When the world was loveliness I was
A composer, Borodin, my left eye
Level with the floor beside toy men.
Wild work and havoc they made,
Being glad. I could draw a line
Would run straight through the minds of men,
Being a sociable angel,
Music before and after, blushing.
Heaven is a nonsense entirely sensible.
I was a child on the floor beside you,
Making music, becoming small in the rosy
Embrace of God's best messenger.
I loved your havoc and your hair.
Continuing with my musical theme this week is a poem from Donald Revell, which takes its name from Alexander Borodin, a Russian Romantic composer. Borodin's music is famed for its sweeping melodies, lyricism, and thick, rich harmonies. In this poem, I think I see some of those elements in the images of play war and Heaven. Let's unpack some of those images!
The narrator of this poem imagines himself as a child, a boy Borodin, playing with toy men. They made "wild work and havoc" which I interpret as a war-like image. It's the image of life happening all at once, and it is the business of "being glad." That is both the business of the child playing with the toys and the imagined business of those toys themselves. "I could draw a line/ Would run straight through the minds of men" to me is talking about the power the manipulator has in this situation.
That image of manipulation is then tied to music, a "sociable angel." Music can run straight through the mind and make us feel and experience a great many things. Music is referred to in the second stanza as "God's best messenger" and I think this is appropriate. There's a sort of deep piety associated with the act of making music. Making music here is an act of love, religious love. It is "havoc." I do not know whose hair Revell loved, but I see it like a child watching their father or mother work, being mystified by the work, but loving it, and loving everything about that figure, right down to the hair.
For your enjoyment, the exciting and sweeping symphony no 2 of Alexander Borodin.
It's not just this. Every written word is a suicide note.
And a love letter, too.
There may be no one to talk to who would get it,
but if you write it down maybe someone will get it after you've left the room,
or in five hundred years, or maybe someone from Sirius, the Dog Star,
will get it. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen
claimed he was born on Sirius. You remember him:
the genius who said the crashing of planes
into the World Trade Center was the greatest concert ever held,
although he later conceded the audience had not been given the option
to not attend
and that somewhat diminished its perfection.
I heard Stockhausen interviewed at Davies Symphony Hall
before the orchestra played one of his works
that sounded to me like the voices of the parents
in A Charlie Brown Christmas if they'd been arguing about real estate.
No, I was not impressed by Karlheinz.
His daughter Christel was a flautist in the orchestra,
and she joined him for the interview
and said her father would take her and her brother out on the lawn
of their summer house outside Cologne
(this was years before he was on the cover of Sgt. Pepper)
and teach them to read each constellation
as notes on a stave and to sing
the words of their favorite nursery rhymes to the stars'
melody: "The dog ran away in the snow" and
"Go get the sleigh in the cellar." It was a game
but it was hard: work and play at once.
Their father explained to them,
"God does not write catchy tunes."
You could tell she meant it to be a charming story,
but the audience sat in silence.
Suffer the little children.
I don't think I've ever taken such umbrage with a poem since I read Gerard Locklin's "The Iceberg Theory." From Thomas' misrepresentation (and I believe outright lying) of Karlheinz Stockhausen and his decidedly anti-artistic anti-intellectual Philistine view of art and artists, to the structure and diction of the poem itself, I find almost everything about this poem to be appalling to artistic integrity and sensibility.
To begin, some context. Within the week of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Stockhausen was asked his opinion before a concert. His response was widely condemned and for many in the public, has overshadowed his immense body of art and achievement (more on that later). Today, they remain some of the most controversial remarks about the attacks, and I think they are extremely provocative. I urge you to refrain from a knee-jerk reaction lest you make a fool of yourself like Robert Thomas and so many other in the media have done already.
Here is the quote:
"What happened there is, of course - now you all have to adjust your brains - the greatest work of art that has ever existed. That spirits achieve in one act something we could never dream of in music, that people practice like mad for ten years, totally fanatically, for one concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. These are people who are so concentrated on this single performance - and then five thousand people are driven into resurrection. In one moment. I couldn't do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers that is."
Take a moment to grapple with that. It is horrifying and radical. It is also not his entire statement. In Stockhausen's own words: "At the press conference in Hamburg, I was asked if MICHAEL, EVE and LUCIFER were historical figures of the past and I answered that they exist now, for example Lucifer in New York. In my work, I have defined Lucifer as the cosmic spirit of rebellion, of anarchy. He uses his high degree of intelligence to destroy creation. He does not know love. After further questions about the events in America, I said that such a plan appeared to be Lucifer's greatest work of art. Of course I used the designation "work of art" to mean the work of destruction personified in Lucifer. In the context of my other comments this was unequivocal. I cannot find a fitting name for such a "satanic composition". In my case, it was not and is not my intention to hurt anyone. Since the beginning of the attack onward I have felt solidarity with all of the human beings mourning this atrocity."
An allegorical answer, provocative nonetheless. Reactionary pundits were quick to call this backpedaling, despite having heard the quote in its abridged format. I do think Stockhausen's comment was poorly considered, but I think there is something there worth real consideration. It was an inconceivable act that irrevocably changed the entire world, and there is an awe to that. In Stockhausen's context, it is the ultimate performance art for Man, driven not by a Divine Love, but by the pitfall of our own beliefs and intelligence. It is deeply abhorrent, which Stockhausen does not deny. Thomas' view of Stockhausen's comment is so far twisted from its original meaning that the reader think he means it made a nice noise, and that it's mildly regrettable that five thousand people died. That's an outrageous claim for Thomas to make, one that is vapid and morally indignant without even a surface attempt to understand.
A very good perspective on Stockhausen's quote comes from Terry Castle of New York Magazine. In his piece, Castle argues with himself about the concept of the Sublime: something which by its size, grandeur, danger to man, instills in us a base terror and awe. Waterfalls, volcanoes, massive predators, these all fall under the umbrella of the the Sublime. As Castle explains, "Certain natural objects, philosophers like Kant maintained, were necessarily sublime: erupting volcanoes, tempests, huge waterfalls, ferocious beasts, racing floods, swiftly enveloping darkness, and so on. But man-made phenomena could also be sublime: ancient ruins, grim fortresses, the interiors of great cathedrals, colossal towers, pitch-black dungeons, and the like."
Viewed from a place of safety, these events and things inspire in us a rush of adrenaline. In the same way, Castle argues that there may be something of the Sublime in the tragedy, as Stockhausen seems to think. I encourage you to read his full piece here.
Brecht Savelkoul of Distilled Magazine goes one logical step further in this debate. He claims that Stockhausen was right in treating the attacks like performance art. To Savelkoul, the intent of terrorism is to convince us to fear them and their power. They do this through acts designed specifically to evoke an emotional response in us. That is performance art, and the answer to that appears to be stoicism, to not let the terrorists' art win rave reviews. However, as Savelkoul rightly notes, that is completely impossible, and against every fiber of our emotional beings. He concludes that we must not take them seriously if we are to make them powerless. While I'm not sure I agree with his assessment of terrorism, his thoughts on Stockhausen (and other composers with notorious reputations, like Wagner) are interesting and valid. Read them on Distilled Magazine's website.
Moving on to some other claims Robert Thomas makes in his poem, I'd like to talk about his attempted character assassination of Stockhausen. He writes, "There may be no one to talk to who would get it,/
but if you write it down maybe someone will get it after you've left the room,/ or in five hundred years, or maybe someone from Sirius, the Dog Star,/ will get it. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen/ claimed he was born on Sirius."
Fairly clearly attempting to paint Stockhausen as a loony before ever talking about his music or his controversial quote about the tragedy on 9/11, Thomas is also lying. Stockhausen claimed that his ancestors came from the stars and that he was educated on Sirius. He did not literally believe himself to be an alien, but rather spoke in metaphysical terms about an education informed by the natural world, and a shared lineage with all of space and time. Thomas, only too happy to take things at face value, turns this into an affront against him, as if he is someone's crazy uncle and deserving of ridicule. What a farce!
Then there is the matter of Thomas' impression of Stockhausen's music (and parenting, more on that later). Thomas writes, "I heard Stockhausen interviewed at Davies Symphony Hall/ before the orchestra played one of his works/ that sounded to me like the voices of the parents/ in A Charlie Brown Christmas if they'd been arguing about real estate./ No, I was not impressed by Karlheinz."
In what strange fantasy world does Thomas live wherein Karlheinz is expected to impress, as if he is a sideshow entertainer? Moreover, I looked for record of an interview of Stockhausen as Davies Symphony Hall, and found nothing. I would not be surprised if the story here is fabricated given the license Thomas feels comfortable taking with facts and quotes, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt. I can understand someone not enjoying Stockhausen's work, but Thomas' intent here seems to be to make Stockhausen seem ridiculous, like a cartoon parody of a man (hence the Charlie Brown reference).
In the part where Christel Stockhausen relates a story of her childhood, singing the stars, Thomas concludes with the line, "Suffer the little children." I take this to mean that Stockhausen's children suffered for having been his, for having to sing the un-catchy music of the stars. After all, "God does not write catchy tunes." If I suspected higher thought out of Thomas, I would have though that a reference to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünlinge, or, the Song of the Youths, the first great masterwork of electronic music. In that piece, we hear the story of how Nebuchadnezzar throws three young boys into a terrible oven, and yet they are unharmed, for they sing praises to God. It was a landmark piece, because it blended the human voice with electrically created and synthesized phonemes for the first time. It's emotionally intense and creative, and it feels as though we are in the fire with them. However, I do not think Thomas intended to put that image in our heads.
His opening assertion, that all written words are suicide notes and love songs, is actually the part of the poem I like best. It hinges on the assumption that we can separate art from its original context, that it can change meanings, and that it is our thoughts and views that make things so or not so. How he was able to go from this rational, clear artistic thought to judging a man's music based on his character and what he has said, I do not know.
The poem strikes me as being deeply anti-artistic and anti-intellectual. I place much of that on his assessment of Stockhausen's quote about 9/11, because it feels uncritical and reactionary. It reeks of a false moral grandstand, where Thomas acts outraged on the behalf of others. Stockhausen's quote is unmistakably outrageous, but that is part of its great value, and it remains one of the most articulate things said about that tragedy, and certainly is a great starting point for conversations about what art is and the ethics of art. I think the quote offers really interesting perspectives on terrorism and its effect on us, and the knee-jerk reactions people had to Stockhausen's quote show that it underscores our fear and apprehensions at other people, in this case, terrorists, being able to make us feel a certain way.
It is a great shame that so many people ignore Stockhausen's incredible work, or let that quote color their perception of his work. It is unfair legacy to a man who helped bring a new form of music to maturity, just as it is a crime against music to disregard Wagner's staggering achievements because of his repugnant anti-Semitic views.
I hope this poem has given you much food for thought, and if you felt some form of strong emotion, outrage, anger, be it at the poem itself, at Stockhausen's quote, at the reactions people have had to it, or indeed, what I've said about all of this, good! Let me know! I'd love to continue this dialogue further.
As a parting gift, I leave you with two of Stockhausen's masterworks. The first is Gesang der Jünlinge.
The second is his Mantra for two ring-modulated pianos. Mantra is a very long work, but when you have time, I highly recommend listening to it.
on houses & power lines
broke like somebody waiting
for payday in a snowstorm.
That snow week, my daughter
& I trudged over the broken branches
fidgeting through snow
like hungry fingers through
an empty pocket.
Over the termite-hollowed stump
as squat as a flat tire.
Over the hollow
the foxes dive into
when we open the back door at night.
That was the week of snow
& it glittered like every
Christmas card we could
remember while my daughter
poked around for the best place
to stand a snowman. One
with a pinecone nose.
One with thumb-pressed
eyes to see the whole
picture once things warm up.
I really enjoy the imagery of this poem, of a father-daughter trip across snow, after a full week of storms, to build a snowman, something somewhat hopeful to look towards the eventual coming of spring. I particularly like the image of someone "fidgeting through snow like hungry fingers through an empty pocket," a sort of plaintive, fitful, unclear walk.
What I do not understand is why the poem is given the title of Gymnopédies No. 1. Arguably Erik Satie's most famous piece, it's a beautiful piece, but I never got a sense of winter out of it. Listening to it while writing this, I can hear some of the ideas, like a wide, barren, featureless landscape. The small dissonances in the piece, characterized by 7ths, are not jarring, but rather, they enrich the fullness of the sound. The light, delicate modal melody could certainly characterize snowfall, but I have trouble reading that into the piece.
I think more than anything, the association with Satie's piece drags this poem down a bit. It saddles it with expectations to which I'm not convinced the poem can live up. I like the poem quite a bit, I think the imagery is lovely, and that it's very evocative, but I think the title is preventing me from embracing it on its own terms. I forget where I heard it (I think it may be Billy Collins), but the transition from the title of a poem to the body of the text is like disembarking from a boat; anything can go wrong. I think something has here, because I can only compare this poem to the piece of music, and I think that's a shame.
Here is the piece. I'll let you be the judge of if the textual content of the poem is a match for the musical content of the piece. I hope that my interpretation has not colored your hearing of the music too much!
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.
The love between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms is the stuff of Romantic legend. With Robert fading in health and going insane, the young Brahms, only 21, came to the side of Clara, at the time 35, who was raising her and Robert's seven children. Their love, likely never consummated (which, as Mueller points out, we all seem rather obsessed with) was fiery and painful. The social mores of the day strongly condemned affairs, and even when after Robert's death, they did not marry.
Their love is much talked about, probably overly so. To be sure it is an incredible story, and I implore all of my blog readers to learn about it (you may do so here). However, the degree to which we obsess over "how far it went" as Mueller tastefully puts it, is silly. The idea that we can quantify depth of love by some metric of physical passion is idiotic. The images of longing in the poem, particularly "a hand held overlong" fill my head with the warmth of another's touch, and the sadness of knowing that that touch can only be temporary. That glow of warmth and sadness permeates much of Brahms' music. As I write this, I am listening to the Intermezzo no. 2, A Major op. 118. It is easy to imagine Mueller's scene of the two of them, friends, lovers, teachers, students, in a flower garden, shaded by the wide leaves of a tree, as rich and full as the deep chords of Brahms' piano writing.
"letting the landscape speak for them, leaving us nothing to overhear" is a great aural image. Other than imagining the background noise of a garden, I like the idea that love can be private and silent. Nothing needs to be said, it is enough to let the silence and gazes speak. We are awfully rude about the private lives of the famous, particularly when the relationship was so famous and fascinating as that between Johannes and Clara. Perhaps it is a good thing that we cannot know exactly what their love was like.
Here is the recording of the Intermezzo that I listened to. It's played by the masterful Glenn Gould, and I hope that you enjoy it.
We're here for the time being, I answer to the query-
Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
We dine sitting on folding chairs - they were cheap but cheery.
We've taped the broken window pane. TV's still out of whack.
We're here for the time being, I answer to the query.
When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,
But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
Sometimes when I'm feeling weepy, you propose a theory:
Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.
We're here for the time being, I answer to the query -
We stash bones in the closet when we don't have time to bury,
Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
Twelve years now and we're still eating off the ordinary:
We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.
We're here for the time being, we answer to the query,
But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.
"Nothing endures but the provisional" is what Google translate tells me for the Greek at the start of the poem. I think it is a version of the Heraclitus "nothing endures but change." I suppose that Stallings' repeated "Nothing is more permanent than the temporary" conveys the same idea, only much more eloquently than Google translate. The idea that the most permanent things in our lives are those we intended to be temporary is two-fold. On one hand, we often make plans and never realize them, with temporary solutions becoming de-facto permanent. On the other hand, there is nothing more constant in life than the idea of the temporary. It's like how the present is always the present, always new.
"Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back" captures the thrust of the poem quite well. We are always making plans that we never keep. There are always boxes, literal or metaphorical, luggage that we never fully unpack. We attach so much value to memories and material things that they cease to be part of our lives ("We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack") and make temporary things permanent.
Honestly, I think there's a sort of rueful humor about the poem. Sure, we sometimes regret the things we let become permanent, but at the same time, there's a good-natured humor in the "permanent" solutions in the poem. It's silly to eat dinner on folding chairs, but how many of us do something equivalent? I know that I put a blanket over my luggage in my apartment and now use it like an extra table or storage. How many times do we do a quick patch job to "hold us over" rather than fixing something properly? It seems in our nature to make permanent what we think will be temporary. Maybe we're all just short-sighted, but the fact that this is an ancient notion implies that this is not a symptom of modernity. I like to imagine some ancient, maybe a farmer at Skara Brae, patching the wall of his house with a bit of wattle and daub, saying to his wife that he'll fix it later.
Her hair was curls of Pleasure and Delight,
Which on her brow did cast a glistening light.
As lace on her bashful eyelids downward hung:
A modest countenance o'er her face was flung:
Blushes, as coral beads, she strung to wear
About her neck, and pendants for each ear:
Her gown was by Proportion cut and made,
With veins embroidered, with complexion laid,
Rich jewels of pure honor she did wear,
By noble actions brightened everywhere:
Thus dressed, to Fame's great court straightaways she went,
To dance a brawl with Youth, Love, Mirth, Content.
This brief poem is a picture of youth, described as a young lady. The idea that we are all clothed in youth is nice, and the images here are certainly radiant. My favorite image is that we all go out to "dance a brawl with Youth, Love, Mirth, Content." Fighting, dancing, all in the bright glow of youth. It's a very attractive image, and I like that. There's not much more to say, really. The poem is straightforward rhyming couplets with simple language. I just like the thought of us dancing a brawl, of seizing our happiness.
What did places look like
before they were
over run run over
by and with
people?
Diverted rivers? Where would you run,
river if you ditched the irrigation
into which you were forced?
Forest, were you once plain?
Plainly, all I know
as I look over the patchwork farms
geometrically growing before me
is that the mountain has been there all along,
looking over the silly people
or not
with their temporary homes,
chimneys lightly sighing smoke,
briefly appearing
on the gentle slopes
of a green valley.
Is it egotistical to share my own poetry and analyze it on my own blog? Probably, but no one's going to stop me. I've no delusions of being a good poet, but I keep writing the stuff anyways, so may as well share some! I rarely share my poems, not because I think they're bad, but because I think people couldn't possibly be interested in them. I hope it does not bore, dear reader!
A thought I often have, particularly as I walk among places where nature and humankind are in sharp contrast, is "What did this place look like before people were here?" It's tantalizing to imagine a landscape untouched, because there are very few of those, if any that are truly untouched left on the whole planet. There are, however, many gorgeous landscapes that bear the mark of man. For me personally, I've been thinking of this idea ever since I came to Korea. In my town here, there is a mountain, not terribly tall or grand, but distinctive nonetheless, a constant and permanent feature of the landscape. Apparently, about two thousand years ago, there was a minor kingdom in this part of Korea, the Jomun Kingdom. They lived on the plains at the foot of this mountain, and the mountain appeared to hold some sort of quasi-religious reverence among them. It was said that anyone creating their family's burial mound on the slopes of the mountain would be rich beyond measure, but doom everyone else in the area to terrible drought.
This is still a very rural area of Korea, with small patchwork farms scraping out livings all along the river. In part of my town, the river runs through a man-made channel, for irrigation. Where did it run before that? Were there forests, or were these farmlands always plains? What mark has man made geographically? What did it look like before we came and settled?
In terms of poetic functions, I tried to keep a fairly steady flow coupled with wordplay and punning. Word pairs like "forced/forest, plain/plainly, over run run over" are meant to keep things moving, and to set up some light puns, and to make the poem fun to read out loud. Apart from those, I sought to use alliteration rather than rhyme to give the poem distinct features. As much as I enjoy rhyme in poems that aren't mine, I never feel like I can rhyme things very naturally. I'm comfortable with some slant rhymes, like "smoke/slopes" but that was an unintended consequence of my diction. Unless I am willing to strongly commit to a formal structure from the poem's outset, I don't think deliberate rhyme makes sense.
I hope as a thought experiment, this has been valuable! I know I've enjoyed looking with scrutiny at one of my own works, even if I'm not fully convinced it has value. I do enjoy reading it out loud, though, and I am proud of a few of the turns of phrase ("geometrically growing") as I feel they provide a vivid image of the way humans spread and conquer a landscape with their funny little farms and lives.
