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The Good of the Arts: Episode Two - The Metaphysics of Spring
At the beginning of the first movement of his Sixth Symphony, Beethoven wrote of what he intended to evoke: 'Erwachen heiterer empfindungen bei der ankunft auf dem lande - the awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country'. BEETHOVEN: Symphony No6 - BPO / Karajan DG 429 036-2 Simplicity could not be more grand: the pastoral world of fields and forests, shepherds, streams and summer storms, a peasant world of health and festival and thanksgiving - this is the vision the symphony reveals, in rich detail and lyrical abundance, with a healthy appetite and flowing energy. The seasons give shape and rhythm, as certain as the heartbeat. The poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay once proposed the idea of one-word poems. The title could be any length, but the poem would consist of a single word. My favourite example is 'One (Orange) Arm of the World's Oldest Windmill' - that's the title: 'One (Orange) Arm of the World's Oldest Windmill'. But you can work it out for yourself. Oh, all right. Windmills have their four great arms revolving, so the world's oldest windmill has to be the four seasons. The one arm which is orange has to be a season - and the one-word poem is: 'autumn'. There's magic in that. It's like a riddle or what's called a 'kenning' - a metaphorical phrase that refers to the literal world through the imagination, like 'The Whale's Road' for the ocean, or 'The Tree of Strings' for the harp. But the turn of the seasons, and the resources of the arts in our understanding of them, is our focus in this programme. And it takes us through the cycle. If Beethoven's Sixth is a high-point of summer, there is an autumn coming. But stay for a moment with that vast simplicity and teeming plenitude. This is the world before the Fall, the Garden of Paradise. Here's Eve, and Adam, before the presence of guilt and exile. Milton is its poet. Under a tuft of shade that on a green Stood whispering soft, by a fresh fountain side They sat them down; and after no more toil Of their sweet gardening labor than sufficed To recommend cool Zephyr, and made ease More easy, wholesome thirst and appetite More grateful, to their supper fruits they fell, Nectarine fruits which the compliant boughs Yielded them, sidelong as they sat recline On the soft downy bank damasked with flowers. The savory pulp they chew, and in the rind Still as they thirsted scoop the brimming stream Milton is sometimes considered brutally masculine, a puritanical Cromwellian, stern and austere. But D.H. Lawrence's famous advice - never trust the teller, trust the tale, or, never heed the biography, go to the words themselves - was never more appropriate. There's an image of the blind poet, turned sideways on his big chair, head over one arm, legs over the other, hand on brow, beginning his dictation to his daughter with a sigh: 'Now I'm ready - milk me!' - and this chimes with his depiction of our first progenitors: Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed; For contemplation he and valour formed, For softness she and sweet attractive grace; He for God only, she for God in him. Well, that might be damning enough, if we were to mock it, and 'mock mockers after that'. But let's look at the world of Eve and Adam. Milton's description of the creation of the animals and insects uses a vocabulary of close focus and detail: The tawny lion springs as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane ..and then, came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or worm: those waved their limber fans For wings In all the liveries decked of summer's pride With spots of gold and purple, azure and green; not all Minims of nature; some of serpent kind, Wondrous in length and corpulence First crept The parsimonious emmet, provident Of future The rest are numberless Those 'minims of nature' and the ant - the 'parsimonious emmet' - all this speaks of a world of unembarrassed splendour, a coherent, unbroken, comprehensive universe of natural unity in which humanity is carefully and happily accommodated. But it doesn't last. Paradise Lost would be magnificent for its vision of the Garden alone, but what happens in the course of the poem turns it into a much more profoundly human document, not only as Satan is expelled and turns into the prototype of the great Romantic Sinners, but even more movingly, in the greatness that comes upon Adam as he recognises, and finds a way to carry the burden of responsibility for his own human guilt. The Funeral March in Beethoven's Third Symphony begins with the hushed statement of the principal theme: BEETHOVEN: Symphony No3 - Philharmonia Orch / Klemperer EMI CDM 7 63356 And the theme runs forward with inexorable push and purpose and drive. Whenever you begin to think he's simply repeating himself, he turns a variation with astonishing and glorious invention. There are four major variations in the movement, but the most staggering one comes about eight minutes in. Just as the Fall of Adam and Eve is prefigured in the apple and the serpent in the Garden, the seeds of this development are there in the simple theme of the Funeral March itself. Yet it comes without warning, a grand fugue enacting a kind of descent, growing and deepening in tension and force: BEETHOVEN: Symphony No3 - Philharmonia Orch / Klemperer EMI CDM 7 63356 It is one of the most gripping passages in symphonic literature, and a lifetime might be spent studying the symphony of which it is only a part. But the point I want to emphasise here is that what that music does is similar to what happens in Milton and, most radically, in Shakespeare. It represents a kind of metaphysical reality, a reality beyond the physical world but that runs through the physical and the living. It is a reality bound up with the seasons, the facts of growth and decay, of birth and maturity and death. And the arts are our best understanding of these facts and this reality. Shakespeare's comedy affords the most familiar example of this. When Statesmen and Officers of Law make their attempts to rule and order a world of unpredictable desires, we know the course of love will overturn their pious assertions. Shakespeare's festive comedy is a happy recognition of holiday in nature and release from the 'workaday' world. Spring becomes Summer. But it goes deeper. In the comedy of Twelfth Night, Love's Labours Lost and even in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the most wonderful celebration of love and love's victories, there is always a sense that if the wrong road had been taken, just underneath or above what's happening, a much more dangerous and probably hostile nature is waiting to erupt in volcanic upheaval or torrential downpour. The comedies are never too far away from the tragic potential inherent in them. In Julius Caesar, Brutus notes the lack in himself of Antony's 'quick spirit' and 'gamesomeness'. This alerts us to qualities that are more than required in the full, human universe Shakespeare's plays inhabit. In Michael Long's terms, it requires 'a flexibility, an openness, a consciousness of ambiguity and relativity to which the very necessity of ordering is opposed'. The complex contradictions here might lead to festive comedy, but they might just as surely lead to tragic loss. The sense of high Summer's plenitude must give way to Autumn's withering and the darkness and death of Winter. At the end of Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' there is a rhetorical, and unconvincing, question: 'If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?' You know the answer is heavily implied: No, of course, Spring will be coming right along and there's nothing to worry about really. But Shakespeare's Spring is much tougher than this, and the Winter that passes before it is much more costly and violent. It is stronger, and in the end more reliable than the Romantic poets could allow, and it is also more beautiful. Something of that hopeful beauty can be glimpsed, too, through the deep pessimism of Joseph Conrad. In Lord Jim, a character named Stein notes the ambivalent closeness of comedy and tragedy and offers his answer and advice: Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns - nicht war? ... No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. This is not simply surrender: great exertion is required. But a kind of submission must also take place, a recognition of the ambivalence of destruction and creation. It's difficult to maintain this recognition. Epochs, cultures, whole civilizations have come and gone, denying its truth. The eighteenth century is known as the age of the dictionaries and encyclopaedias - the codification and categorization of language and knowledge. It was also the age of slavery. But maybe the most revealing aspect of the era was that King Lear could only be performed with a tacked-on happy ending. Dr Johnson complained that Shakespeare had neglected 'poetic justice', and a similar incomprehension was David Hume's, reducing the passion of tragedy to sentiment and its despair to elegy, making the value of art something suitable to the untroubled entertainment of civilised men. Stevie Smith was nearer the mark when she pointed out that 'art has nothing to do with civilization' - or at least, a civilization of enlightened order in which it is impossible to imagine that the forces of the uncontrollably destructive in life are engaged by people, and that such engagement might be made willingly. In the Twentieth Century that recognition has been forced upon us time and time again, as the price of change and the cost of Winter was gauged and understood by its artists. The ending of King Lear is trembling in the aftermath of events and at the prospect of how to continue. Even Edgar's readiness, adaptability and youthful strength, is deferential and hesitant before what remains of what he calls the 'treasury of life'. At the end of Shostakovich's eighth symphony, written in the middle of the Second World War, the same trembling sense of what tragedy means, is present. The tensions are unresolved, the suspense is a permanent fact, the tones conclude, but like unrepairable clouds, the difficult questions are still hanging in the air: SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No8 - Concertgebouw Orch / Bernard Haitink Decca 425 071 If there is a prayer for peace in that, it is no more easily hopeful than the closing moments of Wole Soyinka's novel Season of Anomy, a version of the Orpheus myth set during the Nigerian Civil War. Through a harrowing landscape of bloody massacres, Ofeyi searches for his kidnapped lover, Iriyise. Ofeyi moves through battlefields and slaughterhouses, through the corruption and exploitation of modern Nigeria, deeper and deeper in a fugue-like descent, through prisons and madhouses, to find his Iriyise virtually entombed and literally comatose. Ofeyi and his friends do rescue her, and the affirmation comes in the novel's final sentence: 'In the forests, life began to stir.' - But this offers no guarantee of renewal, only the promise of possibility. Iriyise is still unconscious when the novel ends. War and Winter have taken their toll. The blending of the Orpheus myth with shocking realism in Season of Anomy is another kind of recognition. The archetypal myth has Orpheus bringing Euridice out of the underworld, leading her, by virtue of his music, back to the surface of the earth. But there is a price: she can stay for a while, but she has to go back underground once a year. It's the story of the seasons again: Euridice is Spring, as potent and life-renewing as Shakespeare's Autolocus, in The Winter's Tale, that 'snapper-up of unconsidered trifles' who steals the snow of white sheets from the washing lines of the green hills, baring their greenness again to the world. But in Season of Anomy, as in King Lear, we are closer to understanding the depth of Winter, the metaphysics of Spring, than we are to the frolicsome marmosets of Summer. That depth is sometimes difficult to reach. At the end of the Twentieth Century, the laconic cynicism of Michael Moorcock seemed more characteristic, and more exhausted, when his post-1960s character Jerry Cornelius quipped, 'I'm told that the end of the world is nigh, so I'm off home to watch it on the telly'. Or, in the wonderfully entitled novel of fragments, The Entropy Tango, when Jerry's friends remark, balefully, 'It's the beginning of the end... but then, It always is...' This knowing stance may be recognisable, a hundred-year-old echo of Oscar Wilde at the fin-de-siecle, a matter of being 'cool'. Yet fashion is never innocent, and the further we go from the sense of the unpredictable and uncontrollable, the more we limit vitality. It's a matter of propriety, too, of political correctness. Just as Goya depicted in The Sleep of Reason, a world of nightmare alive in the unconsciousness of rational and civilised people, so the puritan sense of what is proper, and who has property to protect, is a matter for present concern. If my examples from music, art and literature seem historical, the questions they ask - and answer - belong to us all even now. I remember a massively bowdlerized version of Sergio Leone's film, Once Upon a Time in the West broadcast on New Zealand television in the 1980s. In a wonderfully poignant, lyrical moment, the romantic bandit Cheyenne says to the central character, Jill, You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother. She was the biggest whore in Alameda and the finest woman who ever lived. Whoever my father was, for an hour or for a month, he must have been a happy man. When this appeared on New Zealand television, what we heard was You know, Jill, you remind me of my mother. She was the finest woman who ever lived. My father must have been a happy man. But consider another example: the risk, courage and sensual appetite engaged by Alan Bates as Birkin, in Ken Russell's film version of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love. Here he is explaining how to eat a fig. [Brief clip from film soundtrack] Maybe we could do with some fresh air after that hothouse atmosphere. But what risks Lawrence is running in polite society, with his writing - that's just a mild example! How often do we need to be reminded of the energy of the vernacular, the vulgar idiom? William Carlos Williams captures it in an American grain, in 'To Greet a Letter-Carrier', a short poem in the form of a speech delivered by an angry householder to a postman presenting him nothing but bills: Why'n't you bring me a good letter? One with lots of money in it. I could make use of that. Atta boy! Atta boy! And 'At the Bar': Hi, open up a dozen. Wha'cha tryin' ta do - charge ya batteries? Make it two. Easy girl! You'll blow a fuse if ya keep that up. Well, there's enough of the 'destructive element' there to remind us that we should submit to the language of the street regularly, just to keep in touch. This is what allows a poet like the Australian Les Murray to write so brilliantly about matters of both body and spirit, for example in the massively corporeal 'Vindaloo in Merthyr Tydfil' and the beautifully poised 'Poetry and Religion'. In the former, dinner at the Bengal turns frightful: I spooned the chicken of Hell in a sauce of rich yellow brimstone. The valley boys with me tasting it, croaked to white Jesus. And only pride drove me, forkful by forkful, observed by hot mangosteen eyes, by all the carnivorous castes and gurus from Cardiff my brilliant tears washing the unbelief of the Welsh. Oh it was a ride on Watneys plunging red barrel through all the burning ghats of most carnal ambition and never again will I want such illumination for three days on end concerning my own mortal coil but I signed my plate in the end with a licked knife and fork and green-and-gold spotted, I sang for my pains like the free before I passed out among all the stars of Cilfynydd. But eating the hottest of curries makes more possible, more credible, more reliable, the same poet's understanding of the spirit at work in 'Poetry and Religion': It is the same mirror: mobile, glancing, we call it poetry, fixed centrally, we call it a religion, and God is the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror that he attracted, being in the world as poetry is in the poem, a law against its closure. There'll always be religion around while there is poetry or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent, as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, Rosella parrot - who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut. Ezra Pound once snarled that religion was just another failed attempt to make art popular. But Murray's point is well taken. You cannot separate them entirely. The evidence is there in the American tradition, as the Transcendentalists, etherializing reality, were shocked by the bowels and entrails sung by Whitman, and Poe, with his Imp of the Perverse, reminds you that even the transparent eyeball is subject to vicious muscles in malevolent hands and fingers, and Melville sends Ahab over the side in language that literally takes your breath away. In the end, it is the replenishment of language that we hope for in the metaphysics of spring: a renewal of the vital that is so easily lost. Let Wole Soyinka have the final judgement here: The context is the cosmic totality, [including the Earth itself]. Persephone, Dionysos and Demeter were terrestrial deities. Pluto not merely ruled but inhabited the netherworld. Neptune was a very watery god who conducted his travels on water-spouts... [Mankind, in] Asian and European antiquity...like the African, exist[ed] within a cosmic totality, [we did] possess a consciousness in which [our] own earth being, [our] gravity-bound apprehension of self, was inseparable from the entire cosmic phenomenon. [But] A profound transformation has therefore taken place within the human psyche, if, to hypothesise, the same homo-sapiens mythologises at one period that an adventurous deity has penetrated earth, rocks and underground streams with his phallus ... and, at another period, that a new god walks on water without getting his feet wet. Hmmm. The gauntlet comes down with a distinctly glittery clatter. When it comes to concluding, to looking back and forward, across what has been lost and spent, and on, to what might come, the language is all we have to express our despair and hope. Here is Shostakovich, looking back and saying farewell at the end of his last symphony, finally finding the home key of A major, the right key to close. And here is T.S. Eliot, in 'Marina', sensing his own memories fading as the new world buds and breaks into the being of a daughter who, he prays, will sail the new ships into new seas - and new seasons. What is this face, less clear and clearer The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger - Given or lent? More distant than stars and nearer than the eye Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet Under sleep, where all the waters meet. Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat. I made this, I have forgotten And remember. The rigging weak and the canvas rotten Between one June and another September. Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own. The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking. This form, this face, this life Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships. What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers And woodthrush calling through the fog My daughter. SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No15 - Concertgebouw Orch / Bernard Haitink Decca 417 581
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