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The Good of the Arts: Episode Three - The Gift of Prometheus
MOZART: The Magic Flute - Gottfried Hornik, BPO / Karajan DG 431 291 The Magic Flute has a capacity similar to only two or three other things in life: it makes me happy whenever I think about it. Just as Mozart himself comes from the classical world of enlightenment, measurement and grace, and leans forward into the Romantic world of symphonic self-expression, The Magic Flute combines a grandeur of vision with a popular and accessible immediacy of tone. And it's funny. How humourless and dull you would be to deny the glorious absurdity and love in the 'Will you marry me?' duet of Papegeno and Papagena? MOZART: The Magic Flute - Janet Perry, Francisco Araiza, BPO / Karajan DG 431 291 It's pleasing to note that of all the CD and LP covers on which a photograph of Herbert von Karajan is reproduced, The Magic Flute is the only one I've seen in which he's smiling. The story is simple: it's a quest for love, and once the trials of water and fire have been passed through, the happy ending is assured. But the trials are testing moments and whenever I see the opera, there is always a pleasurable tension in understanding those passages of transition, from quest, through endurance, to achievement. I've called this programme The Gift of Prometheus and the connection should be clear. That story is simple too: Prometheus stole fire from the Gods and gave it to people. But that's a metaphor, of course, and I think we can interpret it in at least two ways. The gift of fire is passion, the gift of all the arts, and it's also the gift of love - and both love and the arts - the arts of music, song and ... bird catching, are central to The Magic Flute. But the gift of Prometheus is never an unmixed blessing. Fire might warm and sustain but two other possibilities threaten: that fire might die, diminish and go cold; or that fire might flare to conflagration, consuming the people who had received it as a gift. Prometheus himself paid dearly for his act of rebellious transgression, chained to a rock, doomed to have his liver torn and eaten by an eagle through eternity. That means he's still there, and the fire is still with us. In this programme, let's consider the ways that gift has been used, in the tender warmth of a sustaining love, in the utter chill of a world bereft of such love, and finally in the perishing inferno of flame which burns all before it. The possibility of sustenance and tenderness need not be sentimentalised. The danger of saccharine extrusions might be noted, but we are wise to temper such tones. In Les Murray's beautiful celebration of marriage, 'The Wedding at Berrico', a particular occasion from 1992 becomes universal: Here are your gifts Landscape. Unfraught love. Some poetry. Risk too, with his star rigger Freedom, but here's poise, for whatever may come. What's life wish you? Sound genetics, delight, long resilience against gravity ...a joint sense of home. Fun, challenges, Meaning, work-satisfaction - this must be the secular human lot: health till high old age, children of character, dear friendships. And the testing one: wealth. Quietly we add ours: may you always have each other, and want to. [...] But now you join hands, exchanging the vows that cost joyfully dear. They move you to the centre of life and us gently to the rear. That's humbling, and analogous to the kind of love expressed in the third piano concerto of Bela Bartok. There is a similar acknowledgement of difficulty here, a recognition of the unanswerable questions, the storms that might tear, but these are, miraculously, carried along and dissolved in the sustained tonal resolution of the Adagio Religioso. BARTOK: Piano Concerto No3 - Géza Anda (piano), Radio SO Berlin / Ferenc Fricsay DG 447 399 In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Duke Theseus famously proclaims that 'the lunatic, the lover and the poet / are of imagination all compact.' But he continues: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. We are more or less familiar with the lover and the poet, but the madman brings the dangers of Prometheus's gift more forcefully close. 'More devils than vast hell can hold' are behind Edward McGuire's setting of the traditional ballad, 'Cruel Mither', about a mother who, having had two 'bonny babies' illegitimately, decides to kill them in infancy, and knows her decision has damned her to a life of Hell's fire, plague and guilt. Sung here by Jo Miller, accompanied by the Saltire Quartet, it's an eerie and shivering ballad that has been known for several centuries, but its concerns, of course, are perennial: Trad arr. MCGUIRE: Cruel Mither - Jo Miller, Saltire Quartet Mirabilis Records MRCD 961 When Walter Scott took the matter of child murder as a central theme in his novel The Heart of Midlothian, he probably knew that ballad by heart. Its utter chill is the threat which lies behind the generosity and largeness of spirit for which the novel's central character, Jeanie Deans, and Scott himself, are better known. The lover, and the madman, and the poet are in the same 'compact' triumvirate because of the gift of Prometheus, the fire which is both love and art, which comes to excess in passion or fury, or dies and turns to burning ice. The poet's 'fine frenzy' is exactly what Charles Olson expresses in his liberating, influential essay of 1950, 'Projective Verse': [It's] the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it [...] by way of the poem itself [...] all the way over to, the reader. [...] Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct [...] and an energy-discharge. And the lover's 'energy-discharge' has its own long tradition. A story was told by Michael Ondaatje in New Zealand in March 1988: A woman who was once working as a night nurse in a hospital would keep the patients' interest up by reading to them in the evenings, stories, poems. Nothing was having very much impact this time so she told them when she went in the next evening that tonight she would read them some modern poetry and tonight she would read them some poems by David Gascoyne. And they did sit up and when she read them the poems of David Gascoyne they did listen. And then when she closed the book and was leaving the ward one of the patients rose up and came over to her and he said to her, 'I am David Gascoyne.' And she divorced her husband and she married him. The unexpected delight of the surprising turn, the fresh variation, keeps the dance going. Some rather arid and wrong-headed theorists have suggested that such traditions in themselves are reactionary, that it's somehow wrong or evil to write love poems in this tradition. But we do. In the early 1600s, John Donne calls out in angry opposition to the rising sun that will bring the day that ends the night which he and his lover have happily spent together: Busie old foole, unruly sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run? Saucy pedantique wretch, goe chide Late Schooleboyes, and sowre prentices, Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride, Call countrey ants to harvest offices; Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clyme; Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time. For Donne, the lover is 'all States' and he is 'all Princes', and the Sun itself is finally seen as the hot and happy ball whose centre is their bed itself, and whose sphere is made up of the walls of their bedroom. Four hundred years later, it's the same old story, in Peter McCarey's 'aubade' or 'alba' - another dawn-song of love, from his poem, 'Tantris': Don't go. Don't let the morning turn your head with her shivering, thin grace, in silk like a tarn that just forgot the starlight before the sun takes its usual way with her. If dawn were a dove on the window ledge ... but you don't want to know. Don't go - all this in the dark, her lying there like moonlight on the bed, like a memory, beyond recall already, now the blackbirds were telling the town what we had done that night, carving our initials on each other's hearts. They sang Don't go - but the night was parcelled up in binbags. You're on my mind so much, I hardly know The noonday sun or frost in the bones of morning [...] Goodbye: the yellow planets and the grey dawn will attend you on your way. The sun will get around this blind. The sun will lever us apart. I have her crouching at this square of canvas quite naked. Black canvas. Black on white. Heavy hair pinned up, and chin to cheekbone mulled in light, like a pebble in the hand. She pulls the black aside - she rolls it up, we disappear. But for my money, the most mesmerizing of all modern love poems is by Theodore Roethke: I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain! Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek). How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand; She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin; I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand; She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake, Coming behind her for her pretty sake (But what prodigious mowing we did make). Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize; She played it quick, she played it light and loose; My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees; Her several parts could keep a pure repose, Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose (She moved in circles, and those circles moved). Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: I'm martyr to a motion not my own; What's freedom for? To know eternity. I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. But who would count eternity in days? These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: (I measure time by how a body sways). The 'compact' of the lover and the poet generates a kind of creative heat, a Promethean desire which, at its most dangerous, can flare into destruction. That link with madness is real, and not everyone can face up to it. As great a poet as Wallace Stevens revises the Shakespearian trio in 'A Primitive Like an Orb', where he refers to 'The lover, the believer and the poet'. But wildness of image and language, maniacal energy, the unreasonable and uncontrollable forces we spoke of in the last programme are part of what makes men and women lovers, poets, and mad. It also makes art memorable, tones and airs, paintings, sculptures, moments in language and story. I mentioned Robert Louis Stevenson to a friend of mine once who confessed he'd read nothing since Treasure Island, when he was a boy, but he still remembered the image of Israel Hands, the villainous pirate, shot by the young Jim Hawkins, fallen from the ship's mast into the shallow sea, and lying on the sand while Jim, looking down, sees the fishes swimming between the lifeless body and the clear water's surface. Owing to the cant of the vessel, the masts hung far out over the water, and from my perch on the cross-trees I had nothing below me but the surface of the bay. Hands, who was not so far up, was, in consequence, nearer to the ship, and fell between me and the bulwarks. He rose once to the surface in a lather of foam and blood, and then sank again for good. As the water settled, I could see him lying huddled together on the clean, bright sand in the shadow of the vessel's sides. A fish or two whipped past his body. Sometimes, by the quivering of the water, he appeared to move a little, as if he were trying to rise. But he was dead enough, for all that, being both shot and drowned, and was food for fish in the very place where he had designed my slaughter. The sharpest arrowheads are images, and they work. The virtues of scholarship are needful, but even in Christopher Ricks's edition of T.S. Eliot's juvenilia and early poetry, Inventions of the March Hare, the notes cannot explain Eliot's vocabulary, words like 'longpronged', 'pooper' or 'muriatic acid'. The book runs to 320 pages, 200 of them annotation by Ricks himself, but Eliot's linguistic gifts defy scholarship. What commentary could elucidate a phrase like 'a big black knotty penis'? The Americans are masters of the image. In The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, Ernest Fenollosa proposed the link between visual and cerebral understanding through images, and gave Ezra Pound the green light. A literary movement called Imagism caught on. But even more catchy is the language of the great American humorists, witting and unwitting. Consider Raymond Chandler: She had a face like a bucket of mud. He was as noiseless as a finger in a glove. He had as much sex appeal as a turtle. She had a mouth like wilted lettuce. According to recent reports, George Bush is less knowing, but equally punchy: The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country. If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure. The future will be better tomorrow. It isn't pollution that's harming the environment - it's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. [It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system. Or consider this paragraph, which I heard once on the radio: After ex-cop Freddie Otash got his P.I. licence he was put in charge of verifying the stories printed in a 1940s and 1950s Hollywood sleaze rag which had a circulation of four million subscribers; but he was also the man you went to see if you wanted someone's knees broken, or an abortion arranged, or someone dropped in concrete. In other words, Freddie Otash was an avalanche of bad juju. It's the vernacular again, the language of living engagement which J.M. Synge speaks of in the introduction to The Playboy of the Western World, the words of 'fishermen along the coast from Kerry to Mayo or ... beggar-women and ballad-singers near Dublin... When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen ... I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter, I think, is of importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form' This is as true of Ireland as of any other country. In the West Indies, Derek Walcott's language in his poem Omeros takes up the rhetorical tradition of English literature but connects even further back, to ancient Greece and Homer himself, whose long reach stretches to the Caribbean shores. Walcott's poetry is both autobiographical and universal. ...I said, 'Omeros,' and O was the conch-shell's invocation, mer was both mother and sea in our Antillean patiois, os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore. Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed. And in France, Gustave Flaubert, who was to be such a crucial influence on James Joyce through the panoptic, form-shifting works, The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, was painstaking in his attention to exactly those details of language that, in Synge's words, 'could give the reality of life'. In the ninth chapter of Madame Bovary, there is an evocation of that peculiar feeling called ennui that has always seemed to me perfect: She gave up playing the piano. What use, with no one to hear her? ...it wasn't worth the boredom of practising. She let her drawing-folios and her needlework lie in the cupboard. What was the use? What was the use? Sewing got on her nerves. 'I've read everything,' she said to herself. So she sat there holding the tongs in the fire or watching the rain fall. How sad she was on Sundays when vespers rang! She listened in a trance to the cracked chimes falling one by one. On the roof opposite a cat stepped slowly, arching its back in the pale sunbeams. Along the highroad clouds of dust rose in the wind. Occasionally a dog howled in the distance. And the bell kept on tolling, a steady monotone that died away over the fields. Well, Emma Bovary returns us to our theme, for the compassion we might feel for this foolish but helpless woman is something her creator shows us happening in the words themselves: ...no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, his thoughts or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we strum out tunes to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity. We are back with the gift of Prometheus: the special gifts of being singularly human - love, the arts and now language itself. I said at the beginning of the programme that the Promethean fire might flame to a marvellously sustaining warmth, or it might die and go out altogether. It's time to face up to the third possibility: the fire that destroys. John Donne's contemporary, the devout Christian George Herbert, begins his poem 'The Collar' like this: I struck the board, and cry'd, No more. I will abroad. What? Shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free; free as the rode, Loose as the winds, as large as stone. By the end of the poem, however, his commitment to freedom and reaching out into the large, free world, has led him to a state of raving, 'fierce and wilde'. At exactly that point, he hears, or thinks he hears, a voice calling 'childe' and he replies, 'My Lord'. He is saved. But that first moment of liberating energy, that break from the lines and the collar, is the brutal beginning of a quest which might lead others to press beyond further limits, not to reply to any paternal saviour, but to cross the boundaries. And art has much to do with this. Hugh MacDiarmid: ...as Blake said, all poets belong to the devil's party. This was also the promise of punk rock. THE SEX PISTOLS: God Save the Queen - Sex Pistols Virgin 8 41937 To paraphrase Steve Watts and Steve Xerri, punk rock was a release of dark energies, a feast of inversion in which all the positive, socially proper values of youth - freedom from cares, beauty, innocence, and so on - were transformed into parodic carelessness, incomprehensible canons of attractiveness, and a knowingness that transcended sexual precociousness and became a sort of gestural ennui. What a scary carnival! It was a scary carnival that passed, but it reminds us of other disastrous conclusions, the end of the quest of all Romantic Sinners, from Prometheus and Faust to Captain Ahab and Wagner's Gods. WAGNER: Opening, Rheingold - Met Op Orch / Levine DG 427 607 Michael Long describes Wagner's Promethean operatic cycle like this: Two characters break the primal quiet in The Ring. The first is Wotan, who began the long chain of fatal deeds and offences with which the operas are concerned. In the quiet of the primeval earth he was ready to pay the required price of self-mutilation to get the power for which he lusted. The second disrupter is Alberich. He too acts boldly. He too is ready to pay in a different kind of self-mutilation by forswearing love, and he too savages nature by tearing the gold from the rocks of the Rhine and plunging its waters into darkness. Wotan and Alberich...seek power by separating themselves from what Wagner wonderfully evokes in the music of the forest and the spring, the music of unpolluted water and streaming light, the vast, effortless, radiant quiet which precedes the interventions of these two fatal Prometheans. In the beginning was not the Word. In the beginning was the forest, with the great ash tree in it, and the Rhine flowing through it lit with gold. These things were then desecrated and polluted, caused to wither and darken as the lonely quest for power began. The Ring follows the consequences of that quest down the weary but grandiose logic of its unfolding. It contains a great vision of light; and then it contains another, terrible vision of the light seized, and bent into the ring of gold while the rest of the world falls into darkness. In Wagner's operas, the primal crime is, as primal crimes are apt to be, of irreversible consequence, for the last of the operas, Götterdämmerung, does not sound like a work in which the world is saved. The Ring charts the irreversible logic of pollution, the unavailing efforts of Wotan to devise a means of recovery and the heart-breaking failure of Siegfried in the impossible task of redemption.' In Jack Yeats's words, 'Man is only part of a splendour, and a memory of it.' WAGNER: Immolation of the Gods, Götterdämmerung - VPO / Solti Decca/London 410 137
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