NYC notebooks: "…a riveder le stelle" with Broch & co…

The night before I flew to NYC, I heard Lidholm’s ethereal a cappella setting of Dante, "…a riveder le stelle," in a dream. The atmospheric soprano solo echoed from a balcony while I careened high up in the air on a seemingly endless swing, attached to nothing but the sky. Dante’s vision of the beyond is mirrored in Lidholm’s score, an infusion of the mysterious aurora borealis lights of the Nordic landscape.

Upon waking, memory of the fantastic dream was accompanied by the melancholy consciousness that the professional chorus I’d planned on introducing Lidholm’s music to (in real life) was wrested from me just a year ago. The professional loss was also a personal one, one with which I continue to grapple and come to terms.

My NYC reading list includes Hermann Broch’s profound novel, The Death of Virgil. A neglected 20th century European master, he was a victim and survivor of Nazi persecution (he was arrested as a “subversive” and fled to the US upon his release).

I’m visiting NYC to relax with friends and “enculturate” myself following a grindingly busy spring. I’m the opening of Billy Budd backstage at the Met May 4, thanks to my friend, Steven White. I also have a subscription to the final Ring cycle of the season.

Reading Broch reminds me why substantive art feeds all aspects of the human nutrition cannot reach. To call The Death of Virgil just prose or fiction is akin to mentioning only one facet of a priceless gem. His musical diction, in the form of the dying poet’s interior monologue, reads like poetry. Since I am inventing words in this notebook, the most immediate source of my enculturation is Broch’s “philoetry,” a supremely intelligent and lyrical harmonizing of philosophy and poetry.

Dante’s vision “to behold again the stars” is fittingly paralleled in Broch’s psychologically penetrating portrait of an artist as an old man.
…for a single time, perhaps for the last time, he must come to comprehend the vastness of life, he must, oh he must again behold the stars…
[Quotations are from the Vintage edition, translated by Jean Starr Untermeyer.]

As Virgil stirred from sleep, “he felt perception at work in himself.” Looking “to find the way back to himself,” and complete his life’s work (the Aeneid), he muses in a passage of philoetry, profound as any I’ve encountered in 20 years of close reading.

for he who has left the first portal of fear behind him
has entered the fore-court of reality,
now that his perception, discovering itself and turned towards itself,
as if for the first time,
begins to comprehend
the necessity inherent in the universe, the necessity of every occurrence,
as the necessity of his own soul;

The “doors of perception” to which Blake referred in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" are opened in such visionary writing. Concurrently with Broch, I am reading Campbell’s magnificent study, The Masks of God, Volume I: Primitive Mythology.

Writing about our collective mythological experience, he uses the poet A. E. Housman’s essay, “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” to describe humanity’s “urge to fashion images and organize forms in such a way as to create stimuli.” He is describing our need to create and experience art.

For Housman (quoting Keats), inspiration for poetry “‘goes through me like a spear.’ The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.” I remember the poet Gary Snyder asking me “if I had a fire in my belly,” in response to my naïve question about what I needed to do to “become” a poet. Diane di Prima inscribed her collection of poems to me with the quote, “the fire is central.” Campbell centralizes this inspirational fire through an interdisciplinary marriage.

Human experience and human art…have succeeded in creating for the human species an environment of sign stimuli that release physical responses and direct them to ends no less effectively than do the signs of nature the instincts of the beasts. The biology, psychology, sociology, and history of these sign stimuli may be said to constitute the field of our subject, the science of Comparative Mythology.

Thinking through Virgil, Broch writes that the artist,
must put his perception to the test again and again
and be proven by it again and yet again…

And in a passage echoing Whitman and Rilke at once,
the soul is caught constantly setting out,
ready for departure and departing toward her own essence…

Broch’s protagonist could also be the “absurd” artists Camus defines in The Myth of Sisyphus, for whom “freedom, passion and revolt” are the noblest triumvirate.
Continuing to weave his syncretic and labyrinthine thread, Broch proceeds, circling:
…for man is held into the perceptive ground of his knowing soul,
into the perceptive ground
of his doing and searching, his willing and thinking, his dreams,
he is laid open to the infinite and the chanceless within the real…

held into the now of his own symbol
in order that it may come to be his constant reality;
for it is the defiance of its summons
into which man is held,
the defiance of the imprisoned one,
the defiance of his inextinguishable freedom,
defiance of his inextinguishable will for knowledge,
so unyielding…

The artist is always on some level impatient, both by nature and experience. Discipline may temper the artist’s anxiety and be an antidote to frustration, but the unyielding fire is inextinguishable in the life of such a one. Broch nails it.

…for even though man was so fated to disappointment, delivered over to every sort of disappointment in great things as in small, his labor in vain, fruitless in the past and hopeless in the future, and even though disappointment might have chased him on from impatience to impatience, from restlessness to restlessness, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, harassed and loving and again harassed, fate-driven from one perception to another, driven way from the erstwhile life of simple creative work toward all the diversity of knowledge, driven on toward poetry and to the further exploration of the oldest and most occult wisdom, impatient for knowledge, impatient for truth, then driven back to poetry as if it could be related to death in a final fulfillment – oh, this too was disappointment…

Broch should not be dismissed as an over-stuffed pessimist or another angst-obsessed European. Even a fellow survivor wouldn’t stoop to such a blow. Resilience and persistence, steadfastness and a likeable obstinance mark him. Writing near the end of his own life, after his ordeals under the most brutalized form of philistinism fascism inevitably becomes, Broch’s protagonist is any such artist.

…even though his whole life seemed so utterly shipwrecked and remained so shipwrecked, so clogged by shortcomings from the very beginning, damned to founder for ever and aye, since nothing was fitted to penetrate the thicket…

Oh Virgil, Oh Dante, Oh Whitman, Oh Hermann, let this supplicant’s “many faults and derelictions” share but a moment in your shadows…

for only amidst error, only through error
in which he was inescapably held,
did man come to be the seeker
that he was…
…this was why he held into space after space
of his own awareness,
into the spaces of his self-realizing self,
self-realization – fate of the human soul

Paraphrasing Rilke, life is a series of increasingly large failures through which we grow. Campbell locates transformation in “the imprint of rapture enclosed in suffering.” This is another way of describing the famous catharsis of emotion, originally found in classical tragedy and present in many a great opera. I may be in an insignificant minority of English-speaking readers to encounter Broch, much less be moved to tears by his philoetry. Chalk it up to another “shipwrecking error” or “clogging shortcoming” on my part, hopeless romantic I am fated to be.