Magic is the crown or nightmare of the law of cause and effect, not its contradiction. Miracles are no less strange in this universe than that of astronomers.
Magic, in which every lucid and determined detail is a prophecy. In the novel, I think this [is] the only possible integrity… Borges, in “Narrative Art & Magic”
On Madness, Parts VII-X or Poetry & Survival, Part III
VII.
Whitman’s mind-numbing excess. His over-the-top-ness. Big wide-open bear hug embracing the whole world with a wet kiss! Awkward. Unconventional. Precocious. Unpredictable. Spontaneous. Offensive. Bold. Rash. Rude. Surprising. Child-like. Affectionate. Loving. Open. Wide open…
I cannot define my satisfaction… yet it is so,
I cannot define my life… yet it is so.
Quoth the white-bearded bard in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.
In one page of Whitman are (un)contained entire and infinite universes!
Consider: O love and summer! You are in my dreams and in me…
(The ecstatic romantic Walt).
The myth of heaven indicates the soul (the spiritual mystic walt)
The soul is always beautiful…
It comes from its embowered garden…
Perfect and clean the genitals jetting, and perfect and clean the womb cohering…
(the sensual compassionate big-hearted lover of the whole wide world Walt!)
Whitman and Byron. Bernstein. Ginsberg. Mozart, et al.
Lovers of life. Suckers of the marrow out of it.
Walt’s current companions with me are Dante & Borges. But could be Cervantes, Shakespeare, Hölderlin, Smart, Heaney or Hughes, Goethe or Schiller, Beckett, Coleridge, Rilke, Joyce, Campbell, Benjamin and / or Baudelaire…
Censorship would not exist in human history if art were not dangerous.
Fascinating how resistant to a single interpretation, of all the books of the Bible, the book of Job is. Scholars do agree, however, on this mind-enhancing illumination: “the extraordinary beauty of the poetry is part of its meaning.”From The New Oxford Annotated Bible (A true “study” Bible).
Borges trenchant, insightful & engaging, brilliantly discursive essays.
Like “The Art of Verbal Abuse.” A priest’s last words to the Inquisition show defiance, resolve, courage amidst adversity: I will burn, but that is a mere event. We shall continue our discussion in eternity.
Bold speech is itself a courageous act.
*******
VIII.
The first words of Don Giovanni are not grandiose, foreboding or lascivious. They are the seemingly banal & benign utterances of the lackey, Leporello. “I no longer want to be a servant.” The prologue, the author / composer himself speaking?!?
Mozart, magic mysterious soul he is, expresses the passionate desire for freedom that is the intense and life-long longing for freedom shared by every artist…
Few artists can articulate that desire so clearly. Which is another reason we love opera, its characters expressing themselves so freely, so passionately, the emotions writ large…
The sublime and haunting duet between the dying Commendatore and the murderous Don at the end of the first scene. Such poetry, rich with symbolism and esoteric depth.
His soul departs him / My soul departs me
I see his soul depart / He sees my soul depart (my paraphrase).
There are so many signs, once one starts looking, noticing, listening, opening.
On banality and wit. Poulenc’s great Apollinaire set, Banalités. Rustic Haydn, bohemian impolitic Mahler, sardonic Shostakovich, give us all a wicked scherzo!
(Is the Poulenc set really Eluard poetry? They are virtually interchangeable in Poulenc. So he himself said, wanting his twin poets mentioned on his tombstone).
The proximity of the wickedly banal humor of the scherzo to the wicked duende humor of spirits & demons & souls, oh my!….Mahler & Shostakovich, encore…
John Macurdy’s tales of the Golden Age, at the Met and beyond. The privilege of meeting & working with such colleagues. The bonus of hearing such stories first-hand!
Rudolf Bing. The famous Don Giovanni film by Losey. Raimondi’s Don to John's Commendatore.
The good ol’ days.
The relish of real-life tales of the tape. Or tales from the trenches?
True stories. Adventure stories. Love tales. Tall tales.
To be clear, which were I mimicking Bernhard would be expected, thus predictable, and everyone knows how over Bernhard I am, have been, and by the grave of Mahler’s thrice-exiled tomb, I cannot imagine what multi-synapse brain lapse could have caused such a veritable degrading—a soiling, if you will—of cherished standards. Unforgiveable.
*******
IX.
The visual poetry of Chinese film—and Asian cinema in general—in particular Hero of Zhang Yimou.
Whose Met debut came directing Tan Dun’s opera for the new millennium, The First Emperor. With roles created by Placido Domingo, Elizabeth Futral and Paul Groves, among other luminaries.
Stars. Astral fields. Fields of light. Planets. Moons.
What metallic element might a singer’s voice be?
Gold (Price, Freni)
Silver (Pavarotti, Sutherland)
Bronze (Domingo, Kiri)
Brass (Corelli, Horne)
And what material best fits a melody? A filament of silk? A streak of velvet? A smooth patch of cotton? A tune as liquid as pure water…fine & thin as the early summer morning mist?
Rilke’s Book of Images just fell open to “Evening.” As if I needed to read it. Needed to become more accustomed to hearkening to the oracles life offers one at every turn…
You watch: the land divides from you
one going heavenward, one that falls;
and leave you, to neither quite belonging…
…..
and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)
your life afraid and huge and ripening
so that it, now bound in and now embracing
grows alternately stone in you and star.
Like all genres of art, some poetry gets better with age. As we age. Rilke means more to me as I grow. The paired image of “stone and star” resonates in a new way, carries now a specific weight heavy with life. This is a shift from even a few years ago.
“Was his life really so alien to him? Supposing after all that he did deserve the sort of life he had? Supposing that contrary to the accepted view, men always have the sort of lives they deserve? We must look more closely into the matter,” Sartre says about his subject, Baudelaire.
How sad so many references are lost. Lost and found?
References lost like the false trails in the lyric labyrinthine noir crime dramas of the French Nouvelle Vague maestro, Jean-Pierre Melville.
Who adopted the name of his favorite American author (the poet of Billy Budd, for example).
Le Cercle Rouge. Le Samourai. Army of Shadows.
It is high praise to say Melville elevates style to almost the level of soulful.
Which Bernhard novel now? Old Masters. Wittgenstein’s Nephew. The Loser. The Voice Imitator. Woodcutters. Concrete. Correction. Have I left out more than a few?
Naming. Aides-de-memoire. Cultivating memory. Practice. Discipline.
10,000-hour rule or 100,000 hours? Seven times seven or 70 times 7 or infinity…
I appreciate Anne Carson more with age. Margaret Atwood. Rita Dove. August Wilson. Carl Philips. Tony Kushner. Daniel Mendelsohn, and the list gets queerer…
Men in the Off Hours. Decreation: Poetry, prose, opera. Nox.
Alain Delon’s poised tightrope walk balancing flair and depth. Demeanor is style. Eyes become the clichéd window into the soul…Le Samorai. Melville’s myth inspired noir mystery from 1967.
From the current Paris Review, “Five poems of Kabbalah.”
“To Rise on High” includes these images:
to know the meaning
of the living
and see the vision
of the dead…
to ford rivers of fire
and know lightning.
“Fording rivers of fire” requires expert coordination, mate. Like that of the “cosmic dancer.” Quite specialized. Individual. Eccentric.
Another heat / energy-generating Kabbalah image:
The soul stirs and burns…
To be freed from the wick
or the wood to which it clings.
One never outgrows the precocious need for freedom. Mozart. Picasso. Bernstein. Stoic?
Manguel quoting Seneca: “Is time now present? He makes use of it. Is it still to come? He anticipates it.” Stoic and visionary. Affirmative.
Manguel reminds us “what we know of reality is an imagination made of language.” Yes, what an affirmation of the central role the creative plays in all human existence! A fitting conclusion to an affirming book about the infinite variety, beauty and necessity of the library.
Manguel also channels Penelope Fitzgerald’s brilliant evocation of Novalis and the mad visionary romantic poet in her novel, The Blue Flower.
If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching…
*******
X. …mad pathways to bliss…
“A person who can give to humanity the images to help it live” according to Joseph Campbell (in Pathways to Bliss) is “a poet or an artist.”
Mythology begins where madness starts.
“He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it,” Campbell quotes Christ’s invitation for someone to “give himself entirely to his myth.”
Calling. Vocation. Passion. As opposed to a job. Or career.
The need for repeated experiences of “the awakening to awe.”
“Mythic seizure” is that awakening to awe, “that awakening of zeal” which serves “to activate your imagination.”
Thus one can be struck, like Dante beholding the manifestation of beauty. His idealized, idolized and imagined beauty “struck [Dante] with what James Joyce called esthetic arrest.”
“The job of the contemporary poet and artist” is to recharge and reactivate “the world in which we live.”
To become “transparent to transcendence” by being fulfilled through this strange and unpredictable, endlessly fascinating and wonderful life…
Becoming transparent often means getting unstuck. As out of traffic. Or a sticky relationship. A job. Or a vocation that turned out to be just a career.
Constipation is a physical symptom of this problem. Sometimes, our stuff just gets stuck inside.
Reminder of Twain’s aphorism “there’s nothing overrated as sex, or underrated as a healthy crap.” Taught me, with typical relish, by my father.
An imagined poem from an Icelandic saga might resemble the recently discovered anonymous poem thought to be in that style. Herewith is the first known appearance in modern English of “Egil’s defecation:”
A foul fight it was
through laborious trails
that hardly felt advances
but for the final
strenuous push and heave
and ho forth came
the painful moments of birth!
Behold the spiral,
the snake of poison from the guts,
the throne of labor where kings sit
Behold the fought-for & hard-won giant shit!
Perhaps we can take consolation such-was-thus in so-and-so faraway land, or "as our ancestors once sang of yore..."
Is it madness or genius to follow such bards as guides through the centuries, like Dante’s Virgil, Odysseus’ deities across the wine-dark seas, Beethoven’s angels (surely the deaf must be gifted with the most creative angels of the inner ear)! And what of Borges’ wide-eyed wonder for the world only the blind could so rapturously and originally affirm!
(Why has Borgesian become a more popular word than the words of Borges himself?)
Where is Whitman’s oracular miracle of a voice to lead this chorus!?!
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Monday, June 6, 2011
Poetry and survival, parts I & II
(for C.B and A, true soul-mates)
Sustenance, or Poetry & Survival
What a party!
“Fetes and fireworks!”
Younger than Springtime
we must keep marching…
“Yes, indeed. Thanks. You, too!”
What song is next, mommy?
Cup-cakes or cakes-in-cups?
Whitman / Dickinson
As far as the east is from the west…
A Soviet artist’s response to just criticism.
The Figure Five.
Brodsky. And Sontag. In Venice
Poetry and Exile.
BACH / DSCH
“crossing over” vs. “starting over”
Fantasies. Delusions. Attachments.
Justice is in the soul…the grand natural lawyer
I am satisfied…I see, I dance, I laugh, I sing
I am the poet of the body / & I am the poet of the soul.
I am large…I contain multitudes.
(from Walt Whitman, Selected poems 1855-1892,
A New Edition. Gary Schmigdall, ed. St Martins, 1999).
****************
On Madness. Part 6. (or Poetry & Survival, part II)
for C.B.
Foucault: History of Madness
Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie et l’age classique
The importance of distinctions.
The absolute insistence on them, in certain cases.
The importance of reading “other” literature / Outside one's “normal” cultural experience.
The Importance of Being Earnest.
the Picture of Dorian Gray.
De profundis.
The Serbian poet Ivan Lalic (1931-1996)
Before the earth’s double breast stops / Divided by the knife of memory –
like a ripe fruit (from “the roll call of mirrors”)
Art and madness. In Bosch, for example.
Disturbing. Unsettling. Visionary.
“I am afoot in my vision”
Whitman’s mad, ecstatic manifestos.
Opera’s greatest mad scene?
1. Lucia
2. Ophelie
3. (Does Salomé count?!)
And for a male character:
1. Peter Grimes
1B. Boris Godunov
3. Tom Rakewell
3B. Nabucco
Attila’s nightmare scene in Verdi’s early masterpiece of historic fantasy cum verisimilitude.
The Madwoman in the Attic.
Dickinson & Whitman as contemporaries.
Shostakovich’s sardonic, demonic, wickedly-delightful scherzos!
Dances of Death.
Poetry / Duende
Open this evening like a letter
I’m hidden in the handwriting
Like a shadow in the still leaves of a cherry tree,
Or like noon in our blood.
(from The Horse Has Six Legs, An anthology of Serbian Poetry. C. Simic, ed. 2010).
Lorca would affirm that Lalic is possessed of the duende.
Great is justice; Justice is not settled by legislators and laws…it is in the soul.
Can I get a Dead Poets Society “Yawp!” for Uncle Walt!?!
The mad ecstasy of “Calamus 5”:
States! / Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
By an agreement on paper? Or by arms? / Away!
Shostakovich’s thumbing his nose (wordlessly) in his mercurial & witty, if not crazed 9th. And Bernstein’s inspired & manic conducting of it.
The Enchanted Isle, the MET’s premiere Baroque pasticcio.
Pastiche. The art of which is central to creative choral music programming.
A distinction underappreciated in the wider musical world
(Like the art of professional choral music in general).
the naivety of our positivism believed that it could recognize the nature of all madness (Foucault).
Like wild animals. Beasts. Berserkers.
Frenzied. Ecstatic. Possessed. Inspired. Proleptic. Peripatetic. Crazed.
(Analogs to / for madness, obviously).
I can only take Foucault’s Madness in small doses, man.
Like Proust. James (Henry, that is). Thoreau, even.
Yeats was crazy. Like psychic occult new-age weird
Camille Paglia considers his “Leda and the Swann” the “greatest poem of the twentieth century” (in Break, Blow Burn. Vintage, 2006).
Of "The Second Coming" she is laudatory & penetrating. Hence the poem, with its horror movie finale, is as hybrid as the sphinx, who represents our buried impulses, vestiges of a past that keeps turning into the future. Prophetic. As the poem itself has proven to be.
We who are poets & artists…live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes
Yeats himself said.
Illumination is sporadic, partial, and costly. Paglia again, incisively so.
Sheer folly. Madness!
Sustenance, or Poetry & Survival
What a party!
“Fetes and fireworks!”
Younger than Springtime
we must keep marching…
“Yes, indeed. Thanks. You, too!”
What song is next, mommy?
Cup-cakes or cakes-in-cups?
Whitman / Dickinson
As far as the east is from the west…
A Soviet artist’s response to just criticism.
The Figure Five.
Brodsky. And Sontag. In Venice
Poetry and Exile.
BACH / DSCH
“crossing over” vs. “starting over”
Fantasies. Delusions. Attachments.
Justice is in the soul…the grand natural lawyer
I am satisfied…I see, I dance, I laugh, I sing
I am the poet of the body / & I am the poet of the soul.
I am large…I contain multitudes.
(from Walt Whitman, Selected poems 1855-1892,
A New Edition. Gary Schmigdall, ed. St Martins, 1999).
****************
On Madness. Part 6. (or Poetry & Survival, part II)
for C.B.
Foucault: History of Madness
Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie et l’age classique
The importance of distinctions.
The absolute insistence on them, in certain cases.
The importance of reading “other” literature / Outside one's “normal” cultural experience.
The Importance of Being Earnest.
the Picture of Dorian Gray.
De profundis.
The Serbian poet Ivan Lalic (1931-1996)
Before the earth’s double breast stops / Divided by the knife of memory –
like a ripe fruit (from “the roll call of mirrors”)
Art and madness. In Bosch, for example.
Disturbing. Unsettling. Visionary.
“I am afoot in my vision”
Whitman’s mad, ecstatic manifestos.
Opera’s greatest mad scene?
1. Lucia
2. Ophelie
3. (Does Salomé count?!)
And for a male character:
1. Peter Grimes
1B. Boris Godunov
3. Tom Rakewell
3B. Nabucco
Attila’s nightmare scene in Verdi’s early masterpiece of historic fantasy cum verisimilitude.
The Madwoman in the Attic.
Dickinson & Whitman as contemporaries.
Shostakovich’s sardonic, demonic, wickedly-delightful scherzos!
Dances of Death.
Poetry / Duende
Open this evening like a letter
I’m hidden in the handwriting
Like a shadow in the still leaves of a cherry tree,
Or like noon in our blood.
(from The Horse Has Six Legs, An anthology of Serbian Poetry. C. Simic, ed. 2010).
Lorca would affirm that Lalic is possessed of the duende.
Great is justice; Justice is not settled by legislators and laws…it is in the soul.
Can I get a Dead Poets Society “Yawp!” for Uncle Walt!?!
The mad ecstasy of “Calamus 5”:
States! / Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
By an agreement on paper? Or by arms? / Away!
Shostakovich’s thumbing his nose (wordlessly) in his mercurial & witty, if not crazed 9th. And Bernstein’s inspired & manic conducting of it.
The Enchanted Isle, the MET’s premiere Baroque pasticcio.
Pastiche. The art of which is central to creative choral music programming.
A distinction underappreciated in the wider musical world
(Like the art of professional choral music in general).
the naivety of our positivism believed that it could recognize the nature of all madness (Foucault).
Like wild animals. Beasts. Berserkers.
Frenzied. Ecstatic. Possessed. Inspired. Proleptic. Peripatetic. Crazed.
(Analogs to / for madness, obviously).
I can only take Foucault’s Madness in small doses, man.
Like Proust. James (Henry, that is). Thoreau, even.
Yeats was crazy. Like psychic occult new-age weird
Camille Paglia considers his “Leda and the Swann” the “greatest poem of the twentieth century” (in Break, Blow Burn. Vintage, 2006).
Of "The Second Coming" she is laudatory & penetrating. Hence the poem, with its horror movie finale, is as hybrid as the sphinx, who represents our buried impulses, vestiges of a past that keeps turning into the future. Prophetic. As the poem itself has proven to be.
We who are poets & artists…live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes
Yeats himself said.
Illumination is sporadic, partial, and costly. Paglia again, incisively so.
Sheer folly. Madness!
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Memorial Day Communion
The lines below are references to titles and quotations from the following sources (in no particular order):
Federico Garcia Lorca: In Search of Duende (New Directions, 2010);
Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night (Yale, 2006)
The Saga of Egil, from The Sagas of the Icelanders (Penguin, 2001)
Gustav Holst: The Planets
Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes; War Requiem;
Letters from a Life, Volume Five: 1958-1965 (Boydell Press, 2010)
Walter Benjamin: The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Verso, 1998)
Kaija Saariaho: du cristal ... a la fumée
"...each of my books has escaped to tell me its story."
I: Dawn
Euthymia: well-being of the soul; tranquillitas.
"Memory without distraction, the intimacy of a reading time -
a secret period in the communal day."
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find
Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find
This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found
It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.
(William Blake, from Milton)
Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity
"the language of silence..."
II: Sunday Morning
"The essence of those great moments in life is the experience of pure selfhood."
Candle, lamp,
lantern and firefly
The constellation
of the dart.
"A mysterious power that everyone senses and no philosopher explains."
(Lorca on the duende, quoting Goethe on Paganini)
Uranus, the Magician
"...the real purpose of drama was to communicate knowledge of the life of the soul."
I carve runes on this horn,
Redden words with my blood.
"...the duende loves the rim of the wound...he draws near places where forms fuse together into a yearning superior to their visible expression."
Sorrow wanes in sea-fire's fortress
"...not forms but the marrow of forms, pure music."
It is not the wind but the sad moon
in the Courtyard of the Dead
III: Moonlight
Orion
"Now the great bear and pleiades..."
"from crystal... into smoke..."
Neptune, the Mystic
"Tom Stoppard has one of his characters explain in his play The Invention of Love, 'in the last guttering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son...so we have one sentence from The Loves of Achilles. 'Love, said Sophocles, feels like the ice held in the hand by children.' I trust that book-burners' dreams are haunted by such modest proof of the book's survival."
IV: Storm
"...hell takes on different shapes for its different inhabitants:
for Cain it has the face of Abel, for Nero that of Agrippina."
My subject is war, and the pity of war.
The poetry is in the pity.
"These magnificent poems, full of the hate of destruction..."
"Ardent struggle, endless vigil, like all art."
The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life, they do not hate.
"...the stories that ultimately reach us are but the reports of the survivors."
Federico Garcia Lorca: In Search of Duende (New Directions, 2010);
Alberto Manguel: The Library at Night (Yale, 2006)
The Saga of Egil, from The Sagas of the Icelanders (Penguin, 2001)
Gustav Holst: The Planets
Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes; War Requiem;
Letters from a Life, Volume Five: 1958-1965 (Boydell Press, 2010)
Walter Benjamin: The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Verso, 1998)
Kaija Saariaho: du cristal ... a la fumée
"...each of my books has escaped to tell me its story."
I: Dawn
Euthymia: well-being of the soul; tranquillitas.
"Memory without distraction, the intimacy of a reading time -
a secret period in the communal day."
There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find
Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find
This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found
It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.
(William Blake, from Milton)
Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity
"the language of silence..."
II: Sunday Morning
"The essence of those great moments in life is the experience of pure selfhood."
Candle, lamp,
lantern and firefly
The constellation
of the dart.
"A mysterious power that everyone senses and no philosopher explains."
(Lorca on the duende, quoting Goethe on Paganini)
Uranus, the Magician
"...the real purpose of drama was to communicate knowledge of the life of the soul."
I carve runes on this horn,
Redden words with my blood.
"...the duende loves the rim of the wound...he draws near places where forms fuse together into a yearning superior to their visible expression."
Sorrow wanes in sea-fire's fortress
"...not forms but the marrow of forms, pure music."
It is not the wind but the sad moon
in the Courtyard of the Dead
III: Moonlight
Orion
"Now the great bear and pleiades..."
"from crystal... into smoke..."
Neptune, the Mystic
"Tom Stoppard has one of his characters explain in his play The Invention of Love, 'in the last guttering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son...so we have one sentence from The Loves of Achilles. 'Love, said Sophocles, feels like the ice held in the hand by children.' I trust that book-burners' dreams are haunted by such modest proof of the book's survival."
IV: Storm
"...hell takes on different shapes for its different inhabitants:
for Cain it has the face of Abel, for Nero that of Agrippina."
My subject is war, and the pity of war.
The poetry is in the pity.
"These magnificent poems, full of the hate of destruction..."
"Ardent struggle, endless vigil, like all art."
The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life, they do not hate.
"...the stories that ultimately reach us are but the reports of the survivors."
Friday, May 20, 2011
Remembering Gustav Mahler: 18 May
18 May 2011: Remembering Gustav Mahler
on the 100th Anniversary of his death
(for SCW: O ewigen Liebens – Lebens – trunk’ne Welt!)
“The world has lost its greatest artist. Gustav Mahler is dead.”
(Die Musik, May 1911)
“An artist is like an archer in the night. He shoots his arrows into the darkness not knowing if they will hit anything, but they do hit the mark.” Mahler himself said to Ernst Decsey, quoted in Norman Lebrecht’s Mahler Remembered (Norton, 1988).
Decsey’s memoir of Mahler is “one of the most candid and least known portraits” we have, according to Lebrecht. Observations like the following prove that point:
A fire glowed constantly within him; one never spent an hour with Gustav Mahler in which it did not burst forth, in which one did not gain something from him.
(Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!)
Hugo von Hofmannsthal observed, “where a creative mind is at work, there is drama.”
His 50th birthday tribute (the last Mahler celebrated) continued:
Wherever such a mind operates, it clashes with matter; it is confronted with inertia, miscomprehension and incomprehension. As it wrestles with them, the atmosphere around the conflict becomes the point of interest…A rhythmic process begins…A chaotic and truly heterogeneous entity takes shape, while hostile or indifferent elements band improbably together in opposition. And to the delight of lovers of Art, and the reluctant astonishment of philistines, it becomes apparent that out of many dead elements a living whole can emerge, thanks solely to the miracle of a creative mind.
One of opera’s greatest poets could have been talking about the generative process of artistic creation. He was describing Mahler’s work as an opera administrator in Vienna.
Mahler was fond of quoting Goethe: “a man who seeks to develop will never come to the end of the road.”
(O du, des Vaters Zelle, ach, zu schnelle, zu schnell erlosch’ner Freudenschein!)
Mahler spent the last four years of his life conducting in New York City, at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
Lebrecht subtitles the remembrances from these years (1907-1911), “I am lost to the world” (from Mahler’s transcendental Rückert song, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen).
(Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel, in meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.)
Decsey recalls Mahler waxing poetic, indeed sermonizing like a preacher of the Arts:
How beautiful the world is! How can any fool say: I am indifferent to it all…To be happy is a gift…
He relates how
a musician told us about a concert where they had booed Mendelssohn… This musician said ‘they can abuse Mendelssohn, it doesn’t concern me.’ When “Mahler burst out angrily.” ‘But of course it concerns you. That’s the trouble…everyone says: it doesn’t concern me. The whole world concerns me…’
Mahler observed that Americans “did not have enough temperament, enough feeling for Art.”
Or have not uncovered enough. Connected enough to the proverbial "source." Tapped into enough potential. Let us discuss.
Erwin Stein noted “a single mind could prove right against a crowd of detractors” in an assessment of Mahler’s life & (his inseparable) career.
In that collection of essays (On Mahler and Britten, Boydell Press), Colin Matthews notes a familiar refrain in the negative critical reception history of Mahler. One of Britten’s primary amanuenses chides “those whose dislike has always stemmed from antipathy towards the intensely personal nature of his music.”
Factors, both professional and private, compelled the Mahlers to seek a complete change of environment. In public [Vienna], Mahler was the subject of regular anti-Semitic attacks in the press…[he] had experienced the death of his parents and ten of his thirteen siblings; he supported the surviving three financially…and in July 1907, two painful blows occurred almost simultaneously: the death of one of his two children and the discovery that his heart was failing (from Mahler’s Last Years, exhibit at the Rose Museum at Carnegie Hall in the early 1990’s).
Stefan Zweig met Mahler on what would be the master’s final voyage (from America to Europe). He saw the ailing artist’s “silhouette – unforgettable, unforgettable – set against the grey infinity of sky and sea.” With poetic diction that would inform his literary career, Zweig continued:
For the first time I saw him, the pillar of fire, in his frailty…There was boundless sorrow in this sight, but also something transfigured by greatness, something resounding into the sublime, like music.
Zweig could be describing the last chapters of Mahler’s oeuvre, “transfigured…
resounding into the sublime.” That IS Das Lied von der Erde. And the Ninth Symphony. And the unfinished Tenth.
Such transcendence is presaged in the early works. It is palpably present in both sets of Rückert poetry. The slow movements of his middle symphonies are the sublime far side of a moon whose apotheoses (the 2nd! the 8th!) are as cataclysmic as any eclipse.
(Die liebe Erde allüberall blüht auf…)
In his life. In his love. In his music.
(Ewig…Ewig…)
Jawohl.
on the 100th Anniversary of his death
(for SCW: O ewigen Liebens – Lebens – trunk’ne Welt!)
“The world has lost its greatest artist. Gustav Mahler is dead.”
(Die Musik, May 1911)
“An artist is like an archer in the night. He shoots his arrows into the darkness not knowing if they will hit anything, but they do hit the mark.” Mahler himself said to Ernst Decsey, quoted in Norman Lebrecht’s Mahler Remembered (Norton, 1988).
Decsey’s memoir of Mahler is “one of the most candid and least known portraits” we have, according to Lebrecht. Observations like the following prove that point:
A fire glowed constantly within him; one never spent an hour with Gustav Mahler in which it did not burst forth, in which one did not gain something from him.
(Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!)
Hugo von Hofmannsthal observed, “where a creative mind is at work, there is drama.”
His 50th birthday tribute (the last Mahler celebrated) continued:
Wherever such a mind operates, it clashes with matter; it is confronted with inertia, miscomprehension and incomprehension. As it wrestles with them, the atmosphere around the conflict becomes the point of interest…A rhythmic process begins…A chaotic and truly heterogeneous entity takes shape, while hostile or indifferent elements band improbably together in opposition. And to the delight of lovers of Art, and the reluctant astonishment of philistines, it becomes apparent that out of many dead elements a living whole can emerge, thanks solely to the miracle of a creative mind.
One of opera’s greatest poets could have been talking about the generative process of artistic creation. He was describing Mahler’s work as an opera administrator in Vienna.
Mahler was fond of quoting Goethe: “a man who seeks to develop will never come to the end of the road.”
(O du, des Vaters Zelle, ach, zu schnelle, zu schnell erlosch’ner Freudenschein!)
Mahler spent the last four years of his life conducting in New York City, at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
Lebrecht subtitles the remembrances from these years (1907-1911), “I am lost to the world” (from Mahler’s transcendental Rückert song, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen).
(Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel, in meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.)
Decsey recalls Mahler waxing poetic, indeed sermonizing like a preacher of the Arts:
How beautiful the world is! How can any fool say: I am indifferent to it all…To be happy is a gift…
He relates how
a musician told us about a concert where they had booed Mendelssohn… This musician said ‘they can abuse Mendelssohn, it doesn’t concern me.’ When “Mahler burst out angrily.” ‘But of course it concerns you. That’s the trouble…everyone says: it doesn’t concern me. The whole world concerns me…’
Mahler observed that Americans “did not have enough temperament, enough feeling for Art.”
Or have not uncovered enough. Connected enough to the proverbial "source." Tapped into enough potential. Let us discuss.
Erwin Stein noted “a single mind could prove right against a crowd of detractors” in an assessment of Mahler’s life & (his inseparable) career.
In that collection of essays (On Mahler and Britten, Boydell Press), Colin Matthews notes a familiar refrain in the negative critical reception history of Mahler. One of Britten’s primary amanuenses chides “those whose dislike has always stemmed from antipathy towards the intensely personal nature of his music.”
Factors, both professional and private, compelled the Mahlers to seek a complete change of environment. In public [Vienna], Mahler was the subject of regular anti-Semitic attacks in the press…[he] had experienced the death of his parents and ten of his thirteen siblings; he supported the surviving three financially…and in July 1907, two painful blows occurred almost simultaneously: the death of one of his two children and the discovery that his heart was failing (from Mahler’s Last Years, exhibit at the Rose Museum at Carnegie Hall in the early 1990’s).
Stefan Zweig met Mahler on what would be the master’s final voyage (from America to Europe). He saw the ailing artist’s “silhouette – unforgettable, unforgettable – set against the grey infinity of sky and sea.” With poetic diction that would inform his literary career, Zweig continued:
For the first time I saw him, the pillar of fire, in his frailty…There was boundless sorrow in this sight, but also something transfigured by greatness, something resounding into the sublime, like music.
Zweig could be describing the last chapters of Mahler’s oeuvre, “transfigured…
resounding into the sublime.” That IS Das Lied von der Erde. And the Ninth Symphony. And the unfinished Tenth.
Such transcendence is presaged in the early works. It is palpably present in both sets of Rückert poetry. The slow movements of his middle symphonies are the sublime far side of a moon whose apotheoses (the 2nd! the 8th!) are as cataclysmic as any eclipse.
(Die liebe Erde allüberall blüht auf…)
In his life. In his love. In his music.
(Ewig…Ewig…)
Jawohl.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Transfiguring the everyday: Part II
on Thich Nhat Hanh’s You are Here and Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne
The Vietnamese Zen Buddhist master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh’s latest book is You Are Here (Shambhala, 2010). It is full of simple-sounding profundities like “concentration is the practice of happiness.”
He uses an example called “orange meditation” with characteristic lightness of touch. “An orange is nothing less than a miracle.” He goes on to describe, with the imagination of an artist, how the orange, revealing its orange-ness by simply being present, offers “deep insight” into the nature of presence.
Rilke found such presence, such “suchness” (another TNH term) in the still lifes of Cézanne. His Letters on Cézanne (Fromm, 1985) is essential as Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings. Both defy the limitations of labels imposed by our systems of categorization. Rilke touches on our reductive tendencies when he writes
how deeply we are placed on the ground of transformation, we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything (because we’re unable to grasp it)
I think Rilke must be smiling (through whatever incarnation his current manifestation may be), knowing his Letters could be filed under “biography” or “criticism” or “art” or “poetry.” He concludes his observations on our all-too-human tendencies “to grasp” with words his Zen master great-nephew echoes today.
We reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.
(Thich Nhat Hanh was born in 1926, 10 weeks before Rilke died).
Returning to the Zen slogan “concentration is the practice of happiness,” we can touch both the artist’s single-minded devotion to her work and the challenges inherent in such focus. Rilke called the painter’s concentration a “conflagration of clarity.” The white-hot intensity of artistic passion is both source of the creative impulse and “burn factor” risk to anyone in that smoldering orbit.
The Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation (akin to listening for the “still small voice” in the Judeo-Christian traditions) “invites us to look deeply at reality.” It is an invitation “to discover,” and to “embark on a journey” towards “joy and happiness” through mindfulness of the present moment. Concentration. Attention. Presence.
Rilke speaks for all humanity with refreshing candor when he says
one lives so badly, because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted…
Such a one might miss the miracle the orange is, might not see “the cloud floating in [a] piece of paper.” Thich offers more insight: the “true nature of this piece of paper is inter-being. Before taking the form of paper, it already existed in the form of sun, cloud, rain and trees.”
“You do not have to be a poet to see it,” he gently reminds the literal-minded.
Rilke communes with Mother Nature by praising the animals, “more real than anything.” He is again candid about our species’ tragic / comic habit of “missing the point.”
How blindly they misuse what has never been looked at, never experienced, distract themselves by displacing all that has been immeasurably gathered together…
“To see the world in a grain of sand,” as the visionary poet William Blake saw it, is another way to perceive all of nature’s elements in a single sheet of paper. Rilke relates the ecstatic energy that comes from such newness, when an object “revisited with increased excitement” is seen as if for the first time.
Rilke goes on to describe the essential qualities of Cézanne’s oranges, and his insight is as relevant to the artist as it is to any amateur, student or pilgrim.
This labor which no longer knew any preferences or biases or fastidious predilections, whose minutest component had been tested on the scales of an infinitely responsive conscience, and which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color…It is this limitless objectivity…purely by means of color…
Rilke’s description echoes Michelangelo’s evocation of sculpture’s origin. It is parallel to the process of listening, testing and discerning mentioned by composers. Chipping away at the stone to reveal the form hidden beneath the surface parallels sifting through the internal voices to hear the music. Practicing mindfulness meditation or listening for the “still, small voice” connects the spiritual path to the artist’s work.
Once this process of listening and discernment has been given time to ripen, to season and blossom, essence is revealed. Presence. Suchness. “Muchness,” as the Mad Hatter puts it in one of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Another one of TNH’s recurring themes is naming: calling things “by their true names.” This applies to emotions, beliefs, concepts and people. Naming plays a central role in Alice’s adventures. The nursery rhymes and “tall tales” are but one side of the looking- glass. Before Humpty Dumpty recites poetry (“The Little Fishes”) to Alice, he asks what her name means. “Must a name mean something?” Humpty’s reply, “of course it must!” is another clue to help Alice realize her own muchness.
“Everything is simplified…nothing is insignificant and superfluous,” Rilke says of Cézanne’s still lifes. The “simple” apples and oranges are recognized by their suchness and called by name.
The Vietnamese Zen Buddhist master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh’s latest book is You Are Here (Shambhala, 2010). It is full of simple-sounding profundities like “concentration is the practice of happiness.”
He uses an example called “orange meditation” with characteristic lightness of touch. “An orange is nothing less than a miracle.” He goes on to describe, with the imagination of an artist, how the orange, revealing its orange-ness by simply being present, offers “deep insight” into the nature of presence.
Rilke found such presence, such “suchness” (another TNH term) in the still lifes of Cézanne. His Letters on Cézanne (Fromm, 1985) is essential as Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings. Both defy the limitations of labels imposed by our systems of categorization. Rilke touches on our reductive tendencies when he writes
how deeply we are placed on the ground of transformation, we most changeable ones who walk about with the urge to comprehend everything (because we’re unable to grasp it)
I think Rilke must be smiling (through whatever incarnation his current manifestation may be), knowing his Letters could be filed under “biography” or “criticism” or “art” or “poetry.” He concludes his observations on our all-too-human tendencies “to grasp” with words his Zen master great-nephew echoes today.
We reduce immensity to the action of our heart, for fear that it might destroy us.
(Thich Nhat Hanh was born in 1926, 10 weeks before Rilke died).
Returning to the Zen slogan “concentration is the practice of happiness,” we can touch both the artist’s single-minded devotion to her work and the challenges inherent in such focus. Rilke called the painter’s concentration a “conflagration of clarity.” The white-hot intensity of artistic passion is both source of the creative impulse and “burn factor” risk to anyone in that smoldering orbit.
The Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation (akin to listening for the “still small voice” in the Judeo-Christian traditions) “invites us to look deeply at reality.” It is an invitation “to discover,” and to “embark on a journey” towards “joy and happiness” through mindfulness of the present moment. Concentration. Attention. Presence.
Rilke speaks for all humanity with refreshing candor when he says
one lives so badly, because one always comes into the present unfinished, unable, distracted…
Such a one might miss the miracle the orange is, might not see “the cloud floating in [a] piece of paper.” Thich offers more insight: the “true nature of this piece of paper is inter-being. Before taking the form of paper, it already existed in the form of sun, cloud, rain and trees.”
“You do not have to be a poet to see it,” he gently reminds the literal-minded.
Rilke communes with Mother Nature by praising the animals, “more real than anything.” He is again candid about our species’ tragic / comic habit of “missing the point.”
How blindly they misuse what has never been looked at, never experienced, distract themselves by displacing all that has been immeasurably gathered together…
“To see the world in a grain of sand,” as the visionary poet William Blake saw it, is another way to perceive all of nature’s elements in a single sheet of paper. Rilke relates the ecstatic energy that comes from such newness, when an object “revisited with increased excitement” is seen as if for the first time.
Rilke goes on to describe the essential qualities of Cézanne’s oranges, and his insight is as relevant to the artist as it is to any amateur, student or pilgrim.
This labor which no longer knew any preferences or biases or fastidious predilections, whose minutest component had been tested on the scales of an infinitely responsive conscience, and which so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its color content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of color…It is this limitless objectivity…purely by means of color…
Rilke’s description echoes Michelangelo’s evocation of sculpture’s origin. It is parallel to the process of listening, testing and discerning mentioned by composers. Chipping away at the stone to reveal the form hidden beneath the surface parallels sifting through the internal voices to hear the music. Practicing mindfulness meditation or listening for the “still, small voice” connects the spiritual path to the artist’s work.
Once this process of listening and discernment has been given time to ripen, to season and blossom, essence is revealed. Presence. Suchness. “Muchness,” as the Mad Hatter puts it in one of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Another one of TNH’s recurring themes is naming: calling things “by their true names.” This applies to emotions, beliefs, concepts and people. Naming plays a central role in Alice’s adventures. The nursery rhymes and “tall tales” are but one side of the looking- glass. Before Humpty Dumpty recites poetry (“The Little Fishes”) to Alice, he asks what her name means. “Must a name mean something?” Humpty’s reply, “of course it must!” is another clue to help Alice realize her own muchness.
“Everything is simplified…nothing is insignificant and superfluous,” Rilke says of Cézanne’s still lifes. The “simple” apples and oranges are recognized by their suchness and called by name.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Transfiguring the everyday…
on Jonathan Harvey’s Music and Inspiration
If, in the music I write, I can create a world of sound wherein some, at least, of my generation can find refreshment for the inner life, then I am doing my job properly. It is a great responsibility; to try to transfigure the everyday by a touch of the everlasting. (Tippett)
Would we listen to Tippett’s music differently having read of what inspires him? I know that I am not alone in finding the words of great artists—their letters, essays and biographies—endlessly interesting, enlightening and inspiring. It is one of the ways we “pass the torch” and help keep Mozart, Michelangelo and Matisse alive and posthumously well. It is a sacred trust that needn’t be shrouded in mystery, mentioned but misunderstood. The connection between inspiration & the creative artist (and the society in which the artist creates) is the subject of composer Jonathan Harvey’s book, Music and Inspiration (Faber, 1999). He trenchantly observes
The artist is distinguished less by his desire for transcendental experience than by his ability to create a beautiful object which goes some way towards satisfying that desire…
So let us continue this observation,
musing (or poetically thinking):
Not only the composer / author,
but the performer / interpreter…
driven by passion,
fuelled by the synergy from technique meeting inspiration
creates
and therefore embodies this important and frequently overlooked distinction…
Understanding this distinction (between having the desire and bearing the gift) is essential in relationships between an artist and society. Artists, amateurs and audiences all may have the desire for the "transcendent experience;" the creative artists who "bestow the boon" are much rarer…And that is why artists must lead…and why for the sake of art, society must join along as followers…
The artist must scrutinize the future, see in the chaos new worlds…let him not be frightened of the dark that surrounds him; let him go on and if sometimes he stumbles and falls, let him get up and still press on (Harvey quoting Verdi).
One is reminded of the ancient Jewish proverb “where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).
Creative artists often invoke myths and other ancient stories as metaphors for the creative process. Inspiration appears, rising out of the labyrinth like the wings of Daedalus (Beethoven). Inspiration is the “mysterious Jacob’s Ladder with which art links heaven and earth” (Liszt).
The creative ascent is often plagued with “holy discontent” or “divine dissatisfaction” with the status quo, the limitations of vision, technology or other resource. Mahler described the jarring dissonance between artistic aspiration and “the real world.”
Unfortunately, this wonderful entering-into-possession-of-oneself is undone the moment one returns to the noise and confusion of everyday life…
Mahler was referencing his return to the “city” from the “country;” the return to the “grind” of music administration following the artistic “sabbatical” necessary for creative production. Mahler is a fascinating case study for today’s artistic jugglers, for those wearing “many hats” (increasingly the norm). Is Mahler one of my favorites because I identify with his life / work, or does my simpatico identification with Mahler make him a favorite? And does that distinction matter where such symbiotic “chemistry” is concerned? Mahler was one of the “tortured soul” artists who embody a “type” and restore continuity in our quest for living an authentic, examined life.
One of the prototypes of the tortured artist, Beethoven wrote openly about his creative struggles. His candor is illuminating and inspiring to everyone with “ears to hear:”
Continue to raise yourself higher and higher into the divine realm of art…You must create everything for yourself in your own heart; and only in the world of ideals can you find friends.
In that juxtaposition of divine aspiration / inspiration and human striving for self-realization is a distinguishing dynamic that makes Beethoven such a hero. The uncompromisingly high standards of the artistic ideal are both product and source of the artist’s gift, and a cause of his isolation. That gift is one measure of his “entertainment value” in the public eye, and one source of historical tension between the artist and society. Should we expect that dynamic to be much different today?
Visionary artists like the “mad” poet Christopher Smart have composed some of their most inspired work in the confines of prison, exile or the “lunatic asylum.” Smart’s extraordinary cat, Jeoffry is a symbol of mythological significance for the artist. Smart’s cat inspired one of Britten’s most popular cantatas, Rejoice in the Lamb.
Misfits from Beethoven to Britten have taken both succor and inspiration in such vision. Composer Paul Hindemith’s description of the artist’s role as an ambassador for the “ideal” is apt (and it is worth noting that Hindemith’s standards were so unflinchingly high that his composition program at Yale was considered the most rigorous in the country). His poetic rhetoric is a perfect description of how rare the artistic boon is, and how special the artist’s charge is to society’s well being.
There is a region of visionary irrationality in which the vague secrets of art dwell, sensed but not understood, implored but not commanded, imparting but not yielding. He cannot enter this region, he can only pray to be elected one of its messengers. If his prayers are granted and he, armed with wisdom and gifted with reverence for the unknowable, is the man whom Heaven is blessed with the genius of creation, we may see in him the donor of the precious present we all long for…
And the “we” that “may see” in the artist “the precious present” is society. Like all enduring relationships, the one between artist and society must be mutual. That boon is too often not recognized until after the artist has been silenced (by death or society itself).
Each instance of an “unnatural” silencing of the artistic voice should be cause for consideration and reflection by those “deciders” in the for-profit world upon whose support the artists depend. “Holding up the mirror” is one of the functions of art. Such reflection is intended to provoke thought and stimulate discussion. It could help correct some of the imbalance by shifting focus from “what do we want our Clown / Fool / Artist to play today…” to “how can we help make more of this magic possible?”
Smart’s “crazy mad” poem disguises proverbs of wisdom behind visionary imagery. It crackles with energy two centuries on, and affords a rare glimpse into one of the worlds the artist occupies—sometimes discordantly—with society:
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry…
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary…
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life…
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command…
For he is hated by the hypocrite and the miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge…
For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity…
For he can tread to all the measures of the musick…
Artistic vision includes a truth telling that connects the artist to other outcasts like the clown, the “holy fool” and the prophet. The composer’s quest for order and beauty (Keats: “beauty is truth, truth beauty”) is analogous to Gandhi’s “vow to seek the truth, to live by the truth, and to confront untruth wherever I find it.” Are those uncompromising standards removed even a degree from Beethoven’s? So where do “our standards” fall within such a paradigm?
The ambitious vision that “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?” (Browning) does not depend upon one’s belief in an afterlife to resonate. And artistic ambition makes many uncomfortable. It’s unpredictable. Unsafe, even.
Tension makes many uncomfortable. We find it difficult to discuss dissonance rationally.
We find many things difficult to discuss. Those topics our parents taught us it was polite to avoid—money, religion, politics and sexuality—contain some of the most important considerations of our lives. Are the decisions about “who we are” as human beings not paramount? Are decisions about “what to do” or "what to be,” not essential? Identity & purpose defining decisions like choosing a partner (and whether to “get hitched” at all: “marriage” is about so much more than “1 man + 1 woman”) and ultimately, what we believe. These decisions define us and we should evolve to a plane where we can have more meaningful discussions about affective matters where the heart, soul and “guts” are concerned.
Harvey ends his excellent book with one of the reasons the saying “Vida brevis, ars longa” (life is short, art is long) will always ring true. Music has a unique “capacity to represent the ideal.” One of the reason so many artists overcome adversity, endure suffering, and become true heroes (in the metaphysical / philosophical sense) is
music’s ability to transform the everyday world, by revealing the paradise that exists both beyond and within it…
Until every community (in every generation / era of its culture’s manifestation) learns to distinguish between appreciation (art as entertainment) and value (the artist as cultural ambassador), the artist’s ability to “transform the everyday world” will be fraught with tension.
Such dissonance does not always resolve with the affirming harmony of a perfectly crafted, balanced & proportioned cadence. No one knows better than the artist that “the show must / will go on.” But who is most hurt when the show is cancelled? The artist? The public? Art itself?
It is up to the artists to lead. Sometimes that simply means continuing the discussion. Asking pertinent questions. Beethoven turned a “simple” 4-note motive into the most popular symphony in the world. Schubert invented a genre: the “art song.” Leonardo, Michelangelo and Shakespeare are cultural pillars of civilization, and their worth far surpasses that of political dynasties, empires & profit margins.
Why shouldn’t we trust the artists to lead the way?
If, in the music I write, I can create a world of sound wherein some, at least, of my generation can find refreshment for the inner life, then I am doing my job properly. It is a great responsibility; to try to transfigure the everyday by a touch of the everlasting. (Tippett)
Would we listen to Tippett’s music differently having read of what inspires him? I know that I am not alone in finding the words of great artists—their letters, essays and biographies—endlessly interesting, enlightening and inspiring. It is one of the ways we “pass the torch” and help keep Mozart, Michelangelo and Matisse alive and posthumously well. It is a sacred trust that needn’t be shrouded in mystery, mentioned but misunderstood. The connection between inspiration & the creative artist (and the society in which the artist creates) is the subject of composer Jonathan Harvey’s book, Music and Inspiration (Faber, 1999). He trenchantly observes
The artist is distinguished less by his desire for transcendental experience than by his ability to create a beautiful object which goes some way towards satisfying that desire…
So let us continue this observation,
musing (or poetically thinking):
Not only the composer / author,
but the performer / interpreter…
driven by passion,
fuelled by the synergy from technique meeting inspiration
creates
and therefore embodies this important and frequently overlooked distinction…
Understanding this distinction (between having the desire and bearing the gift) is essential in relationships between an artist and society. Artists, amateurs and audiences all may have the desire for the "transcendent experience;" the creative artists who "bestow the boon" are much rarer…And that is why artists must lead…and why for the sake of art, society must join along as followers…
The artist must scrutinize the future, see in the chaos new worlds…let him not be frightened of the dark that surrounds him; let him go on and if sometimes he stumbles and falls, let him get up and still press on (Harvey quoting Verdi).
One is reminded of the ancient Jewish proverb “where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).
Creative artists often invoke myths and other ancient stories as metaphors for the creative process. Inspiration appears, rising out of the labyrinth like the wings of Daedalus (Beethoven). Inspiration is the “mysterious Jacob’s Ladder with which art links heaven and earth” (Liszt).
The creative ascent is often plagued with “holy discontent” or “divine dissatisfaction” with the status quo, the limitations of vision, technology or other resource. Mahler described the jarring dissonance between artistic aspiration and “the real world.”
Unfortunately, this wonderful entering-into-possession-of-oneself is undone the moment one returns to the noise and confusion of everyday life…
Mahler was referencing his return to the “city” from the “country;” the return to the “grind” of music administration following the artistic “sabbatical” necessary for creative production. Mahler is a fascinating case study for today’s artistic jugglers, for those wearing “many hats” (increasingly the norm). Is Mahler one of my favorites because I identify with his life / work, or does my simpatico identification with Mahler make him a favorite? And does that distinction matter where such symbiotic “chemistry” is concerned? Mahler was one of the “tortured soul” artists who embody a “type” and restore continuity in our quest for living an authentic, examined life.
One of the prototypes of the tortured artist, Beethoven wrote openly about his creative struggles. His candor is illuminating and inspiring to everyone with “ears to hear:”
Continue to raise yourself higher and higher into the divine realm of art…You must create everything for yourself in your own heart; and only in the world of ideals can you find friends.
In that juxtaposition of divine aspiration / inspiration and human striving for self-realization is a distinguishing dynamic that makes Beethoven such a hero. The uncompromisingly high standards of the artistic ideal are both product and source of the artist’s gift, and a cause of his isolation. That gift is one measure of his “entertainment value” in the public eye, and one source of historical tension between the artist and society. Should we expect that dynamic to be much different today?
Visionary artists like the “mad” poet Christopher Smart have composed some of their most inspired work in the confines of prison, exile or the “lunatic asylum.” Smart’s extraordinary cat, Jeoffry is a symbol of mythological significance for the artist. Smart’s cat inspired one of Britten’s most popular cantatas, Rejoice in the Lamb.
Misfits from Beethoven to Britten have taken both succor and inspiration in such vision. Composer Paul Hindemith’s description of the artist’s role as an ambassador for the “ideal” is apt (and it is worth noting that Hindemith’s standards were so unflinchingly high that his composition program at Yale was considered the most rigorous in the country). His poetic rhetoric is a perfect description of how rare the artistic boon is, and how special the artist’s charge is to society’s well being.
There is a region of visionary irrationality in which the vague secrets of art dwell, sensed but not understood, implored but not commanded, imparting but not yielding. He cannot enter this region, he can only pray to be elected one of its messengers. If his prayers are granted and he, armed with wisdom and gifted with reverence for the unknowable, is the man whom Heaven is blessed with the genius of creation, we may see in him the donor of the precious present we all long for…
And the “we” that “may see” in the artist “the precious present” is society. Like all enduring relationships, the one between artist and society must be mutual. That boon is too often not recognized until after the artist has been silenced (by death or society itself).
Each instance of an “unnatural” silencing of the artistic voice should be cause for consideration and reflection by those “deciders” in the for-profit world upon whose support the artists depend. “Holding up the mirror” is one of the functions of art. Such reflection is intended to provoke thought and stimulate discussion. It could help correct some of the imbalance by shifting focus from “what do we want our Clown / Fool / Artist to play today…” to “how can we help make more of this magic possible?”
Smart’s “crazy mad” poem disguises proverbs of wisdom behind visionary imagery. It crackles with energy two centuries on, and affords a rare glimpse into one of the worlds the artist occupies—sometimes discordantly—with society:
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry…
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary…
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life…
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command…
For he is hated by the hypocrite and the miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge…
For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity…
For he can tread to all the measures of the musick…
Artistic vision includes a truth telling that connects the artist to other outcasts like the clown, the “holy fool” and the prophet. The composer’s quest for order and beauty (Keats: “beauty is truth, truth beauty”) is analogous to Gandhi’s “vow to seek the truth, to live by the truth, and to confront untruth wherever I find it.” Are those uncompromising standards removed even a degree from Beethoven’s? So where do “our standards” fall within such a paradigm?
The ambitious vision that “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?” (Browning) does not depend upon one’s belief in an afterlife to resonate. And artistic ambition makes many uncomfortable. It’s unpredictable. Unsafe, even.
Tension makes many uncomfortable. We find it difficult to discuss dissonance rationally.
We find many things difficult to discuss. Those topics our parents taught us it was polite to avoid—money, religion, politics and sexuality—contain some of the most important considerations of our lives. Are the decisions about “who we are” as human beings not paramount? Are decisions about “what to do” or "what to be,” not essential? Identity & purpose defining decisions like choosing a partner (and whether to “get hitched” at all: “marriage” is about so much more than “1 man + 1 woman”) and ultimately, what we believe. These decisions define us and we should evolve to a plane where we can have more meaningful discussions about affective matters where the heart, soul and “guts” are concerned.
Harvey ends his excellent book with one of the reasons the saying “Vida brevis, ars longa” (life is short, art is long) will always ring true. Music has a unique “capacity to represent the ideal.” One of the reason so many artists overcome adversity, endure suffering, and become true heroes (in the metaphysical / philosophical sense) is
music’s ability to transform the everyday world, by revealing the paradise that exists both beyond and within it…
Until every community (in every generation / era of its culture’s manifestation) learns to distinguish between appreciation (art as entertainment) and value (the artist as cultural ambassador), the artist’s ability to “transform the everyday world” will be fraught with tension.
Such dissonance does not always resolve with the affirming harmony of a perfectly crafted, balanced & proportioned cadence. No one knows better than the artist that “the show must / will go on.” But who is most hurt when the show is cancelled? The artist? The public? Art itself?
It is up to the artists to lead. Sometimes that simply means continuing the discussion. Asking pertinent questions. Beethoven turned a “simple” 4-note motive into the most popular symphony in the world. Schubert invented a genre: the “art song.” Leonardo, Michelangelo and Shakespeare are cultural pillars of civilization, and their worth far surpasses that of political dynasties, empires & profit margins.
Why shouldn’t we trust the artists to lead the way?
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Bach, Montaigne & rock climbing...
One of the supposed "tests" of the quality of one's life is how unafraid one is to die. Such freedom is palpable (if not graspable by too many of us) and resonates deep inside the core of our being. Its resonance is another hallmark, an indicator, a barometer of how authentic the experience of our life is.
One of the joys of my life is singing with my partner, wife, collaborator, assistant and best friend, Amy Cofield. Last week we had the privilege of performing one of the masterpieces of Western civilization, Bach's "Great" Passion of St Matthew. It was in Las Vegas. The Southern Nevada Musical Arts Society has been going strong under the direction of the same conductor since its founding over 45 years ago! I have immense admiration for Dr Doug Peterson's vision and perseverance.
Though he may not be a desert landscape-lover, I cannot help but think his mission--to share the riches of great music with everyone that wants to experience it--is enhanced by the beauty and energy of the Red Rock Canyon in the Mojave Desert just beyond Sin City's limits (one of the perks of this gig was actually being housed near Red Rock and NOT on the infamous "strip").
Amy and I went rock-climbing in a wind-storm. Though it was not literally a near-death experience, it was an enriching one. Any kind of distance hiking over varied terrain reinforces the ever-shifting nature of perception itself. "We've hiked all this way, and that peak is STILL so far off!" Or, "How different the view is from up here." The philosopher Thomas Nagel has a book with a gorgeous Caspar David Friedrich landscape as a cover provocatively titled The View from Nowhere. I shall not be referring to it again. But I shall be referring to Montaigne's near-death experience which heralded a seismic shift in his worldview, the result of which is the origin of the genre in which I currently write, "the personal essay." Montaigne's seminal attempts at charting out "how to live" are the subject of an excellent new book on this unlikely Renaissance artist, How to Live-or-A Life of Montaigne (Sarah Bakewell, Other, 2010).
Montaigne's near-death experience caused him to reflect and change his life. An unusual combination of stoicism and questioning (sometimes labeled "doubt") contributed to his articulating a philosophy whose practical applications continue to speak. He found occasion to stop and reflect on everything.
Anything that gives us pause for reflection may become a source for good. That is one of the ways we turn painful experience into healthy fruit. The Tibetan Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh is fond of likening life to gardening. For the harvest to be plentiful, one must have good compost. The compost of our lives consists of our "stuff." How we deal with what comes our way determines the quality of the fertilizer we put into our efforts, it effects how we "water the seeds" of our lives.
The desert landscape, seemingly short on compost, is a fascinating one for the proximity of its metaphors to phrases about life. "In barren lands," "hanging by a thread," "stubborn & persistent" "endlessly fascinating" and "unpredictable" are just a few of those phrases that remind us how powerful metaphor can be in communication, in understanding, in forging meaning. Cultivating life itself into a colorful landscape alive with symbol & multi-layered resonance should be a more common pursuit.
Another creative writer who took Montaigne both to heart and head, Stefan Zweig summarized his Burgundian forbear's philosophy with an outline as indebted to Zen & the East as it is to Montaigne's Renaissance (Roman Catholic) humanism.
Zweig wrote an extended essay on Montaigne, without references, as he was isolated in exile from Hitler. "Zweig chose the ultimate form of internal emigration. He killed himself," is how Bakewell summarizes the great writer's tragic end. His closing Montaigne-ism is "Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will."
Proverbial food for thought, and one of the gifts left behind from another link in the chain of artistic saints that form another kind of "great cloud of witnesses" from whom we draw strength, continuity and inspiration. Zweig's list also includes:
"Be free from vanity and pride...Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed... Be free from fate; be master of your life."
Montaigne said "this great world is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle."
Reading and rock-climbing are but two ways of learning to look from different perspectives so that we may glimpse our true selves from the "proper angle."
Montaigne was an inveterate traveler, with the requisite inquisitiveness necessary to stimulate intellectual & emotional openness, a hallmark of the polymath, "Renaissance" type he helped define.
I believe he would sanction the comparison of perspectives & landscape metaphors the Red Rock Canyon inspires. The wind may be bracing, the landscape parched, but the vistas are amazing. Emily Dickinson writes in "Wild Nights," upon glimpsing the horizon of new perspective, "Ah, the sea!"
Her ecstatic declaration enlivens the voice of everyone who has marveled at any one of nature's miraculous sights: "Just look at that!"
One of the joys of my life is singing with my partner, wife, collaborator, assistant and best friend, Amy Cofield. Last week we had the privilege of performing one of the masterpieces of Western civilization, Bach's "Great" Passion of St Matthew. It was in Las Vegas. The Southern Nevada Musical Arts Society has been going strong under the direction of the same conductor since its founding over 45 years ago! I have immense admiration for Dr Doug Peterson's vision and perseverance.
Though he may not be a desert landscape-lover, I cannot help but think his mission--to share the riches of great music with everyone that wants to experience it--is enhanced by the beauty and energy of the Red Rock Canyon in the Mojave Desert just beyond Sin City's limits (one of the perks of this gig was actually being housed near Red Rock and NOT on the infamous "strip").
Amy and I went rock-climbing in a wind-storm. Though it was not literally a near-death experience, it was an enriching one. Any kind of distance hiking over varied terrain reinforces the ever-shifting nature of perception itself. "We've hiked all this way, and that peak is STILL so far off!" Or, "How different the view is from up here." The philosopher Thomas Nagel has a book with a gorgeous Caspar David Friedrich landscape as a cover provocatively titled The View from Nowhere. I shall not be referring to it again. But I shall be referring to Montaigne's near-death experience which heralded a seismic shift in his worldview, the result of which is the origin of the genre in which I currently write, "the personal essay." Montaigne's seminal attempts at charting out "how to live" are the subject of an excellent new book on this unlikely Renaissance artist, How to Live-or-A Life of Montaigne (Sarah Bakewell, Other, 2010).
Montaigne's near-death experience caused him to reflect and change his life. An unusual combination of stoicism and questioning (sometimes labeled "doubt") contributed to his articulating a philosophy whose practical applications continue to speak. He found occasion to stop and reflect on everything.
Anything that gives us pause for reflection may become a source for good. That is one of the ways we turn painful experience into healthy fruit. The Tibetan Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh is fond of likening life to gardening. For the harvest to be plentiful, one must have good compost. The compost of our lives consists of our "stuff." How we deal with what comes our way determines the quality of the fertilizer we put into our efforts, it effects how we "water the seeds" of our lives.
The desert landscape, seemingly short on compost, is a fascinating one for the proximity of its metaphors to phrases about life. "In barren lands," "hanging by a thread," "stubborn & persistent" "endlessly fascinating" and "unpredictable" are just a few of those phrases that remind us how powerful metaphor can be in communication, in understanding, in forging meaning. Cultivating life itself into a colorful landscape alive with symbol & multi-layered resonance should be a more common pursuit.
Another creative writer who took Montaigne both to heart and head, Stefan Zweig summarized his Burgundian forbear's philosophy with an outline as indebted to Zen & the East as it is to Montaigne's Renaissance (Roman Catholic) humanism.
Zweig wrote an extended essay on Montaigne, without references, as he was isolated in exile from Hitler. "Zweig chose the ultimate form of internal emigration. He killed himself," is how Bakewell summarizes the great writer's tragic end. His closing Montaigne-ism is "Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will."
Proverbial food for thought, and one of the gifts left behind from another link in the chain of artistic saints that form another kind of "great cloud of witnesses" from whom we draw strength, continuity and inspiration. Zweig's list also includes:
"Be free from vanity and pride...Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed... Be free from fate; be master of your life."
Montaigne said "this great world is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle."
Reading and rock-climbing are but two ways of learning to look from different perspectives so that we may glimpse our true selves from the "proper angle."
Montaigne was an inveterate traveler, with the requisite inquisitiveness necessary to stimulate intellectual & emotional openness, a hallmark of the polymath, "Renaissance" type he helped define.
I believe he would sanction the comparison of perspectives & landscape metaphors the Red Rock Canyon inspires. The wind may be bracing, the landscape parched, but the vistas are amazing. Emily Dickinson writes in "Wild Nights," upon glimpsing the horizon of new perspective, "Ah, the sea!"
Her ecstatic declaration enlivens the voice of everyone who has marveled at any one of nature's miraculous sights: "Just look at that!"
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