 Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 Feedback Back SouthWest Print Help |
 |
 |
|
 | |||
| |||||||
| |
)
The Good of the Arts: Episode One - Old Maps and New
Trad: The Lark in the Clear Air - Jenny Ellis, Charlie Saksena "Folk Music in the Orkney Islands" Attic Records (1985) AT004 I started making maps when I was small Showing place, resources, where the enemy And where love lay. I did not know Time adds to land. Events drift continually down, Effacing landmarks, raising the level, like snow. The Lark in the Clear Air and the metaphor of maps: let's begin with an image and an idea. The idea is simple enough: the arts are maps. They show us the terrain of life, contours, cliffs and coasts, they chart our deepest oceans and their rivers run like arteries across arid plains. But Alasdair Gray's words, in the poem I just quoted, are also a warning: the maps tell us that human landscapes are always changing, and they require a special understanding, a training in how best they might be read. In answer to a question about the nature of art, Robert Penn Warren said, 'Ah believe it's just gettin' yore reality shaped a little better'. We have to learn how to make reality shapely. But in any age of crass commercialism, the arts are disadvantaged, partly because the training that is needed to help us comprehend them is so vulnerable. The vanity of rampant managers and the strafing heartlessness of advertising clog up the channels of contemplation. Flann O'Brien is only mildly exaggerating a popular philistinism when he declares that ... there is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and ... most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable. Well, he's got a point, hasn't he? You can imagine certain education ministers trying the thing on without a trace of irony, and getting knighthoods for the damage they do to generations. The arts look after themselves. The creative force that produces them is so essential, so profoundly necessary that they are as inevitable in human life as the desire for shelter, food and procreation. As the American poet William Carlos Williams says, because the purpose of the artist, whatever it is, is to take the life which he sees, and raise it, raise it up, to an elevated position where it has dignity, just the same as a Navajo Indian puts a mark around a clay water pitcher and makes it distinguished, so the artist's purpose in life, what he's for, why he's been preserved for the ages as he has been, the most, the imperishable thing, the one imperishable thing, that the world never lets die, is the work of art. Cities are wiped out, civilisation is wiped out, Homer persists. England will disappear. Shakespeare will be there. It's that. The race cherishes that, cherishes the work of the artist. He's the most important creature in any generation. The arts - all the arts - are as inseparable from being human as the dance is from the dancer, in Yeats's great poem 'Among School Children'. But as the American critic Guy Davenport points out, if the purpose of journalism is to inform and disseminate, it isn't doing its job: 'Thirty years of liberal twiddling with the lines of communication have made it almost impossible to broadcast anything but received propaganda'. And what is happening in the minds that keep other minds alive and give us the courage to live is reported, if at all, in a dangerously denatured and official trickle of news. When the arts are neglected or obscured, people suffer from dullness and ignorance. It sounds all too familiar. Not a lark in sight and no clear air to fly in. It was not always thus. It's perfectly easy to imagine a condition in which the arts are fundamentally integrated to the social economy, but it comes at a cost. Listen to this, and ask yourself, what is it that we're listening to? Trad: Gentle Lady - Peggy Seeger and a cow "Scottish drinking and pipe songs" Legacy International CD 346 Well, it's a song of course - but it's more than that. The regular rhythm measured in the percussive beat that accompanies the woman's voice is the sound of milk jetting from a cow's udder into the bucket: the song keeps its measure by the regularity of the act of milking, and as it keeps its measure, it soothes and calms the cow and the singer. The milk is fresh and good and the cheese that will come from it will be wholesome. In traditional societies and oral cultures, the arts are frequently related to daily life in exactly this way. Cradle songs or lullabies, laments, praise-songs and festive dancing, music and poetry, all have practical applications and connect with the well-being of people. And maybe because our hypertrophisticated modern world might seem a long way from such conservatism, we often need reminding that the arts are to do with well-being. Their purpose is to help people to live. Perhaps it's time to think again of Matthew Arnold's famous, or notorious, phrase, from Culture and Anarchy, that our business in the arts is to get to know 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'. Arguments will question who might judge, but without a sense of value we are doomed to endless pluralism, like the 'real TV' shows which collapse all purpose into inane babble. In any case, there is a simple answer: 'I will be the judge, but I'll show you why I'm capable of judging.' Is this familiar? Remember Sylvester Stallone in Judge Dredd? Judge Dredd - I am duh law! There's an undeniable attraction in the thought that one might resolve an argument as thoroughly as Judge Dredd: Judge Dredd - [Machine-gun fire] This room has been pacified. But that would be altogether too unencumbered. In these programmes, we'll try to be a little more Socratic in our method. The arts are a long conversation, usually with the dead. But they are a living dialogue. So I'm going to introduce more than one voice. I'll present the material. Please feel free to question it. For example, that metaphor of maps. Our understanding works by metaphor. Ideas connect through images and tones. Words make sound as well as sense. When we communicate, we do so through the transport of language, in a world of real things. For the poet, this is the great attraction of the actuality of words. As the English critic I.A. Richards says, 'Berkeley was fond of talking about ... "bare notions" [and] ... "naked undisguised ideas" ... But an idea or a notion, when unencumbered and undisguised, is no easier to get hold of than one of those oiled and naked thieves who infest the railway carriages of India'. Here's Uncle Bill - William Carlos Williams - again: Now you notice what I said. There is no subject that the modern poem cannot approach. There is no selected material. It's what you do with the work of art. It's what you put on the canvas and how you put it on that makes the picture. It's how the words fit in. Poems are not made of thoughts, of beautiful thoughts. It's made of words. Pigments, put on, here, there, made, actually. Even there, Williams is using metaphors and similes - poems are made of words, but the words go on the page like paint on the canvas or like musical tones in the air. Ezra Pound tells us that poetry 'withers and "dries out" when it leaves music ... too far behind'. The musical component of language is at its keenest in poetry, and it's always on the point of transcending its own location, literally: when you speak or sing, the sound leaves your body, and when music gives itself to air, its particular location dissolves. Poetry, like music, can be carried elsewhere in the mind and mortal memory. A final word of advice from Uncle Bill: To understand the modern poem, listen to it. And it should be heard. It's very difficult sometimes to get it off the page, but once you hear it, then you should be able to appraise it. In other words, if it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem. [Laughter.] All art is made to please: that's the way it approaches you. 'All art is made to please' - and even the most tragic and difficult of great art is made to affirm, from Shakespeare's Hamlet to ... The Lion King. ELTON JOHN/TIM RICE: Circle of Life - Elton John "The Lion King" Walt Disney Records 74321214222 Even with its happy ending, the proximity of Disney's film to the state of Denmark with its wicked uncle and hesitant Prince returns us to the notion of maps: the medium, language and conclusion may be different, but the terrain is surely familiar. This relation of old maps and new takes us to the heart of the matter. A philistine disregard of Shakespeare or an elitist disdain of Disney are equally inappropriate. The point is they are connected. Even inadequate maps are better than no maps at all. At least they show that the land is there. As Pound says, 'the value of old work is constantly affected by the new' and 'there is no reason why the same man should like the same books at 18 and 48'. Okay. So let's try to briefly sketch a map of the modern world to suggest the kind of terrain we live in. Start with Shakespeare's Tempest then go on to Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and then to Melville's Mardi and Rudyard Kipling's Kim. These bring us to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the work of Joseph Conrad. The popular counterparts of Conrad's late Victorian, early modern story, Heart of Darkness are John Buchan's imperialist thriller Prester John, where racism goes hand-in-hand with Scots Calvinism, and the series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs about that acrobatic virtuoso linguist, Tarzan of the Apes - of whom, more later. In the twentieth century, the constellation of writers using post-imperial forms of English escalates beyond prediction. This is a map of a literature of empire, its works frequently describe experiences of exploration, colonialism and conquest. Each author enters a crucible of cultures, languages, races and nationalities. It's neatly defined by the links between Shakespeare's contemporary John Donne, referring to his lover's body as an 'America', a 'new-found land', and the principal character in Wilson Harris's 1960s novel, Palace of the Peacock, who is also named Donne. From a sixteenth-century poet of colonial expansion to a twentieth-century novelist writing out of the 'post-colonial' West Indies, the opening and closing of an era can be described. The body of writing contained by this map is caught up by shifting political energies, on a global stage. In the last two hundred years of this period there have been four major areas of volcanic activity. The first is the rise of the chorus of voices of formerly silenced people: women, the working class, 'others' defined by race or predilection. The second is the phenomenal rise in mass-produced literature, pulp fiction, comic books, films, radio and television. Genre fiction becomes established: the Romance, Westerns, Thrillers, Horror, Science Fiction. Popular mass-culture is maybe the most remarkable characteristic of the modern world. Then there's the way in which the Romantic movement developed in written fiction. An international but Eurocentric movement which involved all the arts, Romanticism was inherited and retained in America, Russia, and in Scotland, and more generally in popular culture. But the high culture of England abandoned it. The strongest foundations of the period in each area were laid down by contemporaries: Walter Scott, Jane Austen and James Fenimore Cooper. Scott and Cooper generated Romance; Austen did not. The fourth crucial change in the cultural map of the modern world is the rise to dominance of American power, after World War Two. Internationally, the United States became the most significant cultural authority both as a source and as an arbiter of cultural models (Romantic heroes and glamorous women are only the most obvious examples). Mapping changes like this might seem a hopeless activity. Even the continents have moved from Gondwanaland to where they are now. But the metaphor of mapping helps us to imagine a different kind of geography, a different set of human relations in space and time. For example, think back to that beautiful melody with which we began the programme - 'The Lark in the Clear Air' - I bought the cassette from which the melody is quoted when I was in the Orkney Islands in 1995, knowing that it was my grandfather's favourite song. The cassette was of traditional folk music from the Orkneys, but the words, written by the Victorian poet and scholar, Sir Samuel Fergusson, are also to be found in The Penguin Book of Irish Verse. Now these few facts invite us to imagine a geography in which economic relations in the islands of the north-west European archipelago allowed for a free commerce of song between Ireland and Scotland, Orkney and Shetland, in fact, from Scandinavia to Spain - a different kind of commerce than the one evoked by more recent British political identity. They also invite us to imagine the transmission of that particular song through time and across the generations. Is it Irish or Scottish? Victorian or contemporary? Perhaps, in this sense, it doesn't matter where you are. We all set out from different places and see different things, but we all set out to start with and that's as true of David Balfour in Stevenson's Victorian Kidnapped as it is of Wilson Harris's 'post-colonial' Black Marsden. Balfour sets out like this: I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house. And Harris's weary world-traveller is described in the opening sentence of Black Marsden like this: I came upon him in a corner of the ruined Dunfermline Abbey of Fife like a curious frozen bundle that may have been blown across seas and landscapes to lodge here at my feet. This is why the figure of Odysseus or Ulysses is so central to our cultural tradition: the metaphor of his voyage, his journey in quest of a home he has almost forgotten, after years of war and travel, has an essential likeness to the human story, the return to an earth that will never let us really leave. There is an even larger map we might unroll now. In his little book on Herman Melville, Call Me Ishmael, Charles Olson proposes that the story of a great historical era can be read to its final end in the 19th century, in three great odysseys: 'The evolution in the use of Ulysses as hero parallels what has happened in economic history'. Homer's Ulysses pushes against the limits of the known world, the Mediterranean, and in this way he projects the archetype of the West to follow, the search, to reach beyond the self. By 1400, Dante finds Ulysses in Hell, among the evil counsellors. He has become an Atlantic man. In the Inferno he speaks to his crew like Columbus, urging them further forward: O Brothers! who through a hundred thousand dangers have reached to the West, do not deny yourselves experience of that unpeopled world beyond the sun. He bends the crew to his purpose, and drives them West. After five months on the Atlantic, they see the New Land there on the horizon, but a terrible storm blows up and they are drowned and destroyed before they reach land. 'The third and final odyssey was Ahab's. The Atlantic crossed, the new land America known, the dream's death lay around the Horn, where West returned to East. The Pacific is the end of the UNKNOWN which Homer's and Dante's Ulysses opened men's eyes to...Ahab is full stop'. Olson's map of history shows us the globe and we can recognise the truth in what he's saying. We cannot repeat those journeys, but every setting out is a new beginning, and the open complexity of all journeys is the domain of the arts, and understanding this is a form of resistance. It is to resist the vanity of all efforts to bind and contain imaginative life, it is to resist the mechanical excess of systematic meaning. It is to teach that intelligence and sensitivity reside with an irreducible openness, never with the closed. The energy of the arts is full of exactly this sense of possibility, both in prospect or in elegiac retrospect. The elegiac note will be familiar, but no matter how familiar, it can still be transcendent: ELGAR: Cello Concerto - Jacqueline du Pré (cello), LSO / Barbirolli EMI CDC 7 47329 Elgar's cello concerto defines a tone we can legitimately associate with the Europe ruined at the end of the first world war, when, as Elgar wrote, 'Everything good and nice and clean and fresh and sweet is far away - never to return'. But the world of possibility, of energy rushing to articulate itself most comprehensively, is nowhere more palpable than in the opening of Elgar's last symphony, the third, left in fragments at his death in 1934 but brought together by Anthony Payne in the 1990s. ELGAR (ed. Payne): Symphony No3 - BBC SO / Andrew Davis NMC D 053 Despite Payne's wonderfully rich achievement in reconstituting Elgar's symphony, there remain two fragments which eluded even his best effort to get it all in. These two tiny, terribly eloquent, elegiac pieces - scarcely more than two short footnotes - are balanced with the utmost poignancy on the very edge of oblivion: ELGAR: Unused fragments of 3rd Symphony - David Norris (piano) NMC D 052 That C minor haunts the memory. But it's time to allow ourselves the pleasure of hearing Elgar in full eloquence, blending together the stately nobility of authoritative command and the tragic knowledge of an Edwardian world that was ending, in the opening of his first symphony of 1909. To Wilfrid Mellers , Elgar's case is unique, because his 'magnificently ripe symphonies are the culmination of a symphonic tradition that had never happened'. When Holst and Vaughan Williams tried to bring about a renaissance of English music in the early 20th century, they returned to Tudor choral music and folk-song - they thought of their art as fundamentally vocal. Perhaps something of the poignancy of the lack of a symphonic tradition is an integral part of Elgar's first symphony. It carries a self-knowledge of loneliness. ELGAR: Symphony No1 - RPO / Menuhin Virgin VC 7 90773-2 That speaks of worlds now far away, but it allows us to imagine them each time we listen, and perhaps it allows us a glimpse of worlds that might have been. But that's what all the arts do, really, all old maps and new. They speak of things of spirit and body, Rilke's innumerable angels and the carnal comedy that runs from Chaucer to the 'Carry On' movies, from Boccaccio to Pasolini, from Rabelais to Joyce or Sydney Goodsir Smith. They speak of movement and locality, travel and place, history and geography. We grow familiar with particular locations, actual places like Wordsworth's Lakes, Dickens's Rochester, Melville's Nantucket, Charles Olson's Gloucester, Gregory O'Brien's Wellington, Grofe's Grand Canyon - or we might enter worlds of fantasy, Debussy's Cathedral Undersea, the lost worlds of Shakespeare or Conan Doyle or Rider Haggard or Joseph Conrad or - Edgar Rice Burroughs. In Tarzan the Untamed, Burroughs describes the fight between Tarzan of the Apes and Ska the vulture. Tarzan has been trekking across an African desert for days. For once he has underestimated the requirements of the trip. There has been no vegetation, no game, no water. Above him in the merciless sky circles Ska. At times Tarzan falls and does not move. Ska circles lower and lower. Finally, Tarzan falls and does not move: Ska, filled with suspicion, circled warily. Twice he almost alighted upon the great, naked breast only to wheel suddenly away; but the third time his talons touched the brown skin. It was as though the contact closed an electric circuit that instantaneously vitalized the quiet clod that had lain motionless so long. A brown hand swept downward from the brown forehead, and before Ska could raise a wing in flight he was in the clutches of his intended victim. ...Ska fought, but he was no match for [...] Tarzan, and a moment later the ape-man's teeth closed upon the carrion-eater. The flesh was coarse and tough and gave off an unpleasant odour and a worse taste; but it was food and the blood was drink and Tarzan was only an ape at heart. Sustained by the vile blood and flesh of the vulture, Tarzan survives his trek, and moves on to new sanguinary adventures. Burroughs, like Conrad and all these artists in whatever capacity, attempts to raise and answer the same questions: What might have been? What yet might be? Conrad's Lord Jim and Mister Kurtz in Heart of Darkness are the most troubling transgressors of possibility. We learn from them by training our own imagination. It was once suggested in all seriousness in a university English department that Heart of Darkness should be taken off the curriculum because Kurtz was not a very good role model! The proper reply was given with merciful speed: 'Neither is Lady Macbeth!' Of course the Macbeths are not role models: they are the embodiments of our human potential at its worst. The arts require a metaphorical understanding. But it's easy to see how dangerous the simple approach might be. And how infectious. It's difficult to recognize the truth of greed, fear, envy, vanity and selfishness in ourselves, when so much of our culture is determined to locate the bad things only in others. It's because we see ourselves in the ambition of Macbeth, the foolishness of Lear, the jealousy of Othello, that we can face up to our own weaknesses, and if we cannot fully 'militarize ourselves against our capacity for self-destruction', in Marshall Walker's phrase, we can at least be wary. Hugh MacDairmid: All creative work in the arts proceeds from below the level of consciousness and one has to dig into one's self, down to the very depths of one's personality, to get the kind of material that's required for first-class creative work. Maybe that's another kind of map - a map of the strengths and weaknesses in our capacity and make-up. A map of what we might be, and of what we might lose. And we can read it, or hear it, in the climactic moments of Sibelius's first symphony as clearly as we can in Hamlet or Lear - or in the 5th section of Yeats's poem 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'. In MacDiarmid's phrase, this is 'first-class creative work', and even when it registers defeat, it remains defiant. Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the levelling wind. Come let us mock at the wise; With all those calendars whereon They fixed old aching eyes, They never saw how seasons run, And now but gape at the sun. Come let us mock at the good That fancied goodness might be gay, And sick of solitude Might proclaim a holiday: Wind shrieked - and where are they? Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery. SIBELIUS: Symphony No1 - VPO / Bernstein DG 435 351
|
| | |||
 | |
 | |||||
| |||||||