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The Good of the Arts: Episode Three - Look on her lips, look there
MORRICONE: The Carriage of the Spirits, from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly EMI MANHATTAN RECORDS CPD 7 48408 When King Lear is dying, he asks his two final questions and comes to two final realisations: he realises the common helplessness of mortality: his daughter Cordelia is dead and Lear cries out the question 'Why? - Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?' In this anguish, the commonness of mortality does not bring living things together. It keeps separate the dead daughter and the despair of the witnessing father. This leads to the very last question: 'Do you see this?' And 'this' is so singular, so particular, we cannot pull back into generalisation, we cannot seek a common truth for solace. All last things are lonely, every dying, every final departure, is unique. Lear's final words immediately follow: 'Look on her, look, her lips, / Look there, look there!' What is he looking at? What is he telling us to look at? Cordelia's dead lips, the place where all her breath and language have passed. It is this final, unspoken understanding that brings Lear's life to its end. One of the things the play does is to show us Lear's understanding that he is no longer only the centre of a universe which he broke up in the first act, nor is he only the specific man, 'more sinned against than sinning' - the central character in a story with others - but that he is only 'a' man - just a man - a mortal being equal, and no different from any living thing in this respect. Lear's story has taken him to this extremity of lonely understanding. He dies in its grief. But tragedy commemorates more than merely suffering. There is a strange quality of joy here, a way of remembering, of embodying contradictory feelings and thoughts and beliefs and giving them substance. The truth of this is not unique to Shakespeare. There are other things. It can be seen in certain paintings. John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, draws attention to the contrast between two self-portraits by Rembrandt. The first, from 1634, shows him aged 28, in the year of his first marriage, with Saskia his bride: he is smiling, his eyes dancing, his arms raised and his mood happy. But the depiction is formulaic and superficial: it's an advertisement for youth, wealth and good fortune, and it is heartless. Thirty years later, Rembrandt reverses the tradition of self-portraiture in an image of the painter as an old man: the eyes are hard, they stare out at you quizzically. Existence itself has become a question. STRAVINSKY: Violin Concerto - Kyung-Wha Chung (violin), LSO/Previn DECCA 425 003 The same quality is there in Stravinsky's violin concerto of 1931, as it is in the astonishing series of drawings which Picasso produced in the mid-1950s. As Berger says, in most of these drawings, a young woman, usually naked and desirable, is shown beside various self-portraits of Picasso, old, ugly, small and absurd. Life, nature, sex, universalised in the various women, stand beside age, the collapsing distortions of the body, the lurid absurdity of masks that do not conceal but echo the identity behind them. The old man becomes a clown, then a monkey, a baboon, a monstrous little dwarf, while an acrobat like Harlequin reminds him of the lost agilities of unreclaimable youth. The drawings are Picasso's confession of despair, of loneliness and grief. Picasso does not present a social vision, like that of his countryman Goya, but rather a personal vision, like Rembrandt's, a depiction of the extremity to which his own life has taken him. In Sorley Maclean's poem 'Hallaig' the personal and social tragedy of irreparable loss come together, but something else begins to happen which chimes with that quality I mentioned possessed by the great tragedies: a remembering that accompanies the disintegration, a kind of re-imagining, a strange joy. In 'Hallaig', Maclean evokes the memories of a cleared township on his native island of Raasay, in the Hebrides. Here is how Seamus Heaney introduces it: 'Hallaig' is a key poem, insofar as it's about haunting and loss and this theme is a constant one all through Maclean's work, as indeed is the theme of love and wounding. It's a magnificent epiphany, time, memory made palpable in these lucid, paradisal, melancholy, arbitrary images. The poem has a shimmer of the symbolist imagination about it. It's the same kind of poem, I think, in one way, as Eliot's 'Marina'. But, as well as this skimmer of transcendence and the visionary, there is the firm foothold in history, there's the naming of people, places, the allusion to the clearances, and this makes it part also of the Gaelic tradition. In 'Hallaig', in this poem, Maclean, as a Gael, stands firmly at the centre of his world, and, consciously, close to the end of his world. As a poet, he shows us that the particular horizon and times that happen to encircle him, encircles us all. Hallaig (read by Sorley Maclean) 'Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig' The window is nailed and boarded through which I saw the West and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig, a birch tree, and she has always been Between Inver and Milk Hollow, here and there about Baile-chuirn: she is a birch, a hazel, a straight, slender young rowan. In Screapadal of my people where Norman and Big Hector were, their daughters and their sons are a wood going up beside the stream. Proud tonight the pine cocks crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra, straight their backs in the moonlight - they are not the wood I love. I will wait for the birch wood until it comes up by the cairn, until the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice will be under its shade. If it does not, I will go down to Hallaig, to the Sabbath of the dead, where the people are frequenting, every single generation gone. They are still in Hallaig, MacLeans and MacLeods, all who were there in the time of Mac Gille Chaluim the dead have been seen alive. The men lying on the green at the end of every house that was, the girls a wood of birches, straight their backs, bent their heads. Between the Leac and Fearns the road is under mild moss and the girls in silent bands go to Clachan as in the beginning, and return from Clachan from Suisnish and the land of the living; each one young and light-stepping, without the heartbreak of the tale. From the Burn of Fearns to the raised beach that is clear in the mystery of the hills, there is only the congregation of the girls keeping up the endless walk, coming back to Hallaig in the evening, in the dumb living twilight, filling the steep slopes, their laughter a mist in my ears, and their beauty a film on my heart before the dimness comes on the kyles, and when the sun goes down behind Dun Cana a vehement bullet will come from the gun of Love; and will strike the deer that goes dizzily, sniffing at the grass-grown ruined homes; his eye will freeze in the wood, his blood will not be traced while I live. 'The dead have been seen alive'. Maclean's words are a kind of recovery, a reclamation of identity that otherwise might have been completely lost. The poem's epigraph - 'Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig' - is a beautiful, potently suggestive image. Time is erasure, erosion. The poem itself is the bullet that comes from the gun of love. The memorability of the poem kills time, ends its erosion. It catches the beauty of the woods that remain, and it asks us to imagine the lives of men and women and children in the communities that once inhabited them. 'Hallaig' is a commemoration of home. But it's the sort of commemoration that could only be arrived at through a deep consideration of the price of history. Near the end of Ezra Pound's version of Sophocles's play, Women of Trachis, the hero Hercules, not long before his death, achieves a stunning serenity and calm. The agony falls away and he says, Time lives, and it's going on now. I am released from trouble. I thought it meant life in comfort. It doesn't. It means that I die. And then Pound prints the words in capital letters, and just in case you've still missed the point, he adds a footnote which tells you 'This is the key phrase, for which the play exists': Come at it that way, my boy, what SPLENDOUR, IT ALL COHERES. Well, we might not agree entirely with Pound's judgement of Sophocles's play, but you see what he means. It is not simply that 'it all coheres' but that you have to 'come at it' a certain way. And that's what we've been trying to do in these programmes. The arts - all the arts - are ways of approaching, 'coming at it' as, variously, they do. And at the moment of seeing, the coherence is precise. It doesn't have to be a cosmic or fatal realisation, like that of King Lear or Hercules. That moment of epiphany might happen in mundane or magical circumstances, not only to adults, but even, perhaps, to children. Think of that beautiful transition in Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilleges when the selfish, impudent child has seen the spirits of his room come alive - the armchair, the grandfather clock, the teapot, cup, the shepherds and shepherdesses from the wallpaper - they all come to life and reproach him for his carelessness and malicious cruelty and ungratefulness. At the end of the first half of the fantasy, Colette's libretto has the child groaning about his sore head as his room has become a cell of reproach and guilt. A feline duet reaches cacophonic proportions and then, suddenly - the walls part, the ceiling flies up and the child is standing in a glowing, moonlit garden. The world of the garden will also reproach him, but as he understands and repents, it will also support him and return him to his mother and home, a chastened, good, wise, kind child: transformed. The promise of transformation is contained in prospect in the child's joyous cry when he enters the garden: 'Ah, what happiness to find you again, Garden! - Ah, Quelle joie de te retrouver, Jardin!' RAVEL: l'Enfant et les Sortilleges - Soloists, Orchestre National de la R.T.F. / Lorin Maazel DG 423 718 The child's discovery of the garden, like his sensitivity to the spirits of the things he has hurt, points forward to his understanding, remorse, and forgiveness. His fear is part of this - he fears the threat of the things he has wounded but, increasingly, also, he comprehends his own capacity to cause suffering and can't pull back. Just as the Fall was suggested by the serpent and the apple in the garden, just as the fugal descent in Beethoven's third symphony was seeded with the simple theme it began with, just as Wotan and Alberich initiate the course of tragedy in the Ring, just so, Ravel's child promises the possibility of transformation through understanding. This understanding comes through a dialogue in which spirits speak, and to allow that to happen, a silence has to be created. I mentioned the idea of Socratic dialogue in the first programme in this series, the idea that the programmes might offer various propositions which we could argue about. And that silence has been our subject when we were talking about Lear, Rembrandt, Picasso and Maclean, at the beginning of this programme. But it is part of something greater. Through this dialogue and this silence, good things happen. This also is the good of the arts. This is how we learn to recognise important things: the truly authoritative chords to which we know we must assent, or the tireless freshness of invention, the humour and pleasure of perception and illumination, along with the willingness to enter life's difficult corners - these are qualities we have been exploring in these programmes. Examples might be multiplied, of course. When Robert Louis Stevenson died in Samoa in 1894, the islanders who had given him the name Tusitala, the storyteller, agreed to a law, that on the mountain where he is buried, from that time on, no birds were to be hunted. When you climb to the summit of Mount Vaea, no gunshots break the proximate silence, but the air is full of birdsong. The gift of that silence and song and the spirit of Samoa's 'writer in eternal residence' - these things continue. And in such silence, the arts persist in their human application, across the ephemera of history. In his autobiography, Theme and Variations, the conductor Bruno Walter defines this: History! Can we learn a people's character through its history, a history formerly made by princes and statesmen with an utter disregard of, frequently even in opposition to, its interests? Is not is nature disclosed rather by its poetry, by its general habits of life, by its landscape, and by its idiom? Are we not able more deeply to penetrate into a nation's soul through its music, provided that it has actually grown on its soil? ... Is anyone entitled to speak with authority of the Russians who has not become familiar with Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky, and has not listened to the music of Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Tchaikovsky? ... I have preserved the unshakable conviction that man's spiritual accomplishments are vastly more important than his political and historical achievements ... For the works of the creative spirit last, they are essentially imperishable, while the world-stirring historical activities of even the most eminent men are circumscribed by time. Napoleon is dead - but Beethoven lives. The Irish writer Nuala O'Faolain once attended a performance of Beethoven's only opera Fidelio in the company of the great communist teacher Arnold Kettle. When the curtain came down O'Faolain was crying. 'Why is ensemble singing so beautiful?' she asked. And Kettle replied: 'People would be like that all the time, if they could'. Whether you believe in the socialism behind that sentiment or not, the vision it implies is one of hope - Society perfected, free of deformations and oppressions. People so freed would communicate perfectly, as they do when they sing together in opera. Music prefigures whatever there can be of human and social perfection. There is an ideal, perfect, shape, behind the appearance of things. There is the possibility of perfect communication, and to try to establish social justice is a way of moving towards it. This hopeful movement towards the desire for the possibility of perfect communication is the point of all the arts; that is why they are so subversive. So much of what we take for granted tends to direct us quietly away from this. There's an obscure little book called Them and Us in Literature where Paul O'Flinn remembers his kids bringing home a couple of books from the library. He settled down to read to them. The first one was about a sad donkey - sad because he had long funny ears. They kept catching on barbed wire, tripping him up, getting in his breakfast and generally making the rest of the donkeys bray with laughter. The donkey tried everything: tying them in a knot, turning them inside out, visiting a quack vet, but it was no use. Tears rolled down his face. Then one day along came a lady donkey who just adored long ears. She fell in love with the sad donkey, cheered him up, and soon they were married and lived happily every after. The second story was about a goldfish. He was browned off too - bored out of his mind in a garden pond swimming round the same cement gnome every day. So one night he popped into the overflow pipe, down the drain and out to sea in search of adventure. His mum and dad were against it and preferred to stay at home watching Coronation Street. The sea turned out a disaster: cold, dark salty and full of miserable crabs. Tears rolled down the goldfish's face. Then one day he found himself swimming past the end of a familiar drain. Up he went, along the overflow pipe and pop! Back into the old familiar little pond. Mum and Dad were overjoyed, the goldfish never grumbled about boredom again and lived happily every after. Two different stories and harmless plastic in themselves, but it's amazing when you stop and listen how often the same pattern and the same message get repeated. Your world and your position in it might seem dismal but they're as good as you'll get so there's no point in doing anything about it. If you do try and improve it then either, like the donkey, you're wasting your time or, like the goldfish, you'll only make matters worse. So leave things as they are, be grateful for what you've got, do as you're told, and in the end you'll learn to love it all. P.S. Support your local moderate candidates. Don't think too deeply about anything. It's comforting not to have to worry about such things. But maybe it's more comforting to find a way of asking the difficult questions. There may be answers unsuspected yet. If the snow falls and the contours change, we'll always need new maps, even when the old maps persist, defiant in the memory. MORRICONE: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly EMI MANHATTAN RECORDS CPD 7 48408 This is what happened in the revisionary spaghetti westerns of the 1960s. If western culture goes back to ancient Greece and Rome, why shouldn't an Italian make intelligently subversive westerns? The director Sergio Leone once said that, 'After all, Homer was the first great writer of westerns, [and] just because you put a man on a horse and stick a hat on his head, it doesn't mean he's an idiot.' Leone's films remain uncompromisingly intelligent, tough, lyrical and Homeric. MORRICONE: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly EMI MANHATTAN RECORDS CPD 7 48408 The comic pace of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly contains moments of tragic poise and compassion, too often overlooked, but the most radical work of the film was to reinstate a European idiom in the quintessential American genre. Not only the good and the bad, but a third character, unreliable, loyalty-switching, self-preserving and self-renewing, an aspect of a culture in which Judas might be understood not merely as despicable but as a kind of human alibi, and therefore worth some sympathy. The trickster is also a god. Doubleness may seem normal. After all, it's the heartbeat - it's physical. But the tripleness of Leone's movie subverts that security, for tripleness is magical, transformative. Leonard Bernstein has this to say about it: ...basic as it is in music, [three] is not grounded in our biological nature. It is not physical in its function. The heart just doesn't beat in 3/4 time, Viennese propaganda to the contrary. Try to imagine how life would be if we were triply constituted instead of duply. Imagine having three steps in breathing: inhale, then laterally to another lung, then out...people with three eyes. The mind reels. We are duple; perhaps that's part of our finiteness. But the value of tripleness, to music at least, lies precisely in the contrast with dupleness. It is a subversive exception to the brute instinct of the regimental, 'left-right, left-right'. Three is an invented number, an intellectual number, it is primarily an unphysical concept. Perhaps that is why three has always been so mystical a symbol to man, as in the Holy Trinity. In Leone's epic western, Once Upon a Time in the West, the idea of three is wonderfully complicated around the stories of three men and one woman, Jill, who is central to each story. Each of the main characters moves through different configurations with the others, until, at the end, only the woman survives in the new society. Jill becomes a matriarch, but the new society has nothing to offer the men who finally acknowledge their own singular mortality. But here they are in the penultimate scene, a masterpiece of baroque dialogue, when the villain, Frank, rides in through Ennio Morricone's inexorable score, at last to meet the man who has been waiting for him. Cheyenne: Aah. Good. My mother used to make coffee this way. Hot, strong and good. Jill: Cheyenne. Cheyenne: Uh? Jill: What's he waiting for out there? What's he doing? Cheyenne: He's whittlin' on a piece of wood. I got a feeling when he stops whittlin', somethin's gonna happen. [Frank's theme] Frank: Surprised to see me here? Harmonica: I knew you'd come. Frank: Morton once told me I could never be like him. Now I understand why. Wouldn't have bothered him knowin' you were around somewhere alive. Harmonica: So you found out you're not a businessman after all? Frank: Just a man. Harmonica: An ancient race. Other Mortons'll be along, and they'll kill it off. Frank: These things don't matter to us. Nothin' matters now, not the land, not the money, not the money, not the woman. I came here to see you. 'Cause I know that now you'll tell me what you're after. Harmonica: Only at the point of dyin'. Frank: I know. Frank recognises his own humanity despite the fact that the film presents him as the most repulsive character in cinema history, and Harmonica promises to reveal his identity in the moment before death. That's the moment of understanding with which we began this programme, when we looked at King Lear and Ravel's magical child. I've been careful to keep the discussion open and wide-ranging deliberately, to bring as many references as I could into play. But now it's time to draw things into a final account. John Berger talks about this at the end of an essay called 'The Moment of Cubism', but he figures it not as a necessary ending, but as the time of precipitation, just before the start of something we cannot imagine, like the orchestra at the beginning of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Imagine listening to this for the first time. The symphony is in fact already underway, but it sounds as if they are tuning up, and about to be called to silence. BEETHOVEN: Symphony No9 - BPO/Karajan DG 429 036 The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art. The incongruity of that moment, compared to the uncounted, unperceived silence which preceded it, is the secret of art. What is the meaning of that incongruity and the shock which accompanies it? It is to be found in the distinction between the actual and the desirable. All art is an attempt to define and make this distinction unnatural. For a long time it was thought that art was the imitation and celebration of nature. The confusion arose because the concept of nature itself was a projection of the desired. Now we can see that art helps us to refuse the inadequacy of the given, and to want better. Art mediates between our good fortune and our disappointment. Sometimes it mounts to a pitch of horror. Sometimes it gives permanent value and meaning to the ephemeral. Sometimes it describes the desired. The only inspiration which exists is the intimation of our own potential. [Art is what allows us to] see our past, while turning our back upon it. We suddenly become aware of the previous silence at the same moment as our attention is concentrated upon [what follows]. And it is precisely this which happens at the instant when a piece of music begins. 'Come at it that way, my boy, and what splendour': there is a coherence, after all. This is why the arts are all, and always, both arrival and departure, never one without the other, each a way of coming home. Both their subversive challenge to all forms of authority, and their assertion of order and value, provide a sense of welcome home: both 2 and 3, the wanderer and the resident, the good, the bad and the ugly, the prodigal and the parent. PROKOFIEV: Violin Concerto No2 - Kyung-Wha Chung (violin), LSO / Previn DECCA 425 003 The Andante of Prokofiev's second violin concerto, is the work of a man committed to returning home, even at the risk of his life, and willing to embrace such risk. The music is cheerful, for it resides in the knowledge and understanding of that home, not only Soviet Russia, but art itself. To paraphrase Bruno Walter: Stalin is dead - Prokofiev lives. And with him we are coming home. In Lord Jim, Conrad says this: We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account. We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends - those whom we obey, and those whom we love. Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience. Few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life. The outcome you have waited for is assured, continue to persevere. PROKOFIEV: Violin Concerto No2 - Kyung-Wha Chung (violin), LSO / Previn DECCA 425 003
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