German saying I could not sit down. I realized that after the war both Nazi victims and Nazis had

emigrated to America. I could not believe my eyes when she put her shoes on the bench. But

why argue with such evil directed toward a sensitive boy in short pants. Since Beethoven's

"Spring Sonata","Bach's Chaconne"and  Brahms's "Rain Sonata"  was yet to play I chuckled

through the all German program I was to perform and never told anyone what it impacted me

in an incident that changed my insight now knowing there evil demonic forces at work

which can be directed at souls. When I returned to the concert a Russian woman handed

me a chocolate kefir milkshake for strength. I played the Thais again at the end of my first

recital as a thank you to a gracious audience. Yet I did not realize that in decades of my life

Thais would play on the radio when I needed her, she became a sort of muse or saint to me,

before an  exam or at unlikely times overseas her melody was heard in restaurants or on the        

F.M. radio or when I marched with Dr. King in Washington D.C.

IN-  Could you mention other epiphanies?

BZ-  Well once lost as a child I spent the all night service in a black Pentacostal Church as they

were tarrying for the Holy Ghost.

IN-  I think that happened to Simone Weil and Bonhoeffer whom you have written as influences

as well.

BZ. We are on a search. Yesterday was a hundred years of Roland Barthes but he never found

what he was searching for or should I say who was his answer to all his questionable ideas.

IN-  Are there any other thoughtful epiphanies about loss and found for you.

BZ- After visiting the Vermeer and the Rembrandt's  in childhood at the museum I still pray their

paintings will again be found and that the art heist whether an outside or inside job will be

located and these criminals will realize what artists go through to perfect their gifts only to

be lost to their public. When we read of the grotesque Nazi program against "Degenerate Art" and

their criminal folly of taking away paintings from Jewish citizens we are shocked.

IN-  Is their any accountability for their action or reactions?

BZ- Fascism has its own unfashionable history of the worst criminal gang rapes of history.

IN-  Have you had any recent spiritual encounters?

BZ. There were workers fixing the road where I go on my daily prayer walk and  I was reciting

the 91st. psalm and  heard a deep loving voice within saying cross the street which I did

as stones and boulders off a truck were coming at me as I was saying "For he shall give

his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways, they shall bear thee up in their hands,

lest thou dash thy foot against a stone." All of a sudden a Chinese woman came out of her
 
apartment and stared at me and said in Mandarin and English with joy said " Wow, look at those

huge angels over you ."

Though I did not personally witness the angels I remember the event as if it were today. I
 
know who was behind it and that confidence in the spirit sustains me. My niece Rebecca
 
was in the Chinese Department of the university where this woman's brother also taught.

IN- Do you write these incidents down?

BZ. Yes, one day I heard that still small voice tell me to pray for the people of Upper Volta

now called Burkina Faso which I did and within a week a magazine came to my door

from the End Time Handmaidens saying a spiritual revival had broken out there and also this

happened to me as I prayed for the Massai tribe in Kenya.

IN- Are you an intercessor?

BZ. -Yes, I try to intervene with God's foreign policy intervention of blessing and to be a
   
blessing in lives, nations, literature and human culture for every word and expression has

meaning and sovereignty whether in a play or reality makes a play on words. Nothing

should be foreign to a writer always ready to an artistic expressionist.

IN - Have you always felt to be an exile?

BZ- A writer's kingdom has created the freedom of language. Take that away and we have

the death of our civilization.

IN. Thank you.