32 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dc03caa9abbe434299f03fe70d77f0a7.pdf 419bea4b23a17e928ef567dda1497004 PDF Text Text I~ ,:_ c LETTERSfrom ~1f!a Fe {~ St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico LIBERAL EDUCATION john Agresto M ost essays on liberal education are pompous affairs. They prattle on about how such an education liberates the human spirit, opens our minds to other ways of life, exposes us to higher " values," makes us more sensitive, more humane, more aware, more sparkling. Then follows an often patronizing comment about those who were led into studying the useful rather than liberal arts-perhaps engineering, or computers, or, worst of all, commerce. Finally, they often end with a bit of ostentatious hand-wringing over the nasty character of American culture, which seduces the young away from their native idealism through the workings of those twin devils of modern society, technology and bourgeois materialism. This is pretty much all balderdash. I have never been convinced that a liberal education makes you more moral than you were; it only makes you smarter than you were. It may not make you more sensitive or humane; it only hopes to make you more discerning and knowledgeable about things that matter. It does not necessarily make you more refined; although, poorly pursued, it might make you more pedantic. Its aim was never softness of spirit but toughness of mind. One reason to look again at the meaning and promise of a liberal education is that such an education has fallen on hard times of late. Despite the historic presumption in American colleges that the liberal arts are learning's most sublime expression, the truth is that the liberal arts are in trouble, deep trouble. Last year INSIDE: l r.. ~R Ml\X.. A£~'3oot ;r there were three times as many students graduating with a degree in computer science than in all foreign languages combined. Last year, history, foreign languages and philosophy together graduated 34,000 students, while 24 7 ,000 graduated in business alone. In 1971, half of all fulltime undergraduates were in liberal arts. Today the figures hover around 20 percent for women and 10 percent for men. The truth is that liberal studies comprise a small and dwindling part of American education. So how shall we again promote the liberal arts in contemporary society? More importantly, on what grounds are the liberal arts worth defending? The worst defense, hinted at above, is one that sees the liberal arts as a way of softening the rough edges of our humanity, that teaches us "openness" to each and every "value," that saves us from being overly "judgmental," that frees us from every prejudice and opinion--except, of course, from those most contemporary of prejudices: the love of pluralism and the belief in the egalitarianism of all opinion. Such a defense begins, to be sure, exactly where liberal education always began , with a desire to break the chains of everyday life and the limits of received opinion and see what other cultures, great thinkers, significant events, or powerful literature might teach. But its proper end was always the attempt to ascend from opinion to knowledge, from superstition to truth, from suspended belief to judgment. Once the question s of better and worse are removed from liberal Continued on paf?e 2 . EDUCATI Cl Walt ann L~:.:.z:a SOME #t()IJGHTS ON LIBER~~CATION Ni1ff;) L4f!giulli '' ' .;,? : ~. Fall 1991 .L :(·:. t A COLLEq!,qRADUATE'S J99] RAL �Liberal Education A Message from the President Continued from page I. Dear Friends, Somewhere along the way the idea of what constitutes a liberal education was lost, lost even to educators. Gone , it seems , is the idea of liberal education as a student's exposure to the best that has been thought and said and written. Gone is the idea of liberal education as a coherent and systematic study of the most important areas of human knowledge. Instead, even among those who profess their love for the liberal arts, we are treated to the belief that the liberal arts are akin to an educational smorgasbord-that getting a liberal education means tasting a little of this, savoring a bit of that. How often do we hear that such an education means taking a course in history, perhaps physics for non-majors, an interesting sociology offering, and maybe something in political science, all with the intent of helping you find something to major in. Somewhere along the way, even among its friends, liberal education became confused with incoherence, with dabbling, and with poking around. Once the idea of coherence was dropped from the notion of liberal education , it became commonplace to think that the fatter a college ' s catalogue the more potentially liberal its education . But a fat catalogue doesn ' t guarantee a good education, it only guarantees that there are that many more courses a student will be unable to take. There are, I'm sure, a hundred reasons why liberal education is faring poorly these days . Part of the problem may be economic, since a liberal education costs money without the promise of significant monetary return after graduation. Part of the problem is academic. When fly -by-night fads take over the various disciplines, students flee. If professors declare that "all education is political," or that we cannot escape the confines of class, race or gender, then students soon think that liberal education is silly. If their minds cannot be liberated, at least they can study something lucrative. And, finally, it becomes difficult to teach the liberal arts when those who profess its various disciplines are not themselves liberally educated, thanks to the specialization and research required for today ' s Ph.D. Why institutions insist that in order to be an effective teacher within the liberal arts one needs a research degree in an area of specialization, based on a thesis written on a topic that no one previously thought worthy or interesting, is one of the age ' s great mysteries. Thus, this issue of Letters attempts to lay out what a liberal education is and isn't and what today ' s students may be missing in a college education. education, liberal education dies. If such a newer defense of the liberal arts is not worth pursuing, what can be said of older views? Caution again is in order. There was always a tendency, a strand of argument in the traditional defense of liberal education, that gloried in its irrelevance. Other arts were "useful," the liberal arts were not. Such defenses talked blithely of educating "the whole man," conveniently putting aside the good counsel of friends who said that it was not enough for a man to be good, he must also be good for something. Parts of this older defense were altogether too smug about the intrinsic rather than instrumental value of liberal education. Forms were kept long after the reasons behind them were lost, and the liberal arts opened themselves up to the charge of being little more than a museum culture. Self-consciously disconnected from all utility, the liberal arts seemed less like a preparation for life than a diversion from life. In America, a liberal education modeled on the leisure of European aristocracy was, sooner or later, bound to fail. Democratic societies , Tocqueville rightly predicted, will always prefer the useful to the beautiful, and even require that the beautiful be us eful. Nor does antiquity carry with it the presumption of respect. Indeed, if anything, democracy gives its citizens a sort of instinctive distaste for things merely ancient. Why should we care for Beowulf or Keats? Why pay thousands of dollars for an The comments we have received since we began Letters from Santa Fe have been very encouraging. As I wrote in my first column, one of our aims is to start a conversation among us about the character and quality of education, and we are finding that to be the case. Among those we heard from on our last issue on accreditation was Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander. He wrote to say that he appreciated the "ideas for reform of the current process" and that the issue would be "forwarded to the National Capital Advisory Committee on Accreditation and Institutional Eligibility for their review." It will be interesting to watch as this matter is resolved. On a sad note, William R. Beer, professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, died this summer after a lengthy illness. Professor Beer wrote the article "Accreditation by Quota: The Case of Baruch College" that appeared =; ;" U" July;""' of L,um. O"' regmfa •nd •ymp•~iff Page2 LETTERS from Santa Fe October 1991 �education so proudly disconnected from the world in which we live? The justification for liberal education must not lie in any misplaced faith in the power of English, history , or math to make us more "humane," nor in a belief that such studies have the ability to make us somehow "cultured ," nor in the view that a potential jack of all trades is better than the sure master of one. All that liberal education ever rightly promised was that it would open for us doors of knowledge and imagination that would otherwise be closed. It never promised to make us happier, only smarter. Above all, it tried to make us smarter about things that truly matter. What, then, matters? What is it that we, as human be ings, want to know? We want to know- or at least have some insight intolarge questions of good and bad, of right and wrong. We'd like to know why good people suffer, why great nations fall. We ' d like to know what courage and cowardice, loyalty and treachery, might be. We' d like to know what it is we owe ourselves a nd what we owe our countrymen. We'd like to know what are causes and what are effects. We 'd like to know if ideas can carry any weight, or if everything is done by force. We 'd like to know what the models and standards of an exemplary life might be like. We'd like not to be so easily deceived. Liberal education is hardly alone in offering to answer such questions. Our countries, our parents, our priests, our friends all tell us they have the answer for us, already packaged, ready for the taking. And, to be sure, their answers may be right. But liberal educati on simply offers us the time and distance to consider the answers on all sides, and to say to those around us " Let me think about it, fo r perhaps you haven't told me everything." To reach this goal, the liberal arts have for centuries relied on one great means: Books. Great books. There is where the minds of men lived lo ng afte r their bodies died. Books represent-re-present- the world to us. In literature and drama, treatises, histories and essays, they hold the world up to reflection and for reflection. Paradoxical as it seems at first view, it is none the less true that the conservative act of preserving the books of great literature and the history of great deeds is the first and most radical step in the liberation of an individual's mind . Liberal education mean s th e conservation and transmission of art, of thought, of human acts, and two millennia of radical questions and penetrating, differing answers. No matter how advanced our opinions, no matter how far on the cutting edge of scholarship we are, if our students leave college without knowing some of these books-many of these books-they were cheated. But it was not the rise of modern science, nor some new-found love of money, nor a premature withering of the inquiring mind of students that has turned the liberal arts into a wasteland. More pointedly, the fault is not so much in them as in us , their teachers. The attack on the foundations of liberal education has most effectively been waged from within. Today, for example, the great books of civilized life are often not criticized for being passe as much as for falling on the wrong side of contemporary feeling- for they are, we must note, often male, often white, and often European. Rather than liberation itself, whole sections of the liberal arts now stand accused of being the nasty tools of elitist bondage and oppression. But this is only the latest assault. Even before the ravages of modern ideological ludditism attacked the liberal arts, we had already started to abandon our books. Perhaps C. S. Lewis captured it best- Le conservative act of preserving the books of great literature and the history of great deeds is the first and most radical step in the liberation of an individual's mind. When a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influe nced the Continued on page 4 . October 199 l LETIERSji-om Santa Fe Page 3 �Liberal Education Continued from page 3. We have d e radicalized ideas and turned liberal education from a " tran .s:formative e1·ent into a catalogue cafegoriz.ing and cari calure. or Page4 ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (especially by the learned man's own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is 'the present state of the question.' To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. We have for too long trivialized the liberal arts and turned ourselves into pedants by thinking it smarter to learn about books rather than from books. Knowing all about the author-his life, his times, his maladies, his training, and his influencewe have deradicalized ideas and turned Ii beral education from a transform at iv e event into a catalogue of categorizing and caricature. No longer does our heart hurt for Hester Prynne, for we 're busy writing papers on the roots of Transcendentalism. No longer does Hawthorne write to teach; he now writes to be analyzed. My guess is that all this will quickly be labeled "conservative." Fair enough. If liberal education cannot or will not conserve the landmarks of civilization, then it will have failed. When, as we learned in the late 1980s, twothirds of America's high school seniors have no idea when the Civil War took place, a third do not know that Columbus sailed before 1750, two-thirds cannot connect the word "Protestant" to the word "Reformation," and vast majorities have no notion whatever of Chaucer, Whitman, Austin or Dante, then the liberal arts, as the keeper of memory and culture, have failed. LEITERS from Santa Fe But political terms like "conservative" will soon fail to describe any real restoration of liberal education. Ironically, the more we try to conserve for our students the great writers and thinkers of the past the more we increase the pluralism, the diversity, of ideas and perspectives. A public fed only the contemporary does not live in a diverse society but a fully homogeneous one. In today's culture, every restorative act is a liberal act. Indeed, it is also the most radical of acts, since truly great books, ideas, objects, and people-from Socrates to Pascal to Rembrandt to Freud-together teach us a radical cosmopolitanism of the first order. The most reactionary societies are the ones that live only in the present, in the storehouse of accepted opinion, without ever looking sideways or back. If we truly want to liberate minds, we would again present to all our students the great ideas and insights of civilized life; then we would see how liberal education has the singular ability to both liberate and to preserve simultaneously. All in all, this defense of liberal education has centered around the student. It is the opening of today's mind and the quickening of today's soul that has animated what have written above. But that may only be part of the story. Yes, a liberal education exists to do justice to our children and our contemporaries. But liberal education also serves to do justice retrospectively. Tacitus says of history that it serves to recreate the past so that the great things that men have done can be praised and the wicked held in eternal contempt. If that is true, then the function of liberal education is more than erudition, utility, insight, or even enlightenment. We keep alive the works of the past because we owe it to those who did great deeds never to forget. So, in the end, the restoration of humane learning may not simply be an act of culture or intelligence, but of justice. This essay is taken from an article printed in the Spring 1988 issue of the Boston College Magazine. October 1991 �ACollege Graduate's Despair Max A. Boot W ith this year ' s graduation season drawing to a close , we won't have to listen to many more commencement speakers. Usually, they tell the graduating seniors how lucky they were to spend four years acquiring wisdom. As a graduating senior at UC Berkeley, I have a somewhat different perspective- one that wasn ' t heard often at this year ' s commencement ceremonies but that contains a great deal more truth about the state of American higher education today. I have done relatively well academically at Berkeley. Even so I don't think I've received a true liberal education- at least not in the way that a well-educated man of the 19th century would have understood it. Back then , a university was supposed to provide nourishment for mind, body and soul. American colleges stopped catering to the latter two long ago, when mandatory attendance in chapel and at physical education classes was abolished. Now , Berkeley and other leading research universities have even stopped feeding students' minds . What I've missed is an education that integrates philosophy, history , literature and the other humanities into a coherent whole. Part of the fault is my own: I did not seek out some classes that I should have. But a large share of the burden lies with the university, which lacks a core curriculum-for example, "Great Books"-that could provide a general education. Instead, Berkeley, like many other large universities, offers a host of overly specialized courses that seem to have little connection. The history department offers a class on Theodore Roosevelt; English has a course on science fiction; philosophy offers a class on Hegel. That ' s it. Almost no courses attempt to bridge the gulf between these areas. Those that should-that is, introductory courses aimed at freshmen- have an added drawback: They are taught by inaccessible professors in giant auditoriums before thousands of bored students. The man responsible for this deplorable state of affairs is Clark Kerr , UC president during the 1960s and one of the most influential figures of post-World War II higher education . Kerr dreamed that the college would become all things to all people-a October 1991 " multiversity." Instead, it wound up serving almost everybody inadequately. Nobody is sure what the university's mission is anymore: Is it to educate elite students? To create a social melting pot? To conduct graduate-level research? Partisans of all three viewpoints have waged intermittent battles on the Berkeley campus for decades , leaving all the players profoundly dissatisfied. Undergraduates are therefore denied the opportunity to pursue a comprehensive curriculum . Instead, they are left , like shoppers in a giant supermarket , to wander the aisles, picking products at random, never sure that their selections will add up to a nutritious meal. Laissez faire may work in the economy, but it's no way to run a university. This loss of mission has also allowed a weird collection of nuts and cranks to assume prominent positions at Berkeley, as they have at other leading U. S. colleges. Deconstructionists in the English department teach that words have no intrinsic meaning . Revisionists in the history department teach that the Constitution was the result of a capitalist cabal. Newly minted Ph.D. 's in the ethnic-studies field teach that America has waged genocidal war against its racial minorities for centuries. Instructors in the "Peace and Conflict Studies" department teach strategies for nonviolent protest. A sociology professor instructs students on the "plantation system " in professional sports today. This is education? Thankfully, I've been able to avoid most of these professors with an ax to grind. I have managed to study almost exclusively with professors who believe in oldfashioned academic standards and the importance of Western civili zation. But most students don ' t fare as well. The lucky ones merely miss the chance to be educated. The unlucky ones are indoctrinated by unscrupulous lecturers. It ' s safe to say , then , that the reality of college education today is a far cry from the dreamy land of learning and higher thinking described by commencement speakers. Just ask any recent graduate. Laissez. faire may work in tile economy, but it's no way to ru 11 a u 11 il'e rs i ty . Max A. Boot, a history major, graduated from UC Berkeley and is currently a graduate student at Yale . This op ed appeared in the Los Angeles Times. LETTERS from Santa Fe Page 5 �EDUC I t w_as once the cust~m in the great universities to propound a senes of theses which, as Cotton Mather put it, the student had to "defend manfully." I should like to revive this custom by propounding a thesis about the state of education in this troubled age. The thesis which I venture to submit to you is as follows: That during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state; That the schools and colleges have, therefore, been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live; That, deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds and spirits, the ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values or the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization; That the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it; That our civilization cannot effectively be maintained where it still flourishes, or be restored where it has been crushed, without the revival of the central, continuous, and perennial culture of the Western world; And that, therefore, what is now required in the modem educational system is not the expansion of its facilities or the specific reform of its curriculum and administration but a thorough reconsideration of its underlying assumptions and of its purposes. Universal and compulsory modem education was established by the emancipated democracies during the 19th century. " No other sure foundation can be devised," said Thomas Jefferson, "for the preservation of freedom and happiness." Yet as a matter of fact during the 20th century the generations trained in these schools have either abandoned the ir liberties or they have not known, until the last desperate moment, how to defend them. The schools were to make men free. They have been in operation for some sixty or seventy years and what was expected of them they have not done. The plain fact is that the graduates of the modern schools are the actors in the catastrophe whic h has befallen our civilization. Those who are responsible for modem education- for its controlling philosopy-are answerable for the results. They have determined the formation of the mind and education of modern men. As the tragic events unfold, they cannot evade their responsibility by talking about the crimes and follies of politicians, businessmen, labor leaders, lawyers, editors, and generals. They have conducted the schools and colleges and they have e du cated th e politicia ns, businessmen , labor leade rs , Page 6 lawyers, editors and generals. What is more they have educated the educators. Modern education is based on a denial that it is necessary or useful or desirable for the schools and colleges to continue to transmit from generation to generation the religious and classical culture of the Western world. It is, therefore, much easier to say what modern education rejects than to find out what modern education teaches. Modern education rejects and excludes from the curriculum of necessary studies the whole religious tradition of the West. It abandons and neglects as no longer necessary the study of the whole classical heritage of the great works of great men. Thus, there is an e normous vacuum where until a few decades ago there was the substance of education. And with what is that vacuum filled : it is filled with th e elective, eclectic, the specialized, th e accidental and incidental improv isations and spontaneous curiosities of teachers and students. There is no common faith, no common body of principle, no common body of knowledge, no common moral and intellectual discipline. Yet, the graduates of these modern schools are expected to form a civilized community. They are expected to govern themselves. They are expected to have a social conscience. They are expected to arrive by discussion at common purposes. When one realizes that they have no common culture is it astounding that they have no common purpose? That they worship fal se gods? That only in war do they unite? That in the fierce struggle for existence they are tearing Western society to pieces? They are the graduates of an educational system in which, though attendance is compulsory, the choice of the subject matter of education is left to the imagination of college presidents, trustees and professors, or even to the whims of the pupils themselves. We have established a system of education in which we insist that while everyone must be educated, yet there is nothing in particular that an educated man must know. For it is said that since the invention of the steam engine we live in a new era, an era so radically different from all preceding ages that the cultural tradition is no longer relevant, is in fact misleading. I submit to you that this is a rationalization, th at this is a pretended reason for the educational void which we now call education. The real reason, I venture to suggest, is that we reject the religious and classical heritage, first, because to master it requires more effort than we are willing to compel ourselves to make, and, second, because it creates issues that are too deep and LETTERS ji·om Santa Fe Fall 1991 �l ~TERN CIVfllZATION ,ppmann · too contentious to be faced with equanimity. We have abolished the old curriculum because we are afraid of it, afraid to face any longer in a modern democratic society the severe discipline and the deep, disconcerting issues of the nature of the universe, and of man's place in it and of his destiny. By separating education from the classical religious tradition the school cannot train the pupil to look upon himself as an inviolable person because he is made in the image of God. These very words, though they are the noblest words in our language, now sound archaic. The school cannot look upon society as a brotherhood arising out of a conviction that men are made in a common image. The teacher has no subject matter that even pretends to deal with the elementary and universal issues of human destiny. The graduate of the modern school knows only by accident and I I by hearsay whatever wisdom mankind has come to in regard to the nature of men and their destiny. For the vital core of the civilized tradition of the West is by definition excluded from the curriculum of the modern, secular, democratic school. The school must sink, therefore, into being a mere training ground for personal careers. Its object must then be to equip individual careerists and not to form fully civilized men . The utility of the schools must then be measured by their success in equipping specialists for successful rivalry in the pursuit of their separate vocations. Thus there is a cultural vacuum, and this cultural vacuum was bound to produce, in fact it has produced, progressive disorder. For the more men have become separated from the spiritual heritage which binds them together, the more has education become egoist, careerist, specialist and asocial. In abandoning the classical religious culture of the West the schools have ceased to affirm the central principle of the Western philosophy of life-that man ' s reason is the ruler of his appetites. They have reduced reason to the role of servant to man's appetites . The working philosophy of the emancipated democracies is, as a celebrated modern psychologist has put it, that "the instinctive impulses determine the end of all activities. .. and the most highly developed mind is but the instrument by which those impulses seek their satisfaction." The reduction of reason to an instrument of each man's personal career must mean also that education is emptied of its content. For what the careerist has to be taught are the data that he may need in order to succeed. Thus all subjects of study are in principle of equal value. There are no subjects which all men belonging to the same civilization need to study. In the realms October 199 l of knowledge the student elects those subjects which will presumably equip him for success in his career; for the student there is then no such thing as a general order of knowledge which he is to possess in order that it may regulate his specialty. And just as the personal ambition of the student rather than social tradition determines what the student shall learn, so the inquiry and the research of the scholar becomes more and more disconnected from any general and regulating body of knowledge. For what enables men to know more than their ancestors is that they start with a knowledge of what their ancestors have already learn ed. They are able to do advanced experiments which increase knowledge because they do not have to repeat the elementary experiments. It is tradition which brings them to the point where advanced experimentation is possible. This is the meaning of tradition. This is why a society can be progressive only if it conserves its tradition. The notion that every problem can be studied as such with an open and empty mind, without preconception, without knowing what has already been learned about it, must condemn men to a chronic childishness. For no man , and no generation of men, is capable of inventing for itself the arts and sciences of a high civilization. No one, and no one generation, is capable of rediscovering all the truths men need , of developing sufficient knowledge by applying a mere intelligence , no matter how acute, to mere observation, no matter how accurate. The men of any generation, as Bernard of Chartres put it , are like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants. If we are to "see more things than the ancients and things more distant" it is "due neither to the sharpness of our sight nor the greatness of our stature" but "simply because they have lent us their own. " For individuals do not have the time, the opportunity or the energy to make all the experiments and to discern all the significance that have gone into the making of the whole heritage of civilization. In developing knowledge men must collaborate with their ancestors. Otherwise they must begin, not where their ancestors arrived but where their ancestors began. If they exclude the tradition of the past from the curricula of the schools they make it necessary for each generation to repeat the errors rather than to benefit by the successes of its predecessors. Having cut him off from the tradition of the past, modern secular education has isolated the individual. It has made him a careerist- without social connection- who must make his way-without benefit of man 's wisdom- through a struggle in which there is no principle of order. This is the uprooted and incoherent modern "free man" .. . . This essay is reprinted in part from Essays Yesterday and Today , John A. Lester, editor, Harcourt , Brace and Company, 1943. LETTERS/ram Santa Fe Page 7 �Some Thoughts on Liberal Education Nino Langiulli I T,wsewho believe that liberal education is a hymn or ''celebration <~f' l~fe" have understood neither liberal cduration nor lift•. Page 8 t is not uncommon these days to hear the term "survivor" used as a term of praise. Now l submit that persons educated in the liberal tradition wo uld question the usage. They will wonder whether "survival" is a virtue and therefore worth y of praise . How the s urvivor survived would be crucial. Mere survival is not a virtue because it may be that survival was achieved by treading upon others and leaving behind a long list of betrayals. Sometimes, as Sidney Hook noted, the worst thing that can be said of people is that they survived, since their survival has been at th e co s t of everyone and everything else. De pending on h ow th e y s urviv e, pe ople wri re for them selv es e ither an e pitaph of infam y or one of glory . Those who prai se s urvi vors merel y for s urviv a l write for themselves an epitaph of mindlessness. Consider a lso the orgy of sen tim e nta lity passing for morality, such events as the " Hands Across Ameri ca" phe nomenon or th e " Live Aid" and " Farm Aid" concerts. Again those e du cated in the tradition will find the se express ions of pity- whose purveyors wi ll grace with t he na me "compassio n" -to be meager substitutes for the practice of the moral and theological virtues. They will regard these public displays of pity as mawkish and even the money raised from these displays as fleeting as paper in the wind when compared to acts of inte lli gence, co urage, fai rn ess and c h arity demand ed in th e ord in ar y and somet im es extraordinary events of dail y life. What I am suggesting with these examples is that the tradition of liberal education commits us to excellence. It is the systematic cultivation of th ose thin gs whi c h make hum an beings excellent: reason and the freedom grounded in that reason. It is not a reflection or an echo of fas hi onabl e th eo ri es o r actio n s , of pop psy chology or soc io logy o r a porr idge of cliches, buzzwords, and acronyms whi ch can LETTERS/mm Santa Fe openly deaden reason, deaden moral sensibility and deaden freedom. Liberal education consists in the formation of a proper harmony of intelligence, character, and taste- a harmony which is sometimes vaguely expressed in that quaint metaphor " well rounded. " ft does not consi s t in th e production of dilett ante s or esthetes who believe that their education was aimed at holding their own in cocktail party discussions, or at mastering the Sunday N ew York Times or who believe th at t h ey are liberall y e duc a te d beca us e th ey have subscriptions to the opera, the ballet, or the museums. The tradition of liberal education is just as resistant to producing vol upt uaries w ith ou t c h aracte r as it is to produc in g technicians or specialists without imag ination. Indeed, it is a preparation for the terrors of life so that when fai lure or even tragedy occurs, one can face it and not be destroyed by it. Those who be lieve that liberal education is a hymn or "celebration of life" have understood neither liberal education nor life. If, h owe ver, liberal edu cati o n seek s to develop free and rational men and women who are concerned with the pursuit of knowledge, and who are conscious of their moral, religious, and social obligations, or to put it another way, if liberal education is the formation of persons ca p a ble of respo n s ibl e inte llec tu a l se lfdetcrm ination, then th e test will be not only what they recognize as worthy of pursuit but a lso wh a t th e y deem n ecessa ry to res ist. October 1991 �Consequently, the pursuit of knowledge , of power, of wealth, of pleas ure, of honor will always be subject to the moderating rule of reason. Excess and defect will be avoided. Freedom will consist both in their mastery over their opinions and over their passions, either of the erotic or the aggressive kind. Mastery over opinions will show itself in the ability to explain them and to account for them. Dominion over passions will show itself in such an expression of them that an absolute "letting go" or a "letting it all hang out" will not be permitted. In their relationships with others, liberally educated persons will give and accept service graciously. They will pursue learning together, enjoying the company of like-minded , independent, and confident people . They will avoid or try to keep under control those people who know only two postures-at one ' s feet or at one's throat. They will surely avoid those postures themselves. Rather they will give respect and friendship, not flattery. They will have learned to respect ordinary, plodding, decent humanity which they acknowledge not only in thems e lves but cherish in others. This ordinariness, as Eva Brann has said, is not the opposite of excellence, nor is the respect for it a mythologizing and romanticizing of the "common man ." Rather it is the ground from which excellence grows . The true opposite of this ordinarinessactually there are two of them and they are both monstrosities- are barbarism and intellectualism . The first is the embodiment of mindless passion; the other is the abstraction of passionless mind . Liberal education aims at resisting both of these opposites. Needless to say, the members of the tradition of liberal education are also united in their resistance to tyranny which is the perennial danger to liberty in general and to liberal education in particular. It should come as no October 1991 surprise that modern tyranny, because it has at its di sposal technologies and ideologies, threatens to become what no earlier tyranny ever became , according to Leo Strauss , homogeneous, perpetual , and universal. The members of the tradition mu st be constantly vigilant to defend the elementary and unobtrusive conditions of liberty. They must remind themselves that the face of tyranny is not that of a devil but rather of an angel. It does and will come speaking about its concern for the poor, for the oppressed races, the oppressed classes, even for the oppressed sex. It will appear to be sincere and devotedsacrificial to the point of martyrdom-for its cause. ft will wipe away every tear from every eye. But when the mask of sincerity melts away, the face of tyranny will soon enough reveal itself for what it is-a contorted grimace of the lust for power. In fine, the tradition of liberal education is more than the study of languages, mathematics , history, the sciences, philosophy, and theology. It is a training through those disciplines-in critical reason and freedom- in excellence. It is liberation from ignorance, from baseness , from vulgarity. It demands from its adherents a complete break with the fashionable ideas of the careless intellectual and resistance to the vulgarity and terror of the barbarian. Since the modern tyrant is the incarnation of both the intellectual and the barbarian, it is the tradition of liberal education-save the power and will of God-that will offer the surest resistance to tyranny. Ti1e members of the tradition r~f' liberal education are al.'\'O united in their resistan r_·e to tyram.n; whirl! is the p(Jrnwial dan:!tT tn to /; rnl edu cation in particular. Nino Langiulli is professor of philosophy at St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights , N.Y. This piece , taken from a speech Mr. Langiulli gave when he was presented with the Alumni Association ' s Distinguished Faculty Award. originally appeared in the fall 1986 issue of Terrier, the College's alumni magazine. LETTERS/ram Santa Fe Page 9 �The Aim of Liberal Education Leon Kass L <~l For the aim liberal education is other than the advancement of the sum of human learning or the discovery of new truths or the growth of knowledge from more to more. Page 10 et us begin by distinguishing liberal education from other sorts of education. Let us set aside that part of higher education which prepares one for one's future career, whether in the professions of law, medicine, divinity, engineering, or business or in scholarship or scientific research . In these cases , the mind is specifically prepared in the basic concepts and methods, either of practical arts , say, of legal reasoning or of healing, or of specialized investigation, in each case according to the accepted canons of the profession or discipline. Bodies of accumulated knowledge are transmitted, skills are acquired, and the particular methods of problemsolving are learned through practice. Expertise, competence, mastery are the marks of accomplishment. I do not for a moment discount the importance of such achievement and such training; but it is not liberal education. True, medicine or law or biology or politics can be studied in a liberal way, but when taught professionally or pre-professionally they are not. True, scholarly research can be an aid to liberal education- and vice versa-but the training or preparation of future scholars is not what liberal education is about or for. For the aim of liberal education is other than the advancement of the sum of human learning or the discovery of new truths or the growth of knowledge from more to more. But neither is liberal education just the transmission of accumulated knowledge, the pouring of old learning into new receptacles, or even the initiation of new members into the great tradition, understood as tradition. It is, of course, hard to call someone well educated who is ignorant of the Bible and the writings of Homer and Plato, Shakespeare and Locke, R9usseau and Tolstoy, Newton and Einstein , Darwin and Freud. Indeed, because of their depth, range, and power, these writings are the best materials for the practice of liberal education. But desirable though it is to know one's intellectual forebears, to know them as part of the tradition-or, in the current jargon, as part of the so-called history of ideas-is only to know about them and about what they thought , not to think with them. The history of thought, however valuable, is not itself thinking. And to regard the so-called tradition as authoritative, to accept its authority because of its venerability, is to give over the activity of thinking here and now. The same must also be said for the docile ingestion and unassimilated retention of the fruits of contemporary sciences, whether received authoritatively from written textbooks or even from LETTERS from Santa Fe the mouths of Nobel Laureates. I would also distinguish liberal education from those aspects of education which aspire to or attain a broadening of views, an elevating of sensibilities and tastes, or even the sharpening of intellectual skills. These are, of course, all fine things. It is good to be exposed to and to know about many variations in culture, beliefs, and human activities. But learning is more than exposure, and collecting broad variations does not mean gaining deeper understanding. Liberal education is more than general education. It is also more than aesthetic and cultural enrichment. Our tastes and sensibilities can certainly stand refinement: It should be one of our goals to learn to recognize and to love the difference between what is noble and beautiful and what is vulgar and ugly. But even the love of Homer and Mozart or the growing taste for the beautiful in nature on in human character is not yet what I mean. Liberal education also goes beyond requiring the skills of careful reading, writing, listening, speaking, arguing, calculating, looking, and experimenting. These skills- often called the liberal arts-sharpen the mind and are invaluable as instruments for its proper work. But the skills alone are insufficient. When severed from the true work of the free mind, pre-occupation with skills can be enslaving, a kind of mental gymnastics which tones one ' s mental muscles and swells one's vanity, but which in fact is useless and vain. What is the point of knowing "how to think" if one never seriously engages in thinking? What, then, could be left for the aim of liberal education, if we exclude professional training, research and scholarship, general broadening and culture, the arts of learning, and familiarity with the intellectual tradition? I have already hinted at my answer: Not the adding of new truths to the world, not the transmission of old truths to the young, but the cultivation in each of us of the disposition actively to seek the truth and to make the truth our own. More simply, liberal education is education in and for thoughtfulness. It awakens, encourages, and renders habitual thoughtful reflection about weighty human concerns, in quest of what is simply true and good. This piece is taken from the early part of a speech Leon Kass delivered on September 25, 1981, to the entering freshmen at the University of Chicago as the annual Orientation Week "Aims of Education" address. October 1991 �What are the Liberal Arts The followinf.! piece is taken from a St. John's College brochure for interested high school students. L iterally, "liberal" comes from the Latin root "liber" which means free. There is a certain kind of intellectual freedom gained from studying liberal arts which helps one form sound and independent judgments and allows one to be free from accepting currently modish but not necessarily sound opinions. Another kind of freedom is the freedom from specialization. The liberal arts student is not concentrating on a particular field and is thus able to make connections between different disciplines. The world isn ' t seen only in engineering terms or accounting terms. The student is able to rely on an analogy, illumination, or insight from one subject to explain something in another subject. The primary function of the liberal arts has always been to bring about an awareness of the forms that are embodied in combinations of words and in numbers so that they become means of understanding . Traditionally , the liberal arts were seven in number: grammar, rhetoric, log ic- th e arts of language; and arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomythe arts of mathematics. In more contemporary terms, the liberal arts bring to light what is involved in the use of words and numbers in all kinds of discursive thought, in counting, measuring, deducing, demonstrating, analyzing, thinking, writing, speaking, and listening. They are the arts of judgments and decisions. It is, however, not subject matter alone that determines the character of the liberal arts, for the way in which a formal discipline, a subject matter, is taken up is decisive. The art of questioning, and of seeing oneself differently as a result, is central to a liberal arts education. October 1991 It is not enough to acquire knowledge and to develop facility in the arts of language and mathematics. There must be a constant questioning, a search for the grounding and consequences of propositions, truths, and beliefs. We must ask the persistent questions of human existence, which have relevance to the contemporary problems with which we have to deal. Only to the extent that we honestly face such philosophical questions will we be able to confront our future in a meaningful way. As knowledge advances and the fundamental outlook of civilization changes over the centuries, these arts of understanding remain, in one form or another, indispensable. They enable men and women win to knowledge of the world around them and knowledge of themselves in this world and to use that knowledge with wisdom. Under their guidance men and women can free themselves from the wantonness of prejudice and the narrowne ss of beaten path s. Under their discipline they can acquire the habit of listening to reason in others and demanding reasons in themselves. A genuinely conceived liberal arts curriculum cannot avoid aiming at these most far reaching of all human goals. Through both curricula and pedagogy it is hoped that a liberal education will impart such stimulus that students will become their own teachers for the rest of their lives. It has been a firm and well-supported belief that students who have begun to seek and understand the arts that are common to all disciplines, who have learned to be their own teachers, and who have a beginning awareness of the fullness and variety of human experience will necessarily be the citizens best equipped to deal intelligently with the particular professions they choose and with the human situations in which they find themselves. LEITERS/rom Santa Fe Through both curricula and pedagogy it is hoped that a liberal education will impart such stimulus that students will become their own teachers for the rest of their lives. Page II �Profile St. John's College is an independent, non-sectarian.four-year, liberal arts college. •founded: Established in 1696 in Annapolis, Maryland, as King William's School and chartered in 1784 as St. John's College. Great Books Program adopted l 937. Second campus in Santa Fe opened in 1964. •Curriculum : An integrated, non-elective arts and science program based on reading and discussing, in loosely chronological order, the great books of Western Civilization. •Approach : Tutorials, laboratori~s. and seminars requiring intense participation replace more traditional lectures. Classes are very small. Student/faculty ratio is 8: I. • Degree Granted: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. •Student Body: Enrollment is limited to about 400 undergraduate students on each campus. Current freshman class made up of 46% men and 54% women, from 34 states and several foreign countries. Students may transfer between the Santa Fe and Annapolis campuses. • Alumni Careers: Education-21 %, business-20%, law-IO%, visual and performing arts-9%, medicine-7%, science and engineering-?%, computer science-6%, writing and publishing-5%. • Graduate Institute: The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education is an interdisciplinary Master's degree program based on the same principles as the undergraduate program. Offered on both campuses year-round. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe Description An account of the resource A newsletter published by the Santa Fe President's Office that includes articles about liberal education. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 12 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe, Fall 1991 Description An account of the resource Letters from Santa Fe, St. John’s College—Santa Fe, New Mexico, Fall 1991 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Agresto, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Boot, Max, 1968- Langiulli, Nino Kass, Leon Lippmann, Walter, 1889-1974 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Letters_from_SF_1991_Fall Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a621ba954e887f233265b45f7ac1076b.pdf 099b585e26b8f6f3d7187fe1376a6375 PDF Text Text LETTERSJrom Santa Fe St. John's College-Santa Fe. New Mexico Summer 1992 ONENESS AND OTHERNESS h e problem with sending out a free newsletter is that nobody writes and complains when we skip an issue. Maybe nobody noticed . ... In any event, it's true. We have been so caught up with day-to-day activities at the college that we've been hard pressed to find the time to get out a spring issue. So, unless we squeeze in an extra over the summer, all faithful readers this year will have to bear with one less copy. In this issue I wanted to return to a topic that has been something of a theme, a thread, throughout many of these Letters. I've e ntitled it, somewhat awkwardly, "Oneness and Otherness" in higher education. Traditional liberal education is always being called to task for something. We have, historically, been accused of being insufficiently vocational, insufficiently "relevant," insufficiently research driven. Today, as everyone who cares about the issue knows, traditional liberal education is judged insufficiently diverse, insufficiently multicultural. Unlike some of the earlier attacks on the liberal arts, this criticism grows mainly from within; it rarely comes from the public. (The phrase "dead, white, European males" is not one that comes readily to the lips of the man on the street, but it's all the rage in the halls of ivy.) Despite the overall wrongheadedness of the criticism and the political ends for which it is being used, there is a grain of truth in the critique, one that has to be understood. The truth seems to be this: A liberal education should have two great goals--to teach us something about ourselves and our own and, additionally, to teach us things not our own, things other, things strange, but things nonetheless potentially true or beautiful. On one hand, we need to have a better understanding of who we are and why we might be that way - we need to know something about the Greeks, the Bibl.e, the principles of democratic government. But, above that, we also need to know what ·we are not, have never experienced, have never thought of. All decent highe r education is both an education in identity, in oneness; and, at the same time, an inquiry into things strange, things diverse, things other. Errors happen on both sides of the equation. On the side of sameness, we can spend too long looking at o urselves unquestioningly; learning about o ur civiliza- ... �tion, nation or self uncritically; seeing what we are without asking why we are or what we might be. Today, however, the real danger stems from the other side. The mad rush to "diversify" rarely means the thoughtful incorporation of new material as much as the trashing of the old for no better reason than that it's old, or "European." It rarely means the addition of new insights as often as it means the "representative" inclusion of the work of different groups, as if real education means not knowing the best but looking at the samples. And, contrary to its own standard, "diversity" is rarely diverse. Most often it is simply a way of tearing down the culture not with radical new ideas but with ideas comfortable to the radicals. The truth is that traditional liberal education is still the most radical endeavor around. To be sure, it teaches us some things about ourselves, about w ho we are and the reasons we might have for being that way. It also offers us the opportunity to see the world differently, to see it w ith other eyes, and from the perspective of other times. Not only through literature and history but also through science, mathematics and languages, do we learn to see the world anew. As an example, in the center of this newsletter I have reprinted the course of study here at St. John's. If one wants to learn about one's own, and things not one's own, I'm not sure those works could be improved upon. THE TRUTH SEEMS TO BE THIS : A LIBERAL EDUCATION SHOULD HAVE TWO GREAT GOALS-TO TEACH US SOMETHING ABOUT OURSELVES AND OUR OWN AND, ADDITIONALLY, TO TEACH US THINGS NOT OUR OWN, THINGS Sincerely, OTHER, THINGS STRANGE, BUT THINGS NONETHELESS POTENT/ALLY TRUE John Agresto page t wo OR BEAUTIFUL. L ETTERS fro m Santa F e S u mm er 1 99 2 �THE MARRIAGE OF PC AND DIVERSITY by John Agresto President St. John's College, Santa Fe / said last time that "political correctness" is a dangerous but still limited problem at most institutions of higher learning. Yet, every time I open the papers it seems that another university has capitulated. Like the Great Plague, it destroys the high as well as the low, the renowned as easily as the most humble. Today, I offer you the University of Toronto. It appears clear from the Toronto example that what makes political correctness a potent force in higher e ducation is not a universal belief in some type of economic theory or political structure but, rather, in the simple correctness of the academy's new-found belief in diversity and multicultura lism. Political correctness has very little to do with politics and everything to do with culture. The beliefs demanded are, to be certain, new be liefs - who thought, five years ago, that multiculturalism would be seen as the essential principle of e ducation? Yet, institutions have embraced it with all the fanaticism of new converts. Now, as with all new waves of orthodoxy, the skeptical might well b e advised to be careful rather than critical. As I have argued in previous Letters, this new rage for diversity as a defining principle of e ducation Summer 1992 has already undermined the traditional belief that important knowledge is necessarily transcultural and transracial. For instance, Mozart and Plato, dead white men though they be, might nonetheless be fitting for all students, white or black, male or female, to know. The rage for diversity and multiculturalism has also seriously eroded the old principle that a curriculum should be built around a selection of works and authors that are compelling, perceptive or informative. Often, now, it is not the best or most challenging that must be taught, but the contrary - the most representative and the most culturally comfortable. But, in addition to its rejection of the traditional principles of liberal education, the rage for multiculturalism has now become the reason, the warrant, to enforce codes of political correctness. For, if the celebration of diversity becomes the aim of education, then those professors whose courses are challenges to the easy belief in the equal value and dignity of all notions, cultures and lifestyles are the ones who, bluntly, are in the way. Now, to the University of Toronto. The newest draft of the university's Statement on Human Rights has some items that are, at best, peculiar and, at worst, truly dangerous. It declares, for instance, that it is "a central element of its mission" to educate individuals prepared to work to remove "barriers and inequities" faced by "members of marginalized groups of any sort. " It modifies its commitment to academic freedom with the condition that the university must nonetheless act "to prevent or remedy" discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation ... marital status, family status, LETTERS from Santa Fe receipt of public assistance or record of offense." Most ominously, however, it declares its aspiration to be a community that "embraces teaching, research and other activities in a manner that acknowledges as their context a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-racial society that is represented in its teachers and learners and that informs the subject-matter of many of its disciplines." As Thomas Pangle, professor of political economy at Toronto, wrote in objection to this document, "[i]t allows for the view that the university is to be seen as not merely an extension, but as an indoctrinating tool, of the reigning intellectual and social dogmas and the currrently fashionable crusade of multiculturalism. " Moreover, the document "limit[s] and confin[es] academic freedom, not on the basis of scientific or scholarly merit but on the basis of conformity to what somebody thinks is a 'manner' that 'acknowledges ' (and the term in context clearly means 'legitimates') a certain type of political society .... " Academics may teach what they will about the causes of war, the structure of sentences, the irrelevance of religion, whatever. But if their courses fail to support and affirm the latest craving for multiculturalism , if their subjects are not "informed" by multiculturalism, and if their teachers and students do not themselves "represent" multiculturalism, then, in the words of the current Secretary of Education, they will soon be met by the universities ' diversity police. No matter how ridiculed, derided and maligned political corr~ctness may be in the public press and public eye, so long as it claims diversity as its ally it will continue to capture, say, five colleges a week. page three �EXCERPTS FROMGIANTS AND DWARFS by Allan Bloom Since I first addressed the issue of relativism , I ha ve learned with what moral fervor it is protected and its opposite, ethnocentrism, attacked. This fervor does not propose an investigation but a crusade. The very idea that we ought to look for standards by which to judge ourselves is scandalous. You simply h a v e to beli eve in the current understanding of openness if you are to believe in democracy and be a dec ent person. Carrying this thought furthe r, however, one discovers that if there are no transcultural values, our reaction is ethnocentric. And the one thing we know absolutely is that ethnocentrism is bad. So we have painted ourselves into a corner. And it is impo rtant to unde rstand this. When little childre n speak o f h ow bad e thnocentrism is , I know that they have been propagandized . It is too complicated a thin g for them to understand . Condemning ethnocentrism is frequ e ntl y a s ign o f inte llectual, altho ug h n ot n ecessarily moral , progress. But it is only a first step. To recognize that some of the things o ur c ulture believes are not true imposes o n us the duty of finding out which are true and w hich are not, a business altogether mo re diffipag e f o ur THE FERVOR AGAINST ETHNOCENTRISM DOES NOT PROPOSE AN INVESTIGATION BUT A CRUSADE. cult than the wholesale jettisoning of all that one thought o ne knew. Su ch je ttisoning always e nds up w ith the selective and thoughtless return to old ethnocentric ideas o n the basis of what one needs rig ht now, of w hat pleases one, of pure feeling. But to tra vel one must sp e nd a little time thinking a bo ut one's compass as we ll as the land one wishes to reach. This problem was ni ce ly illustrate d by the case of Salma n Rushdie , a uthor o f The Satanic Verse, w hich insulted the Muslim faith and occasioned the Ayatollah Kh o m e ini 's comma nd to h ave Rushdie killed in England, o r w he rever he is to be found. There was genera l s h ock throughout the Western world at this, and writers, whose ox was being gored, rushed LETTERS f r o m Santa F e before the TV cameras to denounce this blatant attack on the inviolable principle of freedom of sp eech. All well and good. But the kicker is that most of these very same writers have for many years been teaching that we must respect the integrity of other cultures and that it is arrogant ethnocentrism to judge other cultures according to our standards, which are themselves merely products of our culture. In this case, however, all such reasoning were forgotten, and freedom of speech was treated as though its claims to transcultural status, its claims to be valid eve rywhere and always, are true . A few days earlier such claims were treated as instruments of American imperialis m ; miraculously they were transformed into absolutes. Leaving aside the intellectua I incohere nce he re , this floating means to say we do not know from moment to moment what we w ill do whe n there are conflic ts, whic h the re inevitably will be, b etween human rights and the imperatives of the culturally sacred. You may have noticed that the re has recently been silence about the case; this is partially because it is an embarrassment, and our convictions are weak . The serious argume nts tha t established the right of freedom of speech were m ade b y philosop he rs- most n o tably Locke, Milton, and Milland o ur contemporaries d o n o t return to them to refresh their memo ries and to see whether the argume nts are really good. And this is due not only to laziness but also to the current attack o n the very idea of such study. Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs, (New York; Simon and Schuster, 1990). Su m rn re r 1 992 �EDUCATION AND HUMAN COMMONNESS by Nancy Buchenauer Director, Graduate Institute St. John's College, Santa Fe 5 t. John's College is not a community of learning exactly like other academic institutions. Here we are confident e nough to say that there are certain books which we think every educated person should read, and we suppose that these books can be read together fruitfully by people of w idely different ages and backgrounds. This makes us a community, an institution believing in what people have in common in a more radical way. Nevertheless, we should be thinking about the bases of our confidence in human commonness, about why we think we can learn from one another. The most obvious area of commonness that we share is reason. When we read one of Euclid's geometrical theorems, we are all convinced by it in the same way, follow ing the same chain of arguments. At first sight Euclid provides us w ith the best model for holding conversations, because at every step reasons are given which show the persons we are talking to why we think what we think. In mathe matics we humans are in a position of equality with respect to one another, and the only authority we acknowledge is the working of our rational m inds. But, mathe matics aside, getting along w ith one another, our belief about God, the purpose and meaning Summ e r 1 9 92 .. ... WE SHOULD BE THINKING ABOUT THE BASES OF OUR CONFIDENCE IN HUMAN COMMONNESS, ABOUT WHY WE THINK WE CAN LEARN FROM ONE ANOTHER. of human life are the subject of endless controversy. Can talking about these things do more than reaffirm o ur differences? Can we still learn and profit from one another's thoughts' A kind of faith is demanded of us he re . A book is a p lace w here we L E TTER S frum Sa nt a Fe lose ourselves and our familiar worlds, and open ourselves to the unknown and the new, to the possibility of changes of all sorts. Why should we venture into such dangerous territory? Perhaps because it is necessary to lose ourselves first to find out what really is our own and who we really are. Perhaps, too, we can act to shake each other loose from our supposed certainties so that we can come to see truth for the first time. It must be for such a reason that we delight in hearing stories. Human experience interests us vitally. Odysseus tells his hosts in the Odyssey that there is no human occasion better than when people have eaten and drunk their fill and then listen to tales about the terrible in human lives. Somehow we do know that other people's stories matter to us, that we are all in life together and what others have experienced and learned illuminates our own lives. We must not be so very unlike. Besides reason and the w illingness to lose ourselves to books and in one another's company, a third ingredient is necessary to a community of learning, and that is humor. Humor allows us to admit our faults and e rrors, to say "that idea of mine wasn 't right, here's a nothe r. " This k ind of humor recreates the comm unity. It incites o th ers to remember that they can err, too . This invitation to remember our commonness asks us not to fa ll to some level of mediocrity but to rise to our possibilities, and leaves u s open to change, a necessary state for growth and for healing from our ignorance. From a lecture to graduate students at the college, June 16, 1991. pa ge f i v e �W. E. B. DU BOIS I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balz ac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the stronglimbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor cond es c ens ton, So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land? In thinking about the proposition that the greatest of minds can draw us together, speak to us, across any line of race. place and time, consider the following- W. E. 8. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk, (Greenwich: Fawcett Publications Inc., 1903) p a ge si x LETTE RS fro m Sa nt a F e Sum m e r 1 992 �MAYA ANGELOU Determined to do what others did, at age twelve Maya Angelou decided to "render a rendition" of poetry before the congregation of the C.M.E. Church of Stamps, Arkansas. I decided that I would render Portia's speech from The Merchant of Venice. I had it choreographed; it was going to be fantastic, but then, Momma (as I called my grandmother) asked me, "Sister, what are you planning to render? " So I told her, " A piece fr o m Shakespeare, Momma ." Momma asked, "Now sister, who is this very Shakespeare?" I had to tell her that Shakespeare was white, and Momma felt the less we said about whites the better, and if we didn't mention them at all, maybe they'd just get up and leave. I couldn't lie to her, so I told her, "Momma, it's a piece written by William Shakespeare who is white but he's dead and has been dead for centuries!" Now, I thought that she would forgive him that little idiosyncracy. Momma said, "Sister, you will render a piece of Mister Langston Hughes, Mister Countee Cullen, Mister James Weldon Johnson, or Mister Paul Laurence Dunbar. Yes ma'am, little mistress, you will!" Well I did, but years later, when I physically and psychologically left that country, that condition, which is Stamps, Arkansas .. .I found myself and still find myself, whenever I like, stepping back into Shakespeare. Whenever I like, I pull him to me. He wrote it for me. "When in disgrace with fortun e and men 's eyes,/ I all alone beweep my outcast state/ And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries/ And look upon myself and curse my fate.I Wishing me like to one more rich in hope/ Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd/ Desiring this man's art and that man 's scope/ With what I most enjoy contented least... " Of course he wrote it.for me; that is a condition of the black woman. Of course, he was a black woman. I understand that. Nobody else understands it, but I know that William Shake!>peare was a black woman. Tbat is the role of art in life. Maya Angelou, Journey to the Heartland Address delivered at the 1985 National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, June 12, 1985. S umm e r 19 9 2 l. F. T T F. R S f r o m Santa Fe pa ge sev en �Following is the list of books on which the St. John's program is based. The list is subject to constant review and revision . Some books are read only in part. SECOND YEAR FIRST YEAR Homer Aeschylus Sophocles Thucydides Euripides Herodotus Aristophanes Plato Aristotle Euclid Lucretius Plutarch Nicomachus Lavoisier Essays by: Iliad, Odyssey Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone Peloponnesian War Hippolytus, Medea, Bacchae The Persian Wars Cloud;~ Birds Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, 1heaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nichomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, The Politics, Parts ofAnimals, Generation ofAnimals Elements On the Nature of Things "Pericles," "Alcibiades," "Lycurgus," "Solon " Arithmetic Elements of Chemistry Archimedes, Toricelli, Pascal, Fahrenheit, Black, Avogadro, Dalton Cannizzaro, Richter, T. Thompson Aristotle Apollonius Virgil Plutarch Epictetus Tacitus Ptolemy Plotinus Augustine Anselm Aquinas Dante Chaucer De Prez Machiavelli Copernicus Luther Rabelais Palestrina Montaigne Viete Bacon Shakespeare Poems by: Harvey Descartes Pascal Bach Haydn Mozart Beethoven Schubert Stravinsky Webern Essays by: The Bible De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories Conics Aeneid "Caesar", "Antony", "Brutus", "Cato The Younger'; "Pompey ", "Cicero" Discourses, Manual Annals Almagest 1heEnneads Confessions, City of God Proslogium Summa 1heologica, Summa Contra Gentiles Divine Comedy Canterbury Tales Mass The Prince, Discourses On the Revolution of the Spheres The Freedom of a Christian, Secular Authority, Gargantua and Patagruel Missa Papae Marcelli Essays "Introduction to the Analytical Art" Novum Organum Richard II, Henry IV, Henry v; The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Sonnets Marvell, Donne, and other 16th and 17th-century poets Motion of the Heart and Blood Geometry Generation of Conic Sections St. Matthew Passion, Inventions Quartets Operas Sonatas Songs Symphony of Psalms Selected works Bernard, Weismann, D'Arcy, Lamark, Dreisch, Boveri, Von Baer �THIRD YEAR Don Quixote Two New Sciences Leviathan Discourse on Method, Meditations, Rules for the Direction ofMind Milton Paradise Lost La Rochefoucauld Maximes La Fontaine Fables Pensees Pascal Huygens Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact Spinoza Tbeologico-Political Treatise Locke Second Treatise of Government Racine Phedre Principia Mathematica Newton Epitome IV Kepler Monadology, Discourse on Leibnitz Metaphysics, Essay on Dynamics Swift Gulliver's Travels Berkeley Principles of Human Knowledge Hume Treatise of Human Nature Social Contract, The Origin of Rousseau Inequality Adam Smith Wealth of Nations Critique of Pure Reason, Kant Fundamental Principles of Metaphysics of Morals, Mozart Don Giovanni Austen Pride and Prejudice, Emma Hamilton, Jay and Madison The Federalist Melville Billy Budd, Benito Cereno Dedekind Essay on the Tbeory of Numbers Fielding Tomjones Essays by: Young, Maxwell , S. Carnot, L. Carnot, Mayer, Kelvin, Taylor, Euler, D. Bernoulli Cervantes Galileo Hobbes Descartes FOURTH YEAR Moliere Goethe Mendel Darwin Hegel Lobachevsky Tocqueville Lincoln Kierkegaard Wagner Thoreau Marx Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States ofAmerica Tbe Misanthrope, Tartuffe Faust Experiments in Plant Hybridization Origin of Species Phenomenology ofMind, Logic (from the Encyclopedia), Tbeory of Parallels Democracy in America Selected speeches Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling Tristan and Isolde Walden Communist Manifesto, Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844 Dostoevski Tolstoy Twain Woolf O'Connor William James Nietzsche Freud Jung Valery Kafka Heidegger Heisenberg Einstein Millikan Conrad Joyce Poems by: Essays by: Brothers Karamazov, Tbe Possessed War and Peace Tbe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn To Tbe Lighthouse Everything Tbat Rises Must Converge Psychology: Briefer Course Birth of Tragedy, Tbus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents Two Essays in Analytic Psychology Poems Tbe Metamorphosis, Tbe Penal Colony What is Philosophy Tbe Physical Principles of the Quantum Tbeory Selected papers Tbe Electron Supreme Court Opinions Heart of Darkness TbeDead Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and others Faraday, Lorenz, ].]. Thomson, Whitehead, Minkowski, Rutherford, Davisson, Bohr, Schrodinger, Maxwell, de Broglie, Dreisch, Mendel �CURRENT QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE BOOK LIST by Eva Brann Dean, St. John's College Annapolis We are sometimes asked why our program contains so few works by women and blacks, and none at all from the East. It is a subject we have considered individually and as a faculty. Here are some of our thoughts: First of all, it seems that people ask this question with roughly three sorts of expectations in mind: 1. They expect, in a general way, that in putting together a list of re quired readings we would make sure to include a fair sampling of the great works produced by all the diverse groups-the civilizations , faiths, races, professions-that go to make up humanity; in view of the shrinking of today' s world they would hope that we would help our students to a more gl o bal understanding. 2. Or, again, they suspect that it is pre s umptuous of a faculty to establish criteria for a whole school, especially whe n these criteria turn out to select books written mostly by European and North American authors who are white , male and long dead; they expe ct us to balance this list with more recent works by women and minority writers. 3. Finally, they worry that students b e longing to thes e latter pa g e e ig h t EACH WORK IS PICKED BECAUSE IT IS FAIRLY ACCESSIBLE ON ITS OWN AND ALSO BECAUSE IT FORMS AN INTEGRAL WHOLE WITH THE OTHERS. THESE TEXTS BUILD ON AND SOMETIMES REFLECT BACK ON EACH OTHER ... L E TT E RS fr o m Santa F e groups might have a hard time getting what they need from books not written by, or for, or even much about them; they feel that education should provide an element of support for people with special histories. Here are some responses we as a fa c ulty do agree on-of course within wide limits of difference: 1. It is easiest for us to respond to the first version of the question, which concerns the representation in the program of greatness in all its diversity, because our answer is so much constrained by practical educational necessity. Conside r just the literary works and sacred texts of East and West : what c an we do in the four short years we have with our students? We could draw up a list of isolated high points and fill in the context with bro a d-brush e d background lectures-a form of instruction in which we have no faith. Such a spotty survey would be demeaning to the works and unsatisfying to our students. Moreover, we are convinced that the condition of an intelligent respect for other worlds is a thorough assimilation of one's own. So we have chosen to study a sequence of works from the Western tradition . Each work is pick e d because it is fairly accessible on its own and also because it forms an integral whole with the others. These texts build on and sometime.} reflect back on each othe r ; they weave, willy-nilly, that web of refutation and resurrection, of argument and counterargument, sensibility and countersensibility, passion and counterpassion that characte rizes our particular legacy: Our tradition develops as a unity of radical oppositions. More ove r, just as this list lends intellectu a l integrity to the program , it assures some social Summ e r 19 9 2 �coherence to the college community, since we have almost all studies in common. These are features we value highly enough to forego others, though not without regret. 2. In answer to the second version of the question, how we can presume to choose for the whole institution and then to make so restricted a choice , we would say, first, that although our list may not be broad (though it does span almost three millennia and two continents) it is both deep and crucial to our lives. These texts , be they books , music or pictures, contain the roots of understanding for moderns in general and for Americans in particular. What all inhabitants of the globe have in common is the need to come to grips with science, and for that the texts on our program are indispensible. But these works also speak to us as Americans, particularly since they contain the political principles by which we live together. Moreover, a far truer description than that which represents the hyphenated Americans as outsiders to the Western tradition is that which regards them as charter members of its continual refounding. Thus it is not a mere curiosity that in reestablishing the theory of civil disobedience from jail in Birmingham, Martin Luther King reached back to Socrates in jail in Athens, or that the present flowering of black literature comes from women who are equally well versed in the Bible and in Baudelaire. Of course, we cannot ove rlook the fact that groups recently emerging are not well represented in the program. We think of this fact as just that: a mere fact, a brute historical fact. To allow it to govern our choice of readings would be to cut Summ e r 1992 our nose to spite our face . How would we serve our students by curtailing their access to a deep analysis of the present condition? At any rate, time itself will cure the defect. A tradition so long in the making is slow to recognize newcomers, but when we come round we will be paying tribute to the intrinsic excellence of the works , not to some exterior pressure. THESE TEXTS .. . CONTAIN THE ROOTS OF UNDERSTANDING . . . We do, however, have both formal and informal ways of trying new books. As a regular part of the program , we have the prece ptorial , small study groups in which tutors and students can try out books not on the seminar list. Furthermore , students run extra-curricular, all-college seminars for which they often choose just such works. Moreover, some of us subscribe to the ideal of reading everything promising .in sight. The long and the short of it is that as a faculty we could never bring ourselves to include works just because they were written by L E T TE R S fr o m S anta F e women or blacks, or even because they were of burning topical interest. The reason is that we do not think of a great book as representing a group interest, but rathe r as presenting the sometimes radically independent thought of an individual. In fact, that characteristic is one of our criteria for picking a book. We do recognize that there are many people in the universities who deny that there are such books, who think that all books are almost totally conditioned by the ir authors' sex, race or social origin. But we continue to believe that a thinking human being can penetrate beyond these circumstances. At any rate, we find that works approached in this spirit open up to us and to our students. That faith fits in with the fact that this college is-in ce rtain respects-a deeply democratic place. It is democratic in attempting to combine individualism of inquiry with community of endeavor, in encouraging a kind of do-it-yourself learning without recourse to professional expertise or authority, in providing for the sort of seminar discussion in which each member participates on an equal footing and the most diverse opinions get a respectful hearing. So it is precisely to prote ct this egalitarian spirit that we look for works which take hold of us all as human beings, which engage our feelings and our reason and are yet distant enough from topical turmoil to keep the discussion civil and thoughtful. One might say that we are compelled by our democratic format to keep the program gender-and color-and issue-blind. 3. But that doesn't mean that we don't recognize the problems raised by these principles in practical application: We know that we must come to grips with the question how the pa g e nine �female half of our student population or the increasing number of Asian and black students fare here, what they find that may speak to them specifically. Here we do differ a good deal in our individual concerns. One unde rlying assumption for those who feel the problem-not all do-is that the life of individual human beings is so largely informed by their sex and their race and by past injustices done on those accounts that their education must pay attention to these facts. Others, while not denying the importance of being a woman or being non-white , worry about the dangers of fostering too resentful a sensitivity or too narrow a perspective of human affairs. It is an open question within the community which is sure to be much discussed in the immediate future. What we can say is that our books are not the worst background for deepening the conversation. Another supposition, more directly relevant to the program, is that works which are not written by or about or for certain groups, women, for example, have less to say to them. This is a tricky problem , particularly since students' receptivity depends in part on the attitudes that are encouraged. Yet there might well be some spontaneous recoil when, for instance, a young woman meets as the first hero in her reading here Home r's Achilles. She might indee d have trouble identifying with him, and she might see his fatal self-regard as a typically male flaw . But, then, such a woman in her more martial moods might have no difficulty at all empathizing with his blazing fury. Or, again, she might decide that neither alienation nor empathy is the point, but human sympathy. page ten Similarly, it seems somehow evident that no man can write of a woman's lot from the inside. And yet, men have convincingly delineated female characters , from charmingly complex girls, like Homer's Nausikaa and Tolstoy's Natasha to royally terrific women like Aeschylus' Clytemnestra and Virgil's Dido. These grand portraits may be as illuminating even to a womanor a man -as might be a tract by a woman on the condition of women. It should be mentioned that there are in fact several great women novelists on the program: Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Flannery O'Conner. Some of them, read blind, would probably not be distinguishable as female . Others, Jane Austen for example, add the most digestible and salutary kind of diversity, diversity of experience. It would not do her proper honor to say that she brings a woman's view to the world at large ; she claims rather to bring a human view to the small and largely female world to which she so expertly introduces us. Nonetheless, it would be ostrichlike to deny that at this particular time the program requires of som~ students something extra by way of stretching their imagination and widening their thinking. It requires of the men that they take female figures with all the high seriousness LETTEHS fr o m Santa Fe ancient and modern authors have accorded them. It requires of women that they raise to a human level texts not apparently written for them. The rewards for that sort of effort have always been an added distinction. (Although when this was written St. John's had no regular selection of Asian texts in the curriculum, the Santa Fe campus now has an Institute for the Study of Eastern Classics. It follows the same principles as the regular undergraduate curriculum, with emphasis on classic texts and special attention to languages. It exemplifies exactly what we mean by taking "otherness" and real diversity seriously. The program does not have the contemporary political goal of "exposure" to diversity but, rather, a deeper understanding of the fundamenta I and enduring questions that are raised by thoughtful human beings wherever an intellectual tradition is established. In the end, however, what we hope to learn is not simply something other-the Eastern mind-but something common-the human mind, and what we might learn in common about human greatness and the human condition.) Summer 1992 �WHY LATIN? WHY GREEK? Who we are ... and who we are not. by John Agresto President, St. John's College Santa Fe T wain tells us that Huckleberry Finn, that quintessential American, was fascinated with the Biblical story of Moses. But it soon dawned on Huck "that Moses had been dead a considerable long time." With that, Huckleberry informs us, "I didn't care no more about him; because I don't take no stock in dead people ." Since making the case for learning "dead" languages is, arguably, harder than making the case for learning about Moses, what in the world can contemporary Americans say in favor of Greek and Latin? The first answer everyone seems to give is the one that is in the papers each week: the study of ancient languages, especially Latin, is useful in building English · vocabulary, thus helping to raise our children's SAT scores. We read it, and we wince. Is this how low the mighty have fallen? Is the real competitor to Cicero no longer Catiline but Stanley Kaplan and the quickie cram course? Or sometimes we read that the best reason for learning Latin is simply that it is tough- it teaches "rigorous discipline," it "exercises the mind." For what end? Well, so valuable is the rigor of classical learning that I recently heard of a teacher who promotes Latin as good mental training for future computer buffs. A kind of warm-up exercise for the real stuff. 0 temporal Such narrow and merely utilitarian arguments are perhaps why a majority of Latin students drop the language after only one year. Surely we need to know the value of these ancient studies, but is there nothing good the classics have to offer beyond vocabulary building, pretechnical training and the academic equivalent of Marine boot camp? So let us begin a defense of the Ancients with the least popular of all contemporary academic reasons: We read the Ancients because they are ours. These languages and their hooks, their plays, their modes of thought have helped form not only our contemporary speech but our politics, o ur literature, our history and the shape of our civilization. If we are to know ourselves, we must know our own. Despite glib talk in certain circles that insists our first jo b is to open our minds to the understanding of other cultures and ways of life, if we fail to know our own civilization-its hopes, its principles, its reasons and its greatness- we will not be able to make comparisons that are even worth a dime. These dead languages and the civilization the y embrace are ours: they formed us, almost as deep ly as have Christianity and the Bible. To give a small example, not too long ago I p icked up my copy of the Federalist Papers and turned to one of James Madison's attacks o n the opponents of the Constitution. In defending the new Republic, Madison mentions, in the space of about two pages, Minos, Theseus, Numa, Tullius Hostilius, Brutus, Se rvius Tullius, Romulus, Crete , the Locrians, Rome, Athe ns, Sparta and the Achaean S umm e r 7 99 2 L E T TE R S fr o m S a n t a Fe THESE DEAD LANGUAGES AND THE CIVILIZATION THEY EMBRACE ARE OURS: THEY FORMED US, ALMOST AS DEEPLY AS HAVE CHRISTIAN/TY AND THE BIBLE. p a ge e l e v e n �League. Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was just as much at home in Greek and Latin as he was in English and French. But the Federalist Papers were not essays written for a convention of classics professors. They were newspaper articles, read on the street. In forging this new nation, this Novus Ordo Seclorum (you can read these words in Virgil and on the back of a dollar bill), any number of Americans knew their Athens, their Rome , their Republicanism and their Latin, and knew them as something living, not dead. The problems of Athenian democracy were not far from our own problems. Socrates' questions about human excellence are still our questions. Nevertheless, the Ancients are not completely ours. If the thoughts of antiquity mirror our own in all or even most particulars, if we are their direct and exact descendants, then there is less , not more, reason to study them. Or if the progress of the human mind was such that the Romans and Greeks were mental children and we are smarter, more thoughtful adults, then looking back is merely an antiquarian affectation. It is only because Homer and Herodotus and Cicero and Socrates are like us, but not exactly, that they are worthy of attention. Locke, Madison, Marx and Nietzsche would not have been possible without the civilization and politics that stemmed from Plato and Aristotle. But they are not Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, their conversations with the Ancients are profound debates, arguments that take seriously the alternatives defended by those who page twelve lived before modernity. Arthur Miller is not Sophocles. Sophocles has a different insight into human tragedy from the tragedy of Willy Loman. That's why we read Sophocles. In the Ancients we see parts of ourselves more clearly, yet refracted slightly differently. And we see this other side in texts and through Ian- guages that move us from within. Properly taught , the classics inhabit the best of all possible worlds. They can appeal to the desire to know ourselves, to see the roots of our principles, ideas and culture and, at the same time, to see who we are not. People who speak as the Romans did are not the people we meet every day. The examples of Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Priam, Penelope and Antigone teach thoughts that resonate, yet are still disquieting. I once met a professor of Latin who taught Roman literature with great misgivings. The Romans kept talking about such unmodern notions as manliness , virtue, the deepest of friendships , nobility , baseness , revenge, honor. It made LETT ERS from Santa Fe him uneasy. This unease, not vocabulary building or the chance to play in togas, is the true value of Latin and Greek. Yes, we can learn "about" the Ancients and become pedantic. We can do our Latin declensions and hope to jump up a notch on the college boards. Or we can try to learn some things from the Ancients, and do it in their languages and with their ears, and become broader, less provincial and more deeply educated. Despite all our contemporary pride, they still might have the best books. There is one thing more to say, and it has to do not with searching for truth but with beauty. The ancient languages and their poems and plays and dialogues have unrivaled charm, power and grace. They have the singular ability to help us free ourselves from vulgarity. I do not mean "vulgar " in the Roman sense of "common." The Greeks had a more insightful word for vulgarity. They referred to it as apeirokalia, the lack of experience with things that are beautiful. The Parthenon, Euripides, the perfection of each Platonic dialogue, the sound of Greek sentences-all these have the power to raise us up, not simply our vocabulary scores. It hardly qualifies as the most practical argument to make, but as we work over our Latin declensions, difficult as they might be, we might soon get the sense of something precise , something proportioned, something noble, something truly beautiful. Salve. This is an essay first published in The Washington Post, July 22, 1987. Summer19 92 �EQUAL CULTURES-OR EQUALITY? by Cathy Young Freelance Writer Article taken from The Washington Post Sunday, March 29, 1992 Feminism and multiculturalism have become essential articles of current progressive faith. A recent report from the American Association of University Women on eliminating gender bias in high school, for example, also enthusiastically endorsed a multicultural curriculum. But, like most academics, the report's authors fail to recognize that these two tenets are often incompatible. The central premise of the multiculturalist credo, after all, is that all cultures are created equal. To judge other cultures by Western standards is unforgivably ethnocentric. Yet, as Islamic fundamentalists remind us, equality of the sexes is a Western value judgment. It is, moreover, a standard by which most non-Western cultures--even allowing for a few quasimatriarchal tribes-come up short. Last year, the New York Times reviewed anthropologist Kenneth Good's memoir of life with the Yanomamo tribe in Venezuela. Having summarized his account of the tribe's misogynist brutality-unmarried girls past puberty, widows and runaway wives are routinely gang-raped and sometimes maimed-the critic went on to quote, approvingly, Good's assertion that "violence [was] not a central theme of Yanomamo life. " This angered a woman reader, who wrote to the Times denouncing "the myopia ... where violence against women is concerned." Yet surely there was something else at work. One can hardly imagine a Times reviewer extending such tolerance to violence against women by American men. With a Stone Age Amazonian tribe, however, it is safer to be myopic than "ethnocentric," even at the price of mental contortion. In a world civilization course I once took at a community college in New Jersey, our female professor explained that while the status of women in India might seem low, they often wielded much power in the household and were revered as mothers of sons. I expressed surprise she would make excuses for an oppressive patriarchy. "As well," the professor snapped back, "there's no reason for us to be smug. We still have a lot of discrimination against women in this society too. " As if female infanticide and the immolation of widows equaled the unfair denial of a promotion. Similarly, advocates of Afrocentrism rarely say much about cliterodectomy, polygamy or the acceptance of wife-beating in much of Africa. It seems that Summer 1992 LETT ERS from Santa Fe page thirteen �the position of women has to be cast in the best possible light when it comes to non-Western culturesand in the worst possible light when it comes to the West (which, even before feminism, accorded women a higher status than any other major culture). The double standard is blatant. The only civilization that made an effort to overcome its sexist traditions, the West is berated for failing to do away with them completely. But Third World cultures are treated as static; to try to protect the Yanomamo's ancestral customs from the onslaught of Western ways is noble. The issue is not just an academic one. America is home to millio ns of immigrants from a diverse array of cultures. Current "politically correct'' thinking holds that these immigrants and their children should be encouraged to preserve their cultural identities and values; assimilation is viewed as a form of psychic vio1ence. But what if these va lu es include polygamy or arranged marriages of nine-year-old girls? Shall we condone the slaying of unfaithful wives by husbands avenging their honor if that was the custom in their native countries? If you think I am pushing the multiculturalist logic to an absurd extreme, think again. The answer to the last questio n is : We already do. In 1987, a Chinese immigrant name d Do ng Lu Chen killed his wife, smashing h er h ead with a claw hamme r after she confessed to an affair. At the 1989 tria l, w hich include d testimony of an anthropologis t, the d e fe nse a rg u e d that Che n's background-"the specia l high p lace the family ho lds in the Chine se community " and "the shame and humiliation" of a w ife's p a ge fo u r t een infidelity-made him lose control. Mostly on the strength of this "cultural defense," a Brooklyn judge sentenced Chen to five years probation on a manslaughter charge. The sentence initially sparked protests among women's groups and Asian activist groups alike. But the coalition fell apart because Asian groups were fearful of undermining the notion of a cultural defe nse. To bar it "would promote the idea that when people come to America, they have to give up their way of doing things, " huffed Margaret Fung, executive director of the Asian-American Legal Defense and Educatio n Fund. TO JUDGE OTHER CULTURES BY WESTERN STANDARDS IS UNFORGIVABLY ETHNOCENTRIC. YET, AS ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISTS REMIND US, EQUALITY OF THE SEXES IS A WESTERN VALUE JUDGMENT L ETTE R S f •· om San ta Fe Yet is it not possible that many people come here because they arc attracted to the American way of doing things? This may be particularly true of women, who often relish liberation from the patriarchal customs back home. What a cruel mockery if, out of defere nce to multicultural sensitivities, our institutions began to mimic these customs. That was just how the Chen sentence was perceived by women who had the most reason to take it personally: Asian American battered wives. After that case, according to Newsday, many told counselors that the thre at of taking the ir men to court had ceased to be a deterre nt. Said an immigration lawyer, "Their view is that maybe the courts he re protect the male the same way the system protects the male in China." The "cultural defe n se" has s ince cropped up in several spousal homicide and rape cases involving immigrants from othe r Third World countries. One pow erful symbol of Desert Storm was the contrast between the veile d a nd silent women of Saudi Ara bia and U. S. fe ma le soldie rs working alongside the men. It was a source of pride to most Americans, and a reminde r that at least w hen it comes to gender, some cultures are clearly more equal than others. Once this simple fact is recognize d , it might bring us to p o nde r the possibility that women may owe something to such unique ly Western ideals as reverence for the individu al, free dom of c hoice, and even technologi cal maste ry o f naturcw hic h h e lp e d ease the b io logical constraints whose weig ht o n women has always been esp ecia lly h eavy. And o nce we start thinking of that, who knows what heresies could be next' Stt m m e r 1 992 �ACCESS AND EXCELLENCE by Carolynn Reid-Wallace Assistant Secretary for Post-Secondary Education , United States Deptartment of Education / n 1986 the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicated that two-thirds of the natio n's seventeen-year-olds did n ot know wh e n the Civi l War occurred or wha t t he Reformation was or the n a mes of such literary giants as Chaucer, Melville, and Austen. Many of these students went on to colleges that had equally low standards, as revealed in a 1988 National Endowme nt for the Humanities survey of higher education , w hich found that it was possible to earn a bachelor's degree from: • 80 percent of U.S. colleges and universities without taking American history • 80 percent w ithout taking a course in Western civilization • 62 percent without a course in philosophy • 77 percent w ithout studying a foreign language. How can we call o ur citizens "educated" if they have never been exposed to the study of their o wn country's history? What is the purpose of higher education if not to produce an educated person? And how can someone w ho has gone through four or more years of tertiary education without studying history, philosophy, or a foreign language be considered "educated "? No t only can the standards of higher education in America be raised, they must be raised. Moreover, they can and should be raised without reference to the issue of access. There is no access/excellence dichotomy. These concepts are not antithetical because they are not related. They represent two goals, noble in themselves, worthy of our highest and best efforts to achieve them. Su mm e r 7 992 L ETTERS from Santa F e p age f i ft ee n �NOT ALL WHO HAVE ACCESS WILL ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE; HOWEVER, INCREASING SUCCESSFUL PARTICIPATION THROUGH LOWERED STANDARDSOR NO STANDARDS AT ALL-DEMEANS AN INSTITUTION OF HIGHER EDUCATION BY DEVALUING WHAT IT PURPORTS TO OFFER.. .. pag e s i x t een We should direct our attention to solving the challenge of achieving excellence, not as they might seem to relate to one another-for that is the path of finger-pointing and blame-laying but as they exist apart from each other. Not all who have access w ill achieve exce ll e n ce; h owever, increasing successful participation through lowered standards-or no standards at all-demeans an institution of higher education by devaluing what it purports to offer: a firstrate, not third-rate, educatio n. No one benefits-neither the student nor the institution, let a lo ne the prospective employer or societywhen colleges and universities create a false vision of excellence, one "levele d down" by misguided attempts to accommodate the illprepared. There is no easy path to institutional excellence. As H esiod warned, "Badness you can get easily, in quantity: the road is smooth, and it lies close by. But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it, and rough at first." We all know from our experiences that the path to our own education was long and steep. We had to sweat a little or a lot, de pending o n w hether the standards set by the institution we attended were easy or tough. The institution that actually helps its students excel is one that expects sweat and toil from them. It expects its students to read from the classics, to be familiar w ith the natural sciences and the fundame ntals · of mathematics, to be skilled in the principles of logic a nd reasoning. Whether the students consider it relevant or no t, they are exposed to the thought of the ages, to e thics, history, a nd literature. They a re L E TTERS from Santa F e expected to know thoroughly the Western h e ritage on which this democracy is based and a lso to understand the aesthetic vision of cultures outside the Western tradition. Institutions that have a vision of excellence also make a con certed effort to get students in the door. But once there, th e students are n o t allowed to set their sights too low or their goals too narrow. They a re exposed to a rigorous curriculum in an environment conducive to learning, and they are expected to meet the standards set by the institution , be they standards of content or performance or both. Not all who have access will achieve excellence. Tocqueville recognized this when he said, "The gifts of intellect proceed directly from God, and man cannot prevent their une qual distribution ." But we can prevent th e construction of fa lse dichotomies. Access and excellence a re not antithetical. Our vision of excellence must include both . We must set high standards for those who are willing and able to take the long, rough road to the top, and we must help those less capable by ensuring that no door is closed, no path barred, and- especially-no excuse made in their behalf th a t dilutes standards of excellence in the name of increasing access. Su m m e r 7 992 �ANNOUNCEMENTS DIRECTOR OF SPECIAL PROJECTS COLLEGE FUND St. John's College in Santa Fe has an opening, beginning this fall , for someone to help arrange scholarly conferences and symposia, organize on-campus programs involving outside groups and institutions, and manage meeting facilities . A letter of interest with resume should be sent to the attention of John Agresto, President. If there's a theme to this newsletter we publish, it is the value and present condition of traditional liberal arts education. St. John's College is, in our opinion, an outstanding example of this education. Although these Letters. are not part of the fundraising efforts of St. John's, a number of our readers support the college financially. If there are others of you who would care to do so-and these Letters now go to about 2500 friends-we would certainly welcome your support . Helping St. John's College is a valuable way to further the cause of liberal education itself. Thank you all. We are ve1y grateful to the Laurel Foundation for their generous support of this and the next two issues. LE TT ER Sfrom Santa Fe. Summe 1· 1 99 2 L E TT E R S fro m Santa F e pag e s eve nt ee n �PROFILE St. John's College: An independent, non-sectarian, four-year liberal arts college. Founded: Established in 1696 in Annapolis, Maryland, as King William's School and chartered in 1784 as St. John's College. Great Books Program adopted 1937. Second campus in Santa Fe opened in 1964. Curriculum: An integrated, four-year, all-required liberal arts and science program based on reading and discussing, in loosely chronological order, the great books of Weste rn civilization. The program requires four years of foreign language , four years of mathematics, three years of laboratory science, and one year of music. Approach: Tutorials, laboratories, and seminars requiring intense participation replace more traditional lectures. Classes are very small. Student/Faculty: 8:1 ratio. Degrees Granted: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. Master of Arts in Libe ral Studies. Student Body: Enrollment is limited to about 400 students on each campus. Current freshman class made up of 55% men and 45% women from 30 states and several foreign countries. Sixty-five percent receive financial aid. Students may transfer between the Santa Fe and Annapolis campuses. Alumni Careers: Education - 21 %, Business - 20%, Law - 10%, Visual and Performing Arts - 9%, Medicine - 7%, Science and Engineering - 7%, Computer Science - 6%, Writing and Publishing - 5%. Graduate Institute: The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education is an interdisciplinary master's degree program based on the same principles as the undergraduate program. It is offered on both campuses year-round. Readers of the newsletter may be especially interested in applying for our summer session. For more information please contact the Graduate Institute in Santa Fe (505) 982-3691 ext. 249 or in Annapolis (301) 263 - 2371. LETTERS from Santa Fe St. John's College 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599 ADDRESS CORRECTION REQUESTED Bulk Rate U.S. Postage · PAID Non-Profit Organization Permit No. 231 Santa Fe, NM � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe Description An account of the resource A newsletter published by the Santa Fe President's Office that includes articles about liberal education. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe, Summer 1992 Description An account of the resource Letters from Santa Fe, St. John’s College—Santa Fe, New Mexico, Summer 1992 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Agresto, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Buchenauer, Nancy D. Brann, Eva T. H. Young, Cathy (Cathy A.) Reid-Wallace, Carolynn Bloom, Allan, 1930-1992 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Letters_from_SF_1992_Summer Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/338c7645050d44bcbbc66a1da39c49ac.pdf b7508b36e81168cea9efd5e108ba075d PDF Text Text LETTERSfrom St. John's College-Santa Fe, New Mexico Falt 1992 TEACHING ETHICS I NS IDE DIRECTIVE MORAL EDUCATION page2 TEACHING INTEGRITY: THE BOUNDARIES OF MORAL EDUCATION page3 STORYTELLING AND VIRTUE page 7 TEACHING THE VIRTUES page 12 LEARNING GOODNESS page 18 The teaching of ethics has lately fallen on hard times. What schools once took for granted-that students would learn to be better people as well as develop sharper minds-is no longer very evident. Maybe it happened when we started calling virtues "values," shifting from the value of morality to the view that ethical judgments are simply one's own "value judgments." Maybe it happened when we reduced the great American principle of individual liberty to the notion that all ways of life are equally valid, that liberty is only intolerant of judgmentalism. Maybe it happened when people confused teaching with indoctrination, somehow thinking that the questioning of conventional ethics was the mark of a teacher and the teaching of ethics the mark of a thug. Maybe it happened when the idea of cultural relativity took hold, with the corollary that ethics is both culturally determined and all moral views, therefore, of equal worth and stature. (Sometimes this has another corollary-that all cultures are equal, except ours, which is bad.) Maybe it happened when the teaching of old-fashioned ethics was seen as exactly that, old-fashioned, superseded by a new morality, one more enlightened and progressive. In response to the scorn-laden question "And whose morality will you teach?" the answer always is, beneath it all, theirs, those more advanced, those less "old-fashioned." In this issue I have reprinted a number of essays all attempting to understand and improve the current situation. Two themes seem to me to be constant: First, the simple necessity of public moral education, and second, the efficacy of indirect instruction, primarily through the use of stories and literature. This last theme has the advantage of not only raising the level of goodness, but of encouraging good reading. Yes, I will be the first to admit that not all literature is edifying. But it surely would be an advance to hear students and teachers talk about the nature of Iago's treachery or the meaning of Jim's friendship with Huck and not just the shape of the Globe theater or the symbolism of the river. This last point is a topic we will come back to in a subsequent newsletter on literature, but my guess is that using stories to help teach character might well be a real advance both for moral education and for literature, too. Sincerely, John Agresto �The followin g, an excerpt of an essay that first appeared in The Public Interest in 1981, is the beginning of a seminal piece by Andrew Oldenquist of Ohio State University. Much of what has been written since on the teaching of ethics draws on these notions of cultural preservation and the inadequacy of quandary or dilemma ethics . If we were anthropologists observing members of a tribe it would be the most natural thing in the world to expect them to teach their morality and culture to their children, and moreover, to think that they had a perfect right to do so on the ground that cultural integrity and perpetuation depended on it. Indeed, if we found that they had ceased to teach the moral and other values of their culture, we would take them to be on the way to cultural suicide: We would think them ruined, pitiable, alienated from their own values and on the way out. Most of us have similar attitudes toward the educational policies of nation states other than our own. We expect Japanese and Nigerian children to be educated to be, among other things, good Japanese and Nigerians . We find this to be a natural and reasonable expression of societal self-interest. Some of the very people who would be the first to accept all of this regarding other cultures are the first to deny it regarding their own. They are inconsistent, of course, unless they desire the death of their own culture for reasons that do not also apply to other cultures. Private institutions, such as families and churches, have a right to engage in moral education, but public institutions, such as public schools, have an obligation to do so, because they are the instruments non-suicidal societies create to perpetuate what is essential to the continued existence, and therefore the continued benefits, of the society. We need to distinguish the basic moral core that sustains a moral community from the controversial issues and exceptional cases which bewilder adults. In our own society the moral core consists of principles of social morality such as honesty, fairness, willingness to work, disavowal of criminal violence, respect for the democratic political process, together with personal virtues such as courage, diligence and self-respect. It is essential that young people actually acquire these attitudes and not simply talk about them. Several points need to be made in elaboration of the distinction between a basic core and moral controversies. First, teenagers and adults can benefit from reasoning about dilemmas and hard cases only if they have already accepted and internalized a basic core of principles. For example, one has to accept and take very seriously a principle about honesty before one can agonize over exceptions to it. If students are taught dilemmas before or in place of principles, they will think that morality is nothing but dilemmas; and if they discuss exceptions to principles without first having internalized the principles themselves, the exceptions, meeting no resistance, will come all too easily. Second, the inculcation of civilized moral habits not only logically precedes the study of dilemmas, it page t wo L E TT ER S from S an t a F e DIRECTIVE MORAL EDUCATION by Andrew Oldenquist is essential to any society even minimally safe and satisfying. A society is a moral community, which means that it has a shared morality that predictably regulates interpersonal conduct. Habitual, principled behavior is simply more important than reasoning about controversies, though both are important. But people do not become principled by magic or by heredity, nor is it possible to transmit moral principles to children by the use of non-directive methods. They must be made so by the society' s institutionalized civilizing agencies-families, churches, public opinion and schools. Third, acquiring a principle of social morality is not just a matter of coming to know something or to reason in a certain way. A wellbrought-up person feels badly at the thought of breaking a promise or stealing and has to have an awfully good reason, or very strong temptation, before he will go ahead and do it. Aristotle made the point by saying that a morally educated person finds virtue to be (relatively) pleasant and vice (relatively) disagreeable. In general, American moral educators stay as far away as possible from the emotional components of moral principles and the emotional aspects of moral education. This enables them to feign a dispassionate moral neutrality. Consequently, moral educators intellectualize morality and the process of moral education, which also is paradoxical since many of these same moral educators are ethical relativists and do not believe in the efficacy of intellect in matters of morality. F all 1 992 �TEACHING INTEGRITY: THE BOUNDARIES OF MORAL EDUCATION by Edwin J. Delattre A recent Wall Street Journal article on education bore the headline, "Schoolteachers Say It' s Wrong h ea ded to Try to Teach Students What's Right." This view is not new. Fou r years ago, Newsweek magazine described "morals education" as a "minefield" and asked "whose values" are to be taught. Teach ers and administrators w h o object to moral edu cation express fear of stirring unwanted controversy within diverse student populations and families. Some refuse, as a matter of principle, to teach values--on the grounds that moral education d estroys separation of church and state. Others insist that "it would be dangerou s, sad, and boring to have one view of morality imposed on our people." No one familiar with programs that h ave bee n foisted upon sch ools, teachers a nd stude nts und er the b a nner of "values" o r "moral" education can be entirely unsympathetic to these fears and concerns. Some programs, su ch as "valu es clarification," are based on a mindless reduction of morality to a matter of personal and arbitrary t aste . Students are taught tha t whether you like genocide or bigotry is roughly the same as whether you like broccoli. Schools are clearF a ll 1 99 2 ... ly better off avoiding such dangerous folly, especially because these programs teach students nothing about the real nature of principled' judgment and conduct. Other programs are imposition~ al, in the sense that they make pronouncements about morality that are ill-informed, dogmatic and highly questionable. I have seen students told that there are clear litmus tests for ide ntifying decent people- including where they stand on the rightness of abortion, of homosexuality or of specific U. S. foreign policies. Such pronouncements thwart students' learning the undeniable fact that d ecent and conscientious people can disagree about complex questions of conduct and policy . They are the refore a n affront to intellectua l honesty and do not belong in schools. Programs with this tone mislead in another way: Students deserve to learn that no matter what views individuals hold o n complex questions, they may still be d eplorable people in their habits of d aily life a nd therefore unworthy of resp ect and admiratio n . After all, a person w h o betrays the trust of others through insider trading is contemptible no matter where he or she stands on abortion. What this array of harmful and L ET T E R S f r o m S a nta Fe pa g e thr ee �SOME PROGRAMS, SUCH AS "VALUES CLARIFICATION," ARE BASED ON A MINDLESS REDUCTION OF MORALITY TO A MATTER OF PERSONAL AND ARBITRARY TASTE. pa ge f o u r benighted programs shows is that "moral education" can be and frequently has been done badly. But since virtually everyone knew that already, this was never one of the fundamental questions about moral education. The fundamental questions for centuries have been these: • What is morality? • Can morality be taught? • Can morality be learned? • Can adults possibly avoid influencing the moral habits and attitudes of the children and youths who keep company with them? Despite popular prejudices and confusions, these are not unanswerable questions. Broadly put, morality is the achievement of good character and of the aspiration to be the best person you can be. But what is good character and w h at kind of person s hould one as pire to become? The answers are that a good person is one who has integrity and that a ll of u s should aspire to achieve integrity as fully as we can. Literally, integrity means wholeness-bein g on e person in public and private, living in faithfulness to one set of principles whether or not anyone is watching. Integrity is to a person as homogenization is to milk- a single consistency throughout. But this a n swer remains too general, beca use a p e rso n can, unfortunately, have bad character in both public and private; a person can be rotten in dealing with str a n ge rs and fa mily a like. So, what kind of w holeness is genuine integrity and thus worth y of respect and emulation? First, it is the habit of treating other people fairly-givi ng them equ al initial consideration- jus t because they are people, and without regard to race or ethnicity or gender. The habit of recognizing other people as important in themselves-and not as objects to be used merely for our own gratification-is called justice. It means being able to see things from inside the skin of other people, and no one can do that who hates others because of their skin. It also means making decisions from the principle that everyone deserves to be treated fairly by our daily conduct. Where the habit of justice becomes second nature, it inspires the habit of compassion-the habit of real sensitivity to the pain or suffering of others. Second, it is the habit of controlling ourselves amid promises of pleasure, and of confining ourselves to healthful pleasures that are not selfishly sought at the expense of others. This habit is called temperance. Third, it is the habit of controlling ourselves amid threats of pain or loss- facing up to clear duties even when doing so risks ad verse peer pressure or loss of some other kind. This is the habit of courage, and it must be distinguished from cowardice and also from the recklessness to which the young are frequently inclined. Fourth, it is the habit of gathering evidence con scientiou sly a nd rely ing on it in reaching conclusions and decisions, and the habit of not u sing d eception to manipulate other people for ulterior purposes. These are the habits of intellectual and moral honesty. N ow, suppose that a person achieves such habits, achieves a substantial degree of integrit y . Where w ill tha t person stand on abortion? Is it right? Is it wrong? L ETTE R S from S a nt a F e Fa II 19 9 2 �Should it be illegal? Where will the person stand on affirmative action-on the ascription of rights to individuals and of rights to groups? We cannot know where the person will stand. We can know only that the person will take such questions seriously and seek to answer them conscientiously and with rigorous, logical reasoning and deliberation. We can know that the person will extend humility toward others who are likewise decent enough to be serious. We can know that a person of integrity will understand that morality is above all a matter of taking life and its conduct seriously and will feel kinship toward others who show such seriousness in their lives. This, students should have a chance to witness and to grasp. Can morality be taught? Can it be learned? Since achieving integrity or character excellence is a matter of forming habits, and since both good and bad habits can be formed only by repeating actions over and over again, morality cannot be taught. But because people can become habituated by repeated behavior under responsible and loving training and supervision, the habits of morality can be learned. Moreover, it is only when such habits have been learned, when the habit of giving consideration to other people has become second nature, that anyone can recognize moral problems worthy of attention and reflection. For a person who has achieved no habits of justice or temperance or courage, questions of whether to take unfair advantage of others, where to stand on abortion, whether to use illegal drugs, whether to go along with the prevailing fashion of peer pressure and so on, are not questions at all. At Fall 1992 most, conversation about them will be only a word game-perhaps a contest to see who can be most clever-insubstantial and without meaning or consequence. It is for this reason that putative moral education consisting of classroom discussion of controversial issues and putative dilemmas begs all questions of moral decency and moral motivation. Real moral deliberation presupposes learning habits of integrity; what can be taught is the principles of intellectual rigor and reliable thought as they are applied to questions of all kinds-in philosophy, the sciences, history, literature, theology and all the other disciplines of inquiry and discovery. This, surely, no administrator, teacher, or school worthy of the name would ever seek to evade. Neither would any responsible educator shirk teaching that respect for pluralism and disagreement does not embrace mindless tolerance of behavior and attitudes that are transparently unjust (such as racist supremacism of any kind) or selfishly intemperate (such as violent criminality against others) or manipulatively dishonest (such as cover-ups of corruption) and so on. Finally, is it possible for adults to be value neutral, to avoid all influence in the formation of the moral and intellectual habits and attitudes of the young? The answer is obviously no. As the great classicist and teacher, Gilbert Highet, put the point, "It is impossible to have children without teaching them . Beat them, coddle them, ignore them, force-feed them, shun them or worry about them, love them or hate them, you are still teaching them something, all the time." Most teachers know that they teach about right and wrong by the LETTERS from S anta F e TEACHERS WHO BEHAVE AS IF THEY WERE VALUE NEUTRAL IN THE PRESENCE OF THE YOUNG SUCCEED ONLY IN TEACHING THEIR STUDENTS THAT THEY ARE BEING DECEPTIVE, PROBABLY MANIPULATIVE. pa ge fi ve �way they behave. Teachers who behave as if they were value neutral in the presence of the young succeed only in teaching their students that they are being deceptive, probably manipulative. Some students will infer, perhaps unjustly, that their teachers are both liars and cowards. And the most astute students will soon see that attempting to convey value neutrality as an appropriate way to believe and behave condemns life to triviality and education to insignificance, thereby becoming as thoroughly impositional as any other uncritical dogmatism. It is, after all, possible to train and habituate the young with respect, generosity of spirit and intellectual honesty. It is possible to help the young learn habits of integrity without "imposition" and it is possible to teach them and help them learn to think with real acumen and rigor. If their teachers, who are supposed· to care about them, and their parents, who are supposed to love them, do not take life that seriously, then the young will learn their habits from the streets, from demagogues, and from entertainment and commercial media that neither care about them nor love them. That is a consequence no adult of integrity can be willing to tolerate. From Education Week, September 5, 1990. Edwin J. Delattre was president of St. John's College, Annapolis and Santa Fe, from 1980-85. He is now adjunct scholar at the A merican Enterprise Institute and the Olin Scholar in Applied Ethics at Boston University's School of Education. p age s i x LETTE R S f r om S an ta Fe F a l/ 199 2 �STORYTELLING AND VIRTUE by William Kirk Kilpatrick In After Virtue Alasdair Macintyre observes that in all classical and heroic societies, "the chief means of moral education is the telling of stories." In a real sense the heroes of The Iliad and The Odyssey were the moral tutors of the Greeks. Likewise, Aeneas was the model of heroic piety on which young Romans were nurtured. Icelandic and Irish children were suckled on sagas . And the Christian world, which reaped the inheritance of both classical and heroic societies, carried on this tradition of moral education with Bible stories, stories from the lives of saints and stories of chivalry. To be educated properly was to know of Achilles and Odysseus, Hector and Aeneas, and later to know of Beowulf and Arthur and Percival and the Christian story of salvation. The telling of stories does not seem to hold a place of much importance in contemporary attempts at moral education. The closest approximation to a story is the presentation of a moral dilemma: a man contemplates stealing a drug for his dying wife; passengers on a foundering lifeboat decide whether to toss their fellows overboard and who should be sacrificed; survivors in a fallout shelter debate whether to admit outsiders to their sanctuary. It will be apparent at once that there are important differences between these modern "fables" and Fall 19 92 the old ones. And the differences give us, in turn, a clue to the differences in thinking that animate the modern as opposed to the classical and Christian approaches to moral education. The first difference is that no attempt is made to delineate character in the moral dilemma, whereas character is everything in the heroic story. In the saga or epic everything revolves around the character of the hero - whether he exercises or fails to exercise the virtues. But the characters in the dilemmas have no characters, only decisions to make. Both Heinz (the man in the purloined drug dilemma) and Ulysses must aid their wives, but there the comparison ends. Heinz is no Ulysses. He is a blank, a cipher. He is there because he is needed to present a dilemma. We have no interest in him, only in his case. One cannot imagine parents passing down to their children the saga of Heinz and the stolen drug. The second difference is this: The actors in the dilemmas are not tied to any social particularities - traditions, loyalties, locations, or histories. True, Heinz is attached to his wife, but there is no indication why he should be. We know why Ulysses is loyal to Penelope, since her virtues are carefully enumerated. As in all the old stories, the hero's deeds are rooted in loyalty not only to homeland and tribe but also to hearth - essential details that are absent from the dilemmas. It might be objected here that the modern dilemmas are intended not to tell stories but to embody principles or, more properly, the LETTERS f r o m S anta Fe page seve n �A PERVASIVE MENTALITY OF NONDIRECTIVENESS AND SUBJECTIVENESS DICTATES THAT WE DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT TO IMPOSE OUR VALUES ON OUR CHILDREN. AND CONSEQUENTLY, WE ARE FORCED TO CREATE THE FICTION THAT EACH CHILD IS IN HIS OWN RIGHT A MINIATURE SOCRATES. pa ge e i g h t - clash of principles: property rights, for example, versus the value of a human life, with the nod presumably going to the more universal value. But this is precisely the point I wish to make, for what is implied in this approach is that particular loves and loyalties - the kind that make for a good story - are largely irrelevant to moral issues. One can somehow dispense with the prelude of moral particularities and leap right into the arena of universal principles. The assumption is that the kernel of good moral judgment lies in abstract devotion to abstract principles. Moreover, there is the suggestion that devotion to father and mother or attachment between wife and husband may have nothing to do with the pursuit of justice. As in so much contemporary psychology, the central concern is with the autonomous individual. The third difference between the old stories and the new dilemmas is that the new stories, properly speaking, d o not have endings. They are open-ended, unfinished. They await your judgment. What should the shelter survivors do next? You decide. Was Heinz right to steal the drug? You decide. There is, in short, no sense that the story is ever complete or definitive. It's up for grabs and will be again n ext year with the next class. You can do what you want with these stories; you cannot with The Odyssey. There is no sense of a life fully lived or a mission completed. All of w hich amounts to saying that they are not stories after all. The old storytelling approach to moral education has been replaced with something new. The new approach is one from which the concepts of character and virtue are entirely missing. From its point of view, the life of a man is envisioned not as a personal story in which accumulated habits and actions may eventually harden into virtue or vice, but as a disconnected series of ethical and other dilemmas - all amenable to rational solution. If we return to the heroic, classical, and Christian stories, we can see how stark this contrast is and how radically novel the new approach is. And although the current techniques of moral education are largely the offspring of psychologists, we may note that the ancients had a more profound grasp of the psychology underlying moral education. The telling of stories - as opposed to the presentation of open-ended dilemmas - implies first of all that adults have something to pass on to children, a valuable inheritance that children might not come by on their own. This is easy enough to accept about other cultures... but when it comes to our own, a certain inhibition against cultural transmission sets in. A pervasive mentality of nondirectiveness and subjectiveness dictates that we don't have the right to impose our values on our children. And consequently, we are forced to create the fiction that each child is in his own right a miniature Socrates. The traditional view is tha t adults do possess a moral treasure, and that to deprive children of it would in itself show a lack of virtue. We do not, to draw a rough analogy, wait until o ur children h ave reached the age of reason before suggesting that they brush their teeth. But sooner or later children will be able to figure out for themselves that brushing is a prudent practice. This is not necessarily L E TTER S f rom Sa n ta F e Fa ll 1992 �true of moral practices. The moral treasure can be acquired only in a certain way . And if it is not obtained in that way, it is not possessed at all. This is why Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics. And why Plato maintained that the well-bred youth is nurtured from his earliest days to love the Good and the Beautiful "so that when Reason at length comes to him, then bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her." Just Sentiments There is little chance that one who does not learn proper affections and just sentiments as a child will ever fully comprehend them. His knowledge, in short, will always be limited. What he can know will be determined by his sentiments, by dispositions and inclinations learned in childhood. A person who is not well habituated to virtue may come upon the fundamental ·principles of ethics, but he may never be able to grasp them properly. He comes upon them like an anthropologist stumbling upon tribal customs . He can describe them, write about them, analyze them, but he does not know them as an initiate knows them - even though the things he observes are his own cultural values. One cannot begin to understand the moral life until one begins to live it. Consequently, the autonomous moral explorer, because of his detached stance, is in no position to appreciate the practice of virtue, let alone practice it himself. What, then, is the proper form of education in regard to morality? It is, necessarily, an initiation, "men Fall 1 9 9 2 transmitting manhood to men," as C. S. Lewis puts it. And this is best accomplished not by direct moral exhortation but indirectly through example and practice. One cannot have classes in moral education. It is, rather, more like an apprentice learning from a master. "Lewis, like Aristotle," writes Gilbert Meilander, "believes that moral principles are learned indirectly from others around us, who serve as exemplars. And he, again like Aristotle, suggests that it will be extremely difficult to develop virtuous individuals apart from a virtuous society." Yet, even in the most virtuous of societies, adults, recognizing their own shortcomings, have seen the need to point to examples of moral wisdom and moral courage beyond themselves . Hence the reliance on heroic stories as the embodiment of cultural ideals. When virtues have fallen into desuetude, the need for stories about virtuous and courageous men, women, and children becomes more acute. A ware of this, Lewis created in The Chronicles of Narnia a literature of virtue of the type that can be considered both exemplar of and preparation for a mature morality. The Narnia Chonicles cerLETTERS from Santa F e pa g e nin e �FOR CLASSICAL AND HEROIC SOCIETIES AND FOR THOSE THAT SUSTAIN THOSE TRADITIONS, MORALITY IS NOT A MATTER OF FOLLOWING RULES OR MAKING RULES; IT HAS TO DO WITH ACQUIRING VIRTUE. p age t en -- tainly seem to embody Aristotle's dictum that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. But if heroic stories provide examples, we need to ask examples of what? It would be a mistake to look upon the heroes of myth and epic as examples of autonomous moral agents or inventors of new moralities (as Nietzsche did), just as it would be a mistake to look upon them as stoic rule-abiders. The heroes of such stories are not moral philosophers, nor are they stoic. They are virtuous, or they strive to be virtuous. For classical and heroic societies and for those that sustain those traditions, morality is not a matter of following rules or making rules; it has to do with acquiring virtue. The virtues displayed by Achilles are what hold our attention, not any set of maxims he may expound. It is his loyalty to his friends that matters, not his loyalty to principle. Virtues are displayed in his actions, not only in what he says. The heroic man is not a moral pioneer who charts new ethics; rather, he is someone who does what ought to be done. Even in the Gospel stories, the heroic theme is predominant. As I have written elsewhere, "there is nothing in Christ's attitude about himself to suggest that he saw himself mainly as a teacher. There is a strong suggestion that Jesus looked upon himself as someone who had a job to do. And the quality of that task was not unlike the quest of a Greek or Roman hero." Christ does what is required. He comes to do the will of him by whom he was sent. He lays down his life for his friends, not for the sake of a principle. Indeed, in the heroic literature there is usually very little question A Vision of Life Stories of virtue, courage and justice can and should play a central part in the formation of good habit, that is, in the formation of character. Stories provide a way of habitua ting children to virtue. They h elp to instill proper sentiments. They reinforce indirectly the more explicit moral teaching of family, church and school. They provide also a defense against the relentless process of desensitization tha t goes on in modern societies. And they provide a standard against which erosion of standards can be measured. In addition, stories expand the imagination. Moral development is not simply a m atter of becoming L E TT E R S fro m Sa n t a Fe F a/1 1992 about what has to be done (most of the moral dilemmas in the Gospels are posed by the Pharisees); the question is whether the hero can resist temptation and do what he ought to do. Will his training in the virtues see him through? What is revealed in heroic stories is a profoundly realistic appraisal of behavior under conditions of combat when it is dangerous to act as one ought or a price will have to be paid. When the hero is weary, outnumbered or alone, when his resources are depleted or temptation is overwhelming, he does better to rely on his acquired virtue than on his knack for moral philosophy. Likewise, most of us are thrown into situations where there is little time to weigh the moral pros and cons. Then, the best question we can ask is, what do good men and women do in such situations? We are more likely to find an answer to that question if our training includes a thorough exposure to stories of virtue. �more rational or acquiring decisionmaking skills. It has to do with vision, the way one looks at life. Indeed, moral evil and sin are sometimes described by theologians as an inability to see rightly. Conversely, moral improvement is often described (by very ordinary people as well as theologians) as the result of seeing things in a different light or seeing them for the first time. "I was blind but now I see" is more than a line from an old hymn; it is the way a great many people look at their moral growth. It is therefore entirely inadequate to explain morality in terms of developmental stages. The transformation of the moral life is rarely effected without a transformation of imagination. It follows that one of the central tasks of moral education is to nourish the imagination with rich and powerful images of the kind found in stories, myths, poems, biography, and drama. If we wish our children to grow up with a deep and adequate vision of life, we must provide a rich fund for them to draw on. old epics the superheros' qualities do not end with raw power. Moral literature need not be of epic proportions. There is also a place for stories of manners and duty, decency and virtue, loyalty and friendship on a less epic scale-stories that say, in effect: However ordinary people actually behave toward one another, this is how they ought to behave. The Little House on the Prairie, The Wind in the Willows, and The Hobbit (a combination of heroism and horniness) come to mind as examples of this type of literature. Younger children need stories that are similar but much shorter and can be told orally. It might be a mistake to inundate a child with too many stories. But it is important that the right kind of stories be repeated over and over until they are nearly learned by heart. After all, if repetition were not such an effective technique in the education of habits, we can be certain that the advertisers would long since have ceased to employ it. Pure Hearts and Kindly Kings Not just any stories will do, however. Though realistic stories about boys and girls just like oneself probably do no harm, they fail to enlarge the imagination in the way that heroic stories do. But we must also be clear about what we mean by a hero. Heroic stories link strength or cunning or resourcefulness with virtue. Galahad's strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure. Beowulf, who has the strength of thirty men in his grip, is also renowned as the "kindest of worldly kings." The cunning of Ulysses is used in the service of loyalty to his men. In the William Kilpatrick is professor of education at Boston College. His latest book, Why Tohnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong (Simon & Schuster, 1992) may well be one of the most powerful, and depressing, books of this decade. This is an excerpt of an article printed in Policy Review. Fall 1 992 LETTERS from Santa F e STORIES PROVIDE A WAY OF HABITUATING CHILDREN TO VIRTUE. page elev e n �TEACHING THE VIRTUES by Christina Hoff Sommers SOCIAL MORALITY IS ONLY HALF OF THE MORAL LIFE; THE OTHER HALF IS PRIVATE MORALITY Not very long ago, I published an article called "Ethics without Virtue" in which I criticized the way ethics is being taught in American colleges. I pointed out that there is an overemphasis on social policy questions, with little or no attention being paid to private morality. I noted that students taking college ethics are debating abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, DNA research, and the ethics of transplant surgery while they learn almost nothing about private decency, honesty, personal responsibility, or honor. Topics such as hypocrisy, self-deception, cruelty or selfishness rarely came up. I argued that the current style of ethics teaching which concentrated so much on social policy was giving students the wrong ideas about ethics. Social morality is only half of the moral life; the other half is private morality. I urged that we attend to both. A colleague of mine did not like what I said. She told me that in her classroom she would continue to focus on issues of social injustice. She taught about women's oppression, corruption in big business, multinational corporations and their transgressions in the Third World-that sort of thing. She said to me, "You are not going to have moral people until you have moral institutions. You will not have moral citizens until you have a moral government." She made it clear that I was wasting time and even doing harm by promoting bourgeois morality and the bourgeois virtues instead of awakening the social conscience of my students. At the end of the semester, she came into my office carrying a stack of exams and looking very upset. "What's wrong?" I asked. "They cheated on their social justice take-home finals. They plagiarized!" More than half of the students in her ethics class had copied long passages from the secondary literature. "What are you going to do?" I asked her. She gave me a self-mocking smile and said, "I'd like to borrow a copy of that article you wrote on ethics without virtue." A Hole in the Moral Ozone There have been major cheating scandals at many of our best universities. A recent survey reported in the Boston Globe says that 75 percent of all high school students admit to cheating; for college students the figure is 50 percent. A U.S. News and World Report survey asked college-age students if they would steal from an employer. Thirty-four percent said they would. Of people forty-five and over, six percent responded in the affirmative. Part of the problem is that so many students come to college dogmatically committed to a moral relativism that offers them no grounds to think that cheating is just wrong. I sometimes play a macabre game with first-year students, trying to find some act they will condemn as morally wrong: Torturing a child. Starving someone to death. Humiliating an invalid in a page tw e lve LETTERS from Santa Fe Fall 1992 �nursing home. The reply is often: "Torture, starvation and humiliation may be bad for you or me, but who are we to say they are bad for someone else?" Not all students are dogmatic relativists; nor are they all cheaters and liars. Even so, it is impossible to deny that there is a great deal of moral drift. The students' ability to arrive at reasonable moral judgments is severely, even bizarrely, affected. A Harvard University professor annually offers a large history class on the Second World War and the rise of the Nazis. Some years back, he was stunned to learn from his teaching assistant that the majority of students in the class did not believe that anyone was really to blame for the Holocaust. The graduate assistant asserted that if these Harvard students were sitting in judgment at Nuremberg they would have let everyone off. No one was to blame. In the students ' minds, the Holocaust was like a natural cataclysm: It was inevitable and unavoidable. The professor refers to his students' attitude about the past as "no-fault history." How Ethics Courses Have Changed First, a bit of history. Let me remind you of how ethics was once taught in American colleges. In the nineteenth century, the ethics course was a high point of college life. It was taken in the senior year, and was usually taught by the president of the college who would uninhibitedly urge the students to become morally better and stronger. The senior ethics course was in fact the culmination of the students' college experience. But as the social sciences began to flourish in the early twentieth century, ethics courses gradually lost prominence until they became just one of several electives offered by philosophy departments. By the mid-1960s, enrollment in courses on moral philosophy reached an all-time low and, as one historian of higher education put it, "college ethics was in deep trouble". At the end of the '60s, there was a rapid turnaround. To the surprise of many a department chair, applied ethics courses suddenly proved to be very popular. Philosophy departments began to attract unprecedented numbers of students to courses in medical ethics, business ethics, ethics for everyday life, ethics for lawyers, for social workers, for nurses, for journalists. More recently, the dubious behavior of some politicians and financiers has added to public concern over ethical standards which in turn has contributed to the feeling that college ethics is needed. Today American colleges and universities are offering thousands of well-attended courses in applied ethics. I too have been teaching applied ethics courses for several years, but my enthusiasm for them tapered off when I saw how the students reacted. I was especially disturbed by comments students made again and again on the course evaluation forms, "I learned there was no such thing as right or wrong, just good or bad arguments." Or, "I learned there is no such thing as morality." I asked myself what it was about these classes that was fostering this sort of moral agnosticism and skepticism. Perhaps the students themFall 1992 r LETTERS from Santa F e IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF A COURSE DEALING WITH HARD AND CONTROVERSIAL CASES, THE CONTEMPORARY STUDENT MAY EASILY FIND THE VERY IDEA OF A STABLE MORAL TRADITION TO BE AN ARCHAIC ILLUSION. pag e thirte e n �--selves were part of the problem. Perhaps it was the high school experience that led them to become moral agnostics. Even so, I felt that my classes were doing nothing to change them. The course I had been giving was altogether typical. At the beginning of the semester we studied a bit of moral theory, going over the strengths and weaknesses of Kantianism, utilitarianism, social contract theory and relativism. We then took up topical moral issues such as abortion, censorship, capital punishment, world hunger, and affirmative action. Naturally, I felt it my job to present careful and well-argued positions on all sides of these popular issues. But this atmosphere of argument and counterargument was reinforcing the idea that all moral questions have at least two sides, i.e., that all of ethics is controversial. Perhaps this reaction is to be expected in any ethics course primarily devoted to issues on which it is natural to have a wide range of disagreement. In a course specifically devoted to dilemmas and hard cases, it is almost impossible not to give the student the impression that ethics itself has no solid foundation. The "Plain Moral Facts" It will, I think, be granted that the average student today does not come to college steeped in a religious or ethical tradition in which he or she has uncritical confidence. In the atmosphere of a course dealing with hard and controversial cases, the contemporary student may easily find the very idea of a stable moral tradition to be an archaic illusion. I am suggesting that we may have some responsibility here for providing the student with what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called "moral common sense." (Sometimes he spoke of "established morality" as it is commonly understood and accepted.) More generally, I am suggesting that we should assess some of the courses we teach for their edificatory effect. Our responsibility as teachers goes beyond purveying information about the leading ethical theories and in developing dialectical skill in moral casuistry. The Philosophy of Virtue If one accepts the idea that moral edification is not an improper desideratum in the teaching of ethics, then the question arises: What sort of course in ethics is effective? What ethical teachings are naturally edificatory? My own experience leads me to recommend a course on the philosophy of virtue. Here, Aristotle is the best place to begin. Philosophers as diverse as Plato, Augustine, Kant and even Mill wrote about vice and virtue. And there is an impressive contemporary literature on the subject. But the locus classicus is Aristotle. Students find a great deal of plausibility in Aristotle's theory of moral education, as well as personal relevance in what he says about courage, generosity, temperance and other virtues. I have found that an exposure to Aristotle makes an immediate inroad on dogmatic relativism, indeed the tendency to dismiss morality as relative to taste or social fashion rapidly diminishes and may vanish altogether. Most students find the idea of developing virtuous character traits naturally .appealing. Once the student becomes engaged with the problem of what kind of pa ge fou r t e en L E TTERS from Santa F e Fall 1992 �person to be, and how to become that kind of person, the problems of ethics become concrete and practical and, for many a student, morality itself is thereafter looked on as a natural and even inescapable personal undertaking. I have not come across students who have taken a course in the philosophy of virtue saying that they have learned there is no such thing as morality. The writings of Aristotle and of other philosophers of virtue are full of argument and controversy, but students who read them with care are not tempted to say they learned "there is no right or wrong, only good or bad arguments." Is There Moral Knowledge? Is there really such a thing as moral knowledge? The reply to that is an emphatic "Yes." Have we not learned a thing or two over the past several thousand years of civilization? To pretend we know nothing about basic decency, about human rights, about vice and virtue, is fatuous or disingenuous. Of course we know that gratuitous cruelty and political repression are wrong, that kindness and political freedom are rightand good. Why should we be the first society in history that finds itself hamstrung in the vital task of passing along its moral tradition to the next generation? Some opponents of directive moraFeducation argue that it could be a form of brainwashing. That is a pernicious confusion. To brainwash is to diminish someone's capacity for reasoned judgment It is perversely misleading to say that helping children to develop habits of truth telling or fair play threatens their ability to make reasoned choices. Quite the contrary: Good moral habits enhance one's capacity for ration.al judgments. The paralyzing fear of indoctrinating children is even greater in high schools than it is in elementary schools. One favored teaching technique, allegedly avoiding indoctrination, is dilemma ethics. Children are presented with abstract moral dilemmas: Seven people are in a lifeboat with provisions for four-what should they do? Or Lawrence Kohlberg's famous case of Heinz and the stolen drug. Should the indigent Heinz, whose dying wife WHY SHOULD WE BE THE FIRST SOCIETY IN HISTORY THAT FINDS ITSELF HAMSTRUNG IN THE VITAL TASK OF PASSING ALONG ITS MORAL TRADITIONS TO THE NEXT GENERATION? needs medicine, steal it? When high school students study ethics at all, it is usually in the form of pondering such dilemmas or in the form of debates on social issues: abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment and the like. Directive moral education is out of favor. Storytelling is out of fashion. Fall 1992 LETTERS from S a nta Fe pag e f ift e en �THE BEST MORAL TEACHING INSPIRES STUDENTS BY MAKING THEM KEENLY AWARE THAT THEIR OWN CHARACTER IS AT STAKE. p age s i x t e e n Let's consider for a moment just how the current fashion in dilemmas differs from the older approach to moral education which often used moral tales and parables to instill moral principles in students in the primary grades. Saul Bellow asserts that the survival of Jewish culture would be inconceivable without the stories that gave point and meaning to the Jewish moral tradition. One such story, included in a collection of traditional Jewish tales that Bellow edited, is called "If Not Higher." I sketch it here to contrast the story-approach with the dilemma-approach in primary and secondary education, but the moral of the contrast also applies to the teaching of ethics at the college level as well: There was once a rabbi in a small Jewish village in Russia who vanished every Friday morning for several hours. The devoted villagers boasted that during these hours their rabbi ascended to Heaven to talk with God. A skeptical newcomer arrived in town, determined to discover where the rabbi really was. One Friday morning the newcomer hid near the rabbi's house, watched him rise, say his prayers and put on the clothes of a peasant. He saw him take an ax and go into the forest, chop down a tree and gather a large bundle of wood. Next the rabbi proceeded to a shack in the poorest section of the village in which lived an old woman and her sick son. He left them the wood which was enough for the week. The rabbi then quietly returned to his own house. The story concludes that the newcomer stayed on in the village and became a disciple of the rabbi. And w henever he hears one of his fellow villagers say, "On Friday morning our rabbi ascends all the way to Heaven," the newcomer quietly adds, "If not higher." In a moral dilemma such as Kohlberg's Heinz stealing the drug, or the lifeboat case, there are no obvious heroes or villains. Not only do the characters lack moral personality, but they exist in a vacuum outside of traditions and social arrangements that shape their conduct in the problematic situations confronting them . In a dilemma there is no obvious right and wrong, no clear vice and virtue. The dilemma may engage the students' minds; it only marginally engages their emotions, their moral sensibilities. The issues are finely balanced, listeners are on their own and they individually decide for themselves. As one critic of dilemma ethics has observed, one cannot imagine parents p assing down to their children the tale of Heinz and the stolen drug. By contrast, in the story of the rabbi and the skeptical outsider, it is not up to the listener to decide w hether or not the rabbi did the right thing. The moral message is clear: "Here is a good man-merciful, compassionate and actively helping someone weak and vulnerable. Be like that person." The message is contagiou s. Even the skeptic gets the point. Stories and parables are not always appropriate for high school or college ethics courses, but the literary classics certainly are. To understand King Lear, Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn or Middlemarch requires that the reader have some understanding of (and sympathy with) what the author is saying about the moral ties that bind the characters and that hold in place the social fabric in which they play their roles. Take something like filial obligation. One moral of King Lear is that society cannot survive w hen filial contempt becomes the norm. Literary figures can thus provide students w ith the moral p aradigms that Aristotle thought were essential to moral education. L E TTERS fro m S a n t a Fe F a ll 1992 �I am not suggesting that moral puzzles and dilemmas have no place in the ethics curriculum. To teach something about the logic of moral discourse and the practice of moral reasoning in resolving conflicts of principles is clearly important. But casuistry is not the place to start, and, taken by itself, dilemma ethics tends to give the student the impression that ethical thinking is a lawyer's game. Three Steps Towards Virtue What I am recommending is not new, it has worked before, and it is simple: 1. Schools should have behavior codes that emphasize civility, kindness and honesty. 2. Teachers should not be accused of brainwashing children when they insist on basic civility, decency, honesty and fairness. 3. Children should be told stories that reinforce goodness. In , high school and college, students should be reading, studying and discussing the moral classics. I am suggesting that teachers must help children become acquainted with their moral heritage in literature, in religion and in philosophy. I am suggesting that virtue can be taught, and that effective moral education appeals to the emotions as well as to the mind. The best moral teaching inspires students by making them keenly aware that their own character is at stake. Christina Hoff Sommers is Associate Professor of Philosophy , Clark University. This article is taken from Imprimis, November 1991 . Fa ll 1992 LETT ERS f r om San t a Fe page sevent e e n �LEARNING GOODNESS by James Bond Stockdale I KNEW THAT CIVIC VIRTUE, THE PLACING OF THE VALUE OF THAT SOCIETY ABOVE ONE'S PERSONAL INTERESTS, WAS NOT ONLY ADMIRABLE, IT WAS CRUCIAL TO SELFRESPECT. pa ge e i g h t ee n The best education, the best preparation for a full and successful life surely entails a proper blend of classical and contemporary studies. While we pursue the keys to the kingdom of modernity-studies in political science and economics and high technology-we need to understand the importance of a broad background in the readings of antiquity, those readings that form the basis of our civilization. In times of duress, in war especially, is that classical background important. The Stoics said that "Character is fate." In my life, education has been fate. I became what I learned, or maybe I should say I became the distillation of what fascinated me most as I learned it. Only three years after I left graduate school, I participated in the refounding of my own civilization after doomsday, when the giant doors of an Old World dungeon had slammed shut and locked me and a couple hundred other Americans in-in total silence, in solitary confinement, in leg irons, in blindfolds for w eeks at a time, in antiquity, in a political prison. That refounded civilization became our salvation. Stripped to nothing, nothing but the instincts and intelligence of the ancients, we improvised a communication system dredged up from inklings of a distant past (actually the tap code of Polybius , a second-ce ntury Gree k historian with a fl air for cryptography), and lived on comradeship in a polity tha t would L E TTERS fro m San ta Fe have been a credit to Polybius' Athens. The spiritual power (not necessarily religious) that seeped into us as we surreptitiously joined forces against our common enemy came as a surprise. In my solitude the impact of this unexpected spiritual power sometimes caused me to wonder. Does modernity deaden our noblest impulses? Does it smother or atrophy the power of the human spirit, the power of human nature? Do the readings of ancient times, the classics, serve merely to give us insight into the events of the past? Or do not the texts of those self-contained cultures of antiquity portray human power in all its vibrant potential? Do they not contain evidence of a more imaginative and fundamental grasp of the essence of being human than can be found even in 20th century texts that have since joined the classics on the humanities shelves? In Homer's immortal epic, The Iliad, as Hector is about to leave the gates of Troy to fight Achillesknowing, as he must have known, that he would lose and he would die-he says goodbye to his wife and baby son at the gates, and the baby starts to cry, frightened by the nodding of the plumes on his father' s shining helmet. Some would think the tale of the GreekTrojan War to be an irrelevant relic of bygone days. Some would think it should be stricken from the reading list because it glamorizes war. Some would think that now at last, with rea son to guide us, we can scoff at a warrior's suicidal obligations. But others of us react quite differently, seeing in that scen e a snapshot of the a geless huma n predicament: Hector's duty, his wife's tragedy, Troy's necessity, the Fa /1 199 2 �baby's cry .... My reaction, of course, is the latter, not only because I am a romantic by nature, but because by the time I first read The Iliad I had lived in antiquity (and I am not referring to the lack of electricity or plumbing). I had lived in a selfcontained culture, a prison culture I watched grow among men of goodwill under pressure. I knew what it was to be a human being who could be squashed like a bug without recourse to law, and I knew that the culture, the society, that preserved me had to be preserved or nobody had anything to cling to. I knew that civic virtue, the placing of the value of that society above one's personal interests, was not only admirable, it was crucial to self-respect. And I knew that to preserve that culture, symbolic battles had to be fought before real battles could start. I knew that obligations, particularly love and self-sacrifice, were the glue that made a man whole in this primitive element, and I knew that under the demands of these obligations being "reasonable" was a luxury that often could not be afforded. I also knew during this prison existence that I was being shown something good-that life can have a spiritual content one can almost reach out and touch. I suppose it can always have that, but I was used to the idea of it being fuzzed up, powdered, fluffed, and often ridiculed here in man made modernity, where changing the world takes precedence over understanding it, understanding man himself. The same message comes through in the writings of Fyodor Dostoyevski, Arthur Koestler, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They' ve been where I've been. So had Miguel Cervantes. This future author of Don Quixote was a young officer in the Spanish army taken prisoner after the Battle of Lepanto in the 16th century. He spent seven years in an Algiers political prison. Same story: "Confess your crimes," "Discredit yourself," "Disavow your roots." He was tortured to disavow Christianity and would get amnesty and go home if he would disavow it. I was made much the same offer. I was to disavow "American Imperialism." Good boy, Cervantes, you hung in too. You knew how this age-old game is played. Political prisons are not just sources of fables of the past. They could just as easily inspire the literature of the future. Unable to tolerate dissent, totalitarian governments must have them. How else to suppress and discredit their enemies within? You know, the life of the mind is a wonder-the life of the mind in solitude, the life of the mind in extremis, the life of the mind when the body's nervous system is under attack. If you want to break a man's spirit, and if your victim's will is strong, you've got to get physical. Sometimes you might think that you can unhinge strong people with psychological mumbo jumbo. Sorry, there is no such thing as brainwashing. But even physical hammering will not alone change all hard-set attitudes. The real method to jellify those attitudes, that is, to extract those seemingly heartfelt "confessions," is the artful and long-term imposition of fear and guilt. Solitary confinement and tourniquet-tight rope bindings are mere catalysts for the fear and guilt conditioning. Remember, I'm talking about strong-willed victims. They're going to make you hurt F a /119 92 LETT E RS f rom Sant a Fe pa ge n int ee n �them. They know from experience that the compliance extracted by brute force is in no way so spiritually damaging as that given away on a mere threat. And they have learned from experience that in the end it is a spiritual battle. The leak in the dike always starts from within. How does the mind of the victim respond to these challenges? First, regarding the loneliness, the solitude: It's not as bad as you think. Don't forget, the time factor is stretched out way beyond most three to four weeks. It ends when it suddenly dawns on him that he'll have no such luck; he's stuck with himself. Almost everybody then sets himself up in a ritualistic life. Something deep-seated in human nature likes, feels safe with, repetition-a time for this, and a time for that, repeated regularly every day. You get to thinking about how liturgies of worship must have gotten started in some prehistoric clan. Your mind drifts to many anthropological questions. How do institutions and governments get "THE CHALLENGE OF EDUCATION IS NOT TO PREPARE A PERSON FOR SUCCESS, BUT TO PREPARE HIM FOR FAILURE." IT IS IN DISASTER, NOT SUCCESS, THAT THE HEROES AND THE BUMS REALLY GET SORTED OUT page t we n t y psychological experiments. There was a professor at Stanford who got national attention several years ago for locking some students in the basement of a library for a few days, and then writing a book about his observations of their behavior. I laughed when I read it. You don't know the first thing about a person until he has been in the cooler for a couple of months. He has to first go through the stage when he is preoccupied with going insane. That's a normal prelude without lasting significance. Figure on that phase lasting for the first started? Are they the product of a man on a white horse? Does some powerful person impose rule: "We gotta get organized; here are the tribe's rules; break'em and I'll cave your skull in." I doubt it. When you're scared, you don't feel the urge to take charge. And when you 're expected to, by virtue of heredity in clan or tribe, or seniority, for sure, among military prisoners, on first contact you seem compelled to say something becoming a well-brought-up American boy, like: "In these circumstances when you are being threatened or tor- LETTERS f r o m S a n ta F e F a ll 1 9 92 �tured to do things that offend your very being, I can't bring myself to order you to do this or that. Everyone must have the autonomy to choose the best alternatives facing him. Do the best you can and God bless you." How civilized and compassionate! But it will never sell. Those fine young people in trouble won't let you get away with that. Their response is sure to be something like this: "You have no right to piously tell us each to seek out the good, and then back out of the picture . You are in charge here, and it's your duty to tell us what the good is. We deserve to sleep at night, feeling that at least we're doing something right in all hewing to what our leader says . We deserve the self-respect that comes with knowing we are resisting in an organized manner. We expect you to tell us to take torture before we comply with any of their demands. Give us the list!" There's nothing rational about such a reaction. Anybody could see that we probably weren't going to win the battle. But on the other hand, as the veteran prisoner Fyodor Dostoyevski aptly noted, "Man's most deep desires in life under pressure are not for a rationally advantageous choice, but for an independent choice." But believe it or not, as time wears on in solitary you get better at dealing with these matters. The ultimate accommodation with them comes from focusing intensely on leading a very, very clean and honest life, mentally and otherwiseand you find yourself being consumed in a strange, lasting and unexpected highmindedness. By this, I don't mean "joyfulness," and I particularly don't mean "optimism." Fa ll 1992 What I mean by the setting in of highmindedness is the gradual erosion of natural selfishness among people of goodwill facing a common danger over time. The more intense the common danger, the quicker the "me-first" selfishness melts. In our situation, at about the two-year point, I believe most of us were thinking of that faceless friend next door-the sole point of contact we had with our civilization, that lovely intricate human thing we had never seen-in terms of love in the highest sense. By later comparing notes with others, I found I was not alone in becoming so noble and righteous in that solitude that I could hardly stand myself. People would willingly absorb physical punishment rather than let it fall to their comrades; questions arose in my mind about the validity of the much-talked about instinct of selfpreservation. Solzhenitsyn describes his feelings of high-mindedness in his Gulag writings in words like these: It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between classes nor between political parties but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, "Thank you, prison, for having been in my life." LETTERS from Santa Fe pa ge twe nty- one �Was I a victim? Not when I became fully engaged, got into the life of unity with comrades, helping others, and being encouraged by them. So, many times, I would find myself whispering to myself after an exhilarating wall-tap message exchange: "I am right where I belong; I am right where I was meant to be." In all honesty, I say to myself, "What a wonderful life I have led." No two of us are the same, but to me the wonder of my life is in escaping the life Captain McWhirr had programmed for himself in Joseph Conrad's typhoon: "to go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, of terror." And the author adds, "There are on sea and land such men thus fortunate-or thus disdained-by destiny .. ." Phil Rhinelander, my philosophy mentor at Stanford, died a short time ago. We were preparing a book together, and consequently I was with him almost every day at the last. One of the last things we talked about was our agreement on a point we had each separately stated publicly: "The challenge of edupage t wen t y- t w o LETTERS from San t a Fe cation is not to prepare a person for success, but to prepare him for failure." It is in disaster, not success, that the heroes and the bums really get sorted out. Always striving for true education is the best insurance against losing your bearings, your perspective, in the fact of disaster, in the face of failure. I came home from prison to discover something I had forgotten; in my old Webster's collegiate dictionary I had pasted a quotation from Aristotle: "Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity." I had lived in the truth of that for all those years. Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale served for 34 years as a Navy officer. Shot down over North Vietnam, he was the senior Navy prisoner of war in Hanoi for eight years. He is a former president of the Naval War College and currently a Senior Research Fellow at The Hoover Institution. Recently a candidate for the Vice President of the U. S., Adm. Stockdale was on the St. John's College Board of Visitors and Governors from 1981 to 1987. This is an excerpt of a speech he gave in 1987. Fall 1 992 �ANNOUNCEMENTS Institute for the Study of Eastern Classics at St. John's College Santa Fe, New Mexico The institute offers a one-year, graduate level, certificate program in the classic texts of India and China. Among the many works to be read are: Rgveda, Mahabharata, Upani~ads, Bhagavadglta, Analects of Confucius, I Ching, Tao-te Ching, Writings of Mo Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Han Pei Tzu. Participants will also choose a language tutorial in Classical Chinese or Sanskirt. All classes will be conducted by discussion and are scheduled twice weekly in the late afternoon and evening. Tuition is $1,500 for each semester. For further information write to: Institute for the Study of Eastern Classics St. John's College 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599 "Zr 505/988-4361, Fax 505/989-9269 What college has produced two Rhodes Scholars in three years from a student body of less than 1000? We are proud to announce that St. John's College senior Jeffrey Seidman has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. Mr. Seidman is the second Rhodes Scholar selected from the college in the past three years. Mr. Seidman will study philosophy, economics and politics at Oxford and intends eventually to teach philosophy at the college level. We are very grateful to the Laurel Foundation for their generous support of LETTERS from Santa Fe. r---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------, To our readers, If you know someone who might be interested in receiving information regarding the programs offered at St. John's College please fill out this form and return it to St. John's College, 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599. Name of interested person (s) Address Possible area(s) of interest- D Undergraduate D Graduate D Eastern Studies Thank you, f}L f~ / John Agresto President, Santa Fe F al l 1 99 2 LETT E R S fro m Santa Fe pa g e t we nt y - three I I I I I I I I I I I �PROFILE St. John's College: Is an independent, non-sectarian, four-year liberal arts college Founded: Established in 1696 in Annapolis, Maryland, as King William's School and chartered in 1784 as St. John's College. Great Books Program adopted 1937. Second campus in Santa Fe opened in 1964. Curriculum: An integrated, four-year, all-required liberal arts and science program based on reading and discussing, in loosely chronological order, the great books of Western civilization. The program requires four years of foreign language, four years of mathematics, three years of laboratory science, and one year of music. Approach: Tutorials, laboratories, and seminars requiring intense participation replace more traditional lectures. Classes are very small. Student/Faculty ratio is 8:1. Degrees Granted: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. Master of Arts in Liberal Studies. Student Body: Enrollment is limited to about 400 students on each campus. Current freshman class made up of 55% men and 45 % women, from 30 states and several foreign countries. Sixty-five percent receive financial aid. Students may transfer between the Santa Fe and Annapolis campuses. Alumni Careers: Education - 21 %, Business - 20 %, Law - 10%, Visual and Performing Arts - 9%, Medicine - 7%, Science and Engineering - 7%, Computer Science - 6%, Writing and Publishing - 5%. Graduate Institute: The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education is an interdisciplinary master's degree program based on the same principles as the undergraduate program. Offered on both campuses year-round. Readers of the newsletter may be especially interested in applying for our summer session. For more information please contact the Graduate Institute in Santa Fe (505) 982-3691 ext. 249 or in Annapolis (301) 263 - 2371. LETTERS from Santa Fe St. John's College 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599 ADDRESS CORRECTION REQUESTED Bulk Rate U.S. Postage PAID Non-Profit Organization Permit No. 231 Santa Fe, NM � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe Description An account of the resource A newsletter published by the Santa Fe President's Office that includes articles about liberal education. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 24 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe, Fall 1992 Description An account of the resource Letters from Santa Fe, St. John’s College—Santa Fe, New Mexico, Fall 1992 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Agresto, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John’s College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Oldenquist, Andrew Delattre, Edwin J. Kilpatrick, William Kirk Sommers, Christina Hoff Stockdale, James B. Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Letters_from_SF_1992_Fall Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/62e4158f53c67142ba800a418192765a.pdf be1053d3539eb8d27d0856e35781d8c6 PDF Text Text LETTERSJrom Santa Fe St. John's College-Santa Fe, New Mexico Fall 1993 RESEARCH AND TEACHING INSIDE THE IMPACT OF SPECIALIZATION page 2 THE FUTURE OF TEACHING pages THE TYRANNICAL MACHINE page9 THE CHARGE THAT RESEARCH IS NARROW AND OPAQUE IS DECADES OUT OF DATE page 14 SENSE AND NONSENSE page 17 Something has happened to teaching. Simply put, at some point, I know not when, it stopped being the highest function and core calling of many professors. At some point it dawned on administrators in higher education that it was easier to count books and articles in refereed journals, or check off the number of times an article was cited elsewhere, than make the difficult judgments required on something as subjective as good teaching. As everyone now knows, the money and the rewards are less in teaching than in research and publishing. My favorite example is not actually from the U.S. but from a university in Mexico City where, as one of our tutors at St. John's discovered, you get points for various activities. For instance, you will get 3300 points for publishing a research paper. For teaching a course for one semester, you will get 210 points. For writing a textbook or a computer package, you will get 6600 points. For directing a thesis, you will get 220 points. For getting a patent you will get almost 7000 points; if you're on a thesis committee, merely 60. And he who wraps up the most points gets the promotion and the higher pay. The status of teaching in America may not be as cut and dried as it is south of the border, but I recently received a request from a very good foundation for a list of the best teachers of history here at my college. Why? To reward them with a year off from classroom teaching. The personnel offices of big corporations repeatedly say how highly they value a liberal arts education, and then consistently hire people with technical or business degrees. So also do universities consistently proclaim their devotion to good teaching and consistently reward something else. This emphasis on the value of research is particularly odd in the humanities, where research, rather than widening our view of important matters, has probably subtracted from the sum of human knowledge. I'm not going to get into an argument over whether or not some research scholarship does not, at times, prove a great benefit for classroom teachingof course it might. Or that researchers are not great teachers--0f course some are. All I mean to say is the obvious as well as the empirically verifiable: that less time is spent on teaching today than before, that fewer university rewards are given for teaching, and that where there are great scholar-teachers, such benefits as have accrued have accrued to their scholarship, and often works to the detriment of their hours in the classroom. With the selection of the articles in this issue, I have tried to present something of the history of the conflict between research and teaching as well as anecdotal evidence of the problems it leaves in its wake. �THE IMPACT OF SPECIALIZATION by Frederick Rudolph Subjects and courses were often offered not because students wanted or needed them but because an essentially autonomous group of academic professionals could and would teach nothing else. pa ge t wo The American liberal arts college was of pre-industrial origin. Its concern with the education of gentlemen, its lack of sympathy with many of the egalitarian and exploitive impulses of the age, and its Christian orientation suffused the classical curriculum and the humanistic style of the old colleges. The American university, on the other hand, was a child of the new order, a product of the Industrial Revolution eager to play a central role in the refinement and specialization of knowledge and in the training of cadres of experts to keep the machinery of society running. Once the university began to d efine the mission of American hig her ed uca ti on, the colleges were essentially contrary institutions, evoking the old values, suspicious of much that specialization celebrated , prefe rring to r egard higher education as primarily a center for humanistic study, social critici s m , and e thical concern. Increasingly the colleges found themselves at a disadvantage, even anachronistic in an age that was being defin e d by speciali s t s, corporate bureaucracies, g rowth, and consolidation. The curricular battles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must in some ways be seen as s truggles between the demands and needs of the professionals- including the professional academicians- and the L E TT E R S fr om S anta Fe traditional concerns and purposes of the colleges as sources of enlightened and responsible community leadership. The impact of the universities on the undergraduate curriculum was devastating. They promoted old vocations learned on the job into new professions, certified by the universities' own professional schools. They dignified old utilities with new learning, revealing an appetite for new subjects and a receptivity to applied science that allied them openly with the industrial order. They identified themselves as agents of social mobility by offering the courses that appeared to lead the way into corporate and government bureaucracies. In asserting the equality of all subjects, as did Ezra Cornell and Charles William Eliot each in his own way, they invited an expanding clientele to join them-the universities-in their own version of the meritocratic bureaucratic system. It is no wonder that it wa s difficult to keep a clear vision of purpose, to give order to academic priorities, or even to remember that higher education had once revealed more concern for the conduct of society than for the ambitions of individual men, more interest in shaping a human community than in shaping individual careers. In an a tmosphere of confused purpose, jumbled priorities, and forgetfulness, the univ ersities and the colleges that aped them had no difficulty in offering a course of study equ ally confused, jumbled, and forgetful. ***** Perhaps this is the place to dispel the false dich o tomy tha t often clouds any con sideration of the useful a nd the liberal in hig h er F a ll 199 3 �education. Liberal studies were from the beginning eminently useful even if they were not specific in their vocational focus. The skills and attitudes of an educated man were expected to be vocationally useful. It was not enough, however, for a liberal study to be useful; it also had to possess the dimension that made it liberal. The vocational subjects, the professional curriculum, the technical utilities that made their way into the colleges could not justify their liberal pretensions without providing that "something else" that differentiated liberal studies from the rest. What was that something else? The difference between a liberal subject and one that was not was the degree to which there was an emphasis on cognitive skills, rational analysis, the stuff it took to be communicative-clear, expressive, imaginative. A liberal course of study invited contemplation, a look inward, an assessment, even a reassessment of self and society. "Something" went on in the old colleges that helped their graduates to be recognized as possessing a certain style, a moral stance, a reliability in taste and values, a capacity to analyze and even to imagine derived from that amalgam of experiences known as "going to college." It was precisely that "something" that liberal arts colleges nurtured. The growth of professionalism changed who went to college, what they sought there, and who taught there. The consequences for liberal learning, associated as it was with an earlier professionalism, a narrow governing elite, and a less secular orientation, were dramatic-challenging and subversive but not fatal, for Fa /1 1993 much was missing in the new order, as attractive as its dynamism and energy and authority may have been. And that "much" included a social ethic, an element of human concern and regard for community. The professionalization of the professors and the proliferation of academic specialists helped to fuel the institutional rivalries that made academic life very much like industrial life. The competition for professors, the rivalries between departments, the focus on size and numbers and growth, and the appearance of endless numbers of specialists in a growing number of departments led to a kind of acquisitiveness and imperialism that made students both objects of conquest and victims of professional indifference. To that end the curriculum was an expression of the power of the professional academicians. Subjects a nd courses were often offered not because students wanted or needed them but because an essentially autonomous group of academic professionals could and would t eac h nothin g e l se. To co mpen sate for the unpalatable offerings of one kind of academic specialist, the institutions acknowledged their responsibilities to the student clients and the need to bolster enrollments by offering students what they wanted in the way of LETTER S from S anta Fe undemanding courses and careeroriented programs in the neoprofessional and technical studies. Ironically, when the professors abandoned a curriculum that they thought students needed, they substituted for it one that, instead, catered either to what the professors needed or what the students wanted. The results confirmed the authority of the professors and students but they robbed the curriculum of any authority at all. The reaction of students to all this activity in the curriculum was brilliant. They concluded that the curriculum really didn't matter. Their response was an accelerating growth of the extracurriculum, an explosion of fraternities, sororities, and athletic teams that in one sense over w helmed the course of study. Nothing is more revealing of the depth of this point of view than the failed effort of many institutions, including Harvard in the 1890s, to reduce the course to three years. Students would have none of it: they were not there for the courses. They were there for the fun, the sociability, the experiences that gave shape to character, personality, and individual promise. Even as the professional academicians were insinuating intellectual focus into the curriculum, moving away from values and ethics and all those s ticky questions that the classical college was comfortable with, the students were relocating such concerns in their fraternities and athletic teams. It would be embarrassing if widely known, but the heir to Mark Hopkin's mantle was not the new professional professor of philosophy but the football p age thr ee �coach. An elective curriculum allowed students to get what they wanted, but what they wanted was not really very much, since they had long since learned that the jobs they would one day hold depended far less on the courses they took than on the firmness of their handshake and the directness of their eye. * * * ** Out there in the real world employers who say that they prefer business or engineering majors really do not care very much about the technical content of undergraduate education. They know as well as the rest of us that most of what makes a person effective on the job is learned on the job, something that anyone with a Ph.D. degree knows without having to be told. What that business or engineering major means to an employer is that the young man or woman in question has not been contaminated by the liberal arts, subverted by the liberal ethos. If the American college graduate is weak in analysis and the spirit of inquiry, unable to communicate in his own or any other language clearly and effectively, and with it all, ethically unsure and ignorant of his own history and culture, the responsibility lies not with the schools or with college and university presidents, nor with the politicians or the people, but with the professors. They have the power to change the curriculum. They should not be allowed to get away with pointing the finger of responsibility elsewhere. Professionalism among the professors, their narrow specialization, the complete neglect in their training of any concern with teaching or with any professional responsibility other than to scholarship, are conditions that inhibit optimism about whether even liberal arts colleges can in fact teach liberally. Too many teachers of liberal subjects are so far gone into specialization and into the scientific understanding of their specialties that the challenges of teaching, of bringing students into a humanistic relationship with their subjects, are beyond their interest or capacity. And, these days, the uncertainties of the academic job market and the territorial behavior that goes along with academic departments all but disqualify the professors from thinking creatively and responsibly about what a comprehensive and coherent college education ought to be. But, this is where any reform must begin. The professors have the power. They must be encouraged to use it responsibly. Excerpted from: "The Power of Professors: The Impact of Specialization and Professionalization on the Curriculum" that originally appeared in Change magazine, May/June 1984. SCHOLARS AND SOCIETY From "Scholars and Society," a speech by Lynne Cheney, former chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities, to the American Council of Learned Societies, New York, April 15, 1988. When new theoretical interests are added to specialization, the problem of communication becomes even more severe. Not only does the public fail to understand us; sometimes we don't even understand each other. Last month, a professor at South Puget Sound Community College handed me a current issue of a well-known scholarly journal. He wanted to point out a long article in it that he regarded as largely impenetrable. One sentence in the article-part of an explanation for a three-part chart-reads as follows: Second, the denotative-connotative-stereoscopic triplet is indebted to David Bleich's idea of language as a Casirerian "symbolic form" capable of creating knowledge that is "always a re-cognition because it is a seeing through one perspective superimposed in [sic] another in such a way that the one perspective does not appear to be prior to the other" (a process described by Jean Piaget as "the internal reciprocal assimilation of schemata"), the kind of knowledge occasioned "when we 'get' a joke; more specifically and pertinently, such "stereoscopic knowledge" involves language evoking the "perspectival possibilities" of always interdependent denotation and connotation." The Puget Sound professor would probably not have taken the trouble to point out this article, except for the fact that its topic is how to teach English. p age fo ur LETTERS f r o m S anta F e F a /11993 �I THE FUTURE OF TEACHING by William Arrowsmith abandon liberal education so that specialization can begin with matriculation, and when he advocates this in order to reconcile the conflicting claims of research and teaching, it should be obvious even to the skeptical that education is being strangled in its citadel, and strangled furthermore on behalf of the crassest technocracy. I find it difficult to imagine the rationalization of these salaried wardens of a great, ecumenical tradition, who apparently view themselves and the institutions they administer as mere servants of national and professional interests. I am suggesting what will doubtless seem paradox or treason: There is no necessary link between scholarship and education, or between research and culture, and in actual practice scholarship is no longer a significant educational force . Scholars, to be sure, are unprecedentedly powerful, but their power is professional and technocratic; as educators they have been eagerly disqualifying themselves for more than a century, and their disqualification is now nearly total. The scholar has disowned the student-that is, the student who is not a potential scholar-and the student has reasonably retaliated by abandoning the scholar. This, I believe, is the only natural reading of what I take to be a momentous event: the secession of the student from the institutions of higher learning on the grounds that they no longer educate and are therefore, in his word, irrelevant. By making education the slave of scholarship, the university has renounced its responsibility to human culture and its old proud claim to possess, as educator and molder of men, an ecumenical function. It has disowned in short what teaching has always meant; a care and concern for the future of man, a Platonic love of the species, not for what it is, but what it might be. It is a momentous refusal. I do not exaggerate. When the president of Cornell seriously proposes that the university should ** * ** The Colleges I can think of no more conspicuous failure of leadership than in the liberal arts colleges. With a few notable exceptions, the record of F all 1 993 L E TTERS from S an f a Fe ***** What students want is not necessarily what they need; but in this case it is the students who are right and the universities that are wrong . Here, unmistakably, we have students concerned to ask the crucial questions-identity, meaning, right and wrong, the good lifeand they get in response not bread but a stone. Almost without exception the response of the universities to this profound hunger for education, for compelling examples of human courage and compassionate intelligence, has been mean, parochial, uncomprehending or cold. Above all, cold. Why, you ask, is teaching held in contempt? Because it has become contemptible by indifference. Teaching has been fatally trivialized by scholarship which has become trivial. ... we have students concerned to ask the crucial questions-identity, meaning, right and wrong, the good lifeand they get in response not bread but a stone. pa ge f i ve �the college is one of failure, at least if judged by its own claims . Whatever else it may be, Socratic it is not, in faculty, in style, in results. This I take to be a matter of fact. Certainly it is hard to imagine a more damningly documented indictment of the liberal arts college than that of the Jacob study, with its bleak conclusion that, apart from three or four colleges, the effect of college teaching on student values is simply nil, zero, and that what from within . They have recruited their faculties heavily from the major graduate institutions, and these recruits have inevitably altered the tone and finally the function of the colleges. There has doubtless been pressure from the graduate schools, but for the most part the colleges have consented to the process. And they are now in the ludicrous position of proudly claiming, on the one hand, that seventy-odd percent of their gradu- small change occurs comes from the student subculture. The conclusion is the more devastating because it is precisely on the claim to teach that the American college stakes its case. Here-in low studentteacher ratios, in college plans, tutorials, etc.-it has spent its money and ingenuity, and it is here that its failure has been spectacular. Why? In my opinion, the colleges have failed as teaching institutions because they have been subverted ates go on to graduate or professional schools, and, on the other, of complaining that they are being turned into prep schools for graduate study. Gentility and snobbery have played a large part in this subversion, as well as the hunger for academic respectability which is now firmly linked to the business of research . Instead of cleaving to the Socratic pretensions and traditions, the colleges have tended instead to become petty universities, differing from the universities only in a slightly higher regard for the teacher and a corresponding tolerance of the student. If the wealthier colleges have managed to recruit able faculty, the poor colleges have fared badly, recruiting second-and third-rate Ph.D.'s, who for their part regard the college as an academic boondocks and lust for the day when they can return to the urban Edens of research. In the meantime they teach the only thing they knowtechnical expertise-and thereby both corrupt their students and refuse their Socratic opportunities. The colleges, in short, have yoked themselves to Pharaoh's chariot and, if they regret their loss of function, they have only themselves to blame. A handful of small colleges have dared to break the bond of snobbery and respectability that binds the college to the university, and they have done so simply by daring to profess the values they assert and finding teachers who profess them too. I am, of course, in violent disagreement with those who believe that "the selective liberal arts colleges of the future ... must become first-rate preparatory colleges for graduate education." If we believe that the liberal traditions of the colleges are viable and that the college may have a higher function than feeding professional schools, then we must set about saving it. If I am right, the trouble with the colleges is that they recruit their faculties from uncongenial sources; the well is poisoned. By imitating the universities, the colleges have everything to lose and nothing to gain; neither their funds nor their human resources are adequate to the competition. My solution is dramatically simple. Let the colleges go into p age s i x L E TTERS fro m Sa nt a F e Sp r i n g 1 9 9 3 �business on their own, against the graduate universities; let them form their own league as it were and train the kind of man they cannot expect to recruit from the universities. I am aware that such federations are in the air, and perhaps already exist; but I am emphatically not suggesting federation on the principle of beating the graduate schools at their own game. It should be a different game altogether, designed to produce men who do not think it beneath their dignity to educate others; men in whom the general civilized intelligence survives; humanists with a concern for men; scholars convinced that the world needs humane knowledge as never before. Ideally, I think, it would seek to involve its students in the real world, and it would surely seek real association with the vocations and professions. But its primary purpose would be to produce truly educated graduates as well as teachers to whom it could reasonably entrust the crucial task of providing models for those who wanted to become civilized men instead of scholars. I also believe that a formidable but generous enterprise helps to summon large behavior into being, and that the immense task of building institutions worthy of his love and learning might do much to create the kind of man who is missing. Enterprises which require humanity are the first prerequisite for a greater humanity. Men must use themselves significantly in order to grow. That is the law of all education, all growth. Why not apply it to education? We need new or renewed institutions; in the act of renewing them, we may renew ourselves. Such institutions would surely not lack for students. Those who Fa/11993 desire to study further but have no wish to be processed as professors are, I am convinced, far more numerous than is commonly suspected. The country is rich; leisure is available; educational expectations are rising. Far too many graduates of our colleges and universities feel, moreover, that they never got an education, and it is these who go on to graduate school in the hope of getting what they failed to get as undergraduates. It is graduate education they want, not graduate training. This is why dissatisfaction with the graduate schools is so keen. There is simply no option available on the graduate level; everything is geared to professional training. And among those disenchanted with graduate school are precisely those from whom the colleges should in fact be recruiting their faculties-those students who are not averse to learning but who demand that it be given relevance and embodiment. It seems a cruel shame that such talent should go to waste or find no meaningful fulfillment at a time when it is so terribly needed. We are not so rich in the higher human resources that this source can be so tragically wasted. Are there enough men to staff more than three or four such experimental "graduate" centers in the liberal arts? Probably not. But what matters is that there should be at least a handful of colleges in this country which dare to resist the conformity imposed by the research cartel and to distinguish themselves by putting the teacher-and therefore the humanities-squarely at the center of the curriculum. Two or three such places would, I am convinced, reinvigorate, perhaps even revolutionize, American education simply by providing LETTERS from S an t a F e But what matters is that there should be at least a handful of colleges in this country which dare to resist the conformity imposed by the research cartel and to distinguish themselves by putting the teacherand therefore the humanities-squarely at the center of the curriculum. pa ge se ve n �convincing examples of the daring and diversity we need. The logical place for them to be established is either upon the existing base of the better liberal arts colleges, or as a new "higher college" created by a group of colleges acting in concert. Only by some such device, by striking at the source of the trouble, can the traditional role of the college be protected and expanded. It would be a staggering loss if the only institution of higher education still committed to liberal education should be subverted by the demand for professionals and technicians. The Universities Teaching is notoriously worse off in the universities than in the colleges. Not only is the university traditionally more committed to pure research, but it is particularly vulnerable to the pressures that have eroded the teacher's status. Vast numbers of students, huge classes, intense competition for Federal funds, and therefore for distinguished research professors, political and professional pressures, all these have operated to downgrade and even discredit teaching.. . . At present the heart of university power is the department. It is this departmental power that now so vehemently promotes research and is hostile or indifferent to teaching. It is at the departmental level that the evaluation of teaching is subverted, since chairmen apparently equate research and teaching; it is there that publish-or-perish policies are really promulgated; that the pressure for reduced teaching loads derives; from there that graduate deans are recruited; that the demand for early specialization arises, as well as the jealous specialism that fragments the curriculum into p a ge eight warring factions . Put a mild and gentle man of broad learning into a department chairmanship, and within two years he will either be murdered by his colleagues or become an aggressive and vindictive mafioso of the crassest specialism. The process can no more be resisted than the ravages of time. It is inexorable and destructive; and it is the remorseless tragedy of university politics. This is why it is so imperative that some rival to it, some countervailing, antidepartmental force be created. Research is dominant now because teaching has no effective representation , no normalized political place or power, within the structure of the university. The departments are theoretically com posed of teachers or teacherscholars, but actually they have been wholly captured by the research professoriat. The scholar has everything-the departments, the powerful committees , the learned societies, the Federal funds, the deanships, and the presidenciesand if he chooses to say that he finds teaching distasteful and unworthy of his abilities, who will say him nay? Who speaks for teaching here? Clearly nobody, except perhaps the students. problem of research and teaching not by reconciling them but by divorcing them altogether. That is my intention, and one which I am prepared to risk, since the only likely alternative is to make teaching the lackey of scholarship. I think we have reached the point at which slogans like "scholar-teacher" merely darken counsel; there may have been a time when that was a viable ideal, and doubtless some exceptionally gifted men still incarnate it. But by and large its vogue passes on to the professor the two functions which the university has inherited and which it cannot meaningfully reconcile. The realities of educational practice make it starkly apparent that no reconciliation can now occur except at the expense of teaching. And I am not prepared to incur that expense if I can humanly help it. This is why I urge you to consider freshly the wisdom of separating teaching and research, with the thought that significant teaching and fresh energy in academic institutions may eventually make scholarship human again, and that an invigorated scholarship may once again accept the burden of teaching as the source of its vigor and the test of its wisdom. * * * ** This is the present state of affairs; a vast educational enterprise built entirely upon a cast of learned men whose learning has no relevance to the young and even seems to alienate the young from both education and culture. It is a vision of madness accomplished. Logan Wilson, editor, Octagon Books, Excerpted from: The Academic Man, 1967. ** * * * One final point. I expect to be told that I am actually meeting the LETT E RS f r o m Sa n ta Fe Fa /1 1 9 93 �THE TYRANNICAL MACHINE by Lynne V. Cheney Former Chairman National Endowment for the Humanities For decades critics have been saying that institutions of higher education do not do enough to encourage good teaching. Classicist William Arrowsmith made this point in 1967, observing that "at present, the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests." Almost a quarter century later, historian Page Smith asserts that faculties "are in full flight from teaching ... In many universities, faculty members make no bones about the fact that students are the enemy. It is students who threaten to take up precious time that might otherwise be devoted to research." This situation has not come about because faculty members necessarily prefer research . In a recent survey, 71 percent reported that their interests either leaned toward or lay primarily in teaching. But the road to success--or even to survival-in the academic world is through publishing ... . The most dramatic examples of how research is valued over teaching occur when faculty members who have won campus-wide awards for teaching suddenly find themselves without jobs. A 1988 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education even raised the possibility that teaching F a ll 1 9 93 r awards, by implying that a faculty member is not as serious about research as he or she should be, are "the kiss of death" as far as achieving tenure is concerned. Economist Thomas Sowell reports, "I personally know three different professors at three different institutions who have gotten the Teacher of the Year Award and were then told that their contracts would not be renewed. The emphasis on research is greatest at research universities where 64 percent of the faculty report spending five hours or less per week on formal classroom instruction and 86 percent report spending six or more hours per week on research. At liberal arts colleges, however, the emphasis on research is growing. Fifty liberal arts schools have banded together under the lead of Oberlin College and are considering calling themselves "research colleges." Schools such as Colorado College, Grinnell, and Wellesley have reduced the number of hours faculty teach so that they have more time to do research. A recent survey of twelve liberal arts colleges reported that faculty frequently distinguish between teaching and "what they often call, significantly, 'my own work' or research." According to one estimate, teaching responsibilities at noted research universities have, since 1920, decreased in many instances by one-third, and often by half to two-thirds. * * * * * The model that increasingly drives all of higher education-the tyrannical machine that reignswas first established in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Derived from German universities, the model emphasized the production of knowledge rather than its diffusion. Both Daniel Coit Gilman and G. Stanley Hall, influential spokesmen for the new LETTERS f rom S anta Fe p age nin e �university ideal, thought that the scholar's proper role lay in producing "bricks" for the rising temple of knowledge. William James was among the first to note that such a single-minded view threatened a system in which there were many paths to excellence. Teaching Less One of the most dramatic effects of emphasizing the production of new knowledge-that is, research that leads to publicationrather than the communication of knowledge to the next generationthat is teaching-has been a decline in how much faculty members teach . At four-year institutions, time spent by faculty in the classroom has decreased steadily. According to one estimate, teaching responsibilities at noted research universities have, since 1920, decreased in many instances by one-third, and often by half to two-thirds. As the president of York College of Pennsylvania, Robert Iosue notes, it is difficult to be precise about the degree to which teaching responsibilities have declined because official teaching loads are often different from actual ones, which may be reduced for such work as service on a faculty committee. "In one bizarre case," Iosue says, "a professor received fifteen hours of reduction from an official work load of twelve hours. He was paid a three-hour teaching overload yet did not step inside the classroom." The gradually shrinking academic year also affects time faculty members spend in the classroom. In the late 1960s, according to an executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission Officers, most colleges had two seventeen-week semesters. Now, two fifteen-week semesters are more typical, with some schools in session as few as twenty-eight weeks-or half a year. Observing that students in Missouri institutions of higher education now spend a semester and a half less in college than students in the 1940s, Governor John Ashcroft has asked the schools in his state to lengthen the academic year. When faculty members teach less, there is a financial consequence. Because more people must be hired to teach , the costs of education escalate-and so does tuition . Between 1980-81 and 1989-90, average tuition charges rose an inflation-adjusted 50 percent at public universities, 66 percent at private universities, and 57 percent at other private four-year schools. Other factors, including increased administrative expenses, account for some of these increases; but with instructional budgets typically comprising 40 percent of educational and general expenditures, the decline in the amount of time faculty members spend in the classroom clearly plays a role. Between 1977 and 1987, while the number of full-time arts and sciences students decreased by 14 percent, the number of full-time arts and science faculty members increased by 16 percent, but it is hard to find evidence that instruction benefitted. Instead there are reports of students unable to get into classes or to take the courses they want. At the University of Texas at Austin, after the English department reduced the teaching load by one-third, students stood in long lines in Purloin Hall, waiting, as the student newspaper put it, "for an English class, any English class, to open." At Northwestern University, page t e n L E TT E RS fro m Sa n ta F e a student editorial complained about course offering in history, noting that 20 percent of the department was on leave to do research and that none of the four highly publicized, newly hired faculty members in the department was teaching. Even though the number of arts and sciences students has declined markedly and the number of faculty members has increased significantly, many institutions still find themselves short of teachers . They frequently fill in the gap with what has been called an "academic underclass"-part-time instructors. Part-timers, who in 1988 comprised 37 percent of faculty nationwide, are paid much less than full-time faculty. A survey of English departments showed the typical part-time faculty member earning $1,500 per course although there were examples of departments paying as little as $400 . Colleges and universities often cap the number of courses that a part-timer can teach so they will not have to pay fringe benefits. Thus many part-timers become "gypsy scholars," frantically commuting between teaching assignments at different institutions and frequently looking for other ways to supplement their salaries. Michael Shenefelt, a part-timer at New York University and Long Island University, reports that by supplementing his income as an office temporary, he is able to earn $20,000 a year . "A New York University elevator door operator begins at $20,000," Shenefelt observes. For Ph.D. granting institutions, graduate students are another source of cheap labor for the classroom, one used extensively at some universities. A 1989 walkout of Fa ll 1 993 �teaching assistants at the University of California at Berkeley is reported to have caused the cancellation of nearly 75 percent of classes. Like part-time instructors, graduate students are often unsupervised; and while some manage to be excellent teachers without any orientation or opportunity to discuss their work with experienced faculty members, few find themselves rewarded for a job well done. In fact what graduate students learn, all too often, is that teaching is not worth doing well. Says Frank Manley of Emory University, "I left [Johns Hopkins] with the idea that my main job was to do research, write books, and neglect undergraduates, because otherwise they would take all my time ... . My career has been in part an unlearning of what I learned in graduate school." Jaime O'Neill of Butte College in Oroville, California, says that it took him "five years of adjustment to get over the snobbery of graduate school." Across the country are thousands of faculty members whose professional lives run counter to the prevailing culture of academia. At a liberal arts college in the Midwest where a new emphasis on publication has led to a cutback in course offerings, a literature professor teaches as many courses as he possibly can to try to make up the shortfall. " I am permitted to teach on a unlimited basis," he says, "and I do. If I did not do this, many students would not be able to take a literature course." All too often, however, a decision to emphasize teaching exacts a price. At the University of Maryland, associate professor Maynard Mack, Jr., notes that his own focus on teaching "is not a fast track to that promotion. I Fa/11993 r should minimize my campus responsibilities and produce a second book." Faculty Interests and Student Needs The increased emphasis on research has resulted in a surge of publications. The number of books and articles published annually on Shakespeare grew by 80 percent between 1968 and 1988; the number on Virginia Woolf by 800 percent. With so much being written, individual researchers find themselves having to take up narrower and narrower topics in order to find a niche. It is not surprising that faculty would want to teach what interests them professionally, but the extent to which specialization and new theoretical approaches have affected curricula may well startle anyone who has not followed the collegiate course of study over the last few decades. A student can fulfill core requirements at Harvard by studying tuberculosis from 1842-1952, and distributive requirements at Dartmouth with "Sexuality and Writing," which analyzes "the use of sexuality and its ramifications as symbols for the process of literary creativity, with particular reference to ... potency and creative fertility; marriage or adultery and literary sterility; deviation and/ or solitude and autobiography; prostitution and history; chastity and literary self-referentiality." At the University of Minnesota, faculty in the humanities department recently proposed doing away with the ten courses the department offers in Western civilization and substituting three new courses: "Discourse and Society," "Text and Context," and "Knowledge, LE TT ERS f r o m Santa Fe The number of books and articles published annually on Shakespeare grew by 80 percent between 1968 and 1988; the number on Virginia Woolf by 800 percent. With so much being written, individual researchers find themselves having to take up narrower and narrower topics in order to find a niche. pa g e e l eve n �r Persuasion, and Power." In these introductory courses, students will analyze "ways that certain bodies of discourse come to cohere to exercise persuasive power, and to be regarded as authoritative, while others are marginalized, ignored, or to give up plans to abandon the Western civilization courses immediately. For the time being, the older curriculum will continue to be offered along with the newer ones. There is concern, however, about how long the Western civi- denigrated." More advanced courses are also being planned including "Music as Discourse," for which the syllabus includes music video, a heavy metal concert, and songs sung at a workers' strike. Resistance from faculty in other departments as well as from students has led the humanities department lization courses will last since the overwhelming majority of faculty members in the humanities department has little interest in teaching them. A disgruntled student at Minnesota observes, "This is all because members of a department want to teach what they want to page twelve LETTERS fro m Sa nt a Fe teach"-which is not necessarily what undergraduates need to learn. A recent nationwide survey conducted by the Gallup Organization for the National Endowment for the Humanities showed that many students manage to approach college graduation with alarming gaps in knowledge. About 25 percent of the nation's college seniors were unable to date Columbus's journey within the correct half-century. More than 30 percent could not identify the Reformation. A majority could not link major works by Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton with their authors. "We are graduating a generation that knows less and less," says Vassar sociology professor James Farganis. In the absence of required, broad-based courses in which undergraduates study significant events and books, Farganis notes, "students are picking and choosing, making their own curriculum in a haphazard fashion." Some students do not study American or English literature at all: It is possible to graduate from 45 percent of the nation's colleges and universities without doing so. Similarly, some undergraduates do not study history: It is possible to graduate from 38 percent of the nation's colleges and universities without doing so. At 41 percent of colleges and universities, it is possible to graduate without studying mathematics; at 33 percent, without studying natural and physical sciences . Between 1968 and 1988, while the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States grew by 56 percent, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in the humanities fell by 39 percent. There have also been significant declines in mathematics and physical science r \ Fa/1199 3 ;~ · �majors during this period: down 33 percent and 9 percent respectively. For the humanities (and for mathematics) the situation has improved in recent years, but the loss remains significant. Twenty years ago, one out of six graduates majored in the humanities. Today the figure is one out of sixteen. No doubt there are many explanations, but surely one is that many students come to college poorly prepared in the humanitiesand in mathematics and physical sciences as well-and once in college, they do not take introductory courses that fully introduce them to the challenges and pleasures of these disciplines . How could an undergraduate who has never taken a meaningful course in history or physics choose to major in one of these fields? Those who do major in the humanities often find that their courses are not conceived as comprehensive treatments of important subjects but as preparation for graduate school. Even though most majors in subjects like English do not go on to work on Ph.D.'s, they may well spend time as undergraduates becoming familiar with critical theory-perhaps more time than they spend reading literature. "I strongly suspect," " writes Professor Robert Alter of the University of California at Berkeley, "that many young people now earning undergraduate degrees in English or French at our most prestigious institutions have read two or three pages of Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva for every page of George Eliot or Stendhal." In graduate school, students prepare to publish and survive by narrowing their focus as much as possible-and by reading theory. Elizabeth Fentress, who went to F a ll 19 93 r graduate school because she wanted to concentrate in original works of literature, has ~ritten about her discovery that there was no way to earn an advanced degree without diving into a "tidal wave of theory." Rather than be diverted from her goal, she ended her graduate studies. "I deemed it best to leave . .. ," she writes, " and to learn what I wanted to learn on my own." Research interests affect teaching and learning at all levels of higher education, and they have an impact on schools as well. Among today's college students are tomorrow's teachers; and if their curricula have been haphazard, they may well know less than they should about the subjects they will teach. If they have been taught in an indifferent fashion, they will be less likely to know how to teach well themselves. "The undergraduate education that intending teachers receive is full of the same bad teaching that litters American high schools," a group of education school deans observes. "If teachers are to know a subject so that they can teach it well, they need to be taught it well." Excerpted from : Tvrannical Machines: A Report on Educational Practices Gone Wrong and Our Best Hopes for Setting Them Right. 1990. "I strongly suspect," writes Professor Robert Alter of the University of California at Berkeley, "that many young people now earning undergraduate degrees in English or French at our most prestigious institutions have read two or three pages of Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva for every page of George Eliot or Stendhal." LETT E RS from Santa Fe pa ge th i rt een �THE CHARGE THAT RESEARCH IS NARROW AND OPAQUE IS DECADES OUT OF DATE Most academics still have a special field, by Gerald Graff and academic fields This article by Gerald Graff is an communicate in attempted response to the charges specialized vocabularies piece. Sadly, it probably speaks the that few lay people professoriate. And do notice how ten- made by Lynne Cheney in the previous mind of most of the higher-education can penetrate. But the things that are said in these vocabularies increasingly strive for large general import, if only because it is difficult otherwise to get a job, a promotion, or a grant. pa g e f o urt ee n r dentious and ideological the "new" research is compared to the old. -J.A. One of the least examined assumptions in the debates that have raged lately over the compatibility of research and teaching is that academic research is narrowly specialized. Those who criticize the research enterprise and its reward structure for drawing professors away from teaching tend to accept the late Allan Bloom's observation in The Closing of the American Mind that "most professors are specialists, concerned only with their own fields." Even those who defend research against such criticisms often accept the idea that most research is so highly specialized that it conflicts with the needs of undergraduate general education. Neither the detractors nor the defenders of research specialization, however, seem to have been paying much attention to what has actually been happening to academic LETTERS f r o m S ant a F e research over the past generation. Indeed, the whole research-versusteaching debate has been marked by a curious reluctance to examine what academics now actually do under the name of research, in contrast with what they used to do. We seem so used to the image of research as over specialized and opaque that we don't feel any need to actually look at the stuff. The over specialized image was certainly an accurate one in the past. In its first half-century, the modern university was dominated by an ethos of Germanic positivistic science that viewed any broad generalization as a symptom of dilettantism; it held that the narrower a research topic was, the sounder the scholarship. Ideal research subjects were ones like "The Syntax of at and ana in Gothic, Old Saxon, and Old High German," which was the title of a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago in 1916. But that was quite a while ago. With the expansion of higher education after World War II, what counted as "research" became more flexible and capacious. The brute accumulation of facts started to be valued less than interpretations that gave significance to the facts. Not only interpretation, but creative work in the arts began to count toward tenure and promotion. Then in the 1960s a barrage of attacks on narrow specialization began to reshape the way younger scholars defined their work. The result is that today, at least in humanistic and cultural fields, the more specialized kinds of research are actually penalized rather than rewarded. Anyone writing a dissertation in 1992 on "The Syntax of at and ana" would be unlikely to get a teaching job in Fall J 9 93 �today's competitive market. Far more likely to catch the eye of a hiring committee would be broad topics like "Fascism, Modernism, and the Historical Avant Garde: Theories and Praxis," or "Writing Like a Man: Gender and Readers in Adam Bede and The House of Mirth," to mention two titles from the 1988 edition of Dissertation Abstracts. We need only look at the way academic books have come to be promoted to see how much things have changed. Consider the following comments from recent universitypress advertisements. "Twenty-eight of the nation's leading critics and scholars offer a comprehensive exploration of American society and culture." "[The authors] journey into the minds of men and bring to light an imaginative history of women and of the relations between the sexes." "At once fascinating and provocative, [the book] looks at the history of the automobile for evidence on the nature of dreams and desires embedded in modern culture." Even if such comments often contain more hype than sober truth, the mere fact that academic books have come to be promoted in this way is proof of a significant shift in priorities, from over specialization to "provocative" and "comprehensive" generality. Indeed, if today's academy is over-anything, it is overgeneralized rather than over specialized, reserving its greatest rewards for scholars who make large, sweeping theoretical and interdisciplinary claims. As a result, excessive pressure falls on younger scholars to produce the Big Synthesis before they may be ready to do so, while worthy but modestly defined topics go unappreciated. The beneficial consequence, however, Fa/11993 is that significance is valued over pedantry. Of course, a lot depends on what we mean by words like "specialized" and "narrow". As Catherine R. Stimpson has observed, "Specialization is a feature of every complex organization, be it social or natural, a school system, garden, book, or mammalian body." Most academics still have a special field, and academic fields communicate in specialized vocabularies that few lay people can penetrate. But the things that are said in these vocabularies increasingly strive for large general import, if only because it is difficult otherwise to get a job, a promotion, or a grant. As Ms. Stimpson also has pointed out, "specialization" has lately become an ideological buzz word, part of the current attack on new forms of scholarship that allegedly pander to "special interest groups." Thus some would object that a topic like "Writing Like a Man: Gender and Readers ... " is no less specialized than "The Syntax of at and ana in Gothic ... ," and it is true that both dissertations might seem equally obscure to many students and lay people. Nevertheless, there is clearly a big difference, as the critics themselves betray when they object to topics like "Writing Like a Man" for being too political. The objection implies that, far from being narrowly specialized, such topics are all too aggressively general in ways the critics disapprove. Consider "Tyrannical Machines," a 1990 report from the National Endowment for the Humanities by its chairman, Lynne V. Cheney. Mrs. Cheney restates the old chestnut that humanities research is over specialized and that general educaLETTERS from Santa Fe tion suffers as a result, with courses in "increasingly narrow topics" taking the place of broadly general ones. For example, Mrs . Cheney cites one university that has replaced traditional courses in Western civilization with new courses in "Discourse and Society," "Text and Context," and "Knowledge and Power." But what is "narrow" about courses in "discourse and society," "text and context," and "knowledge and power"? Since these courses probably encompass cultures outside the West, they are in one sense less narrow than the ones they have replaced. Obviously, it is something else about the new courses that bothers Mrs. Cheney, not a difference in degree of specialization but a difference in ideology. The question of ideology needs to be debated, but tying it to specialization only confuses the issue. If I am right that the assumptions about research specialization that have dominated recent debates are a generalization out of date, then the prospects for reconciling research and teaching (and research and general education) may be better than we have been led to think. If much of today's research, as I have argued, does tackle questions and problems with wide significance, why can't that research be used effectively in the classroom? At my first job interview in 1962, I was asked the following question: If assigned to teach a freshman course, how would I go about adapting the topic of my doctoral dissertation to the needs of my students? This kind of question, which is still commonly asked, clearly assumes that acaclemic research is adaptable to the "general" interests of undergraduates. page fifteen �The question assumes not only that research has pedagogical relevance, but that professors should teach their research to undergraduates. In the past, of course, such a view often might have been just a cynical rationalization for inflicting the most boring and vacuous professorial specialties o n students. Today, however, I think it signals a new desire that research possess a potential interest for non-specialists, and a new appreciation of teachers who can translate whatever may necessarily b e esoteric and technical in their r esearch into term s t h a t can b e understood by students. It seems that in practice we have been evolving a better, more realistic solution to the researchversu s-teaching problem tha n the nostrums u su ally p rop osed . This solution is neither to subordinate research to general education (as if they were opposed), nor to separate research from undergraduate teaching by quarantining it in non-teaching research faculties. It is rather to ma ke our research more available to undergraduates, even thinking of undergraduates as co-researchers. Does this mean, then, that there is no substance wha tsoever in the widespread perception that academic research interferes with teaching or inordinately narrows its scope? No, but I think that m any critics have not diagnosed the real p roblem. Today the problem often is not that aca d emic resea rch lack s gen era l import, but that the academy does a poor job of clarifying this import for students a nd la y people . If most acade mic publica tion st ill seem s o pa q u e t o gen era l r ea d e r s, the ch ances are this is no t because its con cerns a re i r relevant t o s u ch readers but because that relevance pase s ix f ee 11 is not spelled out for them. Much of what is currently mistaken by the public for specializa tion is really just bad writing, or at least writing that fails to try to make its point accessible to outsiders. Instead of persisting, then, in the traditional, futile attempt to shift the emphasis from research to teaching and general educa tion, universities should try to do a better job of clarifying the educational significance of the research that their faculty members conduct. The public needs to be convinced that, despite L E T T E R S f rom Sa nt a Fe what they have been hearing from critics, time devoted to research is not necessarily time stolen from teaching. Gerald Graff is professor of English and education at the University of Chicago . This piece appeared in the "Point of View" column of The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 21, 1992. Fa ll 1 993 �SENSE AND NONSENSE IN THE ACADEMY who tried to stop the theft will still be disciplined or if Penn's security forces still have to go to diversity-sensitivity training. A note from John Agresto This is a new column that will, in this and future issues, reprint the foibles, These articles appeared in The Wall Street Journal's. Review and Outlook Section, July 26, 1993. failings, shortcomings and downright lunacy in the ever-crazy world of higher Penn The Report education. Please, reader, if you have stories to tell, tell us. For my part, I think I'll look into college catalogues for the next issue. Here, just so we all have it on record, is what happened at the University of Pennsylvania, not in the "Water Buffalo" episode, but in the aftermath of the theft of The Dailv Pennsv/vanian. The only decent part of this whole shabby story is that the interim provost and the interim president at Penn both seem reasonably mortified not only by the publicity surrounding the episode, but by the episode itself. I wrote the provost asking for some explanation of the events recounted below and, though he didn't address these issues directly, he did send a statement that both he and the interim president signed. In part it reads: "This action {the theft of the papers] violated long held principles of freedom of the press and freedom of speech on the University of Pennsylvania campus. We will respond vigorously to any future violations of those principles.... The confiscation of any publication on a campus is wrong and will not be tolerated. Individuals who engage in such actions will be subject to the full range of judicial sanctions." Nonetheless, the charges against those who confiscated the papers have been dismissed. And there is no word if the courageous museum administrator Fall 1 993 r Not long ago, during the memorable Water Buffalo trials at the University of Pennsylvania, we also reported on the concurrent suspension of Donald Fitzgerald, director of security for Penn's University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Mr. Fitzgerald, it appeared, had run afoul of the Penn administration-which has some markedly peculiar notions about the duties of security officersbecause he tried to apprehend two women students running out of the museum carrying three large plastic bags. It turned out that the women were not, as Mr. Fitzgerald worried, running off with museum pieces. Part of a group of black activist students aggrieved by the views aired in the student paper, the women had confiscated all the copies of The Daily Pennsylvanian at the museum, as their friends were doing elsewhere around campus. On April 15, virtually the entire press run of the paper was appropriated and carted off. The administration, headed at the time by President Sheldon Hackney (who recently won confirmation as head of the National Endowment of the Humanities), determined at once that Mr . Fitzgerald should be suspended from his security duties. He would remain on suspension many weeks, while a "blue ribbon panel" LETTERS fro m Santa Fe appointed by the Penn administration deliberated over the events of April 15. Those deliberations have at last come to an end. With that end has also come a report on the panel's findings-one so remarkable for the depths of its fastidiously argued nonsense that we thought it only fitting to reprint portions nearby. The document is a pure specimen of political cravenness. But such cravenness is hardly limited to the University of Pennsylvania. The unhappy fact of university life today is that there are many Penns and many administrators who thought they were purchasing peace by accommodating political zealots. The degree of that effort to accommodate is reflected in the central pronouncement of the Penn panel's report-namely the judgment that the theft of the newspapers was a "form of protest" and therefore not criminal behavior. Apparently, then, any assault-including, presumably, the removal and destruction of library books some group considers offensive-might be held immune from prosecution if it's a "protest." The report goes on to say that rather than taking action, the police should have contacted entities at Penn called "Open Expression Monitors" to study the students actions. Think we're making that up? Read the following excerpt. The panel concludes that the Museum security director's pursuit of the women with the shopping bags was "inappropriate" once those students had left the property of the Museum and was not in "accordance with ... his job functions. " Presumably, then, any thief who wishes to appropriate some page seven t een �invaluable museum piece can now consider himself immune from pursuit, if he can get past the door and grounds. The report recommends that for his inappropriate behavior, security director Fitzgerald's superiors should review his role for possible disciplinary action. Mr. Fitzgeraldw ho has been returned to active duty-received a letter of reprimand and will, along with other security personnel, have to attend sensitivity training classes. There have been other instances in which activists have undertaken to silence opposition views by removing the offending publications. At Penn State (not the same as the U. of Pennsylvania) two former students-journalism majors, no less-made off with four thousand copies of an alternative, conservative s tudent publication called Th e Lionhearted. Here the legal outcome was different. To their credit, the police charged the perpetrators with theft, receipt of stolen property, and criminal conspiracy. Still, it's a measure of how far the assault on free expression has gone on campuses that the Penn State undergraduate paper, The Daily Collegian, actually editorialized in favor of the notion that the re mova l and burning of Th e Lionhearted was a legitimate act of free expression. Presumably these student "journalists" will soon be making their way into the American press corps. George Orwell had the word for this sort of reasoning-and for the entire tenor of the Penn panel's report. That word is "doublethink"-a description unfortunately as relevant today as it was in the 1930s. During his confirmation hearings, Mr. Hackney assured the Senators that his administration took the most serious possible view of the theft of The Daily Pennsylvanian papers, and that the students who took them would be disciplined. Just how seriously the university in fact took this attack on the right of free expression will be clear to anyone who wants to take a look at the excerpts of this stunning Orwellian document from the minds running America's campuses. 1. Biomedical Library/Johnson Pavilion (6:52 a.m.): Incident involving two students and two officers responding to a call from a School of Medicine security guard. The panel found that one officer behaved in a discourteous manner toward the students by ordering them to leave before determining who they were or giving them an opportunity to explain their presence. pag e eig h t ee n LETTERS f r o m San ta Fe Doublethink at the University of Pennsylvania Following are excerpts from the report of a panel of University of Pennsylvania administrators appointed to study the theft of one entire press run of the student newspaper. The The panel found that his actions violated Section 8.4.02 of the "UPPD (University of Pennsylvania Police Department) Policies and Procedures Manual" and should be reviewed by his supervisor for possible disciplinary action. The panel found that the Medical School security guard behaved appropriately by contacting the UPPD. The panel recommended that all security personnel receive training on working and interacting with people from diverse backgrounds. This training should include information about the diversity of the Penn community and the expectation that all members of the community should be treated with civility and respect regardless of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethic [sic] origin, age, disability, or status as a disabled or Vietnam era veteran. papers were seized all over campus by black activist students opposed to The Oailv Pennsvlvanian's editorial content. The report, which criticizes security guards, absolves the students of any wrong-doing- except failure to show 1.0. cards. The panel analyzed what supposedly transpired at each of the campus sites involved. Individual Incidents on April 15, 1993. 2. Blackley Hall/Johnson pavilion (7:48 a.m.): Incident involving two students, one Medical School security officer, one Medical School Supervisor of Security, one security office . .. and four police officers responding to a call to UPPD that "A black male at Blackley Hall tried to take all the DP's [Da ily Pennsylvanians]." The panel found that one officer behaved in an unprofessional manner in violation of Section 8.4.02 of the UPPD Policies and Procedures Manual" by cursing at the student and u sed excessive force .. .by striking the student with his baton. The panel also found that the officer failed to conduct a proper and thorough inves tiga tion because h e neglected to interview the security personnel w ho were in pursuit." Fa /1 199 3 �3. David Rittenhouse Laboratories (8:20 a.m.): Incident involving two students, four officers, and the UPPD dispatcher. When two officers stopped the students carrying a large trash bag outside of DRL, they were informed by the students that this was a protest action. The panel found that the responding officer ... violated Section 5.22.0 of the "UPPD Policies and Procedures Manual" by not requesting that a supervisor be dispatched to the scene in response to a demonstration. The panel found that the dispatcher violated UPPD Divisional Directive 92.08 by making a command decision without consulting a supervisor. 4. University Museum/Sports Medicine (8:16 a.m.): Incident involving two students, a Museum security guard, a Museum administrator and two officers. The Museum administrator pursued the students, who took the DP's from Kress Gallery, and caught up with them in Weightman Hall, where he made a "citizen's arrest" and detained the students. The panel found that the Museum administrator's actions in pursuit of the students were inappropriate after they left the property of the University Museum and not in accordance with the authority and responsibility of his job functions. His actions should be reviewed by his supervisor for possible disciplinary action. The panel found that the students should have shown their Penn cards. In summary, the panel concluded that once the incident occurred at DRL [David Rittenhouse Laboratories], the UPPD should have recognized that the removal of the DP's from at least three different locations was a form of student protest and not an indicator of criminal behavior. According to the University's "Emergency Procedures Protocols" ... the UPPD should have contacted the Office of the Vice Provost for University Life as soon as it recognized that the students were involved in a form of protest. Once the VPUL was notified of the protest, Open Expression Monitors would have been dispatched to observe and monitor the students' actions, in compliance with the existing Open Expression Guidelines. Since this act was a form of protest and not a criminal offense, it would have been more appropriate for Open Expression Monitors, not police officers, to mediate and attempt to resolve any further conflicts that resulted from the removal of the DP's. The Open Expression Monitors could have informed the students about the Open Expression Guidelines, notified them if their actions violated the Guidelines, and identified students who violated the Guidelines. ,.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------, ' GIFTS AND THE NEW TAX LAW As the end of the year approaches, the following, taken from an item in the New York Times, might be of interest. As with any tax-related matter, check with your tax adviser if there are any questions about making a gift. The tax bill introduces, restores and expands several kinds of tax breaks, and among the greatest of these is charity. Philanthropic gifts have been tax deductible all along. But it is even more advantageous for the wealthy to give now that the after-tax cost of gifts is just 60 cents on the dollar for those in the highest marginal tax bracket. There has been another important change in the law, however, that makes it easier than in recent years to make gifts of property that has increased in value over the years. These gifts can be deducted at present market value even though the taxpayer never paid that much for them, and the gifts do not incur any capital gains tax. Under the new law, this kind of transaction can no longer trigger the punishing alternative minimum tax. And the provisions have been expanded to include not only property like paintings, but so-called intangibles, such as stocks or even royalty rights .... The Internal Revenue Service has also been ordered to develop a method for taxpayers to agree in advance of making a charitable donation with the LR. S. on the value of a painting or other property, so there will be no disputes. F a ll 1993 r To our readers, If you know someone who might be interested in receiving information regarding the programs offered at St. John's College, please fill out this form and return it to St. John's College, 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599. Name of interested person (s) Address Possible area(s) of interest - 0 Undergraduate 0 Graduate D Eastern Classics 0 Summer Classics ' ' ' ·- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - -:~ ~-~ ~-~-~ ~:~ ~ - - - - - - - - - - - - - -j LETTERS from Santa Fe page ninteen �PROFILE St. John's College: An independent, non-sectarian, four-year liberal arts college. Founded: Established in 1696 in Annapolis, Maryland, as King William's School and chartered in 1784 as St. John's College. Great Books Program adopted 1937. Second campus in Santa Fe opened in 1964. Curriculum: An integrated, four-year, all-required liberal arts and science program based on reading and discussing, in loosely chronological order, the great books of Western civilization. The program also includes four years of foreign language, four years of mathematics, three years of laboratory science, and one year of music. Approach: Tutorials, laboratories, and seminars requiring intense participation replace more traditional lectures. Classes are very small. Student/Faculty ratio is 8:1. Degrees Granted: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. Master of Arts in Liberal Studies. Student Body: Enrollment is limited to about 400 students on each campus. Current freshman class is made up of 55% men and 45% women, from 37 states and several foreign countries. Sixty-five percent receive financial aid. Students may transfer between the Santa Fe and Annapolis campuses. Alumni Careers: Education - 21 %, Business - 20%, Law - 10%, Visual and Performing Arts - 9%, Medicine - 7%, Science and Engineering - 7%, Computer Science - 6%, Writing and Publishing - 5%. Graduate Institute: The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education is an interdisciplinary master's d egree program based on the same principles as the undergraduate program. Offered on both campuses year-round. Readers of the newsletter may be especially interested in applying for our summer session. For more information please contact the Graduate Institute in Santa Fe 505/984-6082 or in Annapolis 410/626-2541. LETTERS from Santa Fe St. John's College 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599 ADDRESS CORRECTION REQUESTED ... U. S. Postage PAID Non-Profit Organization Permit No. 231 Santa Fe, NM � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe Description An account of the resource A newsletter published by the Santa Fe President's Office that includes articles about liberal education. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 20 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe, Fall 1993 Description An account of the resource Letters from Santa Fe, St. John’s College—Santa Fe, New Mexico, Fall 1993 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Agresto, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Rudolph, Frederick Arrowsmith, William, 1924-1992 Cheney, Lynne V. Graff, Gerald Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Letters_from_SF_1993_Fall Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a4ef9a617060453bb9d5f5ce909e457d.pdf b1169795dd233efc78b6d96fb529003e PDF Text Text LETTERSJrom Santa Fe St. John's College, Santa Fe. New Mexico Winter 1992 POLITICAL CORRECTNESS by John Agresto President, St. John's College Santa Fe, New Mexico INSIDE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND BEYOND page3 THE POLITICAL SEDUCTION OF THE UNIVERSITY page 7 ON DEPOLITICIZING THE UNIVERSITY page 9 UNIVERSITIES MUST DEFEND FREE SPEECH page 11 SAY THE RIGHT THING ... OR ELSE page 14 "Learning is Good" is not only the motto of the college John Belushi attended in Animal House, it is also the simple and universal belief of virtually every American. If there is anything in which we have confidence and from which we all expect great things, it's education. Nonetheless, every now and then there comes along something so disturbing, so stupid, that almost everyone is led to ask if higher education has not simply lost its marbles. Consider the view that education is not instructive, or informative, or liberating, but "political." Consider the notion that higher education really entails not free inquiry but the repression of some ideas and the imposition of others. Consider the position that says that certain words of ordinary speech -- take "freshmen," for instance -- are insensitive, offensive, or otherwise incorrect and should be stifled. The last example is both trivial and telling at the same time. One of my daughters is now applying to college and a number of the questionnaires ask if she will be entering as a transfer student or as a "frosh." (I guess even colleges know that "freshpersons" would be unspeakably barbaric-- or is there a hint of a forbidden gender preference even in there?) When Political Correctness -- PC -- means that even ordinary, useful words are now to be banned, think of how incorrect ideas now fare on college campuses. So, this issue of Letters is about the underpinnings and manifestations of PC at college today. If "all education is political," if what students do when they go to college is become exposed to the "advanced" political views of an academic class of tenured radicals intent on making converts rather than on enlightenment, then education is in deep trouble. If professors now aim (in my friend Edwin Delattre's phrase) not to liberate students' minds but to possess them, then liberal education has rotted from the inside out, and we all have reason to be furious. Some of the articles and essays I've included in this issue of Letters review the incidents, the "highlights," if you will, of PC madness. In my opinion, the situation is both better and worse than they portray. Better because political correctness is not in any way a universal phenomenon in higher education. The instances of imposed speech codes, of students being sent for sensitivity re-education, of professors being shut up or disinvited from speaking their incorrect views are extensive, but finite. Anyone can name scores of good colleges where nothing like this occurs. Federal courts have stood by the principle of free in<Iuiry even when universities have buckled. And even at the worst universities there are still students and teachers who remain unintimidated. But in some ways the situation is worse, because political correctness is not a matter of adding up incidents, but a change in the nature and meaning of what education is. It �IF "ALL EDUCATION IS POLITICAL," IF WHAT STUDENTS DO WHEN THEY GO TO COLLEGE IS BECOME EXPOSED TO THE "ADVANCED" POLITICAL VIEWS OF AN ACADEMIC CLASS OF TENURED RADICALS INTENT ON MAKING CONVERTS RATHER THAN ON ENLIGHTENMENT, THEN EDUCATION IS IN DEEP TROUBLE. pa f: e t wo hasn't yet been accepted by the public, but it is now, in large measure, the intellectual norm in higher education that the very meaning of education is not what we thought it to be even as recently as ten years ago. For example, we had no trouble ten years ago talking about Great Books. Nevertheless, I've watched articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education go from speaking about Great Books, to "great" books, to "the so-called 'great books."' We had no trouble ten years ago believing that all of education should introduce students to the principles, the highlights, the works and discoveries of this their civilization. Now that's viewed as political and ethnocentric. And because it's viewed as "political," we 're told thatthere 's no way we can object to the use of the classroom as a propaganda pulpit since, after all, education has always been "political." Finally, education seems to have dismissed as fiction the notion that people can go from opinion to knowledge and, concomitantly, thattrue knowledge is universal. Everywhere we see repeatedly trotted out the three main food groups of the academic mind: race, gender and class. So those categories we once thought to be accidental are now believed by many to be simply determinative. If this were true, it would mean that liberal education isn't possible. The good news is that the views of the politically correct propagandists rest on false, perhaps even mindless, presuppositions. If (and it's a major if ) these propositions can be rebutted freely on campus, things will get better. It is the attempt notto have them debated freely by the proponents of political correctness that leads them to call their opponents everything from right-wing to racist, sexist, and homophobic. Interestingly enough, it is the humanities part of higher education (where political correctness has far more of a following than in science or engineering) that has been losing so many students. Predict- LETT E RS frn m Santa Fe ably, the response of the PC crowd is, no doubt for the first time in the academic lives of the vast majority of them, to make their courses required. So, after ridiculing the "canon" of old texts they institute a new canon -- a canon of courses on allowed opinion. How can we know if PC thinking is prevalent on a college or university campus. Well, you can observe a Jot just by looking, as Yogi Berra probably said. Look at college catalogues. Before you look for speech codes, look at what's required curricularly. If, rather than a year of foreign language, they require a course in Understanding Diversity, you've got a place where PC probably lives and prospers. If, rather than courses in the history of science or in philosophy they demand you take a course that falls under a "recognition and affirmation of difference," you've found another one. If, rather than a course in mathematics, they require some time spent with one of the sub-fields of the growing area of oppression studies, you've hit a PC jackpot. What can be done? Plenty. If the prestigious liberal arts college your son or daughter was thinking about attending gives evidence that awareness, correctness, and sensitivity are how they interpret their missions, encourage a look elsewhere. If the English Department seems to think that all great literature is the product of the author's time and place, or power relationships, or the result of hidden but now exposable prejudices and biases, suggest courses in mathematics or geology. Ifthe college thinks there's something wrong with teaching about the principles and works of this civilization-- that the study of Western Civilization has to be redirected or diluted--then suggest a major in medicine or business. And if someone you know is interested in a place where civility is expected but where there is no such thing as a view that cannot be examined or an idea that cannot be argued, ask me for one of our catalogues. • Wint e r 1992 �POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND BEYOND Taken From Remarks by Lynne V. Cheney Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities Through the ages, history, literature, and philosophy have been sources of immense satisfaction. But the humanities, particularly in Western civilization, have also been contentious; and that has certainly been the case in recent years. Today I want to talk about some of the reasons for this contentiousness, focusing particularly on "political correctness," or "p.c.," as it's sometimes called. Political correctness typically involves faculty members trying to impose their views on others, and the results can be funny--particularly when the forces of political correctness try to identify ever new forms of offense. At a recent conference at Yale, for example, a distinguished professor of literature suggested that limiting the humanities to the study of humankind was a form of "speciesism." Speciesists, I have learned, are people who refer to their dogs and cats as "pets"--a term much too condescending to be politically correct. Or the speciesist is the person who talks about "wild" animals, when the proper description is "free roaming." Smith College did its part to add to the English language when it recently warned the incoming class to beware not only of classism and ethnocentrism, but also of "lookism," a form of oppression that involves putting too much stock in personal appearance. I thought I'd begin by telling a story. It begins in the spring of 1990 when the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin decided to revise its freshman composition program. Henceforth English 306, the required composition course taken by some 3000 freshmen, would focus on race and gender; and all classes would use the same text, an anthology called Racism and Sexism. This book--the central required text for every section of freshman English--begins by defining racism as something only white people can be guilty of, and it tells students that sexism is unique to men. It goes on to portray the United States as a society so profoundly racist and sexist as to make a mockery of all our notions of liberty and justice. There are no comparisons with other cultures offered, no context to show how American ideals and practices actually stand up against those of the rest of the world--or the rest of history. The overwhelming impression that this textbook leaves is that every injustice of race or gender that human beings ever visited upon one another happened first and worst in this Wint e r I 99 2 L E TT E RS from San t a F e THE NEW MC CARTHYISM -LIKE THE OLD -- OFTEN WORKS ITS WAY BY NAME-CALLING. pa ge th ree �IT WAS ONCE THOUGHT THAT TEACHERS WHO USED THE CLASSROOM TO ADVANCE A POLITICAL AGENDA WERE BETRAYING THEIR PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES. BUT ON MANY CAMPUSES NOW FACULTY MEMBERS HA VE TAKEN THE POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THEIR STUDENTS AS A MISSION. country. And the only way we can redeem ourselves, the textbook tells us, is to change fundamentally the way we produce and distribute wealth. Abandon capitalism, in other words. Now, one might well think that the decision to focus English 306 on Racism and Sexism would cause some debate. For one thing, English 306 is a course intended to teach students how to write. Will they be better writers when they have stopped referring to poor people and instead speak of the "economically exploited," as one essay in the book instructs them to do? Some people in the English Department did object to the plans to revise course 306, but they had little effect, until finally, Alan Gribben, a noted scholar of American literature, decided to go public. He sent letters to newspapers around the state, and citizens began to express their opinions about the English 306 revision. Fifty-six faculty members from across the university signed a "Statement of Academic Concern." The revised course was revised again so that English 306 would include a broader array of subjects, a diversity of viewpoints, and extensive instruction on how to analyze, argue, and write. But Alan Gribben was unable to take much pleasure in this victory. He found himself vilified at campus rallies. He was the victim of hate mail, rumors, and anonymous late-night phone calls denouncing him as racist. Most members of the English Department stopped speaking to him, and they certainly didn't send graduate students his way or put him on departmental committees. Finally, in the spring of this year, he announced his intention to leave Texas, where he had been for seventeen years, and move to Montgomery, Alabama, where he will teach at a branch of Auburn University. "If I continued to live here," he told a newspaper in Texas, ''I'd have to live under siege." Several aspects of this story make it an almost classic example of what is happening on many campuses today. There is, first of all, the idea underlying the English pa~e four LETTERS from Santa Fe 306 reform that it is perfectly all right-even desirable--to use the classroom and the curriculum for political purpose. This would once have been regarded as unethical. It was once thought that teachers who used the classroom to advance a political agenda were betraying their professional responsibilities. But on many campuses now faculty members have taken the political transformation of their students as a mission. They believe deeply in the radical critique offered by books like Racism and Sexism and see themselves furthering the cause of social justice by using the classroom and the curriculum to advance their views, and they go about their mission openly--indeed, proudly. "I teach in the Ivy League," a Princeton professor recently told the New York Times, " in order to have direct access to the minds of the children of the ruling classes." There are people, myself among them, who object to making teaching and learning into the handmaidens of politics. There ought to be an attempt to get at the complex truth of our experience rather than imposing a single-minded, political interpretation on it. Yes, there has been oppression, but the history of Western civilization in the United States is also marked by the discovery and blossoming of remarkable concepts: individual rights, democracy, the rule oflaw. In 1989, before Tiananmen Square, the distinguished Chinese dissident Fang Li Zhi put it this way: "What we are calling for is extremely basic," he said, "namely, freedom of speech, press, assembly and travel. Concepts of human rights and democracy." He went on, " The founding principles of the U.S. government are a legacy [of the West] to the world." I think of it as my great good fortune that I have opportunities to speak for the freedoms we enjoy. It is not only my right but my pleasure to dissent from university officials who decide, as officials at the University of Maryland did during the Persian Gulf War, that students cannot display the American flag. It might offend Winter 1992 �someone, they said; and they relented only after students called in the media. It is not only my right but my pleasure to dissent from university officials who decide, as administrators at Rice University in Texas did, that students could not tie yellow ribbons to trees in the main academic quadrangle. But I also recognize that I am able to express myself so freely because I am neither part of a university nor do I long for a university career. The views I hold represent dissent from the orthodoxy that reigns on our campuses, and such dissent is not very well tolerated there. That's the most significant part of Alan Gribben's story. He disagreed, and he was driven from the university. About the time Gribben was resigning, I received in the mail a copy of the minutes of a University of Texa'S English department faculty meeting. The person who sent them to me was appalled at talk that had gone on in the meeting of "flushing out" other opponents of the revised English 306 syllabus. This student recognized the signs of the new McCarthyism, and he was afraid of becoming himself a victim of it. "Please let me remain anonymous," he wrote. "If it came out that I had written to you--or to someone else similarly disreputable--! wouldn't be [here] for long." The new McCarthyism--like the old-often works its way by name-calling. People aren't labeled "communist" now, but "racist." Harvard professor Stephen Thernstromfound himself denounced that way. His offenses included using the word Oriental to describe the religion of l 9thcentury Asian immigrants and assigning students to read an article that questioned affirmative action. New York University professor Carol Iannone found herself called racist for writing an article in which she said that certain literary prizes have been awarded on the basis of race rather than literary merit. She was not the first to make such an assertion. Two of the five judges on the National Book Award fie- Winter 1992 tion panel had said the same thing. Nevertheless, Carol Iannone was said to be racist. Sexual harassment is a phrase that has been similarly misused. In the politically correct world of the post-modern campus, it can, apparently, mean almost anything. At the University of Minnesota not long ago six members of the Scandinavian Studies Department were charged with sexual harassment by a group of graduate students. The complaint provided a long list of the professorial activities that had led to the charge: not greeting a student in a friendly enough manner, for example. Not teaching in a sensitive enough way. Not having read a certain novel. The charges against the professors were finally dropped, but not until the faculty members had incurred considerable expense and suffered deep, personal pain. One professorreported that it cost him $2,000 to have a lawyer draft a response to the complaint. Another confessed that he wept when the charges were finally dropped. On crucial issues, faculty members are silent. Perhaps apathy plays some part, but concern for reputation, concern of professional well-being--these, I suspect, play a role as well. The University of California at Berkeley has adopted an ethnic studies requirement to go into effect this fall . Now, this requirement was a major step for the university. There are no other required courses, and so instituting one represents a sharp break with practice. But on this crucial matter, only one-fifth of the eligible faculty members voted. The measure passed narrowly and it seems reasonable to suspect that among the 1,500 or so faculty members who didn't vote were some who had doubts. What is the purpose of the ethnic studies requirement? Is it a response to political pressure? Are curricularrequirements now to be set by interest groups who lobby for them? If, on the other hand, the aim is educational, then aren't there other courses that should be required? Perhaps a course in American history, one that would stress LETTERS from San t a Fe pa g e five �THE TERM FRESHMAN IS FORBIDDEN -- IF YOU USE IT, ONE STUDENT WARNED -YOU COULD BE TAKEN BEFORE THE JUDICIARY BOARD. p ag e s i x the democratic values we share and thus provide balance to the ethnic studies approach, which emphasizes differences that set us apart. Perhaps a course in world history that would prepare students for the decades ahead in which people of all countries and continents are going to be increasingly interdependent. Shouldn't a foreign language be required? If the goal is really to understand people different from ourselves, isn't foreign language study the most effective route? Surely among the 80 percent of faculty who didn't vote were some who had such questions, but the atmosphere on our campuses today doesn't encourage questions. And expressing doubts can be costly. This is true not only of large universities, but of some smaller institutions too. Professor Christina Sommers of Clark University has been interviewing faculty and students across the country, and she has particularly striking interviews from Wooster College in Wooster, Ohio. At Wooster, the textbook Racism and Sexism--the textbook that the University of Texas finally rejected--is required reading for all freshmen. Or fresh persons, I should say. The term freshman is forbidden at Wooster. If you use it, one student warned professor Sommers, you could be taken before the Judiciary Board. Another student described the seminar required of all fust-year students. "Difference, Power, and Discrimination," it is called, with the subtitle "Perspectives on Race, Gender, Class, and Culture." According to the student, the seminar resembled "a reeducation camp" more than a "university program." "Now we know," he said, "that when we read the Declaration of Independence that it's not about equality and inalienable rights--but it is a sexist document written by white male elites." Faculty, who are evaluated on their "gender sensitivity," said they are afraid to speak out. According to one, to do so would be "suicidal." Another said, "I am getting old and tired and I do not want to get fired. Until there is an atmosphere of LETTERS f'om S a nta Fe tolerance, I do not want to go on the record." Promised anonymity, he noted, "What you have here, on the one hand, are a lot of students and faculty who are very skeptical, but they are afraid to voice their reservations. " The point of opposing political correctness is not to silence those who advan6;e it, but to open their views to challenge and debate. This often happens when p.c. enters the larger world, but it will not happen on our campuses, I fear, unless those of us who Iivein the larger world help it to happen. When it is time for us to help our children choose a college, we should ask hard questions about which campuses not only allow but encourage a diversity of opinion. When it comes time for us to make contributions as alumni, we should ask how well the college we attended is doing at making sure all sides are heard. Those who serve on boards of trustees should encourage discussion of free speech itself. Does political correctness reign on this campus? The New York Times reported on its front page about a group, mostly English professors, who are uniting to prove that political correctness is nothing more than the product of overheated conservative imaginations. But they are going to have a very hard time maintaining that view. There are too many examples of p.c. at work, powerful examples like that of Alan Gribben. And there are people from across the political spectrum -- not just conservatives but liberals as well--coming together now to defend free speech on our campuses. The stakes are high. The issue here is whether the rising generation of Americans will come to understand what free inquiry is -- and how it can sometimes be hard --and how it is always necessary if truth and justice are to have a chance. • Winter I 992 �THE POLITICAL SEDUCTION OF THE UNIVERSITY Taken from - Campus - America's Student Newspaper by Debra Cermele SENIOR - THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA There is no such tlring as "great" literature. Or so Professor Lennard Davis instructed the class at the beginning of his University of Pennsylvania "British Novel" course last spring. "Harlequin Romances," Professor Davis said, "are part of the same continuum as the novels we are going to be reading." Although none of the students voiced disagreement, he proceeded to spend the entire semester saving them from the "oppression of [the] imperialized discourse" to which they had supposedly been exposed. His own book Resisting Novels clearly underlines what he teaches his class: "We can no longer smugly think of the novel as the culmination of the human spirit." Instead of analyzing the quality of the English classics as works of art, the class investigated the ways gender, class and sexuality influenced political power within these novels. Rather than being a' critical and comparative examination of the ideas that shaped Western thinking, Professor Davis's lectures were sessions for him to preach politics and sociology to a captive audience. For example, Joseph Conrad's Kurtz and Marlowe, Professor Davis insisted, were involved in a homoerotic relationship. Frankenstein's monster, whatever Mary Shelley may herself have believed, represented her "repressed female sexuality." Whenever students tried to raise issues more relevant to the study of English literature as literature, they were dismissed with indifference. Professor Davis was eager, however, to engage students in class discussions on such topics as a Daily Pennsylvanian columnist's ramblings on classroom behavior of women and the fact that the film Glory was produced and directed by white males. Unfortunately, this example is not atypical of what many college students are experiencing at most of the nation's universities, particularly in humanities departments. Nowadays, the prevailing wisdom dictates that the purpose of a professor is not to enhance the critical ability and knowledge of the next generation, but to transform society in revolutionary ways. And what better way is there to accomplish this than by subtly charging humanities discussions with ideas that are, at root, political? Many humanities courses are lectures that affirm, as fact, dubious ideas that are in reality at the center of debate not only within the humanities, but within the natural and social sciences. An overview of questions that tries to be fair to all sides is simply not presented in these classes, and many students are therefore unaware that essential debates even exist. Why else would no one dispute Professor Davis's contention that "views of gender are socially constructed in such a way that we think they are natural?" Indeed, there was no reason to dispute such a "fact." They had heard it many times before in many other classrooms. The desire to jettison the study of Western culture or at least to depreciate its importance is also trendy. The study of the history of Western ideas is now regarded as nothing more than the "hegemonic culture" seeking to regenerate itself, to the exclusion of "marginalized" groups. (This "hegemony" is comprised of white European males, now often handily referred to as "whitemales.") According to a column by Richard Wi n t e r 1 992 ....... LETTERS f ' o m Sa nr u l'e WHO ARE MARX AND FREUD, FOUCAULT AND DERRIDA, IF NOT, DEAD, WHITE, EUROPEAN MALES? page seven �Bernstein entitled "Academia's Liberals Defend Their Carnival of Canons Against Bloom's 'Killer B's'," the new scholars hold that the ultimate purpose ofliterature is to reflect the sociological perspective of the author: "[These] scholars particularly scorn the idea that certain great works of literature have absolute value or represent some eternal truth. Just about everything, they argue, is an expression of race, class, or gender." A sprinkling of Marx and Gramsci completes the justification for the politicization of the academy, the establishment of a new curriculum dictated mainly by political concerns. If culture exists only to maintain an unjust balance between classes, races, and genders, then the "marginalized" must rise up and eradicate the oppression they experience from the study of "whitemale" culture. Thus, the academy must toss out what the new proponents call the "narrow, outdated interpretation of the humanities and of culture itself' and welcome with open arms the writings of all of those who claim to have been marginalized by "whitemales." (This practice has been graced by the politically correct with the euphemism "multiculturalism.") Since literary quality is no longer relevant, it is sufficient, indeed required, for texts to reflect the extent to which the writer has been oppressed by the dominant culture. These new ideologues are actually displaying a profound hypocrisy in three important ways. In the first place, those who have dedicated their academic careers to destroying the "canon" have themselves become canonical. The fact that students now speak in the jargon of postModemist, neo-Marxist, or feminist critical theory reveals that a new orthodoxy has merely replaced the old. In addition, if they really were advocates, as they maintain, of a relativistic view of culture, they would not be seeking to deprecate the study of Western culture. For a relativist, nothing has any more objective value than anything else; it thus p age e i g ht should not matter which culture American students are studying. Yet these scholars seek to dissuade students from examining the classics. That is, they are imposing value judgements while denying that value judgements can be made. Third, by summarily dismissing Western ideas as the political rationalizations of "Dead White European Males" (DWEM's," as they are now affectionately called), the scholars are perpetrating the worst kind of hypocrisy: they are simultaneously making use of specifically that which they seek to reject. That is, the interest in studying other cultures is a specifically Western idea. Historically, almost all other world cultures have proven to be singularly closed and xenophobic. The ideas of seeking to find value in other ways of life--which these scholars maintain is unique to their own philosophy-emerged only through the evolution of Western civilization. Moreover, ideas such as feminism and post-Modem criticism, which the scholars like to pretend are so new, come directly from those very same "DWEMs" who are vilified by the new Establishment. Who are Marx and Freud, Foucault and Derrida, if not dead, white, European males? Even those feminists who hail Simone de Beauvoir know that Sartre was her main influence. However, these scholars conveniently ignore the essential importance of Western ideas to their very own ideologies. There is no disputing the wisdom of acquiring a knowledge of other cultures. Before it is possible to determine the universals of human nature, it is necessary to examine as broad a spectrum of perspectives as is possible. However, it is of little value merely to study isolated LETTERS fr o m Sa nt a Fe examples of other cultures in a vacuum while neglecting the history of ideas that formed one's own culture. The student then has nothing with which to compare new values, ideas, and achievements. For an American, what would studying the I Ching mean without an understanding of Western ideas? Before abandoning the study of Westem culture, academics should consider that by rejecting the study of works that universalize the human experience, they deny that there is a fundamental basis from which different cultures can build a mutual understanding of circumstantial differences. In fact, by denying any common ground, they perpetuate the notion that individuals of different races, sexes, ethnicities, sexual preference, etc. have not only superficial diversity but built-in differences that preclude any concept of a human experience. What is this but thinly disguised racism and sexism? The ultimate purpose of a university should be to engage students in a dialogue of ideas, with the aim of understanding the truth about and problems of the human condition. If today's students are exposed only to the new trend in academia, the only ideas they will absorb is that they themselves are either victims or perpetrators of oppression. Instead of gaining a knowledge of human nature, they will only come to "understand" the separatist doctrine that ethnic minorities and genders have irrevocably incompatible mentalities. They will come to "realize" that only people with the same genitals and melanin concentrations can understand each other. The new Establishmenthas declared that its goal is to change society. Unfortunately, it may do just that. • Winter 1 992 �ON DEPOLITICIZING THE UNIVERSITY by Robert Weissberg Perhaps only the politically masochistic would want to hear for the hundredth time all the stories of imposed speech codes, required courses on racism, and the bizarre Newspeak world of "equal opportunity" employment. Only administrators seem compelled to deny that the Left has successfully invaded and colonized university life. Disagreements presently concern only such questions as "how much?" and "what are the consequences?" Opposition to politicization seems as self-evidently correct and defensible as the programs of the politically correct are wrongheaded. Undoing the politicization has thus become the rallying cry in the battle against the tenured radicals, the deconstruction workers, and the pandering administrators. Opposition to the "politicization of the university" is an appealing call to arms. It permits us "reach out" and be diverse. Nearly everyone from the religious right to the Marxist left is susceptible to the plea that the university should not be an incarnation of the communist-run agitprop schools of the 1930s. Like wartime stories of atrocities, tales of introductory English courses celebrating the virtues of feminist environmental lesbianism are good for enlistments. OPPOSITION TO THE PC-LEFT MUST STOP HIDING BEHIND THE POLITE AND HIGH-SOUNDING CALL FOR DEPOLITICIZING THE UNIVERSITY. THERE MUST BE A WILLINGNESS TO DEFEND POSITIONS ON SUBSTANCE. The Limits of Anti-Politicization As a political slogan, the battle against the politicization of university life clearly has the tactical and psychological virtues of comfortable legitimacy. Easy politics. Unfortunately, it will not prove very serviceable during the battle. It may even be a delusional disorder. First, it puts us on difficult-to-defend grounds, a situation reminiscent of when priests preached that the purpose of sex was procreation, not recreation. Deep down, it is not convincing. We have all confronted the leftish charge that all education (and all everything, for that matter) is at core political. From a practical perspective, we must accept that there is enough truth in this claim that to maintain the polar opposite puts one in an untenable position. When the Left returns our fire with the charge of hypocrisy they Winter I 9 9 2 LETTERS frnm Santa Fe page nine �will score points and we honestly cannot wiggle out of it. If we define politics in the broadest possible way, even the natural sciences such as physics and chemistry have lurking within them a conception of the world constructed on some obscure politically derived premise of order and causation. In my own field of political science I cannot imagine teaching an antiseptically politically clean course despite every precaution. A disagreeable outsider will surely detect a bias in the readings, a tendency to give some perspectives greater class time, and other manifestations of propagating a political faith. Political preaching can be minimized, we can warn students, we can bring in visitors to add balance, but it is foolish to believe that it could be eliminated altogether. It is a situation akin to food purity--we cannot eliminate food impurities so we set minimum acceptable standards for mouse droppings and insect parts. How Is the Battle To Be Fought? The real battle is about substance, not the desirability of political neutrality. Race-based admission is wrong not because it allows group conflict to intrude into the sheltered world of ideas; it is wrong because it debases the idea of individuality and the principle of merit. Teaching freshmen that all literature is oppression is not a political crime, it is a crime against clear thinking and the purpose of education. Compulsory sensitivity training is wrong not because it permits only one portion of the political spectrum access to students; it is wrong because it smacks of totalitarian thought control. Rampant multiculturalism is wonderful only if one is a fan of ethnocentrism and domestic violence. To be blunt, opposition to the PC-Left must stop hiding behind the polite and high-sounding call for depoliticizing the university. There must be a willingness to defend positions on substance. If somepag e ten L ETTE R S from Santa F e thing is bad historical analysis, it should be called bad historical analysis, not the intrusion of trendy leftish politics into historical analysis (though it may be that, too). There should be no shame and embarrassment in saying that some things are right and others wrong. When Western civilization is attacked by delusional wannabe third-worlders, it is pointless to demand an end to the politicization of the curriculum--one must be willing to say that it is a better form of civilization. Reluctance to defend in public what should be defended is to ultimately lose the war. We must not become like those highly assimilated German Jews who refused to defend themselves because " it might cause trouble." This coming out of the closet will focus the battle. Rather than fight unproductive though psychologically safe skirmishes over side issues, the core evils will be addressed. Affirmative action will be opposed because it violates principles, not because it brings politics to the university. Deconstructionism is not wrong because it interjects politics into literature, it is wrong because it rests on nonsensical assumptions and yields gibberish, not insight. Until this occurs, combating the PC-Left will resemble little more than disjointed civilian resistance to a well-organized occupying army--perhaps some sabotage, a little sniping and noncooperation, but nothing that amounts to more than a nuisance. • Robert Weissberg and I were at Cornell together over 20 years ago. We lost track ofeach other until last year, when Letters appeared in his mailbox. This article is taken from a longer piece sent to me just before we went to press. Ifanyone cares to write Bob (Department of Political Science, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Urbana Illinois 61 8013696), a large packet of essays will no doubt follow - I .A. Wini er 1992 �WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE? Once we accept the idea that higher education entails opening rather than closing minds, we are still confronted with what, if any, the appropriate limits of speech and action might be. These two essays, with different answers, are the best I could find on the topic. - J.A. UNIVERSITIES MUST DEFEND FREE SPEECH by Benno C. Schmidt Jr. The most serious problems of freedom of expression in the U. S. today exist on our campuses. Freedom of thought is in danger from well-intentioned but misguided efforts to give values of community and harmony a higher place than freedom. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce "correct" opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind. On many campuses, perhaps most, there is little resistance to growing pressure to suppress and to punish, rather than to answer, speech that offends notions of civility and community. These campuses are heedless of the oldest lesson in the history of freedom, which is that offensive, erroneous and obnoxious speech is the price of liberty. Values of civility, mutual respect and harmony are rightly prized within the university. But these values must be fostered by teaching and by example, and defended by expression. When the goals of harmony collide with freedom of expression, freedom must be the paramount obligation of an academic community. Much expression that is free may deserve our contempt. We may well be moved to exercise our own freedom to counter it or to ignore it. But universities cannot censor or suppress speech, no matter how obnoxious in content, without violating their justification for existence. Liberal education presupposes that a liberated mind will strive for the courage and composure to face ideas that are fraught with evil, and to answer them. To stifle expression because it is obnoxious, erroneous, embarrassing, not instrumental to some political or ideological end is--quite apart from the invasion of the rights of others -- a disastrous reflection on the idea of the university. It is to elevate fear over the capacity for a liberated and humane mind. Mr. Schmidt is president of Yale. This article is adapted from a longer speech delivered at New York's 92nd Street Y. The Wall Street Journal, Monday, May 6, 1991 Acts of Suppression The freedom of speakers on our campuses goes to the heart of academic freedom. However bizarre, off-beat, or outrageous a speaker may be, however compelling the concerns of protesters, the right to speak is as fundamental an issue of principle as any W int e r 1 992 LETTERS fro m S a nt a F e p a ge e lev e n �UNIVERSITIES CANNOT CENSOR OR SUPPRESS SPEECH, NO MATTER HOW OBNOXIOUS IN CONTENT, WITHOUT VIOLA TING THEIR JUST/FICA TION FOR EXISTENCE. LIBERAL EDUCATION PRESUPPOSES THAT A LIBERA TED MIND WILL STRIVE FOR THE COURAGE ANO COMPOSURE TO FACE IDEAS THAT ARE FRAUGHT WITH EV/LANO TO ANSWER THEM. page twelv e campus can face. This is why I believed so strongly that essential principles of academic freedom were violated at Yale, though not by Yale, earlier this year when protesters, for the most part not from Yale, shouted down Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan and effectively prevented him from making himself heard to a group that had invited him to speak. A more vexing question of freedom of expression concerns the actual use of university authority to suppress freedom. This is the most serious example of confusion and failure of principle in university governance today. It reminds us how frequently in history threats to free expression have come not from tyranny but from well-meaning persons of little understanding. There is no more important line drawn in our entire corpus of First Amendment law than the line between threats and fight ing words--which may be appropriately punished--and offensive speech generally. For if concerns about dangers of violence are permitted to balloon into justification for punishing any expression that offends, a vague and unpredictable engine of suppression is loosed. Free expression is lost. Any statement that might give offense is at risk. Yet in many universities this is the critical line that has been blurred or abandoned in the effort to create a civil, inoffensive community. Some of the nation's finest universities have empowered groups of faculty and students with roving commissions to punish offensive speech. At the University of Michigan, before judicial intervention, persons were subject to discipline for any statement that "stigmatizes or victimizes ... on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap, or Vietnam-era veteran status ... that creates an intimidating, hostile, or demeaning environment for educational pursuits." A pamphlet that listed examples of proscribed speech inLETTERS f'°m Santa F e eluded "a male student makes remarks in class like 'women just aren't as good in this field as men.' " Another: "Your student organization sponsors a comedian who slurs Hispanics." So along with utterly boundless options of offensiveness, we have guilt by association. A federal judge threw this out. The University of Wisconsin promulgated a prohibition of "racist or discriminatory comments ... that intentionally demean the race, sex, religion [etc.] of any person or persons ... and create a hostile or demeaning environment for education." Its disciplinary code indicates that "jokes that have the purpose of making the educational environment hostile" are an example of the sort of thing that is barred. The University of Pennsylvania prohibits any comments that "stigmatize or victimize individuals on the basis of race [etc.] and that create an ... offensive academic, living, or work environment." The University of Connecticut had prohibitions on speech that included "conduct causing alarm by making personal slurs." The ban extended to "inappropriately directed laughter, inconsiderate jokes ... and conspicuous exclusions [of others] from conversation." This too was narrowed after a judicial challenge. In the recent Brown case that has received such widespread attention, press accounts might justify the view that the student who was punished had directly and intentionally threatened other individuals with violence. This can surely be punished. The problem is that the Brown rule under which discipline was imposed forbids students from subjecting "another person, group, or class of persons to inappropriate, abusive, threatening, or demeaning action based on race, [etc.]." Under this wide-open formulation, a group of students, faculty and administrators can decide after the fact when speech should be treated as "inappropriate action." Thus, although the facts of the particular case may well have been within the very narrow prohibition of threats that Winter 1992 �free-speech theory and practice have long accepted as legitimate, the rule that authorized this discipline seems vastly wider, indeed almost boundless. The chilling effects on speech of the vagueness and open-ended nature of many universities' prohibitions of offensive speech are compounded by the fact that these codes are typically enforced by faculty and students who commonly assert that vague notions of community are more important to the academy than freedom of thought and expression. Such a view is disastrous to the independence and creativity of the academic mission. A sad footnote to this erosion is the complacency with which many who ought to know better are responding, or failing to respond. An editorial in•the New York Times took the position that because Brown is a private university, and therefore not bound by the First Amendment, it need not treat free expression as a paramount value and should therefore balance the needs of freedom and the needs of civility on campus. This is profoundly wrong. A university ought to be more devoted to freedom than the larger society , which has other goals that compete with the search for truth. This search is the paramount end of the university, its reason for existence. Moreover, universities have a special capacity to answer obnoxious speech. The communal character of the university, the fact that it is replete with opportunities for expression, the capacity of students, faculty, deans and presidents to answer forcefully and promptly, all present manifold opportunities to counteroffensive expression.The current wave of suppression is largely directed at expression that is said to demean racial minorities, women, gays and lesbians, religious groups, persons with disabilities, and other groups that tend to be victimized by ugly stereotypes. Racism and other such prejudices are antithetical to the academic mission of the university, because the search for truth requires that each individual in the uni- Wint er I 99 2 versity be judged on the basis of his or her individual academic merits. But it does not follow that the university should suppress any speech that can plausibly be thought to be racist. A university ought to be the last place where people are inhibited by fear of punishment from expressing ignorance or even hate, so long as others are left free to answer. I have often heard the argument lately that uninhibited freedom of speech was somehow more appropriate in the days when our universities were more homogeneous, while today's far greater racial, religious and cultural diversity call for controls in the interest of harmony and community. That so many people of good will would make such an argument shows how far we have drifted from our confidence in and commitment to freedom. I can only imagine what Madison or Holmes would have thought of this inversion of the theory of free expression. It is precisely societies that are diverse, pluralistic, and contentious that most urgently need freedom of speech and freedom of religion. very dangerous. The political process is too prone to agitation about various sorts of speech to be a wise and stable source of enduring principle. If freedom of thought on campus is to be protected, the universities themselves must summon up the clarity of purpose to defend the principles ofliberty on which the academic mission must rest. • A UNIVERSITY OUGHT TO BE MORE DEVOTED TO FREEDOM THAN Not the Answer THE LARGER SOCIETY, The courts have begun to see bits of the problem that surface occasionally in legislation, and by and large have reacted with justified bewilderment. But the last place universities should look for protection of freedom is the courts. Private universities are in most cases not covered by the First Amendment because their actions are not those of the state. And judges will properly tend to approach issues of freedom within universities with much deference based on long traditions of academic autonomy. Nor does the answer to these problems lie in federal legislation. Rep. Henry Hyde, with the support of the ACLU, has proposed a statute that would subject private colleges and universities that receive federal funds to the strictures of the First Amendment. This is well-intentioned but LETTERS from San1 a Fe WHICH HAS OTHER GOALS THAT COMPETE WITH THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH. THIS SEARCH IS THE PARAMOUNT ENO OF THE UNIVERSITY, ITS REASON FOR EXISTENCE. page thir!een �SAY THE RIGHT THING ... OR ELSE by Judith Martin and Gunther Stent The New York Times, Wednesday, March 20, 1991 Can the university, with its special trust of protecting free speech, be hampered by the restrictions of civility? What kind of a frill is etiquette, anyway, for those in the noble pursuit of truth? These questions are raised whenever a loose-tongued student turns publicly nasty. When Brown University recently expelled such a student, many argued that all restrictions of free speech are intolerable in the university. Brown's president, Vartan Gregorian, agreed with that premise and neatly reclassified the offensive speech as behavior. But the premise is wrong. The special trust of a university is not to foster unlimited speech: It is to foster unlimited inquiry. And totally free speech inhibits rather than enhances the free exchange of ideas. The law cannot restrict such speech without violating our constitutional rights. But etiquette, the extra-legal regulative system that seeks to avert conflict before it becomes serious enough to call in the Jaw, can and does. You may have a legal right to call your mother a slut, but you won't if you know what's good for you. Nor could you convince many people that the controversy that such remarks are likely to provoke will lead to advances in knowledge. The university needs to enforce rules banning speech that interferes with the free exchange of ideas. It must protect the discussion of offensive topics but not the use of offensive manners. It must enable people freely to attack ideas but not one another. pag e fo u rteen LETTERS Education is impossible without the order that prevents intimidation and mayhem. When children first enter school, they must be taught to sit still, refrain from taunting their classmates, show respect for their teacher and wait their turn to talk, or they will never be able to learn. To those who find it horrifying that the university should allow a lesser degree of free speech than the law permits, it might be pointed out that the law itself restricts free speech in its pursuit ofjudicial truth. Try saying some of the things in a courtroom that the law will protect your right to say in a barroom. Jurisprudence uses etiquette in courtroom procedure, not only to restrict speech but to impose standards of dress, comportment and forms of address--matters over which universities have long since abandoned authority. Legislators and diplomats also know the value of keeping speech within the bounds of civility. The parliamentary etiquette book, "Robert's Rules of Order," proscribes "disorderly words" and forbids speakers "to arraign the motives of a member" during strongly worded debate. "It is not the man, but the measure, that is the subject of debate," decrees its section on "Decorum." The rougher the conflict, the more manners are needed. Only when insults, harassment, disrespect and obscenity are banned can people engage in truly substantive argument. Of course it is also a personal insult to call someone a racist or sexist. Incivility is no more acceptable in defense than in attack. Rebuttal, however, is a staple of open debate. Members of the university community should always have the opportunity to attack ideas--but not to attack people. The university should be obliged to provide a forum for anyone who wants to argue for or against an idea, provided the argument is made in good faith and a polite manner. This standard of academic etiquette must be required not only in the classroom and lecture hall but wherever the community of scholars gathers--residence halls, dining commons, recreational facilities. Invective, whether spoken or conveyed through posters or graffiti, in the classroom or in the community, is detrimental to rational debate, to which universities are dedicated. • ATTACK IDEAS, NOT PEOPLE Judith Martin writes the Miss Manners syndicated column. Gunther Stent is chairman of the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley. from Santa F e Wi ni er 1 992 �ANNOUNCEMENTS The creation of an Institute for the Study of Eastern Classics on the Santa Fe campus St. John's College Receives 3.1 Million Dollar Trust St. John's College Summer Seminars for Adults 1992 St. John's College has been awarded a grant of $207,320 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The grant will be used in the creation of an Institute for the Study of Eastern Classics on the Santa Fe campus. The institute will offer a oneyear, graduate level, non-credit, certificate program in the classic texts of Eastern civilization. In addition to studying the major works of China and India, students also will receive a full year of language studies in Chinese or Sanskrit. The institute will be staffed by St. John's tutors. We have always taken Great Books seriously at St. John's, and this institute is a way for us to take seriously the classic texts, the literature and the philosophy of the East. St. John's College recently received the largest single gift in its history. Mara and Charles Robinson of Santa Fe, New Mexico have established a trust that has resulted in a 3.1 million dollar gift to St. John's. The Robinsons have been actively involved with St. John's College since 1982 when Mrs. Robinson enrolled in the Graduate Institute on the Santa Fe campus. She graduated in 1983 with a master's degree in liberal education. Between 1984 and 1990 Mrs. Robinson served on the St. John's College Board of Visitors and Governors and has since continued her participation in various aspects of the college. "My experience as a student in St. John's College and as a member of its Board of Visitors and Governors has made my respect for St. John's grow through the years. My husband and I believe strongly in the program and ideals of St.John's and our support expresses our confidence in its leadership as well as its goals. We hope that future students will profit from its educational program and enjoy as stimulating an intellectual experience as I have throughout my studies at St. John's." This gift is equal to approximately 10% of the total current St. John's endowment. Needless to say, we are not only grateful, we are overwhelmed by the Robinson's generosity. - J.A. This summer St. John's College offers six, week-long seminars and one workshop in Landscape Drawing. Participants may enroll in one seminar each week for 1, 2, or 3 weeks. Each seminar is limited to 18 participants. Inquiries should be directed to: James Carey, Director Institute for the Study of Eastern Classics, St. John's College 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599 Phone: (505) 988-4361 We are very grateful to the W. H. Brady Foundation for underwriting this issue of Week One - Jul~ 19th - 25th Dante - Purgatory or Novels of the Southwest Willa Cather - Death Comes to the Archbishop Rudy Anaya - Bless Me Ultima Scott Momaday - The Ancient Child \;\eek T\\o - Jul~ 26th - \ugust Isl De Tocqueville - Democracy in America or Opera Mozart - Don Giovanni Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier Week Three· .\ugust 2nd - 8th Shakespeare - Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night or Dostoevski - The Devils or Landscape Drawing - Workshop For information write: St John's College Summer Seminars - C, 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599 LE TT ER SfromSanta Fe Faculty Position - Kenyon College Kenyon College has a course of study called the Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS). It is a multi-year, team-taught course based on the classic texts of European and other world cultures. They are now looking for a program director whose duties would include teaching, curriculum development, administration, and leadership of an ongoing faculty seminar. A doctorate, teaching excellence and scholarly achievement are prerequisites. A cover letter, vita, examples of scholarly work and three letters of reference should be directed to Academic Dean's Office, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, 43022, by February 28, 1992. Winter 1992 LETTERS from Santa F e page fifteen �PROFILE Founded: Established in 1696 in Annapolis, Maryland, as King William's School and chartered in 1784 as St. John's College. Great Books Program adopted 1937. Second campus in Santa Fe opened in 1964. Curriculum: An integrated, four-year, arts and science program based on reading and discussing, in loosely chronological order, the Great Books of Western civilization. The program requires four years of foreign language, four years of mathematics, three years of laboratory science, and one year of music. Approach: Tutorials, laboratories, and seminars requiring intense participation replace more traditional lectures. Classes are very small. Student/ faculty ratio is 8: 1. St. John's is independent and non-sectarian. Degree Granted: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. Student Body: Enrollment is limited to about 400 students on each campus. Current freshman class made up of 55% men and 45 % women, from 30 states and several foreign countries. Fifty-seven percent receive financial aid. Students may transfer between the Santa Fe and Annapolis campuses. Alumni Careers: Education - 21 %, Business - 20%, Law - 10%, Visual and Performing Arts - 9%, Medicine - 7%, Science and Engineering - 7%, Computer Science - 6%, Writing and Publishing - 5%. Graduate Institute: The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education is an interdisciplinary master's degree program based on the same principles as the undergraduate program. Offered on both campuses year-round. Readers of the Newsletter may be especially interested in applying for our summer session. For more information please contact Nancy Buchenauer, Directorof the Graduate Institute, (505) 982-3691 ext. 249. LE TT ER SfromSanta Fe St. John's College 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599 ADDRESS CORRECTION REQUESTED Bulk Rate U.S. Postage PAID Non-Profit Organization Permit No.231 Santa Fe, N.M. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe Description An account of the resource A newsletter published by the Santa Fe President's Office that includes articles about liberal education. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 16 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe, Winter 1992 Description An account of the resource Letters from Santa Fe, St. John’s College—Santa Fe, New Mexico, Winter 1992 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Agresto, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Cheney, Lynne V. Cermele, Debra Weissberg, Robert, 1941- Schmidt, Benno C., 1942- Martin, Judith, 1938- Stent, Gunther S. (Gunther Siegmund), 1924-2008 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Letters_from_SF_1992_Winter Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1c77405361b442cf19a76a340f458dc3.pdf 232f5b3e4cec377862e6563e0df9d30c PDF Text Text LETTERSJrom Santa Fe St. John's College-Santa Fe, New Mexico Spring 1993 "BUT WHAT WILL I DO WITH IT?" OR, BUSINESS AND LIBERAL EDUCATION I I NS IDE THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY page2 CHARTING A COURSE FOR LIBERAL EDUCATION pages CREATIVITY, THE CLASSICS AND THE CORPORATION page 7 LIBERAL EDUCATION: PREPARING TOMORROW'S BUSINESS EXECUTIVES page 9 AN ORAL EXAM FOR THE NEW LIBERAL ARTS GRADUATE page 12 once read how the colony of Virginia asked the British Crown for authority to begin a college in the New World in hopes that a proper education might help save souls. The response was blunt-"Souls? Damn your souls. Raise tobacco!" We have never been, it would seem, without the conflict of making a living on one side and liberal learning on the other. But, today, the situation might well be more extreme than in the past. As I mentioned in a previous edition of this newsletter, probably no more than 15 to 20 percent of all college students today are concentrating on the liberal arts or some area of the liberal arts, and the percentage decreases each year. Let me flirt with heresy for a second and say that surely worse things have happened in the world, even in the world of higher education. Professional schools and pre-professional courses have improved immensely over the years. They offer challenges to the intellect and often broaden rather than constrict a person's horizons. Many times they offer the rigor and richness once found in liberal education. And they are increasingly attracting the better students. Conversely, liberal education today, in many places, is a pretty sad affair. Little rigor, much politics, and scarcely a view of what excellence or even "well-roundedness" might be. Today liberal education is not often the formation of penetrating minds and the cultivation of high character (much less the saving of souls). Far too many institutions have abandoned the broad sweep of general education requirements in important fields of knowledge and substituted choice for sequence, aimlessness for rigor, and boutique courses for difficult fields such as mathematics and science. An a la carte curriculum is not liberal education. Liberal education is, we forget, the polar opposite of dilettantism, unfocused electives and groundlessness. What I have tried to do in this issue, besides my usual moaning about the condition of the world, is not to show that a professional education is bad but that it is not nearly as useful either to a career or to life as a good liberal education. I simply wanted to re-present the old view that a solid liberal arts background is good in itself and, in an age when most people will change jobs eight or nine times before they die, good for the more practical parts of life, too. JUST SAY NO TO COLLEGE page 14 John Agresto �FROM THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY DISCOURSE VII: "KNOWLEDGE VIEWED IN RELATION TO PROFESSIONAL SKILL" "A CULTIVATED INTELLECT, BECAUSE by John Henry Cardinal Newman IT IS A GOOD IN ITSELF, BRINGS WITH IT A POWER AND A GRACE TO EVERY WORK AND OCCUPATION WHICH IT UNDERTAKES, AND ENABLES US TO BE MORE USEFUL, AND TOA GREATER NUMBER." pa ge t wo • We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions. . . . Such a union and concert of the inte llectual powers, such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is necessarily a matter of training . But, such a training ... is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces the mind to truth, nor the reading many books, nor the getting up many subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, nor the a ttending many lectures. All this is short of enough; a man may have done it all, yet be lingering in the vestibule of knowled ge: he may not realize what his mouth utters; he may not see with his mental eye what confronts him; he may h ave no grasp of things as they are; or at least he may have no power at all of advancing one step forward of himself, in consequ ence of w hat he has already acquired, no power of d iscriminating between truth and falsehood, of sifting out the grains of truth from the mass, of arranging L E T TE R S f r o m Santa Fe things according to their real value, and, if I may use the phrase, of building up ideas . . . . The bodily eye, the organ for apprehending material objects, is provided by nature; the eye of the mind, of which the object is truth, is the work of discipline and habit. This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study of science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture, is called liberal education... . • Now. .. some great men ... insist that education should be confined to some p a rticula r and narrow end, a nd sh ould issu e in some definite work, which can b e weighed and measured . "Useful" and "utility" becomes their watchword. They very naturally go on to ask what there is to show for the expense of a university; what is the real worth in the market of the article called "a liberal education." • ''Tis matter of astonishment," Locke says in his work on education, "tha t m en of quality a nd parts should suffer themselves to be so far misled by custom a nd implicit faith. Reason, if con sulted w ith, would advise that their children's time should be spent in acquiring what might be useful to them, w hen they come to be men, rather than that their heads should be stuffed with a deal of trash, a great part whereof they usually never do ('tis certain they never need to) think on again as long as they live; and so much of it as does stick by them they are only the worse for." S pr i n g 1 993 �In another passage he distinctly limits utility in education to its bearing on the future profession or trade of the pupil, that is, he scorns the idea of any education of the intellect, simply as such. "Can there be any thing more ridiculous," he asks, "than that a father should waste his own money, and his son's time, in setting him to learn the Roman language, when at the same time he designs him for a trade, wherein he, having no use of Latin, fails not to forget that little which he brought from school, and which 'tis ten to one he abhors for the ill-usage it procured him? Could it be believed, unless we have every where amongst us examples of it, that a child should be forced to learn the rudiments of a language, which he is never to use in Nevertheless, if a liberal education consists in the culture of the intellect, and if that culture be in itself a good, here, without going further, is an answer to Locke's question; for if a healthy body is a good in itself, why is not a healthy intellect? + Let us take "useful" to mean, not what is simply good, but what tends to good, or is the instrument of the course of life that he is designed to, and neglect all the while the writing a good hand, a nd casting accounts, which are of great advantage in all conditions of life, and to most trades indispensably necessary?" Nothing of course can be more absurd than to neglect in education those matters which are necessary for a boy's future calling; but the tone of Locke's remarks evidently implies more than this, and is condemnator y of any teaching which tends to the genera l cultivation of the mind. Sp r i n g 1 99 3 .. good; and in this sense . . . I will show you how a liberal education is truly and fully a useful, though it be not a professional, edu cation. I lay it down as a principle, which will save us a great deal of anxiety, tha t, though the us e ful is not always good , the good is always useful. I say then, if a liberal education be good, it must necessarily be useful too. LETT E RS f r om Sa nta F e + Health is a good in itself, though nothing came of it, yet . .. we never think of it except as useful as well as good, though at the same time we cannot point out any definite and distinct work or production which it can be said to effect. And so as regards intellectual culture .. . . I only deny tha t we must be able to point out, before we have any right to call it useful, some art, or business, or profession, or trade, or work, as resulting from it. . . . On the other t hand, as the body may be tended, cherished, and exercised with a simple view to its general health, so may the intellect also be generally exercised in order to perfect its state; and this is its cultivation. As a man in health can do what an unhealthy man cannot do ... so in like manner general culture of mind is the best aid to professional and scientific study, and educa ted men can do what illiterate cannot; a nd th e man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to ana lyze, who h as refined his taste, a nd formed his judgment, a nd sharpened his m ental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an eng ineer, or a p a ge th r e e �+ I have confined myself to saying that that training of the intellect, which is best for the individual himself, best enables him to discharge his duties to society. If then a practical end must be assigned to a university course, I say it is that of training good members of society. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope. But a university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical, and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them. He is at home in any society, he has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready, yet never in the way; he is a pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend upon; he knows when to be serious and when to trifle, and he has a sure tact which enables him to trifle with gracefulness and to be serious with effect. He has the repose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which has resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift page four LETTERS from Santa Fe chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, or any other for which he has a taste or special talent, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense then ... mental culture is emphatically useful. This then is how I should solve the fallacy, for so I must call it, by which Locke and his disciples would frighten us from cultivating the intellect, under the notion that no education is useful which does not teach us some temporal calling, or some mechanical art, or some physical secret. I say that a cultivated intellect, because it is a good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace to every work and occupation which it undertakes, and enables us to be more useful, and to a greater number. which serves him in public, and supports him in retirement, without which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and disappointment have a charm. The art which tends to make a man all this is in the object which it pursues as useful as the art of wealth or the art of health, though it is less susceptible of method, and less tangible, less certain, less complete in its result. Spring 1993 �defense of the liberal arts based on "relevancy" is always problematic. As a practical matter, career decisions are increasingly being made by students at the time they choose to attend a university and certainly by the time they select a field of concentration in their second year. When the career benefits of a liberal arts degree are obscured, students tend to select disciplines that have higher immediate returns and ignore the needs both they and the business community have for more satisfying and expansive educational programs. The gift society offers our educated youth of today is the freedom to choose various life paths, ... yet the pressure to choose seems, ironically, to narrow the range of options. A liberal education preserves options while at the same time providing the tools and the time to select intelligently among them. In the corporate world of today, where job qualifications and opportunities change with disturbing frequency, the broadest kind of educational preparation will often prove to be the most practical. But if this is so, why are the liberal arts in jeopardy within the corporate hiring structure? I take it that corporations are undervaluing liberal education in the search for graduates with technical and business skills that may be relevant only in the short run. Solid grounding in the arts, sciences and languages is overlooked and the long-run goal of globally competitive corporate leadership is jeopardized. In this sense then the injury done the "corporations at risk" appears primarily to be a self-inflicted one. If top management would just send different signals to the hiring committees, the problem should disappear. But of course, it is not that easy. Liberal education bears some responsibility for the state we find ourselves in. And I say this as president of an institution committed to liberal arts and sciences which just graduated a class dominated by students of like mind. The burden of liberal education has to be that it prepares students not for a vocation, but for life. We do not try to anticipate and teach to narrow specialties. We take instead a broad view of education and teach for the ages; we value the past as a guide to the future. That is a noble objective, but it does not always withstand scrutiny. During the last decade, many colleges compromised the conditions under which a liberal education best operates. Academic permissiveness encouraged students to design their own curriculums. This approach compromised the breadth of liberal education in two respects, both of which impact upon the business community. Left on their own, students often de-emphasized the demanding sciences aspect of liberal education in favor of more congenial humanities and social sciences programs. As the essence of analytical thought is the scientific method, we have been derelict in not requiring of students that they be conversant with both arts and Spring 1 9 9~3 LETTERS/ram Santa Fe CHARTING A COURSE FOR LIBERAL EDUCATION by Paul R. Verkuil A IN THE CORPORATE WORLD OF TODAY, WHERE JOB QUALIFICATIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES CHANGE WITH DISTURBING FREQUENCY, THE BROADEST KIND OF EDUCATION PREPARATION WILL OFTEN PROVE TO BETHE MOST PRACTICAL. page five �sciences in defining a liberal education. Today colleges have largely backed off from this self-directed course selection era (indeed some of us never entered it) and that should help bring business recruiters back to the liberal arts graduates. A related and no less critical oversight at many colleges has been a de-emphasis on foreign languages and a crippling of international studies. It is now obvious that our corporations deal in global markets and are at an increasing disadvantage vis-a-vis foreign business in terms of qualified multi-cultural personnel. One cannot correct this imbalance with quick fix language study just before executives are sent abroad. A total educational approach to the country and region involved is the best method for achieving an educated and culturally sensitive business elite. Area studies programs that deal on an interdisciplinary basis with language, literature and culture of a given region are ideal laboratories for producing Americans for the world business stage. Fortunately, there is a revival of language requirements on many campuses and this should lead to greater interest in area studies .... A mutual obligation arises: Universities must insure that liberal education lives up to its credo of depth and breadth; corporate sector hiring must recognize and act on the values inherent in such long-term educational preparation. •• • deeply troubled about the degree to which society was unprepared for dealing with new energies released through scientific discovery. Yet, while he enthusiastically criticized his own education, in the final analysis Adam's message was not that university education could anticipate and solve all the problems of new technology, but that it took a lifetime of learning and study to do so. In fact in the Education of Henry Adams, Adams criticizes his college experience in an oddly complimentary way: "Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful men." I take comfort from Adam's observation because it implicitly recognizes that colleges can never expect to satisfy demands for fully educating our leaders. Of course we should strive to emphasize usefulness over respectability wherever possible. Ultimately, however, the liberal arts offers an appreciation of how much there is to know in life and the desire and means for beginning the quest. It offers insights into how persons of consequence, like Adams himself, lived their lives and it encourages others to follow in their path. This article is taken from a longer paper delivered by Paul Verkuil, president and CEO of AAA and former president of William and Mary, to the Corporate Council on the Liberal Arts. Henry Adams spent much of his life berating the backward-looking education he received at Harvard College. In the 19th century as today, Adams saw technology overtaking established thought. He was pa ge s ix L ET T E R S fr om Sant a Fe I make free men out of children by means of books anda balance. Taken from the St. John's College Seal S p r in g 1993 �CREATIVITY. THE CLASSICS AND THE CORPORATION by Nannerl 0. Keohane Are liberal arts colleges and universities these days deluding ourselves and our students, their parents and their employers, about how well our graduates are prepared for what they do when they leave our ivy halls? We think not. In fact, we are convinced, now more than ever, that a liberal arts education is the best possible preparation for the leaders of the future, including the entrepreneurs and corporate CEOs as well as the scientists and the lawyers, the artists and the politicians. How do we support this claim? an employer. We offer time and space for thinking, for discussion, for roaming through the ages and across the world on voyages of discovery . As Alice Freeman Palmer, President of Wellesley said in 1897: "We go to college to know, assured that knowledge is sweet and powerful, that a good education emancipates the mind and makes us citizens of the world." Such stock elements in our social rhetoric, however bracing such rhetoric may be, are not however likely to convince the pragmatist who asks us what is the use of it all. To answer such challenges, to convince the skeptical parent or employer of the worth of what we do, we must show how a liberal arts education makes a difference in will evolve and alter overnight. It will be more and more a world shaped by human handiwork and accessible to technological restructuring. Today we have, compared with even a few years ago, a vastly increased capacity to transform the features of the globe, to touch the universe. Our tools of measurement and memory and control are powerful beyond the imagination of our predecessors, and extended every moment. In such a world, the ability to participate with some degree of comprehension, and even more to share in shaping the continuing flux and change, will depend on knowledge of general principles, on habits, on analysis, and on suppleness of mind . Liberal learning gives one the critical capacity for distance, for one' s ability to work effectivelyand more than work, to manage and to change-in the world of the future. Among the few things we can safely say about our future is that it will be a time of accelerating flux and change. The world our children will inhabit is virtually certain to be a world in which skills and instruments and ways of doing things assessment, for stepping back and making judgments, for comparing what one sees before one with things of other times and places, for getting a perspective on the world. These are crucial attributes for anyone who sets out to master new complex phenomena, to ma ke lasting and productive changes. In the world that we can forecast for our children, anyone who lacks LE TT E RS fro m Sa nt a F e page seve n THE VALUE OF LIBERAL LEARNING I would begin by arguing that a good liberal arts education is not a dress rehearsal for anything: it is reality, a re ality that involves maturing intellectually and personally, developing crucial skills. The real world lives in our libraries and laboratories and dormitories, as real a world as any we know. The virtue of the ivory tower metaphor, of course, is that it does convey something precious (in the non-derogatory mean ing of that word) in what we are all about. We do offer some shelter from the relentless pressures of making an immediate livelihood and responding to the requirements of a profession or Sp rin g 19 93 �such broad-based training, who is narrowly educated in specific technical skills of any kind, will become obsolescent almost overnight. Any immediate advantage that such a graduate will have in fitting into a new job will shortly be wiped out-and then forever lost-against the adaptive skills of someone who has been taught how to learn, where to go for answers, how to judge the answers that are given, and how to understand and communicate ideas. This is our tremendous utilitarian advantage over any trade school, any narrow professional or preprofessional education: We teach people how to learn, and thus ensure them against the fate of obsolescence. Their future employers will not have to spend good time and money in perpetually retraining them as skills change, nor will they be so likely to be out of a job because the world has passed them by. Liberal learning delights in equipping students for an array of possible futures, for the individual and for society. In doing so, a liberal education makes several futures possible, and gives liberally educated people an edge in determining which of those futures will come to be. One of my favorite responses to this question hinges on the double meaning of the phrase itself: a liberal education. On the one h and, a liberal education was designed for free persons, not slaves or helotspeople (originally, of course, men) of free birth who were expected to have some responsibilities of public service and some standing within their communities. In order to prepare such people well to lead such lives, a liberal education was required to instill in them the core values of their society, rooting them in history and culture, to make sure they understood and respected ancient truths and carried on worthy traditions. The second meaning of a liberal education, however, stands diametrically opposed to this: the liberation of the mind, freeing the student from unexamined assumptions, opening horizons from narrow parochialism onto the wide, wide world. In order to accomplish this second part of its purpose, liberal learning needs to reward quite different habits of mind from those promoted by the first: a tolerance for ambiguity and complexity, an ability to be at ease with suspended judgment when closure would be premature. When liberal learning works as it is intended to work, these two diametrically opposed meanings move in, against and through each other in a true dialectic- a dialogue, a synthesis, a play between opposites to capture the best of both in a truer whole. The juxtaposition of familiarity with the classics of the human mind, with a penchant for creativity and critical originality, creates the distinctive strength of a liberal education. The good teacher imparts both a respect for the given, for the reasons for what is, and also a healthy skepticism a nd habit of continuing inquiry. The former is at least as difficult as the latter, for simply parroting old truths is not liberal learning; the student must be inside those truths, must take them on, adapt them, make them his own. pag e e i g ht LETT E R S from Sa nta F e WHAT IS DISTINCTIVE ABOUT WHAT WE DO? In a community devoted to liberal learning, in the interplay of teacher and student, in the mind of every scholar, there should be a fruitful tension of positive and negative: a respect for the ceremonies, a willingness to follow rituals and fall in line with tradition-but also a questioning and questing spirit that never lets itself become wholly absorbed in anything that is. Nannerl Keohane, newly appointed president of Duke University, delivered a longer version of this article at a conference "Corporations at Risk: Liberal Learning and Private Enterprise." . . . A LIBERAL EDUCATION MAKES SEVERAL FUTURES POSSIBLE, AND GIVES LIBERALLY EDUCATED PEOPLE AN EDGE IN DETERMINING WHICH OF THOSE FUTURES WILL COME TO BE. Spr in g 199 3 �LIBERAL EDUCATION : PREPARING TOMORROW'S BUSINESS EXECUTIVES by Peter A. Benoliel Plain and simple, a liberal education, is the optimal vehicle in undergraduate years for preparing for a business management career. I speak not as an academician but rather as a practicing executive who contends daily with the many-faceted challenges of business, utilizing many of the techniques and disciplines taught in business schools. The latter remark introduces a concept which I think we continue to lose sight of in assessing the role of educational institutions, namely, the distinction between education and training. It appears to me that the great bulk of what is today called education is really training, whether it be in specific professional disciplines such as engineering, medicine and the law, or in more prosaic but no less necessary vocational training. In no way do I wish to demean or minimize the importance of training or the role of educational institutions in providing it. My immediate point is that the majority of our students complete their undergraduate years under the misconception of being educated, when in reality they are undergoing sophisticated training. This brings me to my central point, which is that the undergraduate years of a Spring 1993 student, especially if that student wishes a career in business management, would most profitably be spent not in taking business courses leading to a degree but rather in undergoing a liberal educational experience. It then becomes incumbent upon me not only to define what I mean by a liberal education but to enumerate those qualities, characteristics and skills that may be necessary for a fulfilling career in business management. I must further make a distinction between those characteristics which for the most part are innate and those which are acquired. Understand, please, that in describing characteristics, I am thinking of those individuals who will rise above middle management into levels of top responsibility. Necessary Innate Characteristics 1. High degree of intelligenceintellectual curiosity 2. Creativity 3. Goal orientation 4. High energy-drive 5. Leadership capabilitiesinter-personal skills. Acquired Characteristics 1. Problem solving-analytical skills 2. Synthesis capabilities-ability to relate seemingly disparate factors into a meaningful whole 3. Perspective-ability to maintain a balanced consideration of factors-an overview 4. Critical judgment-in part, a synthesis of the three preceding characteristics 5. Specific skills acquired through on-the-job training supplemented by formalized modes of instruction, including school courses, seminars, reading: LETTERS from Santa Fe ... THE MAJORITY OF OUR STUDENTS COMPLETE THEIR UNDERGRADUATE YEARS UNDER THE MISCONCEPTION OF BEING EDUCATED, WHEN IN REALITY THEY ARE UNDERGOING SOPHISTICATED TRAINING. page nine �The above is not an all-inclusive list, and there are areas where no sharp distinction can be made between those characteristics acquired and those innate. Further, it may legitimately be doubted whether the specific skills I have enumerated can be acquired on the basis suggested. I differ, and will endeavor to explain why by submitting my concept of a liberal education. My ideal student would have exposure to the natural sciences, engineering, and/ or mathematics, with in-depth study in some specific area. This should comprise at least 25 percent of a student's undergraduate activity. Such a student should also have an introductory exposure to the social sciences, and this area of activity might occupy as much as fifteen percent of his time. The balance, and certainly no less than half of the student's activity, should be in the humanistic studies, with in-depth involvement in at least one area. I recognize that in any such educational process there are certain elements of training as distinct from education. In my experien ce, these can be minimal, a nd the emphasis should be on a Socratic, dialectical approach. Hopefully, it is not necessary to paint the picture in full to see that such an educational experience is almost precisely designed to develop more fully the innate characteristics I previously cited as needful for a manager, as well as enabling that individual to acquire the aforementioned skills of analysis, synthesis, perception and critical judgment. To put it another way, I strongly contend that such a program, designed as it is to expose a person to the achievements--scientific, technical, political, social, philosophical and artistic-of great minds past and present, will nurture the heart and mind of the student, so as to incite to fever pitch his curiosity, increase his ability to assimilate new ideas and skills, nurture and sensitize his spiritual, moral and aesthetic sensibilities, and promote the self-generation of perspective and overview. In short, develop the critical and analytical faculties without dulling that individual's vision. Now it may be fairly asked how, in fact, such a n individual with no specific skills is able to enter the job market. I would submit that, at entry level, any management or professional position (the law and medicine excepted) requires very little in the way of skills that such an individual would not have or could not readily acquire. I speak of positions ordinarily filled by newly g r a duated engineers, scientists and holders of degrees in business. An honest appraisal of starting positions would show that they demand very little in the way of technical knowledge that the individual would not already possess or could not acquire on the job, supplemented by study. I contend that merely to train an individual as a mechanical engineer, as a ch em ist, o r in business is to unnecessarily narrow his vision, and possibly deny him broader horizons. All this does have clear implications regarding current attitudes of the academic world and of business. I L E T TE R S f r o m Sant a Fe S p rin g 19 93 Technical-Engineering, Scientific Financial Legal Marketing ManufacturingProduction Behavioral Sciences I CONTEND THAT MERELY TO TRAIN AN INDIVIDUAL AS A MECHANICAL ENGINEER, AS A CHEMIST, OR IN BUSINESS IS TO UNNECESSARILY NARROW HIS VISION, AND POSS/BLY DENY HIM BROADER HORIZONS. pa ge t e n �suggest consideration of the following ideas strongly implied by my views: 1. The undergraduate degree in business should be eliminated. It is not necessary and has little relevance to the individual's intellectual and spiritual development, let alone what he or she will encounter in the business world. This does not mean that individual courses in finance, accounting, marketing and distribution should not be retained for individuals to take as electives, although my personal predilection is to avoid such courses in undergraduate years. This kind of material is easily assimilated later by a well-trained mind. 2. More extensive use should be made of cooperative programs which enable the student to leave the academic world for specific activities, work or research in the "real world." There need not always be a specific relationship between a student's academic program and his "co-op project." In other words, I am suggesting that no one be admitted to business school fresh out of college. 4. Greater use should be made by the world of business and industry of graduate business schools by allowing managers to take sabbaticals of one month to a year for attending graduate business courses. 5. Business and industry should not require that an individual have a degree in a specific skill in order to gain entry into a position. It should be a relatively simple matter, through testing and interviewing, to ascertain an individual's capabilities to adequately perform job entry positions. Adequate provision should be made by business to enable individuals to supplement their on-the-job training with specific courses in specific disciplines. 6. Business and industry is missing a valuable resource by requiring that all people have college degrees before being given consideration for management positions. There was a time when a college degree was not a requisite. Now, it has become tantamount to working papers. This is unfortunate. Individuals with energy, ambition and intellectual capabilities can and should be given all possible opportunities. about the first three suggestions. The latter three carry with them many practical problems, not the least of which revolve around the resources of smaller companies, many of which do not have the managerial depth and financial capabilities to support the kind of programs suggested. There has been a marked tendency among our brightest students to pursue careers in law, government and scientific research in preference to business management. In many cases, they do so with a mistaken view that business does not serve the noble purposes embodied in other callings. It is not the purpose of this paper to refute such a contentionexcept to suggest that well-managed business enterprises are crucial to the nation's and indeed the world's social, economic and political viability, and I say this in terms of the quality of human existence. In today's world of international trade and the growing activities of the multinational enterprise, talented and committed business leaders are in increasing demand. How best to develop them? Robert Goheen, former president of Princeton University, once remarked, "The true basis of a liberal education is its power to nourish a mind-its ability both to enliven and enlarge a man's conscious jurisdiction. It seems to draw out our potential for awareness, for rational understanding, and thus to extend our capacities for beneficent service, for responsible action, wherever we happen to find our chosen work." 3. The principal form of academic training for business should be the graduate M.B.A. programs offered by many institutions. I would submit that more relevant use of M.B.A. programs would be made by individuals who have had at least two year's experience in the business world. I realize the above suggestions may be greeted with a great deal of justifiable skepticism. I wish to emphasize that I am quite serious Peter A. Benoliel is chairman and CEO of Quaker Chemical Corporation and former member of the St. John's College Board. Spring 1993 LETTERS from Santa Fe page eleven �AN ORAL EXAM FOR THE Soon those new college graduates who have not yet found employment will be knocking on corporate doors asking for jobs. The business world will affirm and reaffirm its belief in liberal education, and then rush to hire graduates with business degrees. The liberal arts graduate will try to convince his future employer that, h aving studied philosophy or literature or sociology or a bit of math, he can do everything, or at least something. Perhaps a little honesty on both sides would help. Though a liberal education may b e o f in estim a ble benefit to the indiv idual, its immediate social utility is not readily apparent-a doctor is not a better doctor because he has read Homer in the original Greek. Such an education may well contribute to an individual's personal edification during his p rofessional life-but that's really beside the point to the employment officer looking at the recent graduate on the other side of the d esk. Sensing that it has a hard case to make in the face of the natural skepticism of the business community, liberal education has come up with some ready, but shaky, responses. The first involves "skills." "N o, o u r graduates have n o t studied accounting or business law or marke ting, but they have high intelligence and have developed truly useful skills, skills of thinking, speaking, communicating. Their combination of brains and skills makes them fast learners and universally helpful." This isn't a totally useless argument, but the business community usually needs more than skills. It needs employees with "content" as well. And business and technical programs have been able to attract increasingly impressive students over the years ; their graduates have native ability, skills and useful knowledge. The second line of defense for liberal arts g radua tes is to argue that what they know is useful, even if not technical. That knowledge of literature and English, of philosophy and his tory, of mathematics a nd science gives their minds a kind of furnishing that h as social and economic utility if properly directed. Through reading and study, the liberally educated candidate may actually know more than others about human nature, its limits, and the achievements of men and their failures. He or she may best be able to grow on the job, to adjust to changes, write more powerfully, see problems and propose solutions more cogently, work independently and not fear to explore the limits of technical expertise. These kinds of things one can learn from studying history, literature or philosophy. It is no surprise tha t the t op executives of the nation's best companies have been, far more often than not, educated in the liberal arts, n ot a technical field. But caution is in order. If w hat the liberal arts gradu ate studied under the guise of a liberal education was nothing more than the latest of fashionable attacks o n Western LETTE R S fr o m Sa n ta Fe Sp rin g 1993 NEW LIBERAL ARTS GRADUATE by John Agresto THOUGH A LIBERAL EDUCATION MAY BE OF INESTIMABLE BENEFIT TO THE INDIVIDUAL, ITS IMMEDIATE SOCIAL UTILITY IS NOT READILY APPARENTA DOCTOR IS NOT A BETTER DOCTOR BECAUSE HE HAS READ HOMER IN THE ORIGINAL GREEK. pa ge t we l ve �• civilization, or if his philosophy and literature courses did not teach him to learn from the world's great thinkers and writers but, rather, to play theoretical games, treating all ideas as "culture-bound" or expressions of authorial prejudices, or if he was taught that all history is really the history of oppression and oppressed groups, then you probably have before you a person who knows less than the most narrowly focused business-school graduate. So much academic garbage passes itself off as liberal education these days that all of us have to be careful. So, what should you ask before hiring a liberal arts graduate? Here's a list: •Can you write clearly and persuasively? Can I know exactly what's on your mind through the medium of a piece of paper and will I take it seriously? •Have you worked in the business world? I would not put graduates with business-related courses above the ones who worked for a business in the summer. Interest verified by experience is 10 times better than a course in accounting and 50 times better than a course on "The Image of the Businessman in Modern Drama." • Can you work cooperatively? Since a good part of liberal education is very introspective and solitaryand cooperative work on exams and term papers is usually, rightly, frowned on- look for some evidence of sociability. Did the applicant, for example, go through four years taking notes in large lecture classes or did he put himself into the give and take of conversation in small seminar classes? And, though independence is hardly a vice, make sure the person knows that working for someone, not just with someone, is expected every day. This is sometimes a hard lesson for liberal arts graduates to learn. • What do you think about this job as a career? The last thing you need is a graduate whose philosophy has taught him that he is noble and businessmen are corrupt. If the graduate has been indoctrinated with the notion that the world of business and industry is a species of ugly materialism, vulgar commercialism or the work of social elements only one step above the criminal class, he is of no use. Let him stay in the academy. • What did you study and what did you learn? Not all liberal education is great or even good. Did the candidate before you study broadly and widely in major fields covering important topics or was he narrowly trained? A course on rape and rebellion in contemporary poetry is no substitute for a course on Dante or a seminar in calculus. Did he read books? Good books? Did he take these books seriously? Do not be afraid to ask these questions! Finally, see if the applicant's education had an effect on his character. Did four years of college make him thoughtful, inquisitive, brave and serious? Or just haughty, pedantic, smug and vain? Pursue these questions, for they not only will make businesses happier but might even do something to improve liberal education in this country. S prin g 1 99 3 L ET T E R S f r o m S a nt a F e NOT ALL LIBERAL EDUCATION IS GREAT OR EVEN GOOD. . . A COURSE ON RAPE AND REBELLION IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR A COURSE ON DANTE OR A SEMINAR IN CALCULUS. This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal, April 23, 1991. page th i rt ee n �JUST SAY NO TO COLLEGE by Aram Bakshlan, Jr. From ele mentary school onward, I had always learned more from independent reading and conversation than from the standard gruel dispensed in class, taking to heart the Shakespearean admonition that No profit grows where is no pleasure ·~ I ANTICIPATING NANCY REAGAN BY TWENTY YEARS, I "JUST SAID NO " - IN MY CASE, TO THAT MOST MINO-BENDING OF HALLUCINOGENS, A SECOND-RATE LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE. pa ge f o urt ee n Few things in life are worth standing in line for, especially on a sweltering summe r d ay in Washington, D. C. Higher education certainly didn't seem like one of them in September of 1963, when, overcome by the dinginess of George Washington University 's d owntown campus, and the industrial-s treng th effluv ium issuing from long queues of nervous, sweaty registering fre s hme n , I made what may well have been the d efining choice of m y life. A n ticipa ting N a ncy Reagan b y twen ty years, I "just said no"- in my case, to that most mind-bending of hallucinogens, a second-rate liberal arts degree. It meant chucking a ge n e r o u s ly ap p o rtio n e d yet u n appetizin g acad emic sch ola rship, but my mind was mad e up: rather th an go to college, I would get an education. More immediately, I decided to abandon campus and walk a few blocks to the old Circle Theatre on Pennsylvania Avenue. By h appy chance, Lucino Visconti's exquisite film a d a p ta tion of G iuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard was playing and the erratic air conditioning system was working that afternoon; two a u s p iciou s om ens in a row convinced me that I had made the righ t decision. As I watch ed th e world-weary patrician hero turning h is b ack o n the g ilded s h a m of risorgimento Italy, I felt a smug kinship, excusable, perhaps, for one still in his teens. a nd a greeing w ith Sydne y Smith (to the aggravation of numerable famil y members over the years) that there is "no furniture so charming as books." So much so that, from junior high school onward, I regularly played hooky to visit the vast, dusty secondhand bookstores that still dotted the Washington landscape in the 1950s and 1960s. Nearly all of them, Lowdermilk's, Pearlman's, Estate, Savile, and Park Books, are gone now. Tod ay's book fanciers, usually forced to choose between ov erpriced antiqua rian dealers and chain retailers limited to standard current titles, w ould be amazed at how far-and wide-a few dollars could go in those literary old curiosity shops. Nicely bound broken sets of the collected works of Volta ire could be bought for all of seventyfi ve cents a volume and Hom er, Plato, Thu cyd id es, Xen ophon, Le Sage, Cla rendon , Cervan tes, M arcu s Aurelius, G ibbon , M acaulay , Carly le, Thackeray, Dickens, Sterne, Smollett, Daudet, de Maupassant, Surtees, Suetonius, Sherid an, Aristophanes, Chau cer, Emerson, Parkman, Pascal, Moliere, Madame de Sevign e, Saint-Simon, P e pys, Pope, Joh n son, Bos well, Monta ign e, Dry den, Goldsm ith, Goethe, Byron, Tennyson, Kipling, de Ligne, Luther, and Dante, not to mention more recent a nd rou tine titles, could b e h ad for a son g, L ET TE R S f r o m S a nta Fe Sp r ing 19 93 ta'en ; In brief, sir, study what you most affect .... �sometimes in morocco or calf. "Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one." wrote Augustine Birrell, and at that time, even a newspaper carrier turned copyboy like myself could afford to start. The very act of working to pay for each volume seemed to quicken one's appetite for reading it, a principle that probably applies to students who have to work for their tuition. Serving as a copyboy, first at the (now-defunct) National Observer and then at the (now-unrecognizable) U.S. News & World Report, also meant access to good reference libraries and interesting conversation with the less stuffy writers and editors. One of the earliest pleasures of my own writing career came when, a few years after I had left the National Observer, I appeared in its pages as a book critic and was able to renew earlier acquaintances on a more equal footing. Reading, writing, and intelligent discussion are the keys to a good liberal arts education in academia; I simply sought, and was lucky enough to find, the same essentials in the outside world without being subjected to the nuisance of gym, the irrelevance of Geology I, and the forced purchase of dozens of badly written textbooks, as expensive as they were worthless. This is not to say that I owe nothing to formal education. Several inspiring elementary and secondary school teachers tolerated my maverick streak and encouraged my interests in history and literature. As a day student at a cozy if somewhat down-at-the heels little academy called Woodward Prep, I even learned the elements of real, as opposed to apparent, political power: Control communications and law enforcement and it doesn't matter who is president. Editing the school newspaper and literary supplement and commanding the hall monitors meant real power and real rewards: Extensive writing on the topics of one's choosing, more free time and fewer scheduled classes, and the ability to slip out for an illicit beer (I was tall for my age) with the connivance of one's subordinate hall monitors. At the same time, a curriculum that still included Latin meant an early grounding in the fundamental structure of languages that would make later acquisition of rudimentary French and German easier. How Latin came to be dropped by some high schools as "irrelevant" baffles me to this day; it is the most practical subject many secondary school students will ever study. Given a little Latin, years later you will be able to get the gist of street signs, simple news clips, and broadcasts in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and, in a pinch, even Romanian. Unlike the author of a recent bestseller, I do not claim that everything I needed to know I had already learned in kindergarten. But I can honestly say that everything I needed to learn-in school, that is-I knew by the twelfth grade. While my own curiosity deserves some of the credit, so does a motley but worthy crew of teachers, not one of whom was an education major. They included a deaf, dentured retired colonel, Merritt Booth, who taught algebra and geometry with the logic and precision they deserved; a dedicated young English teacher named Bill Gaull who, while working his way through law school, took the trouble Spring 1993 LETTERS from Santa Fe to encourage bright students to read non-syllabus authors like Fielding and Tolstoy; a one-legged Seventh Day Adventist history master named Donald F. Haynes who, although somewhere to the right of the John Birch Society, graded fairly and taught passionately; and a wonderful 76-year-old chemistry teacher, "Doc" Valaer, whose enthusiasm for his subject was such that, although a teetotaler, he had written a book entitled Wines of the World, painstakingly analyzing their chemical compositions without tasting any of them. My graduate and post-graduate teachers, while more famous, have all been untenured and unofficial: editors, authors, politicians, journalists, artists, and a widening circle of interesting friends. The odds are that I would have missed out on most of these opportunities if I had kept my scholarship and followed the off-trodden rut of academia, where as early an observer as William Penn remarked that "much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many useless scholars in the world." At the very worst, I might have ended up as a tenured, politically correct hack. Fortunately, all I had to do was just say no. From The American Spectator, September, 1991. pa ge fift e en �PROFILE St. John's College: An independent, non-sectarian, four-year liberal arts college. Founded: Established in 1696 in Annapolis, Maryland, as King William's School and chartered in 1784 as St. John's College. Great Books Program adopted 1937. Second campus in Santa Fe opened in 1964. Curriculum: An integrated, four-year, all-required liberal arts and science program based on reading and discussing, in loosely chronological order, the great books of Western civilization. The program requires four years of foreign language, four years of mathematics, three years of laboratory science, and one year of music. Approach: Tutorials, laboratories, and seminars requiring intense participation replace more traditional lectures. Classes are very small. Student/Faculty ratio is 8:1. Degrees Granted: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts. Master of Arts in Liberal Studies. Student Body: Enrollment is limited to about 400 students on each campus. Current freshman class made up of 55% men and 45% women, from 30 states and several foreign countries. Sixty-five percent receive financial aid. Students may transfer between the Santa Fe and Annapolis campuses. Alumni Careers: Education - 21 %, Business - 20%, Law - 10%, Visual and Performing Arts - 9%, Medicine - 7%, Science and Engineering - 7%, Computer Science - 6%, Writing and Publishing - 5%. Graduate Institute: The Graduate Institute in Liberal Education is an interdisciplinary master's degree program based on the same principles as the undergraduate program. Offered on both campuses year-round. Readers of the newsletter may be especially interested in applying for our summer session. For more information please contact the Graduate Institute in Santa Fe (505) 982-3691 ext. 249 or in Annapolis (301) 263 - 2371. LETTERS from Santa Fe St. John's College 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501-4599 ADDRESS CORRECTION REQUESTED U.S. Postage PAID Non-Profit Organization Permit No. 231 Santa Fe, NM � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe Description An account of the resource A newsletter published by the Santa Fe President's Office that includes articles about liberal education. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 16 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Letters from Santa Fe, Spring 1993 Description An account of the resource Letters from Santa Fe, St. John’s College—Santa Fe, New Mexico, Spring 1993 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Agresto, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John’s College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Newman, John Henry, 1801-1890 Verkuil, Paul R. Keohane, Nannerl O., 1940- Benoliel, Peter A. Bakshian, Aram Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Letters_from_SF_1993_Spring Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/0117038d7d9769cf52d6d386b86d754b.mp3 84f58aef71587a4f98b8cfd2c92a64ad Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:59:51 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Modern symbolic unreality, or Mr. Klein's question : Who lives symbolically? Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on February 28, 2020 by David Levine as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Levine, David Lawrence Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02-28 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Klein, Jacob, 1899-1978. Griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra. English Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_LevineD_Modern_Symbolic_Unreality_2020-02-28 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/88cbdd7f8514209f41e45336f2a67173.mp3 356ed6fce3e81aa69bb03ce8530820d8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Lecture Recordings—Santa Fe Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 01:07:48 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Socrates at play : the beautification of the good Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture given on February 21, 2020 by Janet Dougherty as part of the Dean's Lecture and Concert Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dougherty, Janet Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2020-02-21 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Subject The topic of the resource Xenophon. Symposium Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_DoughertyJ_Socrates_at_Play_The_Beautification_of_the_Good_2020-02-21 Friday night lecture https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8554b921ed71d496c39adc83bf5d8afd.pdf 1409eee1facf648e3bb718a057e29258 PDF Text Text Dialectic, Virtue and Recollection in Plato's Meno* Laurence Berns The first thing that confronts the reader of a Platonic dialogue is its strange form. Philosophic writings, since Aristotle, usually take the form of treatises or essays. But dialogues present themselves as dramas, where actions are equally, or even sometimes more, important than what has been presented as spoken, where what is said must be understood in the light o·f what is done, and what is done must be understood in the light of what is said. Thus, the validity and meaning of the arguments presented in a dialogue must be worked out and qualified by the imaginative and logical exercise of working out the arguments implicit in the action. I. Opening Questions Plato's Meno opens with Meno confronting Socrates with what appears to be a fundamental question about virtue, that is, human excellence. The usual Socratic or Platonic preparation or context for the question is absent. That is, we are not told why Meno asks that question or why it is asked of Socrates. It does, however, appear that Meno is very interested in the question of how to acquire virtue, or at least how to acquire the benefits that a reputation for virtue might supply. But the latter question, why it is asked of Socrates, is not too difficult: Socrates does have a reputation for being exceptionally knowledgeable about the question of virtue: in Plato's, Republic, (358A ff.) Glaucon is speaking to Socrates: But the argument for justice, that it is better than injustice, I have never heard from anyone, as I would like to hear it. And I would like to hear it praised, itself for its very self. And I think that I can learn it from you, most of all. *The Anastaplo Works of the Mind Lecture, University of Chicago, 11 /15/2009, revised for the Homecoming Lecture at St. John's College, Annapolis, 9/24/201 O �Meno, from Thessaly visits the sophisticated metropolis Athens and asks the expert on virtue a "learned" question about the subject of his expertise. Socrates's response to the question is, on its face, outrageous. To Meno's surprise, he answers that wisdom must have emigrated from Athens to Thessaly, because if anyone in Athens should be asked such a question he would laugh about being thought capable of answering it, and would insist that, "I happen not to know at all what that thing virtue itself is." The truth of that assertion by Socrates would seem to depend on the acceptance of his supremely high standard for what "to know" might be. At any rate, he does seem to be very knowledgeable about everything that has been said about virtue, e.g. Justice-Republic, Courage-Laches, Moderation-Charmides, Knowledge-Theaetetus, et al. Socrates claims to share the poverty of the rest of the Athenians: "How could I know what sort of thing something is [for example, whether virtue is teachable], if I do not know what [virtue] is?" Socrates turns Meno's more practical question, about how something is acquired, into a theoretical inquiry about what the thing Meno is asking about is. What is it about Meno's question that could provoke such a response? Does Socrates already know that Meno's character is as questionable, as Xenophon reports it to be in his Anabasis? 1 This dialogue tells us nothing about Meno's later history. We are left by Plato to deduce Meno's character from what he says and does in this dialogue. The opening question is: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is something teachable? Or is it not teachable, but something that comes from practice? Or is it something neither from practice nor from learning, but comes to human beings by nature, or in some other way? 1 Xenophon, Anabasis, II. vi. 21-29. 2 �If "learning" in this question is only considered as the other side of teaching we are given three distinct alternatives as to what the source of virtue might be. If they can be separated, we have four, with one indeterminate possibility: teaching, or practice, or learning, or nature; they all exhibit themselves throughout the dialogue, either by their presence or by their conspicuous absence. The "some other way" may be an anticipation of the answer, "by divine dispensation", with which the dialogue ends. If, as it seems to me, Socrates knew that, as far as human character is concerned, nature provides the capacities, teaching and/or learning set forth the ends, the goals, implicit in the natural capacities, and practice develops the habits that enable one to actualize or defeat those goals. Divine dispensation could be a replacement for nature as the source of the original capacities. Meno's question, then, erroneously disjoins, as separated alternatives, factors that can only be properly understood as interrelated parts functioning together in the unified whole of human development. Socrates' seemingly outrageous response could then be seen as the beginning of an attempt to help Meno get sight of the whole that he has unwittingly dismantled. The vast question of the relations of parts to the wholes that they are parts of manifests itself, but not explicitly, at the very beginning and throughout the whole of this dialogue. II. Dialectic Since this dialogue is a dramatic dialogue and not a narrated dialogue like the Republic, our only access to the action of the dialogue is through the mode of the discussion itself. We are not altogether at a loss, however, in this matter, for Socrates has explicitly characterized that mode as dialectical. But if, being friends as both I and you are now, ... [we] should want to have a discussion with one another, then surely a somehow more gentle and more dialectical way of answering is required. And it is perhaps more dialectical to answer not only �with the truth, but also through those things which he who is being questioned could agree that he knows. (Speech 82 2 [75C-D]) But dialectical means a variety of interrelated things in the Platonic writings. The word is derived from the Greek dialegein, to converse, to discuss. The word dia, connected to the word for two, duo, in composite words like this, signifies connections between two or more separated things. It is a linking prefix. Consider the Greek word diabainein. The word bainein means to walk. When you prefix dia to it, it means to cross a bridge. The dia links the two sides of a bridge. The word logos, part of the word dialoqos (dialogue, a noun connected with the adjective dialectical) means a number of things: some primary meanings are speech, meaning and reckoning. Dialectical then does often mean gentle and friendly conversation, where the interlocutors accommodate themselves to, and try to understand each other's views, in contrast to unfriendly and contentious conversation. Dialectic in this personal sense suggests that the meaning of what is being said is to be understood primarily with reference to the characters and capacities of the speakers including their limitations or talents. If the situation, or the character, or capacity of an interlocutor makes theoretical questioning no longer appropriate, the conscientious dialectician can aim at furthering some salutary opinion or belief, some communal agreement that could be beneficial for society as a whole. This form of dialectic frequently appears, as in the case of the Meno, near the end of a dialogue. Aristotle, in his discussion of dialectical reasoning, in the first chapter of his Topics, distinguishes dialectical reasoning from the most perfect form of reasoning, demonstrative reasoning. Demonstration reasons from premises that are "true and primary". The types of persons holding those premises need not be mentioned 2 The translations, notes and speech numbers referred to are those to be found in Plato's Meno, translated with annotations by George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns, (Focus Publishing, R. Pullins Co., Newburyport, MA: 2004). 4 �because the premises produce conviction or belief "through themselves". But dialectical premises, it seems, require reference to those holding them. Dialectical premises are generally accepted opinions (endoxa) "held by all people, most people, or by the wise, and of these, all of the wise, or most of the wise, or the most notable and illustrious of the wise. " 3 Here, in dialectic, where even true and primary premises might be subject to question, reference to the kind of people holding the premises is appropriate. In this personal sense, for example, Plato's treatment of moderation in the Republic can be called dialectical. 4 It ascends from how moderation exists in all, or rather most, people, as control over one's desires, pleasures and pains with respect to food, drink and sexual satisfaction, to its highest and most rare form as a beautiful harmony of cooperating and interpenetrating powers of the soul, each power functioning smoothly as it was naturally meant to function. It should not come as a surprise that Plato's treatment of dialectic is itself dialectical: it is certainly spoken about in a number of different ways in the dialogues. In the Republic, dialegesthai and dialektike, both usually translated as dialectic, refer to that highest form of inquiry by which reason (logos) ascends from sense perception, experience, opinion and what is changeable and opinable, to seek what is purely intelligible, knowable and unchangeable, that is, the forms, or ideas, what each thing is, its very being (ousia), and finally to the governing principle of the whole (literally, of the fil!, to pan. 5118). Aristotle, Plato's foremost student, put this last point as follows: "Dialectic . . . being investigative, has a way to the principles of all pursuits, (all methods, methodon). " 5 3 One is almost tempted to add, "or by all of the most notable, or most of the most notable, or the very most notable of the most notable; or ... etc." 4 See the note on Speeches 26 and 28 [73A-B], and Republic, 3890-E and 4300-4328. 5 Topics, 101 b2-4 �These two meanings of dialectical, the personal and the theoretical, come together when two or more friends are genuinely disposed through discussion to seek an adequate response to a serious "What is ... ?" question, like, "What is virtue?" 6 Or, if a response is not forthcoming, they can search for a better understanding of the question itself, by refining it. 7 In Plato's Cratylus (390C) the dialectician is referred to as one who knows how to ask and to answer questions. But sometimes these two modes of dialectic can be at cross purposes. Socrates, from the beginning of the dialogue up to Speech 354 [86C], has been trying to get Meno to seriously address the question, "What is virtue?". Meno, in Speech 355 [86C-D], reverts, as if nothing had happened during the intervening discussion, to his opening question (with two important omissions). 8 At this point, Socrates, by dialectically accommodating himself to being "ruled" by Meno, gives up trying to engage Meno in the ways of the higher dialectic, adopting instead what he calls a "hypothetical" approach. Something similar happened earlier in the discussions of shape and color. Socrates seeks definitions rooted in our primary experience of the things defined, but Meno finds such definitions too simple. 9 Socrates dialectically accommodates himself to Meno by producing an overgeneral, fancy, materialist ("Empedoclean") definition of color that undialectically ignores the primary experience, the primary cognition, from which any definition of color, or definition of the object of sight, would have to begin, that is, looking. Just before giving up on Meno, Socrates invites him to join with him in putting into practice what has just been exhibited in the Slave Boy scene 10 But, one might 6 See note for Speech 194 [81 E]. Leo Strauss uses the word "zetetic", seeking or searching (from the Greek verb, zetein), to describe the fundamental characteristic of Socratic philosophizing. On Tyranny, Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. (New York: The Free Press/Macmillan, 1991), p. 196. 8 To use Biblical language, this speech, an important turning point, could be regarded as Meno's Fall. He repeats his opening question leaving out the two things he needs most: learning and practice. 9 See Plato's Sophist, 243A-B. 10 Speech 354, [86C]. 7 6 �object, in the entire Slave Boy episode no "What is ... ?" question is ever raised. How then does the Slave Boy scene relate to the higher dialectic? Both the mode of presentation and the subject-matter of the Slave Boy scene put a premium on looking, looking inside one's self and looking outside at what one can learn only by looking. The Slave Boy scene is an exhibition for Meno's sake of how one can be prepared --here with the aid of a master teacher-- for higher dialectic. The preparation consists of an honest, careful and critical review of what one thinks one knows, in order to come to understand what one does not know. One cannot understand that one does not know without understanding what one does not know. Mathematical illustrations have been traditionally, and are here, models of clarity and precision. The Boy enthusiastically swears when he fully realizes that he does not know from "what sort of line" the eight-foot squared area comes to be. 11 Socrates remarks to Meno and even more to us: "For now he, not knowing, can even carry on the search gladly ... do you think that before he would have tried to seek for or to learn that which he thought he knew while he did not know --before he fell down into perplexity and want and came to believe that he did not know, and longed to know?" 12 - But Meno, although he acquiesces politely, does not seem to see what Socrates is getting at. His vanity may not allow him to become a slave of learning. Ill. Eidos Socrates' major complaint with Meno's different accounts of virtue is that Meno continually gives him swarms of many different virtues, and not that "one and the same form (eidos) through which they are virtues, and upon which one would somehow do well to focus one's gaze." 13 After Meno introduces the ability to acquire 11 Speech 275 [84A] Speeches 282 and 284 [848-C] 13 Speech 16 [72C].Eidos is often translated as "form" or "idea". It is also sometimes translated as "class", as "character" and as "pattern". The elementary meaning of the word is "looks", that by which someone or something is recognized as being who or what he, she or it is. It is connected to the verb eidenai, "to know", the original meaning of which is "to have seen". 12 7 �wealth into the virtues, Socrates characterizes Meno's enumerations of the different virtues, like justice, moderation and piety, as breaking up or changing the whole of virtue into small coin, pieces of small change. This whole, as eidos, as class character, constitutes the whole class of virtues, and each virtue as what it is, according to Socrates; but what kind of whole are we being urged to think of? The old tried and true, natural, if not even childlike, method would be to try to reason to the less known from what seems to be better known. Are justice, moderation, courage, piety and wisdom related to virtue as small change is to gold coin; or as two, three, four and five, are related to number; or as the different kinds of bees are related to their hive; or as the different classes of human beings are related to political society as a whole; or as the organs of a living body are related to the whole living body? Is "virtue" by itself the organism of the different virtues? There is one passage in the dialogue that seems to favor the organismic model. In Speech 112 [77A-B] Socrates urges Meno to tell him what virtue is, "leaving it whole and healthy." While "health" as an analogous term can apply to a number of things, its primary reference is to an animal organism. Aristotle, who appears to be more practical than Plato, approves of Gorgias' and Meno's way of enumerating the virtues. 14 But Aristotle too indicates, near the end of his treatment of courage in the Nicomachean Ethics, (1117b9-13), that no particular virtue possessed in isolation from the other virtues fully deserves the name "virtue": "the more a man possesses virtue in its entirety (ten areten pasan), and the more happy he is, the more will he be pained by death; for life is most worth living for such a man." How does the elementary notion of "sensible looks" become transmuted by Plato and Aristotle into the idea of "intelligible (noetic) looks"? It has something to do with the fact that that by virtue of which a being is what it is, is also that by virtue of which it belongs to a class. When we say, "This is a dog.", we also mean, "This belongs to the class of dogs." What gives a being its character has the attribute of a class character. See Republic, Books VI and VII. 14 See Politics, 1259b21 .-1260b 7, especially 1260a25-28. �There are Platonic dialogues devoted to different virtues, such as Justice-the Republic, Moderation-the Charmides, Courage-the Laches, and Piety-the Euthyphro,. The organismic hypothesis might help account for why none of these inquiries by itself is said to be successful. IV. Cloaking Unknowns As Knowns In Speech 172 [798-C] Socrates tells Meno that "when you were requested by me to talk about virtue as a whole, you fell far short of saying what it is, but you declared that every action is a virtue whenever it is done with some piece of virtue, just as if you had said what the whole, virtue, is and it was immediately recognized by me, even if you were to change it into pieces of small change. " 15 But, Jacob Klein argues, in commenting on these passages, 16 that what Meno is charged with doing (see italics in the previous sentence) is what we all do every time we express an opinion about someone possessing or not possessing some particular virtue. To hold an opinion about that which is under consideration means to take-or, at worst, to pretend to take-the zetoumenon [the thing sought], the "unknown," as if it were "known." To test an opinion means to follow it up through necessary consequences until a patent absurdity (a "contradiction") or something incontrovertibly true comes int6 sight. 17 Klein's use of the mathematical term "unknown" alludes to what he has described (on p. 83 of the same text) as the "analytic" tradition of ancient mathematics, where 15 See Speeches 152-166 [78C-79A (especially Speeches 161 [78E] and 164 and165 [78E79A]. 16 Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno,. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 84. 17 Klein adds, "Depending on whether the former or the latter happens, the opinion is either refuted or vindicated. To vindicate (or verify) an opinion means to transform a zetoumenon into an homologoumenon, into something one has to agree to, to transform the hitherto 'unknown' into a truth now indeed 'known.' However seldom, if ever, such vindicating occurs in a Platonic dialogue, the 'dialectical' process, which is 'analytical' in its very conception and structure, tends toward that end." 9 �proofs begin by assuming that one already has the unknown being sought, the zetoumenon, and then, by following up the necessary consequences of that assumption, one either arrives at a contradiction, proving the impossibility of the assumption, or one arrives at some agreed upon truth which establishes the truth of the assumption. "All mathematics today is an outgrowth of this ['analytic'] tradition," Klein says. He alludes to, among other things, the ubiquitous x of algebra. A very simple example: What is the number that multiplied by two equals six? Let us assume that we have it and call it x. Therefore 2x = 3. = 6. Divide both sides by 2, then x Three is the number. But not only modern mathematics, the argument goes, but all testing of opinions, including the testing of opinions in the dialectical process of a Platonic dialogue, follows some such analytic procedure. This bears on the consideration of wholes and their parts as follows: Generally, any opinion on any subject can be understood to catch some "partially" true aspect of the subject under investigation. This means that, however mistaken each of us may be about that subject as a "whole," we are talking together about "the same thing" or, at least, are making an effort to talk about "the same thing." ... But that, in turn, indicates a common, if usually hidden, ground along which the conversation proceeds and where the "whole" is really "located." This "back-ground" is the zetoumenon [thing sought] and its continuing presence manifests itself in our ability to opine, that is, to cloak what remains "unknown" with the guise of the "known." The dialectical-analytic process thus tends indeed through "parts" toward a "whole." That is why it is not at all impossible to talk about "properties" of something of which we do not know what it is. 18 The continuing presence, then, often inexplicit, of a background idea of "the same thing" holding the conversation together manifests itself in dialectical differences of opinion, each interlocutor is arguing about that which he or she does not fully know, assuming the "unknown" as if it were known. If those who converse are genuinely 18 See Speech 2 (71 B) of Plato's Meno, and Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, p. 85. 10 �interested in getting to the truth of the matter, and if each presents evidence and arguments that make sense, they may come to see that the oppositions they find indicate that they have not been talking about the same thing. The "cloaking" process of opining had at first kept them from seeing, but then made it possible for them to see, that they had been talking about different things. Through the saving grace of the principle of non-contradiction, the oppositions are resolved by distinctions, and opinions move closer to knowledge. 19 If, as Klein argues, Socrates misrepresents, in this and other dialogues, the illegitimacy of our ordinary use of "cloaked" eidetic unknown wholes in order to talk about properties of particulars participating in them, his primary motive would seem to be to open up the question "as to what underlies our ordinary speaking and thinking" on any subject, "as a precondition for looking at the 'wholeness' of things." Does the Slave Boy scene exhibit what it purports to exhibit, that all so-called teaching is really recollecting? It appears that Socrates simply gives, or "teaches," the Boy the sought-for line. The scene does exhibit a perfectly natural series of errors, brought out and clarified by a master teacher. The clarification of those natural errors, as errors, also exhibits how one can come to learn, and to benefit from learning, what one does not know. In this simpler case, at least, the question is answered: the Boy does move from false opinions to a true opinion about the soughtfor line. 20 Meno had complained before the Slave Boy episode (Speech 179 [79 E-80 B]) that Socrates, unlike anyone he has ever spoken with, numbs him both in soul and mouth, so that he is not able to join him in his search for whatever virtue is. Meno, to forestall being recruited into the search, presents in the form of questions an argument that he thinks is beautiful which would undermine any such Socratic 19 See Plato's Republic, 430E-431A, especially 436B-441C. · 20 See Speeches 322-332 [858-D]. 11 �search. 21 To rescue his kind of searching from Menonic oblivion, Socrates introduces his recollection story. V. The Whole and the Surface He claims to have heard -Meno is much more attentive to things heard than to things seen- the story "from both men and women wise about things divine," from priests and priestesses and divine poets "able to give an account (loqon) of those things they have taken in hand." What they say is that the human soul is immortal, it appears to die and be born again many times, but is never destroyed. Because it is immortal, has been born many times and "has seen all things ... there is nothing it has not learned and therefore is able to recollect 22 , about virtue and about other things, which it already knew before." Since part of that time it was without a body and sense organs, that seeing cannot simply be seeing in the normal sense; presumably it was some kind of seeing with the mind's eye. "Inasmuch as all nature is akin (or, connected in kinship, synqenous) and the soul has learned all things, there is nothing to prevent someone who recollects (which people call learning) one thing only from discovering all other things, so long as he is brave and does not grow tired of seeking." Since all nature is connected (syn-) -in kinship (-genous) "every bit the soul recollects can be understood as a 'part' of a 'whole'."23 The implication is that that whole is an ordered and knowable whole, the knowable whole. We spoke earlier of the description, in the Republic, of the ultimate or highest object of dialectic being knowledge of the governing principle (archen) of the whole: the recollection story of the Meno, then, points to the ultimate object of, the ultimate zetoumenon. thing sought, by, our natural inclination to know. To know a whole means to know its parts, and to know how those parts fit together to make a whole. 21 • See Speeches 185-188 [80D-81A]. 22 "Remembering", mnesis, is distinguished from "reminding", or "recollecting", anamnesis. Prefixing ana- to the ordinary word for memory or remembering suggests setting out to recall, or to bring something back up to memory. 23 Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, p. 96. 12 �But if the whole of any particular subject is only a part of the all-comprehensive whole, one cannot have full and perfect knowledge of any particular subject without knowledge of the all-comprehensive whole that it fits into. In any literal sense this is not possible. What then could Plato mean by philosophy, and what is he recommending to us upon reading the Meno? Do not opinions, different opinions, about the ultimate thing sought, zetoumenon, shape or influence the ways we go about seeking knowledge of those parts of the whole that we think we can learn, the different "sciences?" Is the governing principle of the whole corporeal, mathematical, noetic (an object of intellect), organic, or something else ---or all or a few of these together? Seeking to understand fundamental problems, or alternatives, is not solely a theoretical matter. Theory and practice come together as one seeks to understand the principles shaping one's own most cherished opinions. One simple and straightforward consequence of holding to the recollection doctrine is that anyone seeking to discover what virtue is should first look inside oneself, to examine just what it is that one thinks one knows. It may seem immodest, Leo Strauss once remarked, to speak about "all objects of human knowledge," but "we all really have opinions -and sometimes very strong opinions-- about all objects of human knowledge, and it is perhaps better to confess that to oneself and to try to clarify that than just to leave it at the amiable appearance of modesty." Socratic philosophy, then, would be zetetic, 24 ready to seek; openly skeptical in the original sense of the word skeptical: that original sense is derived from the words skopein and skeptesthai, to look carefully, which occur many times in this dialogue. To be a skeptic in this sense of the word is to be a thoughtful "looker." A zetetic skeptic, then, is a thoughtful "looker" seeking and searching for the truth, including the truth about the unavoidable, but elusive, principle or principles governing the whole. 24 See Plato's Meno, cited in note 1, the notes for speeches 12 [72A] and 194 [81 E], pp. 50 and 61. �Speaking generally from what relates to human cognition, the whole and its parts becomes accessible to us through sense experience as sensible heterogeneity: its intelligible (or noetic) underpinnings through intellection as noetic heterogeneity and through counting and mathematics as noetic or dianoetic homogeneity. Sensible heterogeneity refers to the things we all know, dogs, cats, trees, tables, human beings, men women, etc.: they come in different kinds. Noetic or dianoetic homogeneity refers to numbers, that is, multitudes of units or monads of the same kind: if we want to count seats, or humans, or men, or women in this room, we have to specify first the kind of unit we are using in our count. Both of these modes of cognition, sensible heterogeneity and dianoetic heterogeneity, presuppose divisions into, and relations between, different kinds, or classes, or to use the Platonic Greek term, different eide, that is, they presuppose noetic heterogeneity. I will quote Leo Strauss to sum this up: The "what is" questions point to "essences," to "essential" differences -to the fact that the whole consists of parts which are heterogeneous, not merely sensibly (like fire, air, water and earth) but noetically: to understand the whole means to understand the "What" of each of these parts, of these classes of beings, and how they are linked with one another. Such understanding cannot be the reduction of one heterogeneous class to others or to any cause or causes other than the class itself; the class, or the class character, is the cause par excellence. Socrates conceived of his turn to the "what is" questions as a turn, or return, to sanity, to "common sense": while the roots of the whole are hidden, the whole manifestly consists of heterogeneous parts. One may say, that according to Socrates the things which are "first in themselves" are somehow "first for us"; the things which are "first in themselves" are in a manner, but necessarily, revealed in men's opinions. 25 25 Leo Strauss, The City And Man,(Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1964), p. 19, and Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, (Cambridge & London: The M. I. T. Press, 1968), pp. 89-91. 14 �I find it comforting, comforting, but also puzzling, that with all these unusual expressions we have been talking about the "surface" of things. What might be called the sentence of Leo Strauss is about that surface. It goes as follows: "The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things." 26 I have found it instructive to think about how Strauss leads up to that sentence. It is from his book Thoughts on Machiavelli27: We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we profess ourselves inclined to the old-fashioned and simple opinion according to which Machiavelli was a teacher of evil. Strauss then lists nine examples of Machiavelli's "maxims of public and private gangsterism." The central one is: "not virtue, but the prudent use of virtue and vice leads to happiness". Such maxims were said to be devilish. Strauss goes on: To recognize the diabolical character of Machiavelli's thought would mean to recognize in it a perverted nobility of a very high order. [He refers to Marlowe's remark that according to Machiavelli, 'there is no sin but ignorance.' and then goes on:] Not the contempt for the simple opinion, nor the disregard of it, but the considerate ascent from it leads to the core of Machiavelli's thought. There is no surer protection against the understanding of anything than taking for granted or otherwise despising the obvious and the surface. I leave you repeating once again, the final sentence of that statement: "The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things." 26 27 Thoughts on Machiavelli, (The Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois: 1958), p. 13. The Introduction, p. 9. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. 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Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 15 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Dialectic, virtue and recollection in Plato's Meno Description An account of the resource Typescript of a lecture delivered on September 24, 2010 by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-09-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6849" target="_blank" title="Audio Recording" rel="noreferrer noopener">Audio Recording</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Bib # 78947 Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/adc40e1a6e9a1a62bd1cd5ef23c35a89.mp3 281a99dfb222373e54847971bf9dc63f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College. During the Fall and Spring semesters, lectures are given on Friday nights. Items include audio and video recordings and typescripts.<br /><br />For more information, and a schedule of upcoming lectures, please visit the <strong><a href="http://www.sjc.edu/programs-and-events/annapolis/formal-lecture-series/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">St. John's College website</a></strong>.  <br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Formal Lecture Series" href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=5&amp;sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&amp;sort_dir=d">Items in the St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.<br /><br />A growing number of lecture recordings are also available on the St. John's College (Annapolis) Lectures podcast. Visit <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/st-johns-college-annapolis-lectures/id1695157772">Apple Podcasts</a> or <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/6GDsIRqC8SWZ28AY72BsYM?si=f2ecfa9e247a456f" title="Spotify">Spotify</a> to listen and subscribe. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Title A name given to the resource St. John's College Formal Lecture Series—Annapolis Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context formallectureseriesannapolis Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data mp3 Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 51:05 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Dialectic, virtue and recollection in Plato's Meno Description An account of the resource Audio recording of a lecture delivered on September 24, 2010 by Laurence Berns as part of the Formal Lecture Series. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Berns, Laurence, 1928- Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-09-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/6850" target="_blank" title="Typescript" rel="noreferrer noopener">Typescript</a> Friday night lecture Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b73e3e7a2c7e5d495a32a89c0db94efb.pdf 106d1c56ac6d1d7040e78e40113aaea6 PDF Text Text ST^^OLIC 9{IS^0^ ^rougH Sigdt and Sound 38. NOW - CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 March 1994 Last revised June 1996 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History SJM'BOLIC nifirougfi Sight and Sound 39. 1) NOW - Omega $fwtommt^e: Tanfi among stars, tuitfi JgiWert's C.QdBeU; + ^ detait By a leap of impossibility, the^ Now Alpha and Now Omega have to draw together. The task of the Alpha was to render what is mine to earth and cosmos; the Omega must treat earth and cosmos as my own. The mode of this convergence can only be the continual em­ brace and transcendence of antinomy. It is creative paradox which besouls the worlds. 2J ^ree sfiots: ^indres SiigCa, at 11 montfis, (earns to zoal^ What is the paradox of walking? To fall and not to fall. To turn incipient falling to a directed, on-going progress. Here Andres Aigla, 11 months old, explores that simple skill, which the tottering earth has desperately to learn. ^a3) ^iezo rvest from Sangre de Cdristo (C(g%'78) 3) Tfioto-composite of T,artfi, Sofar Corona, and 9doon (or gCazed ^3) '’3 a) MSTm^nSerg photo, eclipse of sun in muCtipCe e?(posure *U3B) MandeCSrot, (Fractal: ’(Blanetrise,'etc. Music: Leonin, 1160-90, from Deum Tim§ (Yves Tinayre), Lumen 32017 We come to life adapted to wonders of earth and sky as beyond known chance or causal prediction as the myths of East or West (say Genesis) assume — all the inwrought balances Newton's science had to ascribe "to the counsel and dominion of an intel&gent and power­ ful being." Above us circle two spheres, so disposed as to seem of equal (hence eclipsing) size — the coronal passion of the sun, lord of day; the sterile death of the moon, goddess of night — an archetypal antinomy. June 1996 NOW — Omega 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic And in music, the two-voiced stretch of Gothic Leonin History (fade) 4 ) detail of3: Corona cfecGpsedsun Beside faCC moon ^4 a) f^pBaeC, 1517-19, Loggia, Isaac andf^Becca 4 B) Teter ^ys, c.1670, S^Xegory of OsQgBt, HOinstBistonscBes 9duseum, I4^n; witfi V details Music: Minischalchi, c.1630, lo tento in van (Max Meili) A.S. 79 swells to the recitative and ground bass of baroque Minischalchi. Though in the opposition of the sky, romance has leaned from the busy action of male day, to the moony Beulah of embracing shade: (Milton) sweet the coming on Of grateful Evening milde, then silent Night With this her solemn Bird and this fair Moon, And these the Gemms of Heav'n her starrie train... (cut Minischalchi) VaS) Sfiip 9(pd(, (h&d, far-off (C(fB, 7ali 1968) B 5) *Eartfi vwwedfrom sateCUte, sfiowin£ ^Europe and Sifrica c5) TCiocene restoration, Ximerican West, Museum of MflturaC 5fistory, (Cg^ '79) 5) 9kmi 9(pusseau, 1891, Surprised, 9^tionaC QdCery, London; + ^details Music: Mahler, 1909, Ninth Symphony, from 4th movement passage for violin and double bass (Horenstein) Vox Box 116 How often, in later music, from Bach to this Mahler, the tangled fabric cleaves^ to a dialogue of high and low. So on the round earth, tensile limits reappear: sea and land, mountains and plain, desert and fertile ground, farm and forest. From the dawn of life, entropic up-and-down reflects itself in leaf and flame, plant and animal, graz­ ers and hunters — this panorama of the American Pliocene. "Douanier" Rousseau, charmed by tropical shows in the Paris Exposition of 1889, caught nature's ambivalence in this painting called "Surprised": lightning from rain, wind-tossed trees, the tiger pushing through reeds. (fade Mahler) June 1996 NOW — Omega 2 �Symbolic C.G. Bell 6) History ^avid SlUan, 1781, ^Tfie ^KaCkptt y^amiCy, Cf\^HonaC QalCery of ScotCamC, ‘E([in6ur£fi} + deiaUs Music: Gretry, 1782, Gavotte de Colinette a la Cour, Col. (78)x-126 No doubt the Enlightened taming of the British landscape and family scene (this David Allan of 1781) appeared to have put to rest the old Behemoth-Leviathan raging and uprooting through time and space — fate soothed, as it were, by Orphic airs and country dance (Gretry’s pre-revolutionary fluff). Even Wordsworth would dream "that Nature never did betray/ The heart that loved her." (fade Gretry) a7) 7) W. (BCa^, 1773, enyravitt£, Josepfi of ^rimatfiea, iritisfi fhfuseum; + ^detaiC 1793-4, *Jhe Qood and‘Evil SlngeCs, Uduseum, ‘Bedford; + V details Though the Bible and Shakespeare were still read, and Blake had already summoned this Michelangelaic Joseph of Arimathea to Albion's rocky coast. By 1793 (about when Beethoven went "to re­ ceive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn"), Music: Beethoven, 1799, Quartet #4,1st mvt. Coda, (Vegh) HSQ 44 Blake would be limning and voicing the radical ambivalence of these Angels contending for the human child — as in The Marriage of Heav­ en and Hell, the passive obedience called "Good," the shackled desire called "Evil" by the world, but by Blake, "Energy... the only life." (end Beethoven) t a8) (Dul^ photographed6y yowny on Sipodo-IG MoonwaCSu 1972 8) 9l^ht-earth ;dith (yhts andfires, art-composite cf satelUte-viezvs, Scientific ^bnerican, Sept. 1989; + ‘U details So, upon this threshing-floor, Odyssean earthlings push off from island domesticities into storm-ocean and star-void. Appropri­ ately, with the globe already (as in this painted composite of satellite night-views) fired so wastefully: the spread of cities, slash-and-burn of tropic jungles, flaming grasslands of the sub-Sahara, burn-off of June 1996 NOW — Omega 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History natural gas around the Persian Gulf and in Siberia, flood-lighted squid-fishing off Japan. 9) !Hans kHbCSein tfU O^owiger, 1528, Music: and CluCdren, (BaseC; zvitfi V details Hieronymus Vinders, 0 Mors..., Archiv Stereo 2533 360 What can the Now be but the rooted outreaching of the whole tree of consciousness, as patiently enduring as Holbein's waiting family — earth's sentient ingathering, wliere the coded past (in each as in all) presses the probabilities of a present, to shape some future, hung between leaf and flame? (fade O Mors) 10) 10a) ^106) VlOc) Suffan (Brenner, 1558, T^aBCe-cCocd^untfi ^troCoBe, LuBecli, 5lrray cf cCoc^ in Chet Johnson's repair shop, Santa J^e Iface of Chet's pendulum cloche (C(fB, '90) CarihSean spiralsh^ from a cruise advertisement That Now is a transformational one-many, far from the dimen­ sionless instant ticked between lost past and unformed future, which the science of chronology seems to make of it. Examine a timepiece closely (this one, say, of 1558). What are its elements? First, some vibrating recurrence. Without flywheel, pejidulum, pulsing crystal, no clock could keep tiihe, any more than than earth, without rotation and revolution, could measure days and years. But that oscillation returns where it was, a dead beat» always the same. So every clock requires another element, a numbered advance, by which the future succeeds the past. Has the union of these two, wheel and arrow, compassed ’ time? 11) California sundial shell, Jlrchitectonica ^ranulata iCQ‘B '81) [video inserts photograph cf snails mating, from (Mature 106, and returns to 11] No. The spiral that knits these poles requires a body of percep­ tion. Like a recording clock, the mollusk of a Sundial shell graphs its growth in this demarcated coil. The shell alone is a spiral resolution of the arrow and the wheel; but it contained a Now, perceptive wholeness of a living process. Without that threshold of organic ac- June 1996 NOW — Omega 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History tion, this Architectonica could not have shared in time, creeping, feeding on his stomach-foot, a gastropod. 12) 12 a) Vl2B) 12c) Jost (BuT£i, 1S94, Star-^loBe cCoc^ Landesmuseum, Zuricfi {Bine slopes £. of San CristoBaC, CfUapas (C^ jfeBruary 1975) Compound eyes in Bead of a Bors^ly % Odponan, photo, midge coming from xvater-phase to air Are the heavens comprehended in Burgi’s 1594 clock of planets and the starry sphere? What of the eternally rooted Now of inward­ ness, as cosmically free and bound as "I am that I am"? Had not Heraclitus, for all his burning antinomies ("We are and we are not"), made thisclear: "Not on my authority, but on that of truth (A,oyO(;), accept the fact that all things are one." And Leibniz: "The machines of nature are still machines in their smallest parts ad infinitum." Here a midge struggles from larva and water to wings and air — Dante's sky-search that racks the globe: "Worms born to form the angelic butterfly." 13) Shane-^Wirtanen composite photo-map of1,000,000gaCo}^ 13 a) SpiralgaCofQ) 9d 83, Centaurus, violin. Scientific S4merican, August '93 13 B) Lava and Lightning on Sahyra Sima, Japan's South Island The cosmos — like a protoplasmic bubble, this photocomposite of a million mapped galaxies (from an estimated one hundred billion, each averaging ten billion suns), evolving at all levels, energy, parti­ cles, atoms, chemicals, through dust-clouds, galaxies, suns forming and exploding, dark stars, planets, satellites — from the assumed bang to tfie earth-now of man — this cosmos has kept all processes going, in creative interplay, aeons before we brought our observations to the scene. al4) South (Polar Star troche, Shu & Lelescope. JFeBruary 1986 14) Ivan SlWrght, 1967, Self-Portrait, (foutgstoum, Ohio Surely, without cosmic consciousness — some print of mind on the radiant void — there could be no cosmos; the problem is to put ourselves in touch with it. For we are earthlings still, earth-ravishJune 1996 NOW — Omega 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ers, and each pretends, like this Albright, to be himself alone — a slime-mould eddy on the chute of entropy — alS) Cascades at ^^gua SizuC in CfUapas, OdejQco (C(^ 1978) 15) iS^prtfiem zuatesfalC rvitfi salmon leaping up that gravitational axiom (in a universe lively for fifteen billion years), that whatever happens is sure to have had a gradient for happening, where a gradient, by definition, goes downhill. But what of the salmon's gradient to leap up waterfalls? Does quantum uncer­ tainty herald a nature where (as de Nerval wrote) "life breaks forth in everything"? al6) 9(psette 9(g6uCa (O^C 2244), tviift stars formed andforming 16) (Beta Tguuleus (Bictoris, 1984 — Solar systemforming? In any case, in cosmic extension, the axiom of closed-system decay rounds on itself, nature not admitting of one-way formula­ tions. "Proliferate" has as strong an imperative as "subside to rest." Like the stars sowed by this Rosette Nebula — stars, any one of which might in its origin be wrapped in such a halo of dust and gas as this recently studied Beta Pictoris (first photographed evidence of a solar system apparently in process of formation) — like those stars, al7) (tropicalgrozotfi, Mayaguez, (Puerto (^o (S. (Mason, 1955) 17) (Bfiotograpfi of a squash bed, Santa (Fe, 9^ (CQ^B '90); + ^ detail every weed seeds itself -as if to take over the earth. But as entropic down swerves to up, so proliferation can turn exuberance to a throt­ tling: "Spirit, at war with itself." I lay in the gourd-bed, flowered, fruitful. Slipping curved fingers down the tendrils To feel the clutch of subtle runners. Twisting a noose for the throats of grasses. 18) SLttic Cup, c. 500 (B.C., J4phrodisiac orgy, Louvre Q 13 *Ul8a) (More startling groups from the same cup June 1996 NOW — Omega 6 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Bessie Smith: "i'm wiid about that thing," Col.GP33, side 3 Once the thrast of human sexuality mounted the oldest fertility urge, what was to limit orgiastic celebration? The Greeks could prac­ tice our "illegal obscenities" in sacred precincts with temple courte­ sans consecrated to Aphrodite and Dionysus, as in Pindar's skolion. al9) Mndu, 1000 fHitud orgies, LaH^fimtim temple, iKfiajurafio ^619) ImCian (diniaiure, c. 1750, T5ie mounted 6y dl creatures, detaU, witfi horse and ape-man, 5(ptah State, fHgjastan cl9) Same, detaiC, zoith hear and elephant 19) Same, zvhoCe; + three V details In India, such rituals appear in stone on the heaven-bands of Hindu temples, here at Khajuraho, 1000 AD — while the West cow­ ered under die penitential climax of the Dark Ages. Small wonder the procreative drive, here symbolized in an Indian miniature of the 18th century, where the Nayika is the coupling mate of all creatures — those beasts, who in the upper section, work God's command: Be fruitful and multiply — no wonder that rapture is so hard to damp today, even where it over-populates the earth. (fade Bessie Smith) 20) 5{indu, 10th cent, (Dahini zoith demons, drinking Blood, !Kfiandaroa 9dahadava temple, fKfipjurho, India 20a) !Hmdu, 9th cent., Shiva, doing penance, (Bhuvanesvara; + V detail In truth that older world had harsh ways of stemming the overflow. Those very temples of erotic abandon equally enshrine the skeletal attendants of Kali, drinking blood on the battlefield. The same Shiva who wreathes in bliss with Sakti and Parvati withers to the death-lord of Yoga, doing penance. How soon is the world to become as ruthless in paradox as the old sacrificial gods? Must we steel our hard-won humanity against ideal and sentimental pretences? 21) 21a) June Ifamine in Besieged (Biafra, Life, 5Utgust 23,1968 (video: details only) ^Ethiopia, 1985: zooman (f 28 Being preparedfor Burid 1996 NOW — Omega 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ^2la) ‘Etfiwpian£roup taitfl starving oCdmm 2lB) CfttCdrenfrom tfie Sudan, (wing on the streets of (I^rtoum, Life, Sum '88 A simple fact: there was never a more ideal or sentimental folly than that by which modern hygiene and medicine were spread abroad, without any thought or concern, much less program, how one planet might house and feed the resulting population. Though war and politics have used famine in Biafra and Ethiopia, drought and crop-failure played a typically Third-World role. So also with the 10,000 Sudanese children, refugees from civil strife and want, who in 1988 slept and begged on the streets of the capital city, Khartoum. 22) (Frogs: fenuiCe, wildi two fertiCizing maCes; first, video^ detail Music: Bessie Smith: Close of "I'm wild about thatihingf Yet still, like these mating frogs — female clutched by two males to fertilize the extruded eggs — black tribesmen and white Christians join in protesting birth control. (fade Bessie Smith) a23) Qiotto, 1306, detail of Injustiu, ^ena Cfiapd, (Padua; first, V detail ^623) *Fony (Priu, Sltomic ImB Jun^Crucifhc, detail (C<fB '90); first, *1^ closer de­ tail c23) (PBoto of a Swiss (ifticlear (H^tor (Scientific Slmerican, SepUmBer 1990) 23) (Hgssian tanB§ move into (Pragtie, Life 1968 (V23: Wider), The indulgence of freedom builds a counter-tension to the common good — radically in Giotto's detail of Injustice. By the com­ promise of law, each must forgo Iiis savage claim to kill, rape, and rob. Such the minimal contract Hobbes and Locke would think ade­ quate. But can we stop there? Even Adam Smith gives society "the duty of protecting... every member... from the injustice or oppression of every other". What then of economic oppression? What if industry work injury? What if our Keynesian boom produced opulent dysecology? Must not June 1996 NOW — Omega 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Smith's "natural liberty" explore some maximal contract for the lifegood of the whole? Despite w'hich, the First World War, the Nazi war, and even the half century of Cold War — here Russian tanks on the streets of Prague — have been lived and presented as the struggle of freedom against tyranny. Si24) Tersiaiij c. SOO ^diers cf (Darius I, Louvre, (Paris (B24) Qreef^ c. 443 (B.C., 3(ydria-Bearers from (^Q ^frieze of tfie (Bartfienoti, McropoGs Museum, J4.tfiens 24) (DouBCe: [21] (Persian ^Ircfiers, and{(Bj Partfierum frieze Our model for that was Greek: in Herodotus' History, how the invading Persian hordes, lashed to the pass of Thermopylae by cap­ tains of squadrons, rued the courage of Leonidas and his Spartans — those men of whom Demaratus had warned Xerxes: "They are free, yet not wholly free; for law is their master. What their law bids them, that they do." A strength subtly expressed in Simonides' in­ scription: "Stranger, tell the Spartans we lie here, obedient to their bidding," where "obedient" is the middle-passive participle of "per­ suade," implying: "We lie here, to their bidding self-persuaded." (For an art-contrast, the 500-B.C. Archers of Darius I confront the 443-B.C. freedom of the Parthenon freize.) a2S) Qree^ c. 460 (B,C., (Rjdns of the 2kus ^empCe, OCytnpia 25) Same, another viexo (Both '77) Yet t’he Greeks, in their very prime of civic life and art, saw such exercise of human daring as a field of mythic overweening and tragic fall, to which their land attests — Holderlein: But where are the thrones and temples, where the vessels. Brimmed once with nectar, delight of the gods, with song?. (CGB) Music: June 1996 Greek, 2nd cent. B.C., First Delphic Hymn, sung by J.E. Butt NOW — Omega 9 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History — The great Zieus temple of Olympia, reduced by earthquake to these shattered ruins. a26) Qrufii c.. 460, Metope from the Zeus ^empCe, iHercuCes shows J4thena the StymphaCian (Birds; Museum, Olympia; first, Va26, detail 26) Same, West (Pediment, Centaur hitiny a Lapith, Olympia 26 a) Same, "East (Pediment, the old diviner. Museum, Olympia; + ^detail Of which the remnant carvings — most dramatic sequence of Greek art exhibit (though from different myths) the phases of Aes­ chylean tragedy. lu this Metope from the labors of Hercules, the hero brings the man-eating Stymphalian birds to his barefoot pa­ troness Athena. It is god-given power in superhuman act. In the West Pediment, the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs be­ comes such a net of death as is spread in the Agamemnon and Choephere: "Who shall tear the curse from their blood? ...The end shall be destiny." For the third phase we draw from the East Pediment the mys­ tery of the rapt diviner, seeing as through loss and turmoil some healing transcendence. Let that cathartic tfiad of power, overreach, and prophecy res­ onate as the noose tightens on the world. a2 7) (Riace bronzes. Both warriors, (R^yyio-CalaBria Museum; + detail 2 7) Same, younger warrior, from waist up (CQ*B ’84); video, detail only Surely “it resonated for Graeco-Rome. The first chorus of the Antigone is a praise of man: "Many a wonder..." But the Greek word for wonder is deina, as in dinosaur — a greatness also to be feared. So in the Riace Warriors, Greek energy risks the hybris of the Pelo­ ponnesian War. It is Plato's "fair and spangled state... ready to burst with liberty." June 1996 NOW — Omega 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In our pursuit of happiness, we forget how far the revolt of agriculture seemed a profane plowing up and seeding of our mother, Goddess Earth. Delphic Hymn) 28) *Rgman (Bust, c. 66-68, O^o/ Musea CapitoG.no, (Rpim; + V detail 280.) (Rpman, 66-67RUD,, coin zoitG (S^o, American (Slptnisnuitic Society By Nero's Rome the outrage is too blatant, too devastating. The preface of Livy’s Histgry (c. 10 A.D.?) foreshadows not only the crisis then festering at the heart of empire, but every such degradation (to quote Thucydides) "as long as the nature of man remains the same." This Livy translation is from a Phi Beta Kappa address by Gordon Craig: ...Poverty with us went hand in hand with content­ ment. Of late years, wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us — through every form of sensual excess — to be, if I may so put it, in love with death, both individual and collective... a29) (Rpnuin Christian, earCy Jrd cent», *lHe Qood Sfiepderd, crypt of Cucina, Cemetery of CaGy(tus, (Rptne 29) (Rpman Christian, c. 470, mosaic, St. J4.m6rose and St. ^RCatemus, San J4m6rosio, (Milan; first, video cUtail Already the followers of Christus were being burnt for noctur­ nal lights (so Tacitus) in Nero's gardens. Strange, the claimants of an embodied Saviour should have withdrawn to catacomb entombments of flesh and outwardness. Music: Pre-Gregorian Sanctus, Mass for the Dead, (Solesmes) DP7532 But it was flesh God had taken, and, as we have centrally pur­ sued, that Judgment ultimatum to declining Rome would incarnate in the West a body of assertive temporality, reaching from the humbled earth-denial of this 5th-century mosaic of St.Ambrose and St. Matemus in Milan. (close Sanctus) Va30) Gemini, Singd, 1673-4, Sacrament SUtar, StlPeter's, (Rgme June 1996 NOW — Omega 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History VB30) (Bemim, 1668-70, toUfi. scroUandtfioms, S> ^Indrea d. VcdU 30) ^Bernini, 1670-71, wMi scroll, IBonte Sant'Sln£e(o, i^pme 30 a) (Detad of same Music: J.-B. Lully, c. 1670(?), Amen from the Dies Irae, ARC 3097 through a Christian antithesis of Baroque exuberance, assertive, whether for joy or grief — here, about 1670, with Bernini and Lully — (close Dies Irae) 31) (DouBle: Bernini [Si] 1634-70, Constantine, Scala Bs£ia, Vatican, and [B] 1663-7, drazoing, ^Equestrian Louis XlV, 9d.useo Civico, Bassano (zndeo sfunus first Si and B separate^; see ziideofUe) Music: Lully, c. 1670, Te DSum, close of "Et in saeculum saeculi", London DTL 93043, side 2 an assurance always primed for the heroic miscarriages of church and state (Bernini's Constantine and his Louis XIV). Through that (fade Te Deum) 32) % BiuCe, 1833-6, La MarseUlaise, Sire de ^riompBe, Baris; witB V details Music: Berlioz, 1830, Symphonie Fantastique, close, London CM 9227 to the secular explosion of the French Revolution, this 1792 rallying of volunteers, carved forty years later, when surely it smacked of some Faustian compact — even in Rude’s Arc de Triomphe commem­ oration, where the face of War (above) follows Michelangelo's sketch of a Fury: So why not pair it with the close of Berlioz' Fantastique March and double fugue? (end Berlioz) 33) ^Triple: [Si] SimBrose mosaic (detail of 29); [B] Bernini Singel (30); and [C] fKitde, La Marseidaise, plaster model, Musie IRyde, Byon (variant of 32) Taking this sequence as a springboard — from the disclaimer of earth, with hope in God; through a godhead seated in the physical, its space, time, and cause; shrunk then to a Deist ground of mere nature, for the hue and cry of Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood — hurled, as June 1996 NOW — Omega 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History we are, on that springboard toward an alarming future, we know that the tragic vaunt of freedom is not Greek or past, but with us, an archetypal antinomy in the Now. a34 & 34) ^oya, 1810-20, Masters (rf the War, 11 and 33 Since- between the "Call to Arms" and Rude's reenactment, had come the Rhine invasion upon which we have quoted elsewhere from Goethe's Hermann...md Dorothea: May I never again in such contemptuous madness Look upon man! Better the beast in his rage! Never let him speak of freedom, as if he could Rule lii§ own passions! — (CGB) and after twenty years of outrage, the Peninsular Campaign, with the long agony of guerrilla warfare, to be recorded by Goya in searing prints and canvases. 33) *B[ahp, 1793, Qood and iviC Angeds, coCor print, *Tate QaUery, London; + V detail (note Va33: possiSCe douBCe ^rfsRde 7, above, and of this 33) So what was Blake's prophecy, when in 1795, a year after the watercolor we saw earlier, he magnified (and reversed) its scene of Good and Evil Angels struggling for a child — to produce this mono­ print, where the energy figure has hardened (as froin Lucifer to Satan) — the French Revolution meanwhile exhibiting at home and abroad the fipree scaling-over of what Blake would call the "Ore Cycle", where: Rebellion' struck the tyrant dead. Became a tyrant in his stead... a36) 536) Vc36) 36) June American, 1826, Vernon Church, Vernon, Mass, (CQ(B '46); + V detail 9lgi£h6orCy 6am-6uildin£/1888, Museum, Massillon, 031; + V detail Side rHexu cf36, Monticedo (CQ(B '62) S^e-rson, 1769-1809, Mgnticello, Charlottesvide, Virpinia 1996 NOW — Omega 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History America seemed to avoid such a reversal. Our revolution hardly stirred the social fabric. It was the educated men of property and substance who took over here; and what they made constitu­ tional Was the liberal heritage of British law and institutions, local government, schools and churches. The have-nots could pioneer; the haves reasonably accej)ted that the "unalienable rights" of the Declaratioir would in time be spread around — as a century later, in the prosperous Midwest, at this neighborly construction of a barn. Though Pain^, our only radical, was exhorting, "We must think as if we were the first men that thought," while the unflawed spirit of Jefferson seemed to share that boldness (at Monticello, three prac­ tical stories contrived and disguised under the mask of one); yet in architecture, as in politics, the genius of the new republic was the caution of its originality, its power of invention within the traditions of the past, here of Palladio. 37) 37a) 376) 9/3 7c) 3 7 d) Scfiin^, 1826-7, CHarCoUenfurf, Sans Souci, (Potsdam (Peittef, Qerman, c. 1939, War, from SlpocaCypse tapestry design ScBin^C 1838, ScfiCoss OrCanda, Crimea, (HhdC and garden Same, S^tcdifor tfie CCassicaC gaUery liilXiam siirsU ttjc/ ZOtfi unt., CoCumnedpooC, San Simeon, CSL Compare the house "Schinkel built in Sans SouCi park about 1826 for the Prussian Princess Charlotte, by marriage Queen of Russia. Its academic neo-Greek wairts the freshness of Monticello; but the clean modesty might almost have raised Jeffersonian hopes for feLegel'i Germany. Though in fact» the whole country would veer in a century to the frenzied excesses of a madman's tyranny. Another Schinkel design may give a blue to the fatal entanglement of that Europe. Here, a Jairy-tale vision he would sketch for the same Charlotte (and her husband Nicholas I, that "Iron Tsar") — a mon­ strous, somehow Graeco-Moorish palace, never built, by the Black Sea on the Crimea, it is the sort of exhibition Hearst would first spring on America — at some cost to Jeffersonian democracy. a38) June WoodviCCe, 1831, Waiting for t/ie Stage, Corcoran QaCCery, Wasfi., (D.C. 1996 NOW — Omega 14 �C.G. Bell 638) c38) 38) 38a) 386) Symbolic History Wtieghd, 1568, iBaraSCe of the ^Cind, Capodimonti, 5dgpCes) + V detail •Banquet ofO^w O^or^pCutocrats, p6oto£rapfi, c. 1900(F); first, video detail V^xv O^or^Hdodem, •World•Trade Center, 9ddnluittan Burning tropical vegetation, photograph, 1989 fKgininger TUBS photo of fKflrposi's sarcoma (9(git (Meei^) Would R.C. Woodville's 1851 irony of the man shrouded behind dark glasses searching the news in The Spy, while he waits with oth­ ers for a stagecoach, have let it out, that the Fathers' trust in a free press to bring truth to a free people, might (as the blind lead the blind in Brueghel) end in the ditch of slogan-sale and media de­ bauchery — as when the children turn on the telly, and soul cries out: "Who let the enemy in the house?" Surely a prophet could have seen, that when neglect of Rous­ "because the force of circumstance tends always to seau's dictum destroy equality, the force of legislation must tend to maintain k" — had installed plutocracy, even our balanced freedoms would join the death-dance of the planet, that great Kermess of arrogation, strung from the May pole of the twin towers of World Trade, out through all competing nations and bank-colonies, to the last burning of jungles for the brief Agricultural failure the tropics allow. As Prometheus says in Aeschylus, "Besides this I gave them fire." So freedom chases the old beast around the tree until the pursuer becomes the pursued — hounded to death in the hunt for happiness. Thus our lot too may harden to a planned order of the whole: our freedom death, our liferoad regimen. a39) David, 1797-8, Unfinished9lgpoleon, Louvre, Baris; + •l7a39, detail 639) Canova, 1803-22, Bust ofO^oleon, detail, Bitti, (Tlorence 39) BouSle: [51] (David, (S^oleon, as in a39, and[B] Qothic, c. 1245, (Head of a •Woman, from (S(^ Bortal, Odptre 0ame, Baris; found 6uried in 1977 (from •Metropolitan (Museum Show); video uses glazed double, *1)39 39 a) CanoVa, 1787-93, Bros and the reclining Bsyche, Louvre Around the 1800 switch from loose-rein to curb-rein, when a liberation still functional in America veered in Revolutionary France June 1996 NOW — Omega 15 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History toward the control of Europe — in that explosion of hope, how deeply David’s unfinished 1797 Napoleon is cloven. So in Rousseau's Social Contract: does the General Will ask Jefferson's state of minimal in­ terference, or the maximal state Marx would infer from the same text? Rousseau: ...the general will is always right and tends to the pub­ lic advantage; but it does not follow that the delibera­ tions of the people have always the same rectitude... Some must have their wills made conformable to their reason, and others must be taught what it is they will... From thence is bom the necessity of a legislator... In that lawgiver proclaiming like a shaman the General Will, Sovereign over all, lurked the Revolutionary Republic of Virtue, 1793: when the Council of the Commune would require the destruc­ tion of all relics "of superstition and feudalism" — here, from Notre Dame, a face ot Gothic humanity, buried almost two hundred years. Under Hebert, Notre Dame became "The Temple of Reason," where the nude dancer Maillart impersonated Truth, until the scan­ dal of her rites gave Deist Robespierre cause for guillotining the radi­ cal faction: extremists in extremis. ^40) y^riedricfi, c. 1810, pen-draxmng Self, 'hlg.tional QaUery, ^edin; + detail 40) ^)ou6Ce: [Ji] SL40, ^rkdricfi, SeCfi-and[(B] 40B, Qericault, i^/jide (see V40) 40(B) Qericoitlt, 1804-12, (Male ^djJLde, ^eatui-Arts, (Hffuen (vuUo: dalf-Cesigtfi <mly) Musle: Schubert, t827, Die Winterreis^, Irom "Fruhlingstraum," f=ischer.Dieskau, Angel 3640 @ Two phrases from Schubert’s Winterreise occasion two images. From "A Dream of Spring" (Fruhlingstraum), where the frost on the window suggests leaves and flowers, the incalculable yearning of the tearful major has summoned Caspar David Friedrich's pen-magic of the searching Transcendental self, (fade FrOhlingstraum) Against which, Schubert's "Mut" breaks into proud defiance: "If there are no gods on earth/ We will be gods Ourselves." " June 1996 NOW — Omega 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic Music: History Also Winterreise, close of "Mut". Angel 3640 B The urge to that was already in Friedrich's longing, as it had been in Goethe; but Gericault's nude gives it the desperate muscle of Napo­ leonic France. Prophetic rumblings from the tragic Continent. a41) 641) 41) 4la) ^Bingham, 1847) fR^tsmen TCaying Carets, Museum, StXouis C6iea£o, 1831 (SM. Teto, 1866, ^Kg^ourcfis and iBrospects) Currier & Ives, 1871, CZTte Qreat C^cago y^ire CurrUr & Ives, 1892, Cfikago from Latip Michigan} + V detail While here the confrontation was delayed — not yCt the Promethean vaunt, or fatal rupture. Yet the very energy and expansive success of America — Chicago from the fort and trading post of 1831, through the spur and stimulus of the Great Fire of 1871, to the 1892 spread of shipping and trade, industry and housing — that surge of powers would launch us on some such tragic risk as Promethean Greece had signalized. a4Z) 42) 42 a) V42B) 42 c) TatUus van I/ianen, c. 1603, Lmdscape tvith river and raftsmen, pen and wash, Museum of fine ^rts, Budapest} + V detad *E/D. Luhfis, 1872, Susquehanna at Conowaga Bridge, Bf.M, Bed} + V detail Mississippi ildver,. 1988 Cow water. Barges strandaC Crashed UCawaiian Beach, 1988, plastic, etc (Deforestation, 1989, Cascades, State of Washington \ Since our freedom of quest, Adam Smith's quick and happy way to clear a land and build a booming nation, rested on what had long sustained the prosperity of Europe — that taming of nature which ties this van Vianen 1600 log-rafting down some German river, to Lukas' Susquehanna of 1872 — America still counting on what Smith and Marx both assume (their common and fatal error), that nature is inexhaustible and works gratuitously. June 1996 NOW — Omega 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But we know too well what price Nature exacts — we who face the extremes of a changing climate, Gaia's great storms and droughts (summer, 198S, these barges stranded on the old Father of Waters, near my home-town of Greenville, Mississippi); we who feel the more actinic rays of the sun, who experience polluted streams, trashed beaches, garbage-fills, the old timber clear-cut from the ranges; and we shall know and feel more, as the world-pinch for food and water, raw materials and energy advances. d43) 43) 43 a) 43B) (Dinosaur s^^tons, (Sifitural(History (Museum, (SQCC (CQ*B'79) (DouBCe: [PL] [FisB in tfie ocean, and[(B] Toune mammals and Birds (DouBCe: Upper Cretaceous, reptiles of land, sea, air Iraqi tan^ 1990, (Persian Qulf crisis, (Mexysweefc Consider the rise and fall of dinosaurs; such adaptive radiation and earth-seizure must throw life-balances, genetic or social, out of whack. Organic causality is a complex interplay. The fall of comets or of asteroids could only have posed a general challenge, which, in fact, fishes in the sea (even sharks), first birds in the air, reptile sprawlers (lizards, snakes and crocodiles), besides early mammals, managed to live through; where all ruling reptiles ("dinosaurs"), large or small, of diverse orders, in ocean, air and all continents, became extinct. External impingement hardly accounts for so selective a catastrophe — from which man should learn, if learning is possible. Since the human assault on the globe, through mechanized war and peace — capitalist, communist, third world — exhibits some such unorganized chain-reaction as must have marked the evolutionary crisis of the higher reptiles — some irreversibility of cultural, as of genetic process. a44) VB44) c44) d44) 44) 44 a) ^44B) Coa£~Bumin£ plant, 1989, San Snan, Olgrv OdcKtco Savonks Solar generator, 1990, (Hawaii Conifers deadfrom acid rain, Scientific PLmerican, 1991 India, Qan^es (River, poCCufion and cocd’Bumit^ plant (Rpmaman polluted town of Cepsa (Mica, 1990! first, ^ detail (Pottutionfrom a (l^w Jersey oil refinery (MeMco City slums, junlcfieap millions. Scientific Pimerican, 1989 June 1996 NOW — Omega 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Take the burning of coal for an always unchecked upward spi­ ral of population and energy-demand — here the Four Corners plant, San Juan, New Mexico, belching dioxides of carbon and sulfur. "The feedbacks are enormously complex," say company scientists, mean­ ing: "We can't act because we can't be sure." While the production of solar panels is neglected or suppressed: "Hardly cost-effective" — de­ ceiving and deceived, by an economics df the fragmented particular, which obscures the cost of greenhouse gases and acid rain. Fourier at the beginning and Arrhenius at the end of the last century had linked carbon-dioxide to climate (I heard of it in 1934 from Barr at Virginia); meanwhile, industry has plunged dead ahead. No doubt one reads now of "sustainable development," and that such polluting power plants as this on the Ganges fail to comply; but how is book-knowledge to change the politics of need and greed? Worst of all when the so-called "planned societies," who took up the banner of world-hope, plan nothing but police enforcement of their own dogmatic rule, blind to the tensile tie of means and ends — materialist hicks who, as Simone Weil said, have fallen to the top in the gravity of power — this Romanian town of Copsa Mica, become under suppression of comment, "the most polluted place on earth". And those other hicks on the Western side, who called them­ selves political scientists and economists, and who take pride in having persuaded America that "plan" is a dirty word — all incapable of polyvalent thinking — as if an essential ingredient (Adam Smith's fess—-fiMStpnss. or Marx's laborl were the entire recipe and cause of prosperity, or of value. a4S) 45) 45a) ^45B) 45c) June tHuman Body, CopiUary circuCaHon, BCood to tissue Odacropfiage, wfUte BCood uCC, Bunting *EncBeridia CoU 'WBite BCood ceU dratving in Bacteria By pseudopods 1851, CCipper SBip, \Cfie CFCying CCoucC Cut-out montage, eartB against ^iCBy ^ay 1996 NOW — Omega 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History They deplore organic analogies. But the goal-directed symbio­ sis of the body is not totalitarian. Evolution has endowed its cells with genes of common loyalty and service. For each to pursue its own gain, as our politicians, bankers, and realtors do, would be can­ cerous. That is where the media have let democracy down. They should have built a gene-pool conscience of the race. Observe this microphage white blood cell pouring itself out after bacteria: that is the immune response. You see no policeman but the cell itself, no central authority. Nor with this hoplite, wrapping invaders in ar­ rowed pseudopods. He is on his own. But the whole action is moral and for the whole. It is only by plan that we can salvage the earth. But not a plan of the dumb and tyrannical. We have to constitute a feedback commufiity of observing and governing intelligence — some many-minded Odyssean navigator. This program smapks of a new religion, a love and worship of the mothering earth, floating at ease in the cosmos. But we cannot simply trust to Tellus Gaia. If that orb is alive, it is vulnerable, like every living being, to sickness and death — our death. We must in­ tensify science to keep it green, but a new science of the mysterious whole, redeemed from short-sighted bondage to logic, profit and war. a46) 646) 46) 4 6a) 463) CDdacrovQ 1830, LiBerty Lmdwy... L(nwre (CQ(B '80) Daumier, 1834, On tfie (Barricades, ^S(fltionaC Q(Ukry, (Prague (Hbudan, c. 1778, (Terra Cotta 6ustcf3J> (Rpusseau, OtCeans (Higfigate Cemetery, London, Qiant memoriaC head of Mavc (TripCe: (Photos: [SI] (JdussoCvni, [(B] Wilson, and [C] Lenin, c.1920 So we scheme; while revolutions of two centuries have height­ ened at once intemperate hope and violence. After the French Reign of Terror and Napoleon, came the inconsequential Paris uprising of 1830 (which would only change one Bourbon for another); yet to what crux of reckless zeal Delacroix has lashed it, in his "Liberty Leading the People". Next the workers' insurrection and brief com­ mune of 1848 (just when Marx and Engels had released their Mani­ festo!. would prompt Daumier's partisan response, as in this Les Miserable^ group "On the Barricades". June 1996 NOW — Omega 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In a calmer century Rousseau had doubted the emergence of good laws from civil strife and hatred — Many governments have been established in war, famine or sedition; but they are the very governments that destroy the state... The choice of the time for in­ stituting any law is one of the surest criteria whether it be the work of a legislator or tyrant. — prophetic condemnation of militant prophets, whether of left, right, or middle. So the Manifesto — The Communists' ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. — of which it could be asked: "What's all that hate doing in there?" Though the curse of hate would fall on all parties, the child father to the man: this beween-wars trio of Mussolini, Wilson, Lenin — all fatefully snared. The tide has swept us forward. a4 7) 4 7) 4 7a) 4 76) However — iK^ssian poster of1905, Cftains (Brol^n ftRussia in iRevolutionh + V detaiC Custodiev, 1905, iR^vofution striding the streets (same voCume) Caricature of 47: fR^wCutum as striding sRfCeton (same volume) Cartoon, c. 1917, QoCd-£reedy Capitalist 5{op (same volume) Music: Scriabin, 1907, from Poem of Ecstasy, London OES 6915 1905-6 is the date of the first Russian Revolution — such a frenzy of defiant hope, joined with Nietzschean scorn ("We have to be destroyers!") as, in this poster ("Chains Broken"), heightens the peti­ tion and massacre of the same year; while in music Scriabin's 1907 "Poem of Ecstasy" cradles its Orphic Egg of explosive yearnings — a complicity of yea-shouts and poignant cries. So Custodiev's absolute peasant-worker giant, trampling and shattering the established city, stirs the privileged to alarm and hate June 1996 NOW — Omega 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History — a wizard of terror that blasts the great rebel to a skeleton trailing blood and fire —> as it counter-blasts those of station to the beast and enemy — this gold-greedy hog of Capital. (fade Scriabin) 48) S. TAsenstun, ^en (Daus tHat Sfiook the ^orCd. ih^f^ndrov, as Lmin, speads at tfU ifinCatuCStation What can it mean that Shostakovich in the climactic forte of his withdrawn 4th Symphony (two-and-a-half minutes of inwrought, percussive dissonance) cleaves the stark violence of two Great Wars and of Revolution from its former ecstasy, crusting the volcanic brew of Eisenstein's Ten. Days that Shook the World? a49) S^irst World War: Cong-distance artiUery firing 649 Samcj aBout 1917, BattCe in t^ trendies 49) iRyssian Taster, C.191T-18, '51/2% War (Bonds' Music: Shostakovich, 1935-6, Symphony No.4, final brass chorale, MHS 824958Z Drums, Gannon (Krupp and Allied) shell both fronts. West and East, the carnage of trench warfare. Spent Russia still lashed to the field this poster for five-and-a-half percent war bonds. 50) Sussia in (Revolution, c. 1920(7), Lenin Harangues tBepeopCe SOa) Same, 1917, Litovsky (Prison Burning, (Petrograd From April 1917 on, Lenin was there, (with Trotsky below: "The end justifies all means". Trotsky, to workers on strike and peti­ tioning revdlutionary sailors: 'Til shoot you like pheasants!" In that kindled pyre of burning, looting, purging, starving, the population of Petrograd fell from two-and-a-half million to five-hundred-thou­ sand. 51) Same, c. 1920(F), White CKecution qf(Bolshez^ 5la) Same, 1921, Corpse-Butcher peasants zoith canniBaC meat SlB) Same, (Poster, 1922, Caricature of the League cf actions June 1996 NOW — Omega 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All parties, White, Red, Socialist, espoused terrorism. Produc­ tion failed; money more or less disappeared. By 1921, when Trotsky had broken the Civil War, famine and disease were rife; even canni­ balism surfaced — these butchers of the human dead. Lenin: "We are beggars, hungry, ruined beggars." Yet hate laid the blame (why not?) on the swollen capitalist powers: France, the U.S.A., England. 52) tRussia in ^evoCution, 1929/ Stalin, xoitfi (Party (Ddeyates What ecstasy could remain, once the plotting exterminator of the old Soviet vanguard — Stalin — had tightened his rule? 53) Spanish Civil 1936-9, (payees at ilie IFrench border Meanwhile, the war of Left and Right spread over the world — Spain: refugees by a gutted farm turn to France. 54) Sino-Japanese War, 1937, troops on the Qreat Wall 54 a) Same: May 3,1939, (BomBiny of Cfvunyhiny, Life 546) Same, (Bodies of zvomen and children after an air-raid fronic chance, that the only appearance in these shows of the Great Chinese Wall, is for the 1937 movement of troops in the SinoJapanese War — from which the most appalling pictures show the bombing of Chunking —with the air-raid slaughter of women and children. 55) (S^i (Reserves, 1939, addressed 6y Mtler at a (RyUy 56) St (Pauls, London, the niyht of (DecemSer29,1940 56 a) Moscozv BomBed, (KfemGn, niyht ofSuly 23,1941 Then it was the Nazi build-up... for the assault on Europe: London... Moscow... 57) 58) World War II, (Ryins of Wesel, Churchill (Life) atomic (BomB, RuyustS, 1945, over Olgyasaici, Japan June 1996 NOW — Omega 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "I will repay," saith the Lord — Wesel, on the Rhine, north of the Ruhr. Could the climax be other than the atomic cloud, of which Oppenheimer averred: "I am Shiva, destroyer of worlds"? (from brass forte to dark brooding) 59) 60) 61) 62) (KCayaret ^our^-Ti^te, 194S, ^uchemvcUd, CiBerated Hervs 0(prea, 1950, iMmines retreat over their ozim dead Vietnam, 3une 1966, {Phoipfwrous Som6 on ajungCe viUage iR^mama, 1989, 5^ired(BaCau cf Communist Boss, Ciaucescu Here, Shostakovich's clang of ordnance gives way to a muffled span of brooding, dark as the trial of the Jews, or Russia's Gulag Archipelago... Or the no-win aftermaths of cold war: Korea, 1950... Vietnam, 1966 (phosphorous bombs on a jungle village)... These brasses smoldering, like Soviet misrule in East Europe, down to the fired palace of Romanian Ceaucescu. What is the prophecy? (cut dark brooding section) Va63 Cathedral of die 5innunciatum, 1484-9, QQrendm, Cfdoscozv 63) Zagorsli^Sdfry, 1741-69, near Moscotv, Russia 64) Ryssia, c. 1917, 9day (Day, Communist (Poster Qreetiny 64 a) (Kpndinshy, 1926, Several Circles, Quyyenheim (Museum, (J^C Music: To the celeste passage closing the Shostakovich Fourth What, most of all, when Shostokovich, after such intensities of attack and repression, distills for the symphony's close a space of mysterious intimation, sprinkled with rising arpeggios of the heaven­ ly celeste?, Whp can hear it as die pealing bells of an Orthodox past? Or attach it to the frail posters of Soviet hope — the exploded delight of this 1917 May Day? Exiled Kandinsky's spiritual abstractions (this 1926 rapture of "Several Circles") seem nearer. If such was the artaffinity, no wonder Shostokovich withdrew the Fourth. 65) 66) 67) 68) (Decender 1989, (Protest at the (Berlin WalO + zHdeo variant, V65a (N^emher 1989, 5lavels victory sign to the people of (Prague 1965, (Blach^protest and arson in Watts, Los Slngdes 1989, Oveiflozving larufm of consumer zvastes, IfJ. June 1996 NOW — Omega 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But if prophecy, why not of the coming wave of liberation — this joyful breaching of the Berlin Wall, Christmas, 1989? Or is that promise as vain as the other claims? (close Shostokovich, 4th — celeste passage) Some open-throttle drive to supermarket expansion: consumer goods and energy? Could even Havel’s victory-sign, made over the streets of Prague, erase the unsolved troubles of the West, which had brought in rigors of Right and Left? Or can today's spendthrift opu­ lence obscure our own crisis of inequality and foreclosure, racial slums, violence, the speculative wars Marx deceived himself to avoid?... But our fate is intensified by what Marx was blind to — ev­ erywhere the power of an earth-rape, defiant of plan, whelming na­ ture in wastes of productivity and poisons of science. 69) 'Eye of tofiite-suCed do^ftin tfirouyfi nyCon of a drift-net Music: Ockeghem; from intemerata Dei mater (Munrow) Seraphim 6104 Through such buildup in the mechanized ravage of war, the ecological havoc of peace, the globe with all its creatures, chiefly man, is snared, like this dolphin, whose dying eye looks through ny­ lon strands of a thirty-five-miler, ocean-exhausting drift-net. 70) Cdortres CathedraC, IStfi cent., ^nyel over Cftoir QaBCe 70 a) Iraqi War, 1991, fKivwaiti OiC T^erminaC 'Burning So a centennial question mounts like an ancient prayer: whether th6 reconstructive earth (here suggested, as through past wars, by the guardian angel over Chartres) can so far assert itself, as to avoid impending catastrophe. That question is being tested, mo­ ment by moment; it has even, of late, almost been answered in the negative. (close Ockeghem) 71) (Dot^Ce: [PI] 'Egypt, (Dynasty III, c. 2660, !Kjng Zoser, detail, (Museum, Cairo, and[B] Sumerian, c. 2700 B.C., (Headof orant from 'Esdjmnna, 'Bcgdad 7111) (Head of (King Zoser (from 71) 71(B) (Head of orant (from 71) June 1996 NOW — Omega 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Tic) ^atollaA !f(jfiotneini, c. 1978, MusCim (efldkr of Iran Appalling, the intensity of faith and will it took to produce civi­ lization, to rear Egypt and Mesopotamia from the bogs of pre-agricultural man — both peoples Semitic, of kipdred, yet warring tribes: here from Egypt, Saq^ara, Third Dynasty, of the Step Pyramid, about 2660 B.C., King Zoser's mutilated statue, its jewel eyes gouged out by later vandals; and from 2700 B.C. Sumeria, a gypsum orant now in the Baghdad Museum, menaced, perhaps, by bombs. As if the tiaemonic force it took to found higher culture must become, in the reactive chemrs^try of place and race, the bane of its continuance. a 72) Assyrian/ 883-59 Lion fmnt rdi^, HLirom room, TaCace of Assumasirpal II, *BriHsfi ^Museum, London 72) Site of5eiiHsh defianu cf9(pme, A.(D. 70, ^di^cf 9dasada Let two relics bridge the millennia since those origins: 9th century BC and after, reliefs of hunting and war, to be transported wholesale from palace rjuins of Assyrian conquerors to the British Museum; and, shrine of the conquered, this Rock of Masada, where the Jews, most God-inspired, jnSligned and persecuted of those peo­ ple, chose in 70 A.D. mass-suicide, men> women and children, rather than submit to Rome. A two-edged precedent. a73) 573) 73) 73 a) 73 B) 73c) Ifoyi tan^ enter S^yrvait, Anyust2,1990 DouBCef [A] 5{ussein and [(BJ (Bus5 QuCf *War, 1991: US. ntissiCe and BomSiny attach OilspUCin the (Persian QuCf Stans von (Briesen BoCdhy scales to the sfiy (CQ% '91); + ‘U detail Lta Carina ndtUaand 1843 nova /Scientific American. ApriC.1973) It is in these faith-cradles of civilization that the question of its future looms. Now, when the will and drive of the whole United Nations, free enterprise, communist, third world, should be creatively focused on a rethinking and reordering of everything — population, diversity, production, distribution, resources, energy — where every June 1^96 NOW — Omega 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History leader needs to plan and implement vision, this imbroglio of desert and Crescent shows leadership impotent but for bungling to the chaos of war; to have fostered and armed a gambler like Saddam Hussein, as reckless as unprincipled, for manifest aggression until, tempted by our own devil, we espouse the mischief — down to our saturation plane-and-missile bombing, Ms. oil-sabotage of the Persian Gulf. In a world so dangerously poised, so bereft of formative con­ trol, so driven to catabolic stampede, the balance Zeus and Jove hung in the sky must read: global catastrophe — advancing at its own chain-reactive rate. That fact seems less in question than whether the calamity will be total or corrective. Here the Janus counsel of wisdom should be: to work for corrective containment, although aware that the cosmos we praise, may -- among countless worlds — already have seeded (by our connivance) the miscarriage of earth. Va 74) 674) c74) 74) finotfier of von (Briesen fioCdin£ tfie scales 9i{emG.ii£, 1466-75, from judgment, weighing souls, 5)anzig! + V detail 5(pger Van der Leyden, 1443-6, judgment, same, Beaune; first, detail QisleSertus, 1130-40, ngmpanum judgment, same detail, ^tun And yet those heavenly scales span a contradiction. Do they herald a fate, or (from the name, Libra') a libration? In Daniel V: 27, God, under that image, warns Belshazz^: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." Milton follows in Paradise Lost: "The Fiend lookt up and knew/ His mounted scale aloft." So in this Memling Judgment, the good soul, to the angel's right; settles, like gold; the sinner risesi like dross. Contrast the Iliad: "The Father balanced his golden scales... The Achaians' death-day was heaviest." Here down is bad, as with van der Weyden's sinking sinner on the angel's left. But the paradox is not the ambiguity of up and down; it is of gravity and spirit — that the weighing of souls (swhyed, in this Autun carving, by angel and devil) must share, with life, some more than quantum uncertainty. June 1996 NOW — Omega 27 �C.G. Bell Va75j 6 7S) H7c7S) 75) 75a) Symbolic History ^u^arians demand reform, *Decem6er 1989, after forty years 9dafiatma,0andfU, c. 1940, seated in Cotus posture, toritiny Cactus fCotuer, Cfuapas, Me7(ico (C^ 1978) flower pfiotoyrapfis: video (V75) Lady's slipper, pHotoyrapfl (CQ*B 60); slide sfmW (75) ^iSiscus, pfiotqyrapfi (CQ*B '91) Ihlalloween pump^n, carved andpfiotoyrapfied By C.Q. *BeU, 1985 So too with the fate of the world; it is not determined but prob­ able. Man% conscious feedbacks may cross the threshold of surprise, almost of miracle. We have again to assess the odds, more searchingly, beginning with the wheel-and-arrow projections pf hisTtory; while the organiz­ ing power and fate of all our shows draws to this here and NOW, as in the plants of Goethe's Metamorphosis: When the plant vegetates, flowers, fructifies, it is still the same organs which under protean shape, expand as leaves, contract to the calyx, expand again in a petalled crown, contract to the organs of reproduction, then expand, for the last time, as fruit. a76) (DouBle: [SI] SltBens, c. 540 Teplos 9(pre, Bead, SLcropolis; and [B] iHead of Slntonia Minor, lira Bacis, 13-9 B.C., Byrne; first, V: SI and B 6 76) Striple: Tyypt: [SI] Old Bjnydom, iffiafre; [B] Middle, SpBinJc (fSUnenemBet III; [C] MfW, Limestone Ilfmatdn; aU details,, Cairo 76) friple: [SI] CBartres, c. 1210, MelcBisukBi detail] [B] Bernini, c. 1615, Msyr. Santoni, S. Brasede, Byrne; and [C] Bicas&o, 1907, Self Brayue What is New in Vico's Science of cycles, of 1725 and '44? That his "nations'^ are less political states than cultures; that their causality shifts from what is outward (as war) to what is inward (as religion and poetry), anticipating our great pulses of consciousness, or soul — such a mutation as from this Archaic Greek Peplos Kore, 6th century B.C.; to a face from the Ara Pacis, under the doubts of Aii^ustan Rome. Yet Vico's pattern for this is a wheel of recurrent Ages: of Gods, of Heroes, of Men (in Egypt: from the pyramid-building Old June 1996 NOW — Omega 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Kingdom, through a Middle Kingdom of weighty control, to the hu­ man quest and yearning of the New). Or we might extend Vico to our own time, charting the Christian West, from the God-force of Chartres (1210), through Bernini's embattled Monsignor Santoni (1615), to a Picasso Self (of 1907), between the human and a Kafka mask. a7T) (DouBCe: ^Jffieran, c. 1500 (B.Cj fresco of a Cady; and [(B] Qreef^ c. TOO •warrior; Bothf i^CfitiotuiC 9duseum, Adiens. 77) (DouBCe:, !^pman, c. 400 5L(D:, Priestess at an Sdtar, (DiptycB of tfie (S^comadii and SymmacBi, Victoria and MBert (Museum^ London; and [(B] QaCdc, c, 400 SUD., 9dan in a tunic, yoCdy (C)um6arton Oa^ 7751) (Che priestess, from 77, oBove (zndeo, detaiC only) In the Cycles show, the Greek show, and even in the personal review of NQW-Alpha. we have dramatized the confrontation at each turning of this wheel, where late-cycle luxury is ravished by barbar­ ian renewal — this Theran lady about 1500 B.C., with an Iron Age warrior of the sequent Time of Troubles. Yet there is something rather static about the imaged repeti­ tions; thus (after two millennia, say 4(X) A.D., in the twilight of pagan Rome) this (ivory) high-born priestess at the altar of Jove, confronts a gold statuette of some tunicate chieftain of Gaul. Too static, when moderns jmake Vico predictive, as Spengler, Toynbee, on the slopes of Western decadence, conjure force from nostalgias. What hierophant, in the circle of Yeats, Pound, H.D., will this priestess evoke? Or where, in her ambiance, will Nietzsche’s "barbarians of the 20th century" appear? I a78) (Boec^ffn, 1880, IsCe of the (Dead, (Kpnstmusemn, (baseC 78) (Dad, 1935, (PaCCadio's Corridor of (Dramatic Surprise, (Museum of (Modem 5Lrt, (NHXC Ominous, when the post-romantic brooding and pseudomysti­ cism of Boecklin's (powerfully painted) Isle of the Dead — the sheeted soul rowed to the hollow of grave and birth, between rock flanks, under shade of cypress — when that yearning spawns the hysteria of June 1996 NOW — Omega 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Dali's 1935 Palladio's Corridor of Dramatic Surprise — Palladio, Renaissance founder of our trusted Jeffersonian orders — his barrel vault collapsiilg^ among surreal vulgarities. Surely a static determin­ ism of history, a 79) Q^mran, Before 68 part of Isaiafi stroll 79) $• l^Ldinza Mosaic, c. 410, Cftrist enthroned xvidi Stposdes Against that classical wheel of time, the Hebrew arrow had been launched (as from Isaiah, this Dead Sea Scroll): "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son... Emmanuel... The Prince of Peace"; through John the Baptist: "The kingdom of heaven is at hand"; to John the Divine: "Christ hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father." But that City of God was more within than without, of eternity more than of time. Church and state had not withered away. aSO) MicBoUis of Verdun, 1181, enameCs: from ^ tripU rows (ri£fit side), four columns of tiiru, (video: of these scenes, the four (ow^r right, with a detail of one, V580, the ^htrrozihng of 9hU), Mtar, H^stemeuBurg 80) Same, two each from Cower and middle rows, especially [Below] Moses ^R^ives the Laws, and [aBove] Desert of the iKoly Spirit (video shows the Cower two first, V80a, then the middle two, V80B) By the 12th century, Joachim de Floris, extending Biblical his­ tory to present and future, foresaw an actual Coming, in time, of the Holy Ghost — such freedom as Virgil assures Dantd at the top of Purgatory: "I crown and mitre you oVer yourself." If Nicholas of Verdun's Correspondences, as (left) from Moses! receiving God's Law, to the Disciples' receiving his Spirit, were pushed to a mystic now, what would it be but Joachim's Third Kingdom of Grace abounding? a81) IHfLeims, West Windows, 12S4-90ff., from the !h(g.ve (CQIB,'S9) 81) IBaris, Mptre Dame, c, 1270, 9lprth Iransept IRpse, unter-spread 81a) Same, South Iransept IRpse, unter spread; + V details of Both Joachim: "The first a^e (of the Old Testament) should be as­ signed to the Father, the second (of the New) to the Son, and the third to the Holy Spirit... when that promise begun in a few will be June 1996 NOW — Omega 30 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History consummated in many... Joel: 'I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters will prophecy.'" Similarly in the "New Light" of Gothic, rose windows spread radiance from God the Father, or from the Mother and Child, out through patriarchs and saints, to the life aftd occupations of the world. (So Rheims and Paris; a82) ^or({^9^inster, c. 1338,3{eart detaiCfrom West ^ndoiu; + cCpser detail 682) Sainte CftapeUe, IStfi unt., iRpse Window, (Baris (C(^, '59) 82). §iotto, 1304-6, (f^gitvity, detail ^em Cdapel (Padua; first V cCoser detail then the flower-wreathed heart of York.) In the sun^-sphere of Dante's Paradise, it is Franciscan Bonaventura, opponent (with Dominic?^n St Thomas) of Joachim's promise, who is made to introduce and praise him. Here Dante, uplifted by the paired circling dance of such ordained lights of Intellect and Love, is suddenly dazzled by a far brighter horizon of soul-sparks: "new spirits making a ring beyond the other circles" (so these music­ making elders of the Sainte Chapelle) — "Oh vero sfavillar del Santo Spiro" — "Oh very sparkling of the Holy Ghost" — at which Beatrice smiles! So Dante hails the spiritual seeding of earth. Had not the windows of three centuries told as much; or in painting, Giotto's radi­ ant humanizing of the birth of God? 083, *UB83, c83, Vc83, Vd83, 83, V83a & 83a) Qrunewald, 1512-16, eentralspread of Isenhem Mtar, unth details, especudCy the spin qfSleavenltf QCory over the mountain rvorCd, (Mother and Child, Music; ’ Josquin des Pres, 1515-20(7), 3rd Agnus, Missa Range Lingua, The Taliis Scholars, Gimell 1585T-09i How successive waves of Reformation take up the Earthly Kingdom of Joachim's Franciscan followers: Luther — before the vio­ lence his preaching loosed threw him into fear and trembling — writing in confident joy of "the inestimable power and liberty of Christians"; Josquin's climactic masses, the Pange Lingua Agnus; and (Incarnation summit in all art) Griinewald's spill of light and angels June 1996 NOW — Omega 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History from the Father in glory into a mountain landscape, where the Child is dandled by Mary, beside a rose without thorns. (fade Josquin) a84) ^Ks-mBrandt, c. 1669, Simeon mtk the ChUd, 9dus., Stochholm; + ^detail 84) iH^mBrandt, 1641, Landscape •with a Coach, Wadau, London 84 a) 5. Cooper, c. 16SS(F), OUver Cromwed, Odptional iPortrait Qtdlery, London; + V detaiC Music: Schutz, 1629, Sackbut overture, Fili mi Absalon, MHS 4504 By the time of Milton, Rembrandt, and Schutz, the same Godtrust rests always more on^ the weight and solemnity of the human drama. In the radiant landscape it is the sun, down clouds, which sanctifies the spatial recess. In CromweU's England the Fifth Monarchy Men expect the coming and present kingship of Christ, (fad© SchQtz) The stakes are always higher, the faith-wars more charged with material detonation. 85) Sacques-Louis 5)avid, 1793, SJdarat dead, detaU, (Beaune Arts, (BrusseCs; + VeCoser detaU The next revolutionary move brings us back to France, 1793, Marat's assassination, under the cleaving shears of fact and dream. For Condorcef's History the blade* of hope (non-Christian) was for a Tenth-Epoch perfection and fulfillment of man; the blade of fact was the mounting Reign of Terror, which pursued him to a prison death. a86) l^ripCe: (Portraits, 1792-1820(7), [A] SCe^eC, [B] SBoCderCin, and [C] Schedinff (here video adds V686, (^n£e, detaiC, then C of a86, Sckeltip£ aCone) 86, 86a) (Kiin^e, 9domin£, Smad and Lar^e, (KpnstfudCe, SdimBur^; + V detaUs In thought, it was Germany which brought to fruition, in three astonishing schoolmates, Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling, radical transformations of Joachim's temporal Coming (blended sometimes with Vico's cycles). / Music: Beethoven, 1799-1800, First Symphony, opening, Toscanini I June 1996 NOW — Omega 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History — All (at that turn to the 1800s) as if launched on Beethoven's early symphonies, toward Promethean daring, Schelling, youngest of the three, by 1809 had completed O f Human Freedom, tracing, from the primal dark ground of nature, and self-willed battle of hisTtory, God’s physical emergence as light. His moral emergence as Spirit. At the same time Runge was composing versions, small and large, of his transcendental Morning to image the life-forces of earth, as in Bohme's Sacred Element. (fade First) a8 7) Hofin Martin, 1852, Tlie (jrerft (Day of (His Wratfi; first,, video detaiCs 87) Same, ^Tfie (PCains of (Heaven, Botfi Hate QaUery, London) + V detaiC Music: Beethoven, *1800-5, Fifth Symphony, from Trio, Toscanini No one has formulated the death-drive of history more power­ fully than Hegel, where a God at war with himself is only to be ac­ tualized through successive alienations; so the fruit that every cul­ ture ripens and hungers for, becomes a poison draught to it, and yet at the same time the rise of a higher principle. By this cunning of reason, every decay, and fall from China to the West, advances the self-realization of spirit, (as with Schelling) actually and" concretely, in the World. In such a theodicy, John Martin, Victorian fantast, leads from his "Great Day of God's Wrath" to these earthly "Plains of Heaven," white witli souls. (fade Fifth) a88) B88) 88) V88a) V88B) 88c) ^88 d) (PasteC of (HoCderCin, 1792, ScfiUCer Museum, MarBacfi; first, video detail MidieCanyelo, 1532-3, 5(gsurrection dratviny, (Bntisfi. Museum Mfiens, c. 600 (B.C.,, (Kpuros, Metropolitan Museum, Mdf.C '79) ^tBena Qyantomadiia, c. 525 (B.C., SlcropoCis Museum, SLtfiens (CQ^ '77) SipolCo tempCe of Corintli, 6tfi unt, (B.C. (CQ‘B '77) Landscape, nortB of Logo di Qarda (CQ^ '59) Landscape, norpBem (Bavaria (CQ(B '59) Music: June 1996 Beethoven, 1804, Third Symphony, 1st movement, Toscanini NOW — Omega 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The third schoolmate and transformer of history was Holderlin, most enrapt elegiac poet of the West, undervalued through life and mad for almost forty years, for whom (as Nietzsche would elaborate) the expected German Coming would not be Christian, but Greek. Aftef the long night of Olympian withdrawal (for which Christ, sec­ ond Dionysus, gave ritual comforts), Holderlin foreknows the dawnecstasy and mythic-return of the keen deities of earth and sky. (The translations that follow are by C.G. Bell.) So the gods of heaven come in, with such deep trem­ bling, Down through the shadows their day-spring breaks among men. (Beethoven's Third, evincing most, how "the Zeus-eagle, from Indus and Parnassus and the votive hills of Italy," Exultant, over the Alps, wings on at last. And sees, wide spread, the many-patterned lands. To wake that Germany, Holderlin, in "Bread and Wine," his greatest poem, invokes the Hellas he would never see: a89) 689) 89) 89 a) Qreece, coast of Taros, pfwto^rapfi (Tpy 9i{oore); or Va89 (De^fii, ^^mpCe of ^oWo and Mt. Tamassus, pfioto£Taph (CQT 77) (De[p6i, Uieatre and n^empU from aSovc (C(fB 77) Qrcece, Mtica, Toy at Sounion, photograph (Tpy Moore) By. day and by night, godlike fire drives us on... Wherefore, To the Isthmus come, there, Where the open sea roars under Parnassus, and snow gleams on the rock cliffs above Delphi; There to Olympian lands and Bacchic heights of Cithaeron; Among pines and firs, over slopes mantled with grapes. June 1996 NOW — Omega 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Where Thebe below and Ismenos sound in the land of Cadmus; Thence comes, ^nd points us thither, the past and coming God. Yet every invocation of that lost and expected glory: Greece, feast-hall floored with ocean, tables mountain Peaks, lifted time out, of mind for a destinate coming — a90) 690) 90) 90 a) ffriedricfi, c. 1830, ^empU erfJuno atS^grigento, (Dortmund (DeCpfii, *Temp(e>of S^oCCo mins, dar^r pfiotojjrapfi (C§(B't?) (Hitn£e, 1799, Crayon Sdf, detail, d^nsthade, dlamSur^ d^riedridi, c. 1818,> CCim6er over (Mists, dOinst^alh, diamBur^ Music: Beethoven, Third Symphony, 2nd movement, Toscanini recalls the desolation: Where are the groves and temples? Delphi slumbers, and where now does the great fate sound? No more in Greece; nor yet in Germany. "We come too late" — or too soon. So the will to anticipate that Coming: -r- Look, we are it, ourselves, we, fruit of Hesperia — darkens the lonely task of unshared prophecy: "And wherefore poets in a time of dearth? — "und wozu Dichter in durftiger Zeit?" Until, in "The Blind Singer," stretched to madness, he prays release: Take from my heart, that I may bear it. Life, the gOd-like, take from me. a91) d7B91 91) 91a) 9lB) June d^riedrUfh 180^-10, (Mon^By the Sea, ChaHottenBurg, (BerCin Same, 1817, (MemoriaC Landscape, CharCottenBurg, (BerCin Cams, c, 1823, Wanderer jat the City Qate, detail (rf9lB, BeCozv Boideo tahgs a detadfrom this, and a under detailfrom die zvhoCe) (K^Ci^ of Susette Qotitard, (HuCderCin's (Diotima Cams, c. 1823, zvhoCe f91 ((Kunst, 1932); first, video detail of the shy 1996 NOW — Omega 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet in what dusk-love paean he hymns that Night itself, of which he wouW "foresee the dawn. The opening of "Bread and Wine" brims the -conscious space of the distych with the soul-inebriated gloaming of that solitude — a mood-suffusion not even Beethoven's Funeral March approximates (fade Beethoven); only Schubert's graveward yearning in The Winter-Journey, with the soul-search of Friedrich and Carus. Music: Schubert, 1827, Die Winterreise: Der Wegweiser, Angei S3640B Ringsum ruhet die Stadt; still wird die erleuchtete Gasse, Und, mit Fakeln geschmiikt, rauschen die Wagen hinweg. Quiet spreads over the town, hushed now are the glimmering byways. And, with torches agleam, rustling the wagons depart... Ah, but the sweep of strings sounds far from gardens... fountains Ever-bubbling and fresh whisper on vaporous beds. Still in dusk-laden aij, roll the echoing bells of evening... (fade Der Wegweiser) — Fruitless, to transcribe mere objects, which that German floats in a liquid of mood-sounds: "Still in dammriger Luft ertonen gelautete Glocken"; only music pours back those volatile pools, or art, in its Way: Cams' Wanderer at the City Gate, with the love-death pil­ grim of Schubert's Winterreise: a92) 92) ‘l^92a 926) 9^riedrkh, 182S, ‘Evening, tHbuse By a Qrove, 9^Cn y^rieHricfi, 1830-35, Easter: to tBe Cemetery; ErWate, London fLriedricB, 1824, ‘Widows and ‘Moon, ‘Wadraf-Eichartz, 9(pCn Sitfiens, Eartfienon from EftUopappou 9{id, yUotograyfi (Hipy Moore) Music: June 1996 Again Schubert's Wegweiser, final repeat of last stanza NOW — Omega 36 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History Momently wakens a wind and stirs in the peaks of the forest; See, and the shadow-image of earth, the moon, se­ cretly Comes- also, and Night, swirled in stars, and little con­ cerned With us, spectrally hovering there, a stranger to what is mortal. Far over rock-heights hung, glances, supernal and sad. Glanzt die Erstaunende dort, die Fremdlingin unter den Menschen,. liber Gebirgeshohn traurig und prachtig herauf. (end Wegwelser) In that prophetic Night, in the death-joy of the god’s betrayal, today's tragic earth-triumph finds its utterance. a93) 0ou6Ce: [SijTompeii, Cst cent. (Portrait of a gift, (h(ptionaC(J^useum, (HflpCes) ancC [*B] Munch, 189S, Self(Portrait, (S^tionaC gallery, Oslo; + VsinyCe of(B 93) 0ouSCe: [A] Christian, c. 300, Orant, CatacomB of S. CaCCisto; and [(B] (Henry LamB, 1914, Lytton Stracfey, detail, Southampton gallery; + V detail cfB Music; Dvorak, 1893, New World Symphony, from 2nd Movement, AngOl $35615 Whereas any Vico-to-Toynbee Cycle would have led the ripe nostalgias of Rome or the West (Arnold's "strange disease of modern life" and j"take me, cowled forms") as Eliot would lead his Lost Generations of“ Prufrock, Gerontion, Hollow Men, "beyond the orbit of the shuddering Beaf — (tade Dvorak) Music; Gregoridn Mass for the Dead, introit. Requiem, MHS 915 and with the luck of the poor in spirit — through alienation and scep­ tic denial, to await in. the desert the Plainsong descent of an "Ash Wednesday" priest (surely hot Christ); while Eliot's "(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things," would lure his convert June 1996 NOW — Omega 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Quartets, into a rose-garden moment of late-cycle nostalgia; "human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality." (fade Gregorian) 94) triple: "Epstein, [^] 1921, Senegdese H^oman, Bronze; [(B] 1919, (Day, stone; and [C] 1939, SliBm, cdoBaster, from riyfit When I began this study during the Nazi overthrow of Eliot's Between Wars, it seemed the sculptor Epstein, from the romantic realism of his portraits, through the hardening abstraction of Cubism, to the world plight of his 1939, Adam, had pursued some such cycli­ cal course as Eliot's, though with more fierceness and humanity. Nor could I avoid comparison with Stravinsky's 1930 Symphony of Psalms. 95-99) Epstein: 1919, (Day; 1929, (f^Bt; 1931, (PrimevaC Qod; 1939, Sidam, from front-C^t; and same, profUe detail aBove Music: Stravinsky, 1930, Symphony of Psalms, I, opening and close. Philips A01193L, with the five slides (holding 99 over) Yet as I review the sequence now, fifty years afterwards, Epstein's Adam puts the Aquarian question: was this the stylized objectificatidn of man's post-romantic agony, or did it purpose, as Symbolic History must, to rear a tragic containment for the crisis of earth itself? alOO) BlOO) 100) VlOOa) 100B) PLuyustus JoBn, 1907, W.(B. yeats, Eate Qadery, London 1918, ErencB warfare in the 9deMse-5byonne 5dosaic of Chrysostom, lOth unt., St. Sophia/ Constantinople Stme, 12th cent., St. John, detailfrom the (Deesis (Band Mso St. Sophia, (Mosaic, 12th cent(F), Christ, S. Qcdery Music: From "Bhroque Harp,"' (Elena Polenska). 2nd Irish Air; TV4069 Meanwhile, our greatest poet, Yeats, in his early dreams of an Irish "Golden Dawn," had hailed Joachim's "Holy Spirit" as a "multi­ tudinous influx," to bring back Celtic myth and the gods of Eri. (fade Irish Air) That wind of change was tied (as Nietzsche's had been) to the spiritual winnowing of "an impending European war". But after June 1996 NOW — Omega 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History twenty years and the actuality of World War I ("We... are but weasels fighting in a hole”), even Yeats toyed with the cycle of Christ's return, as Eliot was doing. Thus the imagined Sailing from sensuous Ireland, "To the holy city of Byzantium": "Consume my heart away; sick with desire/ And... gather me/ Into the artifice of eternity." So in "Demon and Beast," we hear: "0 what a sweetness strayed/ Through barren Thebaid," when Saint Anthony and his monks "Starved upon the shore/ And withered to a bag of bones". 101) Constance Qore-^Bootfi, pHotograpd, c. 1885(?), SCigo (CQ^ '80); first, video detaUs 101a) ^R^m8randt, 1631, TfuCosopfier under a tvinding stair, Louvre; + *1^ detail Music: 2nd Irish Air (as above): pick up 2nd phrase But Yeats perceived that the Christ program would take him through Plato and Pfotinus to the deserts of theology; while in fact he was an Irish poet, and "what theme had Homer but original sin?" (fade Irish Air) (Here, from their County Sligo youth, Constance GoreBooth, "The beauty of her country-side" — later, "A Political Prisoner.") So between Yeats' own search and his wife's spiritual dictations (he brooding, like Rembrandt's "Philosopher under a Spiral Stair"), they hit on a two-lobed cycle of intersecting cones, alternating in time, somehow combining Vico vdth Holderlin (whom Yeats could hardly have read, though he had browsed upon Nietzsche). alOZ) BlOZ) VclOZ) lOZ) lOZe) June feats' QHoof (BadyCee, Qort, County Qtdway (C^, '80) Upper fe/t settion cflOZ: Mttic ^Kpater, Beside cone-spirals detail Oletail cf BlOZ, Attic l^aur (CgO '77) Superimposed'cone-spirols)^ Lunar andSoCar; at tfie comers: A) Attic, 8tfi unt., ffunerary Kjater; ^)!Herculaneum, 1st cent. A.L>., (Dmn^^lercuCes, blouse of tfie Sta^s; C) 9tfi cent, Qerolxeuz, (Dorn, fKpCn; D) TeneCope Jenc^, 1980, 'l^alerie (tvith video^^spiraC,and picture detaiCs, as ^lOZfB-C, douBCe of*B & C — (dosin£ on VlOZD': Valerie) DouBCe: Tros fKg.Cos, c. 300 D.C., [A] Louvre vase, Satyr-nympB dance; and [CB] Derdn, CoupUng Satyrs and fSf^pBs 1996 NOW — Omega 39 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The stair was in his restored Medieval tower near Gort. The tower — most relevant to the early violent phase of Western culture, or to the renewed violence of that time of civil war — could also con­ tain the great gyres of history. Briefly, from a vertex above (that Zeus-kindling of Homeric Greece, here sampled in a funerary urn — Yeats: "I imagined the an­ nunciation that founded Greece as made to Leda... and that from one of her eggs came Love and from the other War"), a twelve-phased lunar gyre of myth and sensuous gods descends, widening toward its late-classical variety, instanced by a drunk Hercules. Yeats: "In pity for man's darkening thought/ He walked that room )and issued thence/ In Galilean turbulence..." Here the absolute incursion of Christ born and crucified sum­ mons (below) to the vertex of a solar cone, a culture of ope God, the­ ology, rational science. So that spiral mounts to our age of "Turning and turning in the widening gyre," where (to a Penelope Jenks' terra­ cotta called Valerie) the "beast... to be born" should recur in Dionysiac rape. Thus in Yeats' "News for the Delphic Oracle": "Nymphs and satyrs/ Copulate in the foam" — a "changing of the tinctures" for which the poet, at 68, would undergo Steinach rejuvenation, to be­ come the incarnate voice of that passion. As an intimate has told of his last euphoria: "He spoke of nothing but sex, mysticism, and his­ tory — all one in his mind." 103) SdttmeC iPaCmer, 1879, H^fie LoneCy *Tower, etcMng, Victoria ancC ^6ert Museum, London 103a) fRgmJ^randt, 1647,9^fit iRsst on die J^Ggfit, (DuBGn QaCCery The central room of the tower was Yeats' , place of night study — as he enacted "II Penseroso's Platonist" (with Palmer's engraving): Or let my lamp at midnight hour. Be seen in som high lonely Towr... June 1996 NOW — Omega 40 �C.ij. Bell Symbolic History So Milton; and Yeats — with Rembrandt’s Rest on the Flight, in the Dublin National Gallery: Benighted travellers From markets and from fairs Have seen his midnight candle glimmering. 104) fDouBCe: [Jl] (Print of a Samurai, and [*B] from friedricA: a netv moon; + video details, first of % tfieh ofSI On the study table lay Sato's sword, curved and stainless as a new moon, gift of a Japanese admirer, sign of the rending and creat­ ing absolute at the vertex of every historical cone — that past and coming violence Yeats had to fear and affirm: AH changed, changed utterly; A terrible beauty is born. 105) CooCe (Parli garden, Qort, (Bust of (hdaecenas (Cg(B 1980) ^lOSa (Picasso, 1901, S^sintfie (DrinAgr, QersAzvin Codection, (SC>% 10SB) CooCe (ParSu stone BencA under ancient yew (Cg*B '80) Music: 2nd Irish Air (as above): pick up 3rd phrase A few miles west. Lady Gregory's house, and especially her garden with its bust of Virgil's patron Maecenas, upheld the Western plateau of aristocratic life and art. So in Yeats' "A Prayer for my Daughter," he, hierOphant of "The Second Coming": "The ceremony of innocence Is drowned" — soon to turn his pen to Crazy Jane — prays that his d^ghter may come into a house of custom and ceremony, innocence and beauty; (end Irish Air for harp) 106) *BattCements ofCfea^' *Xbwer (CgOB '80) 106a) (Ry-in near feats' tower (Cg(B,'80) Music: Bartok, 1928, Fourth Quartet, Last Movement, (Fine Arts), CS501 though lifi. has been on the wind^lashed battlements of the tower: "Imagining in excited reverie/ That the future years had come,/ Dancing to a frenzied drum,/ Out of the murderous innocence of the June 1996 NOW — Omega 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History sea." (For Lady Gregory's innocence of custom, this Gita iilnocence of Sato's sword.) (fade Bartok) 10.7) (Bfwto£rapfi ofO^eats, 1937-38, 6ro(uCcasiin£ in a (BiBC stucCio 107a) TfiotograpH (fuCC-face) of Maud gonne, 1897 No doubt, when Vico's millwheel of return, Joachim's fire-arrow and assault of spirit, had become for Yeats a paradox road of poetry — to affirm both — that oscillating whorl between "dire antinomies" required some resolving timeless embrace. In Yeats' early worship of Maud Gonne, such need had found a Platonic voice: "Lives on this lonely face," and "Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?" al08) Anotfier p/iotqgrapfi (profile) of Maud Qonne in fier youtft 108) ‘DonateCCo, c. 1453, Mary Magdalen, profile of face (first, video adds V6i08, same, from tfie waist up) (Duomo Museum, J-lorence In the 1928 volume named The Tower, beside poems of polar­ ity, gyres and cycles, one of the greatest, "Among Schoolchildren," sets a memory of Maud's youth against her present state. (Surely the reference is to Donatello's penitent old Magdalen of the 1400s, then in the Florentine Baptistery): Did Quattrocento fingers fashion it Hollow of cheek as if it drank the wind And took a mess of shadows for its meat? al09) (DouBle ejqposure: Jo.and Jofin Malins over MeligenBlutfi, xuitfi giovanni CBellini, Madonna and sleeping cfiild (Cg%'59); + 9/ detail 109) Morse chestnut, photograph (CgiB); video uses ^109 109 a) (DouBle: photographs (Cg(B) [J4.J Leaf-Bloom of horse chestnut, and pB] its Bole 109B) Martha graham, c. 1938, 'Marlequinade' (Barbara Morgan) How startlingly the heart-break of our condition, stretched between flesh and eternal Presences (those "self-born mockers of man's en­ terprise"), is consumed in a vitally altered Platonism, where the im­ aged wholeness of a chestnut tree fuses into love, music, and dance, the old antinomies of beauty and wisdom, body and soul: June 1996 NOW — Omega 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 0 chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer. Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole? 0 body swayed to music, 0 brightening glance. How can we know the dancer from the dance? 110) Soutfi Cfiina, Sung, c. 1200, Ma ^uan, semi-routuC of infiaiuC coCor on sUIq ‘Bare ‘WiUo'WS and Mountains; O^ine J4rts, (Boston Think now, in the ad-libbed in all symbolized philosophy, — wheel, the flowing stream, and round. For which I interpolate Chambered Heart: "Pool of Tao": visuals of this homing sequence, as we must mind at once arrow and its expansion or convergence into a poetic discourse from my Five alll) (Durer, 1493-9, (Pond in the Woods, watercoCor, (British Museum V6111) (Kp Son, c. 1830(F), On the Wing, (BihC. Mgt., (Baris 111) (ppSens, c. 1630(F) (forest at ‘Evening, CoUection SLugust (S^tierhurg 111a) ‘Bid ‘WhaCen, c. 1980, (P^Cecting ‘Tam, 'WatercoCor; C.Q. & ‘D.M. ‘Bed I waited the fulness of time. As sunset deepened The wind died. In the hush the pool Was an iris of trees Fringing a sky — Motionless, until A flight of geese passed over; Then I heard the sound Of water, a stream That falls to the pool. Lingers, and falls away. When the geese were gone The sky gave over The motion received; But mine was full. Holding flight and water. The arrow aM ths. wheel. allZ) (BCahp, 1800-03, Jacob's Ladder, (British Museum, London; first, video detaiC June 1996 NOW — Omega 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 112) *]/enice, 13tfi cent., iAfosaic of Creation, J^trium cfScin ^\(arco 112a) Cfiuan£ *Tsu, Japanese Screen 19tfi cent,, Cfiinese Immortals (video sfiozvs de­ tails only, aSove and BeCow, and adds a central detail cf 112) So in the final form of A Vision. Yeats conceives a 13th cycle, cone, or sphere (like Blake's convergent point of Jacob's Stair), mys­ teriously surrounding the historical pulses, altering thoir determin­ ism and bringing Will, human and divine, into the temporal and ma­ terial. (Did not Epicurus make his atoms swerve to spring the deter­ minism of Democritus, as quantum uncertainty has opened up our physics?). Yeats: The Thirteenth Cycle... or the twelve cycles of time less sphere... within which set free, and every Daimon Cone... may deliver us from and space... it is the phase­ live all souls that have been and Ghostly Self." (These Chinese Immortals in a Japanese screen.) intends we cannot precisely say, for there the both in us and beyond. "The particulars are the teenth... cycle, which is in every man and called freedom." What that sphere unique intervenes, work of the thir­ by every man his Conrad V. Soest, 1403-4, ll^tivity detail, ‘BadI^Hddunyen Mtar 1^6113) Vermeer, c. 1663, QirC zoitfi veil, ‘Wriyfvtsman, Balm Beach 113) iMunch, 1893, ‘Death and the 9daiden, Udunch iMuseum, Oslo; video, central detail only; see ‘1^113 alls) It is "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor." Crazy Janes dark Christian word: "For nothing can be sole or whole/ That has not been rent," climaxes in "The Circus Animals Desertion" (Last Epemg). Yeats knows, that when his high visions have failed: I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. 114) JdicheCanyeCo, 1508-12, Sistine vault. Lunettes, Ancestors of Christ, OCd Spinner, ‘Uatican 114 a) Burne-Jones, 1881-98, JLrthur in S4.vaCon, Oduseo, Bonce, Buerto BJeo June 1996 NOW — Omega 44 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Yet the poet who accepts that resides in the Oneness of the Thirteenth Sphere — simultaneous repository of all that has been or is to be. "Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death./ Horseman, pass by!" His is the other knowledge of "The Curse of Cromwell": That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep com­ pany ... That I am still their servant though all are under­ ground. allS) Cftinese, ^en 9{ui, 13tfi cent., I'iefi taiC, Cfiiou-ji ^empCe, ^oto 115) Same, zoUoCe; + otfier video detaiCs Music: *Taoist InwwrtaC, coCor on siC!^ de- Japanese Bamboo flute, Yamaguchi, Koku-Reibo, close, H72025 The problem goes to the very core of thought, the complemen­ tarity of knowledge. Neither mind nor soul can embrace a fabric which does not unite the trial and search of becoming with the source of all Greek wonder. Being. Here, to the Zen flute, a supreme picture by Chinese Yen Hui, late 13th century, this silk painting of a Taoist Immortal, who in his crippled beggar's body, sees himself, on a cloud-track above, taking the sky-road. 116) a)ou6Ce: ^Ks-mBrandt [Si] c. 1660(F), iPaCCas Mena, QuCBenfiian; and [(B] 1665-9, Lady witB a !PinlQ MetropoCitan, (eacB aCso appears sitwCy, Si Before tfie douBCe, (B after) Music: Purcell, .1680, Fantasy (In Nomine) for seven viols, ARC 3007 I Even in the proud embodiments of the West, all souls of depth so thread the one-and-many, weaving the actual and visionary to a robe as seamless as the polyphony of Purcell's /« Nomine for seven viols. So, from Rembrandt's last decade, we draw a complementary pair, immortal, and mortal: the triumphant Pallas Athena; the whim­ sical sad Lady with a Pink, musing on our happiness, "that passeth soone as floures faire." all?) (BotticeUi, c. 1493-7, Dante Drazuing, (ParadiseXXX June 1996 NOW — Omega 45 �C.G. Bell 6117) 117) ^117a 117B) 117c) Symbolic History T>ori, 1857-68, (Dante HXustrations: (Paradise XXXI Stars over Arizona rocfi and tree; (DuntBSed Odg-BuCa (^venna mosaic, 6tfi cent.. Stars and Cross, S. Sipodinare in CCasse Spiral ^aCa^q/ 5d0C 2997, CamBridpe AtCas of Slstronomu In Dante's Empyrean, God's Spirit first appears flowing out through time and space — as in Botticelli's drawing, a stream of sparks between flowered shores; but when the poet has dipped his eyes, those "shadowy presages" gather to the eternal round of the rose of Paradise (here by Dore). While the Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise, all end with the word stelle, stars: "E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle." — And we came thence to see again the stars. — "Puro e disposto a salire a le stelle" Pure and disposed to ascend to the stars... "L'amor che move il sole e Valtre stelle." — The love that moves the sun and other stars. Surely, it is in this cosmos that the Omega earth began, has evolved, and ultimately will end. (fade Purcell) 118) Sifrican weaver ants fioCding territories in the trees 118 a) China, !Ju{y 1989, danh^ in dien an Men Square, Beijing While Marx, despising mystics and romantics, trusted a parti­ san upheaval to institute a classless brotherhood, where, as the Joachites had phrased it, church and state would wither away. How much glory and agony these never-withering states have extracted Trom that promise. Which brings us back to where Shostakovich left us, at the end of a century of global wars and revo­ lutions. all9) Christo, 1968, 5,000 cuBic meter pachg£e, erect, CasseC 119) Same, Cranes Ciftinpi the 'pacfiigge', CasseC, West germany 119 a) May 6, 1937, ZeppeCin von (HindenBury Burning, Jersey History, seen as from the outside, is a configuration in time and space — like Christo's great sausage blown up over the park and city June 1996 NOW — Omega 46 �C.G. Bell of Cassel. Symbolic History But from within and in its own right (as we who inhabit its curvatures experience it) world history is the shape of space-time it­ self. No doubt Christo s phallus is a comic array; whereas that his­ tory (everywhere webbed with waves and fields of electromagnetic messengers, relativistically eternal; since at the speed of light time ceases, and all causalities act in mythic simultaneity) rather suggests the 1937 flame-cascade of the Zeppelin von Hindenburg — alZO) LimBours 'Brot/iers, 1413-16, m of the fR^BeCSlttseCs, ^res <RicA,s f£4 V. Music Condi, CBantidy; + V details 120) (Burning ZQizoait oiC^ zvdCs, fired By Saddam Olussein, 1991 such a chain-reactive Now as we must steel ourselves to convey, whether of achievement or catastrophe. Music: Purcell, 1680, In Nomine for seven viols, close, ARC 3007 There is no division between that Now and what has been ripening since the fall of Lucifer — this earth-harvest, of which we have to inquire: what appears on the plus side, what hopes of a liferoad? But here th^e "insfa-ucmrsU^$_claimed in A Vtj;ion tell me to break off; since that must be the closing thrust of tfie t^uneJ^QW Symbolic—History’s last and fortieth show — entitled "T^he Rooted • June 1996 (end of Purcell, In Nomine) NOW — Omega 47 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 48 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource NOW -- Omega, Symbolic History, Part 39 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 39 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_39_NOW--Omega https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c297c40f35b6c8fa17eed435941e55f0.pdf df84c02e06ed7ad534a53b44ac3e7fd7 PDF Text Text ^(H 64^ (5 ert^y^ ^ -^<^3 H' { SYMBOLIC ^HIS^O^ iZfirougli SigHi and Sound 38. NOUl - Alpha CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 0 r 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 March 1994 �St^nfiOLXC HXSTORy Tlirou9fi Si^ht and, SouncC 38. Nouj - nipha 1) M. QuentRer, 1761, WinUr: Saturn and*lme, (BarocRf J^estsaCe; + ^details Music: J,S. Bach, 1721, 6th Brandenburg Concerto, opening, LLP 144 Time has turned to a myth while I have thought to close Symbolic History with a show called NOW, and still I ask: "Which Now, the fleeting or eternal? Whose Now, mine or of the world?" For five years that Immanence has defied me, while thirty-eight other realms have been subdued, slide-taped, then videoed — until all my Panzer divisions press this threshold, where the flying god with the scythe, who mows the past, gathers that conscious harvest to sow a future. 2) Qoya C.1798, Spain, Music: and iHjstory, !JFine Slrts, ‘Boston; + ‘U detail Haydn 1794, Symphony #101 in D Major, close of 2nd movement ("The Clock"), Westminster WL5102 In 1985 I thought a single NOW could be shaped along with the four shows of this century — as if the modern rush would round to its own containment. Twice I announced deadline dates. The dates were accomplished, but not the Now.Once I presented such fragments as had been recorded. I resurrect the opening: (Haydn, continues through forte) 3) 3a) SLpoUo Module over the moon ^ (d ^ ‘Triton, SatelUte ofpdgptune, 14n£ust 1989j /l. fa. ^ Either we cannot make a show of Now, or we have been doing it all along, since all history is of nows, and it is all past. Waiting for that Now is like waiting with Weil or Becket for God or Godot. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In what sense is the moonflight and landing of 1969 (or Voyager's '89 scan of Triton, satellite of Neptune) more with us than the Age of Revolution or the Birth of Christ? Though all exist in consciousness, where the oldest may mean most, we, the living, can have lived through some and not through others. 4) Victor !Hu£o, 1867, ‘Wave qfi\{y (Destiny, (Hugo's House, (Paris; + V detaiC So there is a relative now of our own experience, cresting, like Victor Hugo's Life-wave, toward an Absolute Now — Shakespeare's "pro­ phetic soul/ Of the wide world dreaming on things to come". Surely that soul, like ours, is a working presence^ where past and future merge and are remade. (close Haydn) 5) (African ((RS’Cent) from (HfiotCesia (ZezuruF) (Demon (Has!^ (Museum fur voC^rl^nde, HamSurg; first, V detail. Music; African drums from Haiti, Elektra ELK-130, B Since nothing that has furrowed perceptive space-time is so past or dead that it cannot be quickened to growth. Thus the oldest, or if recent, most remote record of man's beginnings in the alienation of mask (like the African beat which has wild-fired over the world, here from a New World base in Haiti), (end drums) 6) (Paul (Kfee, c.1920-24, (Mas^ (fCeditfieim QcUlery, ‘BerUn; + V detail 6 a) (DouBCe of 5 and 6 66) (DouBCe: [A] (Picasso, 1932, detail of Qid at a (Mirror, and[(B] (Maslu (F^a^ (Brit.ColumBia Music; from Jelly Roll Morton's Doctor Jazz, to Stravinsky, Histoire du Soldat Suite, from 5th movement. Philips A 01193 L could open through Picasso to this sophistic Klee of the Munich 1920s. Is Chaplin intended, or the blazing absurdity of Hitler, ha­ ranguing first followers in the Hofbrauhaus? While Jelly Roll Morton's "Doctor Jazz" took art-Stravinsky by storm. From Rhodesian mask, to mask return, history brings jungle voodoo to the soul crisis of mechanized man. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Though the Now is more brain-involuted than any simple cut can imply (fade Stravinsky) a7) 7) Jan van T,yc(<u 1434, JimoCfiniManure, Same, dehsi Music; QaCCery, London ^ Dufay, c.1440, Adieu m'Amour (Cape) AS 43, or EMS 206 a crux of the three-fold mystery of time: wheel of return, arrow of advance, pool of what abides. Lear: "And we'll wear out in a walled prison packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon." In that manifold, Paul was more real for Luther than the Papal bull threatening from Rome. So the mirror inscription of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage — "Johannes de Eyck fuit hie," "Jan van Eyck was here" — turns the moment to a testimony — not "was" but "is" — present as the Dufay which might almost have sounded in that room; though it had to die away and be reborn out of scholarship and Cape's Pro Musica of Brussels; yet to a life as real as jazz. 8) 9) ^nne ^uefuman CrosSy, 1372-3, dleatfi of ^Brocris Marda Simpson, '74, ^Uie TCace; Botfi CQ. & (DM. (BdC, Santa J^e What longing of the modern soul, tender as Hellenistic nostalgia (attested by the art of friends: Anne Buchanan Crosby's Myth of Procris, Marcia Simpson's The Place) has pushed the vielle poignance of Dufay to recorded admiration? (dose Dufay) 10) (DouBCe: [Si] "Egypt, Dynasty I"U, c. 2700 (B.C., (Hs^erve JCead, (KjmstfOstorisefies Museum, "l^ienna, and [B] (Dpiasty XVlII, c. 1370 (B.C., (PCaster Mas^Jrom Studio of scuCptor Ihutmose, Simama, (BerUn; + detaiC cf 10(B From culture to culture we have witnessed that buildup of yearning, as of sensuous person: Egypt, from the dawn smile of an Old Kingdom head, to a plaster mask from a New Kingdom studio in Ikhnaton's Amarna, so touchingly enfleshed, who can tell if its veri­ similitude is modelled or cast from life? 3/1994 NOW — Alpha �C.G. Bell 11) Symbolic History (DouBCe: [J^j ‘Etruscan, c. 530 ®.C./ Sarcopfu^us, ^oung 5iiisBan(C and ^fe (Cerveteri), VUCa QiuCia, fl(pme, and [(B] Znd-lst unU ‘B.O, OCd fHusBand and Wife, ‘]/oCterra, Italy So with Etruscan tomb couples, from 6th-century Odysseyan god-favor, to a weighty mortality, after 500 years, under the civil strife of Republican Rome. But is there not a time when the reverse tide sets in, IZ) (DouBCe: ^Rpman HCeads: [H] 1st unt., front Ostia, and [B] 4tB unt., from ‘Uia 5ippia! BotB, Uiermae Museum, fRpme (C(fB fomenting a mystery beyond the personal? Again Rome, from the Julio-Claudian burden of temptation and responsibility, to a 4thcentury stripping off of that too-human consciousness — surely dis­ solving here in some cult of immortality. 13) ‘DotiBCe: [51] !Rpman, Cate 4tfi cent. 5UD., Mosaic Bead, from ‘l^ida at CasaCe, SiciCy; and [B] tRpman-CBristian mosaic, 5tB cent.. Bead of an Ancestor of CBrist, S. Lorenzo, Milan So to Augustine's dire antinomy of the City of Caesar and the City of God. Two mosaic heads, 4th-century pagan, from a Sicilian hunting villa, 5th-century Christian, a prophet from Milan, shift (with the whites of the eyes) from dejected selfhood to the ecstatic frenzy of creed. 14) BouBCe: [SI] Sleyean (‘Uiera), c. 1500 B.C., fresco, fuCC-Breasted woman, and [B] QreeRi c. TOO B.C., Warrior; BotB, MytionaC Museum, SltBens; first, ‘UdetaiCs V In Vico's youth-to-age sequence of cultures, barbarian sion seeds again, on such late-cycle search, "divine and heroic That rape is brought before us (as in Kazantzakis' Odyssey) linking this Theran lady, from the Aegean luxury before the war, to a Greek warrior of the folk-wanderings which brought Iron Age. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha incur­ times". by our Trojan in the 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History IS) (DouBCe: MicfuCan^eCo [A] lSOl-04, (David, Accxidemia, S^Corence, and [(Bl 15SS-64, (Rgndanini (Bkta, Sforza CastCe, (fdiCan ISa) Same, actaus,lMW^ uLlh. V Aa a ^ But the patterns we have applied to societies (as if they too "must have like death that we have") are the groundswell of our lives. From the proud, if troubled, command of Michelangelo's 1504 David, to the transfigured humanity he carved, in his last days, from the abandoned Rondanini Pieta, is not only an outward motion from youth to age, but a miraculous beginning, a reach beyond death itself. 16) (DouBCe: (Hs-mBrandt [A] c. 1629, Self-(Portrait in a Qor^et; and [(BJ1669, Cast SeCf-(Portrait; BotB (Mauritsfmis, iSie S{ci£ue; + video sin^Ces And Rembrandt, a hundred years later, in two self-portraits in the Mauritshuis, perfected his life-pilgrimage from this almost Car­ tesian jubilance of youth: "I think; therefore, I am!", to the dying ac­ ceptance of a defeat and malady which affirms mysteriously beyond itself. ^al 7) LefimBrucCii 1907, (fdotfier and Cfuld, CfoCBsvang (Museum, Tssen 17) Same, Figm our own perilous century, no artist has made of his life . and work as tragic and transcendent prophecy as the German sculptor Lehmbruck, genius child of a coal miner. Where is the af- firmation of sensuous flesh more rapturously ideaF than in this 1907/ Mother and Child? al8) (DouBCe: detaUsofl8.Aand*B 18) SlouBCe: LefmBrucCi [A] 1911, SQteeCin^ Woman, and [(BJ 1913, Ascendant O'outB; BotB, (MunicipaC(Museum, (DuisBur^; + video singCes ^ )> From 1911 to 1913, as the artist labours "to and reconstitute it as spiritual reality" (so August assume a symbolic ambivalence. The tender pathos "Kneeling Woman", the burdened overreach of the 3/1994 NOW — Alpha disassemble body Hoff), the sexes of this Gretchen striding "Ascen- -5 , �C.G. Bell Symbolic History dant Man," rear toward the Great War the looming fatality of the Faustian West. 19) (DouBU: LeftmSruc^ fJl] 191S-16, y^aCCen Warrior, (CetaiC; antC pB] 1918 laying QirC; Both, *Municipa( Museum, ^isBury How the same polarity, carried through the defeat and embitterments of the War, joins the stark negation of this "Fallen Warrior" (detail), to the always more disembodied hope (1918) of a "Praying Girl". 20) LefmBruc^ steads of Lovers, L>uisBur£ Museum (?) Where else can such a sequence be brought to such a close as in the volatile cement of the 1918 "Heads of Lovers," breathing, as we have elsewhere said, "the Orphism of Lehmbruck's suicide" — a sui­ cide of earth, which is" still, unbelievably, an earth-transcendence? I S^Zl) (B(al^, 1804-6, LfruuC Qateway, p. 70 ofStirCina lerusaUm. (B21) ConstaBCe, 1835, Stonefieii£e, watercoCor, Victoria & MBert Mus., London 21) . dlouBCe of S421 and (B21 This is the freedom and bondage of history, that the past, which conditions and limits, structures the realities of a creative calling. We accept the likelihoods of the material; to enter and leave a room we commonly use the door. But spirit too has such thresh­ olds. The submission and defiance of soul is to feel them out — to train probability on the wonder of a quantum leap. Thus Blake and Constable, diverging from the 1800 ground, limn eternal opposites of Stonehenge, inward and outward, of imagination and physicality. 22) 22a) 22B) 22c) (Rgdon, 1883, Sea Slnemone, LitBograpB, MffiionaC QaUery Wasfiington, (D.C (DetaiC(f22 vn-) f) DouBCe (f22 and23 joriyinnf rifitB-^ndhpefftra^ Details of same Music: 3/1994 Debussy, 1890(?), Reverie, Philips St PHC 5-012, side 9 NOW — Alpha -6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic Redon's Anemone (wind-flower, soul-flower) Debussy's "Reverie," or de Nerval's "Vers Dories": History opens as to And like a nascent eye covered by its lids A pure spirit grows beneath the skin of stones. But here, after 1975, among Santa Fe friends, how radical the estrangement of art has become (fade Debussy): Gardiner Jencks, com­ posing like a secret Scriabin in Tesuque — Music: Gardiner Jencks, close of 1979 #21, recorded by C.G. Bell no chord but is dissonant now, yet a dissonance guided, as by a new law of tones, toward the meditational and home-seeking. Z3) 1375, #1, CQ. (Bdlcodectum, Santa ^fe 23aj cf23'jTcMn Japanese Sum CvrcCe 235)^^^^ul^23 (LZc>cj>^ 2,3 "^ This picture by Phoebe Douglas of the Douglas clan, reader of Dante and Middle English, Zen pilgrim, writer of haiku; a diabetic, she was put on oral insulin, suffered a stroke, partial paralysis, the loss of most of her speech — as caught as a jellyfish in a wave breaking up the strand. Yet through that barrier she found a Sumi way, her "Opus One" where shapes abstract a password of search and entrance. (close Jencks) 24) iKefhnistic ruins under zoater, coast ofdiirl^ ("^tny) 24a) Sitfiens, 447 c. 143 J4.CD., (Partfienon over Odeum (C^(B '77) So in the larger paralysis: when Graeco-Rome settled toward the symbolic ruins which lie in water off Mediterranean shores, Au­ gustine did not attempt to revive the lost Republic or Vergilian epic, much less the Periclean city with its drama of tragic heroes thrown to the ritual ground. Like today's world losses, that was all gone beyond probability; and even genius must feel out the odds. S 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 25) ItaCian (Byzantine, 549, S. SipoCCinare in CCasse, (Hg.venna 25a) Tpfiesus, 5tfi cent., (Bust ofTutropius, HQmstfiistorisCfies (Museum, 14^n Music: Gregorian (Solesmes), Messe de la F6te Dieu, Oculis Omnium, opening, French Decca St 7543 B (2) Augustine took the gradient of the church of faith reared on the pagan fall; yet in that submission he created revelational history, The City of God, with spiritual autobiography, The Confessions, clue to the inwardness of a civilization unborn, 26) Apse mosaic’from 25, S. ApoOinare in CCasse, SHeep in a green pasture 26 a) (Detail, photo ofSimone Weil, (MarseiCCe, spring 1941 26B) (Rgvenna, 6th unt., (Mosaic, Christ, detail, S. Apoltinare (^ijwvo How many have felt our Gregorian we hear was recovered, the monks of Solesmes Abbey, focus, the Easter of my 1938 visit, Weil: Now-imperative the same? The under that cyclical supposition, by where the Christ-search came to in the mystical intensity of Simone "Fall on your knees with love, as if this were indeed the place where truth existed." I obeyed, (fade Gregorian) Yet how far into self-denial and humility, the Byzantine Creator and Redeemer had fallen — 2 7) Qreehi Cater 5th cent. (B.C., head offounger (Rjau Warrior, (Museum, (BsggioCaCaBna; + detail after the absolute life-fulness of this fifth century Riace Warrior, a mortal, surely, but with the presence of a Greek God. Such the reality General Marshall claimed for Thucydides during the last great war: "more contemporary than the daily news from the battlefields of Europe." The antinomy has racked the West, from Christ to Now, 3/1994 NOW — Alpha �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Z8} Cimc^ue, 1278-80) St. Srancis, detaiC fresco of Madonna andSingeCs, Lower Cfiurdi ofSt. ^Francis, ^sisi 28a) Midi^mo, 1465, (Dante and fiis Toem, (Duomo, S^Corence; + ^detaUs Music: Italian,.!3th cent., Laud to San Lorenzo, Tinayre, Lumen 32018 Even after thirteen centuries, in the tide of renewal leading to St. Francis and this Cimabue depiction of him (with a Penitential Laude), Dante's answer to Virgil's pagan question: "Why do you not climb the delectable mountain, which is the beginning and cause of every joy?" can hardly surprise us: "Look! The beasts of sin!" Thus the only road was down through Hell and up through Purgatory. (fade Lauda) 29) SeBastiano deC (PiomBo, 1516-18, Man in Sirmor, Wadswortfi SltBenaeum, Sdartford, Connecticut; first, video detail Music: Don Luys Milan, 1535-6, Pavan #3, Pujol, AS 40A So viewed, the Renaissance seems in part a Greek recovery, yet clouded and complex, a displaced heir contending for perilous powers — as in a portrait by Michelangelo's pupil, del Piombo, with a Milan Pavan. (cut Milan) 30) *Bemini, c.1635, (Du^ (BaoCo Orsini, Castle of (Bracciano; + Vdetail Music: Busca, later 17th cent., Occhi Belli, Max Meili, AS 79 From then almost to now, a tide of rising expectations has bred comic (or disastrous) effects. Bernini's Duke Orsini of Bracciano, Busca's "Beautiful eyes, don't blast me!" spread the wings of Baroque bouyancy — under Papal privilege. (cut Busca) 31) ndiorwaldsen, 1810-11, (Bust of SHmself, Museum, Copenhagen; + V detail Music: Beethoven, 1811, Egmont Overture, close; DG-643 630, in the Beethoven Edition, Vol. 11 By 1811, in Beethoven's Egmont, or Thorwaldsen's Self, the world is swept from the old limits and enclosures on a revolutionary 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History wave, culminant proclamation of human will as a phenomenon of hope. Hegel: "man, as man, is free; it is the freedom of spirit which constitutes its essence." Small wonder Greek sculpture was imitated. (end Beethoven) 32) CourBet, c. 1847, SeCf witB a (Pipe, CBarcoaC, WadstvortB Athenaeum, 9{ar^or(C, Connecticut 32 a) CourBet, c. 1844, Sdf zoitfi. (Buc^ifecC *BeCt, Lowore, Taris (xndeo, detaiC only) Music; Liszt 1862, Mephisto Waltz, close, Rubenstein, VLM-1905 By the middle of that century, in Courbet's Self (time of the Communist Manifesto, of Balzac, Hugo, Melville, Wagner, this Liszt), how stormily conscious of "the thorns of life" aftd "bleeding heart" that self-asserting spirit has become. (end Liszt) a33) Qeor£e tRpuauCt, 1903, (Drun^n Woman, Museum of Modem 14rt, (Paris; + ^ detaiC B33) (DouBCe: [3L] Matisse, 1903, Woman witfi Qreen Stripe, Copeniia£en, and [(BJ (RpuauCt 1306, tragedian, (HafmCoser, Wintertfmr 33) (PpuauCt, 1903, ^Uie CoupCe, Le CCery CoUection, (Paris; + ^detail Since Baudelaire's poems, since Flaubert's 1860 letter, the bru­ talization of what was called the external world (though perhaps it was within), had broken, as on late Rome, in. recurrent waves. Reactions came equal and opposite. Just when the Fauves and even Picasso rocketed into euphoria, Rouault gashed down. Music: Stravinsky, 1910-11 (revised 1947), from Petrushka, close, Col. MG 31202 Rouault's Couple of 1905, like early Joyce, like the mocking of Petrushka, strips bourgeois and romantic sentiment to Eliot's "lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows" ... "The burnt-out ends of smoky days"... 34) T,Ci Levin, c. 1963(F), (Prepnant SGppie, etcfiin£, C.Q. BeCC, Santa !f^e; / V detaiCs' Vsik 3/1994 NOW — Alpha VO �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Or "Apeneck Sweeney" jackknifing out of bed — a debunking carried through Depression America to Santa Fe Levin's Pregnant Hippie. (Society back to its vomit; another inveterate habit of Now.) (fade Petrushka) Has art, which we call creative, no power to make history, but only to exhibit symptoms? *]/a35) iI(puauCtj 1905, nJie y-cUCen *Eve, (C^rt 9/[o((eme, Taris 35) 5(puauCt, 1906, {Prostitute at Mirror, Museum of Modem S^, {Paris 35a) {l^puauCt, c. 1924, *lHree Judges, {Private Codection, SxoitzerCand In that case, Rouault displayed two. As in Hellenistic sculpture, a waste-of-life, surfacing in the grotesque and ugly, presaged mys­ tery cults; so Rouault's more-than-Toulouse nightmaring of prostitu­ tion and greed, foments faith — "the hope only," says Eliot, "Of empty men." So the soul-search Flaubert predicted from romantic pain: ("We shall see a return of world-sickness. Music: Stravinsky, 1930, Symphony of Psalms, from 1; Philips A01193L 36) {pj^uauCt, 1936, Cfrrist xvitfi {pgised 5lrms, ^dmore, fEJ? 36a) Same, 1942, Cfirist Moc^d, Museum of 5lrt, Stut^art; + Vdetail (video tfien returns to a detail of 36) beliefs in the Last Day, expectations of a Messiah...") has been vari­ ously wish-enacted, in Rouault's Christs, mediated by the color-forms of stained glass; in the neo-sceptic detente of Eliot's Christianity: "Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still"; most power­ fully in the ritual sequences of Stravinsky's Symphony of the Psalms fusing the modern with Russian Byzantine and Gothic Perotin. (close Stravinsky) The first polarity of my 1930s youth was between that cyclical Christ 3/1994 NOW — Alpha irl �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a3 7) ‘Ben Sfiafin, 1931-2, (Passion cfSacco and ‘Uanzetti, d^nnedy QcdCeries) 3 7) (Hj£fit-fiand£Toup, TidUtney Museum, (SUfC (video, details only) and the socialist vision, more moving in the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti than in Ben Shahn's lean satire on that mal-trial and execution: so Vanzetti's death-prophecy of a time when their passion ("the taking of our lives — lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fishpeddler") will be seen as a triumph over "this bumt-out age where man was wolf to the man". a3S) Strunnikpv, 1929, (Partisan Lunev, ‘Tretya^v QaUery, (Moscow; first, ‘U details 38) (DouBCe: (H^uauCt, 1939, Cfirist (Moc^d, HBrams family, (MyC; and [B] Sunni^v, 1929, (Partisan Lunev, as in a38, aSove 38 a) (DouBCe: BarlacB [H] 1914, Siven£er, and [B] 1938, (fCoating lln£d (video taCifs these singCt^^c^<. , n '2-,^ A In Stalinist Russia the state realism of that cry had hardened to such Partisan rigor of utopian claim as Sholokov's Bolshevists con­ tinually voice: The government must be thrown aside like an old rag. The lords must be stripped of their fleece; they've murdered the people too long... When every govern­ ment is a workers' government, they won't fight any more... One beautiful life all over the world... I'd pour out my blood drop by drop to see that day. Between so demotic a religion of the material, and the drooping aesthetic of "briared hands" and "world wound" (another "Christ Mocked" by Rouault), one hesitated, as before a crazed antinomy, less inclined to say "I embrace the poles" than "a plague on both your houses". Though my Augustinian poems of the early '40s saw the Communist rallying as only a postponement of soul's confrontation —some late-cycle resolve: "To goad the world to order!" That is the last spun thread, and when it severs? 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 12 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History Then comes the timeless trial, the pure affliction, Until we die in wisdom. a39) HitCer at a (Parade, 1938, ‘W.W.II (cf. (Sfa^re 62) (video, detail oidy) 39) (Ma?c(Beclitndnn, 1944, SeCf-(Portrait, (h^ue Staats£atCerie, (Munidi (CQ(B '59); + V detaiC For Symbolic History, however, it was necessary somehow to participate in every crucial earth-search and experience, even of National Socialism, which added another pole to the ChristMaterialist antinomy, another sort of face to the Western sequence we have been pursuing. Strange that Beckmann, always in flight from the Nazis, should exhibit in this self-portrait (begun in Amster­ dam and finished in New York, 1944), under an ironic and ques­ tioning mask, the very hardening of German enterprise and Faustian will, from which he had fled into exile. a40) ^Euricfi, 1940, (Dunquerque, OdfftionaC Qf^ry of Canada 640) Soviet War (Poster, 1941, ^"l^he *Enemy ShdC (S^ver ‘Escape Our Wrat6' (detail of Atomic 5\pe 125) 40) James QiWert, 1961, (RicEard (Jregg (canvas stolen, pHotoyrapfiedin 1967 6y CQ(B); + detaiC Whatever Beckmann represented. Hitler's demonic attack im­ possibly united the Anglo and free-enterprise West with the Com­ munist East, in a crusade of "Peace-loving Peoples"; though after victory had reinstated cold war, another contrary would appear, between police-state Russia and the America of this Richard Gregg, painted 1961 by his friend and mine, Jim Gilbert; Gregg, consultant of Gandhi, Second War pacifist, welcomed as Micah Glenn into my Half Gods — there a martyr to the hope of self-rule against the mass. For that openness too was vulnerable. 41) Cfiurdutt, (RgoseveCt andSta&n at Ofalta, LI^PE: W.W.II: + V details Already one could have prophesied that global leadership was likely to incline. West or East, to the best blend of productive free­ dom and planned world-discipline. One asked; Which is more feasi3/1994 NOW — Alpha 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ble. for capitalist energy to bind itself to the greater earth-good (as Roosevelt surely intended); or for a socialist order of the whole to in­ corporate the lively freedoms of incentive and criticism? Before Vietnam, it may have seemed that the odds were with the West. 42) ^eti Sfiafm, 1947, Spring, S4(Brigfit galCery, ^BuffaCo, 0^; + ^detait But what of our post-war euphorias, from Boom to Hippie bust, all media chain-reactions of my "Atomic Age" — tough-minded Ben Shahn, American Hebrew Lithuanian, lured from social satire to this romantic 1947 Spring? As if free enterprise could mount the parti­ san wave, voicing the poetic raptures of Dylan Thomas: Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means. Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea. 43) Cfmsto, 1943, Surrounding Islands, off Miami; first, ^ detail But time was running out on that squandering of resources to turn earth into an exploding star —for which the wildest art symbol is Christo s earth-alterations — the latest, and most astonishing (for fish off Florida) being the more than 7000 square meters of pink plastic, promoted under the rapture of "Let a thousand islands bloom — a garden in the sea." a44) 644) *Uc44) d44) Slustrian, c. 1770, grandfather dochi Chet Johnson, Santa fe TngCish TCane Tree, S4nnej(j Oxford (cgB '90) CgB in ^Princeton Seech tree, Oct.1946 ‘EdMarshaCC(Photo, 1973: Cg(B in apihon ooerSanta (pe Music; Return to Haydn "Clock" Symphony, opening of 2nd Movement. Here, the first fruits of what I had called NOW, the Bondage and Ereedom—of History, trailed off, groping through time for a deeper underlay — not the ticking clockwork, but the cosmic tree, rooted as far back as memory and evidence go; reaching up, through an abid­ ing present, toward the promise of things to come. And because the 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 14 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History first locus of that awareness is personal, I had variously introduced the art and music of friends. (Fade Haydn “Clock") 44) (Durftam Catlu(CraC, IGtfi-cmtury cCocl^in IZtfi-century Soutfi transept 44a) 9^remBer£ Christ, c. 1520-30, C.Q & (D.M. ^eCC (C§‘B '63); + ^(UtaiC 44B) ^Daumier, 1870, 5)on Qy-V(pte, ^Pimhpthehi Munich {cf V Music: Bach: return to 6th Brandenburg, close of 1st movement But had I escaped from my opening: "Either we cannot make a show of Now, or we have been doing it all along"? Was it clock-time I had set up in the sanctum itself? As Virgil told Dante: "I will lead you through an eternal place"; or Christ his followers: "There be some standing here who shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom." Was I no nearer, than in my other shows, to the ultimate Now, which is eternal? Against that Protean giant, Quixote had to sally out again. (Close Bach, 1st movement) 44 c) ‘BarBara BruneCege / Bugcm fisher, CDouBCc ^inBoxo over SpicCer 5(pcl(j Canyon dc ChcCCy (Sacred BCaces 1990); first, V detaU (0 Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort : Music: 45) Eternity, you thunder-word.) J.S, Bach, from the opening of Cantata 20, MHS 7281 Chorus, title words: 0 Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (fade) (DouBCe overCay: C.Q. BeCC, Lacanha xvater, Ceaves, stars;^^^video detaiC 45a) ZndoverCay: C.Q. Bed(, lo zvith voCcanoes, stars, etc.; + VdetaiC Every, Now exists in consciousness. But consciousness is amor­ phous, an emergence of self in all — Walt Whitman's "separate per­ son" swirled with solids and liquids, roots, quadrupeds, birds. When the spirit moved on the waters, its first commands were three: "Divide! Divide! Divide!": light from darkness; a distinguishing fir­ mament; and beneath, land from seas. How can our Now but cleave into shows of self and world, a fused complementarity — the great I AM and the small. Begin with the small. 46) first WorhC War, 1918, US. photo, trenches under gas attache 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I was born in 1916, when the explosion of modernity seared earth-soul with the tanks and machine guns, shells and gas of trench warfare. 47) ralCy for !HitCer's SOtH Birtfiday, 1939; video, details only 1 reached creative awareness as the totalitarian takeovers — Mussolini's, Huey Long's, Stalin's — swelled to Hitler's. Such the context of my 1936 Atlantic crossing in Delta Return: I set my face to the wind, satanic compact. In that Europe a Wagnerian screamed for thousands: "Like a somnambulist I go the way God has chosen." — Clouds to the hunger of storm ... 48) U^Came-tfirozvers moppiny up in the Tacific, etc 48a) HdfutronyCozv at Oah^iRidye, n3SC(<f. ‘WorldOdeCt 89) I came home to the consequent agony of all that. The Half Gods, of a 1945 newsreel: Thus from Smoky Yanks turned a flame thrower on an embank­ ment. Japs ran out burning. One veered toward the camera, collapsed in a pile ten yards away. To moans from the audience came the announcer's spruce words: "the little yellow bellies are getting their medicine." Next day the long and secretly expected bomb fell on Hiroshima. The genie was out of the bottle. The war was at an end. 49) Currier & Ives, 1866, ^RgumG-ny a ‘Bend in the (Mississippi; + ‘17 detail How far from such world explosion, the Huck Finn River of my boyhood haunts — the side- and stern-wheelers still plying the ox­ bow bends: and at dusk from a floating Log I have seen them go flickering down and down. Bright bearers of cotton into those mirrored glooms. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 16 �Symbolic C.G. Bell $0) History Currier and Ives, 186Z, ‘BomSardment and Capture of Island #10, on tHe ^Mississippi, IRgy ^n£ Collection Though in the time of my grandparents that South (and North too) had pioneered precursive war — in which the southern grand­ father had fought; the northern one, who would come down river later, seems to have battled only — if challenged — with his fists. 51) Charles Q. Bed, photographer, conversation xoith himself We see him, the old photographer, who would die before I was born, in mystical conversation with himself. He had practiced his art before the Civil War in the Ohio basin, with an earlier family. When that broke up, he worked, a52) C.Q. Bell, c. 1880, xvith his travelling studio-tent 52) Bed, c. 1873(F), Bhoto of5(adie Owens, to Be his wife after the war, with a portable studio, up and down the Mississippi, until, in a Kentucky river town, he won that child beauty, come, with a rose, for her portrait (as Fra Lippo Lippi finished his novitiate model with the picture), took her down to Greenville, and set up house and studio. 53) (DouBle: [Si] Tde dreaming photographer, and [B] his driving wife; + ISsingle/ d-a The elemental polarity that flexes my Now had an inverse ori­ gin in that family. The gentle old photographer becomes the yielding mystery of air and water; his wife the hardness and drive of rock and fire. How could a son (my father) but love more the impractical dreamer with his musing smile and art — love but not imitate, his life-ambitions formed by the mother's daemonic will. 54) B>ouBle: Bercy Bdl: [SL] Mouthful dreamer, and [B] fighting lawyer CV’ 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Two photographs, from his teens through his twenties, take him from the art-ideal of the father (his college hopes of being a scholar, thinker, writer), to the mother's pragmatic claim — lawyerpolitician called home by family debt to an ultimately luckless race for power. 55) 5)ou6Ce: [R] (Percy (BeU, c. 1900, and [B] 9(pm Oliver 5lrcfier, c. 1905(F); + detail of (B 1/5^, Now his elements are earth and fire; he searches the state, country, even abroad and chooses (Sylph and Ondine memory of a dreaming father?) my nature-mystic mother — costly for him, but for the protagonist of The Married Lanc^just the disposition of male and ^ female^romantic theory called for. 56) (DouBCe: [5L] C.Q. (Bell, 1947, at Blac^lMountam CoUege, (hlC., and [IB] (Percy Bell5r., c.1935, Qreenville, (Mississippi; + V single details Let a snapshot of me from the summer of 1947, when I was showing Symbolic History at Black Mountain College, with a 1935-6 portrait of my brother before he went to Sewanee, knit up the argu­ ment of generative dipoles. What speaks here is not simply the androgynous blend, but the subtle order of the blending — from which another contrariety arises. In me both natures are affirmed — the father-force embraced in the mother's transcendental quiet. In my brother, most creatively brilliant of us, her tender sensibility rides and repudiates the father's troubled quest. 57) Bed 5^use, Qreenville, (MS (CQB, (March 1945) Here is the house that father's ambition built for a wife who did not require such outwardness. On the banks of what was once Rattlesnake Bayou, it confronts River and slough with the fagade of Greece. So I issued from the womb to the antinomies of Delta Return. a58) Windsor ruin at dusl^ near (Port QiBson, (MS, (CQB '80) 58) Old CQB pHoto, 1912, Breal^ at (PantHer (forest 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History In this night land and by the rising waters We plant homes; kindle fire, and praise In song, the death and void of love's return. What pressed from over the levee was such a bore of water as the old photographer snapped in this 1912 break at Panther Forest — a punitive backlash which by 1927, with deforestation of tributary valleys, slopes, ranges — aSB) ffarn^umsefCooded to the ro<rf, 1927 %l,c) 6SB) (DeCta, 1927, iCCvnois Central washed out SB) ^lUe £reat flood of1927, ^reenzHUe. BdS ((Brown Studio) gave Faulkner's Old Man its climactic setting — climax too of a boy's earth-wonder: the whole Delta from where the hills recede below Memphis to where they bend back at Vicksburg, and eastward to the Yazoo, a crescent 150 miles long by 60 deep — a million and a half acres, with Greenville at its center — gone to swirling water. 60) John S. Curry, 193S, ^The (Mississippi, St. Louis Slrt (Museum Did heart and mind take sides? (Delta Return^: God of brown water and sun, you spawned these blacks. Brood of-'your deeper wild, singing its songs. Sign of your savage bounty on the land ... I slipped to the prow a61) (BrownStudio, 1927 flood, (Delta, tom up railroad 61) Slthens, Sth unt. (B.C. and after, Slcropolis, (CQ(B '77) Where the river voiced its life in roaring mouths. Sometimes Apocalypse seems the only road: To join the avenger, pour this human form Out in the blind occult, world-nature, storm. Could even the tragic Greeks hold their templed headlands without sacrificing, below, to the Furies in Python caves? 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 6Z) fRit-Bens, c. 1625, 9^fit Li£fiinw£, ^ 5^uerBur£, 5(mt6ur0! + V detaiC 62a) ‘Ec^Ce O^Buta, 9dl6, 9{(Ue. OBseTvatoTiesTSiA.t^(.4^i GrgAyi-fe> 62 B) OUpes and sun, near Medina, CalaBria, Italy ^eny) X Such the pantheist celebration of Rubens’ night nature; such the core of an organic physics I drew, from entropic paradox, in Iowa, those March thunderstorms of 1944: I walked into the woods and climbed a great oak, clouds boiling above, batteries of lightning bursting around; sat with my shoulder to the twisting trunk and pondered the astonishing world... When I came home I wrote: "All matter, systems, worlds and living things express the need of energy to buttress against its own decay. In this sense cosmic history is a height­ ening and unfolding of the perceptive ambivalence of energy: that its activity is the fall by which it dies, its life in time a transcendence using and used by the de­ structive urge. a63) Snapshot, ‘BedCfHbuse, QreentHICe, MS, in 1927IfCood 63) Qmco-i^inan, 118-34 SL(D., Canopus, Hadrian's ViCCa (CQ(B ’87) That house of mine, trying to uphold through world storm and on such a floodplain, our always threatened heritage — as of Greece and Rome, lodged in Christianity and revived through Renaissance to the European plateau of thought, art and vision, law, conduct, humor — the cultural polyphony I am fated to bring together and celebrate in these shows: a64) TaUadio, c. 1550, ^UCa ^Rptunda, near Vkenza, 3/4 front 64) Same, fuUfront view (Both CQ*B 1959; \ ^ Palladio, with the voice-overlappings of Gibbons, "Ah Dear Heart," sung almost sixty years ago by the London Madrigalists, though with more sensitivity than any recording since; Music: 3/1994 Orlando Gibbons, 16lS, Ah Dear Heart, old Victor 4317 B NOW — Alpha 20 �C.G. Bell 65) Symbolic History Iiti£o Jones, 1616-35, TJie Q}ieen's 5(otise, from ^ soutfi, Qreemmcfi, London, (Cg(B 74) then the wonder of Inigo Jones' English adaptation, the Queen's House in Greenwich (1616-35), 65a) Same, Qiteen's Jiouse, Co^gia oBove (C<fB 74; cf. JdiCton, 4Za) with its south-facing loggia — 0, 66) 5{enry 5{oare, Tadadian iBarf^ Stourfiead, WiCtsfUre a harmony reaching down the centuries: in Stourhead Park, this sylvan Pantheon over the lake; 66 a) Widiam 5(gntfor dhomas Co^, *EarC of Leicester, 1734-59, tHe JdarBCe 5MC of tKoC^am, iMinfoO^ ‘England (tndeoS\>d7i7> "Mvro OA^di or, for an interior, the Marble Hall of Holkham — how that Classical resolve assumes, as it nears our time, the retrospection of a lost cause. 67) Judge (Percy (Beds 1914 5Couse, Qreenxnde (Miss (C(fB '60); first, detaU (cut Gibbons at "must part”) My Symbolic History house ("Elutings of freedom, cloud pillars of our science"), heaved like a frog over media bogs — these United Snakes of slogan capitalism — as if to turn Spengler's Untergang, Jeffers' "dance of dream-led masses down the dark mountain," into a cosmic celebration — a house so arched and shadowed by its oaks, it was easier to drop assignments, steal out and swing the night branches — a6S, 68, 68a & 6) (Detai^^nd neca:::wBeh(^ Joe (Haydoc^s 1988 Cartoon for ^ 'CUdd of (Revolt'from Ddfa (Return (C^); ^r-otBerA^ defrtik once (as my friend Haydock depicts from Delta Return^, by throwing acorns at passing cars, to fetch the cops: 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The searchbeam took me: 'Hey boy, come down.' My answer was a leap ... Beneath the moon, I swung The trees' great circle and dropped to the ground. Curious, this lighted Ariel clasps a twig fit to support a grass­ hopper; where the dark alter ego, shadowed, but on no surface, grips a solid limb. "Child of Revolt" is the title; and yet that book con­ structs on the Delta floodplain a poetic triangle of three times fiveto-the-fifth-power. Inside the house, our library, about the size of this showy room in the Brighton Royal Pavilion, but nobler; our space lined all around with books in glass-faced mahogany cases, those limited editions of authors, America^, English, Continental, with translations from Greece and Rome, Burton's Arabia, a sprinkling from as far as India, China, Japan. a70) WfiistCer, c. 181S(?), (Prince (Rs£^nt as Cupi^, (RpyaC (PaviCion, ‘Brykton 70) (Dorotfiea Lange, 1936 photo, (PCantation near CCgrhsdaCe, (hCS 70a & 6) 1937 judge (Percy (Be^, 'Lion in his (Den and '39 snapshot Though even the Prince Regent might have offered a sounder base for culture than the plantation backdrop of the Delta scene, 1936, such a planter group as I would drive my father to, in the Depression, between the flood and dust — sit in an oven car by a clapboard store. While he talked, encouraged, farmed the claims... Himself the most in debt, and the life-dream torn By politicians and a failing farm. Private loss and Hitler, our world-betrayal. At night I have seen him when he could not sleep Sit up in bed to light his pipe, the weak Flame rising and falling like the pulse of his hope... 71) Si. (Rpthstein, (Photo, 1936, (fleeing a (Dust Storm, ORfahoma 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 22 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While across the Mississippi, the great brown clouds of dust came rolling in, driven, with migrant workers from the plains. Our folk-plural of "children" had always been the Black one, "chillun". These refugees gave it a drawling whine: "Miz Bail, You gwine bring the chern?" 72) Ife (O^eria), 12tfi-14l£ cent., Oni, Bronze, (BritisB Mtiseuny + V (ktaiC 72 a) (Benin (9%eria), IStd-lGtfi cent., ^fCute (BCayer, (Britisfi (Museum (vMeo, detail onCy) Thus, to the problem of African Blacks, torn from jungle cul­ tures (this bronze King of Ife) through slavery and emancipated poverty, to sharecropper bondage — eighty percent of the population of the Delta, living half-literate and in a flux of mores the master culture feared (though they were loveable, and with a rhythm of soul-music, art-attested from their origins) — to that problem was added now the Depression influx of red-necks and po-whites, hating those blacks and competing with them in a stalled economy. 73) ‘BddHbuse, coCumnedporch, south view (CQ^ 1945) 73 a) 14.frican (Bud *ECepfiant Such the alluvium on which one had thought to build, like a columned house. Western Culture: sonnets, democracy, and madrigals. There, the wartime Halloween of 1916, I came into residence, while the circus carts passed our house, rumbling from the train to the south field; and my sister, almost two, being apprised of her baby brother, squealed: "See the elephants!" As in "The Circus" of Delta Return: I The swaying elephants and caged lions. And curtained vans with the still sleeping stars. 74) (Photo of C.Q. (BedIII, Sprite 1917, Qreenvide, (MS: first, video detail 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 23 �*> Jt C.G. Bell Here is first memory can just, by and stare (it bathroom. TS) Symbolic History my cheerful state, perhaps a year and a half after. My cannot be from much later; since, as in the picture, I propping myself on my arms and shoulders, lean over is late at night) into the flushed toilet of my mother's ^fiirCpooC9^6xUa in Canes ‘Uemtici, zuitfi companion The experience is not at all scatological but cosmic. What I see is a foaming vortex, clue to a Book of Knowledge quest of tornadoes, whirlpools, spiral nebulae. Surely it was the wonder of science which so imprinted my consciousness. Leonardo: "the sea at Piompino, all foaming water." a76) “Book ofKnowCedpe, ^oC. X, pp. 525Z-3, Qiui^ and^J/oCcanoes, detaiC 676) Same, zufioCe: dotiB[epa£e 76) Same, VoL DC, pp. 2916-7, from IchtByosaur tofossiC;^ Vdetails That twenty-volume Book of Knowledge worked my first hyp­ nosis by image and by word. Its illustrations from astronomy, geo­ logy, evolution, physics fired the reading of my earliest years. Could an heir to war and violence be unmoved by this double page of earthquake and volcano? Or one already swayed to the romantic capture of time past in time present, not take up the earth-dream (inspired by Leonardo) of these six panels, where Ichthyosaur and his Mesozoic anibiance are fossilized for modem recovery? 77) WinsCoto Ulomer, 1891, ^Hie Boatman, watercoCor, Brooklyn Museum; first, V det'aiC I hardly felt the reality of stories until the River and cave exploits of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn gave my own such hankerings deeper-than-life imperative. And when I came to art, how could my thought not translate Homer's northern watercolor of a boatman to a mythic convergence of Mark Twain's Missouri and my own Delta sculling on our ox-bow lakes: Washington, Lee, and Bolivar? ^T6e BCeiades, neBuCous, 3/1994 Slstronomu NOW — Alpha 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 78 a) (DouBCe: (Diagrams of B£fit [S^] as corpusdes^(^d [CB] as xvaves (K. Next, my two-and-0fte-half-inch refractor, through years of book-guided sky-search, affirmed my organic existence and contain­ ment in a form-building cosmos of galaxies, suns, worlds in space — revelational backdrop for a planet run amuck. Also from that reading I grappled, before 1933, with the complementarity of light as particle and wave, a creative antinomy central to my thought, action, being — spring of that Odyssean many-mindedness our Now requires of us for global sailing, as between Charybdis and Scylla. 79) ‘EcOwaT(C 9{opper, 1939, yor^^MozHe, Museum of Modem Sin, MyO . details 79 a) WaP^r (Percy, c. 1980, from Hdie Second Coming dust jac^t (video, details onCy) Of course we went to the movies, Saturday afternoons; though not even the horror films, Dracula and Frankenstein, took me like the river, earth and sky. Had I been a painter, I would hardly have shown the Paramount, as Hopper did, magically commonplace; nor with Walker Percy, who joined my school and grade in Junior High, have named my first book The Moviegoer: though between his "cer­ tification" and those "repetitions" by which a segment of "lapsed time can be savored of itself," Walker (like Proust: "fragments of existence removed outside the realm of time") has hypnotized duration, as I would hypnotize the Now. 80) CPicago, 1933 WorCds (fair, viezuedST, across Qrant (Parp, 80a) CPicago, 1931-2, Pomeless unentpCoyed men in Qrant (Parli Before going to the University of Virginia in the fall of 1933, I spent much of the summer at the Chicago Century of Progress World's Fair. For a Greenville dealer, I would drive old cars up and new ones back, staying between-times, a week or so, at the Y, for fifty cents a night. What had polarized my thought for years — the promise of Science and break-down of Depression — peaked in the 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Exposition and unemployment of that dynamic city: homeless bums, beggars, apple polishers, what a comedown, after futuristic dreams. 81) WaC^r ‘Evans, 1936, ‘Tenant 9^amiCy, pfioto from Let ‘Us fUarv (Braise ‘Fatn/iiL< 2!£siy By names Tiyee; first, video details 81a) ‘BfiiC Everyood, 1937, Timerkan ‘Trayedy, mriyfit, ‘Bujfialo; video, detail only Science seemed to suggest a rational solution. My last year in high school I had won first prize in the state with my own oration on what Roosevelt had called the "Forgotten Man," that blight on America, from northern cities to the tenant farms of Agee's Let Us Mow Praise Famous Mgh, with Walker Evans haunting photographs. My speech was the manifesto of a socialism I thought I had invented: all men to work and share. But the apocalyptic rhetoric of its close, those eagles of freedom stormed down in the worid- and intestinebroils of a lost democracy, pointed — like the stom^ the science I loved — rather to a tragic outcome. S2) !l^eTS(m,fimsfied1824, ‘The Lazvn, ‘University of‘UiTyinia ‘1282 a) Same, ‘the Lawn thronyh portico coCumns 826) Same, view of the fHptunda (alC cg‘B, 1986) It was at Virginia that the question of civilization, up or down, anabolic or catabolic, would be pressed; at Jefferson’s University, noblest monument of neoclassic in the world, reared against demo­ cratic erosion Hamilton's Bank heightening inequalities, until we would come "to eat one another, as they do in Europe." Education was Jefferson's answer — his plan for free schools of selective excel­ lence to go down before Jackson's egalitarian "same for all"; and still the democratic poles remain unbridged, unstated: basic instruc­ tion for all, not to preclude the pubUc training of a creative elite. 83) Thoto, c. 1940, Strinyfedow Earr andScott ‘Buchanan 83 a) Chicayo fair, 1933, ‘TraveC and ‘Transport ‘Buildiny (ivith video return to ‘Barr detail) 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 26 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History At Virginia I encountered Stringfellow Barr (on the left here, with Scott Buchanan), Upset by the cyclical determinism of his history lectures, I went up and tried to argue with him, advancing against Spengler the science and architecture of the Century of Progress, with the new and thrilling art of the color-organ — merely the plus side of my Chicago conflict. In three minutes he turned the Exposition to the commercial pastime of a late civilization, its shoddy "As for the colorstructures like Alexandrian pleasure pavilions. organ," he said, "it's a fad. But Bach is real; Beethoven is real." He concluded: "You can't argue about history unless you know the artifacts." S4) "Egypt, c. 2540, (Dynasty IV, d^fre, 3/4 view, diorite, (Museum, Cairo; + ^ (CetaiC 84 a) Same statue, coCor, frontaC view <rf fiead, (Museum, Cairo Music: J.S. Bach, c.l740(?), Credo, Mass in B Minor, Angel 3500C So I had to know them. By making the dean's list, I was freed from classes. I took up art in the library, music in the music room. This Old Kingdom Khafre I fixed to my wall: a serenity to be marvelled at, as Hawthorne's of the Great Stone Face. The older com­ poser mentioned by Barr was Bach. From the B Minor Mass take the Pose Barr's question: Credo with the mighty ground-bass tread. "does modernity offer such transpersonal individuation within the wholeness of common faith?" (fade Bach Credo) V 85) "Egypt, c, 1370, (Dynasty X"Uin, face of coCossaC I^naton^ /\ 85a) Same, c. 1370, Qyeen (M^fertiti, (luartzite witfi coCor, Cairo hn^o returns to 85, detaU) ' ^ 856) Iffmaton, coCor pr(rfik (f 85, (Museum^^m 5%^ 85c) (DouBCe: [5L] SMaBaster fiead of (Kfaj^^nd [(B] pCaster mas^ of IkBnatoy ^ 'Bai^ "Egyptian (Museum, "Berlin " ^ Music: Beethoven, 1825, "beklemmt" from Cavatina of Quartet #13 Go to the counterpole, Ikhnaton of the New Empire, here from the colossal sandstone in Cairo; and since the later composer cited 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History was Beethoven, why not sound a personal phrase, the mystical beklemmt ("anguished") from the soaring Cavatina of the Opus 130 Quartet. Though closer to us, Ikhnaton's sensuous hunger did not reach my wall. Perhaps I felt I could supply that yearning myself. Hardly the Homeric distance of Khafre's Old Kingdom. Already I was caught in the stretch of what I had thought to argue. But could our music, over eighty-five years, exhibit what Egyptian art had spread over twelve-hundred — the shift from epic celebration to introspec­ tive spiritual quest? Clearly, in Symbolic History. I had a life-work before me. (fade Cavatina) a86) 86) 86a) 86B) HacoBean, 1618, 9MC of T,7^ter Cottege, 07(ford (CQ(B '80) CoCor-print of 0?ford, c. 1830(F), Bou^fit tBerc, 1936, By C<fB ‘Bavaria from 9lndedis ‘Totuer (CQB '59, cf (DeCta I,‘D,Z,c) fCorencefrom the BiazzaCe MicBdanydo (C^ '59) And now by luck I won a scholarship to Oxford, changed fields from physics to English, and spent my vacations on the art-rich Continent. The old polarity our house had reared over the floodplain, assumed the form I would articulate in a Delta poem: ...domes and spires of Oxford through the cloud Taking an aureole light in the meadowed land; Or upland wheat fields of Bavaria, Clean stands of fir under mountain snows; Or down those mountains south to the heart's best home. Nest of the migrant wings, the Tuscan town And singing towers of the Western dawn... 87) OCdC.Q. BdCpfioto, c.1912, Qremville, 9dS, from tfie river 87a) Broxvnphoto, 1927 fCood, ‘Washinyton 5ivenue, QreenviCCe, MS But that poem ends with the periodic Delta Return: As I, come back that evening, stood alone Over this landing, on the levee's crown — West the wide river, Venus, and the moon. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 28 �»■ i C.G. Bell Symbolic History And east three lighted blocks in the Delta's dark — I felt the strangeness of being localized, By an accident of birth to be held and hold This poor spot of earth on the turbulent flood A center always of the wheeling stars. 88) (Percy (BeCCjr., 1936-7, SouC(freecC, C.Q. (BeUcoition; first, video detail 88a) C.Q. (B^, summer 1937, '(Boundon a rvhed(rffvre' For my brother had killed himself, and I had come to pass the summer with my parents. Again Delta Return: At your death I was abroad; I crossed The ocean to a sad home. A grief unhouseled As from beyond the tomb, settled upon me. Here, one of his last watercolors, a feminine (yet phallic) Soul Freed, like a bird from the hand. Against it, I risk the almost opposite symbol I then drew and colored. Bound to Life, as inscribed from King Lear: "Bound on a wheel of fire ... Tears like molten lead ..." That fall, Oxford claimed me with new force. 89) Qerman, 1235fif., WedfHouse, (Jester (MauC6ronn; 89 a) Same, detail cftfie fountain Music: from French Motet c. 1250, Descende in Hortum, Lumen 32027 Gothic (though I had still to discover the music) became the flame-center — that lightening of stone which, in the well-house of Maulbronn cloister, joins the mystery of water. Dante: And I saw light in the form of a river, A river of fire between two shores Painted with spring's miraculous colors ... (fade Descende) 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a90) (DouBCe: [Si] Sroasti^ Banners from 90, and [B] MeniCing, 1487, 9/ir£in untfi an SippCe, St. Jofins SBospitai, Bruges (video td(gs these singCy]^'^ 90) 90) Vdgzi 9\^ht BfitCy, 1938, Tarty Bay, 9\BiretnBer£ 90 a) Simo andTonte *Uecchio, (fBorence, from Ujfizi (CQB '39) 90B) QioT£ione, c. 1510, BastoraC Concert, Louvre, Baris (video, detait otiCy) a As if to preserve the complementarity of outward alarm and soul-search, the Europe of our travels was racked, those years, by successive crises, building to the outbreak of the Second War. Weird, after 15th-century Bruges, to thread Germany, from the Night of Crystal in Cologne (the streets, by scorched synagogues, sprinkled with glass), south, through cities aglare with Hitler's rants and rallies (this Party Night in Nuremberg), to the Tuscan complement of Memling's Bruges, Medici Florence. A staggering contrast, to which, returning through Paris, music would be added — that eight-hour day in the airless listening booth of a record store, when the Anthology of Sound, Lumen, and the rest would open at last their polyphonic treasures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. a91) SBo^ein the (youn£er, 1523, Bortrait cfBrasmus^ Loux/re 91) MaBuse CJ.Qossaert), c. 1510, 9]]ght ih(g.tivity; + V detail 91a) Mante£na, erri?H3-53, Vir£in and Child, BerUn Museum ) ’ _ ^ Let what that day began weave into this Now the riches of before and after 1500 — Europe everywhere rising to its hopeful peak of Christian humanity and charm — Mouton's "Nesciens Mater," with the art of the birth in the stable, sung by angels, hailed by shepherds as we had read it around the Christmas tree from my earliest years. ^ Music: Jean Moutons^esoens Mater (Munrow) Seraphim SIC 6104 / And Mary brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 30 ^ �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a92) jean (Bourdicfum, c. 1506, !^el to Sfiepfierds, Qrandes j{eures of Sinne de ‘Bretagne, Bi6C, Vdffi., Baris; + ‘U detail 92) Qeertgen ‘Tot Sint Jans, 1490-5, 5{jgfit OdgUvity, j^tionaC QaUery, Tondon; + V detail 92 a) Meister des jdarietUeSens, 1460-80, Tlngels from Coronation (rf 9dary, detail, S4lte Binal^tfie^ 9dunicfi (C^ 59)^ o-f And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them: "Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you. Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger." And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." 93) Qrimani Breoiary, c. 1500-10, nativity, Marciana LiBrary, Venice (video: details only, aSove and Bdow) 93a) Lucca della B^BBia, c.l450(F), (Madonna d^ (Mela, Bargello, (Florence And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, "Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us." And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen, it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them con­ cerning this child. And all they which heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 3 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History a94) (DouBCe: [Si] SMinom, c. 1500-14S0 ‘B.C., fresco, '{Parisienne,' iHera^ion Museum and [(B] Qree^ c. 710 (B.C, smaCC Bronze zuarrioT, detaU, Mgtioncd Museum SltBens B94) *EBBo ^ospe(, c. 8Z5,f.6ov, St Mar^ ‘BiBB Mun. ‘Epemay 94) 9ipman, Ist-Zndc. SUD., SLrem, fBuCa, 0a[matia. (CQB.'T?) 94 a) fHjfman, ZZ5 SL(D., Tetronius' (Portico, ^uBurBo, Tunisia 94 B) CBartres, c. IISO, a O^ouny d^ny, (Bpyat (Ported, CatBedred 94 c) EcoCoyy 1990, (BraziBan rainforest Buminy The other face of this early-cycle espousal was a first repudi­ ation of the romantic I was rooted in. As if we must practice such a stripping as from ripe Minoan and Aegean to primitive Greek. In a poem written at an Oxford concert, 1939, I muse, like some future Dark Age scop (so the author of the Anglo-Saxon "Ruin": "Well wrought this wall-stone, broken by Weird; the work of giants is crumbling"). I wrote: When these walls ivy covered stand in ruins. Gray to the night of faintly altered stars. And men beholding strike the savage harp And sing the work of heroes, giants of old — They will not know that in this crusted hall Where music wails the specter of a rose, A man of peace leagued with an age of wars. Welcomed destruction, famine and the plague. To find again, strength, without compromise. As if cultures could go on forever, with Trojan Wars and bar­ barian renewals. Though our own war and the ecology crisis have spelled out \vhat we might have foreseen, that now the globe is at stake — World Melt or melt-down. a9S & 9S) (Birds soaring ayainst trees and cCouds (CQB '90; video reverses the order and adds an overCay of tBz two) 9Sa) (Ry-Bens, 1636, Chateau de Steen Landscape, detaU, (Hg.tionaC QaUery, London So even during the war, and in a place no more scenic than Iowa, the spring of 1943* called me from "Augustinian Wisdom" to a 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 32 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History celebration of nature — not simply a Romantic return. What sustains this "Patterned Evening" is the organizing physics of entropic hjB against down: ' ^ Image of the world, mirror to all time: — Clouds, winds, and waves of light, senselessly beautiful. Moved by the force that moves, borne down the stream. Flung from the high to low, seeking repose; And birds, bearers of life, that sing and soar. Fired with a god-like will, breasters of the wind. Beating bold wings up a torrent sky. Feeding the sweet blaze of eternal desire. 9G) ^—' Sfvotdo, c. 1S30(F), St. SLntfwny tempted, 96a & 5) metaUs cf 96, SavoCdo 3 ^ San (Die^o Princeton would have seemed a motion back to the closures of East, from Emerson to Hawthorne, with sin and psychosis. Thus in Savoldo's 1530(?) Temptation, St.Anthony, headed for that nature Renaissance has opened, turns in terror, back to a Bosch pursuing Nightmare. As I wrote on a conference of Atomic Scientists: "Still mad Prometheans,/ Or broken drudges working death's weapons/ Irrelevant what cause. So all props prove/ At last abortive, built of the crumbling tuff." Such the departmental gab and hollowness, smart erosion of honesty and courage, from which I did well to be fired, leaving the old life behind me. Or was escape an illusion? 97) Turner, C.180S-10, On the Thames(?), ^{ptionaC QaTery, London 97a) Turner, c.1830, (Death on a (Pale 9{orse, Tate Qallery, London Had not Turner been driven a century and a half before, from the calm irradiation of an early oil sketch along the Thames, to the Apocalyptic expressionism of this late "Death on a Pale Horse"? The polarities had been dangerously entangled since Blake's Marriage of 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Heaven and Hell — or as he would say, since the Creation, which was the Fall. 98) T,rich 9(gJi[er, pfioto By ^nide ^yCeisdman, 1351, l^estscfiriBt; first, video iUtail 98 a) QaCway IKjnneO, CBuBBed at Sehta, iMarcfi 26,1965 Yet it was from Princeton that I received the Great Europeans (Great - Germans one might say, but they were Jews), Erich Kahler, wisest of them really, humanitarian philosopher-historian, whom I described in his Festschrift, pacing the room, pulling his hair, talking of transcendence, "while insights opened and spread around me like realms of light; for there is no one else that can talk like Erich Kahler." And for an American power, the closest of my students, Galway Kinnell, here clubbed by police at the Selma march, wakes in the arms of a Black Madonna. How death crowds, in his love poems: "I touch your face,/ I move my hand over/ Slopes, falls, lumps of sight..." a99) Qoya, 1824-25, 9(yde against rocl^, !fme 5lrts, (Boston; + V (UtaiC 99) Os^r (Kp^sfi^, 1914, *lHe ^Tempest, (Kpnstmuseunt, (BaseC; + ^ detaiC 99 a) Joan Jdiro, 1938, Sdf-portrait, J/T3o6y, 9^zv Canaan, CT; + V (CetaiC What the old Goya, more than a century before, sought in the form of a nude, her lights drawn by water dropped on blackened ivory. "A cheek-bone,/ A curved piece of brow,/ A pale eyelid/ Float in the dark,/ And now I make out/ An eye, dark,/ Wormed with faroff, unaccountable lights." Like Kokoshka's 1914 Tempest love for Alma Mahler: "And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on./ I think of a few bones/ Floating qn a river at night,/ The starlight blowing in place on the water,/ The river leaning like a wave toward the emptiness." Yet all of these, heirs to Isolde's Liebestod, affirm whatever brings us to this brunt. Even Miro, in his 1938 Self-portrait, as he melts into shapes of earth and sky: Kinnell: "How many nights/ Have I lain in terror,/ 0 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 34 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History Creator Spirit, Maker of night and day,// only to walk out/ the next morning over the frozen world/ hearing under the creaking of snow/ faint, peaceful breaths.,./ snake,/ bear, earthworm, ant...// and above me/ a wild crow crying 'yaw yaw yaw' / from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life." alOO) 5100) Cfiica£o from CS(ffiura£ ^History Museum (C(fB, Sept. '60) CCaude Lorrain, 1678, Landscape vH-t^ Shepherds, !f(}m5a(d Museum, !Lort Worth, Le^as 100) SCoBBema, 1689, rChe Siventie, Mg-tionaC QaUery, London; + V detaiC 100a) CCatide Lorrain, 1648, Tdnds'cape Dancin£ S^igures, QaUery Gloria ^amphdi, 9(pme So I came back to the Chicago of my youth, to teach in Hutchins' University, where Anti-fascist exile, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, ipomed_Jai:gfi*_ Tie~had ^written iiPIKTee fdng^S^S'lTpoenr orliiilife: "Easter Sunday, 1945". ^ m/- Music: Boccherini, c.l775(?), Adagio, Sonata 6 (Casals) DB-1392 A The Italian boyhood took the classical style of Manzoni, to be imaged wherever that dream has fructified, from Claude, to Dutch Hobbema's Poplar Avenue; in music, let it be Casals' Boccherini: — "0 Sicilia, o Toscana, ove sostai fanciullo, o dolce pian di Lombardia" (as translated): 0 Sicily, 0 Tuscany, where I paused In boyhood, 0 sweet Lombardy plain, M6asured by mulberry trees, fanned by the feathers Of poplars, where no more I tread your ways. Lifting my eyes to townships brown along Your hills, or coming home to trusty eyenings Seeking the marble pinnacles of Milan Softened by the breathing of the meadows Where the cloud lingered. Now no more — non piu; (fade Boccherini) alOl) Cams, c. 1830, Wanderer at the City Qate, (9(unst. 1932); video, details only 101) Ludzoi£ fHichter, 1837(?), DerSchrechgnstein, Mas. Leipzi£; + ^detail 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History W'j't 101a) ^rC (BCecfien, iKeid^er^ T^ower, ^nstfiafh, ‘Bremen 10IB) ^Fnedncfi Lessing, c.l950(?), ‘WoodCed ^nge, watercoCor, ‘BerCin Music: Schumann, 1841, Symphony #1 ("Spring"), 1st movement, opening, (Klemperer, New Philharmonia) Angel 36353 dich nicht, Deutschland, Erde meiner zweiten Friihe... The German student-wanderings take the language of Goethe and Holderlin (here with Schumann, Carus, Richter, Blechen): Germany, land of my second prime, where clear streams Rushed through the fragrant darkness of the night. The slowly yielding woodland night, and flowers. Geraniums, from balconies at morning. Laughed like a thousand girls, but I went, lonely. Wandered from ridge to ridge, climbing bell-towers Of immemorial red, listened to music Enclosed in depths, and with my loving eyes Held that strange beauty. Now no more! — die fremde Schone mit verliebtem Auge fasste: nicht mehr: 0 Tenebrae! 0 Aceldama! (fade Schumann) al02j B102) (DotiBCe: [^] ^RgmBrandt, 165S, y^CayedOTO Lot^e; and[‘B] Soutine, 1926, Carcass of‘Beef, 9dme ‘Bignou, (Paris; ^ stng^duaUs '] tmBy (Marc CB^ad, 1947. ffCayedOtc, (Private CoC^tion, (Paris; + ‘1/details 102) , (Marc CfiagaCC, 1947 (on earCier sBptcBes) Hie (faCCing Singed, (Private Collection, ‘Based ui4\joPs-^ V’i/lo (^a 102a) Same, detail (xvitfi otfi^ ^^et^ from 102^j In the last section of his poem, Borgese, in war-time America, forges an English out of Shakespeare and the modern. Thus Rem­ brandt's Slaughtered Ox, as symbolic as realistic, has variously in­ formed our century. Here, in 1926, before the rise of Hitler, Soutine's existential reminder already distills Holocaust. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 36 �**».■ ♦ C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Bartok, 1943, Concerto for Orchestra, from 3rd movement (Elegy), (Reiner) RCA AGL 1-2909 By Chagall's 1947 ox lapping its own blood. Holocaust was real; but the alarm of the night town, the celestial warning voice, weave a Crucifixion magic around Nazi Europe and the trial of the Jews. And in Chagall's Falling Angel, variously painted from 1923 to 1947, as in the Elegy from Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, or the close of Borgese's Easter poem — disaster flames affirmation: You passers-by who stop and wonder what I in uncommuning sounds lament; it is as if I had left home at noon and looked homeward before sundown; I see the barns aflame, the house a rump, the trees writhing in, desperate embraces; death with claws of strangling smoke grips ground and air. The silence is one shriek, one chasm the paths. So let me step westward; my shadow is long. In unmediated transcendence, that striding shadow is cast exactly by the burning world-past — "my shadow is long". (fade Bartok) 103) iPfioto of Qiuseppe ShvUmio (Bor^ese, Italy, Spriny, 19S2 103a) iHenry Moore, 1343-7, Tlie (Private CoCCection 1036) S^yain 103, a closer view oflBoryese Has Borgese, secretary of Hutchins' Committee to Frame a World Constitution, editor of its magazine Common Cause, veered here from planned Reconstruction to an Avant Garde firework af­ firming the negative itself, that blaze of world destruction? Any such antinomy — form against flux, man's- stable earth against Apocalypse — fuses in the actual. When Borgese read that poem, so deeply rooted in its languages, yet so voiced that all languages sounded like Italian, I sensed some modern liberation of dissonance and flame. Yet the Roman will of that thrust-out lip, the conscious command of tradition and form, decried the hermetic shell-game of 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic modernity. It was Farinata who had raised himself up: Farinata, che s'e dritto." History "vedi la, al04) Josepfi MBers, 13S3, SBomage to tfie Square: SlscetuCin^; Wfiitney Vttuseum, 6104) James I. Qi£6ert, c, 1948, Trairie S^des (canvas version), ‘Estate; first, vuCeo ^taiC 104) J. MSers, 1958, SBomage to tfie S<ju.are: SiitardanSo; Janis QcUCery, Remembering my summer with the embattled Erich at Black Mountain, where Albers and his followers were pursuing what would become this "Homage to the Square", I wrote: The modern abstract has been the expression of man reduced from humanity to function or confronted with that reduction, of nature desicated out of organic interplay to symbolic paradigm... It abandoned spacetime for the boom of the Marabar caves. In opposition to this, the new organic reaffirms the meaningful con­ cordances of spirit and matter, of world and man. (An affirmation for which Jim Gilbert, teaching at Chicago with me, became my art-example, as in his prairie and city nudes — though he deplored historical programs.) As for the abstract, I had long felt the beauty of the Godel Proof, to float mathematics again on paradox, the suspension of its axiomatic claims — and not simply the beauty of that result; but of the very proof, of abstraction trained to reflect on and delimit itself. Yet what were the abstractions of Albers proving? alOS) ‘Wiflem de 9(ponvn£, c. 1947, fBindiSfngd, SiSUtney Museum, 105) de %gonvngi c, 1945, ‘iHe Marshes, University Museum, CBerl^Cey (video adds detaUs of al05, then of 105) 105a) (PisaneCCo, 1441-3, LeoneCCo dEste medat, verso, tripCe-faud youth Meanwhile de Kooning, rendering Angel and Marsh, spread an Action-Painting-wing of the New-York-School-flight — an energy 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 38 �Symbolic C.G. Bell released by the dissolution of forms. with the euphoria of flux? History Had not Plato ironically toyed Socrates: Their first principle is that...there is nothing but motion .... everything is becoming and in relation, and being must be altogether abolished... Thus in the language of nature all things are coming into being and passing into new forms; nor can any name fix or detain them... 0 Theaetetus, are not these speculations sweet as honey? And do you not like the taste of them in the mouth? With such modem excitement, I too had risked, from my youth, a dialectic of paradox — though my aim was to enlarge reason, as Socrates did by sophistic contradiction. al06) BIOS) 106) CHicago ^eacfi, 57tfi-53rd, (Daimy & CaroCa (CQ^ 1931) jTX. Wriyfitj 1909-10, 9(pBie 9{ouse, Cfucago (CQ(B '60) !y.L. 1940, Lwiii£ area, LCoyd LettHs Odotise, LiBertyvUCe, IL, rvitfi 3am Overton & (CQ% '60) 106a) ^et, ITtfi-century (DcUai Lama Talace, Lfiasa, zvithfCags 106B) 9(enry Moore, 1359-64, Standtn£ 3^i£ure, Bronze 106c) 9(prea: sBeCCiny of Inchon, 1950; Life at 9^ar 106(C) CfCaminy Santa Cfe sunset (CQ% Sum 1990) And there I found myself by the windy shore of the Century of Progress Fair, breasting Whitman's "oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities" — I, teaching, with humanities and history, art appreciation, especially of the modem. From our leaded Tudor panes we could look across to Wright's Robie House, or visit with friends the one he built for his cousin near Libertyville. To take the thrill of those spaces; to affirm again the daring of the West, the present wonder of the world. In the glow of German Goethe, Schelling, and the music of Beethoven, to span the global reach of Adlai's speeches, the Marshall Plan recovery of Europe, what seemed the geniality of British socialism, the advancing American pursuit of rights; to plant that leaven of hope — though in the stubborn dough of Cold War, Korea, cyclical history, the Greek tragedy and Thucydides I was 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 39 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History teaching — such was the crucible of "Diretro al SqI,” affirmation of tragic America, its title from Dante (Ulysses; "To sail beyond the sunset" — that paean to "the mad flight," "il folle volo," that took him under: "The sea closed over us, as it pleased another".) alOT) Qeoj^ia. O'HC^efe, 1926, City 9^6% Tstate cfJ^rtist 107) (DouBCe: [J^j LaBrouste, 1862-8, iRpom, ‘BiBC. 9{flt., (Boris) otuC [(B] 9\(g,Tvi, (PaCace, cf (under construction), (Turin; + V sinyCe detoUs c/i^srudluS/\/V\oh. On that peak and defile (our freedom aimed at Vietnam, our boom at ecology crisis), my art class was responding to the new architecture, as Georgia O'Keefe had in her New York phase — the explosion of materials, the phenomenal expansion of powers (as from the 1860s wrought iron reading room of the National Library in Paris, to Nervi's post-war Palace of Work, here being built in Turin). al08) SuMvan andITidCer, 1887-9, SUiditorium (Buildiny, CBicayo 108) A Qaudi, 1891 ff, LaSamada (famiBa, (BarceCona; first, video C^taiC 'fo e'\PefiKodL \f{x^ us\<U/' V'uS/tu—\ I was tracing from the 19th century the interplay within a continuing polarity: a straight-lined functionality, as of Bauhaus, rooted far back in the Scott Mackintosh, Hoffman in Vienna, here, the skeletal steel of Chicago's Sullivan and Adler; at the other extreme, a fantasy of organic growth — sprung up like Jack's beanstalk, though not overnight — Gaudfs 300-foot stone towers of the Barcelona Church of the Sacred Family, begun in 1891 and still to be completed. al09) 7.L. Wriyfit, 1954, desiyn, BetB SBoCem Synayoyue Bl09) Wriyfti, 1954, same Synayoyue, (BBUodeCpBia (CQ(B 59) 109) 94hTy(tt, anotfier viezv of tBe same BuUdiny (C^, ^ . V/ So to Frank Lloyd Wright's synthesis and transcendence of the poles — here, in what he was then designing, this Philadelphia Syn­ agogue, defying, as it were, all deaths by war and holocaust — one of which Dylan Thomas had refused to mourn: Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 40 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness And I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead And the synagogue of the ear of corn Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound Or sow my salt seed In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn The majesty and burning of the child's death... alio) Mies v.cC. ^fie, c. 1968, vkiofrom 1‘BM(BuiCdin^, Cfucago; + V BllO) (DeCaunay, 1910, TiffeC^ower, JQmstmuseum, *Basd; video, details only 110) 91ou6Ce: [Jij (Ddaunay, 6110 TiffeC^l^ower; and [(B] ^^.L.^Wriyht, desiynfor t6e MUe 9{ig6 Illinois, stiCC unSuiCt (video scans Wright's Shy City)>^ J0 So the fall of 1951 brings me to my own poem, "Beyond the Sunset," with Beethoven, and a whole horizon of art. Music: Beethoven 1834, 3rd Movement (Adagio), 9th Symphony, (Toscanini)-V-LM 6901, side 13 Driven home along the Outer-drive from a wine-tasting in the Electric Club, by the fearless skill of Elizabeth Mann Borgese, I sat at my desk, just able, with so much tasting, to hold the pen. But this is what I scrawled: over the gulf and soaring of the city We came at dusk to the roof-garden rail. Darkness flowed in the streets; the sheer beauty Of towered steel rose in the violet air — Bands and heights of light under the sky^ plumes; Cars to the suburbs bum the long road lanes. Delaunay's 1910 Eiffel Tower had expressed the ecstasy which would lead Frank Lloyd Wright, after two wars, to conceive his still unbuilt Mile High Sky-city, charged with Icarian overweenings: tandem-cab, ratchet-guided, atomic-powered elevators! 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History alll) UnitedOdg-tions ^uU(Cin£, O^orf^City (indeo, details only) 111) IDeCaunay, 1910-12, La ^iCCe de (Baris, Mush (KyiionaC d^rt Modeme, (Baris; first, video detail Here on the terrace, drinking wine and eating, ^People of every nation, hearts unquelled !Ky By the • encroaching shadows, mingle, speaking Tongues of kindred lands. Their voices tell Of customs and of needs, of the fools who rule; They are loose in talk and laughter, slurs and dreams. (How my Dionysiac poem, beyond conscious programs of worldrescue, kindles a pyre of fatal celebration.) While from the luminist rapture of Delaunay's 1912 City of Paris, 112) J.I. QiWert, c, 1948, (Brairie Vdydes (pond version); C^, Santa iTe 112 a) Copy ofSLttic, c. 430 (B.C; (Berides Bust, (BritisB (Museum, London 1126) (Bfiidian(?), c. 440 (B.C., lounger of the (Hjace Bronze Warriors, detail, (Museum, (Rs££io-Ca(aBria 112c) (Detailof 112, QilBert; *BdlcoClection (andCQ(B photo) Gilbert caught a vision of such Cezanne-nudes over prairie, bridged river, cliffs like roofs of Chicago. And the clouds relinquish the sun's brown setting. Twilight deepens as the city glows. Out of the past of another world-evening Spirit has suffered, a great voice looms; It i’s Pericles — with Athens at the bourn Of her adventurous sailing into ruin: "We are the school of Hellas. Wonder unending Of after ages will be ours. We have Made sea and land the highway of our daring. If now obedient to the general law We invite decay, the greatness we have known Will be some break of beauty in that gloom." 113) (Mies v.d. (Rphe, 1938, Seayram ‘Building, (BarhiSLvenue, (M^fC; + *1^ detail 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 113 a) Same, c. 1968, I(BM (BuUcCing, Cfiicc^o, side view, xvi^ trees (CQ(B '83); + video pan 1136) Same 6uUdin£, front view (CQ^ '83) (Mies van der Rohe already raising his towers of steel and glass in America): These words echo in the mind. From dark flashing Along the gray shore and the wash of waves. Towers, and cars streaming. Up vibrant air reaching Cones of light catch at the destinate planes. The roar west and east. Here in the hum Of mingled voices, careless freedom sings. And we too have lived the dayspring and daring Which all time will remember; we have seen Over the earth-foreclosure of our wasting. Still the incredible brightening of the dream... Now promise is almost presence under the dome Of night stirred with light and the rush of wings. (fade Beethoven) all4) Sane Overton^, 1990, Chicago window with weird manikin; + ^ detaiC 6114) Same, Skyscrapers of Chicago cll4) Same, Street scene 114) Same, Shop vHndow rvith photo-mani%i and r^Cections 114 a) Same, again, the ma£e modd, nearer Since the poem is elegiac, I have let it speak, though its pathos was the flaw of the vision. Adlai's rhetoric had no escape from bas­ tion enterprise, with the hot Koreas of cold war. So a sequel would attend a later visit — a conversation with a manikin in a shop win­ dow: Chicago Twenty Years After The city always taller over the shore; The sirens of its promise heavier; I almost caught in the dream rush as before. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Ask the manikin whose mythic hair Slogans a costly tweed: "Was the Western star We pledged with life, tinsel as you are?" Smiles lewd, smiles last: "What Promethean lure Set your soul to sell, in a mortgaged store. That three-piece suit of freedom, profit, war?" allS) Laf^ ^BoUvar atuC^eer Crufu MS, c. 19ZS (BCuejUter) 6115) Be(X graves, Cemetery, greenvUCe MS (CgB '89, Blue fiCter); + ^ detail ^Hiver Bridge soutB. of greenvUCe, MS (Cg(B '89, Blue filter) 115) 115a) greenvUCe Cemetery (CgB Blue copy of UleCta III,U},3,d) 115B) Urau^ZuUb, 1988, pBoto overlay of tree and nlglit sBy Meanwhile, the poems of westward flight fSongs for a New America) were hardly done when I took the bus south (such a polarity as X against Y) to visit my mother in that Delta of water, night and void. The last return was to the cemetery and my father's grave. There, past the trees and plantings, cars take the speedway for the river bridge: And say, like Herodotus' Libyans, we come to sleep. For divination, on our fathers' tombs. How can their ghosts but point us on and on: Over poisoned fields, up a strand of steel. Where a space-bridge arches a river star-coiled. Such the graveyard close of Delta Return: Therefore this dark of the water-spilled gray moon And oaks by the river over the watered plain. And moon-gray sky and sky's legend of stars. Are the ebb and flow where we go up and down The swirls of Delta night — space, place, haunt, home. 116) Siztec, 1324-15Z1, Calendar or Sun Stone, Mytional Museum of Sintfiropology, Mej(ico City; + V detaU 116a) greenvUCe Cemetery, Muffuletto angel ICgO '89; Blue filter; video shows first a detaU of 115a) 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 44 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Break off. Quixote’s second venture, to probe the sfnall now for the Now of consciousness, has come round also to a time-plot, in this case personal. How far from the cosmic cycles (Tiger, Water, Wind and Fire) of the Aztec Sun Stone. Where is the Sipapu opening from self to world, the Apocalypse opening from world to All? On the cast of a last hope, I take up the Five Chambered Heart (poems of Love, Lust, Earth, Waste, Soul); focusing on those of the fifth state (Soul), I set three to images, and why not music? 117) !fTiedricft, c,1818(?), Hkoo Men ‘Watcfi tfie Moon over tHe Sea, 9{emuta£e, Leningrad (center-spread of tfie picture); + ^ detail Music: Alban Berg, 1935, Violin Concerto, (Grumiaux & Amsterdam) Philips ST 802-785 LY, from the last forte to the close There is the shift from self to earth, and greater, from earth to cosmos. I once experienced it in a dream, to be treated thereafter in fiction and poetry — in The Half Gods under the rubric "the Metamor­ phosis of-the Cave." 118) USX Cokg- Wor^, Cfairston, gfoomy viezo; first, V detail Through labyrinthine closures of the planet we have raped and soiled, we wander as though lost in an overarching cavern, an underworld. But since that vault is the fact of the sky-smogged, trashed and poisoned globe, the poetic distillation (from the Five Chambered Heart") takes the title of "World Cave." 119) Old ^ook of Xnozuledpe print of a torefi raised in Mammotfi Cave The first response is of repudiation: I light the torch And lift it to inscribe in smoke My curse, my warning on the wall. IZO) Ceiling (Utailfrom Carlsdad Cavern, using BluefUter 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 45 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Then, as if the very blaze of wrong had kindled stalactite sparks above, perception, groping the starred dark, shifts and widens — as through speculations of earth: Is it rock crystal Shining? — 121) Qada (PCacida tomB, iRg-vetma, mosaic vauCt of stars; + V detail to the illusionistic jewellings of Early Christian art, this star-dome at Ravenna — the poem questioning: Gold mosaics? while the ceiling spreads and recedes, past the speed of light — 122) SpCendour of the ^leavens, Judy sl^, soutfi, over London; + ^ detail the closure of the Platonic cave become this star-cloud universe of worlds in space, with constellations of a symbolic destiny: Shapes I have known: —three, a moving sequence in the summer sky 123) CQ(B's schematized pattern, prichfd and photqyraphed as of pain, celebration, transcendence: Cross, Lyre, Crown. 124) fP.fP. Jipos, C.1680F, Landscape with a Qrotto, !H£,rmita£e; video, detail ondy 125) Qlints on snow, undere7(posed, with hCuefidter (CQ^B '90) 126) l4nother of 123, aSove: 'stars' of Cross, Lyre, Croton So, with a swifter sequence, the poem sounds again: 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 46 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History World-Cave I light the torch And lift it to inscribe in smoke My curse, my warning on the wall. Is it rock crystal Shining? Gold mosaics? Shapes I have known: Cross, Lyre, Crown! (Close of Berg) 12 7) Sunset (CQ*B SLu^ust '78) 127a) Larger copy cfSarafi il(p6inson's eye CCf ^ ^ 12 75) fHfiinBozo cast By crystal on a white surface (CQ^ ’90) ^127c) ^Bens, c. 1630, Cattle Lrinhing at sunset, tnash^detail, Louvre The next poem is called "Speculum Mundi" — Mirror, or Image, of the world. It came to me in age, as I watched another sunset, aware that for Greek philosophy, seeing is a kind of mating, where masculine light (form or eidos, image or speculum) begets in receptive organs the things of sight. And imagining that I, body's hatching place of sense, might soon, by a dissolving return, become the light itself, I took up nature's love-death praise in a distillate of mirrored words. (For which the music can only be: Beethoven's "Heilige Dankgesang in der lydischen Tonart".) [Six images follow, each circularly niasked] 128) ConstaBle, c. 1821, branch iKitt Tond, Hlampstead, Victoria and MBert Mtiseum 129) Friedrich, 1834, 9(^t after ^Harvest, ‘Dresden Qallery 130) Splendour of die Hleavens. c. 1930, ‘Ihe OdidnightSun 131) Sarah IRpBinson's eye (C^ 1990) 132) Ifm-^ang Odontage, rvith sun and Sarah's eye (CQ‘B 90) 133) Idriedrich, c.1818, ‘Woman facing sunset, Museum, ‘Essen Music: 3/1994 Beethoven, 1825-7, from the Adagio of the A Minor Quartet, Opus 132, (Budapest) Col. MBS 677 NOW — Alpha 47 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Light through cloud now poured from the spent sun Receiver I to the childing of your touch I who next will be the very light Poured down cloud for the receiving eye Great either way sight cloud and sun You into me with the same spending touch As I then into you with child by my light. (End Beethoven) a,B,cl34) Ci^fitest ey(posures erf 134, Bdow V(C134 (BCan^ a wfiite screen (video onCy) 134) C.Q. ^eU in recessive imayes formed By tBree mirrors 134 a) 14n asymmetric variant of the same When the mirrored self Fades into light Beyond the light Who calls? I am nothing But one with the one That makes the nothing All. Remembering my grandfather's photo-montage of himself in circular array, I had thought to close this Alpha search with mirror reflections of myself, fading into light with the poem you have just heard. But that was not the original poem. It had waked me from sleep deep in the night when an old Princeton friend (as I would learn) had died. al35) LimBoury ‘Brotders, 1415-16, Sky-detailfrom Cfvrist in gethsemane, Ores (Rudies iHeures 14Zv, Music Conde, CBantiUy [video first sBozvs a detail of 135, Belotv] 135) (Frank^Zudo, 1388, pfioto-numtaye, niyfit sky over rocks And the fading there was into star-strewn space. The poem (a ballad stanza broken up and spread over eight lines) is too short for any music but its own: 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 48 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Gnomic The night each plows A furrow of death In the field of stars Who calls? I am nothing But one with the one That makes the nothing AU. 3/1994 NOW — Alpha 49 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 50 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource NOW -- Alpha, Symbolic History, Part 38 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 38 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_38_NOW--Alpha https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a25477633f40c38b686dd675793dda8d.pdf eeeeec4f7760b9c5798c685284b8d1e8 PDF Text Text Charles G. Bell, 1260 Canyon Road, or St. John's College, Santa Fe, New Mexico SYMBOLIC HISTORY: 37: !•) , Japan (Heian) 87501 THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND 20th Cent. C: VJorld Melt 11th c. silk painting, Dai-itoku Myo-o, Fine Arts, Boston MUSIC: Peking c. 1850 opera. Beheading a Son, opening, RCA-V LM 6057 How can an entropic universe be other than a tragic universe, its glory reared on the leap of flame? Our task is to celebrate the dangerous radiance of the later West, without the soul-abandon of. Jeffers' dance around the funeral pyre: passed me, saying, "I am Tamar Caldwell, "Someone flamelike I have my desire." Not by an image of fire itself, or any of the burnings of history, but by a silk painting from 11th century Japan, Dai-itoku Myo-o, fire-guardian of the Buddhist Pantheon (with Peking opera) we grip the pathos of the West in the life-death abstraction ) of energy. . 2) (fade music) Fr. Gothic 13th-16th cent., N.Porch and N.Tower, Cathedral of Chartres (CGB '59) Had not the choice been made with Gothic - its last phase, as in the North Tower of Chartres, called Flamboyant, after flame? In music, the old descent of the Greek tetrachord, settling through its Semitone to the Dorian tonic E - a recollection retained in Gregorian: MUSIC: Gregorian, Easter Mass, dote of Terra treauit, MHS 915 — that downward scale inverts with early organum, climbs through the leading tone to a forbidden tonic C: MUSIC: School of St. Martial at Limoges, Melismat'ic Organum from -------------------------- the Benidicamus Domino, Haydn Soc. L-2071 — Dante's Paradise of flame already fulfilled in Perotin: ‘ �20th Cent. Melt - 2 C.G. Bell MUSIC: Perotin c. 1200, Quadruplum close of Sederunt, Cape, ARC-14068 3) Phillipe de Loutherbourg c. 1800, Coalbrookdale at Night, Science Mus., London With the blast furnaces of the 1800 Midlands, how earth-involved the flames have become, Faust's sky-hunger conflagrant with the hell compact — the combustion and flood of Wagner's Valhalla — soaring to an always higher diapason. Nietzsche: "Above all a living thing wants to discharge its energy." ‘ MUSIC: Wagner 1874, Gotterdammerung, close, Seraphim, 4) 1st Atomic Bomb-, July 16, '45, N.M. 60003 ("Trinity") (Al .Cooke, America, 334) (close Wagner) 5) G. Coustou c. 1730, Portrait of his Brother, Louvre, Paris MUSIC: Bach c. 1715?, Little Fugue in G Minor, opening, Biggs, ----- ----- ' -... ----- Col. MS6261 If dissolving is in question, what energized human greatness (as in the character of a lost father) was to be treasured in that Western assertive command of the incarhate field. in the Age of Enlightenment, how Coustou's Yet even here, portrait of a brother, reasonable as MontesquieuSpirit of the Laws, flames toward excess; how even the most cheerful of Bach's fugues breaks in storm-tossed inwardness, beyond measure. 6) Canova 1803-22 -i (fade Bach) (a copy?), Bust of Napoleon,Gal.d'arte Moderna, Pitti, Florence MUSIC: Beethoven 1804-8, toward close 1st myt, 5th Symphonie, --------. _ . --. ... Deutsche Gram. LPM-188 04 In Canova's Napoleonic transformation, "makes war on itself". (as Hegel says) Revolutionary hope (Wordsworth's "A Blackbird's whistle in a vernal grove") with ardent eyes". spirit turns to "hissing factionists Yet superimposed on that yielding up moral �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 3 questions in despair, the now existential will has seized the grim hammer to forge something. minimal or the maximal state? Was Rousseau's Contract for the Thus the motion of liberation which had prevailed since Renaissance becomes the motion of constriction, 7) Arno Breker c. 1938, Nazi Carving, Preparedness which has Hitlerized the later West. (Kunst *81) (fade Beethoven 5th) We will not sift the recorded sounds of National Socialist rallies "With Songs and Cheers", for a music of the reign of Professor Doctor Peter Raabe, blatant as Arno Breker's 1938 "Preparedness" — as if totalitarian "Renaissance" could turn back the clock of Spenglerian time, renewing the civic power of Michelangelo's David against Eliot's "Gerontion" warning: "Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism." Hitler: ) We must be ruthless... Terror is the most effective political instrument...A violently active, dominating intrepid, brutal youth — that is what I am after... 8) Paul Klee 1940, Death and Fire, MUSIC: A.Berg 1935, Klee Foundation, Bern, Switzerland from Violin Concerto, death passage Against the Nazi head set what its call to strength had exiled. Paul Klee, most insistently subconscious of the great moderns, was purged frpm the Dusseldorf academy in 1933. He settled in Bern, where he died in 1940, the year of this picture, "Death and Fire", a wry handling of his own and the world's dissolution. Mein Kampf quell the fires by which it was forged? But could Berg's Violin Concerto on Manon Gropius' death of polio-myelitis; Rilke's surreal landscape of laments in the Tenth Duino Elegy, — with everything from Einstein's relativity, Heisenberg's indeterminacy, Godel' s anti-proof, back to Marx'* Manifesto and Rimbaud's "drunken gnat at the inn's urinal, in love with the barage and dissolved �20th Cent, Melt C.G. Bell in a sunbeam"? 4 (fade music) Did these, as so many assumed, portend the decay of Western power? 9) Rom'q-Gothic Castle 1228, Chateau-de-Mer, Sidon, Lebanon By 1228 the crusading drive of Medieval chivalry had left this Chateau-de-Mer at Sidon, on the Lebanese coast of Asia Minor. 10) Moorish in Spain 14th cent., Torre del Damas & garden, Granada In Granada, this 14th century Torre del Damas, with its garden, pool and Asian lion, marks the last Moorish foothold on the contested sub-continent of Spain. 11) Turkish in Europe 16th cent.. Old Bridge, Minarets etc., Mostar, Yugoslavia As late as the Renaissance the Ottoman Turk was pressing the bounds of Vienna, holding Bosnia and Herzegovina, building this Mostar bridge, minarets and towers in what would later be Austria Hungary, and then Yugoslavia. 12) V.Dyck c. 1633, Wm. Fielding, Yet by the next century 1st Earl of Denbigh, Nat.Gal., London (33 years after Queen Elizabeth had licensed the East India Company), Van Dyck hugely captured what was to become the whole Pukka-Sahib imperial westernizing of the globe; 13) John Nash & others 1815-21, The Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England • With Brighton Pavilion, fashioned for George, Prince Regent, from 1815 to '21, like an Eastern Pleasure-dome (though with the structural lightening of cast-iron), the counter-current of empire draws the styles of exotic lands to the novelty-seeking core. On the tide of post-romantic desire, who is fo be conquered by whom? 14) German Renaissance c. 1500, Dinkelsbuhl, center (CGB *59) No doubt the energy that would revolutionize every phase of �M C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 5 Western and human life had already, in the Renaissance German town (here Dinkelsbiihl) , given Gothic testimony of its soaring dialectic, the free individual empowered in the civic frame. Yet even as the « traffic of another world explodes those towns, how remote they seem 15) Empire State Building, looking up from the street, NYC from the Empire State culmination of that Faustian alchemy. In a community of nations preparing again to tear itself to pieces. New York was skyscraping center, that slogan-capitalist worldhive, with the stock-market of its troubled art soul: — 16) Salvator Dali 1936, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonitions of Civil War), Arenburg Col'n, Philadelphia Mus. Dali's 1936 "Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonitions of Civil War)" dished up what was hatching from post-romantic, depression and Fascism (as birds crack the shell). In that turning of liberalism on itself, transvaluing polarities were everywhere dividing and inbreeding. Left fought right, socialist communist, Trotskyite Stalinist; yet ultimate right and ultimate left converged in totalitarian seizure. In art, realism rose against avant-garde, avant-garde split abstract from surreal; isms splintered and cross-multiplied; while through them all cut the psychic cleavage of backward regret or forward euphoria -whether the manic-depressive should affirm or deny. 17) CanoVa 1804-19, Theseus Battles the Centaur, Kunsthist. Mus., Vienna In the Napoleonic upheaval, Canova thought to battle down centaur violence, summoning the heroic image of Theseus (though already strength swells too much toward a Mussolini pugilist). While in Schubert's last symphony, classical form still masters the rebellious dissonance of Beethoven. MUSIC: Schubert 1826, 7th Symphony, 2nd mvt, nearing close, ------ ——---------------------------------- — Col.ML 5619 (fade) �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt 6 18) j,ipschitz 193B, Rape ol' Europa. .bronze, Musee d*Arte Moderne, Pai is Since Nietzsche's transvaluation of value, that brute seizure Picasso's IS our own-- Lipsckitz' Europa, like/ bull and minotaur. assumpticns of conquering So Schonberg's espousal of emanicipated dissonance. MUSIC: Schonberg 1936, Vln Concerto,- 2nd mvt, brief forte, h through. Col. M2S 679 (fade) Yeats, for all his concern with "traditional sanctity and loveliness", must side with the "roof-levelling wind", the irrational cry of Juno's Peacock, the "old man's frenzy" of his own epitaph: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by. 19) Raeburn c. 1810?, Rev. Robert Walker Skating, Nat. Gal., Edinburgh Has the complicity of alienation removed us forevear from the human image as Romantic inherited it from Enlightenment — Raeburn's Preacher Walker skating, from the time of Wordsworth's Prelude: ("Fair seed-time had my soul") We hiss'd along the polish'd ice...while the stars Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away. Have we now the option of that Vicar of Wakefield wholeness? 20) H.Matisse 1905, Joy of Life, study, Haas Coll'n, S.Francisco MUSIC: Ravel 1909, Daphnis & Chloe Suite II, opening. Col. MS 5397 When Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat meet in the Fauves, those "Wild Beasts" (this Matisse 1905 Joy of Life), Symbolist rupture and escape soar to mythic elation — as in Ravel's 1909 Daphnis and Chloe. And although the Bacchic dream of Mann's Aschenbach attends Death-in-Venice, it was still with the rapture of Molly Bloom that Joyce would close the Dublin wanderings of �M M C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 7 Ulysses, June 16, 1904: and Gibralter as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair... and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. 21) Picasso 1903, Life, Mus. of Art, Cleveland, Ohio And though Picasso had begun in the Symbolist Blue vein of early Yeats: "The wind blows over the lonely of heart/ And the lonely of heart is withered away/" — what Debussy had poured into the last phrase of Maeterlink's Pelleas and Mellisande, "It's the turn of the poor little child" MUSIC: Debussy 1892-1902, close of Pelleas & Mellisande, Col. M3 30119 (whatever Spectre of a Rose would be enacted in the new Ballet of Diaghilev or in the Diaghilev-haunted fate of Nijinsky) — (fade Pelleas & Mellisande) 22) Picasso 1907, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Mus. of Mod. Art, NYC Picasso by 1907 would have broken through that "Hollow Man" anemia, MUSIC: Stravinsky 1912-13, from Le Sacre du Printemps, Col. MG3 1202 striking d’eep into the mother-lode of Faust, Nietzsche and Rimbaud, bulldozing for Joyce the abstract violence of Ulysses' Circebrothel, and for Stravinsky this 1912 Rite of Spring. As Picasso revealed, the crapping pose on the right is as much the earthmother crouch of delivery. Was it not known from the start that when stressed forms are broken, energy flames? 23) (fade Stravinsky) Franz Marc 1914, Heitere Formen (A Schardt, F. Marc p. 160) Perhaps the visual ecstasy peaks (Fauve, Cubist, Futurist) A i �C.G.'^ Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 8 Franz Marc's 1914 "Happy Forms" — such an overflow as Rilke gave words in the Second Duino Elegy, the perilous Archangel t. having advanced one step from behind the stars (Leishman & Spender) ranges, summits, dawn-red ridges of all beginning, — pollen of blossoming godhead (Pollen der bllihenden Gottheit, Gelenke des Lichtes, Gange, Treppen, Throne...) hinges of light, corridors, stairways, thrones, spaces of being, shields of felicity, tumults of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, separate, mirrors, drawing up their own outstreamed beauty into their faces again. — "the eternal torrent" roaring its way through all realms, inward, outward — until creative ecstasy climaxes in terror. 24) Franz Marc 1914, Kampfende Formen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB *59) It is the break implied in this "Battling Forms", Marc's other masterpiece of 1914, that year of the Great War, when man appeared the Faustian bungler off migratory course (Rilke): ...outstript and late, we thrust up suddenly into the wind, to fall upon inhospitable ponds — Und fallen ein auf teilnahmlosen Teich. In 1911 the young poet Heym imagined the catastrophe he did not live to see: A great city sank down in yellow smoke. Sucked without a sound into the ground; Vast above the ruins War heaves his' brand... 25) Geo. Davis 1916?, "Putting out his eyes". Imperial War Mus., London Only above the sodden trenches and barbed v/ire could that First World action hold the Fauve adventure of Homeric war — Yeats, "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death": A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 9 I balanced all, brought all to mind. The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. 26) Nevinson c. 1918, Bearing the Wounded Over No Man's Land (Studio: Mod. Engl. Art) Below, Rilke's first flame elation at the "hearsaid, remote, incredible War God", with George's, and Hesse's, mired in the this of doomed Hyperion landscape of/Nevinson and/Owen: It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down sortie profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned. Too fast in thought or death to be be.stirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared... By.his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell... "I am the enemy you killed, my friend... 27) George Gross 1917-18, To Oskar Panizza, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart George Gross's 1917-18 Kermess of Death whirls us from Owen beyond embittered Sassoon -Does it matter? — losing your legs?... For people will always be kind... And no one will worry a bit — to the armistice debunking of All Quiet on the Western Front and No More Parad.es. Under the Dada compact to mock, the surreal to estrange. Pound hones Hysterias, trench confessions. Laughter out of dead bellies... There died a myriad. And of the best among them. For an old bitch gone in the teeth,' For a botched civilization... 28) 0.Kokoschka 1909-10, the Marquis & Marquise de Rohan-Montesquieu, Nat.Mus., Stockholm, & P.E. Geier Coll'n, Rome But the war shift from euphoria to bitterness was a change of stress. By 1910 Eliot's Prufrock seems indecision of "entre deux guerres" to have entered the ("I am no prophet — and �C 20th Cent. Melt • B011 here's no great matter"). 10 At the same time Kokoschka, in Vienna and Svvitzerland had uncovered the more blasted international neurotics of Eliot's post-war "Gerontion": Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room... Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles... so the Waste Land also about 1919: Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be- savagely still. "My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me... I never know what you are thinking. Think." 29) Brancusi 1919, Mile Pogany (bronze) (Life, Dec. 5, '55) MUSIC: Stravinsky 1922, Octet for Wind Instruments, from First . Mvt. --- ---------------------------------- ^---------------------- Col. SM 30579 In Brancusi's 1919 Mile Pogany, as in the jazz polyphonies of post-war Stravinsky, abstract sophistication leaves no clue to the mutilations style has plowed under. In that civilization of Chaplinesque extremes, what crack-ups were waiting under the brilliance of League of Nations, boom and bust, flapper dress and skeletal steel? 30) (fade Stravinsky) M.Duchamp 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, Mus. of Art, . Philadelphia Before the war Duchamp had painted for the Armory Show of 1912 this Cubist and Futurist analysis of motion, charged somehow with the excitement of the atomic physics of those years — however the American public mocked it as "Nude Falling Down Stairs", or "Explosion in a Shingle Factory". 31) Duchamp 1915-23, The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, Mus. of Art, Philadelphia But the war made Duchamp too a mocker. New York leader of �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt 11 International Dada, with its nihilist debunking of civilized values. Such this "Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" philosophy) (as bare as Wittgenstein would strip —, this love-burlesque of scrap metal and pseudo­ dynamo, to which Duchamp gave ten years of assembling and laissez-faire destruct. tion by negation, Yet how soon in the Avant-garde affirma­ its junk and nose-thumbing would point the path of higher abandon (William Carlos Williams' "No ideas but in things"), to become the dynamic of a New Frontier. 32) Mondrian 1936-42, Rythm of Straight Lines, H.Clifford, Philadelphia, (now D^lsseldorf) MUSIC: Varese 1931, Ionization, Col. MS 6146 (about 2/3 in^after siren) In the tightening of the '20's, Mondrian, who had begun by abstracting from nature, stripped the canvas to ruled rectangles of white and primary colors. Was Varese on such a course in the percussions and sirens of his 1931 Ionization? Or Gertrude Stein in her most arid reductions: Red Roses. A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot... Custard. Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill. Better'her dying question: answer came): 33) "What's the answer?" (and when no "In that case, what's the question?" (end Varese) Japanese (Early Edo) 17th c., Jodan-no-ma, room in Shin Shoin Katsura, Imperial Villa, Kyoto, Japan MUSIC: Japanese Koto(Izumi Kai), Rokudan: close, Everest 3206 How much of the modern has its cognates in Medieval, Eastern, Primitive. Such rectangular grids as Mondrian contrived for panel painting Imperial Villa. unfold to articulated wonder in the Kyoto The conscious inventive novelty of the modern -- �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell "Well then, what’s the question?" recedes before the spatial ceremony of this life-room. 34) 12 (end Koto music) Le Corbusier & others 1937-43-, Ministry of Education, Rio de Janeiro In architecture what had seemed the rectangular quirk of painting gathers the powers of reinforced concrete, steel and glass for the functional enclosure of space (so Le Corbusier's Rio de Janeiro Ministry of Education). The art struggle which • c ruled lines had bypassed (Cezanne's life-fight for geometry in nature) resurrects in the tensile strategy of rearing against gravity (as Buckminster Fuller used to ask at architectural meetings: 35) "What does yctr building weigh?") . Frank Lloyd Wright 1909-10, Robie House, Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL (CGB *60) The most extraordinary genius of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, was also herald of a new America: a new ideal of civilization...based on the freedom of man's mind guided by his conscience... Those wonderful houses, where nature flows in and out: (Wright) We have no longer an outside as outside. Now the outside may come inside, and the inside may and does go outside. They are of each other... There can be no separation between our architecture and our culture. Nor any separation of either from our happiness. — from the Prairie Houses of the early century, the great one built for Coonley, or this for Robie in Chicago; 36) F.L. Wright 1952, Mrs. Clinton Walker House, Carmel, CA through the Pasadena houses of the '20's, or Pennsylvania "Falling Water" from the '30's, to this on the Carmel coast, 1952 — democratic vision, empowered by wealth and daring, went on affirming itself, through war. Lost Generation, Depression, Nazi �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt 13 war, the advance of Communism, New Frontier, down to Silent Spring and the napalm bombing of Vietnam. Wright: There is a new integrity in America, alive and working with new means...for freedom and beauty — yours and mine and our children's — in the realm of the new architecture. 37) Same, interior looking out to the ocean What did that private ocean-pavilion of steel and glass affirm? The splurge of America, the huge canvases of the N.Y. School, oil slicks, the looming energy crisis? Did it affirm its own negation? -- not far away along the same beach, the hand-built tower of stone from which Spenglerian Jeffers had written in the 1920's: "meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic", and "This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places"..."Burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the Carmel water." The very year of the house the vision of Adlai Stevenson would go down before Eisenhower and Nixon: 38) O land, 0 cities; and down to tbe salt sea again. Grant Wood 1932, Daughters of the American Revolution, Art. Mus., Cincinatti Both Wright's avant-garde and his dream of America having been opposed, since the eddies and cross-currents of between-wars, by Philistine tradition — against which Grant Wood and Sinclair Lewis had thought to wield an ironic scalpel: There is a character in spectacles. '. .Babbitt' s spectacles had huge circular frameless lenses of the very best glass; the ear pieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the modern business man; one who gave orders to clerks and drove a car and played occasional golf and was scholarly in regard to Salesmanship...With respect you beheld him put on the rest of his uniform as Solid Citizen. Yet what is such an art mocking but its own limitations, consanguinities? its �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 39) 14 Picasso 1930, Seated Bather, Museum of Modern Art, NYC Copland 1930, from the Eiano Variations (close) Dover HCR MUSIC: ------------ - ----------- ------- bT-7014A'~ Picasso's mandibled Bather voiced the same desiccation more radically. It was just the translation of worn-out content into the elemental charge of distilled abstraction that gave inter­ national modernism its hard vitality. So Copland (with less acclaim) in the hermetic experiment of the 1930 Piano Variations. 40) J.S. Curry 1929, Tornado over Kansas, Hadley Art Gal., Muskegan, MI or RCA LSC 31^4 MUSIC: Copland -1938, from Billie the Kid, 1st scene. Col. MS 6175 Meanwhile the counterdrive (this 1929 Curry) pushed sanity in art and reattachment to nature and man — to avoid what Marsh called "fantastic nonsense" and Benton of Missouri "sickly rationalizations, psychic inversions and God-awful cultivations". Life magazine and the WPA helped, Copland too, as if to show that a clever man can change styles like dress, led music on the tabloid tack. (fade Copland) Typical of the aesthetic war, that when Barnett Newman, in 1942, attacked "Isolationist painting, which they named the American Renaissance... not an art but an expanded Currier and Ives revival", he identified it with Hitlerism: Art in America today stands at a point where anything that cannot fit into the American scene label is doomed to be completely ignored...an ever expanding school of genre painters... telling the story of America's life of humdrum...instead of the old oaken bucket, it based its appeal on the hurricane cellar. 41) Barnett Newman 1949, Concord, Met. Museum, NYC from MUSIC: ■ Subotnick (b. 19'33), Electronic Synthesizer/"Silver Apples of —---------------------------- :------ the Moon", Nonesuch 47174 (Sf. Jno) (hear close of Pt. Ill �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 15 --here Subotnick-Though in a short time (while the synthesizei/ gained in music), the work of Newman himself, this two-lined color-ground called Concord, based on the European abstract, but rapturously, almost (strange as the word seems) organically new, the mystic color pools of Rothko, action swirls of De Kooning and Pollock,^ with numberless variants of other experimenters — all that had pushed the, representational in turn almost to the wall. 42) (fade Subotnick) Max Ernst 1943, The Eye of Silence, Washington Univ., Mus. of Art Had reattachment been an eddy in the always remoter flight from things of the earth; or is it a recurrent calling? Dylan Thomas at any rat:e, began (1934) with estrangement, surreal as this Max Ernst, The Eye of Silence; ■ Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides; And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads. The things of light File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones... 43) Jack B. Yeats 1952, The Morning Sea, J.D. Rockefeller, NY But by 1946, the rapture of "Fern Hill" ("Down rivers of the windfall light") or of "Poem in October", suggests an art as immediate in earth-praise as the Irish landscapes of Jack Yeats, painter-brother of William Butler Yeats, the poet: t It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and heron Priested shore The morning beckon... And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days... 44) P.Mondrian 1942-3, Broadway Boogie V'Joogie, Mus. Modern Art, NYC MUSIC: Boogie Woogie (1936) Count Basie, etc. Did even Mondrian, in wartime New York, follow the trend of �V 9 C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 16 earth-yea to the jazzing of his squares in what he called "Broadway Boogie Woogie"— catchy as Cuininings' take-off on first love as driving a car" she being Brand -new; and you know consequently a little stiff i was careful of her and (having thoroughly oiled the universal joint tasted my gas felt of her radiator made sure her springs were O. K.) i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her up, slipped the clutch... just as we turned the corner of Divinity avenue i touched the accelerator and give her the juice, good (it was the first ride and .believe i we was happy to see how nice she acted right up to the last minute coming back down by the Public Gardens i slammed on the internalexpanding & externalcontracting brakes Bothatonce and brought allofher tremB -ling to a-:dead. stand;Still) (end Boogie Woogie) 45) Diego Rivera 1932, Man and Machinery, Detroit Inst, of Arts MUSIC: Honegger 1924, Pacific 231, (close). Vanguard SRV-274 SD; -——— cf. Mussolov c. 1928, Steel Foundry or Symph. of Machines, -------------------------------------------- old 78 PAT-X96300 The Left had begun Avant-garde, politics. iconoclastic in art as in (MOssolov's 1928 Machine music communizes this 1924 �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell Honegger "Pacific 231".) 17 But the populist rallying, even as it absorbed the radical, veered in counter-revolt against it. In a Mexico which called itself Marxist, Diego Rivera (with others) forged abstract into realism, satire into proletarian acclaim.Meanwhile Left and Right enforced totalitarian conformity. One was tempted to divide Western Civilization into three overlapping spans: 1st, the mystico-ascetic or Medieval; 2nd, the free-humanlst, rising from that ground to Renaissance vigor, 17th century formulation, 18th and 19th century climax, with orgies of lacerative individualism extending into this century; 3rd, the ordered-materialist, growing from the industrial revolution to the state assertions of pur time. (end Pacific 231) From the pragmatic perspective of this third, what was the whole surreal and abstract wave but a bourgeois pathology? As from the flight of Symbolist vision, the mass hardening was a reactionary pathos of between-wars. 46) 0.Kokoschka 1913, Dolomite Landscape: Tre Croci, Horstmann Coll'n, Hamburg Against its blatancy, stands the wonder of the ultimate modern: -- Rilke's last Duino Elegy, the Tenth, gleaming as far as its "stars of the Land of Pain" — "Die Sterne des Leidlands" over the art scene. MUSIC: Alb.Berg 1935, Vln Concerto, Philips ST 802-785 LY (opening) What can we do but invoke it again, and with it, also the music its death molting claims — Berg's Violin Concerto, which brings the sensory renewal of the 'thirties to a like transcendence? It was before the First War, and in the vein of rapt wonder Kokoschka approached in that Austria, that Rilke received the first fifteen lines, ending: �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 18 We wasters of sorrows — wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen -...though they are nothing else Than our winter foliage, our somber evergreen... Place and settlement, camp, soil and dwelling. When the poet, in the trough of between-wars, found his way back to these Elegies begun at Duino, 47) Paul Klee 1915, Der Niesen, Hermann Rupf, Bern the tenth had become a surreal pilgrimage: How strange alas are the streets of the city of pain... Franz Marc having fallen in the great blood-letting, who could advance with Rilke out through the "wide landscape of laments" — "die weite Landschaft der Klagen"? plumbed the subconscious. Klee, as much as anyone, But can Klee's clever miniatures, here Mount Niesen, behind the Lake of Thun, match Berg's requiem for Manon Gropius, much less Rilke's ascent with the Early Dead? (Leishman & Spender) ...in silence the elder Lament brings him as far as the gorge where it gleams in the moonlight, — there, the source of joy — 48) Kandinsky 1913, Improvisation (The Flood), Stadtische Gal., Munich MUSIC: still Berg, Vln Concerto, skip to stormy death It was Klee's miraculous inventions which had mediated the 1 1920 change in Kandinsky. Surely, there is a proportionality between the pre-war and post-war styles in Kandinsky and Rilke. The Apocalyptic storm by which Kandinsky turns his 1913 Flood disaster to a color vortex of earth-swallowing spirit, matches the 1912 stratum of the Tenth Elegy: "that secret weeping may blossom" -- "dass das unscheinbare Weinen bluhe", heart's looser night-surrender to the inconsolable sisters' loosened hair. 49) Kandinsky 1926, Several Circles, detail, Guggenheim Museum, NYC �20th Cent. Melt - 19 C.G. Bell MUSIC; Berg continued into the Choral While when Kandinsky comes, through Dada, Klee and Bauhaus, to the ethereal geometry of this 1926 "Several Circles", it is as if Berg had brought Bach's "Es ist genug" out of a 12 tone agony, or Rilke, under pain ranges had found the "well of joy", ...with awe she names it, says "Among men it's a carrying stream" —"Bei den Menschen/ ist sie ein tragender Strom"— (fade Berg Vln Concerto & skip to the close) So the close of the Berg, like the Rilke — up heights seeded with catkins and the spring rain — climbs the vanishing diapason, to the emotion that almost startles when happiness falls. die uns beinah besturzt, wenn ein Gluckliches fallt. (close of the Berg, without speech) 50) Russian Byzantine 1508, Fresco of Last Judgment, Cathedral of the Annunciation, Kremlin, Moscow MUSIC: Russian 16th c(?), Christmas Hymn, Anthol. Sonore LP-10, A, 1 It is of crucial significance that the materialist nation of the future, Rhssia, should have remained so long immersed .in the lavic appropriation of Byzantine, (this 1508 Kremlin chapel), an orthodoxy 19th century Slavophils must turn into an earth-might — even to the passionate harmonization of all ancient chant, Against so national a mystique, how could Marx say: (fade chant) "The working­ men have no country"? 51) Kiprensky 1827, Portrait of Pushkin, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow In the romantic westernization of that Russia, this portrayed Pushkin, sad singer of autumn — "Sweet mournful days, lure of �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt 20 leave-taking eyes" — is .also the prophet a six-winged seraph gave in the waste, eagle eyes, ears to hear the spheres "And the green vine in the valley climbing", for his own lying tongue that of the wise serpent, and for his human heart a coal of fire. So he wakes to the voice of God: Wander the gray seas and earth roads And burn men's hearts with this, my Word! Was it then that he called to the mine prisoners of Siberia?: The walls will crumble at a word... And brothers give you back the sword. 52) Malevich 1911, Taking in Harvest, Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam In the Avant-garde revolt of the first quarter of this century, Russians leapt to the fore. and Stravinsky, lived abroad. representation kept pace, Paris. Though most, like Kandinsky Not Malevich, whose break with from year to year, with Munich and With the exception of a brief stay in France, 1912, and in Germany, 1926, he stuck it out, through war and revolution, in Moscow. In this 1911 Harvest Scene, the observed puts on the barrels of cylindrical abstraction. 53) Malevich 1913, Head of a Peasant Girl, Stedelijk Mus., Amsterdam In this 1913 "Head of a Peasant Girl" Malevich moves, under the impact of Picasso's cubism, toward what he would formulate as "a feeling for the absence of the object." By 1916 this compl of curved foldings had also yielded to a Constructivism of plane geometry, culminating in the nuclear ultimate of "Suprematism". As Malevich wrote: 54) Malevich c. 1915, Black Square, Russian Museum, Leningrad Suprematism compresses all of painting into a black square on a white canvas. I did not have to invent anything. It was the absolute night I felt in me; in that,- I perceived the creation, and I called it Suprematism. It expresses itself in the black plane in the form of a square. �s 20th Cent. Melt - 21 C.G. Bell Though Diaghilev had observed in the cresting of 1905; We are witnesses of...a new and unknown culture which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. While the Revolution thought itself avant-garde, Malevich had art power in Russia. From Trotsky ("The mind of the artist will limp after the reality the politicians are creating") to Stalin, reaction hardened (was it the outrage of that Internationale where ground and trees were painted in loud geometries?)- When Malevich died in 1935, it was in poverty and neglect, his once Bolshevik attempt called "Bourgeois formalism". 55) Boris Johanson 1933, Interrogation of two Communists, USSR At what flaming acts and inertia of art that overthrow and changing of the tinctures connived. Here a 1933 Interrogation of two Communists, with Shostakovich and Sholokov: . , < (Kouseva tsky; MUSIC: Shostakovich 1937, Fifth Symphony, 1st Mvt, before climax, / =: .. ■ -- Col ML 47 39 Bravely, proudly lifting his head, Podtielkov mounted the stool beneath the noose, unbuttoned the collar around his stout sv/arthy neck, and without the tremor of a muscle, himself set the soapy rope... "See -how few* are left to look on at our death... You have been deceived. The revolutionary government will come, and you will see where the truth was. The finest sons of the gentle Don you have laid in that hole." (fade Fifth Symphony) Let this picture from the year Hitler came to power exemplify the state realism Stalin also enforced. 56) Pavlo Filonov c. 1935?, Fragment of Faces ("Hidden Soviet Art", Life Mar.28, 1960) MUSIC: Shostakovich 1936, close of Symph. 4, Melodiya-Angel SR-40177 And only long after, with the literary underground we know of, paintings would appear of an Avant-garde suppressed under Soviet �20th Cent. Melt C.G,. Bell conformity: 22 this mosaic of distrubed faces by Filonov, Leningrad painter who died in 1941. Suddenly one would realize what one must have known before, that consciousness is like a gene-pool; post-romantic civilizations may demand, resolve; but they cannot obliterate what has been experienced by the soul. It is a tribute to Shostakovich that in his experimental works, condemned or quietly withdrawn, we are hypnotized toward that other focus — as with the mysterious -close of the disapproved Fourth Symphony. 57) (close Shostakovich 4th) Peter Blume 1934-7, The Eternal City, Mus. of Modern Art, NYC When Mussolini in 1923 popped out of the Pandora box, among battered books and broken statues of the Eternal City, he did not 'look so green-faced as Peter Blume would make him more than twelve years later. Lincoln Steffens in fact had thought him God's clc.rifying thunderbolt. asked. "You're a correspondent?" "You saw the war? Revolution in Russia? anything... Listen. Yes. Yes. And the peace? Well," he sneered, Mussolini had Yes. And the "did you learn Do you think now any of the things you thought before you saw the war, the peace and the revolution?" But if that was God's thunderbolt, Steffens obscured the ■h' turning of God on himself — how Futurist ecstatic rant and d'Annunzio's foaming poems, leagued with Mussolini and castor oil to make the trains run on time, might overshoot. no more of the brotherhood, "Let us hear sisterhood and other bastard relations of nations; all relations of nations are those of power"... 58) Hitler c. 1920?, early painting of a dream castle, Life 10/30/39 — So darkening Europe under Flying Fortresses. Since meanwhile a most inadequate representational painter. �20th Cent. Melt C.G. Bell 23 the Austrian, Adolf Hitler, had concretized, and, in the bitterness of German defeat and inflation, was deflecting his art from such paintings as this castle (dream madhouse he might have escaped from) to a Mein Kampf veering of Socialist Workers to the turgid Right. As Dante had said of the wrathful: "Portando dentro accidioso fummo." With the Dachau smoke of that strange incinerator, the pathos of moral rearmament and soul-hardening would spread over Europe the fiercest realism of all. 59) Adolf- Wamper c. 1938, Genius of Victory, Kunst Vol 81, 1933-40 In the "Genius of Victory" by Wamper (another Adolf), everything from abstract and Expressionist, D^da and Surreal is forcibly reversed in the Charles Atlas imperative of totalitarian renewal — caricature of Nietzsche's call to higher living: A ruling race can only grow from terrible and violent beginnings. Where are the barbarians of the twentieth century? (If only the Germans could have claimed a monopoly of theml) 60) Double: Saint-Sever Apocalypse c. 1050, Flood, Bibl.Nat., Paris; and Picasso 1937, Guernica, det. of Left portion, Barcelona? "The tiger springs in the new year . ' Us he devours." T.S. Elio,t in "Gerontion" had voiced that cyclical Coming — so "the innumerable clanging wings" and "Sailing to Byzantium" of Yeats' War, Civil War and post-war Tower. Even Picasso, though more Socialist than Christian, has visibly rested his 1937 bombing of Guernica on a Flood destruction from the Saint Severs Apocalypse of 1050. So the Wasteland had shaped for its age a mythology of earth-sabotage: What is the city over mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Vienna London Unreal... Alexandria �C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 24 (To which the Second War would add Warsaw, Rotterdam, Dresden, and all the rest.) Double: Picasso 1937, Guernica 1st State; and Final State Against the Communist realism of Russia, Picasso's Partisan testimony fragments space and abstracts emotion. From the first state of the Guernica (below) to the last (above), human content (the redemptive pain of the warrior stretched out as if crucified) is calcined and suppressed. Yet in a pictography where perspective, foreshortening, chiaroscuro go under, force flames some Heraclitean inverse of negation. While the claimants of world order cranked up their rhetoric, Picasso locked horns with god in the whirlwind. •_Picasso 1937, Guernica 2nd State det. Warrior's raised fist rays & corn; and Final State det., sword hand with flowers Even so, programmatic message — Rilke's hazel catkins from the dead land, rooted far back in the Revolutionary and Romantic, s Weary the winters, at the last comes corn" — has shaped in the photographed second state of the painting (above), such a sun-rayed promise of grain from the warrior's raised fist. And although the symbolic arm was to disappear under the writhing horse, it is in the final state (below) hand of a dead woman, spray of flowers; that what had been the long since painted out, would resurrect as a Dante's "so long as hope puts up a blade of green"; Rilke's "Heilkraut" of the Fifth Elegy, his "Singing plant" on the peaks of the heart". hand, Leafing up from the clenched sword it counters annihilation. ^_War II photo 1945, Demolition on Iwo Jima, Eastman House, Rochester So where the First War had ended in capitalist debunking, the Second swelled through Partisan alliance to a crusade of the �20th Cent. Melt - 25 C.G. Bell "Peace-loving Peoples", while Churchills's rhetoric of "blood, sweat and tears" and "Fight them on the beaches, fight them at sea, fight them in the air", revived the myth of heroic action. -- How fragile, in the wa^ of Eliot's West: I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain... My house is a decayed house... I an old man A dull head among windy spaces. and: Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still -- how vulnerable to My Lai. 64) Joan Miro 1942, Woman & Bird in front of the Sun Yet through the war and the decade after, down to the overflow of Hippie wish, something extraordinary happened; the partisan crusade incredibly veered through the reversal of Cold War into New Frontiers and the dream of free enterprise opulence. At the same time those arts which had begun in Dada mockery expand the same techniques (this 1942 Miro) to visionary wonder. In Finnegan's Wake of 1939, Joyce led all artificers of transverbal myth: We who live under heaven, we of the clovery kingdom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land. We suddenly have... A kind of a thinglike all trayloggedthen pubably it resymbles a pelvic or some kvind then props an acutebacked quadrangle with aslant off ohahnthenth a wenchyou may cuddler, lying with �20th Cent. Melt - 26 C.G. Bell her royal Irish uppershoes among the theeckleaves. Signs are on of a mere by token that wills still to be becoming upon this there once a here was world. As the dayeleyves unfolden them. In the wake of the blackshape... 65) Arshile Gorky, 1944, "How mv Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in my Life", Coll'n Bagiev Wright, Seattle MUbiC: Carter 1959. Str.Qrt 2, near close. Col RJi272l At the same time the Turkish Armenian immigr^Kt Gorki (up to his accident and suicide) had seized on and was melting down the abstract and the surreal extremes of Avant-garde, crashing through about 1941 to a subconscious plasticity of paint-fused canvas, drips and all, as it has been called, "a ' phenomenology of the invisibile". �20th Cent. Melt - 27 C • G. Bel 1 Was the musical tie back to Ives, or to his followers, here Carter? (fade Carter) It was Gorki's flag which bannered the pfncer attack (action painting and color field) of the New York School, of which Motherwell would write: The present vitality of American Art is connected with the unparallelled depth of our democracy. 66) 0. Pollock 1943, Pasiphae, Coll'n Lee K. Pollock (or a later one?) Pollock's liberation is like that of a Cage happening. MUSIC: John Cage c. 1954?, from Variations IV, a live performance. Everest 3132 In poetry it was the old Pound (though hardly democratic) whose Canto's stirred such unleashing. The stench of wet coal, politicians ............... e and ...........in, their wrists bound to their ankles Standing bare bum Faces smeared on their rumps, wide eye on flat buttock. Bush hanging for beard, Addressing crowds through their arse-holes. Addressing the multitudes in the ooze, newts, water-slugs, water-maggots... howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing house, the clatter of presses... foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges, dung, last cess-pool of the universe... the great arse-hole, broken with piles, hanging stalactites, greasy as sky over Westminster... chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy, ........m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles, monopolists, obstructors of knowledge, obstructors of distribution. (end Cage) 67) Franz Kline 1959, Initial. Robt. S. Scull. Gt. Neck, N.Y. In that booming growth market of elemental art, when the international Black Mountain voice of Franz Kline lets loose, in one of those huge free-brush signatures (this of 1959, called Initial), what is that 100 inch vehemence of Chinese caligraphy turned to muscular release telling us of? If of Jung's "superhuman world of contrasting light and darkness"-- �20th Cent. Melt - 28 C.G. Bell the primordial experience rends from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture Of an ordered cosmos, and allows a glimpse into the unfathomed abyss of what has not yet become -What of Jung's warning: "to which one is therefore in danger of suc­ cumbing"? 68) Jim Gilbert 1949?, Chicago River, detail. CGB & D^B, Santa Fe And when that last old master, Jim Gilbert, about 1949, so aware of post-war experiment, yet pursuing on his own the Cezanne problem of color shapes through the visible (the darks of this detail not unlike those of Kline's ink-writing), when Gilbert gloomed the Chicago River, what does that melancholy bum see in the clouded water but hints of Asian war and ecological catastrophe — Pollock's open-throttle democracy, slinging oil, ready to sling a rod? RocKefexler, Ketropoli ta.n 69) N. Amer. Indian, Mississippi Stage, Duck River, Stone Man, Mus. Prim. Art NYC How much, all over the world, has been melted down into the restless improbability of that chain-reaction. With what timeless sufficiency the stone man of the Tennessee Moundbuilders looks back at the museum lookers of New York. To tell those upstarts how long that forest crouch could have been maintained. 70) Oscar Howe 1962, Medicine Man, US Dept, of the Interior MUSIC: Native American Church, tape of chant with drums Today, even in the Peyote-cult chant of the Native American church (Christian), the irreversible trend is of the melting pot. In this 1962 Medicine Man by Oscar Howe (a Sioux trained in Santa Fe), Indian life gives theme and local color to a panal of which the consciousness and cubistic techniques are world-modern. 711 Clas^sical Mava c. 700, Hill temple stripped of trees, Yaxchilan. Chig,pas —^^-----------------------(Gertrude^om) In 500 years Classical Maya culture had exhausted its habitat �20th Cent. Melt - 29 C.G. Bell (no doubt by cropping the jungle around such populations centers as this Yaxchilan, sacred city in a great bend of the Usumacinta. Abandoned about 1300, it is only now that the temples have been cleared of whelming forest. As when facing the monuments of the Near-East, of India, China, or the Cambodian ruins of the Kingdom of the Khmers, we are staggered by the contrasting glories of pre-Western man, each isolated fastness flowering in its own life and style. 72) Maya c. 800, Jaina Style, painted pottery (whistle). Lovers, Bliss Coll_l£ ---- ----Nat. Gal., wash. DC —'■ '' .So in the late Classical Maya, the Gulf Coast island of Jaina produced wonderfully refined painted pottery figurines, in which ari­ stocratic life is depicted with a finesse and verve as of the Orient, though with a fusion of beauty and the mocking grotesque elsewhere un­ paralleled -- a tragi-comic individuation on its own human terms, to which we have lost the clue. 73) M. Ocoranza C. 1870?, The Withered Flower, Bellas Artes, Mexico DF How weird, after the conquest, to see the whole expanse, from Toltec through Aztec to Maya, take up the leavings of Europe — Ocoranza, sentimentalist of the Federal District, receiving from Greuze of The Broken Pitcher this erotic double-talk of lechery and morality the poor debauched girl tearfully contemplating her snapped lily. 74) Orozco 1937, Hidalgo, fresco det., stairhall. Pal de Govierno, Guadalajara No wonder the mawkish mummery broke to Orozco's frescoes of the Revolution, where the Meschittf firebrand Hidalgo frees the enslaved masses. Though that would-be socialist upheaval empowered another exploitation by the few. 75) Orozco 1939, Man of Flame, fresco, Hospicio Cabanas, Guadalajara Prophetic, that the national series of between-war Orozcos should A, �20th Cent. Melt - 30 C.G, Bell culminate in the cupola of the Hospicio Cabanas in Guadalajara, the dilemma of the man of flames -- as with Kazantzakis' Odysseus -- that to live is to be consumed, the ascent of man inevitably his conflagration. 76) L. Garcia Guerreo 1961, Pintura 99, Priv. Coll'n, Mexico, DF Meanwhile art-Mexico settled from the '30's peak of Expressionist propaganda realism to the undifferentiated internationalism -- whether weak or strong -- of Guerrero's flame and black abstraction, entitled, after Kandinsky and the rest. Picture 99, 1961. Nok Sculpture of Nigeria c. 600 BC, 77) MUSIC: ------- Terra Cotta Head, Inst, of Arts, Detroit Malinke (14th c. Mali of E. African), Percussion Dance (calabash water drums tuned in 4ths) 01ympic:Atlas 6110 The African Black enters art in the Nok terra cottas of Nigeria about 600 BC, these heads as charged with force as the drum rythms which, from that continental base (here the 14th century Mali of East Africa) and with unparallelled dispatch, would ravish the entire world. 78) Hellenistic c. 1st cent.BS, Young Negro Musician, bronze, det. Chalons-sur-Saone A measure of that power (with which Faulkner, who calls it indomitable, has energized his fiction), that when it fans out 500 years later from the Nile into Graeco-Rome, the most sophistic Hellenistic bronzes suddenly sway with the pulse of black body and the throb of black soul. 79) Eakins 1878, Negro Boy Dancing, watercolor, Metro. Mus, NYC A measure — that when in Eakins' Emancipated Philadelphia (after the Civil War) the lithe banjoist strikes up, it is recognizably in the same beat; and when the boy responds for his father with a dance, it is with the unaltered suppleness of abandoned ligatures. No doubt, through all vicissitudes, the Negro, as unmistakably as any group in history, will have held his own. (fade Malinke drums) 80) Abu Salley (US Black) 1977, acquatint & etching; "And they tried to kill all our Buffalo"; C.G. Bell Coll'n �20.th Cent. Melt - 31 C.6. Bel 1 Yet when today's American Black rouses the Irish blood of his ancient servitude, and under the Mohammedan name of Abu Salley, takes over, in post-Gdya etching (with the hanged Christ), the dismembered totems of our Indian tragedy -- "They tried to kill all our Buffalo" -- he is as catastrophically world-modern as the French, or English poems of the New Africa • this Parkes, of Ghana, "Apocalypse"; In the last days'. Strange sights shall visit the earth. Sights that may turn to blood the moon. This sun to midnight -- in the last days. But now, when swords are not yet ploughshares. And spears still spears... Remember, my little ones... If in this strange sub-human realm Your eyes fall on a stone, a hard black stone. Lifeless and muddy, that has grown a beard. Pray children...ask no questions... If perchance you see a hare that roars Or an ape perched in a palanquin. Look on in silence. Quickly pass by. Quickly. 81) Double: Attic c. 285 BC (replica). Head of Epicurus, Met. Mus., NYC; and Hadda (Gandhara) c. 4th cent. AD, Stucco bust of an Ascetic, Mus., Kabul MUSIC: ______ Bismillah Khan (Benares) Shehnai (cf. oboe) & acc't, Raga-Lalat, Odeon V..::::: ------------MOAE 113 The excavations of the Indus Valley reach back to the earliest civilizations of the third millennium; but the India we think of as primordial, has elaborated its arts since contact with Alexander. As Dion Chrysostom records (c. 80 AD) : "even among the Indians, they say, Homer's poetry is sung, having been translated by them into their own dialect." If the epics so implied .claim -- like the Vedas — the second millennium of Aryan conquest, the earliest Sanscrit inscription remains of 150 AD; and who can rear a history of thought, poetry and music over the flux of oral tradition? In art, on the contrary, we perceive at a glance the Indianization of the Greek philosopher �•$ C.G. Bell 20th Cent. Melt - 32 image, from this urbane Epicurus (left) stemming from the 3rd century BC; to the Gandharan ascetic of Hadda (right), in what is now Afganistan. 82) Indian (Madya Pradesh) c. 1000 AD, Kandarya-Makadeo (Siva) Temple, Kajuraho, N. India When Bismillah Khan of Benares performs on the Shehnai (a kind of oboe) this Raga-Lalat, a melody of morning pathos, to the tablat 16 beat Teental rythm, that improvisation of today issues like robed Brahmins from the por­ tal of the living past -- this lOOOAD Shiva temple in Madya Pradesh. Here no revolution has occurred; in art, in music, in the recitation of Sanscrit hymns, it might seem timeless India was flowering still. (jump to close of ■ Ra^ 83) Indian scene, on the banks of the Ganges in Benares (Hurlimann,) Though the whole life of India, through British occupation, Ghandi and the achievement of independence, cries out (as here on the Benares banks of the Ganges) how desperately that soul-stretched land is caught in the aTl-melting whirl of modern necessity ; good nighti" "Do not go gentle into that It is the Third World of Galway Kinnell's "To a Child in Calcutta"; In Calcutta, I thought. Every pimp, taxi driver, whore and begger. Dowsed for me through the alleys day and night -In Bandook Gulli I came upon you, I On a street crossed by fading songs I held you in my arms Until you slept, in these arms. In rags, in the pain of a little flesh. 84) Affandi (Indonesian Expressionist) c. 1940?, The Barber, Museo d'Arte Orientale, Rome And when Buddhist India spilled over into the Cambodian Kingdom of the Khmers, how remote that jungle majesty from what the Wes tern-trained Expressionist, Affandi, has recorded in his "Barber" -- not to speak of the Manifesto now invading the Indonesian poverty- vacuum of coca-cola exploitation �ts 20th Cent. Melt - 33 C.G. Bell and napalm-war. 85) China (end Raga) (Sung) c. 12th cent., Kuan-yin (Bodhisattva), Fine Arts, Boston MUSIC: Ancient Chinese, Tzuey Ueng Charn, played on the chyn (zither), RCA-V-LM ---■ —----------------------------------------------------^--------------- 6057, Side 1, Band 1 Erom the imperial China of this 12th century polychromed wood; Kuan-yin Compassionate Bodhisattva in the posture of Royal relaxatioi^a figure of meditational command, with a zither tune of refined intoxication, 86) (end zither) Hua T'ien-yu (Chinese Sculptor) c. 1940?, Air Raid, Priv. Coll'n, Paris the same time-vortex whirls us (about 1940?) into the "Air Raid" of Paris trained Hua t'ien-yu; where Oriental mother and children, stretched on the. wish and danger of romantic self and mechanized war, seek, like a bomb shelter, the containment of abstraction. Though again what would intervene would be the Communist absorption of individual desire in a realism no lessTfestern than propaganda gladness -87) No. Korean 1975, "The Fatherly Leader Marshal Kim.II Sung with our Compatriots, from Japan", Commun. Publication here from the-Democratic People's Republic of North Korea, "The Fatherly Leader Marshal. Kim II Sung with our Compatriots from Japan" -- which, though it purports to be most militantly of the East, has scarcely a trace of anything Less Euro-American than pie in the sky. Is not the touted "Immortal Juche Idea" of the fatherly leader himself a plural rehandling of the most blatant Victorian poem, Henley's "Invictus": "I am the master of my fate...the captain of my soul"? At the same time that the East has materialized that promise -88) India (N.W. Deccan) MUSIC: 5th Cent., Gautama, the Buddha, Cave 10, Ajanta Tibet, Lamaist Chanting, RCA-V-LM 6067, Side II, Band 1,b the flower-child West, alienated from those goods, reverts to a quietism the Orient has abandoned — this haloed Gautama Buddha of 5th century Ajanta, with �20th Cent. Melt - 34 C.G. Bell Tibetan drums and chant. That an ancient cave religion, however, stemming from the earth-denial and search of soul it shared with early Christianity, could now, uprooted from its habitat, answer for mechanized man, seems as in­ congruous as when a Buddhist monk rides a motor bike to his protest immolation, 89) (fade Lamaist chant) Blue glow of Neutrons in a high flux reactor. Oak Ridge, Tenn. and uses the gasoline to set himself on fire. Here art images knock under; since that blue grotto of neutrons in the water of a high flux reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, says things no painting, statue or building will ever say about the Promethean overweening of our three­ fold world, its fission and fusion building to a threshold, whether of advance or catastrophe is not yet decipherable in the cards. 90) Double: Paul Klee l903. Portrait of the Artist's Sister, and 1918, "Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht", both Klee Foundation, Bern Is the spaceflight from connection the only art-vivifier, where syn­ thesizing responsibility has gone stale? Thus Klee from 1903 (left) to 1918 (right); and surely if realism offers so little in the treatment of a loved sister, it must be time to dissolve those constructs of the physical, into cryptographs of lettered color-squares: "Einst den] Grau der Nacht enttaucht" — "Once from the gray of nighd; emerged/ The heavy and dear/ and strong from fire" -- with the rest of the fathomless message, penned above and painted below. 91) Mexico, Mahogany Logs on a pon. , near Lacanha, Chiapas (C6B '78) Was there a tie, when the abstract chessboard took over, in the break­ down of realistic cultivation — a link always stronger from war through between-war and second war, to now (mahogany logs floating on a lake in the vanishing Lacandon rain-forest, Chiapas)-- a tie between the miscarriage of earth and of art-representation -- �20th Cent. Melt - 35 C.G. Bell 92) Skylab nears reentry 1979, NASA (Smithsonian May 79) as between the desperate gamble of other worlds (Skylab 1979, nearing reentry), and the assault of abstract art on the secrets of the void? 93) Geo. Catlin 1836, Sioux Indians pursuing a stag in a- canoe, Smithsonian ------------- ----------- —-----------------Wash. DC Wherever-polarities, (Empedocles'^Eros and Eris, Love and Hate) are to be drawn, like light and dark, from the mottlings of the actual -- all phenomena, all experienced states, though we give them polar names (as bound and free), can no more coincide with their limits than a hyperbola can touch its asymptotes. Fire and water treated as symbolic opposites are other than their haunting appearances in nature and history. As far back as Catlin's first studies of fhe American West, this water-rich concord of man and nature sets firestick killer against grazer. 94) Catlin 1830, Prarie meadows burning, upper Missouri, Smithsonian, Wash.__DC As here the same upper-Missouri sets, against the slow uprearing of plant, fire -- both Heraclitean, all-consuming limit, and a seasonal process, destruction contained in the form-building balances of nature. Already Catlin's America is stretched over straining absolutes of leaf and flam^. 95) Japan (Heian Period) MUSIC: lOth-llth cent., Dai-itoku Myo-o, Fine Arts, Boston, Peking c. 1850,opera. Beheading a Son, close, RCA-V-LM—6057 (1 ,6.) So if they were indeed gods, those worshipped ambivalencies (this Daiitoku Myo-o, fire guardian of the Esoteric Buddhist Pantheon, with whom our World Melt began — here too with Peking opera), they must have stared through it all before, like Yeats' "Old Rocky Face" — laughing "in tragic joy". (end Peking Opera) Foreseeing that at the end of romantic reversal and abstract splurge. �20th Cent. Melt - 36 C.G. Bell from between wars and after, to the Hippie disburdening of all restraint, ■96) M. Rothko 1936, Self Portrait, estate of Mary A. Rothko ther^ would come a man named Rothko, American, born in Russia 1902, his 1936 Self Portrait the burnt-out malaise of old Europe landed in Melting Pot New York, — that pathos of the '30's crying for the ab­ stract conversion of the '50's, compared by some with Paul's cataclysm by blinding light — though William Carlos Williams' "I gave up" had explored the way -- based everywhere, from fceat defiance to drugged hope, on the same desperate evidence, to boost ultimate negation into transration orbit; -97V Rothko 1938, Subway Scene, Rothko Estate (Guggenheim Rothko show). Foreseeable, he would try New Deal realism, still groping at age 36 — this Subway, he would try, and fail, rather inconspicuously; until surreal and abstract, Kandinsky, Miro, Gorky came to the rescue 98) Rothko 1945, Primeval Landscape, Estate of the Artist (Guggenheim Show) (this primeval Landscape of 1945) — as he would later theorize: The progression of a painter's work as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I give (among others) memory, history or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from’which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood -ignoring Jung's devouring abyss, where Idea, stripped of world-content converges the limits of infinte and void -- what Sylvia Plath longed toward in her "Poppies in July": Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm?... A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts 1... If I could bleed, or sleepl -- �■ » 45 20th Cent. Melt - 37 C..G. Bell If my mouth could marry a hurt like thatl... But colourless. Colourless. He on the verge of that, talking of myth and the collective un­ conscious, yet drawing from the abstract surreal no such archetype as Picasso's GLsrrrica, still searching, through dream roots, swirl and vegetation, a 43 year old genius, not yet sure -- the private life also in upheaval... 99) Rothko 1961, Number 118, Nordrhein-Westfalen Coll'n, Dusseldorf MUSIC: Messiaen 1940, Quatour pour la Fin du Temps, Beginning of last mvt, ----------------------------------- —---------------------------------- Deutsche Gram. 2531 093 When suddenly, 1949, almost ten years after Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Rothko, in touch with Barnett Newman, who had like­ wise probed the surreal, and then struck deep into color pools crossed by one or two (more vital than geometric) bands -- now Rothko, nearing 50, took up the rapturous drowning -- those soul absorbing color glows, melting at the edges like cloud: -- such a breakthrough as the poet Roethke's, though his led, outwardly, to classical measure: In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade... I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go. How slowly dark comes down on what we do. 100) (fade Messiaen) Rothko 1970, Black on Gray, Acrylic, Anon, owner (Guggenheim show) MUSIC: same Messiaen, close of last movement Although the soul-solitude of those paradox voids plagued Rothko with continual self-doubt, for 20 years he pursued the logic and mystery of that inmersion, culminating in the '60's in contemplative rooms of such hypnotic panels. Though of those for the Chapel of Religious �20th Cent. Melt - 38 C.6. Bel 1 Meditation in Houston, arranged like ikons by singles and triptychs (in suggested accord with the Passion of Christ) he said in disappoint­ ment, shortly before his suicide; "I was always looking for something new more." He was 67, in poor health and with/family troubles; yet the release of the primordial, to draw an always expected more from an always attenuated less, until the infinite hangs on the zero, gives that death symbolic dimension. At the end, he thinned to acrylic in this horizoned Black on Gray, whose Dark Light, draws us on, as to a landing on a formless planet, to grope the alien atmosphere for whatever we once called our own. ... Is this the way The world melts, on the wind suffers a cloud change? (close Messiaen) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 38 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 20th Cent. C: World Melt, Symbolic History, Part 37 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 37 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_37_20th_Cent_C--World_Melt https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fdf76224d7534fb924b715c96430b3df.pdf 16dafb5633b3d3c11de8d5f717310c44 PDF Text Text Symbolic' C.G. Bell synfiOLiC' ^t^sTOJly TFi’rougFw SigFvt ancC SouncC 36. 1) Htomic Rge: [istow '-fH' / Frontiers Neio and Lost Tfioto of1946, ^Picasso ivitfi J^rjcmfoise QiCot, Cote (CS^zurjgprVpSetmCs- la)' ^S^Hit/-dtLai( Music: -j Charlie Parker (1920-55, Saxophonist & Composer), Bird Nest, from Jazztone LP ^ I'2,1^ Our search is infd the strange euphoria of the post-war world. With what release of spirit Picasso, after the immurement of oc­ cupied France (and as the saxophone harmonics of Charlie Parker, miraculous bird, sounded the rebirth of jazz), with what release Picasso moved to the Cote d'Azur with Frangoise Gilot, new mistress, then wife, for his storm-happiest years (until she broke off, with their two children in 1952). Though the tensions under all that liberation were to seize on one such sun-bathing day, when former model-love’ Dora Maar, also walking the beach, would drive a crucifying heel into the sleeping Fran9oise's outstretched hand. 2) (Picasso, 1946, La Hole (Ce Vivre, QritnaCdi Museum, LLntiBes;^ ^ cCetaU Had not jazz put off the old chord-norms of the hunjanist claim (music) for an energy as stripped to the radical as in nuclear* fire — all particles accelerated? So with Picasso's abstractioiis: whether of satyr delight, this Joie de Vivre, also of 1946; or the converse its bacchanal held in retrospection (music skip toward cicse) 3) (Picas0, 1944-43, Lhe CdarneC (House (Museum of Modem S4.rt (ETcfiiBition); + 1? detaU this oil and charcoal summary of world outrage. The Charnel House, from a year earlier — "painting," as Picasso said, "an instru­ ment of war," and, "In former times... a painting was the result of additions. For me, the painting is the result of destructions." (music) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 1 �. Bell Symbolic History So by the acid bath of jazz, ghetto squaloigy^, and Parker's addiction turn to rhythmic drive-, keen for the abandon of either Picasso extreme. It is the flame leap from "No" to "Yes," Existentialist Sartre: "Man is condemned to be free." (end Bird Nest) 4) Joseph Wright of T>er6y, 1775, J^ireworhs for the eUction of Tope Tins (Menen, (Cetait Trace that Chain-reaction of the West: as the 18th century veered toward Storm and Stress, Wright of Derby revelled in this papal firework. So Goethe, in the Elective Affinities would seal with a firework festival the fate of his balanced couple, Edward and Charlotte, now drawn like chemicals to Ottilie and the Captain: Rockets roared skyward, bombs thundered, fireballs traced the night, squibs coiled and crackled; there were spouting wheels of sparks...crossing and weaving together. Edward, whose heart was afire, fed eager eyes on the spectacle of flame. But to Ottilie's gentle and volatile spirit, this roaring and blinding birth and decay gave less pleasure than pain. 5) ‘Turner, 1834, ‘Bumin£ of the JCouses of TarCiament, Museum, of JLrt, ThiCacCeCphia; A,^detaiC Music: Liszf 1853, Sonata in B Minor, Allegro, near close, (Arrau) Philips 6500 043 ^ And when Turner, learning that the Houses of Parliament were ablaze (1834), passed the night in ecstatic sketching of that cata­ strophe, did not the storm-topographer of an England veering from Austen to the Brontes, also seal the fire-compact, as of Liszt's B Minor Sonata? 6) 6 a) ‘lurmr, 1834, (Burning of tfo SHouses of TarCiament, waurcoCor, 'Brittsfi Museum, on view at the Tate, London; +31^ detaiC Turner, 1835, The ‘Burning of the Jhouses cf TarCiament, CCeveCancC Museum of 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 2 �.G. Bell Symbolic History But Listz s heavy chords, the spatial rhetoric of even the Turner sketches, bare the Promethean complicity, the half-god struggle of consciousness which J.H. Miller's Poets of Reality would make a postromantic syndrome, from Faust and Melville, through Conrad's Heart of Darkness: How many powers of darkness claimed him for their own... Never before did this land... river... jungle, the very arch, of the blazing sky, appear so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human reason... through Yeats ^ of man. Ravening, raging and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality... down to Eliot: . . . De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear In fractured atoms... T) Currier ancC Ives, 186S, J^aCC of ^Hicfimond, ‘llir£inia, fired By Confederate rioters; + detail Such Currier and Ives' attempt at the Civil War burning of Richmond — reaching in Faulkner's Absalom to the combustion of Sutpen's Hundred: The entire staircase was on fire. Yet they had to hold her... (Miss Coldfield)... clawing and biting at the two men who dragged her back and down the steps as the draft created by the open door seemed to explode like powder among the flames, as the whole lower hall vanished... Clyde... in that window from whi5h she must have been watching... for three months — the tragic gnome's face... against a... background of fire. -ut/kA (/ From such exsufflicate and blown surmises (that war of romantic values) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 3 �Symbolic .G. Bell 8) Japanese. (BuMfdstj !Heian, Znd ficUf of the 10th cent., iTii 86) Same, History J^ire-£uard.ian, William Carlos Williams seemed to have taken a direction as dia­ metrically opposed as, in art, that of the ancient Buddhist Fireguardians — this 10th century silk-painting from Kyoto. So William's "Burning the Christmas Greens" from about 1945, a time as serious as any for fire-death poems, yet when all that unmistakably symbolic Christmas foliage — "Green is a solace/ a promise of peace.../ those sure abutments" — roars into "a landscape of flame," "a world! Black/ mountains, black and red.../ ...and ash white/" — "in/ that instant," we break (as Williams, in the college crisis of which long after he would write Marianne Moore, must have broken, from programmatic morality and swelling utterance into the "inner security" of "despair... I resigned, I gave up") so in the poem, by a leap of sheer immediacy, we break: breathless to be witnesses, - as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire. How do the arts of our century attest that transformation? 9) Miro^ 1917, The 9dan in pyjamas, CoTection of Mr. and Mrs. SanrneC Mono Chicago, IL; + V detail Music: Bartok, 1917, from 1st Movement, 2nd Quartet (2nd forte passage) Concert Disk CS-501, Rec. I, Side 2 Consider — with three excerpts from the quartets of Bartok — Miro"^ early, middle, late. 1917, Man in Pajamas, a First-War attack in the mood of Kafka and with the weapons of Van Gogh, Expressionist, Fauve. From the same year, Bartok's Second Quartet twists com­ parable dissonances. (fade Bartok 2nd Quartet) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 4 �Symbolic 10) History / Miro, 1924, iHaumity, CoCUction of ^CamC(Penrose, Lon(Con<^V<U^ ".hoS^rtefcS-So", Rec"?re"‘ By 1924 Dada and the Surreal have led Miro into a shorthand of ironic play: Maternity - left and above, the mother’s haired head; right and below, a skirt-pelvis with a displaced hole; two children, as m Charity, a bald male below at a profile breast; above, a girl with hair, at a breast full-view — these elements tied with Calligraphic wire, the vertical, crossing a pluck like a floating worm. In Bartok of the 1920's, the Pizzicato from the 4th Quartet seems to distill such cleverness. 11) (Mtro, 1960, r[Ee!P^(C (Disl^ CoCCection of Mr. and Mrs. Victor (KCam, Off 11a) Same, (P^d'Dis!^ detail; witH various video details Music: Bartok 1939, from the last Movement of the 6th String Quartet, Bartok barely lived into the Post war; but his Sixth String Quartet of 1939 (here from the closa) has already found in avantgarde the mythopoetic renewal of transcendental. And in this Mir(< Red Disk of 1960, Dada Rorschach is launched into an orbit of cosmic excitement, as of the death-birth explosion of a star. Here is the flame-tie to William Carlos Williams' effortless acceptance: as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire. 12) ^laPe,182S-27, 'Dante drawings, Purgatory 27, Dante Before ententuj the fire, Mg-tionaC gallery of Victoria, MelBoume ; mZjL 12a) Same, Purgatory 27, detail; VUm More than a century before, Blake had hymned Regeneration y such blaze. Would he have found it strange that the Second World War, under deepening materialism and after the disillusions of the First, should grow so yeasty with the now mass ferment — as if 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 5 �Symbolic G. Bell History this Tharmas-Dante, entering at the summit of Purgatory the liberating fire ("poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina"), were also for our charnel house a passage through the threefold sleep of vegetative Beulah into the fourfold kindling of creative desire? So N.O. Browns Ap.^n.t Death is furiously impelled, from its Resurrection close, toward the chapter sequences of what would become almost a Hippie Bible — T.nve's Bodv: beyond "Boundary," through "Fire" and Free­ dom" to the "Nothing" of Cage’s Silence. al3) Samie-C TaCrmr, c. 1829, In a Sfiorefiam garden, detail, 9/ietoria and MBert 9d.usenm, London 13) Same, Shoreham garden, rohoCe Music: Schubert, 1818, from Litaney auf das Fest aller Seelen, (Schwarzkopf) Angel 35023 And when in Palmer (before 1830) Blakean vision touches a Shoreham garden - as Schubert's "Ruhn in Frieden alle Seelen" loads the litany for the Feast of All Souls with sensuous promise: The kingdom of Love is within you — (^^de Schubert) 14) ‘Bonnard, 1946-47, SUmond Lree in Blossom, Odg-tionaC Oduseum of (Modem J4.rt, Baris 5 14 a) Same, Mmond Lree, detail; + various video details Music- Benjamin Britten, 1962, from War Rpquiam, near close, Decca MET 252-3 Again, it is strange, in the pure flame of Bonnard’s 1946 flowering Almond Tree, to open the curtains of war and Dachau searing to such a renewal, in the shimmering now of modernity. So the close of Britten’s War Requiem. Of 1962; so from St.-John Perse, the Seamarks (Amers) finished 1957, its austerity swayed to the groundswell of Blake and Whitman. ...We who perhaps one day shall die, proclaim man as immortal at the flaming heart of the instant. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 6 �Symbolic History .G. Bell - Vhomme immortel au foyer de Vinstant. Bu. in music we are confronted not only by an uP^-val m *e classical tradition, IS) SolCock. 1947, ^ Joslyn 14n Mu^euv, OmU 9(s6r<^ka, detail but by the fertile anomaly of jarz. where ^ Pnmitivi^m attested from Negroid to Pop received G!laxy, absorbing had moved into transcendental rapture, t Tobey’s white-writing in the cosmic unleashing of y Nature'" I am Nam ai.n in American poetry the visionary claim opens to t _2 Ginsburg’s 1955 banana dock and rusted locomotive, with the smogdried Sunflower of that child-affirming Sutra; Ig) Tun,' (mtH tfo ^ bollock 1949, r^otosrav^d taftiU palntwg Below) Lm, (KsmemBer 9, 19S9^^^^f‘tt _ We're not our skin of grime, bleak dusty imageless locomotive, were all beautiiu uolfen sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own feed & golden hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing imo mad black formal stmflowers in the so^ fef soied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad mcoXte rYverbank' sunset Frisko hilly .mean evening sitdown vision. Yet who could forget that behind Pollock's star-cloud drips, 1933, Tainms, sam; and [Cj 1943, v j, Slpw CTort Cim;tvsasleaofl4.and'B,-rl-<~^ 17c) 4^ C of 17, ‘iollocfu SBe-'Wolf lay a violence abstracted (early 1930's, top) from his «^"‘To 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 7 �Symbolic ^.G. Bell History totems) to the fury of the wartime She-Wolf (below, 1943)? Could the dance of galactic action sublimate such an explosion of self and __ (end Dancing in the Dark) 61 18) ^ — (DouSCe, ‘Ifwmas ^ Benton: [Si] 1917, StUC Life, 7ine SLrts, CoCumBus, and tB] 1938-39, Tersepfwne, Bita Benton, tKjinsas City^ ^ 18 a) Lfwtnas Benton, 1938, SusannaH and tfu BCders, BaCaee of tHe Legion of S{onoT, San Brancisco CSL Benton, of Pollock at art school; "not an exceptional student... incapable of drawing logical sequences. He couldn't be taught any­ thing" (Life. Nov.9, 1959) — Benton, who had begun in Paris, 1917 (left), with awkward abstraction, and then come round, as in this 1938-9 Persephone endangered by Gloomy Dis as farmer, to Amer­ ican scene (avant garde and reaction buffeting each other through the century like Dante's misers and spenders in the Fourth Circle of Hell: "Tieni!" and "BurlH") — Benton, staggered in age by the Ab­ stract Expressionist outbreak: "The art of today is the art of the 1920's, which we repudiated" (had not the 1940 jLife collection of American Painting pronounced: "The wave of French modernism had spent its force by late 1929"?) — Benton had voiced the pioneer myth where Pollock began: A windmill, a junkheap... a Rotarian in their American setting have more meaning to me than Notre Dame, the Parthenon, or the heroes of the ages. 19) BericCean (Ictynos, Bfiidias, etc), 447-32, Bartfienon from the BropyCaea, In ^his Preface and Essays (1853 and '65) Mathew Arnold blamed our poetry, from Shakespeare down, for sacrificing architec­ tonic order to a brilliance of impression, image, effect. It was the Greeks, he says, who understood "the poetical character of the action in itself... They regarded the whole; we regard the parts." So it was not our "poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation," but criti7/19 94 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 8 �Symbolic .G. Bell History cism, that "disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world," which must point to such epochs of affirming wholeness — though "we shall die in the wilderness." 20J ^fiidias, 477-32 ‘S.C, Parthenon, ‘East Eed-iment, H&ad of SeCene's 3{orse, ‘Britisd Masmm, London (CQ‘B '77) ‘1720a) Same, Eartfienon, ^rtd frieze, detaiC, foutfis witd sacrificiaC o?o SLcropoCis Museum. Mdens (C(fB '77) Selene's horse from the Parthenon keeps Olympian repose, even as he sinks, restive, with the moon-chariot, into the sea. It is easy to project Arnold backward to the Greeks — the 4th Ode of Sophocles’ Antigone (Fitts and Fitzgerald): She raced with young colts on the glittering hills And walked untrammeled in the open light: But in her marriage deathless Fate found means To build a tomb like yours for all her joy. Hard to apply him forward. allowed? What would he have condemned; what • If spirit builds against entropy, it is by complicity with flame, whether in Greek tragedy or the atomic West. a21) 621) c21) 21) EoCCocI^ 1948, Mfmder 1, Museum of Modem Sirt, 9^zu ‘ford^City Irisd MS., c. 800, ‘Bood^of f 34, detaiC, ‘Trinity CoCCe^e LiBrary, London Leonarda (^f^nci, 1498, SaCa deCCa S4sse, Sforza CastCe, MiCan ‘Dou6C^'^^Tdcd^l93S, Seared, Sydney Janis CoCCection, fordi and a21 Eodoedj MymSer 1 (UvV \d»A> 21a) Tlyain, 21J4, Eodoedf Seared And what if abstraction, fragmenting the wholeness Arnold desired, might purge the sickness he deplored — that private loss, become a laughter to the gods? What Arnold invoked is the oldest polarity of thought and perception — from Heraclitus to Plato, one and many, form and flux. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 9 �Symbolic History It was the field in which Pollock came to the breakthrough of his drips _ as if the interweaving line of the Book of Kells, of Leonar os branchings in the Sforzescb ceiling, had been seized on to compose a personal agony. Yet how could the triumphal abandon of ftat apo­ calyptic wallpaper, in euphoric balance from 1947 to 50 this significantly entitled "Number One," above), exorcise the frustratio it rooted in? Inaction would recur, with works of fiercer strugg e this "Search" (below), his last, before he challenged death on a dark road. Was the consuming passion of the New York school the simul taneous overthrow and mastery of form in flux? zz> Cezanm, c. 1860, muraC btubcape found under ■aaOfuper, Jos do ‘Bouff^ near SHTijen-Trovenu) Music: (CetaiC Mendelssohn, 1843 (Overture 1826), Midsummer Night’s Dream Cezanne, archetypal modern, began before 1860 with a classic^ commitment like Arnold's. This oil-mnral found under the wa paper in the las de Boufffev then being built by Cezanne s father, l«ans to the style the Carr^and Claude received from late Renais­ sance It was a love whic^ would affect music from Mendelssohn s Midsummer Night’s Dream Nocturne to our time. Zi) (lade Nocturne) Ceainm, 1867-70, Die Jdurda, TPoferilrt Qotkry, Uvtrooob + "l^dcUiU Music- Borodin, 1876, close of 1st Movement„2nd Symphony, MHS 4013 But Cezanne, through the ’sixties, countered the classical with as lurid a violence as any of the Russians — here from the First Movement of Borodin's Second Symphony. Would Arnold have heightened the condemnation he made of his own Empedocles, against a morbid distress, without catharsis, of which the representation is painful, not tragic? (®nd A eg 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 10 �Symbolic 'G. Bell 24) History Cezanne, 1885-86, OvCont Sainte-Victdre, O^etropoCitan O^luseutn of Art, O^tv O^orli City; Music: Borodin^ 1876, Opening of Third Movement., 2nd Symphony, MHS 4013 Marvellous, how Impressionism, absorbed into Cezanne s ground of primitive force, houses the Poussin dream, but in a fabric of always more daring modernity. Surely the great calm paintings of the ’80's, this Mont Sainte-Victoire, confront Arnold with radical re­ covery of classical dignity. In music the third movement of the Borodin Second is at least comparably aimed; while the abstract imperative in fiction must have pushed Tolstoi to War and Peace, Melville to Mohv Dick and Billy BuddAndante) 25) Cezanne, 1904-06, 9^ont Sainte-Victoire, 9Qin^tmuseum, 'BaseC; A V fetaiC — Music: --------- Borodin, 1876, close of Fourth Movement, 2nd Symphony, MHS 4013 But Cezanne continued, up to the year of his death in 1906, the more shimmeringly cubistic analysis of Mont Samte-Victoire. In this rendition, perhaps his last, the dissolution of forms in a quilt of color binds flux itself into compositional patterns, startling as the new mathematics from Lobachevsky through Riemann, Dedekind, Cantor, Hilbert, to Russell and Whitehead. While the same Borodin Symphony moves^ in the last move­ ment toward a comparable suspension of tonality. aerobatics stirs euphoria. Already such Borodin) 26) BouBCe: Bicasso [A] 1895-96, first Covmunion, OvCtiseum Bi and [B] 1969, Largeffeads, QaC. Hipsenyart, Lucerne (zHde^^ 26a) Again, !g ^ u r of 26:Larye Heads Meanwhile, the 14-year-old Picasso had begun (1895) with this First Communion (left), against which we set from 73 years later (four years before the artist's death) an oil sketch called Large 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lo 5 �Symbolic .G. Bell History Heads". Here the demolitions of world and art have come, in Nietzsche's phrase, "as ia cleansing wind" to the Romantic charnel house, blasting its sentimental verisimilitudes. After two wars, with totalitarianism, earth-rape and nuclear juggling paradox and indignity fuse in the death-life of energy. Would that tragic return have pleased or troubled the author of "Dover Beach ? / 2 7) J^ranz von Stuck c. 1900(?), Mcndsum, oU Suimiw. 27 a) same, ^ I Mahler, 1883-5, Lieder eines fahrendenden Gesellen (from the last: "Ich bin ausgegangen...") VOX PL9100 Music: For the clinging heart's miasma that wind had to clear away, let Franz von Stuck's "Evening Star," with Mahler's early Songs of a Wanderer," join the clandestine brew of Browning s Porphyria s Lover": And made her smooth white shoulder bare. And all her yellow hair displaced. And, stooping, made my cheek lie there — to curdle in Meredith's Modern Love: Ah what a dusty answer gets the soul When sick for certainties in this our life! Von Stuck's lighted house on the horizon (left) among trees, the stream albng which a wife (surely) and lover have walked to kiss in the glow of Venus — such visceral fullness as Mahler drew from Brahms and Bruckner — fills a bog of romantic identification, where (fa^® Mahler) tragedy drowns in wish and waste. 28) T>ou6U: [A] TicMsso, 1900, Lovers in the Street, ^^eum, (Mru^na; and f^B] ‘Brancusi, 1912, Lhe 9Qss, 9duseum, iPhiCadeCphia; + detam^ ^ ^ Music: 7/1994 Webern, 1913 (Pub.1924), Bagatelles 1 and 2, Opus 9, V-LM 2531 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 12 ^ ^ �Symbolic 'G. BeU History By 1900, in Picasso (left), the embrace shifts to a public street, shedding romantic resonances; nature, morality, poetic ideals — a detachment which, with Brancusi's 1912 Kiss, achieves physiochemical crystalization. Is this minimaiiy altered block of stone (right) carved in earnest, irony, or play? Snch indulgences have been erased So in Webern's 1913 Bagatelles, attenuation of melody and chord precludes the moods of Mahler. (end Bagatelles) / 2mCZ7) Z^mn, von StudiMemlstem, dctaif erj -fCc€<rue,>, Even O'Neil thought in Mourning Becomes Elegm "to see the transfiguring nobility of tragedy in as near the Greek sense as one can grasp it." Though his lacerations wind the gut out on a spoo . "staring into the sunlight with frozen eyes. 2nd: 28) S^ain of 28, 'Brancusi's !Kjss Here before the first World War, that feedback howl was damped. Though Arnold's Greek baby may have gone out with the bath. 29) 9kkn7r<mf^tlu^'iSS7,'Eden,Co(k^ofthcS^t 29a) Same, •EtUn. /etaiffWfcl tfaiu Music: '^-‘1 ^ Morton Feldman, 1968, from False Relationships and the Extended Ending, Composer Rec. Inc. SD 276 In the Post-war indeterminacies of graphic music — Morton Feldman's "False Relationships and the Extended Ending huge stained-canvas improvisations of Helen Frankenthaler, we find ourselves spaced out from the old human condition. If this 1957 Eden, by its love-garden title and playful "hundred-hundred calli­ graphy (is that God caught above, red-handed?), plays at passion passion's involvement has melted away — albeit in a world of cold war. Silent Spring, Korea, Viemam. (•b''® Feldman 30) Limoges 'EncrneC, c. 1200, fuUkr and Vancing Woman, from a CRat, •Sntish 9A.usamt, London 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 13 �Symbolic 'G. Bell History 30 a) Same, S^iddter and ivonmn, detail Music: English, 13th cent., from Bryd one brere (at words), Sawt Q C n /I >rA FY In early Gothic, iconographic distance had been as automatic as the suspension of earthly loves in ascetic creed. Yet passion, (m this Limoges enamel of fiddling and dancing, or the English love song "Bird on the briar") burns through that denial with a flame sharper for its cowl of modality, bare intervals, the vacancy of yearning faces. Who could conceive at that remove the danger of romantic abandon. (fade Bryd one brere) 31) Tintoretto, 1SS7, Susanna and SCders, detaiC, 0<iinstfiistonscfies Oduseum, Music- Giovanni Gabrielli, c.1585(?), Canzona a 5 (New Ybrk Brass) In the Renaissance (here Tintoretto expansive celebration of flesh is held allegory, drama, myth, where the fires of raised and sublimated. The boundary with Giovanni Gabrielli) the in the transpersonalities of life and love can be at once condition for Shakespearean tragedy — Romeo and Juliet. Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks... Antony and Cleopatra: Your crown's awry, ni mend it, and then play (fade Gabrielli) is that cleanness of combustion. fma-ecuA, 1S64, Taolo ami J^ramesca, ScfiMtgaCCay,^Cu^ (C§^ S9) 32) 32 a) Sam, francesaa, 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 14 �Symbolic \G. Bell History Brahms, 1855-75, Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op.60, from 3rd Movement, Andante (Festival Quartet), RCA VLSC 233U Music: Past 1860, time of Brahms, even myth and legend—Dante s Paolo and Francesca: But tell me, at the time of the sweet sighs (al tempo de dolci sospiri) By what and how did love bring it about That you should know the dubious desires (i dubiosi desiri)? — even Dante's creed-suspended flame becomes, in this Feuerbach, a (fade Brahms) lure to adulterous loves. As that seduction sighs and writhes with Munch toward fin-desiecle — this love-death Madonna of orgasm, sheathed in a mantle of mummy-embryo and sperm — w^ are whelmed in Expressionistic paradox, that the abandoned cliniax of pain-passion is also its turn to symbolic alienation. Strindberg: (Playing with Fire) Daughter-in-law I will run away too! We shall die together! Friend (takes her in his arms...) Now we are lost!... Fire of hell that burns and parches all that was green and flowered! Ah! (They part and sit down again in their former chairs.) a34) (Picasso, 1932, Qirt at the (Mirror, detaiC, Museum of Modem Art, (hQCC 34) Same, §irC at the Mirror, whoCe In Picasso's 1932 Girl at a Mirror, those morbid loves are caught in a crystalline change, "pearls that were his eyes." What we are looking at must be model-mistress Marie Therese. How her belly swells with wish and pregnancy (though daughter Maia was not yet 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 15 �Symbolic :G. Bell History conceived); but the old vulnerabilities are distilled into color-forms. The curtain has been drawn on the loading of the post-romantic bed. 3S) ‘WesseCtttann, 1967, Qreat Simerican 4198, WaCCTaf-^Kicfiartz Museum, After the Second War, in the always rising market for novelties, however corn-porny the pop-art titillation of Wesselmann's Great American Nude, number 98, mouth and tit disclaim the hunger of the femme fatale. Euphoric euthanasia! a36) 36) ford MaddoTC •Brown, 1837, 'Ta^ •four Son, Sir,' detaiC, fate qaUery, London Same, fakg^ four Son, Sir," wHoCe; i\^^l7cCose detail What had been intolerable in romantic pain, its arrogation to so much, when, on the scale of Oedipus or LeM.> it deserved so little. Ford Maddox Brown's 1857 protest "Take Your Son, Sir (womb-cloth, crass father reflected in the mother-haloing mirror) brings home. So Charles Bovary's bungling operation on the clubfoot (of the same years). He has cut the tendon and strapped the foot for straightening in his famous machine. The strethopode was writhing in hideous convulsions... the box was removed. ...the livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with blisters... whence there oozed a black liquid. a3 7) •EdvardMuncfi, 1883-86, fhe SietChM, detail, Motional gallery, Oslo 3 7) Same, •Tfie Siet Child, whole Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Hyppolyte looked at Bovary with eyes full of terror, sobbing: "When shall I get well?... How unfortunate I am!" The amputation follows: A heart-rending cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to fainting... he listened to. the last cries of the 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 16 �Symbolic fG. Bell History sufferer... like the far-off howling of some beast being slaughtered. Thirty years after that Flaubert, Munch, in The Sick Child, began with the lacerative heritage. 38) 'Edvard Oduncfi, 1940, 'Betzueen tde CCocf^ and tfie Bed, SeCf-Bortrait, OduncH Oduseum, Oslo; + V detaiC By Munch's 1940 Self Portrait, "Between the Clock and the Bed," a pain no less, goes almost funny-paper grotesque. So in Faulkner's As I Lav Dying, where Cash has broken his leg and the father has poured cement on it "to ease hit some," the scene, through the eyes, of a boy (Vardaman), turns to idiot laughter: Cash's leg and foot turned black. We held the lamp and looked at Cash's foot and leg where it was black. "Your foot Iboks like a nigger's foot. Cash," I said. a39) Francis Bacon, 1964, HlenTietta Moraes, detail, Ian Stoutz^r, London; + V^^^detail 39) !francis Bacon, 1964, (DouBCe Bortrait of Lucien Ifread and IfranliSiuerBacfi (artist's collection?); + detail "I reckon we'll have to bust it off," Pa said... They got the flatiron and the hammer. Dewey Dell held the lamp. They had to hit it hard. And then Cash went to sleep. "He's asleep now," I said. "It can't hurt him while he's sleep." Music; Stockhausen, 1961-65, from Momente, voices, instruments, etc.. Nonesuch H-71157/^nto 2nd record face) Though for Francis Bacon — this so-called double Portrait of Lucien Freud and Frank Auerbach (1964) — we should advance in literature (perhaps with Stockhausen's Noise Momente) to the most mutilated post-war extension of Faulkner's picaresque — Molloy. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 17 �:G. Bell Symbolic History Beckett's fiction of a crippled anti-hero — as germane as the new mathematics of fractals bridging, order and chaos, to the mauled flesh 40) CDouBCe: [Si] Ticasso, 1939, (Portrait of SaBartes as SpanisB. Qrandee, Jirtist's Collection; and.1(3] Ifrancis (Bacon, 1972, Sdf-(Portrait, (Jdar^orougB QaCCery, (Kszo forSi 40a) Single \r\.<LLX> (Bacon, Sdf Bacon singled out from the infinitely varied brilliance of Picasso (this 1939 Sabartes as Spanish grandee, left) — Bacon struggling through a lifetime, doggedly (as in his 1972 self-portrait, right), to hang the old carcass between abstraction and the pathos of touch — like Socrates, asked in the Parmenides if dung has an eternal form. 41) fronds (Bacon, 1964, (Cfiree figures in a (Ppom, fonds (dgtionaC d'Sirt Contemporain, (Paris; + f detail 41a) (Bacon, 19S4, fwo figures in Qrass, (Private ColCn, (Paris 4lB) (Bacon, 19S3, frvo figutes, (Private Collection, So from Beckett's Molloy. with one of Bacon's life-of-a-salesman triptychs: So you get up and go to your jnother, who thinks she is alive... But could I crawl, with my legs in such a state, and my trunk? And my head... Flat on my belly, using my crutches like grapnels, I plunged them ahead of me into the undergrowth, and when I felt they had a hold, I pulled myself forward by the wrists... And from time to time I said. Mother, to encourage me, I sup­ pose... The forest ended in a ditch...and it was in this ditch that I became aware of what had happened to me... I lapsed down to the bottom of the ditch... Molloy could stay where he happened to be. 42) (DouBle: [Si] (Picasso, 1940, Woman ‘Drejtng (Ker (Hair, (Museum of (Modem Sirt, (NfC; and [(B] fronds (Bacon, 1964, left detail of 41 (,cj 42a) (Bacon, 1973, friptydi, Sirtist's Collection (video: left detaUonly) 42B) (Bacon, 1946, (Painting, Museum of (Modem drt, (MfC 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 18 �Symbolic ZG. Bell History For body too, it is on the bitterest malformations of Picasso (left: this 1940 Woman Dressing her Hair) that Bacon (right: detail) has seized. How far down both he and Beckett root the Existential claim: rMollov^ "deep down is my dwelling... somewhere between the mud and the scum." Even Beckett, Bacon, Stockhausen — in their agony — are post­ war equilibrists. (fade Stockhausen) 43) gentiCe cCa ifManoj 1423, O^tivity, Tr&cCeCCa, Uffizi, (A (Cg^B '48)vP^ d^&taiC ) ‘V43a) Same, detail of SHepHerds fmm^U'ffity Music: Brasart, c. AS 27-a 1420-30(?), from 0 Flos Fragrans, 2 ' near close, (Cape) How many centuries the arts of the West have been wooing and now breaking with Vala, Blake's luring goddess of Nature. After that action, what can reattachment signify? Consider Night. In Gentile da Fabriano and Brasart of the 1420's, how poignantly the Burgundian loves of earth harmonize Gothic mystery. (end Brasart) 44) Gossaert (9daBme), c. 1S12, S{yony in the garden, StaatCiehe 9dmeen, BerCin; detaiCs Music: Senfl, c. 1520(7), Asperges me, Domine, opening, MHS 1390 By the 16th century the wonders of the moonlit world, the enfleshed passions of man, have filled almost to plenum the old mysti­ cal realm. In what Mabuse drew from Leonardo, Senfl from Josquin (Asperges me — Cleanse me!), we approach a divide of spatial and humanist transformation. (fa^® Senfl) 43) ‘Fan di c. 163C Londonf^^detaiCs t Music: 7/1994 Buxtehude, c.1680(7), Viola da Gamba interlude from Solo Cantata, Jubilate, Lumen 32030, Side B Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 19 �'.G. Bell Symbolic History With the 17th century (this Dutch Van der Near), with the cor­ poreal harmony of Buxtehude (a viola da gamba phrase from the antata Jubilate"), one cannot say the mystery has been annulled, hough miracle seems almost resolved; wonder has taken its seat in he moonlit expanse of nature itself, formulated, as by an experimen­ tal science — Milton: "And o're the dark her silver mantle threw." ^ c. lS20,^mats in the. Sjishes, freks ‘Deutsches Xochstift ^Franl^urt-am-Main; + ‘VcCetaiCs -nocnstijt, Music: Beethoven, 1826, Quartet 14, C-Sharp Minor op. 131 movement, midway, 2v etc., Columbia M5L 277 ' ’ is. Friedrich s night scene of swans in the rushes (about 1820) of which he said. "The divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand’ Here depicted it for once in the rnshes" _ representation both maintains and etherealizes the phenomenal. Nothing in the music of tha time so disembodies harmony as the passage in the opening anasy of the C Sharp Minor Quartet, where Beethoven thins the fabric to a Renaissance-inspired polyphony of two and three. (fade Beethoven) 4 7) lBauCj(Cee, 193S, ‘WaCpurgis t%ht, ‘Tau QcUlery, London!^ cCetaik Music: Alban Berg 192^ from Lyric Suite, close of 4th movement agio, Deutsche Grammophon 5 LP Stereo 2713066, Rec. 5a ’ has fi^,!“* U content as flattened to the visionary, as in this "Walpurgis Night" - Baroque d Classical given over for inspired child-doodling. Marvellms w at related magic Alban Berg has brought from the 12-tone rows of the Lyric Suite, though with the twist of Between Wars. (fade Berg) of tH.-Hpthh.ot Music: 7/1994 Messiaen 1940, from Quartet for the End of Time 5 Louannc A lEternite de Jesus, Deutsche Grammophon St. 2531 093 ^ Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 20 �Symbolic LG. Bell History Messiaen, in a 1940 prison camp, had already entered (under the designation "Quartet for the End of Time," here from the Move­ ment "Louange d VEterniti de Jesus") into the orbit of weightlessness — what, in Rothko a few years later, subsumes night and fire in colorfield voids — this Brown, Black, on Maroon — like Roethke's dark come-through: "Ye littles, lie more close"; and, "The right thing happens to the happy man." 49) 1793, "I toant, I zoant,’ gates ofTaracCise 9, ‘BritisH UvCusetim, London; ^details Take a theme — as central as any to the world action from the Age of Revolution through our Wars — let it be Blake's from The Gates of Paradise, 1793, a little engraving labeled "I want, I want" — a ladder through the night sky reaching to the moon. For all Blake's revolt from logic, this symbol of fallen desire is literal — the temporal folly of. an eternal delight. SO) Miro, 1926, ‘Do£ ^ar^ng at the OvCoon, Sduseum of Art, ThiCadeCphia; In Mir(^s 1926 Dog Barking at the Moon (though one thinks of course of the nursery rhyme about the cow and "The little dog laughed"), the surreal has cut loose from daytin^e moorings. Yet the rift between dream and waking still flexes consciousness to weird defiance, as symbolist-loaded as when atonality warred on tonality in the music of those years. Si) Qeorgia 0'J(g,^e,19S8, Ladder to the Moon, Artist's CoCCection;^^!^^e4!ai£^ Sla) Same, Ladde^^^mtaiC ^ has Of her "Ladder to the Moon," 1958, Georgia O'Keefe writes: At the Ranch house there is a strong handmade ladder to the roof and when I first lived there I climbed it several times a day to look at the world all 'round... One evening I was waiting for a friend and stood leaning against the ladder looking at the long dark line 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 21 �Symbolic .G. Bell History of the Pedernal. The sky was a pale greenish blue, the high moon looking white in the evening sky. Painting the ladder had been in my mind for a long time and there it was — with the dark Pedernal and tlm high white moon all ready to be put down ■XU'v^Tc^ , Though she must have known the Blake and the Miro, her picture is as free of symbol or surreal tension, of any directive gravi­ tation, as if it existed in interstellar space. Of an abstraction so auto­ matic, what account can be given but hers of the visible; "I was leaning against the ladder... and saw it so"? More detached than William Carlos Williams "so much depends/ upon// a red wheel/ barrow// glazed with rain/ water// beside the white/ chickens.// Was that letting go enough? SZ) Soviet SLrt, Serov, 1937, Lenin's SLrrivaCin Tetrqgrad 1917, USS%^ Enough? even in Russia, that a society which had lived, for better or worse, through the embattled polemic of the thirties — in art, this Serov, of Lenin's 1917 arrival in Petrogrnd S3) Tiotr Ifomine, 196S, S{orses on the Coast, 'Le Mnsee 9(iisse, L7(hi6itwn should settle for Fomine’s 1965 contented horse realism of a coastal scene — happy days are here again? 54) Chinese Communist, c. 1947, Li Shva Woodcut, ^fCood of zvrath. Or' in China, that the Marxist "Flood of Wrath" Li Hwa climaxed in this 1947 woodcut, and which Malraux had seen in Man's Fate as drowning backward dreams 55) Worl^r Qouaches from SCuhsien County (Li Xf-ht-min), 19S8 ff,, TFe/ifTfigging, Snowy i%h.t,' (fine Sirts iPuS, fPehim; + should yield to the peasant gouaches from Huhsien County Well Digging on a Snowy Night — every personal concern put off for the cartoon smile of achieved togetherness? 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 22 �Symbolic .G. Bell 56) History 'DouBU: [Rj ^andinskn, 1910, Mstract iMatercotor, Mrs. %fl.ndinski}, ^arisj aiuCtB] RrsfiiCe Qork^, 1945, OTte UnattainaBCe, Museum of 5lrt, (BaCtimore, MCD; + VcCetaiCs V ^ A' ^ One did not have to be a died-in-the-wool reactionary to wonder — when Archile ^orky, New York Armenian, in his 1945 "Unattainable," (right) restaged Kandinsky's first total abstraction of 1910 (left) — how the global search, shooting the rapids of two great wars, had come full circle to the glad frenzy of plucking the feathers off outwardness. Let fly! 57) (DouBCe: [51] Scfizvitters, 1920, iHair-naveC'Bicture, Lords QaCCery, London; and [CB] 5ig.usclienBer£, 1964, ^ftaCe, JosepH 5C. HCirs^m 57 a) giotto, 1297-99, (Detail offresco: Devils driven out of 5irezzo By St. francis. Upper CBurcfi, Ussisi 57B) J4£ainScfizvitter^5{air-naveC^(video: details only) 57c) Ayain, (BytiscBenBery 94lliale (video: detail only) Or when Rauschenberg's 1964 Whale Composition (right), with its ocean-bobbing space capsule, met Schwittei<^Hair-navel Picture v' from forty years before — to question such Dada stacking of the cards for the mass let-go of American Pop — "warmed over Schwitters.' Compare poetic nonsense. Dante had used it for the fury of Minos, hell guardian: "Papa Satan Aleppe," and again for Nimrod over lowest Hell: "Raphel may amech zabi £mi." But we have made more of Babel, from Morgenstern's early century "Laleu, lalou, laloo," through the same between-wars Schwitters — bee bill/ bii bell/ baa ball/ bimm bimm// bii bill/ bei bell/ baa ball/ bumm bumm// bemm bemm/ bumm bumm/ bimm bimm/ bemm bemm/// — to international claques of such, who, adding belches, smacks, and whistles, cluck the Art of Body-sounds. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 23 �•G. Bell 58) Symbolic History 5)ouBCe: [51] M. l^oBey, 1958, 5{awest, Marian W. jofinson, ^ ^ r , .. .. ------------- ---- ancC . + And when, in (1958, with no indication of directional influence, these granite mottlings would appear — left, an amber Harvest by Mark Tobey, child of Wisconsin and the Pacific; and right, French Dubuffet's gray Marmalade-Matter-Light — both as far as quantum mechanics from the emergent shapes of nature — what could one surmise, but that art-prophecy, in the globe-rounding of modern vision, had somehow closed on itself? Nietzsche: "Who stares into the void long enough, the void will stare back at him.'* 59) l^laCdmuCCer, c. 18^0, Spring in tfie Vienna Woods f!Kunst, voCume 75) 59 a) Same, Spring, detaiC; + V closer detaifs Music: Copland, 1944, Appalachian Spring (Ormandy) RCA LSC-3184, near close Yet who could believe that the romantic delights of bourgeois and Biedermeyer (this 1830 Waldmuller Spring in the Vienna Woods) could be revived -again in Between-and Post-War Americ^ ^ however the New Deal leaned that way; while Copland, who had begun with tough experiments, by the 1940's was harmonizing Appalachian Spring for those "soft ears" Ives had cried down. Could romantic cultivation be called valid, as long as endangered wood-lots remained for picnics and love-meetings? (fade Copland) a60) Qeorg 9(pCBe, c. 1936-38, 9{gjei ScuCptor, (Dancer, formerCy (Kronprinzen(PaCais, (BerCin; + V detaiC B60) l^xCoCf Wamper, c. 1938, VdCozvsfiip, from (Kunst, VoCume 81 60) Qeorg Scfirimpf, c. 1933F, Osterseen, from (Kunst, VoCume 69 V60a) (jrant Wood, 1930, Stone City, -lozua, JosCyn 5irt (Museum, OmaBa, Vfg-BrasBci (video returns to a detaiC of 60, Scfirimpf and then of B60, Wamper 60B) MitCer, Qoervng, etc. admiring 'fwnest Qerman art,' LITT., Oct 2, 1939 60 c) MitCer and MussoCini, 1938, In (fCorence Music: 7/1994 Richard Strauss, 1940-41, Capriccio, Overture, Angel 3580 C/L Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 24 �Symbolic rG. Bell History Could one build on those cinder-cones of reaction — every­ where romantic nostalgias to be whipped by King Fish rant, "Share the wealth" (and share the women), into will and power: to prop up the big-top of the West? From Germany in the early 1930's, George Schrirhpfs hundred-year-landscape-flashback, curiously tied to Grant Wood — and why not to Strauss's wartime Capriccio (music) — harmless, as the name Schrimpf — /fSound: From "I can hear it now," Columbia MM 800 ) \__ (Narrator;)____ _______________ ________—------1933 was dark all over the world... Japan was already in Manchuria, and the League of Nations was dying in Geneva... (cannon) until one sees Hitler, pinning the swastikas on all such echt-deutsch confirmations. inuecL^^Jy 61) In Germany the Reichstag fire was history; so was the Weimar Republic... In Italy Benito Mussolini had txanslaterLa. people's search for security into savage conquest.4 (cries: "Duce")^ (DouSCe: [Pi] Pimo ‘Brel^rj 1930/ nucCe., from Zt,ICP{J^G^^ and [(B] fosepfi dhoralQ c. 1938, dhe Muse, piaster, from OCunst, VoCume ^1 ^ ^6la) PLmo ‘Brek?-r, 1940-43, dhe PCerald, piaster for Bronze, (Die 9Cunst im (Deutsehen iReicB, PfpvemBer '43 ejy , 6IB) Pigain, d'fioral^ Muse, (B of 61 (z^uijnde^retumfif^^61, ^ douBie) Arno Breker (left), three years before Hitler came to power, crayonned the life-urge that would shoulder his climactic sculptures, "Preparedness" and "Hero," to the cliff of Nazi acclaim. While sensu­ ous nudes hardened (right) to this astonishing Muse by Thorak. If only the benighted Chancellor, bestowing the accolade, could have divined, that it was for the Allied occupation they were stripping those girls down. a6Z) 7/1994 ^£inai(C Marsft, 1936, Monday Migfit at tHe Met., Pirizona Museum, ducson Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 25 �':G. Bell Symbolic History !R^£inaC(C Marsfij 1940, T,t[in£e !foCCies, Mr. ancC Mrs. Menry Luce III, (video puts tf-is Setzveen 62 and a detail of 62) ^BsyinciCd MarsH, 1945, Strip ^ease in 9{g.zu Jersey, Senator ^iUiam 99enton, 62) Mpiv Xorl^ f Sound: From "I can hear it now," continuiJ^j (Narrator:) ________-—^ in ilcFTfertile America, fear and uncertainty lay heavy upon the land... (Roosevelt): "For first of all, let me assert my firm belief, that the only thing we have to fear is — fear itself." From Hart Crane's "Winter Garden": Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats... We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed, — All but her belly buried in the floor... through Reginald Marsh's paintings of Burlesque — down to Parrel's masturbating Studs: ^ leaned forward in his seat... he watched... four beefy women... legs spread, orgiastically shaking their wob­ bly bellies. Washed out, painted whores. But they sure could shake that thing... what cataleptic will conjures exhuberance out of waste of life: "nothing to fear but fear itself a63) 663) c63) I2d63) e63) Myzi O^Ht ^(dy, 1938^^rty (Day, MyremSery CfiamBerCain in Munic^^938 nXVlI, (BCitzIqi^, Sept 1,1939, Qerman tan^s invade ToCand TiWiI, ^rd 1940, Qerman troops on a Mprweyian Mountain (RyiCroad WWII,\^m^uergu^^ay~194^(Painter: Charles CundaCC, detail, ImperiaC li^ar Museum, London Germans in Paris, throuyh Sire de rPriomphe I2f63) (Photo, June 1940, 63) Photo, WorCd War IlpY940, JdtCer's ‘Dance’ in the forest of Compieyne (after the surrender of)france) Sound: "I ran heanitnow," continued VlHitler's rabia over the Sudeten Germans, then cheers) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 26 \ �r r Symbolic G. Bell History But who would have chosen a dream recovery, hunting "Peace in our time," through Rhineland, Austria, Chekoslovakia, Poland, through the Phony War behind the Maginot Line (imaginaire), then Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland Belgium, France — Sound: From "I can hear it now," (German radio announcement of the French-surrender) (fade) to Hitler's dance in the Forest of Compiegne for the French Surrender — if photo-faked, no wonder it has the look of Tolstoi's child in the carriage, pulling the strap and thinking he is guiding the team. Since the Chaplinesque drollery of The Great Dictator a64) ‘Botn6m^o^^^auCs^940-41^^ L G4) (PHoto, WWlIj 1940, ‘BaitCe. of (Britain: TCanes aBove,, antiaircraft BeCorv 64 a) (Pfioto, WWII, c. 194Z, US. sfieCCin^ O^rtfi S4frica , rode a physical and psychic release, which neither the arch-bungler nor anyone else, once it was revved up, could steer, much less stay. Like the rise and fall of dinosaurs, that roar of planes warping in over the meager air-defenses of England was what we would live through — in fact and in the rhetoric of Churchill: their darkest and "their finest hour." Music: Wartime song, Liiy Mariene, (Mariene Dietrich) MCA-60137 ■ 7" 45 RPM Then the counter-rallying — 65) (Bfioto, 1943, (Divc-BomBer asscmBCy Cine (Mistair Cool^'s S4M‘E‘RICil) 65 a) (Beauvais, 5)estroyecC SLrea SlrouncC tfie CathedraC irresistable thunderhead of war production, backing the myth of the free and peace-loving peoples — this California assembly line of dive 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 27 �Symbolic ro. Bell History bombers, 1943; with the Europe I would travel to under occupation ("Fire-scarred gaunt cathedrals out of ruins"): I had seen you before, now after, when the last storm Romantic recklessness involved you in Broke over you, and your Atlantic children Backlashed on the wind clouds of detonation... a66) (Bfioto, 1945(?),S[ave LaBorers, 9{grdliatism 66) Tfioto, 1345j ‘Bmen, 55 men made, to Bury Jezuisft victim-^ Hitler's talk of realpolitik, his masterminding, fomented a Europe more visionary than actual: "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord; "I will repay." These SS guards at Belsen Concentration Camp, set to sort and bury the rotting corpses of Jews (fade Lily Marlene) — surreal as the art the Fuhrer had condemned — what a slide, to this, a6T) Moritz von5cfi%oind, 1850-60, HQmBen Wunderfiom, 5cJiacligaC., Munich B67) 5pitzzue£, c. 1850, ‘Boof^orm, 5cmmCwi£5cltatzer, 5cfizveinfiirt 67) 'DouBte: ,[5l] von 5cfimnd, WuTuBerfiorTtJa67^and [B]5pitzzve£, Booksaorm ^B6^ j / 6*7^ Music: Mendelssohn, 1826, Fairies from Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, Philips (Festive) 6570 021 from the Germany of a century before: Mendelssohn's Dream Over­ ture of Bottom and the fairies, Moritz von Schwind's woodland rap­ ture of a Bo)?s Wonderhorn (left), (right) Spitzweg's playful irony of the Bookworm tottering on his ladder with more books than he can manage. Does all history attest a change so swift — and terrible? (fade Mendelssohn) ^8) (BoscB, 1500-04, hlscent to Meaven, (Doges' (PaCace, Venice (4 4 '^68) (Photo, 545WII, London5uBtvay as BomB sfteCter ^8) (DouBCe: [51] 14gain, Bosch, S4scent (tf8); and [B] Slgain, London 5uBzvay (if8); +. V various singCes and detaiis 68 B) Menry Moore, 1940-41, 9\5WII, London LuBes, Bh-axviug of5Ceepers 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 28 �..-r----(or Henry Moore's drawing) the tubes Bosch’s tunnel to Paradise. Spenders J fire-bombea Lonuuu ...cv. . I think continually of those who were truly great... Sorn of the sun they travelled a short while toward And left the vivid ait signed with their honour iov " "And death shall have was reaching out for Dylan rrv, Thomas'r,s "rrv Cryjoy, A rdominion" the paean of "A Refusal to Mourn... . Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter. Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins or n Secret by the unmourning water After Ve'*fit*st^death, there fm is mother. no other. M ^ Svanis^ e96) music: ^ George Crumb 1970, from Black Angels, Electric String Quadet, SVBX 5306 (3) . a.d...i H..., ~ socialisl. haves ""f,''*r^'’'ne!loii.flux of follow.lraveling oppoaiKB, that of Kurtz m Africa with all iconoclasms of new art, music, poetry, down The Ant’s a centaur in Learn of the green world what can Pull down thy vanity, I say pu Y Fascist Pound: place... Ho these marvellous utterances subscribe? Atomic Age; 7/1994 Frontiers New and Lost 29 �Symbolic History fuartet? Or Motherwell's giant sixty or so variations on an Elegy for the Spanish Republic — belated insistence that avant garde (even as it rode a growth market of art-investment) remained loyal to the left? Though one could have asked the Weathermen about that. Or Diane Broughton hoisted by her own bombs, who had seen through the light in Peace Corps Guatemala? Would her ghost have answered, "Energy is the only life"? (fade Crumb) 70) (DouBCe: [J^j JosepB ComeCC 1940-5S, HBree Trivate Collections] and [B] 9(j l^rean Communist, Before 1977, CBoCCima, Do-cfie symBoC, Cdangyongdac 70a) Sigain, ComeCCs BoTces (5L-of 70); + V various details 70B) lAgain, Xprean CfwCdma (B,of 70) 70c) Slide sBozv and video repeat the douBle 70 Over all convergences a rift was widening between West and East. Had the two exchahged art roles? — the arcane, refined opium dream of the Chinese sage in Malraux's La Condition Humain^ is somehow paralleled by Joseph Cornell's 1940 to '55 haunted souvenir boxes (above): Portrait, then Egypt (with bugs and red sand glazed in under the bottles); and below, a Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova; while our old assertive outwardness now pylons up the sky in this ^ollima, symbol of Communist Korea, over the city where Kim II Sung was born. Was it, for the West, "not with a bang but a whimper"? a71) SUfredBinstein, 1947, photo Bhilippe Slalsman, Slastin^s (gallery Collection B71) i^Bemont-(Dessoigne (Bada), 1920, Qrand Odusicien, I4.ndri Breton Collection, Baris (same as 5L of 71); video: detail only 71) (DouBle: Sixain, [51] BiBemont-Dessoi^ne's Qrand Odusicien (B71); and [B] H^ols (Wolfyan0 Schulze), 1945, Bateau Ivre, 9Qinsthaus, Zurich V 71a) Wols', Bateau Ivre Here, off the shoreless harbor of Now, perhaps it is time for a confessional Gesture. After the \Apocalypse of the war, I was in Princeton, drawn to those exiled \ great Europeans who hoped, in thought and act, to redeem the atomic age. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 30 �Symbolic G. Bell Music: History Satie, 1913 (produced 1921), from Le Piege de Meduse (#6), Mhs 1475/6 (3) I scrupled that the Dada Cynicism of the First War (this RibemontDessoigne, Grand Musicien, left) — which Satie had anticipated in Le Piege de Meduse — dances for a stuffed monkey — should stage a wilder comeback, (fade Satie) Music: Hiiler (and Parman), from Avalanche, section St 2549 006 as in Wol's Bateau Ivre (right), or Hiller's Avalanche. bedevilling his Cantos with political nonsense. 1, Heliodor Like Pound's a7Z) ITindrew WyetH, 1947, ‘Wind from tfk Sea, (Professor and (Mrs. CfiarCes tf{. Morgan 72) 72 a) 726). 72 c) 72d) S4ndre'W ‘Wyeth, 1949, ‘The (^x^enant. Museum cf American Art, (N^zo (Britain Andrexu ‘i^eth, 1965, MonoCoyue, ‘WUCiam Weiss 5.1. QiCBert, 1949 (or Before?), detaiCfrom Chicayo (River, C.Q. (BeCC CoCCection Again 72, ‘WyethfR^venant, detail Andretu Wyeth, 1956, ChamBered (S(fiutiCus, Mr and Mrs (RpBert Montgomery; + V detail Music: Douglas Allanbrook, c.1954, from slow Movement of 1st String Quartet, tape I had stared at the Decline of the West too long to require opti­ mism, nor in art the ghostly revival of realism by which Andrew Wyeth pqrceived himself through the dusty mirror of a Maine farm­ house; or in music even the rich overlappings of Allanbrook's First String Quartet. What I was fixed on could have grown out of Arnold, or of what Faulkner (from my native state) would espouse in his Nobel acceptance: "No room in his workshop for anything but the old verities..." — verities for me no less of head than heart — a philo­ sophic reconstitution of tragedy, transcending the art-poles of New York modern and romantic person. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 31 �Symbolic :G. Bell History Yet when a student, Galway Kinnell, appeared, not unlike this Revenant, in my Princeton study with his first poems — "all willing worlds at once," "Darkness swept the earth in my dreams," and "We were not misers in our misery" — it was as if a Vesuvius fountain had gone off in the room; or to use his own Yeatsian words; It seemed a star went burning down the sky. (fade Allanbrook) SiTC scuCptecC heads: ^rerud: Qothic 1200; TarCer c. 1383; ‘l^ischer, c. 1313; (Bu0et, c. 1670(F); (Danneche-Tj 1803-10 (SchiCCer); Ti^Udt 1909 73 a) lAgain, 31 of 73, (french gothic 736) fl^ain, C of 73, Vischer head 73 c) Sixain, T, of 73, (Dannechffs SchiCkr 73 d) 3{gain, (f of 73, diHldt head 73e) 9^FdheCm LehtnBnicfu 1918, Seated fouth, (KatnBurg (Cg'B '87); + V detail 73f) Lehm6rucl^@18, 3{eads of Lovers, (DuisBur^ Museum / That was soon after Kinnell had chanced on a poem of mine, dark with the cyclical burden for which I was photographing slides: here (above): 1200, Gothic mystery; 14th century, Chaucerian pilgrimage; 1515, a Christian saint in humanist pride; (then below), 1670 France, Baroque cradle of irony; 1810 bust of Schiller, ego as defiant hope; early 20th century, Wildt, pain, on the road to abstraction. 73 ) That consciousness speaks in the poem: I, Flame of God, took flesh in the flame Of earth's delight — pride, glory, fame. With earth unsatisfied, the bleeding heart Spent itself in romantic passion's part. Worse-fevered now, passion be^ts at the gate Ghiberti sealed, lost paradise of faith — Last delirium, where self-pitying soul Licks its own secretions, ooze of wounds. Into the wished immortal gho^y balm. And soiled with lust, leaps th^nviolable One. 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 32 (3 �Symbolic ^G. Bell History So all paths lead me to myself and home; And but for some faint whispering from the caves, Some half-spelled message of the Sibyl's leaves, I would quit hope. One promise holds hope green: "In the rank of its own bubbling filth grows clean." a74) 74) “ 74a) 746) J.I. QiCBert, 19S0, iMarcfi (Dunes, Indiana, cropped, C Q. (Bed CoCIectum 3.1. giCSert, 1930, (Portrait of C.g. (Bed at tfie (Dunes, (Bed Codection; detail dstronomy, (Planetary (Hs^BuCa 'CraS' in (Taurus, 9{aCe Observatories dlBetan danka, 16t6 cent., (Mabal^Ca, (Terror-god of (Kprthern (Buddhist (Pantheon, detail, (British Library (Sddd. 8893), London (Cg(B 84) 74 c) (Polar Star dracll^s. Southern (Hemisphere But the Spenglerian war was over. With Wyeth and Rothko, I had staked out a new life — mine in Hutchins' Chicago. That winter at the Dunes, in the cottage over Lake Michigan, Jim Gilbert, who tied art affirmation and denial to the deepest realities of man and world, painted this picture of me — Galway Kinnell in the same room, sketching his "First Song" ("Then it was dusk in Illinois"), while I wrote, undismayed — though New Deal, Stalinists, even Nazis had hawked such programmatic goods: Armageddon has always waited around the corner. Whether for the individual or culture, the bombed earth or sun-exploded solar system, or the assumed world of matter crouched before Judgment — what dif­ ference... The film over the meaningless and void is no thinner than ever, the spectacle of life on that film grander than before. The spiritual malady of our time is mostly of faint heart — a kind of green-sickness in girlsI yiAi 73) Slndrezv H^eth, 1946, Winter, w^ate^dection 73a) (Again, Wyeth winter, detad^S^^Cf^^^i^^ 73b) Samuel (Mason, 1939, Susquehanna diiver SHCls, from giCtnan (Paul's 'Land of (Promise,' *Bed Codection, Santa (fe 73c) Samuel (Mason,M^ods, Little (Pines (farm, (Bed Codection, Santa fe 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 33 �.G. Bell Symbolic History If Wyeth had been in Chicago, teaching and painting, as Jim Gilbert was, I would have shared in the release of his "Winter" — this depicted recovery from his father's death: "A neighbor boy all topsy-turvy like a rolling stone," running downhill. "The boy," Wyeth tells us. "is really, me, at a loss... That hand drifting in the air... my free soul, groping. Just over the hill was where my father was killed. For the first time I was painting with real reason to do it." For me, too, some such recovery had led from Spenglerian war to the Susquehanna River Hills, Little Pines Farm, Sam Mason ("He dips the water from his own spring"), his daughter (Sub Regno Dianae Bonae) — This fall is my spring; down lost forest ways Your frank eyes guide, the daughters Of laughter run ... that promise of a Married Land. But Wyeth was by the Brandywinei3 a76) 576) c76) 76) 76 a) 765) 76c) QiCSert, C. 19/i4. Splf ^’nrtrait. f^aura f^iCdert rnCCit‘t giCBert, 1350-5 QiCBert, 1943, Tlie 5B[ueStream, HvCartHa's ^^ineyarcC, 1 QitSert, c. 1962(F), OUe iR^cCStream, Laura QiCBert Co QiCBert, c. 1938, ^l^^dCist^ vioCa MamUrfeCt CoCCeeti QiCB'ert, 1950(^^^^mia^nes ‘Bluff, BelCCodeetion Strain. 76, IRg'dStream^^'^^kk^ J.I. And there was Gilbert, fighting the post-war like a battle of his own, from such dark Spanish realism as Manet had begun with a century before, through Impressionist lightening, to Cezanne's more and more radical search for color form: Gilbert's rock streams, grayin-green, blue-m-brown, this (a few years after) red as Dante's Bulicame, her^y/was representation, abstraction, symbol, all in one, so^ incredibly right, yet so cloaked in verisimilitude, that when, in the 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 34 3 �Symbolic History painter's absence. I lugged canvasses to Ld said "too academic for us." And what did diey have on their walls? imitationSof Dufy, little Klee's, little Albers'. The oo s i n know where theVademy was. Could b ue or was it perennial? The market answered unreliably. cheese is good, tomorrow yellow". As for the Go s t ey i answer at aU. 'What could oue do but trust inner convicuon. For me. A this Red Stream became Nature itself. ‘UmirLnti 1950, TT) frr] 7ri, Vermottt Landscape,‘BeU. CoiUctkin ~utiu„ i/tlie 19% t. im ^osai. m Wif ' /^B7 Lhc Law,^emp(e Beth Bt, Qary, Indiana;/^ detaiH^ Also in Hutchins' College was Hal Haydon, exploratory spirit aware of what has slowly come to light, that our age is _ liked a landscape, he gave it the pallette-knife. His lighted cit reeled with white-writing, his close-ups with his own bifo“^ ** bling Perhaps a block print will catch him as well as anything, gki® so doubled, dreams of flight - Icarus over the sea. How many 'j ' FT*''"' ' ~~l I u'v-J ’ '■7 ’ ! _________________ - _ -------------- *— Like Picasso taking to the beach after the war, li e t e breakthrough of the New York School, like Adlai's speeches - we were all lured from dark to light. But my response was in the context of teaching Thucydides and Greek tragedy, those Chicago years. 78) ■BucHminster fuCkr, 1967, ^coitsk Dcm, iHontred-Eitpo!^ Vi&.uM ■rsi) ‘Victorian, 7alhn amtmy: + VM 786) Supemwa 1987A, Cover of Wtifk AmncM, August 1989 “ ? ■; •- 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Fair, I then at the height of my LTntific rapture, he exhibiting the streamlined Dy-a-on c. under his energy-saving Dymaxion house, building seems alrea y 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 35 �Symbolic ;G. Bell History \ into the colonizing orbit of other worlds. Though this wonderful geodesic dome, erected for the Montreal Expo of 1967, surely left its prophet-designer with doubts about the use of his vision, even on planet earth, much less on the moon or wandering stars. f^xr fed) ' '—II Of course, Arnold's program of disciplined responsibility for the balanced whole made sense, both for art and world. Though his Empedocles proved rebellious to that aim, and his "Dover Beach" found another close: "Where ignorant armies clash by night." Coleridge too, for Christabel, had aimed at a reconciling marriage; but what opium-inspired possibility gave him was a fragment of demonic possession: In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell Whis is lord of they utterance, Christabel ... By the hard lesson of Machiavelli, history has a gradient of its own — for us of the post-war, earth as exploding star, our supernova of spangled dysecology; and what is the art-gradient of that, but a supermarket of widening the sphincter to the flux: "Look, Ma, no hands!" ............. .. 79) Ll^^, (DecemBer 28jJ9S9j (DouBCe Cover 79 a) Same, Li^t: cov&r^^miEiC y e issue; + V (Cetai^ A Music: The Beatles, 1967-70, from "All You need is love," Capital SEBx 11843 At the turning point between the Fifties and Sixties, the society of opulence and joyful leisure stuffed the Xmas issue of Life Magazine with nothing but THE GOOD LIFE; and already the Beatles were warming up for the Magical Mystery Tour, where "It's easy... All you need is love" (though love seemed often the thing most wistfully and wishfully lacking). (fade "All You need Is love") Music: 7/1994 The Beatles, from same record, "Strawberry Fields" Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 36 �Symbolic History Would not those same Beatles' invitation to "Strawberry Fields" be made on condition that "nothing is real"? Surely the dream ship of past and future — New Deal, New (fade "with eyes closed") Frontier, Great Society — 80) (DouBU: [SI] SleriaC Spraying of Tepper, Smithsonian, January, 1979; and [(B] Utan InUrcontinentaCBaCistic OdissiCe, QCenn Jdartin Co., c. 19S9 80 a) Sixain, SLeriaC Spraying of (Bepper, Si of 80 806) Sixain JXtan, B of 80 was heading full speed for the simultaneous rocks of Silent_Spring and Dr. Strangelove — eternal boom as ecology crisis, free-enterprise as missile race and Vietnam War. What speculative vacuum! A world crying to be steered from exploding star into steady-state; yet no mind in politics or the media could rethink any priorities. Against the life-and-death need of an organic theory of economics, one party pushed an overstretched Keynsian debit welfare; the other flopped like a headless chicken all the way back to what they called Adam Smith; while communists insisted on the blind-bridle of Marx's axiomatic materialism. Where were the visions the crusade of war had kindled — or damped? Music: 81) Ll'fi ouC; Conlon Nancarrow, c.1950 ff., Study No. 3a for Player Piano 1750, Arch Records S-1786 (1) 17, 1963, 'Birmingham, Mahama: "TJieyfijht afire that won't go UaiC Yet the photographed news, that global nerve-net still not at­ tached to any brain, went on, in wild fibrilatiori, atomically, thrillingly active (Birmingham, 1963, the Black protest-marches, against Bull Connor's hoses 82) Same, LldT., ‘BCaehs versus (Potice and dogs and dogs). 7/19 94 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 37 �Symbolic History While the composer Nancarrow, laboriously cutting into playerpiano rolls criss-crossed jazz-based rhythms, with time ratios beyond the commensurate — of root-2, tu , or e — a year maybe of cutting. 83) ^eU^rapd Sivcnue, (Berl^fCey, CciCifornia, 1969, ‘Brozun pHoto, (Rsg to produce a three minute bomb-burst of body-compelling yet bodydefying dance — as wierdly on target for the hippie wave of impos­ sibility (Telegraph Avenue, 1969), as if Chaplin and the Marx Brothers had been lashed together haywire, cyclotron accelerated. 84) (PeopCe's Tarfu 1969 (S4pri£ ZOtfi and after), ‘Berl^eCey CaCifomia; ‘BaCCantine Bool^ People's Park, that Berkeley 1969 junk lot confiscated from the University of California for the free-work, free-speech, free-love flowering. My daughter Charlotte, called Frankie on the Street, was there, in euphoria. 83) 9{ationaC guard tal^ BeopCe's BarlQ 1969 (May 13-20), BaCCantine Bool^ Until the cowboy governor sent the troops with guns and teargas — as the man said in the Woodstock film: "It never should have happened." But it did. 86) Barrier fence around BeopCe's BarCg 1969 (May 20 ff.), Berks-Cey, 'B.aCCCantineBool^j^^ V86a) Trooper Uproom^Cants, 1969, BemCe's BarCu Ber((eCey, BaCCantine 3ooKs 1969^(^^l<§tei^,^BaCCantine 865) Tear Qcissiny^ And all around the forbidden paradise the high chain-link fence was set up, like hymen-— Cherubim versatilem... gladium. Woodstock. (fade Nancarrow) Sound: From Woodstock, August 1969, Cotillion SD 3-500: voice: "draft resisters... Raygun." then song: with Joan Baez, etc. (fade) 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 38 /y �Symbolic Bell History 7) Vietnam War, c. 1968, ‘ETcecution of a Viet Cong Prisoner < 587) \/ Vietnam War, VvCardi 1968, ViCCage Burning after the 9\^assacre, 0\{y Lai, Vietnam U% photo 1972, ^HgpaCm Strihe, Vietnam, Lung Eang VUCage Vietnam, March 1968, Slaughtered peasant and Boy, My Lai, Vietnam 87) 87a) Music: Woodstock, August 1969, Country Joe and the Fish, Vietnam Song, (Fixin' to Die Rag), Cotiiiion SD 3-500 Here the famous picture of a Napalm Strike on Tung Bang Village (friendlies, it turned out); and Galway Kinnell, in The Book of Nightmares: Lieutenant! This corpse will not stop burning! (fade Woodstock) d)ouB[e:.Char.Com^ ‘BdC. ffranhie) MJ^uring and [E] after Miter Te(wBe!s / iL oj m With a wave, one formulates at least the physics which makes a crest yield to a trough. In society the Hippie climax of People's Park (Charlotte, left, in Blakean delight playing and singing: "I was as clean," she said, "as a new-born child.") — the yielding of that crest to a long^rough of reaction (Charlotte, right, fallen back to the closure and heroin of the Street, where I sat with her for three days and wrote "The Prodigal Father": Christ later, by her testimony, to Jead her ^way) — such social breaking takes wav^^iders by surprise. 'arler c. 1385, 'bust. ............................. King Wenzel, Dom, ible: Pari niga, 1966, "Solitude", detail, Mexico ^ty (?; ^^Tho^h SYMBOLIC HISTORY might have foretold the odds of that now mass eruption of romantic wish, against the gas and guns of the beast with heads and horns. As if the d^bvn dream and lifedisillusion of th& Wes^had gathered itself into two images: (left) the 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 39 ^ i/ �Symbolic ^C.G. Bell History <51/4 young King Wenzel of Prague, from the time when Chaucer wrote of May: I leave my books and walk to the mead To see those flowers, white and red, Which men call daisies Come from that spring of liberatio^to Zuniga's Solitude (right) — or to Borges, who returns blind to the books (from In Praise of DarknessV. (El hombre que esta ciego/ sabe,..) The man who is blind knows he will not decipher... the books he ranks on the shelves, parchment, leather. cloth.../\ g) From south and east, west and north the roads have led me to a secret center... My wish is to die wholly; to die with this companion, my body — Quiero morir con este companero, mi cuerpo — where was the courage to go 90) ^rencfi, from Liege, 1200-IS, SrCiraeCe of tfie fCozoering Catices, from Cfuisse of CdarCemagne, CcitfiecCraC, SiacLen; + V cCetaiCs (Spin the roulette of courage in ten slides.) Like the Roland, this 1200 Miracle of the flowering lances raises battle death to sainthood. Certain knights of Charlemagne wake to find their lances rooted and flowered, a sign they will be holy martyrs that day. Roland's father, Milon, smiling, plucks his lance frohi the earth, is embraced b^ Charles (in the tent), and rides joyfully to battle. 91) (Biero deCCa francesca, 14S2-60, victory of Constantine over 9rCa7(mtms, (CetaU, SBoCy Cross frescoes, San francesco, SLrezzo; + V detail Cv^t 7/19 94 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 40 �'C.G. Bell Symbolic History The victories Piero della Francesca frescoed in his Legend of the True Cross, after 1450, have expanded sacred myth to Renais­ sance drama. One would be tempted to stage Shakespearean war with this Homeric clarity, a dignity beyond the here and now. Shakespeare, although a century and a half after Piero 9Z) ^eCasquez, 1634-35, SurrmcCer of‘Breda, Brado, Madrid; + ‘]/ detail < and only a generation before Velasquez' Surrender of Breda — ties Piero's mirage of early Renaissance to the weight and swelling con­ sciousness of this Baroque. Though such willed heroics of earth admits now a satiric converse — 93) B)ou6Ce: Jacques CaCCot 1633, Les Misires et Ces MaCheurs de Ixi (Juerre, large format, [JL] etcfiing 5 and [B] etcfiing 11; + ‘U details Callot's bitter etchings of the 30 Years War: below, an attack on a farmhouse where a man is being roasted in the great fireplace, horrors Moscherosch and Grimmelshausen would describe and Vol­ taire parody in the Candide. Yet Callot's captions still vindicate heroic morality. Could our disillusion voice what is inscribed under his famous oak of corpses? — these ignoble thieves, hanging from this tree like evil fruit, show that... vicious men sooner or later experi­ ence the justice of Heaven. 94) Qoya, 1810-20 {pu6. 1863), Los (Desastros de la Querra, #7 ((Dover) % As Goya approaches the existential stripping, a revolutionary heroism, this "Que Valor!" "What Courage!" remains possible. Yet how lonely such war-matyrs of heart. Chenier, of Chaflotte Corday: "You thought by your death to revive France... Brave girl... One reptile the less crawls in this slime." 95) (KstetHe (Kpllwitz, 1903, OutBrealu LiBrary of Co^r^h'^asBington D.C.; + ‘U detail 7/1994 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 41 �r.G. Bell 90) Symbolic History 9^rencfi, from Liege, 1200-15, Mirade of tfie fCowering tances, from Chasse of CdarCemagne, CatfiedraC, Siadien} + ^details (Spin the roulette of courage in ten slides.) Like the Roland, this 1200 Miracle of the flowering lances raises battle death to sainthood. Certain knights of Charlemagne wake to find their lances rooted and flowered, a sign they will be holy martyrs that day. Roland's father, Milon, smiling, plucks his lance from the earth, is embraced by Charles (in the tent), and rides joyfully to battle. 91) (Piero deCCa CFrancesca, 1452-60, zHctory of Constantine over (Maj(entvus, detail, (Holy Cross frescoes, San francesco, SLrezzo; + ^detail (V91a) The victories Piero della Francesca frescoed in his Legend of the True Cross, after 1450, have expanded sacred myth to Renais­ sance drama. One would be tempted to stage Shakespearean war with this Homeric clarity, a dignity beyond the here and now. Shakespeare, although a century and a half after Piero 92) Velasquez, 1634-35, Surrender of (Breda, (Prado, (Madrid; + V detail (V92a) and only a generation before Velasquez’ Surrender of Breda — ties Piero's mirage of early Renaissance to the weight and swelling con­ sciousness of this Baroque. Though such willed heroics of earth admits now a satiric converse — 93) (DouBCe: Sacques Callot 1633, Les Mislres et les MaCBeurs de la Querre, large format, [51] etching 5 and ^B] etching 11; + V details Callot's bitter etchings of the 30 Years War: below, an attack on a farmhouse where a man is being roasted in the great fireplace, horrors Moscherosch and Grimmelshausen would describe and Vol­ taire parody in the Candide. Yet Callot's captions still vindicate heroic morality. Could our disillusion voice what is inscribed under his famous oak of corpses? — 6/1995 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 41 �Symbolic €.G. Bell History these ignoble thieves, hanging from this tree like evil fruit, show that... vicious men sooner or later experi­ ence the justice of Heaven. 94) goya, 1810-20 (pu6.1863), Los (Desastros de (a guerra, #7 (Dover) As Goya approaches the existential stripping, a revolutionary heroism, this "Que Valor!" "What Courage!" remains possible. Yet how lonely such war-matyrs of heart. Chenier, of Charlotte Corday: You thought by your death to revive France... Brave girl... One reptile the less crawls in this slime." 9$) UQietfie ^(Czvitz, 1903, OutBreafu LiBrary of Congress, WasBington D.C.; + V detaiC We think of the Great War as a breaking point; but when Kaethe Kollwitz in 1903 cut her print of blind "Outbreak," no more battle-strength remained than in Yeats' 1922 "Phantoms of Hatred : The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop. Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide For the embrace of nothing... But those terrors were metaphorical. 96) iK^rcfiner, 1915, MuUCatedSdf as SoCdkr, S^Oen 9duseum, OBerCin, OBio; first, video detail Trench warfare enforced a break-down reality. Kirschner, on garrison duty at Halle prefigured his later suicide in the imagined mutilation of this self-portrait with a nude model and lopped-off right hand. Not even the English war poets, piercing "the old lie: Dulce et decorum est...," seem as faith-blasted as this German. 97) Soviet War Toster, 1941, ’^e Lnemy sBalC never escape our tvratB'; witB video details 6/1995 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 42 �Symbolic Music; History Prokofiev, 1944-45, close of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible In a people's reversal of that, the Russian defence of the Second War, revived, with all the blatancy of conviction, the old heroism of righteous will: "The Enemy shall never escape our wrath." While Prokoviev and Eisenstein (under invasion) could make a warhorse film of Ivan the Terrible voice that resistance — its closing chorus: "At the scene of the great fire unified -Russia/ Gathers upon the bones of the enemy!" (end Prokofiev) Though it is hard to distinguish patriotism from 98) Jfoe fSs>sentfiaC (J^sociatecC iBress), 1945, fHouse, fRpdiester, 9^; + VdetaiC 98 a) ‘WWII, c. 1943, CBougainvUh (Beacfifiead propaganda. CKgisiti£ on Ixvo Jima, ‘Eastman The most rallying American image of that war, first in photo­ graph and then in bronze, was the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, said to have been staged after the event. While the American radio was advertising candy bars: "What are those boys on the atolls fight­ ing for? For peace and the American Way — with Butterfinger!" All that time I was writing "Studies in the Future," to feel out the "rising and falling motions of a culture" — the rising, like the Greek, where individuality empowers a colonizing free expansion; until (in the disillusion and strife of that enterprise, the need changing from release to an ordering) ZncC 97) 5i£ain, Soviet War (Poster, detail 2nd 97a) Cfilnese Communist, 1958, Student parade in ‘Iten-an-men square, (Bering comes (as with Rome) the falling or constrictive motion, where revo­ lution itself takes on the character of regimen. Power shifts from the liberators and developers to a new nation, born in discipline, which can slowly loose itself as it binds the world. S^or 2nd 98) 6/1995 Space SfiuttCe Laundung, 1981 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 43 �Bell r Symbolic History So I wrote. But how did the assumed crisis of free confidence in the West, the predictable malaise and self-question, go with that euphoria of art and life which remains the subject of this study? a99) James I. QiCBert, c. 1951, Staamp, Indiana (Dunes, near Cfticxigo, (BeCC Coition 99} Izapa (Cfuapas), c. 300 (B.C., SteCa SO, Sf^CetaC (Bartfi (Motfier, (h(g.tionaC (Museum of Sbithropotogy, (Me?cico City; + V details 99 a) Same, Stela, detail; + V return to the whole i As when Galway Kinnell, after the glowing pioneer projections of his Chicago years — "the cries of the prairie and moan/ Of wind through the roots of its clinging flowers" — went abroad, plumbed the avant-garde and came up with the prophetic nightmare of "The Supper after the Last," for which comparisons might range from this Pre^Maya Stela — a skeletal Earth Mother of death and birth, placenta and foetus floating above her on an umbilical cord — through the Beatus Commentaries of 11th-century Spain, to who knows what in Picasso or Mird. In token of which range, let 1912 Schonberg launch the musical invasion. Music; Schonberg, 1909-12, from 1st of Five Pieces for Orchestra, Col. MS 6103 In our world such demonic seizure has recurrent reality — Kinnell: that company eating chicken on a Dali shore, where the of I ...bearded Wild man guzzling overhead... who has not yet smiled... Devours all but the cat and the dog, to whom he slips scraps. The red-backed accomplice busy grinding gristle, ’You are the flesh; I am the resurrection, because I am the light. I cut. to your measure the creeping piece of darkness That haunts you in the dirt. Step into light — I make you over. I breed the shape of your grave in the dirt. 6/1995 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 44 �Symbolic aioo) Stuart'Boyi,13r9,C0a^psi«s Systems, c . j;u(eo trims to a (UtaU . ^ ^BlOO) iPedersen, Warttc lOOu) HlSXOi y <3 nftfie cCouBCe 100; uffUcfi tfU of schOnberg) ^ ^ loO, Bdow) ^ •CoCCapsins Systems, Lost Odessage, a X^u,^«Cersm,-MuuicS<tulu<y,^ufiOO ---------- . .Ug century over-extended, as if to With the New 0“®*=“°“ , nature and man always inore call us back to nature “ ^ ^constructive return? Wa er ominous, what was the substan characters whose Percy's novels, for all *®“ .'a ’catastrophe. That tore_ world seems already to have perceptive and boding has been shared Here Ufe powerful, though hardly known^ ^oijing the civilized fabric; but as psychologist and teacher to i^hol g ^ when he puts brush to ^when a flash a white what Klunell has lately burned into a P msh sparkled": - this glare of r^ehng^^^ ^ entitled "Collapsing Systems, 1^^ Light." While Doug Ped«s aftermath of that when ^c^’hLfthe sick, they shall aU end sicker. alOl) /• Suscyh ^ 1CIC9 a? SiasemraB, ‘Beuys sBoto f Jeftmny 1SS3,tovsr %!m) ■Infiltrutiun,-Cmtrt georys VdlOl) Beuys, 1966, 9^eit covi^risf. . . „„ ^ ”” “ * ^ has received more attention attention No European of the tothest teach of avantihan the ^^aLt society and finally art. Shot down garde becomes a protest agai 6/1995 A Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost 4i �Symbolic History • ♦or of 1943 he was saved by the the Eastern front m the win regenerate warmth, ^rtars who covere^/^^X the — iZ” So fat and felt have and wrapped it m felt... t dominated hia P Pack, of 1969, Gugrenhdm show. A Volhs- sS:d "sil, each cattving a ilashUght, Mt and elephants called to world rescue. r. • „ the European post-war modern In style, and even in ‘"rting to that backing when Beuys has owed much to America. down a pile of dirt for the climaxed his political de^^ ^ announcing disgust Berlin Zeitgeist Show of 1982, at t with all pretences of the art scene. Kunstler". aioz) CMsto, 1369, wL) 9a) nea Sy 9 (Msto,Savu,y^t«^^ Cfinsto, • \ 1QR'^ from KoynsriisQUtsi Ss?^'zSiSTAtSh?grn'gofP..'3,"Cioudsoape» , ___ and f .h, art-frontiers of« opulence and In a final overflow o of landscape-and-earth euphoria, come the ataggenns P almost ateration. Christo's ‘‘'at auch w canvas to lOnuug r— In music such packaging P^“;"omTot^^^^^ in the program scores of Phihp ,omp i- Williams' Williams "Ii l®f A'''- 8°o— 6/1995 a Atomic Age; Prnntiers New and Lost Frontiers 46 �Symbolic History A year after Christo's Coast, Robert Smithson, reverting (as "^others were doing) to the mystery of prehistoric earthworks, piled this rock jetty, spiraling into Great Salt Lake. Here permanence was no doubt intended, though it is rumored that the sidereal anchorage is already covered by the rising water. 104) SpiraC QalaTQ) M 81 in Ursa Major, Tfioto, 9^vaC OBseroatory 104 a) SpiraC Qaicnqf M 83, ^Rjce University! or. Better, M§C 2997, SiustraCian H^eCescope 93oari£ MaCin, And above, our own milky way, with countless such galactic systems (here M-81 in the Great Bear), put off their nebular sun-condensing whorls — as in my Delta Return I saw the Mississippi from the air, in curves and reverses, fling off ox-bow lakes on either side — the whole flood-plain (fade Glass) ...patterned still — On the spiral shapes of melting, infinite seal Of home-returning time on the transient floor. Under star-cloud night, first matrix of that swirl. alOS) PlstronomicaC distances yiven as train-times, c. 1911, detaiC, (BooB of ^CnowCedpe, VoCume /; + Vdoser detaiC 10S) Same, zuBoCe 105a) (Pierre-iPauC (Prudfum, c. 1804, 9{ead of 'l7en£eanu, S4rt Institute cfCBicago 105B) Orozco, 1936, ‘EC^Ion^re, detail. University of QtuidaCajara Music: Glass, same, late in Part IV, "Pruit Igoe" No wonder as a boy I pored over this illustration in The Book of Knowledge — astronomical distances conveyed by the travel times of trains arcing from the earth-globe to moon, sun, planets, the nearest star — imagining such star-wars as the great space-powers would gravitate toward. In Chicago, 1950, I waked from a dream not unlike the present show, and wrote: 6/19 95 Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost ^*‘*''*» rrew—anu—cnST 47 T �Symbolic History To perceive in the scope of its profligacy the history — that is the self-destruction — of the West, is to glimpse no mere human folly, but one of those terrifying open­ ings out of the organically wild and wasteful, the more dire for its satanic sense of 4irection. To see a group of living Christian nations, fostering within their' contradictory self-seeking and Machiavel­ lian policy a cradled bourgeoisie of idealistic hope and criticism, bringing to bear on the faith that sustained them the acids of the liberated mind — to see those nations, as birds crack the shell, break through the medium of protective tradition, the inheritance of paradox unrecognized, into the vast of a valueless freedom; to see that well-born folly change its nature in the face of all it confronted and meeting became, to the temporizing waste of violence — 106a) 9izUc, iStd-lGtfi cent., goddess nXazoCteotC in cdiCdBirtli, detaiC of dead, (DumSarton Oads, Wasdin^ton, (DC 106) Same, HazoCteotC, wdoCe statue the technically giant and spiritually withering nation­ alities, as pettily suspicious as each business and freeenterprise man (though all were culturally one), un­ dermining the other and debilitating the other, as if by mutual murder to clear a space for the alien regimen that would feed upon their ruin: this is the phenomen­ on we have observed and lived through and been part of, the whirl in which all values have changed; it is the turning of liberation upon itself. The compelling ques­ tion remains, was this our avoidable, even now cor­ rectable folly, or is it the jealous law of every timebirth? In The. Rook of Nightmares Galway Kinnell grows reconciled to birth: ...Sancho Fergus, my boy child, had such great shoulders, when he was born his head came out, the rest of him stuck... 5/19 95 Atomic Age: 48 Frontiers New and Lost 'MTTcry and Lost 1 �S'^^'i^'k-cL (^LLL. S' - /v-j—^ y4v^c/ S ■/ ^ (^ska^<^£., Led (^lid <^JL>^K-^f^ dd, SkJl/\S (^jyir\Jj^^ ^ (^'XA-ijJAcL S^n\/?d djldltJSds'K^ d\^\iX ^Ajt- df^ yt^'^ dL-uf^ [cA^Welr^yd^ Jj^^oji r^CiL jJ7> 7^ o � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 50 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Atomic Age: Frontiers New and Lost, Symbolic History, Part 36 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 36 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_36_Atomic_Age--Frontiers_New_and_Lost https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a0ed02521508c52d97293d18e87bc0ab.pdf 785f8d18dbe5bee66ee4ba56357894a5 PDF Text Text Charles G. Bell, 126b'''Caii3y3n Road, or St. John's College Santa Fe, Ne^r Mexico 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY — Through Sight and Sound 35t Betveen Wars — 20th Century, Art and Politics 1) Rembrandt 1656, Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, State Gallery, Kassel (video begins vith detail) la) Same, detail (vith video lb and other details) MUSICt Albert 1640, from Recitative, Kirchenkantata, "Bist du nicht . --- mit deinen Gaben", (Tinavre) Col.7073 D, Side 7 Begin vith the style-plateau of Europe, Rembrandt, 1656, Jacob blessing the sons of Joseph, in the century of Descartes and Newton (in music this Albert), when rational science, chordal harmony, representational art, seemed to constitute a divine order — Henry Moore: That spiritual object, which we call space... represents for us... the true and universal nature of the continuous divine presence... (end Recitativ^^ ' Bos?Sn (upplr Daughters of E.D. Boit, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Stewart Gardner, Kus. of Fine Arts 2b) Again 2, Daughters of Boit, detail Ill ^ ”»e, John Hay ^SIC: Hugo Wolf 1896^^0var dein Haus (Rita~ Streich) D.Gram. 138641 From this 1882 group portrait, through the First World f War, Sargent kept up the grand manner of figures lighted in space. But against Rembrandt or Velasquez, these daughters of Boit in their Paris drawing room (with the music of Hugo wold) seem as spaced out as the children of Henry James. When a reality which once affirmed God and world has become BO spectral, (fade Wolf) how is it to be maintained? a3) Gino Seyerini 1915, The Armored Train, detail, R. Zeisler, NYC [video only] b3) Andre Derain 1905, Le Faubourg, Collioure, priv. coll'n, Paris 3) Double: Again a3, Severini's Train, whole; and Picasso 1938, Girl with Cock, Museum of Art, Baltimore 3a) Again 3B, Picasso, Girl with Cock j �C.G. Bell Between Kars - 2 MUSIC; Varese 1922# frorn-Americnie (Utah)# Vanguard SRV~274 SD All during Sargent's lifetime and in all arts (Varese's doubleedged clang of Amerioue# 1922)# the converse vave had been moxinting# through Cezanne# Post-Impfessionist# Fauve# to the dissolving ecstasy of Ltuninism# Blaue Reiter# Futurism — this 1915 Severini (left)# where an armored train elides into rapture. % And when Picasso (right)# in the throes of a Europe bungling through Fascism to Second War# struck back# it was not by realism, but by the cleaver of post-Dada attack — this Girl with a Cock of 1938. [video only) a4) G. Kolbe (Nazi) c. 1935, Great Fighter [video only] b4) Boccione 1913, Unique Form of Continuity in Space, bronze, Civic Gallery of Modern Art, Milan 4) Double: b4, Boccione's Continuity; & a4, Kolbe's Fighter 4a) Reginald Marsh 1932, Tattoo & Haircut, Art Institute, Chicago [video only] 4b) Marsh 1934, Negroes on Rockavay Beach, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC 4c) Again 4, Double, Conti^iuiiy & Fighter, upper detail [video only] 4d) Again a4. Fighter, detail [video only] 4e) Again b4. Continuity, detail Though Establishment# even into nightmare times# resisted modernism (whether of Yea or Nay)# as if it sabotaged old claims _ V this 1913 Boccione (left)# "Unique Form of Continuity in Space." (fade Varese) No wonder# as the Free Enterprise flivver went into Depressionshimmies and mass cults took over (Mussolini# Stalin# Hitler# the milder New Deal)# they backed art-reaffirmation of nature and man. This 1935 Kolbe "Great Fighter" (right) damns the whole Boccione experiment. Yet how like# in that wilful assertion which pushed with Futurists toward the First# with Fascists toward the Second World War. Must not both wear like a shadow some Hollow Man suppressed anaemia: "Here we go round the prickly pear/. ..At five o'clock in the morning"? �. Bell Between Wars - 3^ a5) Maurice Utrillo C.1910, Rue des Abesses, Paris, Whitney Collection, NYC [slide only] b5) Derain 1906, Charing Cross Bridge, Private Colection, New York City 5 [video only] c5) Picasso 19b8, Standing Figure, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 5) Utrillo 1910-12, Rue du Chevalier de. la Barre, Coll'n. of Richard Seewald (with video detail) For there was a euphoria (from Revolutibn through romantic, symbolist, modern, which it was always possible, by, temperament, drink, or Pascalian vertigo, to slip off of ~ Hindemith, from 1922. So alcoholic Utrillo's pre-war Paris clouds the Fauve-bright scene -- like the Boston of Eliot's "Prufrock": Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question... O, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit. 6) c. 1919?, Woman in a Large Hat, R. Lehman Collection, NYC (with video detail) Modigliani too, by addiction and consumption, fell beyond Picasso's Blue and Rose into the enervations of that Lady whose Portrait Pound — "your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea", and "she is dying piecemeal/ of a sort of emotional anaemia" — would turn over to Eliot* "Eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase", and "I shall sit here, serving tea to friends". (end Hindemith, sehr lanasam) [slide only] a7) Kandinsky 1913, Improvisation 30 (Cannon), Art Institute •*'“ of Chicago [video only] a*?) Kandinsky 1914, Picture with 3 Spots, Guggenheim Museum, NYC 7) Double: Again a7, Kandinsky, Improvisation 30; & 1927, Points of an Arc, private collection (with video details) 7a) Again 7B, Kandinsky Arc Points _______ ^________ ____________________ MUSIC* Hindemith 1922-3, Same sonato, 4th Mvt, "Rasendes", Mace ------------------------------------------------------ MCS 9075 Kandinsky's early elation (left) had turned foreseen destruction to a Symbolist Sieg Heil: this 1913 Improvisation with firing cannon and toppling materialist towers. But Kandinsky himself after Versailles (all those little doomed democracies carved �C.G. Bell Between Wars for exploitation out of defeated empires) Kandinsky (right) tightened inebriation to a geometric aftermathi while the climax movement of the same 1922 Hindemith, strait-jackets pre-war iconoclasm. F.A. Breuhaus, Bonn Such the foreboding drumbeat Hofer, in 1920 Berlin, would bring from Cubism and the blood-depletion of war. AgaiVi Eliot had penetrated to that skeletal mood in 1911 Paris; "Rhapsody on a windy Night": Every steet lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum. The last twist of the knife. (end Hindemith, "Rasendes") a9) Salvator Dali 1935, Nostalgic Echo, coll'n L.M. Maitland, close detail b9) Clovis Trouille c. 1940?, Mon Tombeau, detail, artist's coll'n (with video detail of bats) 9) Again a9, Dali's Echo, whole (with closer video detail) In The Waste Land Eliot seems to have foreshadowed also the Dali smart Surreal, this 1935 Nostalgic Echo, with its bell-clap^^ woman and skip-roping inversion; A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. 10) Mack Senne’tt c. 1917, Bathing Beauties, Mus. Mod. Art, NYC (with video detail) As for Dali, after*Spain and Paris,, he was now sharing in the continental fruitcake of America, everything from Rock of Gibralter East to the Zaniest shenanigans of Hollywood — this Mack Sennet 1917 Bathing Beauties; give those girls anyway? and what is Santa going to a bag of diapers? �9 Between Wars C.G. Bell 5 11) John Marin 1922, Lower Manhattan, watercolor. Museum of Modern Art, NYC ____ (with video detail)_____________ __________ ____________________________ Yet the Ea^t too was pulsing with the vibrance of capital expanding as never before toward boom and bust — staid insurance companies housing JveS and Wallace Stevens, while John Marin caught this 1922 Lower Manhattan, the sun going off Like an atonic bomb at the heart of it. Such affirmation as William Carlos Williams risked in his 1917 "El Hombre": It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: “ shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no p^rt! al2) 20th cent.. Swimming pool at the Hearst Castle, San Simeon, CA 12) Double: Inigo Jones Etc. 1647-52, Double Cube Room, Wilton House, England; & Assembly room, Hearst**s San Simeon (1919) 12*a) Single of 12B, Hearst *s Assembly room________________ _______________ While incalculable fortunes rose and deployed themselves, not yet for the modern, but in the acquisition and pastiche-display of Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque. Beside the ornate refinement of Inigo,Jones' mid-17th century Double-Cube Room, Wilton House near Salisbury (left), how ecclectic the ostentation of the Assembly Room at ;5an Simeon, where William Randolph Hearst sat at the hub of a tabloid ,empire to receive his guests. Did the infinitely varied surge and intemperance of that America admit of any limits jt; at ali? al3) Nigerian (Olowe of Ise) 1895, Reception of first British Administrator to visit Ekiti, carved doors from Palace of Ogoda, British Museum, London, detail 13) Same, Carved doors, whole (video various details)---------- ---------MUSIC, central Africa, Burundi chant avec clthare (vhlsper-so^ By will or fate we had subsumed everything the conquering West had dreamed or brought of against what was not yet called the Third world:— this Reception of the first British administra tor in Ekiti, Nigeria — Captain Ambrose like a sick bird, with �C.G. Bell V. - Between Kars 6 his shackled bearers, confronting the Uoruba chief with his wives and elders. (fade Burundi> Jttterbugglng In a Jake Joint, Clarksdale, MUSICt Duke Ellington Orchestra 1938. from Battle of Swing ' ' ' - jjazz II tape, A.475) But would not Kurtz meteoring down to the Heart of Darkness symbolize the reverse conquest of beat rythm seeding New World and Old with reckless revitalization — these indomitable Blacks to a Juke Box in Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1939 .A' (why not to Duke Ellington's "Battle of Swing", lately the rage of Paris?) (end Ellinoton) 15) Photoi Margaret Bourke-White 1937, -At the Tine of the Louisville ---- Flooa-, Eastman House, Rochester. NY (with video A.t.Hsi _Blues, Odetta (from Blind Lemon Jefferson#) I just can't kfeep from cryln' sometimes. RCA LPM 2573 all post*>Nretzschean modern, that wild release transvalues the caustic betrayal of enlightened and romantic hope. This 1937 photograph is entitled "At the Time of the Louisville Flood", but the seeking blacks against that slogan-sale of the American Way, might project from any Depression city the job or soup lines of a crazed economy, everywhere veering toward violence. 16) Photo 1938, Mussolini & Hitler parading on Hitler's visit to Italy, Florence (with video details) (cf» Atomic Age a76)* I wa’s in Florence during Hitler's 1938 visit. The Italians hated the Germans, but Welcome signs plastered the walls. From windows, not to be raised above five centimeters, we saw the great car pass between banks of soldiers, the Duce and FUhrer side by side, one acting for the crowd, the other for his own romantic heart. On every lamp-post loud-speakers had been hung, form which (to offset Italians shouting for Mussolini) volleyed a raucous "Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler?" The corporal waved acceptance. passed, the real cry eased, while the record-rehearsing As the car ^ �Bell Between Wars - 7 ■legaphones boomed "Hile Hitler, Heil Hitler" ad absurdum. Italian cleverness! 17J^Hans^Hofmann wSSo S2an) Of ArtV New But who was being deceived? Mfe's Picture History of World War ii ' Fantasia, University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (with ?95fGallery, Nev YorX ^ Square: "Ascending", Whi tney Museum MUSIC: Schonberq 1936, Fourth Quartet, opening. Vox SVBX 590. sidP> s From that vortex beyond the human, of which Chaplin would make fun and history destruction, the arts, the races banned as degenerate: this Hofman color Fantasia of 1943, with its stressed discoveries of pure "push and pull...force and counterforce"; SchOnberg'E 1936 twelve-tone Fourth Quartet: the very sciences of relativity and indeterminacy, also accused of decadence _ these regrouped in America for a love-feast of modernity — euphoric transvaluation of earth-upheaval. Had what was exiled constituted a kind of "Drunken Boat" danger: or search through danger for radical renewal: or was it the protraction of a now fashionable mode? Could it be all in one? (fade_SchSnber£) 18) Provencal Rom'q c. 1160, Bearded Apostle (head), Gilles-du-Garde, near Arles (with video detail)_______________ _____ MUSIC: Leonin c.llSO, from Alleluva, at "In Azimus "(Oberlin etc.) -- • ■ ■■ ... .. — MHS 676 (Band 2) "Eternity," said Bernard of Tours, called Silvestris, "is I that from which time must be bom and into which it must be resolved." But not all our art-stripping could revive the force with which spirit first buttressed (over the bare-fifth voids of Romanesque) the almost demonic stare of body overmastered by God’s word. (fade Leonin) 19) J. Dietrich 1738, St. Augustine (head), Diessen am Ammersee, Bavaria (with video detail) �C•G• 6g1X Between Kars - 8 MUSIC: Bach 1733-8# from Quoniani, B Minor Mass (Karayan etc.) ■ ------ -------------------------- Angel '3500 C Nor our sensuous cultivation# our fulness of techniques and knowledge# restore the sanctifying order of earth and man, which the 1700's rhetoric of Baroque (here Dietrich and Bach) tirelessly proclaims. (fade Quoniam) 20) Rouault 1925, The Apprentice (self portrait). Museum of Modern Art, Paris (with video detail) 20a) Rouault 1932, Christ Mocked, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (with video detail)____ ______________________ MUSIC: Satie 1918, close of Socrate, Angel S-36846 In conscious disclaimer of that plenitude# Rouault's simulation of stained glass# or this close of Satie's Socrate does not resume the clean force of the pre-personal, romantic# Eliot's 1911-12 "Prufrock": its soil is broken "I am no prophet _ and here's no great matter" (close Satie) — a debility perfected by 1925 in "The Hollow Men": "...We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!" ... "Waking alone/ At the hour when we are/Trembling with tenderness/ Lips that would kiss/ Form prayers to broken stone." Between "This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms" and faith "Falls the Shadow/ Life is very Ipnq... For Thine is/ Life is/ For thine is the/ This is ^he way the world ends...Not with ^ bang but a whimper." Had the spirit and exhuberance of the past worn down to Eliot's neo-skeptic return to high church and state? of"Moal: irtf'NYC** Dancer Accompanies Herself vlth her Shaaowe, Mus. Hashlnston, Art Musenm, Portlana, & American Gothic, Art Institute, Chicago 21a) Again 21B, Wood's Gothic (with video details) Again 21A, Maurer's Washington 2l£j John Stuart Curry 1937. The Mississippi, eitv Mnsenm. st. Louis By 1916 cliques of Americans had turned (with Gertrude Stein) to clever or pained debunking, if Man Ray and Schamberg carried �o » r Between Wars - 9 it with the wit of Dada» poor Maurer (left)» who scarificed Impressionist success to the Cubism of Paris, gave that reduction a melancholy of his own: this George Washington of 1932, year of the artist's suicide. Appropriate to a time of Crash and Depression, that such anaemia on the abstract side should be countered on the realist by Grant Wood's 1930 American Gothic (right), its make-believe of pitch-fork father and spinster daughter (ironically aproned in circles and dots) prime for Eliot's slide through The Waste Landt I think we are in rat's alley Where the dead men lost their bones — to the dry conversion of Ash-Wednesday (also of 1930) — Although I do not hope to turn again Although I do not hope..i Wavering between the profit and the loss... Yet in the realistic fiction of that horizon, Mississippi Faulkner could sweep the impenetrable gloom of The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Wild Palms on an affirming thunderhead of hallucinated prose: ___ 22) Marie Hull 1936, An American Citizen (John Wesley Washington), Artist's collection (with video detail) ^ w c*. 22a) John McCrady c. 1936?, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, City Art Museum, St. _____Louis, MO------------------ --------- —--------------------- ----—----, . . Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become then all of remembering will cease to Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grie . Marie Hull, Mississippi painter to be caught up later in the excitement of the New York School, is no art-equivalent. Though this portrait, from the Depression, of "An American Citizen" (another Washington), has the stamp of Faulkner's indomitable Blacks— in Dilsey's church, the monkey-like preacher with the great voice: �Between Wars - 10 C.6. Bell 0 breddred! I sees de doom crack an hears de golden horns shoutin down de glory# en de arisen dead vhut got de blood en*de ricklickshun of de Lamb. a23) Robinson Jeffers 1958# Photo by Edward Weston [video only] b23) Photo Sept. 26, 1918, Mobile Railroad Gun at Baleycourt, U.S. Official War Pictures , . n ^ ^ , c23) Photo May 3, 1939, World War II, Chungking (China) bombed by Japan, Life»e Picture History d23) Photo: Crab Nebula in Taurus, remnant of Super-nova observed by Chinese in 1054 AD ^ e23) Robinson Jeffers' Stone Tower, Carmel, CA (CGB 83) f23) Yeats' Ballylee Tower with bridge (CGB '80) 23) Morris Graves 1940. Blind Bird. Museum of Modern Art, New York C_i^-West of the Black sway, Jeffers attempted a Dionysiac crucible of terror* He brays h\imanity in a mortar to bring the savor From the bruised root... I have seen these ways of God... Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: ... a certain measure in phenomena: The fountains of the boiling stars, the flowers on the foreland, the ever-returning roses of dawn. As if three pockets of the English speaking world had approached tragic resonance* Jeffers' Carmel coast, Faulkner's Mississippi, and (above the rest) the Ireland of William Butler Yeats. Yet these were word-kindlings, loosely linked to any art-stirrings from the same or other soil ~ as from Seatle, Graves' 1940 V Blind Bird. 24) Frank Lloyd Wright 1936, Falling Water, Bear Run, PA 24a) F.L. Wright 1936, Falling Water, South elevation. Night 24b) Photo: Windsor ruins near Port Gibson, MI (CGB '80)--------------Who is greater than Frank Lloyd Wright? tragic. Yet he defies the Can even his masterpiece, this 1936 house cantilevered over Falling Water, lift the ruins of time to an eternal sphere, all presences abide? It is what Yeats does in poems of those years ~ "The Curse of Cromwell"* I came on a great house in middle of the night,^ Its open lighted doorway and its windows all alight. And all my friends were there and made me welcome too; But I woke in an old ruin that the winds howled through; And when I pay attention I must out and walk Among the dogs and horses that xinderstand my talk. O what of that, O what of that. What is there left ^ say? �’CVG'.«Bell Between Kars - 11 25) Mondrian 1902, Trees on tKe R*»in detail)______________ on the Gein, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (vith video Begin again. MUSIC. ------- , Can ve typefy the style-current of the first third of the" century? Mondrian would »,ove in twenty years from this 1902 I«>tch landscape to a ruled abstraction of white and primary color equares. In the comparable break with tonal harmony, Pebussy, up to 1890 was refining French Romantic ?vlth^vtdeo Farmhouse, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague towards musical Impressionism, while art sought an abstract color-music. Yet what Of the ratios on which music had relied? The ear knows them by wave-overlay. but seeing blurs proportion, whether Of space or color frequency. stretched representation. No wonder visual harmony has mostly In this 1906 Mondrian (from four years later than the first), landscape feels its way toward geometry. (end Nocturne) Mondrian c. 1911-1?, Horizontal Tree, Sidney .T.nis Gallery, w.w v„,. ^SlCi^bussv loot. PaooHe.. unin^, ^t. PHC t ,n., si* ">ore years Mondrian climaxes that search for the form underlay of nature, indeed the background of this Horizontal Tree already admits the cubism of Paris. With pebussy, a oomparable span might take us to the gamelan inspired Pagodas of 1903. detfu)^ detail Composition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (vith video Almost within a year Mondrian had dissolved the espalliered tree (with other natural objects) into a complex of straight and curved lines forming planes of blue and tan - for which the title �C.G* Bell Between Kars - 12'- now can only be "Composition". t It is the pre-war climax of abstract experiment. (fade Pagodes) [slide only] a29) Mondrian Double: 1921 Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, The Hague; & 1922 Composition 2, Guggenheim Museum, New York City 29) Single a29A, Mondrian Red, Yellow Si.Blue (with video details)__________ MUSIC: Debussy 1915, from Etudes, Pour les notes repetees Debussy did not live into the reductive tightening of the post war twenties, in which, from 1921 to 1933, Mondrian’held to a canon of perpendicular black lines, ruled on white and edged with primary-color rectangles — though Debussy's last studies, the Etudes of 1915, move that way. Is Mondrian's abstract stripping the main stream of the time? And what is its content? Before I knew Wil.liam Carlos Williams, I cited his "Between Walls" for such indirection: Between Walls the black wings of the hospital where nothing a30) Mondrian 1942-3, Broadway Boogie Woogie, Museum of Modern Art, NYC 30) Mondrian 1943-44 (unfinished). Victory Boogie Woogie, Coll’n Tremaine, Meriden, Conn.____________________ __________________ _________________ will grbw lie cinders... in- %diich shine the broken pieces of a green bottle Though when I asked him afterwards if that shattered glass spoke mere fragmentation, or the outcrop of beauty even from the sterile — he, who hated to explain poetry, groaned: "I meant the latter." So Mondrian in New York, 1943, brought the vibrance \ of what he now called Boogie-Woogie, to this final unfinished diamond entitled "Victory Boogie-Woogie". (fade Etudes) �C’ .G. Bell Between Wars - 13 31) Duncan Grant 1910, Portrait of James Strachey, Tate Gallery, London (with video detail MUSIC; Vaughan Williams 1914, from London Symphony, into the 2nd mvt., " -------------------------------- London LL 569 We cannot deny the trend of reattachment. Duncan Grant, born in India, trained in Paris, painter of the Bloomsbury group, might seer, at first drawn to the abstract. Into the Edwardian realism of this 1910 portrait of James Strachey, secure in its heritage from Pre-Raphaelite and Degas — 32j._D_.._Grant 1912, Still Life, Courtauld Institute, London________ _______ he has absorbed, in this Still Life of 1912, Cezanne. Perhaps the early work of Vaughan Williiuns, as from the London Symphony, finished in 1914, has some such blend of romantic and modern, expressed in a richly |>ersonal idiom. 33} D. Grant 1913, The Tub, Tate Gallery, London (with video detail)_______ But Grant, by the next year, under the tutelage especially of Matisse, ventured further into the modern experiment than Vaughan Williams, perhaps, ever would. Surely the painter's admirers must have thought him launched into the proper orbit of the century, (fade London Symphony) After the First War, however, he made an about face and gave the rest of his life 34) D. Grant 1940, Haystack before trees, Tate Gallery, London 34a) Nolde c. 1945?, Surf, Kunsthalle, Hamburg to a modern reconstitution of the realistic English landscape. It was the sort of affirmation Vaughan, Williams aimed at in the Fifth Symphony shift to E major. MUSIC; Vaughan Williams 1943, Symphony No. 5. 1st Mvt, major theme * ^ ------------ - Angel 35952 How crucial xs that earth—rallying to the decades of Between—war? (fade Vaughan Williams) �i ^ C.G. Bell Between Kars - 14 35) Double: Wyndham Levis 1913, Composition, drawing, Tate Gallery, London; and 1937, Red Portrait (oil), Grosvenor Gallery, London (with video detail)__________________________ __ _____________________ _ Even Wyndham Levis, Blast and Tyro of English avant-garde, would move from the Vorticist iconoclasm of his 1912-14 Compositions, to the representational i>ortraits of the •30's, this in red, a haunted recording of the very aesthetic anaemia, the very people his pen vas satyrizing in The Apes of God. 36) Picasso 1901, Harlequin Leaning on his Elbow, Met. Mus., NYC (with video detail) [slide only] 36a) Picasso 1905, Acrobat's Family with a Monkey, Goeteberg Museum, Sweden What of Picasso, style-maker of the century, — with the only musician who rivalled his art-surprises? As Hugo Leichtentritt wrote, "There is not one Stravinsky) there are ten." MUSIC: Stravinsky 1907 & ff, from Pastorale, Col M 30579 Picasso leads the way. This Harlequin anticipation of Blue and Rose is from 1901} whereas the earliest Stravinsky cognate seems the 1907 Pastorale (here in a later setting for violin and wind quartet). (end Pastorale) a37) Picasso 1907, Buste de Femme ou de Marin, Picasso Museum, Paris 37) Picasso .1907/ Head (sketch for Les Demaiselles d'Avignon), priv. coll 'n. MUSIC: Stravinsky 1912-13, from Sacre du Printemps, Col.MG ST 31202 Picasso's eruption of force advances from 1906-09, through the t Negroid to the violent beginnings of Cubism. Stravinsky peaks his upheaval a few years later in the Rite of Spring, (fade) 38) Picasso 1921, Three Musicians, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (with video detail) ___________________ ___________________________________________ IfflSIC: Stravinsky 1922-23, Octet for Wind Instrumf^nts. from 2nd Mvt, “ --------------------- ---------- !— Close, Col M-30579 The post-war cleverness of cubism pervaded by the irony of Dada and-Jazz, ties Picasso's 1921 "Three Musicians" to Stravinsky's Octet for Wind Instrxaments, a year or so after, (fade Octet) �cVg. Bell Betveen Kars 15 a39) Picasso 1932, The Dream, Ganz Coll'n., Nev York, upper detail 39) Same, Picasso’s Dream, vhole (vith video detail) MUSIC» Stravinsky 1939-40, Symphony in C, 2nd mvt, nr.opening, —-- ---------- --- -------------- ' Deutsche Gram. 2530 267For the correlations of Picaisso's Classical delight and of his Guernica terror, the Stravinsky time-sequence appears crossed. This Dream of 1932 (what would fetch daughter Maia from the vibrant new model Maria-Therese) looks toward Stravinsky's most pellucid re­ shaping of the Classical, the 1940 Symphony in C. (fade 'C* Symph.) 40) Picasso 1934, Bullfight, Ganz Collection, NY (with video detail) MUSIC; Stravinsky 1927, Oedipus Rex, from Epilogue. Col M 31129 By 1934, Picasso's Bullfight series was prophetically warming up (with Fascist Europe) for the Guernica. But Stravinsky's tragic blast had come earlier, as in this Oedipus Epilogue, of 1927 — before his classical lightening, (fade Oedipus Rex) [video only] a41) Picasso 1924, Paul in a Clown's Suit, Coll'n of the artist 41) Double; Picasso 19^23-4, Bird Cage, V.M. Ganz, NY; and a41, Paul in a Clown's Suit ^ Clearly, in the dialogue of abstract flight and earth-return, Picasso plays an ambiguous role — Picasso, who within a year (1923-4), had always the style-choice of putting space together, as in this clown portrait o£ his son Paul (right); or of wrenching it apart, as in this post-cubistic "Bird Cage" (left) ~ without any implied polemic of world loss or recapture. 42) Conrad Witz 1444, Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Museum of Art, Geneva (with video details) In Western history, however, the representational conquest has been no matter of indifference, but a reality of power. ' Let five boating scenes plot that odyssey. In Conrad Witz* 1444 Miraculous Draught of Fishes (cf. Luke 5), with Christ's Walking on the Waves and Peter's sinking (cf. Mathew 14; blended in John 21), Renaissance observation has taken its �C.G. Bell Between Wars - I’B stand in sacred legend, which opens to the delight of the Lake, shpre an4 mountains near the city of Geneva — a birth of nature in the miraculous, real by timeless suspension (everything mirrored in the water but the risen Christ). 43a)^Same^“qfor» Malta, Nat. Gal., London Same, Storm detail (video, another detail In our second the ship is going to pieces on the rocks. It is Paul's shipwreck on Malta, closing the Classical world, as the shipwreck of Odysseus had opened it. Acts; There arose a tempestuous wind, Euroclydon... and falling into a place where two seas met they ran the ship aground...but the hinder part was beaten with the violence of the waves...and some on boards, some on broken pieces of the ship...they escaped all safe to land. But what fills Elsheimer's Shakespearean scene is the night violence of ocean: (Othello) What from the cape can you discern at sea... (Winter s Tale) The ship...swallowed with yeast and froth, as you'd thrust a cork into a hogshead... A world real by Cartesian and Apocalyptic ambivalence. Hunting in the Estuary, Gallery Quirini----Stampalla, Venice (with video detail) In Longhi's 1760 Duck Hunting in the Venetian Estuary, the sacred sanction has receded. Secular pleasure stands on its own. Even the shadowed, heroic might it received from spatial formula­ tion under religious war (as in Rembrandt) has lightened to the wit of the salon century. Though that comic ease holds the great claims of nature and man in the moderation of aristocratic propriety. 45) W.S. Mount 1845, Eel Spearing at Setauket, NY State Historical Association, Cooperstown, NY (with video detail) Worth^^”^^*” a River, Amon Carter Museum, Fort With Mount's Eel Spearing, the earthly hope has staked out romantic holdings in the New World. How quietly radiant the �Between Kars C.CJ. Bell Transcendental pervasion: 17 (Thoreau) "The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted." If Longhi's four servants have been replaced by a black woman, she is the Queegueg who handles the gig, while the white boy paddles — type for Buck and Jim, proto­ Only a throb of sentiment hints how near we are to the breaking of earth's over-extended claim. What child of the Mississippi (or Brandywine) could rekindle such radiance today? Has not history itself imposed another search by making (most of all in the New World) that vulnerable ecology of individual wish and joy a laughter to the gods? 46) Paul Klee 1923, Scene from a Comic Operatic Fantasy "The Seafarer", Frau Trix Durst-Haas, BasJLe, Switzerland 46a) Same, Comic Opera, detail (with closer video detail) It is by no mere caprice that when Paul Klee (1923) took up the boating and spearing, day becomes such dream-night as in Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle (pub. 1928 — to be comprised in Finnegans Wake) Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice, bawk talk...Can't hear with bawk of bats, all the liffeying waters of...My foos won't moos...My ho head halls...Tell me tale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night! Klee's quarry has gone surreal -- sea-abstracts in a spaceless monitor of raised and lighted water, which the hunting whimsy stabs. The war of representation has been fought in the probabilityfield of the mind-invested globe. "Wonder ye then at the fiery chase?" a47) Jan Vermeer 1667, The Guitar Player, Kenwood House, Hampstead, London 47) Vermeer 1665, The Studio, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (with video detail) MUSIC: Buxtehude pub. 1695, Largo from Sonata Op. 1 no. 3, ~ ~ " •" -- Music Guild 121 Who can specify when the reasoned affirmation of world order reached its eurt-peak? Contradictory dimensionalities blur the �Between Kars - *18. ^ ' C.G. Bell question. Yet we would not be far off, if we should choose, from the century of Milton and Leibnitz, Vermeer's masterpiece. The Studio — with the instrumental sonata then forming out of chromatic polyphony in Rosenmuller, or this Buxtehude(end Buxtehude! a48) Joseph Beuys 1962-67, Hasengrab, (see Shirmer, Munich: Beuys) 48) Dan Flavin 1968, Daylight, Pink & Yellow Flourescent Tubes, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York MUSIC: Cage 1958, from Fontana Mix, magnetic tape. Turnabout TV 34046S ■I I II II I I .1.1 nil I 111 iM ■■■■■■ III ■■■ I ■■■!■ ■ A — — -I Nor can the limit of the modern break with that humanly proportioned cosmos be defined — whether in the Expressionist or Futurist attack, in Dada or the Surreal, or the extensions of the post-war abstract — here one of Flavin's con­ structions with flourescent tubes, ^o too with music: on what scale can we weight the indeterminate abandon of Cage's Electronic sound against his Silence? (fade Cage) 49) Albrecht Durer 1495, Trees in a Mountain Landscape, watercolor, Kupf Kab., Berlin To confirm, around the 17th century, that upland of spirit in form, take thr^e landscapes, as like in airy freedom as their time-span admits of: — this 1495 Durer watercolor: 50) Claude Lorrain,1638-9, Landscape watercolor, British Museum, London this Claude Lorrain drawing about 1639, with the conscious pervasion of Saint-Amant, "Mon Oieul gue mes yeux sont contents/ De voir ces bois..." 51) Monet 1880, Woman Seated Under the Willows, National Gallery, Wash. DC this sunlit Monet of 1880. Though chosen for some similitude of instinctive lightness, each remains a compendium of its period style. 2nd 49) Again Durer, Trees in a Mountain Landscape 2nd 49a) Same, Durer Landscape, detail MUSIC: Brumel c. 1500, Du tout plongiet - Fors seulement, close ~ ...... • ...—Seraphim SIC-6104 , �/e.l. Bell Between Kars - 19 Dtlrer's observational discovery is suspended in the trans­ personal gift of the creed-world, as sensuous a mystery as in the rondeavDc of Josguin, or this Brumel. (end Brumel) 2nd 50) Again Lorrain, Landscape watercolor 2nd 50a) Lorrain c. 1640?, Herdsman^ Resting under a Tree, British Museum, ________ London______________________________________ _____ __ ______ MUSIC; Cavalli 1654, Beato chi puo, Musiche Italiane Antiche 4 Even in so light a wash, Claude asserts the noble_ formulation of the phenomena^(as in the mathematics of chordal harmony, Cavalli's Blessed Solitude, "Beato chi puo"), its mood tion by Descartes' universal knpwer; think, therefore I am." penetra­ "I ( fade Cavalli) 2nd 51) Again Monet, Woman Seated Under the Willows 2nd 51a) Same. Monet's Woman & Willows, detail of woman----------------MUSIC; Faurg 1887, Les Presents (song). Hist. Mus. Sound, In Monet (as in Faure), all that inherited spatial grandeur wimples toward the new evanescence ; the great Miltonic moods thin to the personal poignance of an almost sobbing delight. (fade Faure) 52) Spanish (Silos) 1109, Commentary on the Apocalypse, MS Add 11695 folio 240, British Museum, London (with video detailsj------------ ------ ---» MUSIC; Iraq. Roval Mode. His Image, voice, viol t lute; RCA V-LM-60_57 Before and after (or geographically around) the plateau of Europe from the 15th through the 19th century, lies a world more stripped to the timeless and spaceless; the primitive force of this 1100 Beatus commentary on the Apocalypse,from Silos, in a Spain permeated by the Dark Age and Moorish (does the Royal Mode of old Persian song preserve something of that faith-frenzy?) (fade Roval Mode) �C.6. Bell Between Wars - -20 53) Boccioni 1912, Materia (his nother), G. Mattioli Coll'n, Milan (with video detail)^ MUSIC; Schonberq 1912, Pierrot Lunaire, last stanza of 1st song; ■ ■ - ---Col. M 25679 Such force erupts again after eight centuries in the faithhungry surfeit of self, to Expressionist and Futurist thrillspasms: Boccioni's 1912 study of his mother, or from the same vear Schonberc's Pierrot Lunaire — Nietzschean nilomanias. (fade SchSnbero) ---------- a54) Goya 1788, The Meadow of San Isidoro, Pradd, Madrid, detail 54) Same, San Isidore, whole (and another video detail) MUSIC; Mozart 1786, from Concerto 24 in C Minor, 1st mvt, nr close, • — ..... — - Murray Hill S-3906 Yet where could human fulfillment have affirmed "So far and no further"? Since already Goya's last possession of an 18th century enlightened order was reaching from its lace and powdered wigs to the liberation that would turn this festive meadow to a Napoleonic battlefield <— a summons of which even Mozart felt the dissonart call. (Mozart forte, then fade) 55), Mark Pothko 1944, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, Mary Pothko (with video details) 55a) Pothko 1949, Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Ped, Guggenheim, New York (video detail only) MUSIC: Messiaen 1940, Quatour pour la Fin du Temps 3 opening, Abime — des Oiseaux, D. Gram. 2531 093 There was no stopping place, from that, to the soul-risk of the wartime forties, Messiaen's Abyss of Birds from the Quartet for the End of Time, with Rothko's Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, closing his Surreal apprenticeship, just before he melted landscape to 'drowning color pools, (fade Messiaen on low note) 2nd 54) Again 54, Gova's San Isidoro, another detail Let six stations — from the Goya picnic, 2nd 55) Again 55, Pothko’s Slow Swirl, detail to the Rothko swirl, trace the abstraction of the outward, the surrealization of the within. �Between Kars C'.G. Bell 21 56) Constable 1825, Jumping Horse (center detail), Victoria & Albert Museum, London_________ ______________________________________________ In Constable's Leaping Horse of 1825, how visionary eye's vision has become. But there is also the inner eye, and from 1800 to now, it is as if those polar pairs of sight and dream 57) John Martin c. 1825?, Fallen Angels Entering Pandemonium, Tate Gallery, London 57a) Same, Martin's Pandemonium, detail had advanced together in revelational estrangement.' Since time-linked with Constable's observation, and from the seune quarter of England, John Martin was continually transforming appearance into fantasy: Milton's Pandemonium like Poe's "Dreamland" — "I have reached these lands but newly/ From an ultimate dim Thule —/ From a wild weird clime that lieth sublime,/ Out of Space ~ out of Time." 58) Montecelli c. 1880?, Under the trees by water's edge. Collection Alfred Lambert (with video detail) After 1870, whatever dislocation of the outward was peaking to Van Gogh, cropped out here and there — in Marseilles with the late works of Monticelli ~ this color impasto "Under trees by water's edge". — as "earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled" as the "bushybowered wood" and "marbled river" of Hopkins "Epithalamion": "What is water? Spousal love." 59) Victor Hugo c. 1866, The Snake, Hugo Museum, Paris While subjectivity itself, in Victor Hugo's "The Snake", about 1866, draws from Symbolist encroachment (Baudelaire's "Litanies of Satan", or Meredith's "On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose") its alienating core. 60) Cezanne 1900->05, The Bathing Women, Nat. Gal., London With the turn to this century, Cezanne's studies of landscape and of human forms converge in those monumental still-lifes called "Bathers" — this almost final one in London, whose solid �C.G. Bell Between Wars -* 2? * geometry is no more Euclidian than that of Lobachevsky or Riemann, of Abbott's Flatland or Duhamel's Mount Analogue♦ 61) Edward Munch 1895» Jealousy, Rasmus Meyers coll*n> Bergen Over the same years Munch, moving oppositely, from inside out, nightmared the canvas to a symbolic confession: his jealous friend Przybyssewski, whose Eve-wife Dagny plucks for the artist the forbidden fruit. [video only] a62) Picasso 1913, La Bouteille de Suze, Washington University Collection, St. Louis, MO 62) Double: Braque c. 1914, Composition, Papier colle, Priv. Coll'n, Basel, & Giorgio di Chirico 1913-14, Anguish of Departure, Albright, Buffalo 62a) Again 62B, Chirico»s Anguish (video detail) I As a wave mounts up a shoal, the motions of abstract and surreal climb the slopes of the Great War, both cresting, 1913 and one in the paper collages with which Picasso and here Braque (left) completed their cubistic analysis —— a reduction of the physical beyond which, in a sense, art could not push on. At the same time, with Giorgio de Chirico (right), the depths of the sub-conscious poured out as in Freudian dream. Could the disillusions and Kafka—neuroses of war and post-war plumb a more haunted surreal? Without and within, we could almost affirm 1914 as •the climax of experiment. a63) Robert Rauschenberg 1955, Rebus,. Coll'n V. Ganz 63) Hans Arp c. 1920, Bird in an Aquarium, painted wood, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (with video detail)____________________________________ Though if put to it, we could surely—in the tide of Dada, non-objective, op and pop, which has seemed ever since to rise without limit all over the Western wrld -- extend the dual sequence through Second World War to now. So one who had thought Chekov, Shaw and Chaplin had pushed heartbreak comedy all ■the way, might yet be startled, in Becket and Ionesco, by the fuzed schizophrenia of that laugh-agony. But have not the poles also fuzed in this Arp cut-out, about 1920, Bird in an Aquarium? 4 Can we call it abstract. ,>. S' �C.G Bell Between Wars - 23 64J Joan.Miro 1924-25, Harlequin's Carneval. Albright Gal., Buffalo and set against it as* surreal the diverting flea-circus of Miro's Carnival, one of countless marvels in a field too complex to be ordered, much less clarified ~ ^ough the professional analysts, every year or so, would attempt just that, in ism-searching too tomes on "New Directions in Art"? 65) Mark Tobev 1941, Forms Follov Man, Seattle Art Museum \ While all directions went on cross-breeding: 1941, West Coast Tobey's "linear multiplicity", this "Forms Follow Man", abstraction loosened to a "White writing" which mystically absorbs the surreal. Yet the same fusion can everywhere exhibit the other leaning, 66) Darrel Austin c. 1940?, Europa and the Bull (cf. Life, 1940's) (with video detail) 2^ • as (for a West Coast complement to Tobey) in Darrel Austin — this palette-knife swamp of Europa, lambent as the sphynxhaunted pools of Raintree County: ^ "He could see her pale form turning over and over in a slow spiral floating away on green waters..." > 67) Double: de Kooning 1950-52, Woman I, Museum of Modern Art, NYC; and Barnett Newman 1951, The Way I, Annalee Newman, NY 67a) Again 67A, de Kooning's Woman 67b) Again 67B, Newman's Wav Finally, with the post-war Fifties, the New York School brought to simultaneous culmination (on those huge canvases, pushed by the vast resources of art-speculation), opposites transcending the former poles, a color-action of violent gesture (here de Kooning, Woman I), and a passive mystery of spaceless colorspace (Newman's The Way I) right). In the cross-section we have thus made, from Goya to Abstract- Expressionism, it might seem that the whole drift of the modern, formal or romantic# was univocal — to dissolve all rational �C.G. Bell Between Wars - 24 programs of man and world in an inebriation of the depths, non­ objective or subliminal. If crisis was the cause, our misrule of the mind-invested globe, how could the trend be opposed? 68) Albright 1927-30, Into the World There Came a Soul Named Ida, Art Institute, Chicago (with video details) Though it cannot be denied that the period of between-wars also witnessed a realism of material reattachment. What then,, if that \ attachments soils its own material nest? /\ Albright's 1927-30 "Into the World There Came a Soul Named Ida" was as sure as Miss I^nelyhearts to outrage all who thought such realism should be life-affirming. risk the distortion of a simplifying schema. 69) Quadruple: Top L: Delauney 1912-13, Suri #1, Stedeliik Amsterdam; Lower L: Picabia 1917, Amorous Display, ^i^coll'n Paris; Lower F: Cropper 1935, The Senate, detail^ Mus MoS ^r? "nyc e9a,lL^ie 69b 69c) 69d) 69e) irill: Single of Single of Agian 69, Single of 69B, Picabia's Amorous... 69C, Cropper's Senate Quadruple slide 69D. Zvefvez's Divide the field into four: by an X-axis running left to right, as from abstract and surreal to real and representational, across it raise a Y, as from negation (below) to affirmation (above). On this Cartesian plot, counterclockwise rotation will compass the art and politics from War to War. The fire-rush of avant-garde stands Heft and above, Delaunay's 1913 delight of sheer Sun-circle energy. Below it (also abstract, but negative), Picabia's 1917 Amorous Display toys with the machine mockery war and Dada had already made of modern vision. Below and to the right, .Cropper revives earth-seated realism, although for‘mockery ~ this Depression swipe at a senate of sleep and rant -- of which it might be asked: as well? if the intent is negation, why not negate objects Any answering claim of social message must sweep us right and above where programmatic realism asserts the imperative �“ C.6. Bell Between Wars - 25 of its earth-yea — this 1934 Russian Communist portrait of Kirov. • In this quadrant/ right and above/ art comes into danger. 70) Doubles Michelangelo 1513-16/ Moses/ detail/ Pietro in Vincoli, Rome; and Curry c. 1930?/ John Brown of Kansas/ Study for Fresco, Kansas State Capital I So in Curry's John Brown of Kansas/ post-romantic indulgence of t the vill-to-power manifestly suggests (beside its Michelangelo Moses-model) that heroism which/ as Eliot said in "Gerontion", fathers "unnatural vices". 71) Doubles Michelangelo 1501-04/ Head of David/ Accadcmia, Florence; S. Arno Breker c. 1938, Preparedness, Kunst, Vol 81 How ominously that could be the case, when at storm-center Nazi rallying would require of every level — religion, politics, science and art — the cheer of Mass-acclaim for the militance of reaction, nothing more grimly enforces than Arno Broker's "Preparedness" (right), its overweening also measured against (i’ Michelangelo — the civic call of the David. a72) Ernst Barlach 1914, The Avenger, 1956 D.S. Show 72) Barlach Double, again a72. Avenger; and 1927, Floating Angel, Cologne Protestant Church 72a) Single 72B, Barlach's Angel, detail_____ ___________________________ Let Ernst Barlach, North German sculptor, friend of Kaethe Kollwitz, attest the danger of that rocky narrows in the stream. In response to the First War, which Nietzscheans, even Rilke, hailed, Barlach's 1914 Avenger (left) bradished the blade of Biblical warning: Bword." "Who take the sword shall perish with the When such art-exhortation (with Barlach's cult of peasant humanity, especially Russian) had thrown him into the solitude of Hitler's condemnation, this 1927 floating angel (to be destroyed by the Nazis and reconstituted after the war from a hidden cast), became his dying prophecy, God's messenger hung in sightless gloom over the hvunan shore. �C.G. Bell Between Kars 26 * a73) Diego Fivera 1914, Las Figuras, Arkansas Arts Center Foundation b73) Same, Fivera's Figuras, left detail c73) Fivera 1914, Marine Fusilier, Nat. Inst. Fine Arts, Mexico City 73) Double: Deigo Fivera 1914, (c73) Marine Fusilier; and 1915, Zapata Landscape, Nat. Inst. Fine Arts, Mexico City ^ 73a) Again 73B, Zapata, detail (and closer detail)________________ ________ ^ Back to 1914. As the long-awaited. First World War came to Europe, the also expecteci revolution was. under way in Mexico. IVhile Rivera was with Picasso in Paris. When the abstraction which had affirmed by dislocation# took both impacts# who could say whether it stood now above or below# in the quadrant of Yea or of Nay# or if those Opposites had merged? MUSIC: Carillo 1913 & after, from Cristobal Colon ik etc, tones) ' * — Old 78; Col 7357 M (close of side A) Of his 1914 Marine Fusilier (Sailor at lunch)# though Rivera would later assert: "l believe my Cubist paintings are my most .Mexican"; or of the 1915 Zapata Landscape (Guerilla Fighter), "It is probably the most faithful expression of the Mexican mood that I have ever achieved" — his revolutionary compatriots might have judged (as of the micro-tone experiments of Mexican Carillo): "Elitist imitations of international avantgarde. " (fade Carillo) a74) D. Fivera 1927, El Hombre ante los Elementos, fresco, Escuela Nac. de Agriculture, Chapingo, Mexico b74) Same, Fivera fresco, lower detail (with further video detail) 74) Same, Fivera fresco, wide angle (video various details) MUSIC: Carlos Chavez c. 1930?, from Los Cuatro Soles (of water, air, ~ fire, earth) Ballet, Col. MQ 32685 (middle, soft-loud) Whereas# when Rivera took up twelve years later the painting of political and social frescoes for the post-revolutionary govern­ ment — this School of Agriculture myth of man facing the elements Earth# Air# (left) Water# (right) Volcanic Fire# with the machines of their mastery (the very child sparking an electric arc) — he had obeyed the other imperative# of monumental# patriotic representation. As if we had gone from Carillo's fractional tones to Chavez folkloristic Ballet on the Mahuatl sun-cycles of the same Four Elements. �C.G. Bell Between Wars - 27 [video only] a75) Jose Orozco 1939, Hernan Cortez Fresco, detail, ceiling of auditorium, Hospicio Cabanas, Guadalajara 75) Same fresco, detail of Cortez At the same time Orozco — though with more Expressionistic attack began his fresco celebration of national culture, which would climax, 1939, in the vaulted auditorium of the Guadalajara orphanage — this Marxist vision of Cortes as armored machine, advancing in flames over mutilated Indians. 76) Sigueiros 1943, Self-portrait, Inst. N3C. de Bellas Art’es, Mexico City (with video details) Finally Sigueiros, third of the great moralists, makes of his 1943 fist-advancing self a personal assertion of the whole Mexican revolutionary claim — the pathos of between-war realism raided to the partisan demand of the Second War crusade. (fade Chavez) 77) Russian Byzantine 1065 and after. Church of the Intercession of the Virgin, near Vladimir (with video detail) MUSIC; Traditional Russian Chant, Liturgy for Lent, Psalm 141, solo; — ...."....... " --- ----- - "" ' Anth. Son. LP-10 A-2 In Russia avant-garde came as a late flowering from a more primitive soil. With what vis inertia the snowy wonder of the Byzantine north held its own: witness this 1065 Church near Vladimir, altered through centuries, just such as Tolstoy's Godfolk would still have pilgrimaged to, with the old chant they itfould have sung. [video only] a78) Russian 15th-17th cent.. Walls and Tower, Kremlin of Novgorod 78) Same, Novgorod Kremlin, another view with bells (with video detail) (same music. Chorus) And like the Renaissance impassioned harmonization of that chant, the force of European revival spills into the ancient city of Novgorod — in this 1490 wall and 1600 bell tower, announcing Peter the Great. (fade Liturgy) �f C.G. Bell Between Wars - 28 79) Alexander Ivanov c. 1850/ Boys Basking in the Sun, unused study for State Museum/ Leningrad (with video Christ's Appearance/r Russian db«««« wwwsi AJdAAAiUA.au \«AWii V A U tT ^ (Sof a4 1 1 detail) 79a) I.E. Repin (Russian) c. 1881/ Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkisl® Sultan/ Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow (with video detail) MUSIC: Tchaikovsky 1866/ 1st Symph (Winter Dreams)/ 2nd mvt close, ------ ——--------------------- ------------------ -—--- SUM 5053 Curious, that even as the Russian soul tpok the full dose of Romantic sickness (the consumptive refinement of Ivanov's midI century studies for Christ's Appearance to the Multitude/ with Tchaikovsky's First Symphony, called Winter Dreams), the infection showed itself in the egoism of Slavophil world-calling: Prince Odoyevsky -Weston Europe is on the highroad to ruin. We Russians, on the contrary, are young and fresh and have taken no crimes of Europe. We have a great mission to fulfill. Our name is already inscribed on the tablets of victory; the vicories of science, art and faith await us on the ruins of tottering Europe. (close Tchaikovsky) Co-ll-n Of the Artist, Prom that Romantic longing, the arts of Russia vper to modernism with the rest of Europe. In the sudden absorption of Fauve, Cubist, Futurist, leading to Constructivism, came Natalia Goucharovna, whose "Green and Yellow Forest" of 1912 (climax year also for Stravinsky and Scriabin) lives the ecstatic explo­ sion — knife-edge already designated on our Cartesian plot as the quadrant convergence of left above and left below, it is the ambivalent violence and fragmentation Blok carried over into his 1918 revolutionary poem. The Twelve. 81) M. Saryan 1937, Industry in the Mountains, State museums, USSR (with video detail) The Stalinist 'thirties saw the enforcement of proletarian reaction. The older painters adjusted as best they could; the younger came fresh to the mass jubilee. While the rebuke of �f ^ ’''C.G. Bell Betveen Kars - 29 Shostakovich for musical experiments, mounted him on the warhorse of the Fifth Symphony (1937). MUSIC: Shostakovich 1937, Fifth Symphony, 1st mvt, clima?^ (Kousevitsky) -------------------- ------------------------------------ Col. ML47 39 82) Seraphina Ryangina 1934, Higher and Higher, State museums, USSR (with video detail) 83) Toitze 1935, Stalin at the Rvon Dam, USSR state museum (fade Shostakovich) 2nd 82) Again Rvanoina’s Higher, detail ~ The modern apocalypse gone as sentimentally heartfelt as the outpourings of Sholokov's Anna: You know. Ilia, I perceive the future like a distant magically beautiful music. Just as one sometimes hears it in sleep...Kon't life be beautiful under Socialism! No more war, no more poverty or oppression or national barriers... 2nd 83) Again Toitze*s Stalin, detail Though against the Nazi overstretching, this believed propaganda might almost have tipped the heavenly scales to a prophecy of Leningrad. a84) F.C. Hassam 1918, Flag Day, Hirshhorn Coll'n 84) Paul Cadmus 1934, Coney Island, J.R. Stark Coll'n 84a) Same, Cadmus' Coney Island, detail , oa\ 84b) KW II Photo 1943’, Dive Bomber Assembly Line (cf Atomic Age 80J-------MUSIC: Ives c. 1905?, Central Park in the Dark, climax. Col MS-6843 Ives* "Central Park in the Dark" from early in the century shouts' the affirming vigor of American realism. Cadmus' Coney Island from 1934 wallows in negation — like the anti-life of Farrell's Studs Loniaan: (fade Ives) click of the cue balls from where Stan Simonsky was practicing. An elevated train rumbled. An auto­ mobile whizzed by. A heavy-footed, well-formed girl passed. "How you like it?" "Push-Push!" mumbled Mike. In the confusion of data Spengler made the assessment which disasterously misled Hitler — that the United States was too decadent to be a cause for concern. �♦ C.G. Bell * A Between Kars - 3t>’ 85) Stuart Davis 1924, Odol, Coll'n Mrs. S. Davis 85a) Grant Wood 1932, Daughters of the Revolution, Coll'n E.G. Robinson 85b) Double: Norman Rockwell 1927, Sears Catalog Cover; and Kayne Thiebaud 1963, Girl with an Ice Cream Cone, Private Coll'n 85c) Double: Again 85, Davis' Odol; & Andy Warhol 1965, 4 Campbell's Soup Cans, private coll'n Ten years before Cadmus' cartoon-realism, Stuart Davis had given negation the acid-bath of the abstract, joining Dada in lower-left-quadrant debunking. Cvunmings at the same time hatched "Poem, Or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal"i take it from me kiddo... from every B.V.D. let freedom ring... Amer i ca, I love. You. And there*re a hun-dred-mil-lion-oth-ers, like all of you successfully if delicately gelded (or spaded) gentlemen (and ladies) — pretty 1ittleliverpi11hearted-Nujolneeding-There's-A-Reason americans (who tensetendoned and with upward vacant eyes, painfully perpetually crouched, quivering, upon the sternly allotted sandpile —how silently emit a tiny violetflavoured nuisance: Odor? ono. cqmes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush a86) Saint-Gaudens 1891, "Grief", monument for Henry Adams' Wife, Rock Creek Cemetary, ‘Washington DC b86) Same, "Grief", detail of face c86) Frank Lloyd Wright 1907, Avery Coonley House, Riversdale, IL 86) F.L. Wright, Living Room, Coonley House 86a) Arthur B. Davies before 1909, Dream, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City (with video detail) MUSIC: Ives 1908, The Unanswered Question, opening Col MS 6843 Where was the rapture with which America had faced the century? For Frank Lloyd Wright, the 1907 Coonley House opened fifty years of radiance; and surely this living room accords with the myster- �Bell Between Wars - 31 ious web of Ives 1S08 Unanswered Question — though for Ives, the power to compose would wane after the 1916 war. And Pound, before the embitterments and crippling misjudgments of the later century — how he glows with Sappho and Troubadour and early Yeats: Aupia Be in me as the eternal moods of the bleak wind, and not As transient things are — gaiety of flowers. Have me in the strong loneliness of sunless cliffs And of grey waters. Let the gods speak softly of us In days hereafter. The shadowy flowers of Orcus Remember thee. (fade Ives after dissonance) a87) John Marin 1919, Sunset, Maine Coast, Museum of Fine Arts, Columbus Ohio 87) Marin 1923, Ship, Sea and Sky Forms, an Impression, vatercolor, Mus. Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio___________________________________________ Before the war, through it and after, John Marin held to the vital claim of his Maine and New York yatOrcolorsj but what that thrill affirms, William Carlos Williams' 1935 poem "Yachts" may clarify: the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies ...reaching from the dead to be taken up they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over. 88) Hartley Double: 1914, Portrait of a German Officer; and 1937, Smelt Brook Falls, City Art Museum, St.Louis (with video singles)__________ We can set up polarities of yea and nay, objective, non­ objective; but how is time dramatized if the current rxans both ways? That Marsden Hartley, in Germany, 1914, called this insignia-abstracted mockery (left) "Portrait of a German Officer"; while by the 'thirties, in Maine, his Constructivist schooling would serve the representation -of natural scenes — is that part of a trend, as from Gertrude Stein to Hemingway? �Between Wars - 32 C.G. Bell a89) Arthur Dove 1911/ Nature 89) A. Dove 1937/ Rise of the 89a) A. Dove 1913/ Ferry Boat detail) [video only] again 89/ Dove’s Symbolized/ Art Institute of Chicago Full Moon/ Phillips Coll'n/ Washington DC Wreck/ Whitney Museum/ Nl’C (with video Moon, detail Early in the century American avant-garde had fortified a position around Stieglitz in New York. Yet as Hartley did/ Dove too from 1910 pure abstraction, tended, between wars, toward representational recommitment. Though his 1937 "Rise of the Full I Moon" admits only such depiction as Expressionist magic requires. So Wallace Stevens describes the sunrise in "The Fed Fern": The large-leaved day grows rapidly, TUid opens in this familiar spot Its unfamiliar, difficult fern. Pushing and pushing red after red... Infant, it is enough in life To speak of what you see. But wait Until sight wakens the sleepy eye And pierces the physical fix of things. 90) Double: Georgia O'Keefe 1917, Light Coming on the Plains II, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX; jand 1929, Black Cross, NM, Art Inst., Chicago 90a) Single of 90A/ Again O'Keefe Light 90b) O'Keefe 1928, Wave, Night, Maine Coast, light, etc, Phillips Academy, Andover, Maes. 90c) Single of 90B, Again O'Keefe Black Cross Also Georgia O'Keeffe seems most abstract at the start. though the 1917 watercolor (left) is called "Light Coming on the Plains". distance One feels, no less than with Dove, such preternatural as Wallace Stevens casts in the circling spell of "The Snow Man", — "One must have a mind of winter/ To regard the frost and the boughs" — a syntax that wanders, as over •the land/ Pull of the same wind/ That is blowing in the same bare place" (and returns) For the listener, who listens in the snow. And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. By the 1929 "Black Cross, New Mexico", the artist has taken on the landscape of the Southwest; yet the earth sought remains �■f Bell Between Wars - 33 archetypal, — Wallace Stevens' "Cliffs of Moher rising out of the mist,/ Above the real..." a91) Bonnard 1916-20, Pastoral, Bernheim-Jeune Collection, detail b91) Bonnard c. 1900, Woman with Black Stockings, Lord Fosslyn, Grt. Britain 91) Again a91, Bonnard's Pastoral, whole MUSICt Ravel 1909, Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2, Col MS 6077 (near ■' .. beqinninqT In Europe, in France, in Paris, the abstract current was also \ countered, though not by the nature-awe of the New World, Bonnard, who at the sardonic turn of the century had exchanged Nabis prophecy for post-impressionist delight, here, at the close of the First War, and against the acid of Dada, greets the armistice as with a memory of Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe — before the shells had torn pastoral Arden. (fade Ravel) [video only] a92) Georges Braque 1913, La Table du Musicien, Kunstmuseum, Basle 92) Braaue 1929. Still Life; Le Jour, National Gallery, Wash. DC And when Braque, drafted from Cubist experiment to be wounded and trepanned, returned convalescent to more than 40 years of Btill-life synthesizing — were those color-muted geometries fixations of the drier '20'8, or already, after pre-war collage analysis, insistencies on a reliable realm: Rilke's "custom", "Treusein einer Gewohnheit"; his saying "House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug"? 93) Matisse 1907, Music, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (with video detail) 93a) Matisse 1909-10, Dance, Hermitage, Leningrad______________________ ^ For sensuous affirmation within the current of avant-garde itself, Matisse asserts a presence as continuous as the lovers / and dancers of Yeats: "1 am of Ireland,/ And the Holy Land of Ireland,/ Come out of charity,/ Come dance with me in Ireland." So Matisse, from hie radical Fauve beginnings, left no more doubt how strong that life-line was, than the Yeats of 1899: �C.G. Bell ocbween wars fiddler of Dooneyl* And dance like a wave of the sea. detaf?) T!hre& Sisters, Coll*n Mme Paul Guillaume (with video Yet Matisse did not escape, in this 1915 "Three Sisters", the waste-of-life tightening which, with the death pf brothers and lovers, fell on so many. j^en Yeats took a darker turn that year: The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished* I have nothing but the embittered sun... As for Bartok, it vas throuah the lean •twenties that he would pare and spare. (fade Barfnw' 95)’MatlMrc!®j922!'’|tifr”ife-‘ADnf Bash. DC Ivldeo ““ video detail) o" PlhK Tablecloth, Nat. Gal., collection Matisse, however, in this still Life of 1922, has already recharged the sensuous. •thirties. That turn in music typefies the Thus Bartok^s Violin Concerto. It is what renews Yeats' youth — And pluck till time and times are done The-silver apples of the moon. The golden apples of the sun ~ more passionately in his age: I carry the sun in a golden cup. The moon in a silver bag. 96a)**Photo%fter”l940^°M?J?^®*^^< gouache on paper cutouts, prlv. coll'n j If 96b Aoaln wheelchair, making cutouts 2S°i Again B6, Matisse's Dancers, upper deta-ti_________ As he approached 70 Matisse achieved an ultimate physicality in a form of radical reduction, that of the paper cut-out. Yeats had expressed it as the dilemma of age ~ body become �1 ^ ' C.G. Bell Between Wars - 35 "a sort of battered kettle at the heel", while mind lived more and more in "an old man's frenzy"; ...Never had I more Excited, passionate, fantastical Imagination, nor an ear and eye That more expected the impossible... (fade Bartok) Yet twenty years before this Matisse, 97) Chagall 1917-18, The Promenade, Russian State Museum, Leningrad (with video detail) as the First War had closed, Chagall, on vacation from Paris to his native Vitebsk, painted such a picture of himself on "Promenade with his wife Bella, joy lifting her high as a kite. While the Revolution, from which Chagall would go into exile, advanced toward Theirmidor. Was there an alienation and reattachment? what? Attachment to what? Alienation from If mystery is the attachment, it comprises alienation. 98) Chagall 1933 S. 1945, The Wedding Candles, detail, private collection (with further video detail) Yet Chagall too was most abstract in those early works, whereas in his later, as in this picture of the same Bella, begun in the thirties, and transformed in 1945, after her death, when she became the mystical Jewish Bride — mythic sentiment and the luxury of paint are heightened together. Chagall was in Connecticut when he reworked this canvas; 99) Max Weber Double: 1917, Two Musicians, Museum of Modern Art, NYC; and 1944, The Wayfarers, Gallery of Fine Arts; Columbus, Ohio 99a) Again Musicians, detail 99b) Again Wayfarers, detail [video various details)________________________________________________ but the Avant-garde response to the human plight was international. The years that led Max Weber from Cubist detachment in the Paris of 1917 (left; Two Musicians), to the vortex of 1944 (these Holocaust refugees called Wayfarers — right), also took Wallace Stevens from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird": �Between Wars C.G. Bell 36 A man and a woman Are one. A man and a %raman and a blackbird Are one ~ 4 to his wartime "Martian Cadenza": What had this star to do with the world it lit. With the blank skies over England, over France And above the German camps? It looked apart. Yet it is this that shall maintain... Mot the symbol but that for which the symbol stands. The vivid thing in the air that never changes. Though the air change... 100) S. Dali 1931, Persistence of Memory, Museum of Modern Art, NYC 100a) Dali c. 1936?, Face and Fruit Dish on Beach, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Conn. In Wales, the bardic rapture of Dylan Thomas drove him from early poems (1934) surreal as Dali's Persistence of Memory, with its voodoo of limp watches — Dawn breaks behind the eyes; From poles of skull and toe the windy blood Slides like a sea; Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky Spout to the rod Divining in a smile the oil of tears — 101) Jack B. Yeats 1948, We Left Our Name on the Road...of Fame, Lord Movne, Dublin (with video detail) to such a yea-frenzy as Jack Ifeats, also in the 'forties, blazoned abroad: "We left Our Name On the Road...Of Fame". Thus from Dylan's "Vision and Prayer": I turn the corner of prayer and burn In a blessing of the sudden Sun. In the name of the damned I would turn back and run To the hidden land But the loud sun Christens down The Sky. I Am found. The slump of Between-Wars had become a launching pad: 102) Photo: New York City with Empire State Building, from RCA Observatory^ roof (with video detail) �t ©.G. Bell Between Kars - 37 Depression crucible of Europe» Russia, America, Japan, hatching social euphorias: Manhattan, as much as any art sign, chain-reaction pile of transvalued negation, thrusting through crisis and war to the Atomic Age, growth stocks, the space-flight spiral of a new Avant-garde. On the verge of that blast-off, let us recompose the currents of the century — daring and reaction, with ,the risk, pathos, transcendence of their infolded destiny — the outward terror, the inward vision. al03) Nijinsky in "L*Apres-midi d'un Faune", (recumbent), 1912 103) Nijinsky dancing "Afternoon of a Faun", London, 1912 103a) Nijinsky in "Le Spectre de la Rose", 1911 (with video detail) 103b) Again 103, Naiinsky dancing, upper detail Perhaps the Fauve ecstasy of the early century peaked in the Russian Ballet. Even the stills of Nijinsky dancing the "After­ noon of a Faun" in London, 1912, suggest the art rapture from Matisse to Delaunay, Marc, Kandinsky — what Joyce made Irish in the girl-on-the-strand epiphany of the Portrait (1904-14): A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed to the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird...Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot... —Heavenly GodI cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy... ...on and on he strode, far out over the sands, sihging wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him... al04) Nijinsky 1919, arc drawing (female persona). Museum of Modern Art, New York City? 104) Nijinsky Double: again al04. Arc Drawing; & 1922, Demon, watercolor, Museum of Modern Art, New York City? 104a) Single of 104B, again Nijinsky's Demon WozzgIc f MUSIC: Be^ 1914-21,/from III,ii, murder of Marie, Col.Odyssey 33126 Slde^ Though beneath the projected joy of Nijinsky was the fleeing feminine persona he recorded in the child limitation of his �C.6. Bell Between Wars<j- '38«- arc'drawings; and# as he approached the break of dementia, the mask of his demon pursuer Diaghilev. That turn to terror is implicit in the final dance Nijinsky talked of performing: "Le Mariage avec Dieu"; Rilke had bared it in the destructive angel, Berg in Wozzek's murder and suicide by the haunted pond. [slide only] al05) Franz Marc 1913-14, Tyrol, detail Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB *59) 105) Otto Dix 1914, War (Arms), Kunstmuseum, Duesseldorf (vith video _____details) _______________ ______ ______________________ MUSIC: Richard Strauss 1889, from Tod und VerklSrung, death climax. ~ ~ Angel S 35976 In Nietzsche, by an ambivalence typically modern, force leaps to the quantum state of its own celebration — will to Power c. 1887: "Dionysian wisdom: joy in the destruction of... existing things, however good...We have to be destroyers." So the sequences of Expressionism mount a transport of fragmentation (this Otto Dix, Arms, of 1914), symptomatic of the Great War itself. How the youthful Richard Strauss lashed his 1889 Death and Transjfjguration toward that high frenzy — (fade Tod u.VerklSrung) to become the twelve-tone pact of Thomas Mann's Faustus. 106) Kaethe Kollwitz, 1907, Schlachtfeld, etching. National Gallery, Wash. DC (with video detail) 106a) Same, Kollwitz.etching, lover detail________________ _________ MUSIC: Richard Strauss 1943, Metamorphosen, opening, Angel S 35976 It took a woman, Kaethe Kollwitz, to foreshadow the human reality of that night trudge over No Man's Land: -- her Battle­ field of 1907 pointing down the century, borough the Kaiser miscarriage arid then the Nazi, to the bombed out Munich of 1943, with the same Richard Strauss, in octogenarian gloom, composing his last Metamorphoses. (fade ) al07) Kaethe Kollwitz 1921, Lithograph, Gefallen bl07) Kollwitz 1924, Lithograph, Nie wieder Krieg 107) Double of the Kollwitz lithographs [video various details and order) �^ f C.G. Bell ^ Between Wars - 39 MUSIC: Metamorphosen cont., forte (3/4" into record) And when the first trench slaughter had eased, it was Kaethe Kollwitz whose lithographs would show the Weimar racking of the soul — 1921,the despair of "Killed in Action", beside the 1924 wish-spasm of "No More War", a cleavage romantic realism heightens toward schyzophrenia. It is still Hegel's paradoxical rise out of a fruit turned to poison; still the Western cycle as convergence of G&tterdammerung and paradisical hope. (fade Metamorphosen) al08) George Grosz 1915-22, "Dawn", vatercolor XV, from Ecco Homo bl08) Grosz 1915-22, "Man is Good", vatercolor XII, from Ecce Homo 108) Schwitters 1919, Construction for a Noble Lady, Los Angeles County _____Museum (with video detail) ________________________ ____________ MUSIC: Metamorphosen cont., piu forte (just before middle) If the stock market searches economic futures, how the depth-confessions Hitler would trample xinder, had foretold the death of bourgeois values: like the 1919 invective of Pound: home to old lies and new infamy usury age-old and age—thick, and liars in public places; this Dada Schwitters, "Construction for a Noble Lady" — her imc lost in the jvink assemblage of "a botched civilization" — Schwitimers own poems of nonsense soxind: "rakete rinnzekete/ rakete rinnzekete/ rakete rinnzekete/ Beeeee/ bO." those Nazi art-banishers. They knew, Yet how pig-headedly wrong, to think they could shore — against world hurricane Adolf^w Hitler c. 1925?, Corinthian Ruins, Life, Oct. 30, 1939--whatever right they ranted to save. Where Hitler's early paintings glean the nostalgia of ruins. Staggering that the wielder of so timid a brush, veered into �C.G. Bell * _ Between Kars^- *40^ politics to stave off Spenglerian decay, should have loosed such Apocalypse on Europe. (fade Metamorphosen) liPl Paul Klee 1939, Aspiring Angel, private coll'n (with video dPfa.’i) MUSICI Metamorphosen, cont. (slow, 1 * from end) Geman Bodernism Went Into exile. The year of Hitler's rise, Klee, dirolesea from the oSsseldorf Academy, withdrew to his home in Switzerland, with what sad self-mockery this 1939, Aspiring Angel comment, on the arti.f . approaching death and the disaster Of the earth-scene. (fade) ^ideo^mldrift^^detail) H®^^ald, plaster. Die Kunst, 1943 (with 11.1a) Same, Herald, upper detail MUSIC; Metamorphosen, cont. (after pause. Against that poignant foreclosure, official German art (like a Wehrmacht invasion), stormed the northeast quadrant of our style chart — the yea-cry of realist reaction. Arno Bfecker, most favoured eculptor of the Third Reich, modelled for all the totalitarian sanity and strength that must prop up the sagging West. (fade) Gross 1938, A Piece of my World, Gallery, Newark NJ Ijjaj Same, gross- My Vend, d.tsll f.ts.h MUSIC; Metamorphosen, concl. (last bars) Irom that upheaval, what could the old avant-garde of embittered excoriation.do but record, from the stations of their exile (with Mann and Hindemith in an already crusading America; or with Strauss indeed, immured in wartime Munich), the confirmation of their worst fears; these mouldy scarecrow veterans of George Gross's "A Piece of my World", (end Strauss, Metamorphosen) What we have followed to the pathos of this terminus, might be called the outward motion. �■ -I - - ..... ..—— =- ^;g. Bell — Between Kars - 41 .all3) Picasso 1937, Guernica, Final state, Picasso Museum, Barcelona 113) Picasso Double^ 1937, Studies for Horse and Woman with dead child (video also singles) A year earlier Picasso, painting for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition the great political picture of between-wars (the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi planes in Franco's hire), Picasso advanced from graphic sketches — this anguished horse, still in touch with ^ * % Delacroix; this mother and dead child, charged withg the residuum of romantic outrage — 114) Detail of Guernica, left, with woman and horse (final state) to an apocalyptic abstraction, in which modern vision (by paradox) vaults the falls of its outwardness. It is what SchCJnberg stretched over a lifetime, 2nd 113A) Again Study for Horse 2nd 113B) Again Study for Woman and Child 2nd 113a) Guernica, Study for Sun's rays & Corn from Warrior's MUSIC; SchMnberq 1899, climax & epiohanv from the Transfjqnr«:>H ' ---- - Night, Turnabout TV 4032 S from the climax and Epiphany of the Transfigured Night, (skip to Epiphany and fade) 2nd 114A) Again Picasso Guernica, right detail, horse 2nd 114B) Again Picasso Guernica, left detail, woman and child ■£Pg.. 114a) Same, Guernica, detail of Flowers from Warrior's Sword Hand______ MUSIC; SchCfriberg 1936, from Violin Concerto, near opening. Col. M2S 679 to the,12-tone transemotionality of the 1935 Violin Concerto — such a calcining as Camus would bring to the agonies of La Peste (1947); This hioman form,. .lacerated by the spear-thrusts of the plague, consumed by searing superhuman fires, buffeted by all the raging winds of heaven, was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence, and l^e could do nothing to avert the wreck. (fade SchUnbera) Without that Nietzschean crucible of dangerous conversion, how could Rilke's Duino Elegies have brought (in the last) hazel katkins from the land of pain? �Between C.G« Bell \ ^ alls) Franz Marc 1913, The Bewitched Mill, Art Institute, Chicago (with video detail) 115) Double: again allS, Marc's Mill; and Paul Klee 1922, Twittering Machine, Museum of Modern Art, NYC 115a) Single 115B, again Klee's Twittering Machine [video only] 115b) Klee 1924, Dance of the Red Shirts, private coll'n, Bern, Switzerland ^ i MUSIC: Webern 1909, first of Five Pieces, Opus 5, V-LM/LSC 2531 On the brink of the First War, when the Elegies were begun, Franz Marc's Enchanted Mill had explored such transreal discovery as would lead Rilke, guided by a youthful sorrow, "from the streets of the grief-city", far out ("Weit, wir wohnen dort draussen") — Lightly she leads him on through the wide landscape of Laments — to the rock source of joy, "a carrying stream." But Marc was Jcilled at Verdun; and it was Klee, who in ironic miniatures, whimsied by Dada and the Surreal, this 192*2 Twittering Machine (right) , would pursue the Blaue Reiter search, even to the Second War. ^ In music, Schonberg's pupil Webern — subtle and terse as Klee — had been working since 1909, (here the first of his Opus 9 pieces), toward an ultimate suspension of modernity. But could either Klee or Webern take up the starred secrets of Rilke's Symbolist journey? (fade Webern) 116) Lehmbruck 1911, Kneeling Woman, Municipal Museum, Duisburg (with video detail) 116a) Same, Woman, detail of Head MUSIC: Berg 1935, from Vln Concerto, Pt.II, before Death Agony, ---------------------------------- ;------ Philips ST 802 785 LY For that transcendence of Romantic, "we, wasters of sorrow", turn in music to Berg's 1935 Violin Concerto on the death of Manon Gropius; and in art, why not to Lehmbruck, prodigy of the mining Ruhr, who modelled this Kneeling Woman in 1911, about when the roar of the Adriatic ^ave Rilke the opening of the First Elegy, "Who, if I cried out, would hear me, among the angelic �p ^^,G. Bell Between Kars - 43 orders?", and soon after, of the Tenth: "That I, issuing at last from destroying visions/ May break into jubillant praise for assenting angels." }^2\1913, Ascendant Youth, detail, Mun. Mus., Duisburg 117a} Same, Youth, whole Lslides opposite order} With Lehmbruck's Ascendant Youth of 1913, sorrow stretches like Rilke's "tall teartrees", his "fields of blossoming', sadness", up toward the stars of "the Land of Pain:..." (fade and skin tn _____ ____ ___ ~ death agonv) Varrlor, cement. Museum, Puleburg The Great War whelmed Lehmbruck in the 1916 Fallen Warrior. Such in Berg's Concerto, is the last agony of Manon Gropius. But when the Berg, from that 12 tone struggle, feels its way toward Bach's hymn to death, "Es ist genug", m 119) Lehmbruck 1918, Praying Woman, cement, Duisburg _119a) Same, Praying woman, detail of head_______________________________ it is as if Lehmbruck had brought from war itself his 1918 Praying Girl) or Rilke, in bhat rock gorge, discovered the spring of joy: **die Quelle der Freude:* They stand at the foot of the range. And there she embraces him weeping. Alone he climbs to the mountains of primal pain. And never once does his step resound from the soundless fate. (fade Bero) 120) Lehmbruck 1918, Heads of Lovers, cement, Duisburg 120a) Variant of 119, Praying Woman, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (CGB '86) (with video detail) 120b) Again 120, Heads of Lovers, detail MUSIC: same Bero, close i*' Lehmbruck's final Heads of Loves, already breathing the Orphism of his suicide, that we scale (with the close of the m Berg, and of the Rilke), the height of Between Wars — a mystery we claim — earth wrinkling behind us like a pricked balloon. �C.G. Bell Between Kars 3gs And yet, were they waking a likeness yithin us, the endlessly look, they'd be pointing, perhaps, to the catkins, hanging from empty hazels, or else they'd be meaning the rain that falls on the dark earth in the early Spring. — der fallt auf dunkles Erdreich im friiVijahr — And we, who have always thought of happiness climbing, would feel the emotion that almost startles when happiness falls. I Und wir, die an steiaendes Gluck denken, empfanden die Rtihrung, die iins beinah destfirzt, wenn ein GlAckliches fSllt. (close of Berg) ^ � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 44 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Between Wars -- 20th Century, Art and Politics, Symbolic History, Part 35 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 35 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_35_Between_Wars--20th_Cantury_Art_and_Politics https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/97f8e30053aa4a46990f5c41c5e10065.pdf e1d27cb823ae359e83c996891b828197 PDF Text Text Chairl^s G. Bell, 1260 Canyon Road, or St. John's College Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 SYMBOLIC HISTORY: THE HUMAN ARTS - THROUGH SIGHT AND SOUND XXXIV: 1) 1900 Bi Crisis of the Abstract Claude Monet 1882, The Cliff Walk, Art Institute, Chicago MUSIC: Faure 1879, Piano Quartet, 1st mvt close, RCA-ARI 1-0761 If desire is a lack, romantic desire (footnote: cf. the Meno paradox of learning) is loaded... In Monet, in Faur^, in Verlaine, wish is the sensuous inverse of fulfillment: "How blue the sky was, and how great our hope" — "Qui'l etait bleu, le ciel, et grand, I'espoir." This flowered headland cries to the wind the wistful beatitudes of light and air. (fade Faure) ✓ Such poignance Chausson would learn from Faure, though swayed already by the younger Debussy: MUSIC: Chausson 1891-2, soft passage half through 1st mvt. Concerto OP« 21 for Vn, Piano & Str.Qr; Orion 73134 (Mace MC S 9074) (fade) 2) Gustave Moreau 1896-, Jupiter and Semele, Moreau Museum, Paris MUSIC: same Chausson, 1st mvt, near the beginning, forte * Yet the Chausson concerto just paired with Monet, equally swells toward" the. Wagnerian counterpole of Symbolist Moreau — this 1896 Jupiter and Semele, of which the artist wrote: Semele, penetrated by the divine effluence...dies struck by lightning, and with her dies the genius of terrestrial love, the genius with the goat hooves... It is an ascension toward th,e upper spheres... Death on earth and apotheosis in immortality... How far from Renaissance this late revival of its tragic themes. 3) B. Cellini 1553, Perseus -with the Head of Medusa, Loggia della Sig­ nor la, Florence MUSIC: Mhdarra c. 15507, Fantasia (rtaniera de Ludovico, con falsas — ARC 2533-183 (B-5) ' Benvenuto Cellini, by his own account as overcharged a �1900 B - 2 C.G. Bell n revolutionary as any of the Avant Garde, poured the bronze Perseus in 1553, under trials set forth in the Autobiography. After a quarrel with the Duke of Florence ("My lord, you do not understand my art"), he fires the furnaces.' The house roof takes the blaze; a sudden fever drives him to his bed. When rain and _ wind have caked the bronze, a slacker twisted in the shape of an S appears: "You are attempting an enterprise which the laws of art do not sanction, and which cannot succeed." Cellini resurrects, piles on oak, hurls all his pewter in the melt, opens the sluices to an explosion and flash of flame. No man, they say, could have brought it off, only some powerful devil. 'Vulnerable, as Faust. Yet the achieved Perseus is a victory of light, for which Cellini's elation was prayer: "I fell on my knees: '0 God...who didst rise from the dead and ascend to heaven...'" Even the dissonant works of Renaissance, Mudarra's "falsas" . .. ,^ El Greco's Laocoon, have a containment like Lear: "The wheel has «• 4) come full circle, I am here." (end Mudarra) Paul Klee 1916, Stars above Evil Houses, Gustav Zumsteg col'n, Zurich MUSIC: Alban Berg 1926, Presto Delirando f-rom Lyric Suite, (begin --------- then skip) Deutsche Gram., from LPSt 2713066,- Rec.5-a But the new art tears containment in a life-and-death ecstasy, a rite of'passage, where the very record of loss, incapacity, negation, turns by paradox to a yea-frenzy of the absolute. From Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre" to the first World War, that transformation prevails. And even when trench stalemate had betrayed its dominant Yes to the great recessive and the backlash of Dada was cracking the whip of the absurd — even then, how soon, in Klee's 1916 "Stars over Evil Houses", or the programatic despairs of Schonberg or Berg (this tenebrous Presto Delirando from the Lyric �1900 B 'Bell 3 Suite), how soon Spenglerian fall — "the dance of the dream-led % masses down the dark mountain" — phosphoresces, a self-affirming energy. 5) (fade Berg) Wm. Blake 1799-1800, Bathsheba at the Bath, Tate Gallery, London That going under of the physical and spatial, Blake's art had prophecied: "the world will be consumed in fire...displaying the infinite which was hid." In this 1800 Bathsheba seen by David, the Beulah garden is at once of the Fall ("Cruel sacri­ fices had brought Humanity into a Feminine Tabernacle in the loins of Abraham and David" J 27) and of love's redemption (Bathsheba, Hittite adulteress, on the line to Mary); "O Divine Humanity!__ If I were Pure I should never Have known Thee..." In his solitary precursing of Avant Garde, Blake made Christianity his point of' departure. 6) M.v.Marees 1885, Hesperi^es Triptych, Neue Pinakothek, Munich—(CGB 59) MUSIC: Wagner 1870, Siegfried Idyll (orig.) near close, London LL 525 By 1885, under the sway of Wagner (this Siegfried Idyll) and of Nietzsche — When the Dionysian powers rise with such strength as we are experiencing at present, there can be no doubt that, wrapped in a cloud, Apollo has already descended to us; whose fullest and most beautiful effects coming generation may perhaps behold , Hans von Marees, in this pagan triptych (unconsciously tied to Blake's abstraction), sets the serpent-guarded Eden of renewal in the Hesperides. Nietzsche: "Blessed race of Hellenes What must this people have suffered, that they might become thus beaiitiful! (fade Wagner) How was that stable of Faustian yearnings to be cleansed? 7) P.Cezanne 1900-05, Bathing Women, Mus. of Art, Philadelphia �C.G. Bell With Cezanne the disruption of the personal and formulable crystallizes past loss the dynastasis of that overthrow. perhaps Ives, in New England, of all places, pursued a like purging - as in the First Symphony, written while he was still a student at Yale. At the same time Mallarml's aesthetic of ..pure poetry" broke off (1898) with the picture pages of A Throw of Dice, the poem constellated by the annihilation, LE HAZARD, of its objects^ "collapsed/ by the indifferent neutrality of the - "neutrality identique du gouffre". (gnd I^) Manet 1869- olvmpia, Jen de Paume (LouvrenParis in the abstract stripping of romantic flesh, Manet s 1863 Olympia focussed the art breakthroagh and social outrage. This take-off on Titian.s Venus of Urbino (itself an adulteration of Giorgione.s idea - like Shakespeare's "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head") short-circuited normal responses, amorous, moral, even practical. As Courbet complained: "flat... like the Queen of Spades coming out of a bath." If Baudelaire played such a role, his lushness of Spleen and Ideal is 'far from the Queen of Spades. 9) j.-A. Ingres 1814. Odalisque. Louvre> Paris (CGB-- 8^ T +- Tnrrnfao 1814» Where the tradition of the 19th In the coolest Ingres, lox'i, century harem Odalisque begins, the style of Fountaineble already swells with seductive touch. Prom Baudelaire the climactrc poem would be "The Jewels", "Les Bijoux" La tres chere etait nue . .. ses bijoux sonores �Bell 1900 B - 5 ...Passion's child, born where the sun Showers triple light, and scorches even the kiss Of his gazelle-eyed daughters. Though this voluptuous dream has hardly entered the bordel of erotic ennui and decadence, which made "The Jewels" be censored from the 1861 Fleurs du Mai: She was recumbent, and let herself be loved... File etait done couchee, et se laissait aimer... -- gP^^bet 1856, Girls by the Seine, Petit Palais, Paris Courbet's 1856 "Girls by the Seine", even more than his nudes, advances the passion-throttle commensurately with Baudelaire: A certain candour coupled with lasciviousness Gave a new charm to her metamorphoses... gysic: 12) Saint-Saens 1875, Samson et Dalila, oboe cadenza to Bacchanal —------- --- RCA Viet LM-184 8 Renoir 1870, Odalisque, Nat. Gal., Washington DC It is the risky coloration which runs in music from Berlioz through Bizet, this Saint-Saens Dalilah, to a whole Scheherazade horizon. (fade Bacchanal) And in this Renoir 1870 Odalisque, the langorous flesh of Courbet’, more exotically clothed, has — at the risk of calm — almost been wallowed in. Whereas Baudelaire even as ravished by Joanne Duval's flashing world of metal and stone...where sound is mingled with light" — ou le son se -mele a la lumiere — il)-- Cezanne 1873, A Modern Olympiar, Louvre. Paris �1900 B C.G. Bell 6 even as he lifts to the adored, couched at the height of the divan, a passion "deep and gentle as the sea, which mounts toward her as toward its cliff" must draw release from that poison. Cezanne would take up the scene in his extraordinary mockery of Manet's Olympia — as if the grotesque were one rescue from the Scylla vortex. BACK; again 12, Renoir 1870, Odalisque, Nat. Gal., Wash. DC. Since rescue was required. The new worship must rear on lubricity itself a paradox of equilibrium — what would drive Renoir from this lush indulgence toward nudes like Maillol's later bronzes, of statuesque repose. Again 13) Cezanne 1873, A Modern Olympia, Louvre, Paris But how — at the condemned erotic bound of "Les Bijoux": Her eyes fixed on me, like a tame tiger. With a vague air of trance she varied her poses -how is Baudelaire to refine the postures of a West Indian mulatto to a contemplative counterpart of the mystical? 14) Van Gogh 1887, Oval Nude, Barnes, Merion; or From Rear, Priv., Paris No artist pl\ambed that Flower of Evil maelstrom more reck­ lessly than Van Gogh after his 1886 arrival in Impressionist Paris. And her arms, her legs, her hips and her loins. Polished, smooth as oil, undulent as a swan. Passed before my eyes, clairvoyant and serene. And her belly and her breasts, clusters of my vine. Et son ventre et ses seins, Oes grappes de ma vigne. In that tactile seizure where, as with Dante's damned, "fear turns into desire", it is no longer the woman flesh-throned on the divan who looks down, but the poet "from crystal rock", at the "hips of antiope", "the torso of a boy" — those posture, which �-r Bell 1900 B 7 advance, as to dislodge his spirit from the.height. Ou calme et solitaire elle s'etait assise. 15) Gauguin 1897, "Nevermore", Courtauld Institute, London If Van Gogh's calm was in question, Gauguin variously assumed the Baudelaire mystique of contemplative Eros, as in this Tahitian "Nevermore" (another variation on Manet's Olympia), "to suggest", he said, "by means of a simple nude, a certain longlost barbarian luxury." But for Baudelaire, a romantic half-century before, the selftransendence of spleen asked a more excruciating stretch. As ' he wrote: into this atrocious book I put all my heart, all my tenderness, all my religion (travestied), all my hatred. On her savage brown complexion the rouge was superb — Sur ce teint fauve et brun le fard etait superbel By a sensuous art of sex, to bewitch pure flame from the devouring cleft itself — 16) H.Matisse 1905, The Gypsy, Mus.de 1'Annonciade, Saint Tropez MUSIC: Stravinsky 1909-10, Firebird, harp etc. 1/3 way. Col.MG 31202 (but orig. version better) what Joyce would do with Molly Bloom's "I will", what Agee with « the girl sleeping on the floor: "as if flame were breathed forth from it" — though these, like Matisse's 1905 Gypsy (or Stravinsky' Firebird), lend the attack of another century to the arcane glow of Baudelaire's last stanza: And the lamp at last being resigned to die. It was the fire alone which lighted the room; Which, every time it uttered a sigh of flame. Flooded with blood that amber-colored skin. Et la lampe s'eta'nt resignee a mourir, Comme le foyer seul illuminait la chambre. �1900 B C.G. Bell Cheque fois qu'il poussait un flamboyant soupir/II inondait de sang cette peau couleur d'ambre (fade Firebird) 17) Matisse 1906, Luxe Calme et Volupte, Col'n H. Matisse (Skira) —A Tantrie prolongatio of fire and blood. In the oil of verbal texture, Baudelaire might seem a romantic decadent; but in the ambiguity of crushed opposites — Spleen become Ideal: the "Harmonie du Soir" that so moved Joyce, where through an evening drowned in curdled blood, memory shines like a monstrance; or in the untranslatable refrain of that other poem Matisse mythologized in 1906, the "Luxury, calm and pleasure , "Luxe, calme et volupte" — in Baudelaire's unmediated elation by negation, we have crashed the gates of the Modern: (Yeats) I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. 18) I.K.Brunei 1857, Steamship Great Eastern under construction, photo: Institution of Mechanical Engineers^ London Even the Faust of mechanical power was cloven -- Priestley's technocratic hope already undercut in Franklin's 1780 letter: ' It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter...O that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement... Whatever euphoria drove Brunei to engineering marvels: j^ailroads, bridges, this 1857 iron ship, the Great Eastern, a wonder city to cut the night ocean in lighted luxury, broke in morbidity and suicide — the industrial call clotting round the soul like Baudelaire's evening, "le neant vaste et noir", where the "tender heart" enshrines its luminous past. In the Crystal Palace of Exposition Europe, ambivalent progress 19) Edw. Burne-Jones 1880, The Golden Stair, Tate Gallery, London brewed ambivalent dream: "the great four-leafed clover of modern �^Bell ^ 1900 B 9 idealism" (as they were praised): Bocklin, Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones of this "Golden Stair". 'And 'might not the Great Eastern, or any of her more practical successors of the Jamesian era, have adorned their steel salons with Botticelli-inspired visions of such secretly erotic beatitude — Rossetti'e "Blessed Damozel" who leaned "From the gold bar of Heaven", "And laid her face between her hands,/ And wept. (I heard her tears.)"? 20) Monet 1877, Gare Saint-Lazare, Art Inst., Chicago (or Louvre, or double) When Monet in 1877, frequenting the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, painted the same scene through variations of cloud and hour — the steam blue against background sunlight, or white against an overcast gray he cut through those argiiments of nostalgic heaven and industrial hell. irradiation of the actual: But what is signified? Hardly Vermeer' (Traherne) Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven__ look upon the skies, the earth and the air as Celestial Joys. Monet s naturalist delight is in the art changes of abstract percep­ tion — a "Sea Surface Full of Clouds". In the art detachment of any such station, Tolstoi's Anna KareAina (the novel finished that same year) might have gone under the wheels: A luggage train was coming in. The platform began to sway...she knew what she had to do...A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her..."What am I doing? What for?"... 21) G.Eiffel 1887-9, The Eiffel Tower, Paris (CGB '80, or other, night?) Since the Paris Exposition of 1889, the Eiffel Tower has expressed for tourists everywhere the joy of the Impressionist with the excitement and utility of the sky-race of skeletal �1900 B C.G. Bell steel. Though not even the designer claimed a utility beyond the view -- that abstraction concretized (so Hugo's Hunchback or Michelet's Tableau. Barthes) out of But the great precursors are the tempted Christ, and in Goethe's Faust, Lynceus on the tower: Born for seeing. At watching skilled. Pledged to the tower, I delight in the world Zum Sehen geboren, Zum Shauen bestellt, Dem Turme geschworen, Gefallt mir die Welt. Thus he sees the ship at sunset enter the harbor, and that night thd burning of the house of the pious old couple. ’ When.scientific vision had girdered the 984 foot tower over the Seine, aviation was anticipated, and the vibrant geometry of Cezanne strangely parallelled. The delight, however, is of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat", of Mallarme's "Sail past fertile islands": "But 0, my heart, hear the sailors' song entends le chant des matelots!" 22) Renoir 1881, Boating Party, Phillips Gallery, Washington, _DC MUSIC: Faure 1879, Piano Qrt Op-15, 2nd Mvt, No doubt (as in Faure) Avant Garde was always tempted to a compromise of genial cultivation. No doubt Renoir was as gifted as any foi; the color-glad depiction of life as pleasantly lived, perhaps that ease left him vulnerable to the form-crisis and sterility of 1883 — on the way to which even the lustiest group scenes, this Boating Party of mashers, top hats, flirts, puppy kissing girls, entrain surface realism in a sort of Joycean search for radical value. So the plucked-string Scherzo of early Faure (fade) reaches toward the remoter harmonies it drew from Debussy. �1900 B - 11 / Bell 23) Manet 1882, Bar at^the Folies-Bergere, Courtauld Inst./ London Nor was it merely a dictate of Puritan morality, that James, from The American (1877) to The Ambassadors (1903) should alienate the Impressionism he handled so well. As in late Monet, Cezanne, Seurat, there was an abstract imperative. Even Manet, oldest of them all, who had begun the revolution by a detached flattening of dark Spanish realism, who in the success of his forties had joined Monet in pure color and open air, arrived by 1882 (a year before his death) at the mysterious and formal illusions of A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, (end Debussy) where everything beyond the foreground bottles and the musing girl is reflected in a mirror: her back, the looming customer, theater and lights — Platonic images. 24) Pissarro 1877, The Red Roofs, Louvre, Paris Pissarro was at the center of the Impressionism, originator with Monet of its theory and practice. But he is also the radiant for Post-Impressionism to follow. From 1871 to '77 his teaching brought Cezanne to a threshold of light. One might think to ^see in this Pissarro landscape of Red Rooves how much Cezanne could have learned from him. But the painting, from the last year of the Cezanne association, dramatizes the teacher as learner. 25) Cezanne 1873, House of Pere Lacroix at Auvers, Nat. Gal., Wash., DC Without what Pissarro taught, Cezanne's early violence would hardly have lightened to this "House of Pere Lacroix". Yet Cezanne painted the picture in 1873, four years before Pissarro's "Red Rooves". In the interplay of that Avant Garde, effect con­ tinually circles and acts as cause. MUSIC: Satie 1888, Gymnopedie 1, Philips PHS-900-179 �1900 B C.G. Bell 26) Pissarro 1887, Woman in an Orchard, Louvre, Paris (Jeu de Paume) ^ Again Pissarro, from 1887, time of Satie's first radically neglected piano compositions (.this from the Gymnopedies, to be orchestrated by Debussy) — Pissarro, teacher of everyone, might seerii in this orchard to have gone as far as Impressionism could in preparing for Neo-Impressionist Seurat, with his consuming science of minute color spots. But here too the influence goes the other way -- the master swayed by a pupil's genius. 27) Seurat 1884-5?, .Morning Walk, study for The Seine at Courbevoie, Ittleson Col'n, N.Y. Since more than five years earlier, Seurat, studying with Pissarro, had begun those ravishing sketches in which color division works from observed nature toward a final harmony of abstract "color-luminist" control — scores of studies, in charcoal and oil, exploring and fixing the intellectual geometry of the great pointillist monuments, where Impressionism becomes its own antithesis — Baudelaire's passion- throned on cyrstal rock: — Valery: This tranquil roof where pigeons promonade Trembles between the pines, among the tombs; Noon, the just, composes there with fire The sea, the sea, forever rebegun 1 28) .t. Seurat 18B4-5, Afternoon on.the Grande Jatte, Art Institute, Chicago The Grande Jatte is as total a fulfillment of Seurat's method as any. What mappings of the scene, open-air studies and stage- set division of the players, remote from each other as the charac­ ters of a Chekov play, produced this life-size frieze, where all motion, all life is stilled — not merely as every carved .or painted object must be, but in doctrinal soul, proclaiming a metaphysics of changeless remove — as Valery would invoke the sun at the zenith ("midi le juste"), a Zeno paradox to immobilize �ell 1900 B - 13 that "Cemetery by the Sea": Zenon! Cruel Z^on! Z^on d'Elee! _Zeno! Cruel Zeno! Zeno of. Elea! Have you fixed me with that arrow winged That whirs and flies and cannot fly the place?... X) sun...What tortoise shadow for the soul, Achilles, with his great stride, motionless. 29) - (close Satie) Double: Van Gogh 1888; Van Gogh's Yellow Chair with Pipe, Tate, London; and Gauguin's Arm Chair with Candle, V.Gogh Mus., Amsterdam In a direction opposite to Seurat's, Van Gogh too ricochets from Pissarro, his Parisian catalyst of 1886-8. The concert- dependence of music must have stacked the odds against a Van Gogh as composer. But in poetry Rimbaud comes near enough — his Season in Hell, like Van Gogh's Chairs, record of a destruc­ tive friendship: letters of 1873, to Verlaine: Come back...everything will be forgotten...Yes, I was in the wrong...Be brave. Answer me quickly. I cannot stay here much longer...Yours, all my life. Rimbaud. So while waiting for your wife and your death, you are .going to struggle, wander about and bore people. . .But it is you who will be wrong in the end, because, even after I called you back, you persisted in your false sentiments... Think of what you were before knowing me... These Chairs, Van Gogh's with the pipe, Gauguin's with the candle, testify to that other love-hate, when an imagined accord broke under the nerve-frayed fact, and Van Gogh sliced his ear, sent a piece of it to, a prostitute, beginning the reductive con­ finements which would grind to his suicide — as if life had to hold to norms of outmoded pretence, or tear itself to pieces — the vulnerability of avant-garde. 30) A. Bocklin c. 1880?, Faun and Throstle, Neue Pinakothek, Munich MUSIC: Debussy 1892-4, Prelude a I'Apres-midi d'.un faune, .Col.f'iL 6077 • (last thirdT From the Bohemian modernity of Paris, it is strange to turn �1900 B C.G. Bell (0Y6n es we sound Debussy's Feune) to the jromantic lingeiring of Germany, Bocklin's pagan make-believe — to sense the Dionysiac affinity with Mallarme's Eclogue or this Prelude, and at the same time to note the demarcation; that in Bocklin (as in Brahms, say) romantic longing still accepts the old forms; its Symbolist quarrel with the space-time fabric of will and cause has not yet disabled the harmonic and representational modes — the reason and morality of bourgeois assurance. 31) That break drives us forward from Bocklin. Gauguin c. 1893, Indian Queen, Mme Desjardins, Paris to Debussy's Post-Impressionist contemporary (who also began with Pissarro), Gauguin, 1893, where space itself, like chordal harmony, invokes a dissolving magic. So Maetetlink, the same year, in Pelleas and Melisande (for which Faure, Debussy, Sch5nberg and others would compose music), suspends a mystery, beyond fathomable ground, vague as the forest pool where Melissande loses her wedding ring: — Golaud to Melisande in the wood: Come with me. The night will be very dark and cold... (She) Where are you going? (He) I do not know. I am lost also. % (The Avant-garde paradox of the lost guide): Venez avec moi. La nuit sera tres noire et tres froide... Ou allez-vous?...Je ne sais pas. Je suis perdu aussi... 32) H. Rousseau 1897, Sleeping Gypsy, Mus. of Modern Art, N.Y._C_^ Henri Rousseau, le Douanier, customs man, found his way, by a self-taught primitivism of naive vision and dream color, through the same barrier of *the objective and outward into a mystery more immedia-te than Gauguin's, 'some haunted realm of the Faun, where the Symbolist flows over into the Surreal this Sleeping Gypsy of 1897, gone, unanswerably, beyond the phenomenal veil. �< Bell 33) 1900 B 15 Odilon Redon c. 1905?, Le Cyclope, Kroller-Mviller Mas., Otterlo At the same time Redon completes the circle to a more abstract handling of Moreau — this one-eyed Cyclops rising like a phallus over the earth vaginal fold of the sleeping' Galatea — dream changes rung on Mallarme: 34) ripe pomegranates, purple, burst and murmur with bees, and our blood aflame for her who will possess it flows for the timeless swarm of all desire. At the hour when this wood is tinged with ash and gold A feast flares up amid the extinguished leaves, AEtna, on your slopes, by Venus visited... (end Debussy) Degas 1876, L'Absinthe, Jeu de Paume (Louvre), Paris In Degas, Impressionist realism broke through a first devotion to Ingres and an interest in Moreau. As with the naturalism of Zola or DeMaupassant, Hardy's Satires of Circumstance \ or Chekov's heartbreak comedy, the content of civilized despair is carried over into an objective lightening of technique. In this study called Absinthe, a laceration as in Dostoievsky or in Gorki's Lowest Depths, seems less the work of philosophic pessimism than of accident, as in the snapping of a camera. MUSICj Mussorgsky 1874, Pictures at an Exhibition (piano). Ballet of “ Chicks in their Shells, Turnabout TV, 34258 Where the world falls in on itself, with hardly a whimper, I the challenge of Mussorgsky's eerie Pictures (this "Ballet of Chicks in their Shells"), 35) (fade Mussorgsky) Degas 1890-95, Dancers in Blue, Jeu de Paume, Paris will bleed through the lightest 1880 Scherzo-Valse by Chabrier. MUSIC; Chabrier 1880, Scherzo Valse, Rubinstein, RCA LSC 2751 In that Absinthe context the radiant delights of theatre and ballet, which Degas painted from the early '70's until increasing blindness drove him in the 'nineties to cloud-rich pastelles �1900 B - r C.G. Bell .and finally to modelling ("Death", he would say, "is all I think of"), form a contrast so polar, one has to ask: Is this realism, or an escape into artful dream; or is realism itself the escape, the earth-claim luring as the Sleepsong in Faust. (fade Chabrier) 36) Toulouse-Lautrec 1896, Maxime DeThomas, (Dale) Nat. Gal., Wash.,DC Some nostalgia of the infinite was driving through Degas' Absinthe and beyond, seizing on maladies of body or soul (Avantgarde strategy of creative negation), turning vulnerabilities into powers: — so, with the high-born dwarf, Toulouse-Lautrec, in this portrait of Maxime DeThomas, Bohemian connoisseur, lifedeformity speaks oracular depression, biding the next thrust of the style-apocalypse. While Henry George, American economist, who died in 1897, wrote of other things, than art: As public spirit is lost...as reforms become hopeless, then in the festering masses will be generated volcanic forces... Strong unscrupulous men...will become the ex­ ponents of blind popular...passions, and dash aside forms that have lost their validity. 37) Toulouse-Lautrec 1894, The Bed, Louvre (Jeu de Paume), Paris If Toulouse-Lautrec ever inclined to genial affirmation — obverse of the DeThomas pathology — it is in this 1894 evoca­ tion called "The Bed"; though like any obverse it affords another view of the same coin. So Joyce's brothel of Circe would yield in Ulysses to the bed of Molly Bloom, she reclined semilaterally...left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed... (thinking joyful adultery): he does it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look �Bell 1900 B - 17 with my hair a bit loose from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage brute Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait till Monday. The sword will again be mightier than the pen, and in carnivals of destruction brute forge and wild frenzy will alternate with the lethargy of a declining civilization. Ensor, Flemish contemporary of Dutch-French Van Gogh (though Ensor lived on and on), was possessed by symbols of destructive carnival, as in this detail from his huge 1888 Entry of Christ into Brussels. How the demons of Bosch and Breughel, in Ensor’s Ostend isolation, bear down, angels with the vials of wrath. They had staged a Romantic comeback in Hugo and windy Wieftz; now the Expressionist fin-de-siecle opens to them. 39) Cezanne 1888, Mardi Gras, Pushkin Museum, Moscow Yet the same year, 1888, Cezanne distilled Carnival into something quite different. Mere estrangement and transvaluation (since no one can explain what is humanly intended) have been lifted to a well-being as enigmatic as any in Don Quixote — though of the order, as we implied with Seurat, of Chekov's 1903 Cherry Orchard, that sublimation of pain into incongruous laughter. It seems the right genius could ride those a[lternate "carnivals of destruction" and "lethargy of a declining civilization", winning its art—image (cleansed in the abstract) 40) ^o-Americhn, Maya 7th-10th c.AD, Terra cotta Aristocr;,^. mus. ~^throp. , Mexico City back to the unfathomable vitalities of ages to which understanding and causal entry no longer apply — this Maya terracotta of about �1900 B C.G. Bell the 9th century, where representational refinement almost makes us one with its aristocratic herald: "0 Kin," - and we cannot go on, because time and the Spanish auto-da-fes have left us ignorant of whom he would address or what he might say; so we can only repeat, as with Cezanne’s wilful suspension, "Magrcair' ca.anne 186S. Sorrow (Mary Ma2dalen)x^g!Z£^r,^a£j:S But with Cezanne we have a context, life, a history in which .we share - the rebellion that spanned Europe from this 1866 tear-drop Magdalen called Sorrow (with Mussorgsky's "Catacombs" from the 1874 Pictures at an Exhibition) ii; Cezanne 1900. Old Woman in a Cape, Mat. Gal., London to this Cezanne Old Woman with a Eosary of 1900, rim of no man s land. Here the abstraction of Landscape, Bathers, of the mysteri­ ous Mardi Gras, assume a function the Pre-Columbian has lost: to shape, of romantic Angst, an Aquarian containment. over forty years Cezanne was forging that He^ of Darkness, 411 Cezanne 1866, Sorro«^.I£u:^ from some Tess of the d'Urbervilles pain. As if, m the poetizing of cyclidal fall, we had gone from Arnold's disenchantment: Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age. More fortunate, alas 1 than we... .for the world which seems TO lie befor^’ufe like a land of dreams... Hath really neither joy, nor love, no g Cezanne 1900, 01dJjoman^n_A,CaESxJgl!l^^gS^ to what Yeats distilled from Nietzsche and his own crazy Jane. aTf tfLoSf if thiroSe'^SoJd 'Pejoice! ' �1900 B - 19 Bell 43) Picasso 1901, The Poet Savartez, Mus. Modern Western Art, Moscow MUSIC: Stravinsky 1909-10, The Firebird, Lullaby close. Col MG 31202 . I I I.. .1. . . . . . . . . . . .. . l.l It was easier to inherit Cezanne's abstraction than his OlymEjian maturity. illusion. Picasso had to begin, 1901, again with dis­ So later with Joyce and Eliot; even Yeats had opened his 'poetry with "The woods of Arcady are dead", his plays with "the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." It was a blue mood the young Stravinsky (so time-tied to Picasso) would exploit in the Lullaby of The Firebird. (Lullaby into Victory finale) 44) Double: Cezanne 1887-9, large Bather, Mus. Mod. Art, NYC; S Picasso 1905-6, Nude Boy with Horse, Paley Coll'n, NY But as Stravinsky, out of nostalgic sleep, could always stage a Firebird victory, Picasso's Virile force had begun by 1906 to break the Blue spell. And what could better precipitate an energized opposite than the absolute magnitude (left) of Cezanne's Bathers, this standing youth — to receive a softer poignance in Picasso's Boy and Horse (led without rope, a manbrute meld). It was Rilke who would write in 1907 of "that development... in me which corresponds to the immense forward stride in the Cezanne paintings"; while his sonnet on an "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (how it "breaks out of all its contours/ like a star: no place/ that does not see you. for there is You must change your life") points as much to Cezanne and Picasso as to the early Greek. 45) Matisse 1905, Pastoral, Priv. Coll'n, Paris (fade Firebird) While Picasso was moving through Blue and Rose toward Negroid and Cubistic, an ecstatic complement appeared in pure color, those Dionysiac Fauves, led by Matisse, most versatile �1900 B C.G. Bell and life-loving of them. Though darker Mann (1911) would turn this pastoral dream, with Death in Venice Aschenbach (Brook-ofashes) to "the promiscuous orgy (grenzenlose Vermischung) of his own fall". narain 1906. L'Estaque, Three Trees, Ayala & Sam Zacks, Toronto AS for Derain — this 1906 L'Estaque — with Dufy, Vlaminck, Braque and the rest - who would have believed that such heirs of individual outbreak, joined in a group fervor, could become almost indistinguishablY charged? Yet how many composers of the time (from the older- Debussy -to the rising generation) might share in the designation "Fauves"? By 1907 the last movement of Schonberg's Second String Quartet advances from chromatic tonality to the atonal setting of George "Transport" - "Entruckung": "I breathe an air from another planet" _ "Ich fuhle luft von anderem planeten." I have seen sidereal archipelagoes! and islands Whose delirious skies open to the voyager: in these unfathomed nights do you sleep your exile. Millions of golden birds, 0 future Vigor. i �1900 B - 21 /Bell -*• Rilke of that .future, 1912, First Duino Elegyc ...Wirf aus den Armen die Leere... ...Fling the emptiness from your arms into the spaces we breathe — maybe that the birds should feel the expanded air in more intimate flight. (close Bartok) 48) Picasso 1908, Friendship (L'Amitie)-, Hermitage, Leningrad The crested wave still breaking. MUSIC: Stravinsky 1912-13, from Le Sacre du Printemps, Col. MG 3 1202 Thirty-seven years after Rimbaud's South Sea frenzy — I have watched the fermentation of enormous swamps Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs Fall down from gnarled trees with black scent — Picasso (1908), as by a voodoo of jungle and Negroid, hammers Blue-period loss ("Hurl the emptiness from your arms!") into primitive and cubistic gain. Four years later Stravinsky would break into the fertility climax of the Rite of Spring. (fade Stravinsky) 49) Polynesian Easter Islands c. 1400?, Colossal monolithic heads What was in fact longing over into the new century — some dinosaur upheaval through the crust of civilized restraint, romantic idealism and ennui — was deeper than sense, beyond conscious control; as if suppressed demons and gods, these Easter Island huge volcanic monoliths, with prehistoric and African, all primitive rebelling loci in the Freudian and group unconscious (Rilke's "buried guilty river-god of the blood" — "verborgenen | schuldigen Fluss-Gott des Bluts") had heaved up to seize their [ day: Yeats to Florence- Farr, 1890: Has the magical armagedd'on begun at last? S^'O) Picasso 1910, Girl with a Mandolin, Penrose Collection, London �1900 B C.G. Bell MUSIC; Debussy 1910, Preludes Bk I, from ”Les Sons et les parfums ■---------------— tournent dans 1'air du soir", Philips PHC 5-012 ^ Though in the ambivalence of Picasso, what had begun as rape could always be methodized and refined to seduction. This 1910 "Girl with a Mandolin" suspends the langour and elegance of Blue and Rose in formal analysis. While Debussy, in the Preludes of the same year, has begun a systematization of the semitone mode of chords in fourths. 51) (fade Debussy) G.Braque 1910-11, Composition with Violin (Behind Appearance, p. 12) Which Schonberg, Berg and Webern continually advanced toward the technique of the twelve-tone row. Here Schonberg, of 1911: MUSIC: Schonberg 1911, Six Little Pieces for Piano (#5), Dover HCR 5285 Also by 1911 Braque, working as one with Picasso, had brought the abstraction of things to a threshold of corrugated space, a tensile geometry, beyond which in one sense art could not go. Yet to ring the changes on that non-objective claim would take half a century. 52')' (end Schonberg) Theophanes the Greek 1378, St. Macrobius, det. , Cath. of Transfig­ uration, Novgorod, Russia In 1378 Theophanes the Greek had fresqoed the Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Novgorod, Russia. MUSIC: Russian 10th-16th c.. Entombment chant (near close) Anth. —------------------ —------------- Sonore LP AS 10 (A-5) That the Eastern Slavs, in the time of Chaucer's humanity and lusty realism, 'should have held to the crypts of world-dissolving and "otherworldly power with which Dostoievsky's mystics still contend, dramatises, in the leap to the modern, what Trotsky calls "the messianism of backwardness." 53) (fade Troparion) V.Tropinin c. 1818, Portrait of Artist's Son, Tretyakov Gal., Moscow �'Bell 1900 B - 23 MUSIC: Glinka 1845, Symphony on Two Russian Themes (near opening) VJestminster XWN 184 57 In Tropinin's ideal portrait of his son about 1818, the old theophany yields (as with this Glinka, or the untranslatable Pushkin) to a radiant opposite, fruit of liberal England, Revo­ lutionary France and Romantic Germany — trust in the worth of man and world (though Pushkin complements that glow with Byronic irony). In Tropinin's picture, the give-away flush of sentiment takes us back to Rousseau: The Russians 'will never be perfectly civilized because their civilisation was attempted too hastily... takes us forward to Dostoevsky's depiction of The Possessed heirs of such enlightened dream. 54) (Glinka: forte and fade) Kandinsky 1909, Murnau with Rainbow, Stadtische Galerie, Munich MUSIC: Scriabin 1909-10, Prometheus: Poem of Fire (near close), London ------------------------------------------------------------- OES 6915 In the early century quickening toward war and revolution, Russia's avant-garde 'leap was extraordinary it would turn out, -mostly in exile-. though made, At the time of this 1909 Village Scene, Kandinsky was 43, had absorbecj Impressionism '‘twenty-five years before, was living near Munich at Murnau,. and was just entering the crucial phase of his art, when he would found (with Franz Marc) the Blaue Reiter — in touch with the musical iconoclasm of Stravinsky,. Schonberg, the Scriabin of this 1910 "Prometheus: Poem of Fire". Through Fauve mastery, Kandinsky was advancing 55) Kandinsky 1911, All Saints Day II, StSdtische Gal., Munich toward a mystical color music in which objects would disappear, this 1911 "All Saints Picture" (trumpeting angel above), of which �C.G. Bell 1900 B the artist wrote: ^ In many ways art is similar to religion...was the New Testament possible without the Old? Could our ..."third" revelation be thinkable without the second? That Superman Judgment clue, with subsequent abstractions — flood and cannon turned to vital ecstasy — lift us on the tide of New Apocalypse which also inspired 'Scriabin's Poem of Fire. (close of Scriabin) He wrote: I am desire, I am light...I am the boundary, i am the summit. I am nothing. I am God... I shall not die, I shall suffocate in ecstasy. Though he died not long after of blood poisoning, from a boil on the neck. 56) M.Chagall- 1911, I and the Village, Mus. of Modern Art, NYC From Jewish family life in a suburb of Vitebsk, Marc Chagall shaped such fantasies as "I and the Village", 1911; although he had lived in Paris for a year, absorbing Fauve color and the non-perspectival rythms of Cubist space. But what he poured into that crystal architecture was a new imagery of memory and symbolic ’>• dream. As Andr^ Breton, later spokesman of Surrealism, would write: I V^ in 1911, and through Chagall alone, metaphor ■made its triiimphal entry into modern painting. Yet those metaphors — "the cow who used .to talk to us", the magic spray of flowers, trance-green face of the artist inspired, are not, as with Dante,, or even Blake, systematic, but subliminal, associative mystery for its own sake. 57) G.Balia 1913, Velocita d'automobile + luci, M.G. Neumann Coll'n, Chicago Now various Italians, also in touch with Paris, spurred �ell 1900 B - 25 Cubism (with or without Fauve color) to the cinematic transcript of motion (this Ballo "Velocity of Automobile + Lights"), actualizing the dynamic of the 1910 Futurist Manifesto; We exto11 the love of danger... rebellion...the double quick step...the box on the ear, fisticuffs ^otor-car, its frame adorned ^ith greafpi;;s, libraries, shjant the canal^?; flood the museums; demolish, demolish the venerated ••• That utopian unrest would read itself through socialism, war. Fascism, industrialization, to a belated echo in Spender's "Express" (Internationale); Steaming through metal landscape on her lines She plunges new eras of wild happiness up strange shapes, broad curves And parallels clean like the steel of guns. AJelaunay 1912, Windows on the City (Ist Part. 2nd Replica), Kunsthalle, Hamburg By 1912 Parisian Delaunay opened, for Blaue Reiter contempo­ raries, the Orphism of his "Windows", described in passages of inspired delirium; Impressionism is the birth of Light in painting, Lignt in nature creates movement of colors Art in nature is rythmic__ to reach the limits of sublimity, it must approach our harmonic Vision; clarity. Clarity will be color, proportions; these proportions are composed of various simul­ taneous measures within an action. This .action must be representative harmony, the synchromatic movement (simultaneity) of light, which 'is the only reality... As Apollinaire would close his Delaunay poem; The window opens like an orange The beautiful fruit of light — Le beau fruit de la limi^re. Yet It is curious that in Mallarme's earlier "Les Fenetres", such openings of abstract radiance were an escape, as from the �1900 B C.G. Bell sad hospital of soul's confinement; ^ I flee and lean at all the casements... Blessed in the eternal dews of that glass Which the chaste morning of the infinite gilds. That escape become Delaunay's "only reality". 59) Franz Marc 1913, Tierschicksale, Kustmuseum, Basel MUSIC; Schonberg 1910-13, Die Gluckliche Hand (climax) Col.M2S 679 In Franz Marc, as in Schonberg's "Die Gluckliche Hand" (while the Great War neared), the tumult of elation crests in terror — as if the metaphorical vase of culture,- violin-bowed up the scale of natural and unnatural resonances towards a euphoria of self­ transcendence, should be stretched ahd shattered before our eyes. Mark's "Animal Fate" projects Leonardo's prophecy of a ravaged nature — Nothing on earth or under the earth or in the waters but shall be pursued, molested and destroyed — into the Symbolist subconscious Rilke also shared; ...throttling growths and bestial preying forms!...How he loved that interior world... ...seines Inneren Wildnis,/ diesen Urwald in ihm. When Mark, most searching German artist on the scene, fell % in 1914, who could follow the burning call of George?; "You who have, circled the flame, hold to the faith of the flame!" "Bleibe der flamme trabant!" 60) (fade Schonberg) Q.&O. Wright 1903, Flyer (with Langley's 1896 steam model), Smith-sonian. Wash., DC In 1896, year of Moreau's "Jupiter and Semele", with pictures we have seen by Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec, this Langley steampowered plane (above and small) brought the dream of flight almost home — though his model could not lift a man. In 1903, when �/ Bell 1900 B - 27 the old Cezanne was touching off the excitement of the Fauves, this larger Wright brothers biplane accomplished the first heavier-than-air powered and piloted flight. Like all adventures of Avant-garde, it would prove ambivalent. 61) R.de la Fresnaye 1913, Conquest of the Air, Mus. Modern Art, NYC Ten years later, when Fresnaye painted his Cubistic and Delaunay-inspired "Conquest of the Air", who could have told how far these cloud-hung airmen at the drafting table were plotting the sky-strategy of the war so soon to be loosed over Europe — theirs the only war-vision which would not appallingly bog down in trench mud-holes, where Nietzsche's expected trans­ valuation would concrete toward a mustached phoney of frenzied outwardness. 62) European Armour c. 1535, to Francis 1st from Ferd. of Tyrol?, Mus. de L'Armee, Paris If the paired offence and defence of -toothed Tyranosaurus and horned Triceratops ±ook them both under, it was with Duckbill and all the rest. So the" warning against armament, like all the lessons of history, remained equivocal. In the West (where evolution has not completed its proof) the mechanized type of force was conceived from the start — armored knight on aritfored horse charging peasant field or village like the precursive ultima-te of ironclad war. Although the horse-name of chivalry embraced a damsel-succoring code. 63) Photo World War I c. 1917, stalled Tank, U.S. Official Pictures After 1916 the true tanks caterpillared in, and some, like tar-poOl Dinosaurs*, were -stranded, swivel of what Nietzsche had hailed: I am delighted at the military development of Europe... the period of quietude and Chinese apathy is over... �1900 B - C * G • HgH Rilke's first war elation, George's account in his long poem Per Krieg of the first Demian hope for spirit out of material destruc' tion, Kastorp's leap from the Magic Mountain into sacrifice — such soul-surmises cloud to Owen's "Anthem": What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns... The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells And bugles calling for them from sad shires... 64) George Grosz 1918-22, from Ecce Homo: Twilight, watercolor, pub. 1923, repr. 1965 So to the embittered post-war of George Grosz's book of cartoon derelictions, Ecce Homo, Behold Man. Plunged into that "hell where youth and laughter go" (Sassoon), would not the crazed vessel at last be shivered in the Untergang Spengler imperatived: "Bare your necks to the blade 1" And what of America, whose vital delivery had s'prung the trench stalemate — America, barely emerged from pioneer assurance, how would she take to what war had hardened 65) Toulouse-Lautrec 1899, Private Room at Le Rat Mort, Courtauld, London from fin-de-siecle Toulouse-Lautrec, this "Private Room at Le Rat Mort"? Could the Jamesian traveler have missed, under Impressionist verve, the Vampire metamorphosis of Baudelaire? — The woman meanwhile from her strawberry mouth. Twisting her body like a snake... Let fall these words, charged with the odor of musk; Zola's 1880 Nana, dead of smallpox in a Paris seething with Franco-Prussian war? — The' pustules had invaded the whole of her face... The left eye had foundered among bubbling purulence; the other, half open, was a ruinous black hole...a reddish crust was peeling from one of the cheeks and invading the mouth, which it distorted into a horrible grin...And over this mask of death, the beautiful hair still flowed like sunlight downward in rippling gold. �Bell 1900 B - 29 Acade.., MUSIC: Scott Joplin c IRQ? r>v. • ■ ========g^^g=^i=^i^l^=gg^g4gal,^^ tape I. ^ George -Luks, through the Naturalist . . arisian tra-ining, saw in pre-war 1905 , . ^ his boisterous New York claim: glass of surh p> gj-ass Of such European and a -roai •-i^ reality proportioned to Who taught Shakespeare ter^hn-i rT,.^o ^ Or George Luks? Guts> f Rembrandt? ^—.That s my technique! Ana Drelsser, in studied pursuit of Deter^inist Zola, had Closed his first novel (1900, with sister Carrie rooming alone ,ret those who would answer Spengler with the plea of a New world culturally new, were Ignoring the continuity of culture Ashcan affirmation was a Whitmanesgue phase of an Avant-garde everywhere transvaluing the negative, hnd. what, in civilised content, comprised more negatibn than the worksongs, blues and lazz which, gathering head in the unlettered proletariat of Black America (New Orlpanc; °* "his joplln 1897 ragtime). The Circus. T.onvrs Kould.irresistably conquer the worlds ■ v.,.-- , (fade Joplin) Monde, Nonesi^^TTT^ And Within the sophistication and science of Pointillism, what stripping to Circus, music-hall f music hall and ^ive, occurs in the last patterned reductions of gfan-m-i. Seurat - an affinity that would open post-war orchestration ation to to thr^ the ki blue notes and rythmic firewater of Harlem's elemental "Yeah'" ^ean. du Monde". mhnc -fv-n Thus from Milhaud's "La Creation (fade Milhaud) 3rd whistle) C01.D3S 783 ! �C.G. B^eTT Ives was the composer who from his earliest works gave the disruptive triumph of modernism an American stomach for every­ thing from the great tradition, to hymns and pop tunes. . 68) Prenderqast 1901, Central Park, Whitney Museum, NYC_ After Homer, Eakins and Ryder, no American artist had such force; though various painters between realism and the all-out abstrac­ tions of the 1913 Armory Show, share a natural vigor with Ives. Here is Prendergast's patchwork "Central Park" of 1901. (fade Ives) with the slow movement from the Second Symphony: MUSIC: Ives 1897-1902, 2nd Symph., 3rd mvt, near close. Col. D3S She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe. As a calm darkens among water-lights... The day is like wide water, without sound. Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Ove'r the seas, to silent Palestine... Why should she give her bounty to the dead... Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow... These are the measures destined for her soul... 70) Eilshemius 1909?, Contentment, Kleemann Gallery, NY Like Stevens' lady, Eilshemius quickens the Bacchic myth: Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to_the sun. Not as a god, but as a god might be. �. Bell 1900 B 31 Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise-•. Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice. The windy lake wherein their lord delights. The trees, like serafim, and echoing hills... And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest. (end Ives Adagio) 71) Arthur Dove 1910, .Abstraction No. 2, Downtown Gallery, NYC As early as any of the Europeans, Dove, from upstate New York, who had known the Fauves in Paris, moyed to the delight of pure color forms (1910). Though if the scanning eye could have taken in thdse numbered abstractions as dwellingly as tjie time-art of tones forces upon, the ear MUSIC; Ives 1897-1902, 2nd Symph., close, last Mvt. Col. D3S 783 it would surely have experienced ^ shock, as from the fanfares and unresolved dissonance with which Ives concluded that Second Symphony*. 72) Macdonald-Wright c. 1915, Abstraction on Spectrum (Organization 5) Art Center, Des Moines, lA After the 1913 Armory show’, when European Modernism first struck America in force, the country was divided between mass realist reaction (last bars of_ Ives) Avant-garde handful of artists "(and even buyers) caught up in the European Fauve and abstract. Ma’cdonald-Wright, in this 1915 Abstraction on the Spectrum, rapturously pursued the color-circle Synchronism of Delaunay. 73) Double:/ Cezanne 1900-06, Bend in the Road, Walter Bareiss (cf. Munich) & Delaunay c. 1912-13, Window, Museum, DiSsseldorf, Germany In the juxtaposition of a Cezanne (left) from about 1900, and a Delaunay Window of 1912 to '13, we ride — ecstatic as Holderlin and Nietzsche, for the coming of the gods — the comber of an abstract surge peaking up the shoal as far back as the 1870's in Cezanne �1900 B - C.G.> Bell or in the "Drunken Boat" precosity of Rimbaud. Morton Schamberg c 74) 1917, Miter box and plumbing trap entitled God, Mus., Philadelphia What a break, when Dada, beginning in World War Zurich of 1916, had espoused the ridicule of a civilization gone wrong, and Morton Schamberg — 1917, Philadelphian, in the New York Circle of Duchamps, could give the title "God" to this found sculpture of a miter box and a cast iron plumbing trap — not a mockery alone, but like William Carlos Williams on the pretence of a hearse: 75) "Knock the glass out!/ My God — glass, my townspeople!"; Joseph Stella 1913, Battle of Light, Coney Island, Yale Univ. Gal. MUSIC: Ives 1910-16, 4th Symph., 2nd MVt, 4th of July close, Col.D3S 783 The Italian Futurist Stella, who would also settle in America, had brought the Armory show to its color-action peak with the glad riot of his Coney Island — as Ives, the same years, unleashed the Fourth of July scherzo of his Fourth Symphony. easier the art we can gawk at. How much No one would hear the Ives for fifty years; but Century Magazine gave Stella's "Battle for Light" a color reproduction: a daring interpretation...of the dazzling light, the noise and ceaseless motion...so evident in America... Had he merely represented the physicai...(the artist) believes that he could not have given the rythm of the scene, which transforms the chaos of the night, the lights, the strange buildings and the surging crowd into the order, the design and the color of art. (end Ives) 76) Stella 1922, The Bridge, 5th panel, Newark Museum The disillusion of the war did not undercut Stella's celebra­ tion of America as Futurist land. Though the early century ardor tightened, like Twelve-tone harmony, here to the bound geometries of the Bridge Panels. �. -Bell 1900 B 33 It was the theme under which Hart Crane, from 1924 to '30, hoped to affirm America: f How many dawns chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him. Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty... —' Till elevators drop us from our day. Always Crane's vision lets him drop: A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets. Tilting there momently, shrill shirt balooning, A jest falls, from the speechless caravan. In the gulf of Munch's Cry, how could the "curveship" of the Bridge "lend a myth to God"? 77) Francisco Goya 1812-19, Bullfight in a Village, Royal Academy of San Fernando, Madrid In the old revolutionary world of Blake, Goethe, this Goya, there was a separation of light and dark; the brute seizure spoke its ritualistic containment — what in music gripped the magnification of dissonance from Mozart: MUSIC: Mozart 1788, near close of 1st Mvt, Jupiter Symph., Col. B3S 891 through Beethoven. MUSIC: Beethoven 1804, 3rd Symph, 1st Mvt before recapit., Deutsche ■“ ---------------- Gram. LPM 18 802 78) Pablo Picasso 1935, Minotauromachia, det. of Beast, etching Since Zarathustfa, we are one with the world beast. Picasso: If all the ways I have been along were worked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a Minotaur. BACK: again 77) Goya, Bullfight in a Village In the uncontained emancipation of dissonance as such — BACK: again 76) Stella 1922, The Bridge what Schonberg would take for his battle cry — BACK: again 75) Stella 1913, Battle of Light',.'Coney, island �1900 B C.G. Bell soul flames the antinomy of the unresolved, consuming in revelational delight the crucible of its tensile ground. 'After Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat" ("0 let my keel burst; 0 let me go down into the sea") .cain 74) Schamberg 1917, God_^Miter.A^lHBbiS^^£g£n-^jii^^^ Hart crane despaired of a reconciling Bridge (Letters of 1926): At times it seems demonstrable that Spengler is . ■ T-+frVici mone and more licks his r^;o“if!;inT^f£without^Sidge;'in?Sl2ctually judged the whole theme and project seems more and more absurd... ' ,ca)n-73) Double, ^^esaHia^fter,190^H)l^glaunay^^ ?iofw?irsefi^hfi?rSf/airti:fgreJt“iiiircrackers in Valhalla's parapets; Again 74) Schamberg 1917, God the sun has set theatrically while Lafdrge, Eliot and others of that kidn y have whimpered fastidiously... ..Mn 75) Stella 1913, Battle of Light, Coney Islajjd But Picasso could have said the same about working in the " wake of that disruptive fervor (from Cezanne down) which he himself, with Fauves, Cubists, Blaue Reiter, had inflamed, ;'cain 76) Stella 1922, The Bridge up to the break and restrictive deliberations of post-war. again 77) Gova 1812-19, Bullfight in a Village, Since all arts after that crisis had to grope gackward and for­ ward for a "Tower Beyond Tragedy". But where Hart Crane slipped from the stern of the Orizaba, Again 78) Picasso 1935, Minotauremachia det-. of Beast Bartok had mounted (1928) the fierce lunge of the Fourth Quartet. Bartok 1928, Fourth Quartet,_J,as^ivt^_g^gs^^^ �Bell 1900 B - 35 Picasso turned the beast outbreak (Yeats' "Violence upon the road; violence of horses") to the 1935 Minotauromachia, Hi-- Picasso 1935, Mintauromachia, det. of child, L, etching where a child poignant as the one who in Rimbaud ".launches a boat frail as a butterfly of May" — confronts with candle -and flowers (Yeats' "0 may she live like some green laurel") -- again 78) Picasso^ Minotauromachia, detail of Beast the shared dread of Crete (Yeats too "Imagining in excited reverie/ That the future years had come,/ Dancing to a frenzied drum__ "). Again 79) Picasso, Minotauromachi, detail of Child, L. Crane would ignore Yeats in that prophecy of no gr^at poet after adolescent Rimbaud; but it was just Crane's despair which Yeats had hammered into "The Second Coming" of 1920: the gyre of negation pierced by the Thirteenth Cone, God-sphere of tragic miracle. 80) Picasso, Minotauromachia, whole •V Turning and turning in the widening gyre ^ The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood—dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last. Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (end Bartok) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data pdf Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 35 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1900 B : Crisis of the Abstract, Symbolic History, Part 34 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 34 of the symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_34_1900_B--Crisis_of_the_Abstract https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/e48a607917b6a927ba03d295125fb92f.pdf e911cc9801961398698e6091ce44307b PDF Text Text sc/m-bolic Througfi Sigfit and Sound 33. 1890: fluant-Garde Break CHARLES G. BELL ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO or 1260 CANYON ROAD SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 January 1994 Last Revised June 1996 La>*^ �Caiarles Greenteaf Ben, 1260 Canyon Boad, Sanfa Fe,J«vi87501 synfiOLxc KisTOJxy Through Sight and Sound 33. Med 189B - fluant-Garde Break '■='^'9®"“'’. Prelude (from Moser, CGB Greg. vnlo-f*"” “ >>efore the "mad flight" (Dante's "(olle with a P TT "Fonr q“":“ ® *^“'®kura Japan. Eliot's lines from the Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves, perpetually in its stillness. bevnnJ** Romantic, incarnate stretch beyond possibiltty had flawed the West with Symbolist rupture that sky-leap and crazing of the temporal fabric. V2a) ------------\ (Arrau) Against that ancient East, Delacroix's mid-19th century Jacob wresting with the angel, like stormy Liszt, fables the Faust champion, out of Judgment Hebrew by Promethean Greece. Yeats, in A Vision: June 1996 1890 Avant-Garde Break 1 �SSymboIic Histoiy C.G. BeU A civilization is a struggle to keep self-control, and in this it is like some great tragic person... (fade Liszt) The loss of control over thought comes towards the end: first a sinking in upon the moral being, a3) Qauguin, 1888, ^iHsion after tfie Sermon, (ktaiC, Scot. !J^t. QaC., T,dhifur0fi 3 ) Same, wfioCe then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation — the scream of Juno's peacock... Music: Satie 1890, First Gnossienne, close, Philips PHS 900-179 In Gauguin's 1888 Jacob and the Angel, Symbolist vision breaks so far with nature ("Art is an abstraction," Gauguin wrote) that the padre and his witnessing congregation could only laugh at the artist's wish to hang that picture in the church. And who took Satie's piano pieces of the strange names, the 1890 Gnossiennes, as musical compositions at all? (fade Satie) SFor Znd 2) (DeCacrovo 1852, OKe 5ea at (Dieppe, from CoUection ^eurdeCey, (Baris It is the abandon of Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre," "Drunken Boat" of 1871,* once guided (like this Delacroix) by the ropes of its haulers, traficking in Flemish wheat or English cottons, under the stupid eye of lighthouses, "I'oeil niais des falots". for 2nd 3) Qaupuin, 1889, SeCf-Portrait, (J^tionaC QatUry, ^asfiwyton, (D.C. 2nd 3a) gtmyuin, 1892, fatata U (MiU, (HationaC galCery, Wasfiinyton (D.C. Gauguin has cut loose from that life-class, job and family, celebrates Rimbaud's take-over: (Wallace Fowlie) Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles... As I was going down impassive Rivers, I felt no longer guided by the haulers; Yelping redskins had taken them for targets. Having nailed them naked to colored stakes June1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 2 �C.G. BeU Sjymbc^ EBstoiy aux poteaux de couleurs. What if the "waves... eternal rollers of victims," which have washed him clean of wine stains and vomit, have also "scattered rudder and grappling hook"? — he is bathed "dans la Poeme/ De la Mer." 4) Ignaz ^untfier(F), c. 176S(?), fKeratd Singdj entrance, (Diessen am Simmersee (CQ‘B ’59); first, "U detaU Music: J.S. Bach(?), c. 1730, from Cantata No.53, "Schlage Doch," Westminster SL 5197 If the angels of "the Babylonian starlight" brought in on the Classical world "a fabulous formless darkness," their Western suc­ cessors of Rococo ceremony, here Bach and Gunther, have filled even the last call with sensuous promise: "Schlage doch Gewiinschte Stunde." Where is Yeats’ fierce incursion of the absolute, a glittering sword out of the East"; (fade "Schlage doch") aS) !l(pman 'Byzantine, 9tfi cent., SbigeCmosaic, S. ^assede, 9(pme 6S) 9doreau, 1897, 'Dead Lyres, iJdoreau Mus., Taris 5) DouBCe: [J4.J 9tfi cent., S^ngeC mosaic (aS); and [‘B] Dead Lyres (65) where Rilke’s "Every angel is terrible" — "Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich"? The 9th-century mosaic vault of Sf:~Praxecrs“in Rome'is'wfdeeyed with the Dark-Age revelation which dissolved earth’s assur­ ance. But that messenger was contained in creed. How frenzied now the Zarathustra cry to the rending infinite — Moreau’s last sketches (1897) for the unpainted "Dead Lyres": the great lyre of the soul... has just silenced... all... those voices that glorified nature; this superb lyre is raised, held by a dark, terrible angel armed with the cross of blood... So Rilke, 1912, as TEufope armed for war, would pace the bastions of Duino over a storm sea, and catcli, as if roared by wind: Juztel996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 3 �C.G.BeU ^ymboluc BSstofy Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? Who, if I cried, would hear me then among the angel orders? 6) 6 a) MuruA, 1893, iJie Cry, 9^twnaC QaUery, OsCo; + ^ cCose detaiC Vduncii, 1899-1900, dlanu ofLife, OdgHomU QaUery, OsCo *1^66) Same, Cry, intermediate detaiC Music: Mahler, 1909, 9th Symphony, 1st movement, dissonant passage, (Horenstein) Vox Box 116 Was Munch's 1893 "Cry" (after Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic) a yet wilder charging of the personal and temporal, or its dissolving return to the transpersonal abstract? The poles define the art. Since the insufferable loading of romantic realism, as in earlier Munch, climaxes here in a stylization which becomes its mask. So Strindberg abstracted his ghastly marriages into more and more symbolic dramas. And does not the suspension of tonality in dis­ sonance — what Mahler (1860-1911) advanced in his symphonies like a throttle, to the culmination of this, the Ninth — deflect Liszt's blatant major to an estrangement of the cry it heightens? (fade Mahler on drum-roll) S^or 2nd S) 9doreau, 1876, SaCome (Dancing Before (Herod, (Sdoreau 9dus., (Paris Naturalist Manet deplored the influence of Symbolist Moreau: Moreau has chosen the wrong path... He leads us to the incomprehensible. While we want everything to be understandable. That realist-romantic rift had stamped the century. But the poles were always inbreeding: Rouault and Matisse would study with Moreau. 9^or 2nd 6) 9dundi, 1893, (PuBerty, (MuncB 9dus., OsCo (video uses MuncB, 1894, J4ju>(Uty, Munch Mus., OsCo, V2nd 6) June1996 1890 — Avant-Grarde Break 4 �C.G.BeU Symbolic History By report Expressionist Munch visited there. "The camera," he said, "cannot compete with painting so long as it is impossible to use it in heaven and hell." 1st 7) Cezanne, 1860, Louis-^uguste Cezanne (tfie painter's fatfier), ih(p.tionaC Qa(£ery, London Cezanne, whose revolution peaked as Munch's began, must have thought himself on the other side — from the violent Daumier realism of his youth (boyhood friend of Naturalist Zola); 1st 8) Cezanne, 1873-7S, Tanorama of lAitvers, Inst., Cfiicago (C^CB '74)) through his Pissarro awakening to landscape apprehended in light and air (this 1873 Panorama of Auvers): 9) Cezanne, 1890-92, Lhe Card iPCayers, CourtauCd gallery, London to the objective formalization of the actual, as in these Card Players of 1890 to '92 — he practiced Manet's science of the physical. 2nd 8) Cezanne, ^Panorama cfJ4upers, detail (CQ^ '74) Yet Cezanne throughout was overriding the real: sionism is already an abstract of brush work planes; his Impres­ 2nd 7) Cezanne, LLe (Painter's Ifatfier, detail-foideo-f^0tn4st-7)-------------------------his radical first caricatures leap from the prose journalism of Zola toward the visionary Baudelaire he memorized: "The Voyage", 0 Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps!, levons I'ancre! the worm-kissed transcendence of "A Carrion"; the repeated specter of "The Seven Old Men" in their "ant-swarming city." IFor 3rd 8) Cezanne, 1894-98, IForest of Ifontau^Ceau, (Rpcds, 9det., (N)yc 3rd 8a) Cezanne, 1883-87, VdteSte. Victoire, (Pfiidips CoCCection, Wasft., (D.C. June 1996 1890 Avant-Garde Break 5 �C.G. BeU j^ymboHcHistQE^ From Baudelaire's "Correspondences" — (CGB) Nature is a temple where from living pillars Will come from time to time a confused phrase; One passes there through a forest of symbols, As under the scrutiny of familiar eyes... Vast as the night, or as the light of day, ' Perfumes, sounds and colors correspond... Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clart6, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent. __ Cezanne’s analysis points to Rimbaud: A, black, E, white, I, red, U, green, 0, blue: vowels, I will tell one day the latence of your birth. (CGB) 2n(£ 9) Cezanne, OTte Car(C TCayers, Stephen Claris O^C; + VcCetaiCs 2nd: 9a) Cezanne, 1900, La n/kiOe au ChapeCet, QaC., ^ndon; + ^detaiC These Card Players, Munch’s Cry — from the same years — grip though differently, Rimbaud’s Season in HpIII made every hope vanish from my mind. With the lunge of the beast I leaped on every joy to strangle it... Misfortune was my god... Spring brought me the idiot’s terrifying laughter... (CGB) Music: Bruckner, 1891^, 9th Symphony (original.version), forte before close (timpani), Deutsche Gram. Gesellschaft 29333 And in the 9th (unfinished) symphony by Mahler’s first master Bruckner, also from 1891 to ’94, the rip-saw of dissonance cleaves a Choral and fugal buildup of studied polyphonic form. (music pause) 10) Cezanne, 1896, The Lahe of Plnnecy, Summer, CourtauCd Inst., London: -first video detail ■' 10 a) Same, a central detail (from which video tahfs only two closer details) Music: June 1996 Same Bruckner, close cont., tranquil 1890 — Avant^arde Break 6 �^yxnbolic Ifistory C.G.BeU But the dissonance yields to a close as calm, as classically harmonious, as Cezanne's 1896 Lake of Annecy. ("I will arise and go now, and go to Annecy"...) Yet there is a puzzle in Cezanne's classicism, his admiration for Poussin and belief that he himself was reconstituting that noble order of planes. Since the cubist colors here emerging from tree and mountain, water and sky, effect a prismatic diffraction of Poussin’s Cartesian space, as new to the world as the wave equations of Max­ well. Did Bruckner so reconstitute the polyphony of Renaissance and Baroque — Wagnerian chromatics exploding Gabrielli? (fade Bruckner) 11) (BuzHs (U Chavanms, 1889-93, tti (study), 9dus., CUvedand; ivith-video detaiCs Music: Franck,1884, Fugue from Prelude, Chorale, etc, opening V-LM 1822 The 19th-century cult of Bach, as in Franck's Prelude, Chorale and (here) Fugue, is cognate with Cezanne's espousal of Poussin, as with Puvis de Chavannes, who in this sketch for a fresco of Summer also revived the dream of classical order — like the Parnassians in poetry, Heredias: Maternal earth, who to the gods would seem Yet gracious, with each spring, as for a tomb. Brings to the broken urn acanthus bloom... (CGB) Fait... Au chapiteau brise verdir une autre acanthe... But all that is somehow backward looking, aU) Cezanne, c. 1890-94, (Batfiers, Louvre, (Baris; + ^ detaiC 12) Same, 1900-0S, CZHe (Bathers, S4rt Institute, Chicago; + ^detail against Cezanne's always vibrant Bathers, or the pointillism of Seurat __ both esteemers of Puvis — however mired (with Franck s chromatics) in the. reeds of the 'SO's. Cade Franck) June 1906 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 7 �C.G. BeU Symbolic Histbay "Take eloquence, said Verlaine, "and wring its neck." Perhaps only Reger, especially in the Bach-based cello suites, projects formal Baroque beyond Wagner, toward the modern stripping — Music: Reger, c. 1910(?), from Fugue of Cello Suite 1 (Feuermann) Col. ML 4678 a leap as far as Mallarme made from the Parnassians: The Will The The (CGB) virginal, vigorous and beautiful today. it tear for us with a blow of its drunken wing hard, forgotten lake which haunts under frost transparent glacier of flights that have not flown! Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui! (fade Reger) Only by vivifying abstraction could the arts of that late century repossess 13) C.(D. ^riedTicIt, 1821, Mi(C(Cay, O^dersac/isiscfies Landestmiseum, iHunover; + (CetaiC the natural health of Goethe a hundred years before, which Friedrich and Beethoven would carry over into the Transcendental yearning of 1820. Music: Beethoven, 1825-7, A Minor Quartet, from Trio of 2nd Movement, Col. M5S 677 ____________. Goethe: "Happy only is the soul that loves" — "Gliicklich allein/ ist die Seele, die liebt." All those now used up "Laughing suns and pastures bright,/ And Maytime harvests of delight" — Mailied; Wie Mir Wie Wie herrlich leuchtet die Natur! gl^zt die Sonne! lacht die Flur! 14) HAiTtwr, c. 1826, iJ\{ortCal^ ^Terrace, 9^t. QaC., Wasfi., CD.C (CQCB '60) 14 a) Same, detaiC (C(j‘B '60), wfUch video may tal^from 14 (fade Beethoven Trio) June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 8 �C.G. BeU Symbolic IBstoiy In 1820-England that first immediacy ("0 blithe New-comer") yields to a moodier colouring, as of autumnal Keats: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness... Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.’ While in Turner’s Mortlake Terrace, where the sun spills over, dis­ solving the wall, earth's diffraction into light and air has begun. ’ Van go£fi, 1887, WfUaifieU witd !jrCyin£ Lark, Van GoaH Museum, JimstercCam ISa) Same, detail (video tfien returns to the rvhoCe) 15; By the Avant-garde break, what vertigo of electric technique lifts Expressionist joy from its Gates of Hell base — the flight of Van Gogh's lark hair-triggered to an anguished opposite. So Rimbaud: I know skies split with lightning, waterspouts. The surf and currents; I have known the night. And dawn exalted like a flock of doves... I would have shown children those sunfish Of blue waves, the fish of gold, the singing fish. (CGB) ...ces dorades Du flot bleu, ces poissons d'or, ces poissons chantants. Music: Bartok, 1934, close of the 5th Quartet, Concert-Disc CS-501 t Bartok, fifty years later, closes his Fifth Quartet with such a "Drunken Boat" injection of the Beethoven trio. 16) Van Qosh, 1890, Crows over a ComfieCd, Van Qogh Mus., Slmstadam 16 a) Same, Crows, detail (to which video adds another, from 16) Rimbaud through the 70s, Van Gogh through the ’SOs. most in­ tense spirits of the time, both cracked up. Van Gogh’s rapture of wings over wheat closed in by 1890 to the last road, disappearing June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 9 �C.G.Ben l^ymbolic BSstory under a fatal flight of crows. Rimbaud's sabotage was of his poetry — by that tropical buming-out he had predicted in A Season in HellMy day is done. I am leaving Europe. Sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me... I will have gold. I will be lazy and brutal... But now I am accursed... (cf. Delmore Schwartz and Wallace Fowlie) The poet-angel, the Gdnie, "0 fertility of the mind and vastness of the universe" (Illuminations^ goes under: "Je voudrais me taire." 17) ^riedricd, c. 1820, ^Evening, iSQedersacfisiscties Landesmuseum, ^Hanover; first, video detaU Music: Beethoven, 1825-7, A-Minor Quartet, Heilige Dankgesang, opening. Col. MSS 677 Or there is night, the quiet Friedrich and Beethoven distilled again from Goethe: Over all hills Is peace Through all trees You can trace Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the wood; Wait; soon, like these. You too will rest. (CGB) 18) y^riedricd, 1835, ^RiesengeSirge, l^landerer at Evening, 5dg.tional QaCCery, West EerCin; first, video detail liber alien Gipfeln 1st Ruh, In alien Wipfeln Spurest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch. (fade Beethoven) June1996 1890 — AvanM^arde Break 10 �Symbolic History C.G.BeU 19) ^an Qo^fi, 1890, witfi Cypresses, a Sit cropped., 9Qrd(hr-9du^ Museum, OUerCo 19 a) Same, an upper detaiC 19 S) Van QoyS, 1889, Starry 9^St, detaiC, Museum of Modem Pirt, O^C (ivSUe video ta(^ wSoCe and two details from VlSS) By 1890 even in England the "Winter Heavens" of Meredith hint at the form-twisting of Van Gogh: Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive. In swarms outrushing from the golden comb... While Hopkin's evening — ...frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day... The times are nightfall and the light grows less; The times are winter and a world undone — that "Evening strains to be time's vast womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night." Though the Victorian island had hardly passed, with the Symbolist Continent, through the collapsing antinomies, the yea-and-nay fusion of Eternal recurrence: (Nietzsche) This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end... a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness... this Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally—self-xiestroying7.T — my "beyond good and evil"... This world is the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides! Yet Hopkins could almost have spoken for Van Gogh: ...This to hoard unheard. Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began. 1st 20) ConstaSCe, c. 1823(.F), Hsee Tsunf^s, 9{amstead ydeatfi, Victoria and MSert Museum, London (sCide show: wfioCe picture; video: cropped) June 1996 1890 — AvantGardeBreak 11 �Symbolic His&ny C.G. BeU Of course the break had shown at the peak of Transcendental and Romantic inebriation, most strikingly at the art surface with Turner, or this Constable; 21) J^riedricd, 1830~3S, ^ad to tfie Cemetery, ^Easter, (Baron *Tfiyssen (Bomemysza, London at the brooding core with Friedrich (this last Easter Road to the Cemetery). In poetry it was Holderlin above all, in whom nostalgia for the infinite began to crack the canons of utterance, compressing the two-fold time-symbol of the God's indwelling and soul's deserted winter into that almost fragment 2nd 20) ^ain, ConstaSCe, Tree 'Trun^ (sCide sfiow: detaiC; video: first, cCoser detaiC) called "The Half of Life" — "Halfte des Lebens": Wreathed with yellow pears And with wild roses, hangs The land in the lake, 0 blessed swans. And drunk with kisses You dip your heads In the holy sobering water. (CGB) Mit gelben Birnen hanget Und voll mit wilden Rosen Das Land in den See, Ihr holden Schwane, Und trunken von Kussen Tunkt ihr das Haupt Ins heilignuchterne Wasser. 2nd 21) l^ain, y^rUdricd, (I(pad to the Cemetery, detail 2nd 21a) y^riedrkh, 183S, Wood and Stvamp at Sunrise, Qoethe Vdus., S^ranhfurt Where alas shall I catch At blooms in winter, where At the light of sun And earthy shadows? June 1906 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 12 �C.G.BeU Symbolic History Speechless and cold Stand the walls; in wind The vanes clatter. (CGB) Weh mir, wo nehm' ich, wenn Es Winter ist, die Blumen, und wo Den Sonnenschein Und Schatten der Erde? Die Mauern stehn Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde Klirren die Fahnen. 22) V22a) 226) V22c) lumer, 1832, CfiUde 9{aroC(Cs Ti^rimage: Italy, ^aUery, London burner, 1823, “Bay ofBaiae, ^ate Qtdiery, London HAimer, 1833, QrandCanal, Venice, Ulyde.Codection, Qlen J^cdls, burner, c. 1829, J^lorence, British 9duseum, London Music: Mendelssohn, 1833, Italian Symphony, 2nd mvt, opening, RCA-VLSC-2221 A testimony to the rifted love of Romantic, that rapt Holderlin's god-claim abuts on the desired Italy of Childe Harold and Turner, of Mendelssohn's Symphony, or Shelley's "wild West Wind" — And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day. All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet the sense faints picturing them — the whole post-card dream on which generations were reared. (fade Mendelssohn) 23) burner, 1835-40, WatercoCoT, Boats at Sea, British Museum, London Yet in some watercolor sketches, unlike the canvases he dressed for show. Turner could cleave through all that, as in the performing art of music no composer perhaps did or could; so these boats at sea anticipate the negative capability of the minimal — Rimbaud: June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 13 �C.G.BeU Symbolic Histcny I wrote silences; I wrote nights. pressible, fixed vertigoes... I recorded the inex­ Elle est retrouvee! Quoi? I'etemite. C'est la mer melee Au soleil. iMxmetj 1872, Sunrise, 94ms. 94armottan, iParis (since stoCen) 24 a) Same, (ktaiC (video uses *1)24 and returns to tde zufioCe) 246) Monet, 1875, *Woman witd a ^ParasoC, Sdrtist's Wife and Son, 9(fltionaC gaPCery, Wasfiington, *D.C. (video: detail only) 24) It is found again! What? Eternity. It is the sea Mixed with the sun. (cf. Fowlie) Was Monet's Sunrise, from the same year as that Rimbaud, on the same track? Impressionist eternity pursued through a shimmer of light and air? — Emily Dickinson's I'll tell you how the sun rose, — A ribbon at a time... Or later, Wallace Stevens: The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing... V. No objects, but modes; relations, but of no substance; the wave motion of light, and no ether to be waved. Music; Saint-Saens, 1873, Cello Concerto, 2nd movement, cadenza, etc. Col. M 30113 In that France of the '70's, after the Franco-Prussian War, where first-impressionist lightening joined Symbolist estrangement, and Saint-Saens and his pupil Faure (played by Leonard Rose on one record) formed the Society for French Music, June 1996 1890.-—. Avant-GardeSreak 14 �C.G.BeU ^ymbofic History aZS) WfiistCer/c. 1867-68, ^ J^rtist in 6is Studio, SUrt Inst., CRicago; + Vdetail) 25) H/RistCer, 1875, O^ctume in ‘BCacR^and QoCd: ^ ^alCing 5(pcR^t, Institute of SLrts, (Detroit 25a) Same, (h^ctume, detail and began the etherialization of Wagnerian chromatics, distilling out its heavy Germanic tug toward resolution (fade Salnt-Saens) (as if the modal and Eastern already beckoned beyond tonality: Faur6) __ Music: Faure, 1883, Elegie, cello and orchestra, Op.24, close (from flute) Col. M 30113 in that Paris, an American, Whistler, as much as any, leavened Western realism with the Japanese print — this "Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" — to provoke in England Ruskin's slander, with the Pyrrhic victory of Whistler’s suit: "Can you explain to the jury, Mr. Whistler, what constitutes a work of art?" The monocle scans them. "That is manifestly impossible." Was the root shift of the modern away from the spatiality of cause from Spinoza’s "God as an extended thing"? (close Faur6) 26) goCden (PsaCter (MS, c. 880, David xvitfi (Musicians and Dancers, St Gad+ *1^ detail ‘ ^ " In the representation of motion, this 9th-century David with Musicians and Dancers claims as bodiless a symbol-world as Carolingian astronomy, where Alcuin, to clear up for Charlemagne an assumed disappearance of Mars (they had lost sight of it for several years), contrived a muddle of solar glow, latitude and longitude, all aimed at the caprice and irregularity of the merely physical. 2 7) DoCCavuoUo, 1470, (Battle of (My.de Warriors, (Petit (PaCais, (Paris 2 7a) Same, detail; + two closer video details and a return to the xvfioCe Music: June 1996 M. Pesenti, c. 1480(?), Dal letto me levava (de Van) AS-77 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 15 �C.6. BeU Slymbolic H]st(»y With Pollaiuolo, 1470, motion and force take up the physical, as in the chordal Frottole, or the pulleys and levers by which Leonardo embodies the animate: Force with material movement and weight with per­ cussion are the four accidental powers in which all the works of mortals have their being and their end... where there are neither sinews nor bones there cannot be any force exerted in any movement made by imag­ inary spirits. (end PesentI) Yet that lean anatomy 28) HiiiBens and Studio, c. 1620, (Drun^n SiCenus and Crexv, 9dg-tionaC QaCCery, London; + VdttaiC Music: Scheldt, 1621, Canzone Gallicam, brass, opening, Candide 31004 was a century and a half from the billowing flesh and voluminous riot of the circle of Rubens, the ground-bass order of baroque (Scheldt), Galileo's demonstrations of the mechanics of mass: Since I assume matter to be unchangeable and always the same, we are no less able to treat it rigorously than if it belonged to mathematics. (fade Scheldt) 29) (BCaf^, 1804-18, SlCBion turns from fiis daugflters, ^Binder Jerusalem, p. 47 Blake assaults that formulation no less in thought than'* in the representation of body and motion. The Atoms of Democritus And Newton's Particles of Light Are sands upon the Red sea shore Where Israel's tents do shine so bright. 30) ^Bicasso, 1908, Dryad, Jlermitaye, Leningrad; xoitfi video details June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 16 �C.G. BeU History 30a) OCripCe: details from [Ji] Spanis/i 9dSj Cate lOtd cent., TscoriaC (Beatus, f18, T,ve; [(BJ fBjiBens, 1622, {Marie de {Medici at {MarseiCCes, douvre; [C] {Picasso, 1907, {DemoiseCCes dSlvi£non, {Museum of {Modem Art, {J^C If Cubism reverts to a dynamic of the abstract, it is not by Blake’s vision, but by a method like that of the sciences through the Cubist early century: Planck, 1900; Einstein’s 1905 paper merging the discrete physics of atoms and the continuous physics of waves, leading through the quantum ambivalence and indeterminacy of Bohr and Heisenberg, to Schrodinger's wave mechanics, its mathe­ matics a crushing, by reciprocal fiat, of the "least-action" velocities of mass-point and propagated wave. No one doubts in physics that something was revealed. And if not in the art, why should it have multiplied its value a thousand fold? That sequence, from abstraction, to mass in motion, and back to the formal and abstract, 31) graeco-iKpman ({Pompeii), 1st cent. A.'D., fresco, (fmit and game, {Mus. 3^., {^CfipCes reappears in the still life; though this Pompeian richness of fruit and game foreruns the phenomenal certainty of the West — heir to what Heidegger would call the Greek "tuning of wonder," its instinctive space to go down in the spiritual undertow of the Dark Ages. 32) ZurBaran, 1633, App[es(?) on a {Pewter {PCate, {Mus. Cat., (BarceCona; + detaiC (where sCide show has a32: ZurBaran, 1633, tripCe stUCUfe, Simon {J^rton, Los PlttgeCes, foCCowed By 32) Music: German, c. 1670, Viola d'Amore Sonata, from 2nd Grave AS 19-B When the still life resurfaces, through the vibrance of Renais­ sance to the weight of Baroque (this Zurbaran, with a tensile ground bass sonata), one feels the conscious science, not only of those fruits, but of the projective space in which they hold substantial being — summit for all time of that Galilean matter: "unchangeable and always the same." June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 17 �C.G.^U (Symbolic Bistory 3*3) Cfiardin, 1764-65, TCums, (Private CoCCection, (Baris; first, xndeo detaU 33 a) Same, detail (wfiUe video dratvs a closer detailfrom 33) Music: J.S. Bach, Chromatic Fantasy, opening, Edwin Fischer, Piano, V8680/1 One sentation Zurburan's surface of might say Chardin holds to the grandeur of the old repre­ as much as anyone after the Baroque debacle; but geometry of lighted recess wavers toward a brushwork color play. So in Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, tonal heroics is suspended in, accidental transtonality. (fade Fantasy, begin Fugue) 34) Liotard, 1782, (Pears, figs, pCums, Mus. dS4.rt et ddlistoire, Qeneva 34 a) Same, detail Liotard's last still life, 1782, in its spatial detachment, might almost be taken for a century later. While Bach’s Chromatic Fugue, even more than the Prelude, has that clean hypostasis of formal relations, which has launched it again and again into modernity (fade from Fugue beginning to close) 35) Cezanne, c. 1900(7), Still Life witfi Melon, watercoCor, (Private Collection; first, a vuko detail 35a) Cezanne, 1882-85, La Mer a L'^Estague, CoC. Pederin, Paris as when Fischer, thirty years into the century which this Cezanne began, reshaped it on the piano, for our between-war world. (close Bach) But to see Western history as a dimensional conquest returning to the abstract is to obscure what dimensionality contained — 36) Ingres, c. 1810, Portrait of tfU Sculptor Paul Lemoyne, (S(g,Cson QaCCery, d^nsas City, Missouri 36a) Ingres, 1810, OUe SLrcHitect Jean-Paptiste (DesdeBan, detail, Mus. of Dec. SLrts, Pesan^n 36B) J^ain, 36, Portrait ofLemoyne, detail June 1906 1890'— Avant-Garde Break 18 �C.G. BeU l^ymboKc IBstory the maturation, outbreak and crisis of conscious person: stamped on the classic form, of this portrait. Herder: what Ingres All beings have their centre In themselves, and each stands in proportioned relation to the rest; all depend on the equilibrium of opposed forces, held together by organizing power... i Novalis: "Nature is visible spirit; spirit invisible nature." feel yourself sprung from the highest God!" Robespierre: Goethe: "0 Kings, aristocrats, tyrants of every description, are slaves in revolt* against the sovereign of the earth, ■ which is the human race, and against the legislator of the universe, which is Nature. V * Yet the wine of the god-self was always changing to the other draught, Hdlderlin, Pindaric rhapsodist, at length desired: But let one reach me Brimmed with dark light The foaming beaker full. That I may rest; Since sweet Under shades would fall that sleep. (CGB) Es reiche aber, Des dunkeln Lichtes voll, Mir einer den duftenden Becher, Damit ich ruhen moge; denn siiss War unter Schatten der Schlummer. 3 7) ^ouBCe: [A] T^ypt CDynasty c. 2600 (B.C, (Bust ofTnnce S^l^-3{af, J^ine Arts, (Boston; ancC [(BJ (Dynasty X^III, *TeC Antama, xvoocCcn fieacC from a harp, Louvre (first, vuCeo (ktaiCs of A and ‘B) If a culture matures by individuation from mythic cult, and if individuation is always fraught with danger — a Pandora box of consciousness -—• we should find from culture to culture a recurrent ripening, as here in Egypt, from Fourth Dynasty prince to time-ofIkhnaton carving from a harp — a paradigm of early against late. June 1998 1890 — AvantTGarde Break 19 �C.G. BeU Symbolic IBstoxy 38) (DouBCc: [SI] Jitticj c. 550 iHfiittpin 5{e(id, Liouvre.) dtuC [*B]~^£eXpndH(tti(?) 2nd ctnt. (B.C, CaGmacfias (once ccdhdSeneca), Mus. V^pCes In, the Classical theater, such a leap takes us from the keen Archaic smile of the 6th-century B.C. Rampin rider, to the burdened Alexandrian bust, probably of the librarian Calimachus, though once called Seneca — baffled in either case. 39) (DouBCet [^] OCtnec, 800’400 ‘B.C; Qiant 5kadfront £ja ‘l^enta, (Mus., JaCapaj and [B] CCassicaC Maya, c. 700 ‘^.(D.l?), Stucco Bead from BaCenyue, Mus. SlntBropoCoyy, Mctqco City Even in Mexico and Central America, the oldest monuments, the giant Jaguar-man heads of the Olmec, simplify to a primitive force of monumental stone; while the refined Maya stuccoes, as this from Palenque 1500 years later, suggest the romantic brooding and sensuous complexity of a life-mask (though the nose-bridge pre­ cludes that). 40) (DouBCe: [Si] (Dirl^ Bouts, 1464-67, SeCf from Last Supper, St. Beter's, Louvain; and [B] Corot, c. 1835, SeCf zvitB BaCette, Uffizi, BCorence (video adds details from'sinyCes *l7405L and ‘1/40B) In the West, the realistic self-portrait arises out of the Medieval. Less than four hundred years separate this Dirk Bouts detail, from Corot’s The Artist with a Palette. That Corot, in simple modesty, has also taken the stance of a craftsman, heightens the build-up — from Dirk Bouts' assumed appearance in the creed-room of a Last Supper, to the 19th-century unfettered looming, as if seen from below — a measure, over that span, of the amplification of the earth-claim. a41) Laf^ Constance Master, c. 1480, CoupCe from Megory, detail of Covers, Qerman Mas., MuremBery B41) Same, detail of the lady (to wBicB video adds detail of tBe man) 41) Same, the ivBoCe scene of tBe Covers Music: Junel^e H.Fink, c. 1490(?), Ach Herzig Hertz, A.S. 51 1890 Avant-Garde Break 20 �C.6. BeU l^ymboEc Histoiy Consider Eros. In the Middle Ages it had kindled a Chivalric flame, but earthless, mystical. As the thickening plot of space, time, and cause foreclosed on chivalry, married love advanced its bour­ geois hopes — curiously enough, first in the book of a King, James of Scotland, whom Venus — "Worship my law... And I your confort here sail multiplye" — and Minerva — "Desire," quod sche, "I nyl it noght deny. So thou it ground and set in Cristin wise" bring to the guerdon of his "blisfull aventure": In youth, of lufe,- that now from day to day Flourith ay newe, and yit forthir, I say. So in Finck's love songs, or in this Lake Constance detail, we feel that validation, but modestly — these lovers form one scene in an Allegory on Life and Death. (cut Fink) 42) yosepd-Marie 1773, l^mpCe of tHyimn, ^^ecture. de CdamBiry, Savois; witfi video details Music: Mozart, 1791, The Maaic Fluto. "Tamino mein," Deutsche Gram 2709 017 Under what panoply of bliss marriage parades in this French Temple of Hymen, 1773, cognate (if only the artist had some of Mozart’s genius) with the trial and union of The Magic Flut^P^,tTiino... Tamino... mine... what happiness." Our grandmothers featured such engravings on their walls. (fade Maaic Fluted a43) ‘Bocffin, 1878, Weddiny Journey, upper section, 0dp.t. gaC., (BerCin; + V cCoser detail 643) Same, Wedding Journey, Cower section; + ^ detail of a43) 43) JLgain, Wedding Journey, wdoCe picture Music: June 1996 Brahms, 1878, vioiin Concerto in D major, slow movement RCAVICS 1028 1890 — Avant-GardeJBreak 21 �Symbolic Histoay C.G. l^U Though by that time what the world dreamed toward was no allegory of the old regime, but the Freudian enfleshment of Bocklin's "Wedding Journey," love's garlanded, flute-blowing descent down the shaded cleft into the honeymoon valleys of the South. It is the over­ loading of desire, which the concert repertory pushes like a drug; Brahms’ Violin Concerto; in poetry the addiction of romantic penta­ meter: "Far folded mists and gleaming halls of morn" — that Ten­ nyson vibrato fulness of loss and wish: The woods decay, the woods decay and fall... And after many a summer dies the swan. 44) iMonet, 1873, ^iJie ^Poppies, Louvre (Jeu cCe (Paume), (Paris 44 a) Same, dCetaiC (tufiUe video puts the zufioCe Between details) Such paradisical longing stretches the realistic hovel. It fills the Poppy Fields of Monet's light and air as with flesh memories of Meredith's "Modern Love": We saw the swallows gathering in the sky... Love that had robbed us of immortal things. This little moment mercifully gave. Where I have seen across the twilight wave The swan sail with her young beneath her wings. What Wallace Stevens so breathed At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink. Downward to darkness on extended wings — that he fought it the rest of his life. 45) (Rffdin, 1889, the LtemaC IdoC, (Ppdin Museum, (Paris; + 9/ detail The notion of Brahms as a reserved master of design, obscures the soar and sob. Through the Impressionist veils of that Paris, Ro­ din's "Eternal Idol" bends ideality to the flesh-loading of Baudelaire: jTxnel996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 22 �C.G. BeU ^ymbofic History Evenings illyminated by the charcoal glow __ Les soirs illumines par I’ardeur du charbon. when: I thought I breathed the perfume of your blood __ Je croyais respirer le parfum de ton sang... And it is just that Eden bubble of promissory touch, (fade 2nd movement) 46) c. 1882, rEhe gates of 9{eCC, Hipdin 9vCus., {Paris (wfiicfi tHe video divides into detaiCs, aBove and BeCow) Music: Brahms Violin Concerto, continued, begin 3rd movment which involves Rodin, and the whole Romantic world, inner and outer, in the turbulent enormities of The Gates of Hell — as the slow movement of the Violin Concerto requires the finale's inflated battle to affirm. 3rd movement) 47) SamueC {PaCtner, c. 18S0(F), Slmos Simon CottCe, {\(fitionaC {Portrait GaCCeru, London; + 'l^detaiC 4 7a) J7E. {MiCCais, 1852, OpBeCia, {Cate QatCery, London How does estrangement enter that Faust-night of Care? Even in England and by 1850, the beauty of the ideal (Palmer's portrait of Cottle) seems withdrawn from the actual. Yet that refined estrangement keeps the old techniques of. ordered command __ Arnold's "Dover Beach", Tennyson's "idle tears": Break, break, break. On thy cold gray stones, 0 sea! the resolve of "In Memoriam": June1996 1890 — Avant-GaMe Break 23 �C.G.BeU BSstoiy I hold it true whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.. a48) 48) Cezanne, 1869, Tfie Temptatim ofSt. Slntfiony, ‘BuftrCe y^oundation, Zuricfi Cezanne, 1870-71, '9vCan in a Strata 9{at ('Boyer), Odet. 9/tus., 9>0yC; first, video detail 'U48a) Cezanne 1880, SeCf-Tortrait, detail, Louvre, Taris Music: Mussorgsky, 1874, Pictures at an Exhibition, opening. Turnabout TV 34258 As Yeats would write after the first World War: We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart's grown brutal from the fare... And planned to bring the world under a rule. Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. When Mussorgsky and Cezanne charged the rtiusical hnd art salons with something of the same bull-violence (Man in a Straw Hat, 1871; Pictures at an Exhibition, 1874), a break was made with the romantic ideal and its vulnerability. How much nearer to Camus' Stranger than to those lost dreams of Palmer, Tennyson, Brahms. (fade Mussorgsky) 49) iBarmagianino, c. 1523, Self in a conveTcmirror, HQinstfiist. 9dus., Vienna V49a) iMaster of S4u7(erre, 1537, (Descent into the CeCCar, Stadtische (Kynstinstitut, y^raiihfurt 496) deCC SlBSate, 1555-60, Landscape zvith 9den Tlireshiny 'Wheat, 9dus., (fontaineSCeau Parmagianino's youthful self-portrait in a convex mirror is one of the wildest pictures of the 16th century. Yet its experiment is rationally grounded in the optics of the mirror. The stormiest adventures of Renaissance are landward; those voyagers do not, as Baudelaire's, "partent/ Pour partir". Thus with Du Bellay's Odyssean sonnet: (CGB) Jux»1996 1890 ^ Avant-Garde Break 2A �C.G. BeU Symbolic History Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage... Happy who like Ulysses after a fair voyage... Comes home to employ the experience of his age... Better my fathers' house than Roman palaces, Loire than Tiber, my hill than the Palatine; Better than ocean air, the sweetness of the Angevine. Et plus que I'air marin la douceur Angevine. SO) V\{anet, 1879, (Portrait cf^eor^e Moore, detaiC, Met. Mas., O^C ^SOa) Manet, 1876, (Before the Mirror, §uggenheim Museum, 9^C SOB) Manet, 1873, Sur Ca (Plage, Musie du Jeu de (Paume, (Paris Where the iiew art, even in observational quiet (this detail of Manet's George Moore), is suggestively adrift. Against Du Bellay's sonnet, take Mallarme's on the Sea Breeze, "Brise Marine". He sits at home, in Paris, with his wife and child, before him the unwritten blank of the page. He drowns in ennui: "The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books" — "La chair est triste, h61as! et j'ai lu tons les livres"; he thinks to sail, inviting storms, towards "shipwrecks lost without masts, without masts or fertile islands... But O my heart, listen to the sailors' song!": ...les naufrages Perdus, sans mats, sans mSts, ni fertiles ilots... Mais, 6 mon coeur, entends le chant des matelots! SI) ^an Qogh, 1887, SeCf-(Portrait, V. Qogh Mas., Sbnsterdam *l7Sla) ^an Qogh, 1890, Self-(Portrait (Qreen), detail, Louvre, (Paris (video then returns to a close detaid of SI) Mallarme dreamed and wrote in the wifely embrace of that room. But Van Gogh (Self Portrait, 1887), embarked with Rimbaud in the Bateau Ivre, took the shoreless voyage all the way: (CGB after Fowlie) I sailed until across my fragile cords Drowned men spinning backward sank to sleep. June1996 1890 — Avant-^arde Break 25 �C.G. BeU ^ymbotic mstary Now I, a lost boat in the hair of caves. Hurled by tempests into the birdless air. Whose water-drunk carcass would not be fished up By Hansa sailing ships or armored Monitors... Who ran, spotted with electric crescent moons — Qui courais, tache de lunules 61ectriques... Lucifer-Ahab broken to what climax of pity? 52) *l^an Qogfij 1888, (Portrait of an Victor, 5(fdCCer-fM^uCCer (\{us., OtterCo; + (UtaiC 52 a) Cezanne, 1890-95, ^oy in a (Rg^cC Waistcoat, (BiirfiCe CoCCection, Zurich (video: detail only) I, who trembled, hearing at fifty leagues. The rut of Behemoths and heayy Maelstroms, Eternal spinner of blue immobilities, I regret Europe with its ancient parapets! But in truth, I have wept too much! Dawns are rending. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter. Acrid love has swollen me with intoxicating torpor^ 0 let my keel burst! Let me go down into the sea! Through that split century of revolt — self-pity, tender memories, backward longings arise: Impressionist domesticities, Renoir's girls, Degas' Dancers, the sigh under Seurat's pointillism, even Cezanne's Boy in a Red Waistcoat, resonate toward Yeats' Prayer for his Daughter: 53) (Picasso, 1906, (Portrait of Leo Stein, drarviny, (Museum of ^rt, (Baltimore: + detail (here video adds a detail of sCide 806, from the close of the shozv: (Picasso, 1924, (Paul in a Clozun Suit, .Artist's Collection) And may her bridegroom bring her to a house Where all's .accustomed, ceremonious... Though he himself, has paced storm-battlements June 1996 1890 — Avant-Grarde Break 26 �C.G. BeU SymboBn HiigtoTy Imagining... the future years... Dancing to a frenzied drum... So Picasso, at the onset of abstract rupture (1906) calls back photo­ realism for the romantic representation of Gertrude Stein’s brother Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleure! and: Fileur eternel des immobilites bleues, Je regrette 1 Europe aux anciens parapets! I long for that Europe of the ancient parapets! 54) >2aire, ^rt^o bronze 94:ask, 5(pcl^fdCCer CoCCectum, MetropoCitan Museum cf m, 9^0 first, video detaiC But Picasso had already fixed his sights on an impersonal primi ive containment for all demonic possessions, the African mask, in which the terminal and personal shame of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat might pronounce beyond personality, clean: Je ne puis plus, baigne de vos langueurs, 6 lames __ I can no longer, bathed in your languors, 0 waves. Follow in the long wake of cotton boats Nor traverse the fanfare of their flags and flames Nor swim under the horrible eyes of prison ships.’ — As m all satyr wisdom from Homer down, death-acceptance turned to life-force. first, vuCec dose S5a) mcasso, 1308, ‘Woman witfi a fan, hermitage, Uningrad V55c) (Picasso, 1908, ifriendsfivp (L'Sdmitie), (Hermitage, Leningrad June 1998 1890 Avant-Garde B^ak 27 �^ymbolieHistoiy C.G.BeU How would it operate in the post-individual and luxuriant West? An art fad? A Dionysian birth? Where Rilke, the same years as this 1908 Picasso, in the Malte Brigge "Other Self," saw the facds of Paris wear out... split and fold... be changed in succession... The last is worn through in a week, has holes in it... gradually the lining — the no face — comes through, and they go about with that... Or he sees the woman, sunk inward, her head in her hands: At his step... the emptiness clattered... she took fright, was torn too quickly out of herself... the face remained in the hands... to see a face from the inside... the flayed head without a face. The excitement of Cubist art is as clear as the record every­ where of broken content, what moved toward the World War and totalitarian seizure — Yeats (that "last romantic"): We, who seven years ago Talked of honour and of truth. Shriek with pleasure if we show The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth. The marvel of the Negroid and Cubist is its changing devaluation, outrage and despair to abstract strength — the dance of Zarathustra: "zur Umwertung aller Werte." 1 56) y^ragonard, 1780, ^ete at !^m6ouU£et, QulBenJoan CpCCection, LisBon 56a) Same, detaiC of stream (into zofiidi video inserts a detail cf the sBip, from V56B) The first turning of royal France from court ease to the risk of wild nature is deliciously toyed with by Fragonard in his painting of a Fete at Rambouillet. So Johnson's Rasselas — "he whose real wants are supplied, must admit those of fancy" — searches the woods and June 1996 1890 — Avant-Grarde Break 28 �Symbolic Histoty C.G. Bell cliffs of the Happy Valley for an escape from those "soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose": He examined the cavern through which the waters of the lake were discharged; and... discovered it to be full of broken rocks, which... would stop any body of solid bulk... 57) C.T>. g^Twiricfi, 1818, CftaOiCGffs of ‘KS£en, fKginfiart, Wintertfiur 57a) Same, CfiaCliCCiffs, centraC detail, from 'wfiicfi video draws two closer details (cf. V57al and a2) In Friedrich's "Chalk Cliffs of Riigen" that mannered grotto-play advances to the awed contemplation of cliffs and mountain torrents, which, from romantic poetry and the tales of Hoffmann, would seize on Poe ("A Descent into the Maelstrom", 1841): The "little cliff" upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown himself... arose, a sheer unobstructed precipice of... rock, some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world of crags beneath us... In truth, so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward at the sky... "You must get over these fancies," said the guide. 58) (Bavarian (Romantic, 1869-86, (hlg.uscfiwannstein, S'H^ of (Municft (video uses ^58) But what Symbolist enactment of the European Weird, could lead from Friedrich's nature mystery to the actual Wagnerian extra­ vagance the mad king of Bavaria, Ludwig II, reared at Neuschwanstein in the chain of Valhalla-imaginings which let to his suicide? As if the whole Alpine landscape were haunted 59) giorgio de Cftirko, 1908, (Jlpsta^ia of the Infinite, (Museum of (Modem Strt, (Nirc ^59 a) g. de Chirico, 1913-14, Singuish cf (Departure, 5llBrigh.t gallery, Buffalo, (N!/ June1996 1890 — Avant-(5arde Break 29 �C.G. BeU Sjymbolic Histoxy by a ghost of the surreal, future, to be painted in 1908 by Giorgio de Chirico, in this "Nostalgia of the Infinite" — Neuschwanstein of the now consciously alienated mind, as immediate, and remote, as the Castle Kafka's Land Surveyor sees but never reaches, phones and is bureaucratically shunted from, evasive ultimate of religion turned on itself. Even when Kafka's surrealism had been confirmed by the Great War, the many had no notion how his Castle and Trial, his Meta­ morphosis into cockroach and the like, applied to their daily lives. Va60) n^ozuer detaiCfrom sCide 58, Odg'Usdvwannstein, 60) 5Lnierican QingerBreacC, 1886, LumBertnan's Bouse, ‘Eureka, CaCifomia; first, xHxCeo detaiCs How could Ludwig n have known what Masque of the Red Death his fairy castle was to accommodate? How much more purblind the new rich of Gilded America must have been to the ghostly estrangements which nightmared their gingerbread — as in the meeting on the stair of James' Turn of the Scre.w The apparition had reached the landing half way up... in the cold faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the ,oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity... Like that candy-manufacturing malaise and soul-closure from which at the turn of the century. Hart Crane would be born to the exile of the poetry nonsense that strained his nerves (Dante's prurient "mal protesi nervi"). 61) fFJC. (hCesserscBmidt, c. 1770, Carved SeCf, 9duseuin, TressBur£, Qermany; + V detaiC Music: Shostakovich, 1945, close of 9th Symphony, Col. M 31307 In the energized West, enlightened well-being has long over­ played its cheer. Extrapolate, from Messerschmidt's 1770 grinning self, to Shostakovich's 1945 "merry little piece" (the 9th Symphony), June 1996 1890 *— Avant-Garde Break 30 �C.G. BeU ^J^mbolic History its close carrying the comfort of Papa Haydn to an assertion the more urged for 200 years of irreversible trouble — an always toothier lie even to its jolliest participants. Shostakovich) ‘i'aezj Semini, c. 1619, (a. of imUc sOde 62) fbtma Dannata, ‘SaC. di Sp(ma, 62) (Bernini, c. 1619, (DouBCe: [H] (DatnnecC ancC f(B] BCessecC SouCs, (PaC. cCi Spagna, 9(pme V62a) Bemint, c. 1619, (B (rf 62) S^ima Beata, TcU. diSpagna, Bsmie Since already the twenty-year-old Bernini had stumbled on the disturbing truth, whether universal, or a curse of Faustian civiliza­ tion, that in the pairing of saved and damned, the creative energy of his own face had to operate ^ on the satanic ,side; while peace and blefssing would furnish a female of such wall-eyed mawkishness as must enforce angel-limitation from Blake's Milton to Nietzsche's creeping Christian, 63) Basttmn Joflnson, 1869,,for 1869 painting of tfie Boy LincoCn (I(^ing, So how would Eastman Johnson’s charcoal of the imagined boy Lincoln reading (sketched after the Civil War though still in the hope of pioneer humanity) _ how would it hold out against Baudelaire’s Au Lecteur, To the Reader," published twelve years before: "and we feed our pleasant remorse as beggars nourish their vermin"? 64) (Daumier, 1863, ^TBe !l(gader, Center, (Des Moines, Iowa; + V detail Daumiers Reader of 1863 more sustains that dedication to Satanic loves: "It is the Devil who holds the strings which move us " Johnson’s glowing Lincoln would know nothing of that worst vice of all, 1 Ennui, hookah-smoking boredom of Romantic decadence: Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre delicat. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere! June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 31 �C.G.BeU ^ymlx^ic H]stda:jr A close Eliot would take up in The Waste I.and. without even troubling to' translate. 65) Victorian, 1897, T>mtnon([ JuSiCu, (Progress since 1837, iCCustrated: London Odg.'WS', + V details 65a) Van Qo^fi, 1885, Lhe (Potato Xaters, (Rij^mus., ^Lmsterdam (video: detaiC only) 656) 9dundi, 1891, (Rite Lafayette, (NfitionaC QaCCery, Oslo No one can doubt progress. From Roger Bacon, to Francis Bacon, to Priestley, to this celebration of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, 1897, with its sixty years of sail to steam, coach to train, lamp to electricity — the vision of technocracy builds a spread in time, from burning apex to the diffusion of common acceptance; while the counter-spark condenses in the mass — Hopkins: "And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil." The question is not of Progress, but of its Satanic bent — as simple as whether the Devil is real. The same split has attended the view of the city. though a journalist, framed the poles:* O’Henry, Far below and around lay the city like a ragged purple dream, the wonderful, cruel, enchanting, bewildering, fatal, great city. 6 6) 5ldCeT and SuCCivan, 1890-91, WainrvriyRt ‘Budding, St. Louis, (Missouri 66 a) Currier and Ives, 1862, Central (ParR, ‘Mater, Skating, detaiC, (Rpy. (Rj-ng CoL, (^ 666) SuCCivan, 1907, CkandeCier detaiC, farmers' and (Merchants' ‘BanCu Ckvatonna, (Minnesota 66c) (M. (Prendergast, 1901, Centred ParR^ ‘Mutney (Museum, (Mlf Whitman’s first focus in Democratic Vistas is on the surge of material possibility which, thrusting up the 1890 Wainwright Build­ ing in St. Louis (Adler's steel skeleton hung with Sullivan’s patterned brick), would put architecture at the vanguard of the modem: June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 32 �C.G. BeU Symbolic History Whitman After an absence, I am now again (September 1870) in New York City and Brooklyn... The splendor, pic­ turesqueness and oceanic amplitude and rush of these great cities, the unsurpassed situation, rivers and bay, sparkling sea-tides, costly and lofty new buildings, facades of marble and iron, of original grandeur and elegance of design... the flags flying, the endless ships, the tumultuous streets, Broadway, the heavy, low, musical roar, hardly ever intermitted, even at night... these I say... give me... a continuted exaltation and absolute fulfilment... A67) g. ‘BdCoivs, J9p9, 9Cfie Lone 'Tenement, 9^tionaC gallery, 'Washington, 'D.C.; + 'U (CetaiC 67) 9{. (Daumier, 1863, 'Washerwoman, (MetropoCitan 'Museum of Art, (S^C (video: detail onCy) t But we have already mentioned Baudelaire's antithesis; Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves. Ant-hill city, city full of dreams. Where the specter in plain day grips the passer-by. It is the "unreal city" Eliot, like that specter, seizes on in The Waste — where Baudelaire had encountered in self-multiplying repli­ cation his seven old men, bent and eternal as this Daumier Washer Woman (shoulders hunched again in the child) — at which his soul __ old dismasted hulk, danced, and danced/ Across a monstrous sea without a- shore." (CGB) Et mon ame dansait, dansait, vieille gabarre Son mats, sur une mer monstreuse et sans bords! IfreiKh (g. 'Eiffel), 1887-89, 'Ihe Eiffel 'Tozuer, night storm, (Paris (video: detail only) '17068) ']7an gogh, 1889, 'Uan gogh's 'Bedroom at Arles, 'l7incent van gogh (Mus., Amsterdam c68) 'l/an gogh, 1889) On the 'Threshold of Eternity, Hg-oller-lMuller Museum,. Otterlo, UTolland a68) June 1996 1^0 — Avaii1>€rarde Break 33 �C.G. BeU 68) ^ymboHd Histoxjr *Uan Q 1886, (Boots witfi Laces, f^ij^museum, l^bnsterdam In the modern break, what so drives us without bourne, is art’s tragic enactment of cloven value: the Eiffel-towered city, its victories of steel and dynamo, our cage and defeat; while the dejecta of that aim. Van Gogh's Room or Chairs, his face-clutching man "On the Edge of Eternity," become the crushed-out oil of Heidegger’s essential truth: a well-known painting by Van Gogh... a pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet from the dark open­ ing of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth... Under the shoes slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls... The art work lets us know... what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness (Greek: aXiiGeia) of its being. a69) Manet, 1863, Le ^Dejeuner sur CfierBe, oiC s^tcfi, CourtauQC Inst., London; + tcpo V details 69) Same, Le (Dejeuner sur CdeTSe, Louvre (jeu de (Paume), (Paris (first, a video detail) Music: Mussorgsky, 1866, "Why should Your eyes" Artia ALP 704 (3rd sect.) No wonder, whereas Renaissance art-advances were a civic delight, each phase of this avant-garde unveiling occasioned hue and cry. Whatever deft liberation of the urbane tickles our left-bank senses in Manet’s 1863 Luncheon on the Grass, the old moral and spatial connections are falling away. As in Mussorgsky’s 1866 "Why should your eyes," so rich in the bass of Kim Borg, those transmodulatiofts and short-cuts were creeping in which would leave the composer unplayed until Rimsky-Korsakoff had revised out the idiosyncracies. In Paris, at the Salon des Refuses, connoisseurs could always titter: "Where is the background?" "Why make a farce of Giorgione?" and "What are those girls up to?" (end Mussorgsky) Juik1996 1890 — Avant-Grarde Break 31 �Symbolic EBstoacy C.G.BeU 70) Japan, Cate 18tfi unt., Tea Ceremony; tobocCBCoc^ print; + V (CetaiC 70a) J{dl^ai 1827-30, Ono Waterfall, lUoodBCoc^prmt (video: detaiConly) 706) 9donet, 1872, IRdjatta d. Jlr^enteuil, Louvre (Jeu de iPaume), Paris Music: Gamelan Orchestra of Bali, Sekdar Gadung, close, BAM LD 096 M When the great causal rhetoric which Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment had bequeathed as their noblest heritage, was to be thinned toward Verlaine's "rien que nuance" — the non-Western everywhere pointed the way. What the patterned flatness of the Japanese print, its casual composition and haunting remove, sug­ gested for the circle of Manet, the Gamelan music of Bali would effect for Debussy when he heard it at the Paris Exposition of 1889. How elegantly the shadows of tensile harmony might be withdrawn. (close Gamelan) Music: Debussy, 1910, Voiles (close). Preludes, Bk. I, (Gieseking) Col. Odyssey 3236- 0021 Frail as Debussy's own Prelude depiction of Sails. (end Voiles) 71) Monet, 1866-67, Women in idie Qarden, Louvre, Paris; + V details 71a) Monet, 1880, Woman Seated Under Widows, 9^tionaC QaUery, Was6., P>.Cs + V detaiC Under the sway of the Japanese, of Manet's figures and Boudin's color-lightening, Monet caught the ephemeral play of a garden. . Music: Faure, 1879, Trio, 2nd mvt. of 1st Piano Qrt, RCA ARL 1 -0761 But that was in 1866, when Debussy was a child, and thirteen years before Faure matured to the airy delight of this First Piano Quartet. Though Verlaine (at 22) had just published a book with such garden moments: We were alone and walking in a dream (Nous etions seul a seule et marchions en revant)... June1996 1890'^' Avant-Garde Break 85 �C.G. BeU Symbolic History How the first flowers have the sweetest scent (Ah! les premieres Hears qu'elles sent parfum&s!) Or the Autumn Song of violins sobbing in the heart, which, as much as any poem, refines pure sound: Les sanglots longs Des violons De I'automne Blessent mon coeur D'une langeur Monotone. So the chromatics of Faure moves toward an abstract repose. (fade Faur4) 72) (DauBigny, 18$8, Mominy, fortnerCy ^ermitaye, now Moscow; first, V detaUs Music: Liszt, 1863, Etude, Waldesrauschen, opening, Philips 6500 043 The musical antecendents are as complex as the Beethoven to Wagner scene. But a piano sequence might reach from the Nocturnes of Field, through those bolder .ones of Chopin (the D-Flat Major close) to Liszt, who in such studies as this Waldesrauschen went as far toward nuance as anyone around mid-century. In art, the freshening of landscape flowed from the Romantic English through Barbizon France, where Daubigny evoked light and air over earth and water. But to see how sharp a break was still to be made, set this oil-sketch of Morning (fade Liszt) 73) Monet, 1869, La grenouiCCere (froygery), MetropoCitan Museum of llrt, ■9frC; + ‘UdetaiC ^ 73 a) Monet, after 1920, Les (DeuT^ LtoiCes, Oranyerie, (Paris 'U73B) Monet, c. 1920(F), Water-CiGes, 9fationaC gatCery, London Music: June 1996 Debussy, 1888, En Bateau, opening. Petite Suite, 2 pianos. Turnabout TV 34234 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 96 �C.G. BeU ^mbcdic History against Monet's wave reflections not twelve years later (1869), where space and motion atomize into abstract impressions. Though the musical contrast leads us to 1888, Debussy's "En Bateau," from the Little Suite for two Pianos. (fade En Batteau) Music: Debussy, 1905, from Reflets dans I'eau Images. Bk.I, (Gieseking) Angel 35065 (arpeggios). Since that post-impressionist phenomenon called musical Impres­ sionism does not climax its suspension of tonal rhetoric in wave-play ("Reflets dans I'eau") until Debussy's Images of 1905, contemporary not with Monet’s rippling Froggery, but with the advancing abstrac­ tion of his Lily Ponds. (fade Images) a74) Van Qo^fi, 1888, Cafe atO^fit, !lQ;d(leT-Mu(hrMus., OtterCo 6 74) ‘Domenico Veneziano, c. 1480, St. Jofin in tfie Desert, 9\(fitionaC QaCCery, ‘Wasfiit^ton, D.C. (C^(B '60) c74) Van Qo^d, 1886-87,14tfi cfJuly, Jaggd-JdifvnCoseTCodection, iVintertfiuT 74) fRsnoir, 1879, Oarsmen at Cdatou, O^ational gcdlery, ‘Wasd., D.C. 74 a) iRgnoir, c. 1869, Luncdeon (ftde ‘Boatvny Tarty, Jlrt Inst., Cdicago Avant Garde having set the conditions for always more radical revolt against establishment, even, by their acceptance, the estab­ lishment of its own styles. Renaissance, in this sense, had not been avant garde. Its explorers could move with society toward the shared ordering of space, time, and cause. This new elite forms a cadre recruited within that now entrenched civilization, and, as the military term implies, at war with its traditional values. But the current can always eddy, Music: Faure, 1886, 2nd Piano Qrt, 1st mvt, 2nd theme, RCA V LSC 2735 Renoir harnessing to the art customs of the past (Titian, Rubens, Watteau) the^ revolt of free composition and broken color, for the more cheerful accommodation of elegant status quo. So in the musical salon, Faure and the rest tamed Wagner. No doubt art is June 1906 1890 — AvanlrGsorde Break 37 �Symbolic Histpiy C.G.B^U celebration; but what is to be celebrated? of bourgeois delight? 75) The fragile Gallic shimmer (fade Faur6) Moreau, c. 1880(?), Jlt^eCs of Sodom, Moreau Mus., (Paris; first, video detaiCs Or, through a surface of romantic dark, Moreau's assault of Symbolist angels, the holocaust overthrow of the physical by spirit? Music: C. Franck, 1883, Le Chasseur Maudit, close, Westminster WL 5311 As with Franck’s symphonic mysteries against the charm of Faur6, (end Franck) who can say which is more Avant Garde? a76) TautQau£uin, 1898, Hdie ^fiite (Horse, (Paris, Louvre 76) gau£um, 1897, ‘ZTte (Batfiers, Mg-tionaC QaiCery, Wasfiin£ton, (D.C.; + ^ detail Music: Debussy, 1893-4, Prelude a I'Apres midi d'un Faune (opening). Col. MS 6077 So it was attuned to that older Symbolist pain and Faustian attack that a post-impressionist corps, withdrawing from the already prosperous circle of Manet, turned Impressionist weapons against the ephemeral ease of Impressionist savoir-faire: — Gauguin, seeking realms as visionary as of Mallarme's Faun: Nymphs, I shall see the shadow you became. « Couple, adieu; je vais voir I'ombre que tu devins. — though salon-eased perhaps in the music Debussy wrote for the poem. (fade I'Apr^s midi d’un faune) 77) Van Qoyfi, 1888, LLe (SQgfit Cafe, Slit gadery, O^aCe University; + V detail Van Gogh, radical as Rimbaud: "I accustomed myself to plain hallu­ cination"; "At last I held sacred the disorder of my spirit" — "Je finis par trouver sacr6 le d6sordre de mon esprit." Consumptive Laforgue, praying that "whirlwinds and floods... sweep the leprosy of cities... June 1^6 1880 — Avant-Garde Break 38 �C.G. BeU l^ymbofic EBstoxy that nothing be known of this rotted, brain which was the earth, one day" — "De ce Cerveau pourri qui fut la Terre, un jour!" — Laforgue, for whom on all the peopled stars "a fraternal outcry will be raised against God" — "Ce sera centre Dieu la clameur fraternelle!" C^zditnC/ 1900/ ‘BeruC in tfic (^cu£/ T'l^dCtcv CBcirciss CoCCcction/ ycUc ^ftwini Sfiow (video cropped BeCow) 678). Cezanne, 1900-04, *Tfie (BCue Landscape, ^Hermitage, Leningrad; + ^17 details 78) Cezanne, 1898-1900, !I(pc^ at 'BiBemus, ^oCfcjvang Mus., Tssen ® Cezanne, most rooted in the past, most looming over the future, shaping from personal neurosis and ennui an art as Olympian in well-being as Whitman’s, yet as radically compulsive as Rimbaud's __ Cezanne, great beyond parallel, though with cognates everywhere; from Verlaine, "The sky above the roof/ Si bleu, si calme!/ A tree above the roof/ Sways its fronds./ The bell in the sky you see/ Softly sounds..."; through Mallarme, obsessed with "The Azure": "Je suis hante. LAzur! lAzur! I'Azur! rAzur!"; Rimbaud (closing the vowel poem we earlier began — Fowlie): O, supreme Clarion full of strange stridor. Silences crossed by worlds and angels: — O, the Omega, violet beam from His Eyes. — O rOmega, rayon violet de Ses Yeux! to Valery (1920): When, on the abyss, a sun takes repose, iPure works of an eternal cause. Dream is knowledge in a time that shines. Le Temps scintille et le Songe est savoir. *]/a79) Seurat, 1884-86, La Qrande Jatte, detaiC, J4rt Inst., CBicago B79) Odauriude VCamincki 1906, Landscape xvitB 9(^d OIrees, .d^tionaC Museum of Modem. Slrt, Baris Vc79} Bicasso, 1911-12, Clarinet Blayer, detail, B>. Cooper CoCCecthn, London June 1996 1890 — Avant-€rarde Break �Symbolic ffistory T9) T9 a) (Bo(xioni, 1911, forces of tfie Street, iBrivate Cofection, (BaseC, SwitzerCaiuC; + video detail f upper section Same, detail of Cower section When those post-impressionist assaults have been absorbed — with the others, Seurat, Ensor, Munch — in the chain-reacting iconoclasm of Avant-Garde, to kindle by 1905 the Fauves, "Wildmen," more fiercely improvising with color and form; and when that salvo has yielded in Paris to Analytical Cubism, and over Europe touched off Blaue Reiter, Suprematist, Futurist darers of the pure abstract, this 1911 Boccioni, "Forces of a Street" — as in the 1910 Manifesto, no less the forces of the coming World War: Music: Schdnberg, 1912, Pierrot Lunaire #13, Col. M2S 679 A roaring motor car that looks as though running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace... We wish to glorify war, the only health giver of the world, militarism, patriotism, the destroying arm of the Anarchist, and the beautiful ideas that kill... — in the desperate ecstasy of that increasingly global enactment of The Drunken Boat (music too, in Schonberg, pursuing the Wehrmacht attach on tonality) (close Pierrot #13) 80) iK^noir, 18T6, QirCwitfi Watering Can, CMpdoncd gallery, ‘Washington, 2).C 80a) Bonnard, 1929-32, Little girl xuith Dog, (Private Collection, fontaineSleau, france 806) (Picasso, 1924, (Paul, the Slrtist's Son, Artist's Collection (video: detail only) 80 c) (Pissarro, 1881, (Peasant girl with a Stichi Louvre, (Paris (video: detail only) 80d) Again, from 80, (Renoir's girl, detail; + V closer detail efface Music: Chausson, 1880, "Les Papillons," RCA V LM-6153 — under successive revolts, how could there not be successive pinings back, as to Renoir's Girl in a Garden (with Chausson's Butterflies, "Les Papillons"), a tenderness already of the past, though Bonnard would enchant it forward — such a prayer as Yeats' for his Daughter, such a wish as Picasso's in his children. Had not the most infernal rebel of June 1996 1890 — Avant-Garde Break 40 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 41 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1890 : Avant-Garde Break, Symbolic History, Part 33 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 33 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_33_1890--Avant-Garde_Break https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/db3b0a15d18be5a0a23abe5b7c4d9e7a.pdf f41be0e62438fa22d1ee7554881029cc PDF Text Text (3^t liA.^'hu.p SO^^OLIC 9<ISi:o^ ^rougH Sigfit ancC Sound 32. Face and Landscape (R6sum6 of Man and UJorld) CHARLES G. BELL ST. JQHNfS COLLEGE SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO /or 1260 CANYON ROAD S^TA FE, NEW MEXICO S7^0l July 1993 Last revised June 1996 �Cajaries Greenleaf Bell, 1260 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 \ \ ^ HisTOny Thrbuqb Sight ntnt Sounii 32. al) Face and Landscape (ROsumb of Man and UJorld) gmrwtoaU, 1528, iktaUcfSt. Imt, 5{ermt, ma Landscape, IsenAeim Mtar, CoCmar The arts should be experienced first in their own right But they ate also the language of symbolic history, the history Novalis recognized in poems and fables. » ^ V [Wenn] man in Marchen und Gedichten Erkennt die wahren Weltgesqhichten. To trace man's view of himself and his world, two sequences suggest themselves, of face and landscape. 2) LascauK, c. 20,000 ‘B.C, Cam (Paitititi£, (CetaiC, Man and •Buffalo 2 a) Same, detaiC In cave art neither appears. But in Lascaux (as in Trois Freres) there is a related pair: inner and outer, man and beast It is hard U> know what that bird-totem, phaliic man, is doing under the disembowelled buffalo. Music; African (Dattomeyl, Speech rhythms, Contrepoint MC 20.093 Do the gored, like the hanged, suffer erection; or is this magic, like (fade speech rhythms) African speech rhythms? One thing we note, Music- Central African Republic, Medicine Man's Chant, UNESCO; BM 30 L 2310 what is outward, the animals, could not be more real; what is human wears the disguise of mask. June 1996 Face and Landscape 1 �C.G. Bell 3) Symbolic History Congo, *Bantu-(Ba[ega, Manyema region, recent, OvCasf^ 9^us. !I(pyaC de C^frique, ^erxnieren Mask, voodoo counterpole of the individuation, we are calling Face — the human image usurped by demonic expiations — a primi­ tive ground of unquestioning obedience to inherited tabus. (fade Chant) a4) 4) Tgypt, (Dynasty II/, c. 2540 *B.C., ^I5ie Qreat Spfdwi in its pyramid setting (xvfiUe video sfiozus Sp/tin?c alone) Same, tHe SpHin^ aCone (rvfiUe video sfiozvs tfie head only) Out of ritual surrender, face appears. Music: From Tibetan Buddhist Ritual for attaining the quality of spiritual adepts, Barenreiter BM 30 L 2009 looms like Tibetan music (Egyptian music lost), this Cheops of the Sphinx, proudly and joyfully lifted above the impersonal fates. No accident these first Pharoah statues are records of immortal soul, of Ka, in the eternal serenity of a temporal command, (fade Tibetan Ritual) 5) ‘^yp^j Dynasty XVlII, c. 1370 (B.C., Qyeen Vdgfertiti, (Berlin (3/4 face) No sooner is face present than, like any embodied vitality, it is caught in process, the cultural phases we need not repeat. Only, with Nefertiti, to recall that what emerged in the Old Kingdom from the trans-personal cult which gave it strength, has ripened by the Late Empire into a mirror-haunted consciousness of ennui and quest. 6) 6 a) DouBCe: [S4.] ^ttic, c. 540 (B.C., (PepCos (Kpri (Vdg.679) head, Sithens, SLcropoCis (Museum; and [(B] (Rpman, c. 100 5L.D., (fCavian) Coiffured Cady, CapitoCine (Museum, (Rpme Coiffured Cady, (B of 6 So too in the sequence of Greece and Rome face emerges from the primitive like a fresh discovery (left), clean of introspective brooding. For all the sensuous delight of painted marble, it is a phe- June 1996 Face and Landscape 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History nomenon of vital energy, beyond the personal — a wierdly smiling immortal visitant. Set it against a Roman patrician (right), where the civilized preoccupation has become again the self-caressing search and satis­ faction of the private — in this case, no doubt — rather hard and vul­ gar soul. Roman satires run the gamut of her kind. So much for the briefest hint at the art-vicissitudes of face over twenty-seven hundred years. 7) (DouBCe: [SI] T,£ypt, 'Dynasty XVlII,. 1580-1314 'B.C, 'TomB fresco from 'TdeBes, garden witB fisB (Bond, 'BritMus., London; and [B] (Paul (Kfee, 1930, Sid 9dar£inem, Jijinstmuseum, 'BaseC, SpitzerCand; ffien 7S4. and 7'Bfo(Cow separateCy The art of landscape unfolds between convergences of begin­ ning and end. This garden of New Kingdom Egypt (left), its trees flat­ tened in ranks around a pool; Paul Klee's 1930 primeval memory, "Ad Marginem" (right) bridge a spatial conquest of more than three thousand years. The Theban fresco heralds a representation not yet available; sophistic Klee dissolves all perspectival claims in the haunted sun-tarn of psychic mystery. 8) (l(pman, earCy 1st cent. S4..(D., fantasy Candscape from tBe SKouse of S4^rippa (BostBumous, Mas. 9dyz., (JdgpCes; + '17 detait (wBiCe sUde show goes to 8a, anotfier Candscape from tBe same viUa) In Greece, we know landscape developed through phases of exploration and mastery. Music: Greek, 1st cent A.D., from Hymn to Kalliopeia, J.E. Butt, priv. rec. But the examples that remain are Graeco-Roman backdrops for an imperial age of luxury and exotic longing — dream evocations, with­ drawing from the spatial conquest in which earlier artists took pride, (end Kalliopeia) Even in the time of Augustus, this illusionistic melting and search for gnosis hints at the abandonment of the earthly king­ dom, with its cultivation of Phidian ivories and golden bees. June 1996 Face and Landscape 3 �C.G. Bell 9} e ^ Symbolic CRmese, StA-StA cent. (attr. History Wei) WautfaCC, Trw. ColC., Ma It would seem a counsel of despair to turn from the already superfluous challenge of Western history. Yet no treatment of landsea^ can quite Ignore the subtlest tradition of that art. Let this 8thor 9th-century Chinese waterfail, attributed to Wang Wei, remind us what a Tao of Power was opened there into the deepest forms and moods of nature, at a time when the West had suffered Barbarian overthrow. 10} CaroCingum, c. SZO, St. Lufy, -EAAo GaspeC, ‘Epemmi 10a) Same, (ktaiC ^ n the Europe of those years, in the art of Charlemagne’s reviva It IS as if a great wind had blown through — Vico's barbaric re­ newal — reducing landscape refinements to calligraphs of rock, strip­ ping the person also of cultured nostalgias, down to the skeletal energies of ascetic faith — Music: Gregoriart, before 1000, Adjuvabit (G. deVan), A.S. 34 side A impersonal, though within the abstract personality of man-to-God Lukes upward inner glance determinative. (,ade Adjuvabit) This IS the Dark Age creed-containment, within which the new temporal forces develop and articulate themselves. 11) Qerman, 1Z50-60, face of Uta, CatfiedraC of 9^umBura 11a) Same, detaiC And first, to hint, in three faces, at the whole Western systole and diastole: 1250, Uta of Naumburg, from the century of the Ger­ man romances, Instan and Isolt. The later unfolding of self and love IS nascent in the Medieval ground, a longing heightened by timeiess suspen^on Uta at once a legendary queen on a cathedral facade and a Cressid of secret love as sensuous as the fold of the robe on the c ee . As with Dante's Paolo and Francesca, all that would inform June 1996 Face and Landscape 4 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History the romantic novel is prefigured, the more hauntingly for the enigma of its loyalties. Music: Neidhart von Reuenthal, c. 1220, Mayenzeit, EMS 201 (fade) From Minnesong al2) ^Bens, c. 1629(F), *Ilfiomas tHbivari, ‘EarC cf JlruTuCeC, detaiB; Gardner i\Cus., (Boston 12) Same, xoBoCe to Frescobaldi: Music: Frescobaldi, c. 1620(7), Canzona 7 "La Superba", Decca DL 79425 a jump of almost 400 years, and the personal and individual claims which vivified the Middle Ages under the paradox of denial, have stepped from the Thomistic frame, to issue their culminant procla­ mation of secular command — Rubens' Earl of Arundel, in the confi­ dence of late Renaissance and Baroque, the will to power magnifying self and world. (fade & skip, closing Canzona) al3) Qaii£uin, 1889, SeCf-(Portrait, detaiC; (h(g.tion(U QdUry, Wasfwi£ton (D.C. 13) Same, zofioCe Music: Brahms, 1891, from slow mov.. Clarinet Quintet, D. Gram. LPM18278 Another 250 years ends in world-weariness and withdrawal. The self has looked into the self, and behold, vacua et inana sedes; or as Rimbaud wrote, "I took Beauty on my knees — and I found her bitter." (fade Brahms) Here is Gauguin as the old Adam toying with the vine-snake; but by the halo he is New Adam too, and how ambiguous a martyr ("my head, grown slightly bald, brought in upon a platter") — Stavrogin, the horned saviour. Thus post-romantic ego Baudelaires its ennui, prepares to go under; to clear the world stage for whatever is to follow. June 1996 Face and Landscape 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 14) y^ranco-Qerman, earCy 13tfi cent., Camtina CBurana 9/CS, Summer, scenes (iBove and BeCow; StaatsBiBCiothe^ MunicB 14 a) Same, upper sune only In its similar course of emergence, conquest and withdrawal, landscape suggests the phases of natural science. This 13th-century Carmina Burana scene of summer represents a sort of alchemical phase, where the powers of material nature are to be apprehended immaterially, by allegorical rites and signs, as if things themselves were symbols through and through. 15) ^m6. Lorenzetti, 1337-9, Qood government in the Country, ^PaCazzo fPuBCico, Siena; right side offresco 15 a) Same, centred detaiC By the 14th century the landscape opens out, with a transi­ tional creak of hinges, to the panoramic expanse of Lorenzetti. As in Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux, we hang between prophetic space and spaceless symbpl: Today I climbed the highest mountain in this region, Ventoso ... There is a summit higher than all the oth­ ers... I looked around me: clouds were gathering below my feet... the Rhone river was directly under our eyes... But he dissolves the vastness in allegory, opening his Augustine to read the countertext: And men go to admire high mountains... ocean, stars — and lose their own souls. It is the residual non-dimensionality of Gothic. 16) Leonardo da ‘Uinci, 1499, Storm over an SUpine VaCCey, Windsor CastCe 16 a) Same, upper detaiC (video having Begun xvith a centraC detaiQ As we approach 1500, in the notebooks and drawings of Leonardo, scientific thought and the landscape are simultaneously June 1996 Face and Landscape 6 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History transformed. The new mode of apprehension is spatial and causal. With an exploratory rush of delight, thought enters the world fabric, participating in its rational order as tested and confirmed by the senses: "although nature begins with the cause and ends with the experience, we must follow the opposite course ... begin with the ex­ perience, and by means of it investigate the cause" Universal law is reached for, though not yet captured in equations. IT) (Beminij c. 1650(?), Sunrise over the Sea, dratving, HQrpferstich^Bmett, (BerCin That conquest is the achievement of high Baroque. In science, causality is pursued tb the Newtonian synthesis of the world. In this Bernini sketch, what for Blake would become the mere ratio of the senses, the sea of time and space and bondage of nature, is cele­ brated exactly for its formulable nobility, the spatial recess tri­ umphant with the rayed determinism of light. 18) C(D. ^Friedrich, 1834-35, %ist after ^Harvest, gemaCcCe£akrie, (DrescCen 18 a) Same, center (white video Coohs to the horizon and shy) With Friedrich after 1810, the same methodic space, still glori­ ous, has become the phenomenal veil, to be penetrated (as in Faust's rapture of following the sinking sun) by infinite longing: the world, says Coleridge, "of such hues/ As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes/ Spirits perceive his presence." Since the hunger for the infinite is also a death wish, the pictures become hymns to death, as in Holderlin's "Abendphantasie": "And there in light and air, let grief and love flow from me" — "und moge droben/ In Licht und Luft zerrinnen mir Lieb und Leid!" Though no one had observed it yet, the turning point to the "mysterious universe" had occurred also in elec­ tro-physics. 19) Cezanne, 1904-06, gardens, Les Loaves, (PhiCCips Cot, Washington CD.C. (to which stide show adds 19a, a centred detaU) No scientist sought the paradoxes that lurk already under Fara­ day and Maxwell; the artists did not say they were going to stop June 1996 Face and Landscape 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History representing nature. With the Impressionists it was to represent it more precisely: the reflection of light at such a place and such a time; with Cezanne (as in these gardens from his last years) to ex­ hibit the geometries that underlie the visible — "to treat nature," he shid "by the sphere, cone and cylinder." Yet the net result (as in the increasingly refined abstractions of electric field, probability, wave theory, relativity and quantum mechanics) was the dissolution of the spatial and causal scene. 2 0) (DouBie of20SI amCzm ff. 20SI) german, c. 1000, goUCen Madonna, head, ‘Essen; video, detaiConCy 20(B) S. JFrench (Landes), c. 1050, (Beams (f LieBanus on the 5lpocaCypse, J^Cood, (BiBL (Hgi., (Paris; video, detaiC onCy The sequence now again in more detail: portrait-like face and represented nature. We begin, about the year 1000, with the virtual negation of what we seek. Music: Organum, Musica Enchyridion, Sit gloria, MHS- In the Golden Madonna of Essen, person giography of cult and faith. Hammered form, encrusting jewels and great agate esque dark these are not of the human, tude: Ev ap%ri ev o Aoyoq. bows to the transreal ha­ gold on the stiff wooden eyes gleaming in Roman­ but revealed signs of beati­ From fifty years later, a flood destruction from the Saint Severs Apocalypse:' the flattened formal landscape, the figures of arbitrary sizes and projections, all pressed to a symbolic dread. The earth of which even Dark Age chronicles tell us is not the Europe we travel to see, but a ghostly battleground of demonic and angelic powers. As Paul had said: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world." 21) french gothic, c, 1210, (HeCchisidehu (H, (PortaC, CathedraC, Chartres 21a) Same, detaiC June 1996 Face and Landscape 8 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History A hundred and fifty years: who could have foreseen the vigor to which the Christ-paradox of incarnation and earth-denial would lead __ how much body the heaven-vector would entrain, lifting over burgeoning towns three-hundred foot towers of stone? Under the vaulting porches of Chartres the great prophets loom into time. Yet all that human force assumes the eternal severities of the sa,cred frame, canonical, hierarchical; it is the Gothic incorporation of the mortal into the City of God. Perotin: Music: Perotin, c. 1210, close of Viderunt quadruplum, Ducretet, Thomson 320 C 107 22) 5. ^yroC, earCy 13tfi cent., Mrahant & Isaac, S. 3(ico(>o, Qrissiano 22 a) Same, detaiC What would become the Renaissance garden grows in that church close. The artist here is of South Tyrol, early 13th century. Where the text of Abraham and Isaac requires mountains, he fills the background with snow-capped ice-cream cones of Dolomites, ar­ chaically stylized, half spaceless; yet a shrewd thrust toward natural observation. 23) StrasBourj, 1290-1300, O^ouny 23 a) Same, detaiC from West CPortaC, Cathedral. 1300. The Kings of the Cathedral of Strasbourg have put off the sacred severity of Chartres. Music: , From Fauvel, 1316, Je voi douleur—Fauvel nous, etc. AS 91 We are already on the late-Gothic road to Chaucer's Squire: "A lover and a lusty bachelor." In the loosening faith-world of this "Fauvel," Occam and Meister Ekhardt, the individual and secular surge with vitality. Though strength has still the lean bare-fifth enigma of floating in the mystery it serves. 24) Srviss-Qerman, c. 1320, Manessa 9dS, Mnnesittyer Von Sune££e, University LiSrary, ^{cidMas June 1996 Face and Landscape 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The hierarchic proportions — the boy small, though near, the heraldic devices hung spacelessly - these are of the past. But the Minne­ singer's leap up the mountain is real; and in so small a touch as the projection of the horse's tail and hoof over the border, the drive has been set up which in the Baroque would spill fallen angels over the ceiling frame of II Gesu. 2SJ giotto, c. 1303j JoacMm returns to His fCocHs, ^ena CdapeC, Tadua 25a) Same, detail figures But that late-Gothic turn in the North remains thin and imper­ sonal against the sudden expansion of space and consciousness in Florentine Dante and Giotto. True, these celery trees are still halfByzantine, and the background hills of stripped rock remind us of Cennini's advice late in the century: "if you want to paint a moun­ tain, set up a rock in the studio and paint it large; for what is a mountain but a big rock?" But that alchemy of the nominal swells with delivery. The great robed figures seem to shoulder out a space of their own, as the Florentine heroqs stretch the theology of Dante's Hell, or chromatic inflection strains the modes in da Cascia. Music: 2 6) Giovanni da Cascia. c. 1320(7), lo son un peliegrin, AS-I Orcxgna, 1359, SeCf, from dleatH of Mary, Or San MicHeCe, !FCorence The landscape here would be the Lorenzetti panorama, which we have already seen. While Orcagna's self-portrait in his 1359 Death of M^y speaks the rise of secular person in the time of Boccaccio the kind of person no doubt who at the end of his life will repent and make his Retractions, with Petrarch and Boccaccio and Chaucer; yet so life-oriented that it is only , the lingering quaint enigma of faith-suspension which distinguishes this late-Medieval from early-Renaissance. ^3 2 7) LotseCandiBnve, 1397, ConnitaBCe du guescGn, St. (Denis; + Vdetail Having mentioned Chaucer, we should follow late-Gothic north to St. Denis, 1397, time of The Cantp.rhiirv June 1996 Face and Landscape 10 �Symbolic C.G. Bell Music: History French, late 14th cent., Centre le Temps, Seraphim SIC-6052 The aesthetic refinement of Italy livens to realistic vigor. But the suspension we have spoken of, that all temporal and secular values are emergent, gives this character the cleanly observed force and moral ambiguity of Chaucer's warty-nosed Miller, wanton Friar, or hunting Monk with his eyes rolling in his head — a gusto which would hardly survive post-Renaissance responsibility. (fade Centre le Temps) 28) ^oC de Lim6ouT0,1413-16, Tres Niches 3Uures, June, 9dus. Condi, CdantUCy 28 a) Same, detaiC (video fiaviny shoxvn jirst a zvider detaiQ Music: Ciconia, c. 1405-10, 0 Rosa Bella, RCA V-LM 6016 By the 15th century the way of seeing has quietly changed from the symbolic to the representational — gracious as the first chordal space of Ciconia. A page of the Tres Riches Heures is a win­ dow into a lovingly delineated spatial scene. Strange that so revolu­ tionary a work could be so unobtrusively and thinly naive. There is none of Lorenzetti's vastness of assault on the world; it is as if from that great spread, details had been trimmed and perfected in the early-Renaissance mode. Where the sign of the 14th century was a residual bare ambivalence, here it is the last innocence of Gothic, which makes no proclamation of the ultimate value of the new way. (fade Ciconia) 29) SCuter, 1393-99, Moses (fountain, detail of Moses, Cfiartreuse de CfiampmoC, (Dijon; + ^ closer detail Though just before 1400 some such humanist proclamation — in religious terms, paralleling the preaching of Gerson in France and of Huss in Bohemia — had been made by Claus Sluter, a Fleming ac­ tive in Burgundy: this Moses, in the spirit of Chaucer's last invoca­ tion to the soul: "Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast out of thy stall!" While faux-bourdon filled the triad. June 1996 Face and Landscape 11 �Symbolic Music. History Apt MS, 0.1390, Jesu, nostra redemptio, a phrase, SAWT 9505-A (fade) 030) (DonateCb, 1423-36, Jermiaf^, iktcaC affimtC, CatIUdrat Museum, 7Carence 30) Same, atwtHer and mder detaU (video Having panned its 30a from this 30} By 1425 the cutting edge of Renaissance was being honed in many parts of Europe. Against the reform humanity of the North the philosophic humanism of Fiorence centers in the recovery of Roman antiquity by an act of the will. Yet the dynamic which cleaves Donatello's Jeremiah from the Qassical is also Gothic bom. So Dante's landless Ulysses, against the home-seeking oid Odysseus. As for music, the star of that Florence was Flemish Dufay. Music: 3X) Dufay, c. 1425, from Le jour s'endort (at "da quelque mai") AS-3 Same, Candscape detaiC (video sfiows onCy tfiis 31) (end "Le Jour s'endort") The vastness of the Lorehzetti panorama reappears in Masac­ cio, 1426. Granted the precise landscape refinements of the Limbourg brothers are lacking here. This Trasimene expanse of the folded Apennines, lake and blasted trees, has the inherited bareness o Giotto; but there is a theoretical consciousness of space itself — of laws by which to command it. a32) Men arUjan Van ‘Eyci, c. 1425-32, MoratUm oftHe Lam6, Ghent 32) Same, upper lyht (shde show goes from a32 to 32; video hegins and ends With 32, tnterposiii£ a cCosct detail) The background of the Van Eyck Adoration of the Lamb, from the same years, is the Northern complement; Florentine reason traiis thm Flemish miracle of eye and hand. Its heavenly Jerusalem is bright with every technique of foliage, light and air which High Re­ naissance would require. No wonder it was said in Italy that Van Eyck panels were worth their weight in gold. -While Dufay and the other Italiante Flemings work in either style: June 1996 Face and Landscape 12 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Dufay, c. 1450(?), close of Kyrie, Mass "Se la face ay pale", AS-25 (end) 33) ^rmcH, c. 1465, Livre (Cu Cueur (CJ4mours ‘Espris, Cueur waf^, Vienna The boldest explorations of 15 th century retain the sharp focus of insularity. Here a French chivalric miniature of about 1465. Representational naivet6 and daring meet in the gold-leaf sun, cast­ ing long shadows toward us from the trees. We approach the humanist perfection of what is still the middle-earth, transitional, Cusanus' privative infinity of space and time. 34) ^ouiceCCi, c. 1478, giuCiano de'^ecCici, QaC., Was/iinffton (D.C 34 a) ^Berpanto variant (rf same, detaU of fiead (zokUe video detaiCs 34) So there is a 200-year sequence from Dante to Machiavelli, the proud emergence of heroes in hell. Music: Ockeghem, c. 1475(7), Puzzle Canon: Prenez sur moi, Mus. Guild, MS-134 With the Medici (here Giuliano, painted by Botticelli about 1478) we stand on the verge of the battle of values — to throw down or dynamically transform the old. The assertion could not be more forceful, but with the hard ambiguity of being still a deadly sin. If you want to rule, says Machiavelli, this is the method; to follow it is not Christian or even human, and of course one should be a Christian; but this is what power requires. Against such lean grandeur the Baroque would claim philosophic sufficiency. (end Ockeghem) 35) Leonardo, c. 1512, SeCf, cftaC^drawin^, Liirin, 5(pyaCLiSrary 35a) Same, detaU Music: Josquin des Pres, 1506, Requiescat close of Absolve, SAWT 9561-B With Leonardo (1510-12), as with Josquin after Ockeghem’s Puzzle Canon, we seem to have arrived at that god-like condition, (end Josquin) Yet the battle of the 16th century has not quite been June 1996 Face and Landscape 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History joined. The humanist island has grown to a continent, where man expauates in universal potentiality, for the last time in the tacit grace of the old dispensation, rich in the illusion that the new world can ounsh in the lap of the old. Beyond that high-Renaissance noble calm, humanization has no direct road. What lies ahead is a whirl of transformation under trial. 3€) Durer, c. 1494, Vuw ‘Toward: Trent, waurcohr, stolen, from ‘Bremen QaC. Landscape too, in Dtirer's watercolor of Trent, from the glowing years before 1500 (the youthful genius on his way to Venice), reached a point beyond which reahsm — as the harmonious filling in o Gothic perception — could go no further. Here, too, what the future held was struggle, space buckling into vortices, through a century of religious wars, persecutions and incursions of tragic darkness. 37) H. ‘Bosch, c. isio-ie, ‘lemptatwn ofSt. Jdatthony, landscape detaU; Lishon And already the new mastery was enforcing the eschatology of udgment.. That is the dialectic of Reformation and Counter-reforma­ tion — individuality and reason in Luther stirring the eddy of Pente­ costal identification. Strange that the strongest reality of 1500 should be the flaming recesses of Hieronymus Bosch’s hell-pockets. 38) ‘Direr, 1S26, Tortrait cfK. Mteschuher, ‘Bet{in-‘DaMem 38 a) Same, detaU Now the liberation of the human and secular musters militant powers under the great seal of righteousness. Gone forever the ohve-eyed Gothic distance. From the Catholic Humanist Diirer of 1500 to this Protestant Diirer of 1526, there is a buildup of assertive volume — as if (as in the polyphonies of Stoltzer) whole new registers nad been added to consciousness. Music: June 1996 Stoltzer, c. 1525(7), Goto Tonorum Melodiae, #1 close. Nonesuch Face and Landscape 14 �Symbolic C.G. Bell 39) History Mtdojfer, 1529, ^ (BattCe of 5Ue?cander, 5lCte (Bimkptfie^ Municfi (sCide sfiozo adds first a39, a detail to the ri£ht) 39 a) Same, a Bach^round detail (®nd Stoltzer) No less, in Altdorfer's 1529 Battle of Alexander: the Magellanic rondure of the curved earth, wheeling under the sun and moon, as the empire of Persia falls. Even the sign, against the heraldry of the Minnesinger MS, hangs with fluttering drapes in real space from the picture frame. In fact, Copernicus had already revolutionized that astronomical space, and been encouraged by two popes, in the clarion decades of discovery, before the Counter Reformation put the jinx on his delayed Revolutions. 40) 9dkheCaii£elo, c. 1543, 'Brutus, head, Bar^eCCo, S^Corence; + detail (while slide show Be£ins xvith a40, another close-up, and closes with 40a, whole Bust in color) Stretched in the field of titanic humanism and penitential re­ form, the Renaissance rises to its first great tensile infolding; and as always the mightiest spirit most kindles to the fervor, makes it most his own. In the radiance that Florence spread over Italy and to Rome, no spirit was as firecely strung to resonance as Michelangelo. It is he who most deepens human possibility. In the face of his Brutus (1543) Shakespearean tragedy first becomes conceivable — the infinite pathos and transcendence of the flawed will. Music: G. Gabrielli, pub. 1597, Sonata pian’ e forte, AS 25 [through slide 45] 41) fP. 'Breughel, c. 1568-69, Seascape, f}(unsthistorisches ^Museum, 'i/ienna 41a) Sume, detail Past the midpoint of a century of tragic storm, artist after artist runs the course from early works harmoniously auspicious, to deeper immersion in the enchafed flood. Here Breughel's last picture, on the proverb of the barrel and the hell-mouth whale: a desperately weathered sea-sorrow, to become a prevalent theme in Shakespeare. June 1996 Face and Landscape IS �C.Cj. Bell 42) Symbolic History ^ntoretto, 1550, {Procurator Jac. Soranzo, 5Lcca(Ccinia, Venice (CQ^ 59); first, VdetaiC In Italy after 1550, there is a shift from the tensile, as in Michelangelo, to the kinetic — its musical crest in Giovanni Gabrielli. With this early Tintoretto, the always increasing pride of person ex­ hibits itself as an opulence of electric fire flashing in the also increas­ ing and pervading world-dark. 43) Tintoretto, 1591-92, Christ on the Sea of QaCiCee, {h(g.tionaC (^aCCery, Washington (D.C. Tintoretto's later works, from the time of Giordano Bruno's in­ finite universe, push toward its climax the explosive vision, which by 1610 would stretch the frame and logos of every art almost to breaking nature a discharge of phosphorescence, the wind-heaped water under a sky of rage. 44) TC Qreco, c. 1600-10, Viezo of ToCecCo, MetropoCitan {KCuseum, + VfetaiC; white sCiKe show suSstitutes another, 44a (CG93 74) ’ I j'{ ^ i It is in El Greco that the doomsday seizure of the magnified Re­ naissance earth reaches a crux of visionary inturning. In the Toledo Landscape, as in King Lear (1605-6), you cannot thrust a bodkin point between the real and symbolic universe: You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks! 45) T,C Qreco, 1613-14, head of priest from {\Carria£e of the Virgin, {l(p.mania; + V detaiC At the same time form and face undergo a tragic dissolution, as if all human glory and nothingness had met. In the face of the priest in El Greco's "Marriage of the Virgin", Lear's pride — "Of all these bounds even from this line to this ... we make thee lady" — and crushed humility — "Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and June 1996 Face and Landscape 16 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History foolish" — merge in a stateliness pieced out of shreds and tatters, a brushwork like straw tossed on a cyclonic wind. (end Gabrielli) 46) Caravaggio, 1602-04, IhCead of 0\laTy, T,n.tom6imnt of Cfirist, Vatican; first, VcCoser detail Music: Sweelinck, 1610-20(?), Chromatic Fantasy, opening, SVBX-5316 Yet the kinetic spirals of Mannerism were exactly the crucible in which the tactile and volitional formulations of Baroque were be­ ing explored. No sooner is 1600 past than from Italy northward (here Caravaggio) the expanding whirl (as in the chromatics of Swee­ linck) coagulates into the rhetoric and histrionics of reasoned com­ mand — though a reason (like Galileo's) schooled by brute fact and tenebrist pain. 4 7) diiiBens, c. 1624, 9{et Onwaer (THe Storm), Ifranz ^nig Collection, iKaarlen^ + V detail So too in Rubens, 1625, when the limitless storm spills over, it is into a century of Cartesian Method. A critical point has been passed, like that between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson: in the dyna­ mism of release the energies, rational or emotional, have precipi­ tated: from the realized Apocalypse to the Apocalyptic real. (fade Sweelinck) 48) iRsmtSrandt, 1629, Self-portrait, Isabella S. Qardner iMuseum, (Boston; + V detail From the equivocal might and exploratory transhumanity which make Lear unfathomable, person, by early Rembrandt (1629), gathers itself into a philosophically validated, space-investing will. Music: Pachelbel, c. 1690(?), from Canon in D Major, MHS 1060 [to slide 52] a power like Spinoza's divinity: "Extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing." And it is by the formulable soul of light that this Miltonic introspection presents itself, in the glory of spatial June 1996 Face and Landscape 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History bondage, a reasoned justification of the ways of God to men — destinate as Pachelbel's Canon-passacaglia. 49) ^Rg,mBran(Ct, c. 1638, Landscape witfi Sridge and Boatmen, Slmsterdam (Cg^'59) 49 a) Same, detaiC So too with the Rembrandt landscape of chiaroscuro realism. By the heroics of sun through cloud, nature is subsumed under a di­ vine syntax, as tensely fought for as the somber affirmations of Milton; while the realism affirms of all that ordering light: it is here and now, these fields, that bridge with the boatman passing under. As Spinoza says: "Particular things are nothing else than modifica­ tions of attributes of God"; and "Reality and Perfection I understand to be one and the same." 30) n/eCasquez, 1656, ScCf-portrait from Las Odeninas, Trado, Madrid The most impassioned Baroque assertion has an aspect of reasoned mastery (even in Pascal, where, Car-tesian reason undercuts itself). But in the great souls of the mid-century, here Velasquez, it is just some Pascalian affinity which saves the art-assertion from flagrant pride — a continuing antinomy of the poignance of space and the pathos of reason. 51) CCaude Lorraine, 1657, QaCatea Landscape, ^Dresden The classical landscape peaks in Claude: here Acis and Galatea of 1657, with Polyphemus on the promontory beyond the bay. Yet that heroic world, like Prospero’s "cloud-capped towers" is visibly melting into light: "Hail holy Light, offspring of heaven firstborn." 5Z) ‘Bernini, 1665, Bust ofLouis XlV, q/ersaiCCes That which is overpushed recoils. It is in the French court of Louis XIV that the Baroque assertion swells to a point from which it could only break to the ridiculous. And it was only Rome that could offer in Bernini the virtuoso brilliance to boost the king-image to an June 1996 Face and Landscape 18 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History all-time sublime without letting it slip, (cut Pachelbel) Though we measure the risk by the secular arrogation of the old religious ground: "L'etat c'est moi." aS3) Qodfrey 1700, VvCatfmo (Prior, detail; Trinity CoCC^e, CamBrid£e 53) Same, tfie xufioCe (wfiidi video puts B^ore and after tfie detaiQ By 1700 that heroic inflation — Dryden's "Aloft in awful state/ The God-like hero sate/ On his imperial throne" — is about to yield to Pope's: "Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,/ Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea." lyiusic: F. Couperin, 1714-15, Concert Royal No.4, 1st Mov., Nonesuch H 73014 Thus the Baroque yields to Couperin; thus Kneller's Mathew Prior, even in the robes and pose of the vaunt, turns the flourishes of ex­ pression and light into Swiftian mockery. 54) Watteau ,1717, CTndarquement pour CytBere, Louvre, (Paris 54 a) Same, detail (video pans a detailfrom 54) The bubble of virtu breaks in a witty play of artifice. The ironies of reason hide a growing sentiment of nature. It is the 18thcentury polarity: mocking mind, searching heart. In Watteau's Island of Love those landscape depths of the Baroque become a pre­ cious filigree, stage-set for the masque of manners, which is at once a courtly game and a sigh for joy. Pope: But now secure the painted vessel glides. The sun-beams trembling on the floating tides; While melting music steals upon the sky. And softened sounds along the waters die; Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play, Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay. a55) *BouclieT, 1746, fisfiin^ Landscape, ivfiole; 5l£rmita£e, Leningrad 55) Same, detail June 1996 Face and Landscape 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The artifice of landscape espaliered into park seems fulfilled in Boucher's 1746 fishing scene — an arabesque of trees, clouds and stream. Yet through that china veil, the cult of Rousseau begins to touch everything with dream. (Couperin from 1st mvt to 2nd) So Marie Antoinette played at shepherdess in her village in the Petit Trianon. 56) WUson, 1774, Ccider Idris, ^ate Qcdlery, London 56 a) Same, detaU (wfiicfi video can draw from 56) The drive to forthright nature spurns that: (cut Couperin) England, Richard Wilson, most of all his revolutionary "Cader Idris" of 1774. But it is not the dimensional world reaffirmed. Light­ streaming space is stripped to the stark phenomenal. Man seems dwarfed, an exile. What begins to be verified is the Wordsworthean relation to the "souls of lonely places" — Haydn's muted horns. Music: 57) Haydn, 1794-5, from Adagio of Symphony 102, Vanguard SRV211SD [to slide 60] jG. *Xocque, c. 1750-60, ^alz£rafv. ZwdBruckpt, ‘Bir^nfeCd 59) The mid-century rift between genteel convention and the natu­ ral man of heart is nowhere stronger than in Germany. The foppery of Renaissance humanitas, undercut by two centuries of aristocratic appropriation, could hardly show a prissier mask than in the Munich Duke of Zweibriicken. 58) ^nton 5(g.pfiaeC 9den£s, c. 1750, SeCf-portrait (sUverpoint), SUBertina, Vienna While the young artist Mengs, sketching himself about 1750, reminds us that Rousseau's intuition held the seeds both of Revolu­ tion and Romantic. The Social Contract: "Man is bom free, and is ev­ erywhere in chains." And the Confessions: "the austere Jean Jacques, serious citizen of Geneva ... became again the love-sick shepherd ... and seeing nothing in existence worthy of my enthusiasm, I sought nourishment for it in an ideal world ..." 59) (B.O. !Kiin£e, c. 1803, SeCf-portrait, 9^nstfial[e, 9{am6ur£) + V detail June 1996 Face and Landscape 20 �Symbolic C.G. Bell History Like the same person reborn stronger, Runge steps from the 18th-century drawing room onto the Goethean world-stage of 1803: "Gefiihl ist alles" — "Feeling is everything." Man's proclamation of grandeur had crested once in the rational hybris of the Baroque. After a century of irony and enlightenment, it rallies under revolu­ tionary command — the Faust-claim in Beethoven, Hegel, Holderlin, that world-spirit is realizing itself through the shaping passions of the heart and will. It is the final liberation of the Ego as a pheno­ menon of hope. 60) HosepH S^ton ^cfi, 1811, ScfmadriSacfi 60 a) Same, upper cCetaiC Leipzig Museum The central urge of the Christian West had been to bring the Kingdom of God from the timeless and spaceless to the here and now. The free and transcendental self requires a free and pantheistic na­ ture, untamed, "shoreless as God." Koch tried what romantics would pursue in the mountain fastnesses of the world. While Wordsworth, climbing Snowdon at night, saw, in a sea of mist under the moon: ... a blue chasm; a fracture in the vapour, A deep and gloomy breathing-place through which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams ... ... in that breach Through which the homeless voice of waters rose. That dark deep thoroughfare had Nature lodg'd The Soul, the Imagination of the whole. (end Haydn) 61) C.(D. S^riedrich, 1810, SeCf-portrait (drawing), Mgtionad Q(dCery, ^erCitt 61a) Same, detaiC (sG.de onty) Music: Beethoven, 1824, Quartet #12 in E flat, Opus 127, opening. Col. M 5 S 677 [through slide 63] Nothing takes us deeper into the night-brooding of earlyromantic than the face of Caspar David Friedrich, German landscape mystic of 1810. Thrown back (like Beethoven in the late Quartets) from revolutionary hope, soul turns its introspective retreat into a June 1996 Face and Landscape 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History triumph of inwardness. As Friedrich wrote under increasing neglect: "And so I spin myself into a cocoon and shall let time decide what will emerge therefrom." So Schelling's process of creation: the revelation of light in what was originally the prin­ ciple of darkness ... That principle which rises up from the depths of nature and by which man is divided from God, is the selfhood in him; but by reason of its unity with the ideal, this becomes spirit. 62) ^riedryi, 1819, (DrescCen men oBserving the mom (or annuCar ecRpse of the sun?) Against the landscape of ordered harmony (the 18th-century lord of the manor secure in the Lockean propriety of fruitful ground), Friedrich abandons ownership altogether. Earth and all begin to eclipse, like the moon, into figments. As in Goethe's Walpurgis Night, we have gone into the spheres of dream and magic: "In die Traumund Zaubersphare/ Sind wir, scheint es, eingegangen." 63) (joya, 1820, 'J^modea' or fantgstu; *l?i^ion (front the Qyinta deCSordo), now in the (Brado, Odadrid; + ^ detaiC How variously landscape now veers back to the visionary, ab­ stract, revelational. In Spain, Goya's 1820 Fantastic Vision from the Quinta del Sordo, launches the older techniques of crisis — 1600, El Greco; 1700, Magnasco — toward the modern. (fade Beethoven) 64) SamueCfBaCmer, c. 1826-30, ComfieCd By mootdight, 9(^nneth CCarf^ In the England of this Samuel Palmer, Blake was the total revo­ lutionary, for whom the outward universe is the vegetative husk of symbolic reality. Music: Schubert, 1828, slow opening, C Maj. Quintet, Col MS 6536 But landscape as such was more cultivated by the disciple, in those Shoreham pictures of 1826-30 (time of Schubert), when Palmer's youth was marvellously possessed by Blakean imagination. June 1996 Face and Landscape 22 �Symbolic C.G. Bell 65) burner, e7(fii6itecC 1843, 65a) Same, a cCoser unter spread History -after the 2)e%e; CTate, London While Turner, starting in the traditional manner of the Dutch and Claude, threw all his academic skills into a program not unre­ lated to Blake's (though their techniques were opposite) — an ecstatic transformation of matter into light. Thus one of his last pictures, "Light and Color, Goethe's Theory, the Morning after the Deluge, Moses writing the book of Genesis," exhibited in 1843. (fade Schubert) a66) DeCacroiTQ 1826, Study for‘Baron Schwiter, detaiC; SpringfieCd, 9dass. 66) Same, luhoCe Music: Berlioz, 1830, Funeral March, opening, Symphonie Fantastique, CM-9227 Not that Napoleonic assertion was a thing of the past. The 19th century is dominated by the sort of titanism we have called the lib­ eration of the ego, but shifting from its 1790 Enlightened base ("a phenomenon of hope") to a Berlioz Gallows March ("a phenomenon of despair"). This 1826 Delacroix portrait has absorbed Faust's satanic compact, with Byron's "pageant of the bleeding heart". Rousseaus pain has eroded his natural good. One begins to wonder how far the human boast is suicidal. (fade Berlioz) 67) Courhet, 1845-46, Man vH-th a Tipe (SeCf), Museum, MontpeCCier 67a) Same, detaiC Music: . Wagner, 1857-59, Tristan & Isolde, from Prelude (Stokowsky "Synthesis"), V-LM-1174 Twenty years more and we come to a face inescapable in such a survey, the Courbet Self, paired in "Cycles" with Flaubert on world­ sickness and a coming Dark Age. But the ennui and spleen of Baude­ laire equally apply: "When with eyes closed as in an opium dream" and "I am a burial ground the moon abhors" — "Je suis un cimetiire abhorri de la lune." It is the mood Dowson brought to England: June 1996 Face and Landscape 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "Desolate and sick of an old passion," and for which Arnold, in his purer way, had written a Fall-of-theWest program: The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full ... But now I only hear Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar. Retreating, to the breath Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. 68) (Bocl^in, 1865j Vida am 9v[eer, Zndform, Scfiacf^^aC., 9dunidi (CQ^ '59) 68a) Same,.(CetaiC Landscape takes up the "Dover Beach" burden. Bocklin suffuses each rock, wave and cypress with Tristan and Isolde lushness of Sehnsucht — as in the phrase Eliot culls for The Wasteland: "oed' und leer das Meer;" or elsewhere from Nerval: . "J'ai rev^ dans la grotte oH nage la sir^ne." Here the art problem of the century becomes in­ escapable. Bl^e, and even Goya, had challenged the outward order. With bourgeois consolidation, re^alism also regrouped itself, as if to affirm our place in the dimensional. But its message is the reverse, is Rilke's "that we're not very much at home in the interpreted world." So how long can the techniques caress that world with the oily touch of Baudelaire, Wagner and Bocklin? 69) fHans von 9darees, 1863, Marees and LenSacfi, 9^ue (Pina^, 9dunicfi (CQ^B '59); first, video detail The soul is almost at cleavage, raised (as Yeats saw Nietzsche) from the romantic gyre toward another, where Rocky Face laughs in tragic joy. (fade Tristan Prelude) Music: Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan, climax and interruption of Love Night, London 5938 (fade) And in Hans von Marees' portrait of himself and Lenbach, 1863, Nietzschean violence turns to idiot laughter: June 1996 Face and Landscape 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History To offer up God to the void, that is the last mystery, the sacrament of terror reserved for the generation at hand. We have already felt it working in ourselves ... 70) Monet, 1888, J^ntiSes, (Duran(C-!^ueC, (Paris 70 a) Same, detaiC (wfUch video draws from 70) '' From that bituminous immersion. Impressionism, by a shift of attention from the. self to the science of light and air, drew Monet and the rest from the visceral wake of Wagner and Zarathustra into the plein-air of Argenteuil and Provence, the rainbow of broken color — like a Faure scherzo — an art of delight. Music: Faure, 1879, Scherzo from 1st Piano Quartet, RCA-V-ARL1-0761 Of which, however, two things must be said: that the strains of yearning distill through the brightness; and that (as we have implied with modern science) reality itself, the landscape, begins to dissolve under the analytical shimmer. 71) (Rgnoir, 1876, (Portrait ofPd. Chocquet, ^ntertfmr} + V detaU (fade Faur6) Thus Renoir's 1876 portrait of Monsieur Chocquet slips quietly beyond Marees' Confidence Man smile. What the palette clothes in wistful gaiety is man's withdrawal from the temporal field. As in Verlaine: Ils n'ont pas I'air de croire a leur bonheur Et leur chanson se mele au clair de lune ... they have the air of not believing in their own happi­ ness and their song is mingled with the light of the moon. While Faure yields to Debussy: Music: Debussy, 1893, from last Movl, Quartet, Nonesuch H-1007 72) Van Qo£fi, 1889, Sdf, S. (Rpny, H^itney (Museum, (N^C June 1996 Face and Landscape 25 �Symbolic History 7Za) Van Qo^fi, 1885, ^Potato ‘Eaters, Van Qo^H Museum, Zlinsterdam 726) Van §036, 1887, Larl^over Wfieat ^ieti. Van gogh Museum, Slmsterdam 72c) Van QogR, 1889, SeCf, detail, Jeu de Paume, Taris (w6Ue V details 72) Anyone who thought the spiritual hunger solved by picnic outings along the Impressionist Seine, would be troubled by the case of Van Gogh, which is not a private case, though all lives have that dimension. From the den of the "Potato Eaters" he took the release of broken color and went south, risking the manic "Lark from the Corn," to plunge with as bright a plumage into despair. As Hopkins, the same years, shreds the canons of utterance for urgency: I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree Bitter would have me taste; my taste was me; Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse. 73) Van Qogh, 1889, Starry 9^6t, Museum of Modem Sirt, 9dg.w ^orf^ 73 a) Same, detail (slide only) Ecstasy and anguish have broken realistic depiction. Again Hopkins: "Our evening is over us; our night whelms, whelms and will end us ... ware of a world ... where selfwrung, selfstrung, sheatheand shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind." The Trump of Doom sounds again, in the frenzy of private vision. (Debussy, com.) 74) Ticasso, 1909, Seated woman, Penrose Collection, London 74 a) Same, detail I In the first decade of this century, Cezanne’s abstraction of the visible world into geometry was carried all the way in Analytical (^ubism partly, as in this Picasso, taught by what was most primi­ tive, the African mask. This demolition and discovery still rides the Nietzschean soothsaying wave. So the Futurists ("and like young li­ ons we go pursuing death"), with Rilke, George, Hesse’s Demian, Irish Revolutionaries, and world-socialists too — hailed the superman call to the shrapnel liberation of war. (,3^3 Debussy) June 1996 Face and Landscape 26 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Schonberg, 1912, from Pierrot Lunaire, 8: Nacht, Col. M 2S 679 75j ^ranz Marc, 1915-16, TyroC, 9^tte Tina^ Municfi (CQ(B '59) 75a) Same, detail (cf. glazed 59 in video fide) Though we are closer to that mood in Franz Marc's Tyrolean landscape from 1915, a year before he was killed in action. Seven centuries had labored at the rationally ordered realm of space, time, and cause. It was a release now, a Yea-saying, to sacrifice it on Pierrot Lunaire's altar of Heraclitean Fire. "Every angel is terrible," wrote Rilke; "yet woe is me, I sing you down, almost death-dealing birds of the soul, knowing what you are" — "Jeder Engel ist schrecklich. Und dennoch, weh mir, ansing ich euch, fast todliche Vogel der Seele, wissend um euch." (fade SchOnberg) 76) dluTand, 1849, HQndredSpirits, ^or^^BudCic Library In these images of face and landscape, the whole pride and catastrophe of Western man beckons. How could democracy in America (1849) have done otherwise than reaffirm with the clarity of everyday enlightenment that landscape meeting ground of visionary and real, the irradiated space of a wild continent, ordained Eden for a new race of reason and heart? 77) (Ryder, 1870-90, MoonCiyfit Marine, MetropoCitan Museum, 9^rv Odor(<i And how it would strike at those daylight Emersonian hopes, that Ryder, after Melville and the Civil War and the Gilded Age, would shut himself in a New York apartment, painting in solitude a night nature of symbolic menace. El Greco's Toledo and Goethe's Walpurgis Night win back in an American haunted by the sea. 78) (PoCCocRi 1952, Converyence, SldSriydt-dQioTQ ‘Buffalo 78a) Same, detail Ridiculous, in three terminal slides to deal with a global cen­ tury, as labyrinthine in warring ways as a Pollock "Bateau ivre" soulscape of drips and muscular movements, jerked off in peristaltic deJune 1996 Face and Landscape 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History fiance of the old arrogation to order self and world. As if, possessed from between the stars, we were breathing great gulps of Pythagorean void. Music: Earle Brown, 1964, from Four systems for 4 amplified cymbals. Col. MS-7139 If this is the space we operate in, we must search (with Earle Browne in music) for other modes of operation. (fade E. Brown) In the lunge from willed depiction to a swirl where face and landscape drown, 9(p[kvitz, 1934, Sdf-ToTtrait, Litfiograpfi, TftUaddpdia Museum T9) was it only the socialists who would uphold the blatancy of the old claim, of man's responsibility for space and time? And even that programmatic hope, in the between-war throes of the liberal West, assumed in Kathe Kollwitz the age-old Roman shadowings of despair. What does it mean for face to choose between this and the abstract void? Are real leaders to be expected where the affirming image is no longer real? 80) Mard^9(pt/idp, 1958, ‘Brown on TCum, franz Meyer CoCC., Zurix^i (wdere tde video pans in and out on tdis intake, tde sCide sfiow £oes to two otder tRs>tfidp's: 80a, 1961, untitCed, Baca QaCCery; and 806,1961, iS/um6er 118, (DusseCdoif Most modern art has taken another aim, to push to the thresh­ old of sense what drove Wallace Stevens to slough off the images of "Sunday Morning" on the Dump: ... to eject, to pull The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone? Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the. But what else besides the artist himself, Rothko, must go down in the transcendental reduction of that purple pool? June 1996 Face and Landscape 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We do not like to hear what the history of the images makes commonplace: that art, as real, comes at a cost. "When the modes of music change," Plato says in The Republic, "the fundamental laws of the state always change with them." In the Roman empire, when spirit turned from mastered outwardness to the abstract call beyond that wavering veil, those anchorites, St. Anthony and the rest, knew what they aimed at was the end of the world. As Yeats, in a time he considered parallel: Ah what a sweetness strayed Through barren Thebaid And by the Mareotic sea When that exultant Anthony And twice a thousand more Starved upon the shore And withered to a bag of bones. What had the Caesars but their thrones? June 1996 Face and Landscape 29 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 30 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Face and Landscape (Résumé of Man and World), Symbolic History, Part 32 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 32 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_32_Face_and_Landscape_Resume_of_Man_and_World https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/5e0d2cd95f88211a36907c829156c9da.pdf 4707fd9e11c578d2217cad616cccdd1d PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 31. 19th Century: The Loaded Dream 1) Double: [A] Wilkie, 1804-05, Self-portrait, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, and [B] Toulouse-Lautrec, 1880, Self, aged 16, Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, Albi; + V details of A and B, with returns to the double Let an opening portrait-pair span our theme: the perilous reshaping of two worlds, inner and outer. In Wilkie's 1805 Self (left), God-affirmed inwardness and Rights-of-man outwardness arise together from the hopes of Enlightenment. In Toulouse-Lautrec's 1880 Self at 16 (right), the backlash of such promise fires, in both realms, the crisis of modernity. Where first shall we take the pulse of what was leading, in the arts, from transcendental assurance to Symbolist estrangement; in politics, from constitutional debate to Marx and the anarchists? a2) 2) 2a) A. Böcklin, 1865, Villa am Meer (2nd form), Schack Gallery, Munich (copy of CGB '59, Face and Landscape 68) Böcklin, 1857, Pan in Reeds, Alte Pinakothek, München; first, video, upperspread Same, Böcklin's Pan in the Reeds, lower detail 2b) Same, Böcklin's Pan, upper detail Music: Brahms, 1891, Clarinet Quintet, from 2nd Movement, Deutsche Grammophon, LPM 18278 If the century of Böcklin and Brahms is the Romantic century, Baudelaire's "cimetière abhorré de la lune," its stretch of Spleen and Ideal, "0 serments! ô parfums! ô baisers infinis," makes it an insurgent hatching ground: That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? But if "Romantic," a recurrent pole in man and art, is to designate a time, it cannot be in mere opposition to "Classical": both Hölderlin and Nietzsche were prophet-lovers June 1996 19th Century 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History of Greece; the most daring pre-Symbolist of France, de Nerval, says the Muse has made him "l'un des fils de la Grèce" — and from where else did Böcklin get his "great God Pan, down in the reeds by the river"? Nor can Romantic simply oppose Realism: this swamp dappled with sun, with even its frogs and scarab could not more imitate the visual. It is that classical theme and realist body are possessed by some sensuous abandon of romantic soul. (fade Brahms) 3) 3a) 3b) H Daumier, c. 1860(?), The Uprising, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; + V detail Daumier, 1848-49, The Fugitives, Collection of Mrs. William van Horne, Montreal Daumier, 1854, On the Barricades, National Gallery, Prague; video: detail only Music: Chopin, 1841, Close of Ballade #3, A Flat Major, Op. 47,. (Casadesus ) Col .ML 4798 (or Rubinstein, RCA-V-LSC-2370) Shift to the Revolutionary strand of the century: Daumier's realism, inspired by the Socialist outbreak and brief Republic of 1848; Chopin, part of the musical build-up (with Berlioz, Liszt, early Wagner, the firebrand Verdi); in literature, George Sand, Lamartine and the rest, culminating in Victor Hugo, with his youthful definition of the Romantic as "nothing but Liberalism in literature" — even Stendahl and Baudelaire later amazed at their 1848 intoxication — all swept on a mounting wave of surge, reversal, more radical quest to affirm — as Shelley's first poetic championing of the proletariat after the massacre of "Peterloo," points down the century: Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear? If we ask what Daumier's force shares with Böcklin's mood, it may give a clue to Romantic Soul: a tide of rising expectations, heightening touch and dream, wish, vulnerability, despair. (end Chopin) 1st 4) Böcklin, c. 1846 Idyll, Neue Pinakothek, München; + V detail V4a) Böcklin, c. 1860(?), Triton and Nereid, Schack Gallery, München (detail from copy of CGB '59, Nature 10) June 1996 19th Century 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It is the time-loading of all physical and psychic bases. The romantic still carries that entire burden of articulated heart and world, as Keats bears the weight of Miltonic pentameter: from Endymion: One faint eternal eventide of gems; to Hyperion: Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. And Baudelaire, even as he moves toward the modern, luxuriates in such visceral fullness: Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse de maîtresses, O toi, tous mes plaisirs, ô toi, tous mes devoirs! 1st 5) Henri Rousseau, 1907, The Snake Charmer, Louvre, Paris; the video having first returned to 4, Böcklin's Idyll V5a) Same, detail Whereas Mallarmé draws the plug which drains that voluptuous "perfume of the blood," refines the forms to a hyaline shimmer — as Böcklin's explicit "Idyll" yields to the innuendo of "Douanier" Rousseau's Snake Charmer. Huxley casts such a spell in his free translation of "The Afternoon of a Faun": Between the reeds I saw their bodies gleam Who cool no mortal fever in the stream Crying to the woods the rage of their desire: And their bright hair went down in jeweled fire Where crystal broke and dazzled shudderingly... Et le splendide bain de cheveux disparaît Dans les clartés et les frissons, ô pierreries! 2nd 4) Again, Böcklin's Idyll, detail; + V return to a larger detail of V4a Romantic had preferred the bases loaded, that we open all stops of the earth-organ — thus the tonal sob-yearnings of Brahms, even in the encroaching estrangement of the Clarinet Quintet — June 1996 19th Century 3 �C.G. Bell Music: V2nd 5a) 2nd 5) Symbolic History Brahms, 1891, earlier in the 2nd movement, Clarinet Quintet (fade) Rousseau, 1910, Dream, Museum of Modern Art, NYC Again, Rousseau's Snake Charmer, central detail (video takes its detail from 1st 5, whole against the dissolving tonalities of Ravel's 1903 Quartet. Music: 6) Ravel, 1902-3, String Quartet in F Major, close 3rd movement, Nonesuch H-1007 Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1660, The Maas at Dordrecht, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; + V details Of course the rhetoric of fullness the 19th century had to shed was the heritage from Baroque, with its proclaimed grandeurs of space, time, and cause — Leibnitz: Therefore each individual substance expresses the resolves which God made in regard to the whole universe. We grasp it in the light-flooded distances of Cuyp, the ground-bass tensities of a Viola d'Amore sonata, German about 1670. Music: 7) German, c. 1670, Viola d'Amore Sonata, lst movement, opening, AS-19 (fade) Norbert Grund, c. 1670, Flat Sea Coast, National Gallery, Prague; + V detail Music: Haydn, 1772, from 3rd movement, opening, Quartet #1 of 0pus 20, Qualiton SL PX 11 332 a From that heroics much of the 18th century already lightens to the Berkeleian and subjective, as in the Sons of Bach and early Haydn (here from the first quartet of Opus 20), or in such landscapes of sensibility as Norbert Grund's. Though, like Rousseau and Gray ("Wanders the hoary Thames along/ His silver-winding way"), this pre-romantic respects the court manners of rococo. (fade Haydn) a8) b8) C.D. Friedrich, 1828, Ships in Harbor at Evening, Gallery, Dresden C.D. Friedrich, 1818, Woman on the Shore near Rügen, Winterthur June 1996 19th Century 4 �C.G. Bell 8) Symbolic History C.D. Friedrich, c. 1916-18, Setting Sail, Morning Landesmuseum, Hannover; + V detail (here video returns to a detail of b8, then of a8) Music: Beethoven, 1807, 2nd movement, Second Rasoumovsky Quartet, Col. ML 5596 (or Fine Arts Quartet, Everest SDBR 32) Certainly, as far as transcendental melting goes, the Baroque vapored to a veil, it attends the Kantian fruition of that idealism Berkeley had sowed, and to which this Friedrich, with Beethoven, Coleridge, a whole 19th-century horizon are legatees: Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea: No truth therefore is more certain... than that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea... The sea across which Friedrich's morning boats set sail is rayed through with the longing which Schelling's "eternal One feels to give birth to itself." Such the ocean of Nietzsche's rapture, in whose Seventh Loneliness the silver soul-fish swims from the bark; though that timeless love, for all the miscarriage of Enlightenment and Revo- June 1996 19th Century 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History lution, still clings to the tonal and spatial touch of earth — Romantic. (fade Beethoven) a9) 9) Rembrandt, 1647, Night Rest on the Flight, detail, National Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (CGB '74) Same, whole (CGB '74) From the same three centuries, fix on night: — 1647, Rembrandt's Rest on the Flight, with Paul Gerhardt's "Evening Hymn." How the poem gleams in darkness, a sure life-prayer: Nun ruhen alle Wälder... The woods are silent now... The stars, golden, glow In the blue halls of the sky... God give you quiet slumber; His gold-bright angels render Armed watch at your bedside. (CGB) Stell euch die güldnen Waffen Ums Bett und seiner Engel Schar. 10) Joseph Wright, 1780-89, Moonlight Landscape, Art Gallery, Brighton; + V detail Another consciousness of ruins, lake, and moonlight broods over Wright of the 1780's, as over Claudius, whose "Abendlied" works mood-variations on Gerhardt: Der Mond ist aufgegangen... The full moon has risen, Gold star-points glisten Over heaven clear and bright; The silent wood is shadowed; Breathing from the meadows, The mist comes strange and white. (CGB) Der weiße Nebel wunderbar... 11) 11a) C.D. Friedrich, c. 1836, Pines, Lake, and Moon, Dr. Schäfer, Obbach bei Schweinfurt; video: detail only Friedrich, 1820, Evening, Landesmuseum, Hannover June 1996 19th Century 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History With Friedrich, as with Eichendorf's romantic hermit, the love of nature feeds the love of death: Comfort of earth, come, silent night... I weary of the blind daylight; The still wide ocean darkens. Give rest, give ease of wish and want, Until the dawn's eternal font Through the dark wood sparkles. (CGB) Komm, Trost der Welt, du stille Nacht... Der Tag hat mich so müd' gemacht, Das weite Meer schon dunkelt; Lass ausruhn mich von Lust und Not, Bis daß das ew'ge Morgenrot Den stillen Wald durchfunkelt. Novalis had turned from day to the comforting death-mother leaned over the fevered child; as Poe would vulgarize it: "Quaff, 0 quaff this sweet nepenthe". Music: 12) 12a) Schubert, 1825, Nacht und Träume (Fischer-Dieskau and Moore) LHMV-1046 Friedrich, 1830, The Fallow Field, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (CGB '86); + V detail Friedrich, c. 1834-35, Rest at Hay Making, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden Hölderlin's "Evening Fantasy" (like Friedrich's twilight landscapes, or Schubert's Nacht und Träume) suffuses such earth-dusk with infinite longing: Here by his cottage quiet in the shadow sits The plowman, with the smoke of his hearth content. Near in the peaceful village the bell of Evening kindly calls to the wanderer. 13) V13a) 13b) June 1996 F. Schinkel, 1815, Gothic Church above a Cliff, Mod. Mus., Berlin Carl G. Carus, Wanderer at the City Gate at Evening, lower spread (Dr. Otto Frank, Munich, in 1933) [also, cf. 3rd 13] Friedrich, 1817, City at the Rise of the of the Full Moon, Reinhart, Winterthur 19th Century 7 �C.G. Bell 13c) Symbolic History Again, Schinkel, 1815, Gothic Church above a Cliff, upper detail, Mod. Mus., Berlin Back now the seaman turns to the harbor's home. In far off cities gently the market shrouds Its bustling noise, while the still arbor Gleams with the affable meal of neighbors. But I then, whither? Do not all mortals live In reward and labor, with change of toil and rest Finding their joy? Why for me only Then does the bitter thorn not slumber? (CGB) Wohin denn ich? Es leben die Sterblichen Von Lohn und Arbeit; wechselnd in Müh' und Ruh' Ist alles freudig; warum schläft denn Nimmer nur mir in der Brust der Stachel? (fade Schubert) Against the dream radiance of Schinkel's Gothic, 1st 14) French, Early Gothic, 1134-1150/1195-1210, W. Front center, Chartres Cathedral (CGB '59: video has used V14, wider variant (copy of CGB '59, Gothic II 41) V14a) Delacroix, 1822, Dante and Virgil in Hell, Louvre, Paris V14b) Chartres Cathedral, West Front, with Towers how stripped, how severe, the old Gothic of faith, which has plumed such emulation. Music: Franconian, c. 1250(?), Ave Virgo — Ave Gloriosa, (Tinayre) Lumen 32018 Heine, having been called "a dismembered man... a divided soul, a Byron," wrote in 1829: ... complain rather that the world itself is split in the middle. For since the heart of the poet is the center of the world, it must at the present time be lamentably torn apart... Once the world was whole, in antiquity and in the Middle Ages; in spite of superficial struggles there was always an inner unity and there were integrated poets. We honor these poets and we rejoice in them, but every imitation of their unity is a lie that every sound eye penetrates. (fade Ave) June 1996 19th Century 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 2nd 13) Friedrich, 1809-10, Abbey ruin in an oak grove, Schloß Charlottenburg, Berlin So Arnold, at the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse, "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born," implores: "Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again." 2nd 12) Friedrich, 1825, Lonely House by a Forest of Pines, Walraff-Richartz Museum, Cologne; to which video adds the whole of 11, Friedrich's Pines, Lake, and Moon, and then a detail of 12, Friedrich's Fallow Field But since Arnold's "strange disease of modern life" is in fact the fruit of Hegelian consciousness, why not celebrate its ripe introspection — what Coleridge most shares with the Germans: No cloud, no relique of the sunken day Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues. Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge... — which Victor Hugo distills in his early plays: Hernani: Regarde: plus de feux, plus de bruit. Tout se tait. La lune tout à l'heure a l'horizon montait; Tandis que tu parlais... Je me sentais joyeuse et calme, 0 mon amant! Et j'aurais bien voulu mourir en ce moment. June 1996 19th Century 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History For 3rd 13) Carl G. Carus c. 1825, Wanderer at the City Gate at Evening, whole, which video separates to upper half and lower half, and then returns to 13c, upper detail of 13, Schinkel's Gothic Church Les Burgraves: True, the sun is beautiful. Its rays — The last — now set a crown on Taunus' brow. The river gleams, the forests take the fire... All nature is a flood of life and light! (CGB) La nature est un flot de vie et de lumière. Music: Schumann, 1850, Feierlich, from Symphony No.3, Rhenish Though the cult Gothic of Coleridge's "Christabel," Keats' "Eve of St. Agnes," Schumann's Cathedral in the Rhine Symphony, in Romantic fullness and repletion, For 2nd 14) French Gothic, esp. 1210-30, S. Portal and S.W. Tower, Chartres (CGB '59); video: lower detail only V2nd 14a) Again, Chartres, c. 1210-20, detail of N. Portal (CGB '74) is far from what it hungers after. Music: 15) 15a) (fade Schumann) Same, c. 1250, from "Ave Virgo — Ave Gloriosa," Lumen 32018 (close) P.O. Runge, 1806-07, Christ walks on the Sea, Kunsthalle, Hamburg; + V details Blechen, before 1828, Stürmische See mit Leuchtturm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg Renaissance, Baroque, Transcendental have intervened. Runge's 1806 Christ on the Sea of Galilee shapes the world from subjectivity, no less than Goethe's Faust or "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": And the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge; And the rain poured down from one black cloud; The Moon was at its edge... The harbour-bay was clear as glass, So smoothly it was strewn! June 1996 19th Century 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And on the bay the moonlight lay, And the shadow of the Moon. What is reached for is Schelling's Primordial Will: The primal longing moves... like a surging billowing sea... But there is born in God himself an inward imaginative response... the first stirring of Divine Being in its still dark depths... Schelling's "birth out of darkness into light" is no less of good from evil: The living Word enters as a firm and enduring center in battle against chaos, and a declared state of war between good and evil continues to the present time, when God reveals himself as Spirit, that is as concrete actuality. 16) Correggio, c. 1532, Jupiter and Ganymede, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien; + V upper detail That revelation is not purely a life-motion. When Goethe made a poem of this Correggio Rape of Ganymede, he gave it the dithyrambs of dissolving: I come. But where? Upward, upward... Clouds of the sky Bend to me, Me; I am here, Seizing, seized — All-loving Father — Upward on your breast. (CGB) Mir! Mir!... Umfangend umfangen! Aufwärts an deinen Busen, All liebender Vater! June 1996 19th Century 11 �C.G. Bell 17) Symbolic History P.P. Prud'hon, 1808, Psyche, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); + V details With such heart's wish Prud'hon stretches the Græco-Roman Psyche and the style of Correggio. The surface is classical; but neither the vagabond soul of Chenier's loving Neare, nor Keats' Endymion glimpsing his Goddess in dream, cave, or by plashing pool, has wagered more desperately on "a thing of beauty is a joy forever." Against the Satanic mills of actual flesh — ...a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue — those "leaf-fringed legends" of "a Grecian Urn" ("Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness"), that "draught of vintage" of "a Nightingale" ("Thou wast not born for death immortal bird"), beat urgent wings. 18) J.M.W. Turner, 1829, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, National Gallery, London; + V details Music: John Field, c.1825(?), from Nocturne in A flat major, near close, MHS 4512 When Turner adds to Classical subject (here Ulysses deriding Polyphemus) not only Romantic heart but a color-play that turns whatever could be touched and seen to Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn — then, as in those Field Nocturnes, which inspired those of Chopin, (fade Field) Music: Chopin, c.1830(?), from near close of Nocturne in E-flat Major, 0p. 9, #2, (J. Bolet) Everest LPBR 6079 such life and hunger for life initiate a dissolving (as Turner's blind giant melts into cloud over rocks and sunset sea) which would run in art to Monet and Redon, in music to Debussy and Scriabin. (fade Chopin Nocturne) June 1996 19th Century 12 �C.G. Bell 19) 19a) 19b) 19c) 19d) 19e) Symbolic History L. Richter, 1837, Rhine-crossing at Schrekenstein, Staatsgalerie, Dresden Same, detail of boat Joh. G. v. Dillis, 1817-1831, Quirinal, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Friedrich, 1810, Greifswald Harbor, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Again, 19, Rhine-crossing, somewhat nearer; video: detail only M. von Schwind, 1804, Waldkapelle, Schack Galerie, Munich Music: Schumann, 1850, from slow movement of Symphony #3, the "Rhenish," Angel S.36689 What is the aim, on Richter's Rhine-crossing (or Schumann's Rhine) but to take as one the riches of earth and spirit, to foster both nostalgias, of the finite and infinite — as with Mignon and the harper in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister: Do you know the land where lemon trees bloom? — Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn...? ...Dahin, dahin, Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter ziehn — (fade Schumann) a point of departure for Eichendorf's posthorn, and wanderers singing of the South, of statues and fountains, by moonlight, in summer gardens. Always the orchestrations of "Todeslust": Die Sonne, Funken sprühend im Versinken Gibt noch einmal der Erde Glut zu trinken... Always the soul-flight of "Mondnacht": And my soul spread her pinions Wide in the kindred gloom, Flew through the silent regions, As if she flew toward home — (CGB) Als flöge sie nach Haus. Lamartine would suspend time's flight by returning alone to the lake where the two, boating in silence, had heard, far off, oars and the harmonious waves: Un soir, t'en souvient-il? nous voguions en silence; On n'entendait au loin, sur l'onde et sous les cieux, June 1996 19th Century 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Que le bruit des rameurs qui frappaient en cadence Tes flots harmonieux. In Italy Leopardi rears such earth loves over "the infinite vanity of all" — "E l'infinita vanità del tutto." 20) M. von Schwind, c. 1860(?), Midday, Schack Galerie, Munich (CGB '59); + V details Never in history had soul and the ideal so seized on world and flesh. As Jung said, when Freud took off the psychic lid of Europe, he found the whole landscape flooded with sex — Moritz von Schwind's rock-pooled mystery of Midday, queer as Anderson's fairy tales: The Red Slippers, The Snow Queen. Those fish (like a Shakespearean pun: "The bawdy hand of the dial... upon the very prick of noon") around the hair-curtained form and reflection, dream-overcharge the pubic mandala. So in Schumann's "Frauenliebe und Leben." Music: 21) Schumann, 1840, from Süsser Freund, Frauenliebe und Leben, Decca CL 9971 Adolph von Menzel, 1847, Artist's Sister, Neue Pinakothek, Munich; first, video detail (fade Schumann) Though what Adler would find was Will to Power; Jung, will to myth. As in Menzel's 1847 study of his sister (like "Fräulein von Kulp/ Who turned in the hall," "Madame de Tornquist.../ Shifting the candles"), all the bases of desire are loaded. 22) 22a) 22b) Julia Margaret Cameron, 1869, Double: [A] Sir J.F.W. Herschel, and [B] Mae Prinseps as Beatrice Right half of double, Mae Prinseps as Beatrice Left half of double, Sir J.F.W. Herschel, detail; video adds closer details of 22a and 22b Even the photographs — Julia Margaret Cameron's old Faust men and tender Gretchen girls — voice it no less than the sonnet Victor Hugo, past eighty, wrote to Judith Gautier: "La mort et la beauté sont deux choses profondes": Death and beauty are too somber loves, As deep in blue and shade as if to say: June 1996 19th Century 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Two sisters, alike fecund and destructive, Bearing the burden of one mystery. Loves, voices, looks, tresses dark and fair, Be radiant; for I die. Hold light, warmth, solace — You pearls the sea rolls in waves up the shore, You birds that nestle, luminous, in the forest. Judith, our destinies are nearer kin Than one might think to see your face and mine. The abyss of all opens in your eyes — The same starred gulf I harbor in my soul. We are neighbors of the sky, and for this cause, That you are beautiful and I am old. (CGB) Judith, nos deux destins sont plus près l'un de l'autre Qu'on ne croirait, à voir mon visage et le vôtre; Tout le divin abîme apparait dans vos yeux, Et moi, je sens le gouffre étoilé dans mon âme; Nous sommes tous les deux voisins du ciel, madame, Puisque vous êtes belle et puisque je suis vieux. 23) Egypt, New Kingdom XVIII Dynasty, c. 1370 B.C., Blind Harper, from Mortuary Chapel of Patenemheb, Mus. Ant., Leyden Has such romantic soul appeared before? No doubt in all ripe civilizations, there is some filling in of conscious touch and longing — the blind harper from an Egyptian tomb of the time of Ikhnaton. 24) Graeco-Roman. lst cent. A.D. (from 3rd cent. B.C. original?), Spring, from Stabiae, Nat. Mus., Naples Or there are those frescoes, 1500 years later, from the Bay of Naples, a pleasure seat of Imperial Rome, its Euripidean and Hellenistic refinements already centuries old. 25) Chinese (Ming), 1470, Shen Chou reading in Autumn, Peking Museum; + V detail and return to whole What civilization could be riper than Ming Chinese? — 1470, Shen Chou reading out of doors — the poem: June 1996 19th Century 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The big trees exposed to the west wind are losing their leaves; To be comfortable I've unfastened the collar of my robe; Sitting here, I'm letting the time go by. Doing nothing, I've turned my back on encroaching autumn. I've not finished my book. My spirit has gone wandering in the sky... Who can fathom it? Yet personality, in these anticipations, seems contained in ancient traditions of philosophic and religious lore. 26) Franz von Lenbach, 1860, Shepherd Boy, Schack Galerie, Munich; + V detail Music: Smetana, 1874-9, from Ma Vlast 4, Col. ML 4785, A, band 2 It had hardly ventured on the blossom-and-tear-bearing branch of Lenbach's 1860 Shepherd Boy, or Smetana's Bohemian Fields and Groves — all those Intimations of Immortality from Wordsworth's: ...all the earth is gay; Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity... Thou Child of Joy, Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy! to Longfellow's: A boy's will is the wind's will And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. 27) (fade Smetana) French, 1316, Roman de Fauvel, Charivari sports, Bibliotheque Nationale, fr. 146 f. 34r, Paris; + V detail Music: French, early 14th century, from Fauvel, Motet, Quant je le voi, ARCHIV 2723045 (2 b) Startling, that a civilization which would go so far in temporal deification, should, in its Gothic phase, have reduced earthly delights to the mumming foibles of religious feasts, under cowled disapprobation; while in that music the major and minor chords essential to romantic joy and grief are passing tones; they melt with the dissonances of June 1996 19th Century 16 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History earth into bare fifths and octaves, beyond the vanity of our moods. (fade Fauvel) 28) Petrus Christus, 1446-47(?), Portrait of a Girl, Staatliche Museen, Berlin; + V detail Music: Dufay, c. 1429(?), La belle se siet, opening, (Munrow) Seraphim SIC-6092 How often we have traced, in that faith-ground, the ripening of what would become romantic personality — how archly tempting here, in Dufay and Petrus Christus, to the time-tree of consciousness. (fade Dufay) 29) Vermeer, 1660-65, Head of a Girl, Mauritshuis, The Hague; first, video detail Music: Bach, c. 1725, Bist du bei mir, close, (Schwartzkopf) Angel 35023 A fruit Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring has gloriously eaten, and what is it but wholesome and good to the taste, sustaining the earth-loves, to which Bach, for Anna Magdalena, gave pre-romantic voice. (end Bach) 30) V30a) V30b) 30c) 30d) Geo. F. Watts, c. 1863, Ellen Terry (his wife), Kerrison Preston, Esq.; + V detail H. Marees, 1863, Bath of Diana, detail only, Neue Staatsgalerie, Munich (CGB '59) Marees, c. 1870(?), Horse Leader and Nymph, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Moreau, c. 1865(?), Leda, detail, Moreau Museum, Paris Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-70, Beata Beatrix, Tate Gallery, London; video: close detail only Music: Duparc, c. 1870, L'Invitation au Voyage, 2nd stage, (Simoneau) Westminster W 9604 In the 46 year old Watts' painting of his 16 year old wife, the actress Ellen Terry (to leave him in a year), love, fevered as voluptuous, pants for the specter of a rose, Petronius' "harbor for a stilled desire," "Luxe, calme et volupte," as in Baudelaire's June 1996 19th Century 17 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History "Invitation to the Voyage" — supremely, as set, about 1870, by Duparc. But here we should read a sheaf of Baudelaire, closing perhaps with the condemned "Jet d'eau," erotic fountain: "Tes beaux yeux sont las, pauvre amante" — "Your beautiful eyes are tired... Let them close" — You, whom night so beautifies That it is sweet, bent to your breast, To hear the sad eternal cries Weep to the bowl from the water's crest. Moon, sounding drops, night serene, The melancholy of your mien, Is the mirror of my love. The fountain fills the night With flower-spheres, That in the pale light Of the moon's spears, Fall from the height Like a burst of tears. (CGB) Tombe comme une averse De larges pleurs. 31) (end Duparc) Japan, Kamakura, late 13th cent. Burning of the Sanjo Palace (1160), detail of paper scroll, Fine Arts Museum, Boston Have West and East converged toward modern consciousness? The burning of the Sanjo Palace, as painted (a hundred years after) in thirteenth century Japan, is, like Gothic, mytho-symbolic. 32) Japan, Edo later 17th C., Gay Quarters of Kyoto, detail, Fine Arts, Boston But this Edo screen of the pleasure quarters of Kyoto has the social irony and wit of Molière and the English Restoration, with which it is contemporary. 33) Japan, Hiroshige, 1857, Sudden Rain at Ohashi, Woodblock print; video: detail only June 1996 19th Century 18 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History While the Hiroshige woodblock of 1857 — A Sudden Rain at Ohashi — is abreast with the realism and mood-drama of 19th-century Europe. If the world-community attests such concurrence, 34) Franco-Flemish, Tapestry, c. 1385, detail of Arthur, Nine Worthies, Cloisters, NYC; first, video closeer detail what has arisen in the West, to revolutionize everything, is the assertive consciousness of person. Here it just shows itself, in the time of Wyclif and the first people's wars. As this Arthur takes up the banner, under the angular asperities of creed-invalidation, Gawain, flower of chivalry, returns from the Green Knight bearing about his neck the snaky belt of his temptation and fall, symbolic frailty "of this crabbed flesh." 35) 35a) 35b) V35c) 35d) 35e) V35f) Dürer, 1526, Joh. Klehberger, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien (CGB '59) G. Romano, 1532-34, Cupola with Olympus, Palazzo Te, Mantova Cranach, 1546, The Fountain of Youth, Berlin-Dahlem Museen, Berlin; video: detail only Giorgione, c. 1506, The Three Philosophers (section to the right), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien Same, close detail of the bearded old Philosopher Dürer, 1508, Martyrdom of 10,000, detail, upper left, Kunsthisthistorisches Museum, Wien Huber, 1522, Portrait of a Man in a Cap, Staatliche Museen, Berlin In Dürer's 1526 portrait of that dubious operator Kleberger, ego seems to express once and for all its earth-mastery. The same years, Vives, riding the wave that spread with Pico's "Dignity of Man," describes a feast of the gods: The universe was the amphitheater, in the skies the divine spectators; the earth was a stage for the actors. ...They saw man, the mime of Jupiter, take the mask of a plant, of a thousand wild beasts, then his own: prudent, just, friendly, a political and social being. The gods were not expecting to see him in more shapes, when behold, he appeared as one of their own race. He had transcended man and the lower gods, and was piercing into that inaccessible light-indark where Jupiter dwells, king of kings and of gods... While Fugger launched modern capitalism, and Geismayr, leader of the Peasant's Revolt, wrote his bill of reform: June 1996 19th Century 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History All privileges shall be done away with, as they are contrary to the word of God... All city walls, castles, fortresses shall be demolished... No profit is to be made, as all things are to be sold at cost... 36) Rembrandt, c. 1655, The Polish Rider, Frick Collection, NYC; first, video detail We have witnessed over Europe and America (that pioneer soil for Protestant and free humanist dreams) how the complex of thrust and counterthrust builds a transformational current, whose eddies and regressive whirls gather head and jet again into the main stream, altering and darkening its course — as under the shades of Rembrandt's Polish Rider, the deepened reality of Leonardo's Horseman strides into the century of brooding Baroque and Milton's Commonwealth. 37) Andreas Schlüter, 1698-1700, The Great Elector (Equestrian), Berlin; + V detail Music: J.K.F.Fischer, 1695, Fugato of Overture, Suite from Le Journal du Printemps, AS 52 How even when that confidence hardens to a wigged pomp of state, (Schlüter's Prussian Elector, Fischer's Overture in the style of Lully) such blatant mutants of the humanist claim, hung as it were between Newton's synthesis and a Dryden heroic play, carry the force that would drive through the ironic whirls of Rococo, to break out in the inalienable Rights of Man — and what right, if not to Vives' enactment of the gods? (end Overture) 38) J.E. Liotard, 1765-70, in his garden near Geneva, Reichsmuseum, Amsterdam; with video details And already in the 1760's of Rousseau's éclat, Liotard had pastelled himself in his own garden. in the mountain canton of Geneva, a way-mark to every Connecticut Yankee in those dogmatic courts. So, on the Easter morning of Goethe's Faust, the people crowd from stone gateways, mills, and vaulted churches, to the natural Resurrection of the Lord ("Sind sie alle ans Licht gebracht"). Had not even Pope said "An honest man's the noblest work of God" — to be taken up by Burns: "A man's a man for a' that"? 39) J.L. David, 1793, Marat Dead, Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels June 1996 19th Century 20 �C.G. Bell 39a) Symbolic History Same, detail And the world of inertia, oversurge, and backlash being what it is, what could come of that plea but that Marat, champion of the people, murdered first by the intemperance of his aims, should be stabbed by Charlotte Corday in the bath? Were the dying words as she reported, "they shall all be guillotined"? David painted him, his truest picture, art climax of Revolution turning on itself. Let it be stressed again that the Romantic century — Schelling, Friedrich, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Beethoven, Schubert, Byron, Keats, Lamartine. Hugo — all varieties of Transcendental immersion and socialist attack, work in the known shadow of that populist tailspin into terror. a40) 40) J.L. David 1805-07, Coronation of Napoleon, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); video: detail only of Napoleon (cf. Va40) J.L. David, 1824, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Graces, Beaux-Arts, Brussels; + V detail As for David, he slid through the Coronations of Napoleon and of Josephine to the slickness (in Brussels exile) of this Mars disarmed by Venus, with her aids. The 19th century had to face that degradation too — Revolution gone as vapid as in Von Weber's Freischütz. Music: 41) 41a) C.M. von Weber, 1820, Der Freischütz, Overture, close, (Toscanini) old RCA Victor 11-9172 Austrian Rococo, c. 1750(?), Millionenzimmer, Schloss Schönbrunn, Vienna G. Tiepolo, 1725-26, Angel appears to old Sara, detail, Archiepiscopal Palace, Undine Music: Telemann, c. 1737(?), Concerto for 3 trumpets, etc., from 2nd movement, Nonesuch H-1017 (oboe) So it was the 18th-century rococo, Telemann, and the Millionenzimmer at Schönbrunn, which the royalist regimes of post-revolution would espouse. And why not? Had not rococo shared in Enlightenment, its melodies everywhere beckoning to the heart, its chords loaded with supposititious good? (fade Telemann) June 1996 19th Century 21 �C.G. Bell 42) 42a) Symbolic History French (Vautier), c. 1855, Queen Victoria and Albert greeted by Napoleon III, Windsor Castle; video: details only Friedrich, c. 1818, Woman at Sunset, Essen Museum; video: detail only Music: Berlioz, 1830, Symphonie Fantastique, from 2nd movement, dance, London CM 9227 And what good could be greater than Napoleon III's entertainment of Queen Victoria and Albert in a Paris showy as Berlioz' waltz in the Fantastique — but a show gone hectic, like all the Vanity Fairs of Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, de Maupassant, driven to a drugged frenzy — those death-wish Kuragins of War and Peace. Anatole, Ippolit, white-armed Ellen, and through them "The Harlot's House" of Wilde: The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust — into which from time to time yearning Emmas and Natashas are drawn. (Berlioz cont., tender phrase, skip to fast) a43) 43) Viollet-le-Duc, 1858, Napoleon III and the Empress, owned by Madame Viollet-le Duc Thomas Lawrence, 1819, Portrait of George IV, Vatican, Rome; first, video detail; cf. V43 "My dearest Clough," Arnold would write: these are damned times — everything is against one — the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties... Great qualities are trodden down And littleness united is become invincible... (end Berlioz) In a depiction of the century, put Sir Thomas Lawrence's 1819 George IV, nine and a half feet high (and in the Vatican), on Byron's sinister side, counter-revolutionary background of whatever he wrote and did. June 1996 19th Century 22 �C.G. Bell 44) Symbolic History William Blake, 1804-18, Rinder Jerusalem, p. 51, Vala's Lifeless Court (with Hyde and Scofeld); + V details June 1996 19th Century 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History And on his creative right the continuing fierce vision of William Blake, an eternal doctrine of revolution against any crowned Vala's court of Submission and Death, whether of Rights of Man or Socialist Manifesto — a radical Judgment, for which the musical likeness seems always and only Beethoven's Great Fugue. Music: Beethoven, 1825, Grosse Fuge, from mid-section, Columbia M 5 S 677 Between those embattled extremes, a45) b45) 45) G.F. Kersting, c. 1815(?), Lady Making Wreaths, National Gallery, Berlin G.F. Kersting, 1827, Girl at a Mirror, Kunsthalle, Kiel; + V detail G.F. Kersting, 1817, A Couple at a Window, G. Schäfer, Obbach; + V detail Music: Schubert, 1815, 2nd Symphony, 2nd movement, opening, Nonesuch H-71230 the neo-classic, all over Europe, crossing into the new century, took the quiet glow of Transcendental and early Romantic, as in Kersting of the Friedrich circle, or the delight of Schubert's early symphonies. Here the Faust and fire forms leave a space of calm for the balancing of the leaf. Thus through all nature water counters fire, plant animal, grazer hunter; and if there is truth in Goethe's extending the ratio to woman against man — Women consider more how things are linked in life... since their fate and the fate of their families depends on this continuity — then it is fit that the ultimate perfection in art of the vegetable weft should be in the novels of a woman, Jane Austen. (fade Schubert) Thus the Baronet, in Mansfield Park, of his son and the poor cousin Fanny: Sick of ambitious and mercenary connections, prizing more and more the sterling good of principle and temper... he had pondered with genuine satisfaction on the more than possibility of the two young friends finding their mutual consolation in each other for all that had occurred of disappointment to either... Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted... With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune and friends, the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be. 46) J.A.D. Ingres, double: [A] 1806, Mlle. Rivière, Louvre, Paris; and [B] 1851, Madame Inès Moitessier, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. June 1996 19th Century 24 �C.G. Bell 46a) 46b) Symbolic History Ingres, 1806, Mlle, Rivière, Louvre, Paris (CGB '80); video: detail only Ingres, 1851, Madame Inès Moitessier, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; video: details only Music: Chopin, c. 1845(?), Waltz in C-Sharp Minor, 0p. 64, No.2 (Lipatti) Odyssey St. 32 16 0058 Ingres had begun in that vein (left), this 1806 Mlle. Rivière, in the studied dress and pose of the cult of nature. But if one leaps forty-five years, to a portrait from Ingres' age (right), it is not just that the sitter is heavier and older, or the dress changed from naive white to black Carmen and Cleopatra; what speaks through that is social — the stuffy hardening of the Third Empire. Against the dreams of Emma Rouault's youth — her futile wish for romance in marriage: Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some great strong heart... she would never have fallen from so high a happiness — comes the fate (as in a Chopin waltz) to which Emma Bovary is bound: that town circle of hideous trade, the draper tempting her with money, the eternal monotony even of clandestine passion, down to the blind man's song mocking her as she dies: Maids in the warmth of a summer day Dream of love and of love alway... 47) Attributed to T. Gericault, c. 1818, Portrait of Delacroix, Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen; first, video detail (cf. V47) Music: Berlioz, 1834, Harold in Italy, 4th movement, beginning RCA Victor LSC-2228 The focus on self as affirming center (Gericault's likeness) of his young friend Delacroix) bares, under the flesh-claim, those "fallings from us" and "blank misgivings" of Wordsworth's "Intimations"; Coleridge "Plucking the poisons of self-harm"; Berlioz' Childe Harold. Since behind the romantic as Promethean, 48) T. Gericault, c. 1818, Guillotined Heads, National Museum, Stockholm; first, video detail June 1996 19th Century 25 �C.G. Bell 48a) Symbolic History T. Gericault, 1824, Mad Woman, Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyons lie Gericault's later studies of corpses, guillotined heads, the criminally insane — waveof-terror reminders of Poe's macabre obsession, to be turned to sex by Baudelaire ("Une Charogne"): (viola) Remember, my love... by the roadway, a hideous carrion... With legs flexed in the air like a courtesan... The flies swarmed on that putrid vulva... maggots... Over those rags that lived and seemed to breathe, As if the romantic self were haunted — like Emma Bovary by the blind beggar: She saw the hideous face of the poor wretch standing out against the eternal night like a menace... She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. She was dead. (forte) As Dostoievsky's egoists would be haunted by dreams of horses beat down and children tortured. 49) John Martin, 1812, Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, Art Gallery, Southampton; first, three video details What flowed from "Kubla Khan" — A savage place, as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover -- to Poe's "Ulalume" — Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber — This misty mid region of Weir — Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber, This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir — is reflected in the English painter Martin, with whom Heine compared Berlioz — here the wanderings of Sadak in search of the Waters of Oblivion. (fade Berlioz) Yet Martin's slick art of nightmare stems from the same years 50) Constable, 1816 ff., Weymouth Bay, National Gallery, London; + V details June 1996 19th Century 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History as Constable's daytime celebration of the actual earth, which, like Jane Austen's peopled scene, smiled through wars and rumors of wars. The radiant is Transcendental, as in early Wordsworth: …the sky Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart, and held me like a dream — an almost German mystic presence: …laid asleep In body, and become a living soul; but it gathers a fabric of descriptive color and feel ("Give me a Constable," they used to say, "with the dew on it") — a vibrance later Wordsworth could bring off now and then: There was a roaring in the wind all night; The rain came heavily and fell in floods; But now the sun is rising calm and bright; a51) 51) Constable, 1830-36, River Scene, with a farmhouse near the water's edge, Victoria and Albert Museum, London Constable, c. 1830(?), On the River Stour, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; first, video detail, to the right The birds are singing in the distant woods; Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods; The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters. But Constable too had his polarity of peace and storm. What woke up the French at the Paris show of 1824 (so that Delacroix took his Massacre at Chios from the Salon wall to give it the brushwork of broken color), was late Constable's clare-obscure and fury of palette, rooted in the Baroque crisis of Magnasco and reaching for the crisis of Expressionism. As the painter said after the death of his wife: "Tempest on tempest rolls. Still the darkness is majestic." Some would limit "Romantic" to such Storm and Stress of body; but its core is deeper: man and nature one incarnate godhead. "Malgré moi," de Musset protested, "l'infini me tourmente." June 1996 19th Century 27 �C.G. Bell 52) 52a) Symbolic History Diaz de la Peña, 1871, The Storm, National Gallery, London; + V details Theo. Rousseau, c. 1850(?), Sunset at Arbonne, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Where soul becomes world-flesh, art-violence is a measure of spirit's war on itself. So with the earth and clouds Diaz de la Peña learned from Constable and fomented for half a century (here from 1871). But through calm or fury runs the pantheist thread of de Nerval's "Vers dorés" (Duncan): Man, free thinker! do you believe yourself the one alone thinking. In this world where life bursts forth in everything?... — Un mystère d'amour dans le métal repose — A mystery of love lies concealed in the metal... Beware in the blind wall a gaze that watches you... Often in the obscure being dwells a hidden God; And like a nascent eye covered by its lids A pure spirit grows beneath the skin of stones. How Victor Hugo would spill that earth-soul through his early poems: "Tonight the sun has set in a sky of clouds" — "Le soleil s'est couché ce soir dans les nuées..." a53) 53) Corot, c. 1826-28, Roman Campagna with Claudian Aqueduct, National Gallery, London Corot, 1855-60, Bathing Nymphs and a Child, Art Institute, Chicago In such a field each artist shapes his own path, under relational probabilities. Corot, beginning about 1826 with luminous scenes of Rome, both classic and early romantic, would blur the dark of mid-century to a kind of salon Arcadia — a Greek cult to metastasize in Bougereau, Puvis de Chavanne, Swiss Böcklin, as in academic sculpture everywhere — reaching in poetry through Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, to the last gentleman of the columned American south, William Alexander Percy, dreaming of Sappho on the levee over the Mississippi. a54) 54) Hans Thoma, 1875, Valley of the Main, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59) Delacroix, c. 1849(?), Sunset Sky, Pastel, Louvre, Paris; first, video detail Music: June 1996 Chopin, 1839, Sonata in B-Flat Minor, Op.35, from 3rd movement (Funeral March), tender mid-section, with trill (Horowitz) V-LM-1235 19th Century 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Men still thought of themselves as fleeting and nature as eternal — "the immense and radiant world": "Je m'en irai… Sans que rien ne manque au monde immense et radieux." Yet as man's power mounts iron, coal, and steam, the infinite drowning has the feel of mutual death: — with Chopin's Funeral March Sonata, Delacroix and Leopardi ("Sempre caro mi fu quest' ermo colle"): This lonely hill was always dear to me, And this hedgerow, that from so wide a part Of the ultimate horizon shuts the view. But as I look beyond it, I conceive A space which has no measure, a quiet not Of man, a hush and void that draw the heart Almost to the brink of fear. And as the wind Noises in the leaves, I set that voice Against the silence of the infinite, And call to mind the eternal, and lost time, And this that lives and sounds; and so it comes In that immensity my thought is drowned, And sweet to me is shipwreck in that sea. (CGB) (heavy tolling of Funeral March) E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare. 55) G. Courbet, 1865, Stormy Sea, Louvre, Paris; + V details To Delacroix's pastel Courbet adds mass and volume — a cloud-gathering reached for in Tennyson: There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas... That mood-space stretches out in Arnold's "Dover Beach": ...on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. In some Meredith "the largeness of the evening earth" clots round us like the blood of Modern Love — Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force... To throw that faint thin line upon the shore. June 1996 19th Century 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But it is Victor Hugo who most summons the storm — sailors gone down in "Oceano Nox," Dans une mere sans fond, par une nuit sans lune — until the creation he entered as a realm of light rounds to "A great wheel,/ Which cannot move without crushing someone": June 1996 19th Century 30 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Que la creátion est une grande roue Qui ne peut se mouvoir sans écraser quelqu'un. 56) 56a) Victor Hugo, 1858, Fantastic Landscape, Bibl. Nat., Paris Hugo, 1859, The Hanged Man, drawing, Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris (here video returns to 56) Though when Hugo took to ink-wash and watercolor in the late 1850's, he cut through space as Blake had done, reaching back to Bosch and ahead to the surreal — a road he would parallel, with more knowing defiance of the forms, in his last poems: so "The Trumpet of Judgment": I saw a monstrous trumpet in the clouds... Forged out of justice condensed into brass... It lay on a mist that trembled, unfathomable, Out of the world... Oh, what night; nothing there has contour nor age, And the cloud is specter and the specter cloud. Et le nuage est spectre, et le spectre est nuage. Revealing sea-mark for the youth who had declared: "Romanticism... is nothing but liberalism in literature." 57) V57a) 57b) V57c) 57d,e,f) Turner, c, 1843, Eve of the Deluge, National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Same, detail, Sky with Birds (from V57a & c) Same, detail with Alligator Same, closer view of Flocking Birds (also from V57a & c) Triple: [d] Constable, 1820-23, Pond in Branchhill, Hamstead, Evening, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; [e] Pissaro, 1887, Woman in Field, Louvre, Paris; and [f] Cezanne, 1900-06, Trees and Rocks, Museum of Modern Art, NYC (slide show combines three vertical cuts from these pictures; while the video shows them separately, substituting for the second: Monet, 1888, Antibes, detail, Courtauld Institute, London (see V57e) Music: Same Chopin Sonata, to last movement The continuing optimism of the century seemed to be science. How the old Turner's theory and practice of light gives his most pessimistic "apocalypse of heaven" June 1996 19th Century 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (this Eve of the Deluge) the élan of an electrical discovery by Faraday or Maxwell. Or pain-racked Darwin's Origin of Species: to contemplate a tangled bank...plants of many kinds... birds singing... insects flitting... worms crawling... and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms have all been produced by...Variability... the Struggle for Life...Natural Selection...Thus from the war of nature... the production of the higher animals directly follows. There is grandeur in this view... Was the art-cognate of science not the realism of the century, but the search beyond realism? What gave Constable such headway against his moods but the pursuit of painting as "scientific and mechanical"? Later the technique of pure color would rescue Impressionists from the bogs of Baudelaire; while that, combined with geometric analysis, would turn the splenetic solitudes of Cezanne to clarity. As he would say: "I have only painted all my life to escape the ennui." (final forte and close of Chopin) a58) 58) 58a) Anselm Feuerbach, 1870, Medea, formerly: National Gallery, Berlin Feuerbach, c. 1865, Medea, Neue Pinakothek, Munich (CGB '59); + V detail Same, Munich Medea, detail of beach and waves (CGB '59); here video adds another detail of 58 Music: Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan and Isolde, from Overture, Stokowsky, Victor LM 1174 Though the ambiguity which stretches the Wagnerian ocean of Feuerbach's Medea broodings, also had its center in science. As late as 1847 Helmholtz could celebrate the First Law of Thermodynamics: The universe possesses, once for all, a store of energy which is not altered by any change of phenomena, can neither be increased nor diminished, and which maintains any change which takes place on it. Yet Carnot had already proved the motive power of heat fixed solely by the always equalizing temperature gradient — an insight clinched in Clausius' 1850 formulation of the spent energy in any system: "The entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum" — which Kelvin's Second Law would give apocalyptic irreversibility: Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for June 1996 19th Century 32 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the habitation of man as at present constituted, unless operations have been, or are to be performed, which are impossible under the laws to which the known operations going on at present in the material world are subject. 59) George Stubbs, 1770, White Horse Frightened by a Lion, Walker Gal., Liverpool; + V detail Music: Haydn, 1772, from 4th movement, A Major Quartet, 0pus 20, #6, fugue, near close, Qualiton SLPX 11 332-b Since Rubens, art-power had seized on the beast — horse, pitted sometimes against lion or tiger, in Blake's Bible of Revolution: "the tigers of wrath... wiser than the horses of instruction." So Stubbs had painted them in that England (time of Haydn's Opus 20 Quartets), island cognate for the Storm and Stress of the Continent — bold as mad Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno": "For a Lion roars himself compleat from head to tail" — (close of Haydn) and so freshly painted, 60) Gericault, 1817, Horses Held by Slaves, Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen; first, video detail they changed the art of Gericault when he came to England. Music: Beethoven, 1812, opening of 4th movement, 7th Symphony, Columbia ML 5405 Though Gericault had already ventured on the horses, at the Corso in Rome, and with an elevation of Classic and Romantic like Beethoven's in the Seventh Symphony. (fade Beethoven) 61) 61a) Delacroix, 1860, Horses Coming from the Sea, Phillips Gallery, Washington, D.C. Delacroix, c. 1843, Head of Lion Roaring, Cabinet des Dessins, Louvre, Paris Music: Wagner, 1869-74, Close of the Götterdämmerung (forte) 6-London 1604 By the event of Delacroix' 1860 Horses Emerging from the Sea, Wagner had written Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan. and much of The Ring. The cult of exotic savagery (Delacroix' splendid tigers, as Clark says, his best self-portraits) was crudening June 1996 19th Century 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History toward Lesconte de Lisle's 1869 primeval earth of beast-death and volcanic blood, where "the Creator panted in his creation" — a62) 62) Böcklin, 1878, Battle of the Centaurs, 2nd version, central detail, Meiner Collection, Leipzig Same, Centaurs, whole setting for his sinister superman, Cain: But beyond the lava heights of Gelboë-hor, Charged with a boiling mist of savage smells, Which bears and roaring lions spewed and fumed, Sounded, like seas outraged by cyclone winds, Death-rattles rising from those livid shades. By 1874, Wagner had completed the Götterdämmerung, and Böcklin was midway in his series of battling Centaurs. But what — in the fire-fall of Valhalla, when flames and Rhine flood close the Twilight of the Gods — (music to melting) what is the import of that rippling death-by-water, coming in like a tide of sensuous good? For 63) Monet, 1873, Autumn at Argenteuil, Courtauld Institute, London; first, video detail What the relation of Impressionism's poignant and shimmering dream to the contemporary deep-rooted and wide-spread tree of Romantic and Symbolist pain? — Count Axel's death persuasion: 2nd 62) Again 62, Centaurs, lower detail "Our existence is full, and its cup is running over." Is it, as in the nether abyss of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, when, from the cataract of fire and serpent-folds, the tiger-striped head of Leviathan rears, tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence — and the frightened cherub flees, June 1996 19th Century 34 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History 2nd 63) Monet, 1868, Along the Seine, Art Institute, Chicago; + V detail (for which the slide show substitutes 63a: Monet, 1866-67, Women in a Garden, Jeu de Paume, Paris) and Blake finds himself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight hearing a harper who sung to the harp... (close of Wagner) Are Monet's bright visions outward or within? In any case, it was at the heart of Wagner's Zarathustran and chromatic longing that the tonal dissolutions of musical "Impressionism" (beginning with Saint-Saens) would appear. Music: 64) Saint-Saens, 1868, Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, 0p. 22, from 1st Movement, (Rubinstein and Ormandy) RCA-LSC 3165 J.B. Carpeaux, 1869, The Dance, façade of the Opera, Paris; + V details Sculpture, denied the levitating science of color, hardly got the dance of delight off the ground. Carpeaux' Opera nymphs may hint at a flaw in Romantic joy, even in the greatest — those inadequate allegros, finales of works too searching to be rondo-resolved — from Mozart's G Minor Quintet: Music: June 1996 Mozart, 1787, a phrase, last movement, G Minor Quintet, Columbia ML 5192 (now Columbia D3S 747) 19th Century 35 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History through the dry-leaf whirl after Beethoven's A Minor Adagio: Music: Beethoven, 1825, from closing Allegro, A Minor Quartet, Columbia M5S 677 to the hectic flush closing Schubert's great string Quintet: Music: Schubert, 1828, from last movement, near close, C Major Quintet, Columbia MS 6536 No wonder Beethoven tried radical finales: the choral of the Ninth, the visionary variations of the last Piano Sonato, the Quartet Grosse Fuge. For 1st 65) Rodin, 1882, from the Gates of Hell, lower left, Ugolino Group, Rodin Museum, Paris V1st 65a) Rodin, 1882, separate Ugolino group, bronze, detail, Rodin Museum, Paris (or video can work from 2nd 65) Melville: "The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows." Let Rodin's Ugolino from the Gates of Hell, against Carpeaux's Dance, twist the intolerable theme of Ibsen's Ghosts. As Oswald tells his mother of the inherited syphilis eating at his brain, he contrasts the old view of life, "a state of wretchedness" under "punishment for sin," For 2nd 64) Rodin, 1886, The Kiss, Tate Gallery, London 2nd 64a) Rodin, 1877, The Age of Bronze, detail, Louvre, Paris with the awakening of Impressionist Paris (Goethe's Easter again, the souls come up from vaults and cellars): Oswald: the mere fact of being alive is thought to be a matter for exultant happiness. Mother, have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned upon the joy of life? And it is just this beaming happiness and presumptive good which is denied when, as the mother pulling the curtains on the sunrise, com- June 1996 19th Century 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History forts her son, "Look, Oswald, what a lovely day we are going to have," the attack falls. 2nd 65) Again, Rodin, separate Ugolino group, whole; first, video detail of Ugolino only Oswald: (who has been sitting motionless in the armchair, with his back to the scene outside, suddenly says): Mother, give me the sun... (Oswald seems to shrink up in the chair; all his muscles relax; his face loses its expression, and his eyes stare stupidly. Mrs. Alving is trembling with terror) Mrs. Alving: What is it? (Screams) Oswald! What is the matter with you? (Throws herself on her knees beside him and shakes him) Oswald, Oswald! Look at me! Don't you know me? Oswald: (in an expressionless voice...): The sun — the sun. a66) 66) 66a) Double: [A] P.O. Runge, c. 1802, Self-Portrait, Hamburg, and [B] Cezanne, c. 1875, Portrait of M. Choquet, Cambridge, England Delacroix, c. 1824, Self-Portrait as Ravenswood, Louvre, Paris; video: upper half only Moritz von Schwind, c. 1850, Knight and Water Siren, Staatsgemälde Galerie, Munich Around the middle of the century Gerard de Nerval wrote the transforming symbolist poem, "El Desdichado," from which Eliot quotes one line in The Waste Land and paraphrases another in "Prufrock". But from Poe through Baudelaire to Mallarmé and Rimbaud, Symbolism was abstracting itself from Romantic by a motion of estrangement. In Delacroix' early portrait of himself as Ravenswood, hero-suicide of Scott's Bride of Lamermoor, we grope toward de Nerval's "Disinherited": (CGB) Music: Wagner, 1857-9, Tristan, Act III, shepherd's pipe, RCA-Victor 6700 (5) Je suis le ténébreux — le veuf, — l'inconsolé, Le prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie... I am the darkness, widowed, unconsoled, The Prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower; June 1996 19th Century 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History My one star is dead; my lute, star-scrolled, Burns with the black sun of an old despair. 67) Böcklin, 1875, Triton and Nereid, 3rd form, old National Gallery, Berlin; + V details Böcklin, 1875, still holds the intolerable Wagnerian longing, "Empty and waste the sea," which in de Nerval (and even in Wagner's lonely pipe) begins to escape from the causal fabric: You who healed me in the night of the tomb, Give me Posilipo and the Gulf again; Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d'Italie You who fed my life with your bloom, Give me the trellis of the rose and the vine. ...la treille où le pampre à la rose s'allie. For 2nd 66) Delacroix, 1826, Study for Baron Schwiter, detail, Springfield, Mass. Am I Phoebus or Love, Byron or Lusignan? My forehead is red with the kiss of the Queen. Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine; V2nd 67) Böcklin, detail from Sport of the Waves (CGB '59) 2nd 67) Again, Böcklin, Triton and Nereid, detail of Nereid, Berlin I have dreamed in caves where sea-sirens rise. J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène... a68) Vb68) 68) 68a) V68b) G. Courbet, 1845-46, Self with a Pipe, detail, Musée, Montpellier (or Va68) M. von Schwind, c. 1845(?), Luring Wood-fay, Schack Galerie, München Cezanne, 1866-68, Achille Emperaire, Private Collection; + V detail Cezanne, c. 1670, Self-Portrait, Tate Gallery, London Cezanne, 1866, Sorrow (Mary Magdalene), Louvre, Paris Music: June 1996 (fade Wagner) Mussorgsky, 1868 and '71, Boris Godounov, from Prologue, Angel S-3633 19th Century 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Conqueror twice, I have crossed the Acheron, Singing by turns to the Orphic lyre, the moans Of the saint, the fay Melusina's cries. (CGB) Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée. With the 1860's, as in Cezanne's portrait of the painter Achille Emperaire, the monstrous egg of longing begins to crack to the radical and elemental — Mussorgsky and Dostoievsky also beginning what would culminate in Boris and The Brothers. But in that revolt of "The Disinherited," who can tell whether the attack is religious, social, aesthetic? Estranged from what Flaubert called society's "brutal course", Cezanne and Marx meet in Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, who knows that it is glorious to belong to the universal... but that higher than this there winds a solitary path; he knows that it is terrible to be born outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveller... Humanly speaking, he is crazy and cannot make himself intelligible to anyone. (cut Mussorgsky on dissonance) Va69) Goya, 1810-20 (published 1863), Los Desastres de la Guerra, first etching: sad presentiments… Goya, 1813-16, The Forge, Frick Collection, NYC; video: central portion only 69) The poles of day and night, outward and inward, had shadowed Rousseau's Enlightenment with his melancholy. And as Storm and Stress struck through Revolution toward Romantic, the schemes of head, the dreams of heart, meet in repeated transformations, but hardening, from the liberal bourgeois to socialist labor; darkening, from Transcendental to Symbolist. In the first decades of the century, Goya's message of The Forge is contemporary with his black mythologies, Saturn Devouring his Children, a Dog Buried in the Sand. At the storm-center of the French Revolution, Babeuf knowing the rich had let them down, gave his life in conspiracy for a "Society of Equals". His followers were the link between Robespierre and the Manifesto. a70) M. van Raymerswaele, c. 1540, Two Tax Gatherers, National Gallery, London June 1996 19th Century 39 �C.G. Bell 70) 70a) Symbolic History P. Brueghel Jr., 1620, Commodity Finance, Museum, Bruges Same, Commodity Finance, detail The sin which in Dante sets the Usurers clutching their pouches on the hot sand and under flames at the edge of lower hell, had sprinkled the arts of Renaissance and rising capital with satanic extortioners, as in this Peter Breughel the Younger, or about the same time, Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's Play: [His agent Marrall speaks] The... justice did his part, returning... the certificate, Against his conscience, and his knowledge, too... to the utter ruin Of the poor farmer. Overreach: Twas for these good ends I made him justice... So he serve My purposes, let him hang or damn, I care not; Friendship is but a word. 71) 71a) Daumier, 1834, The Legislative Belly, Lithograph; + V detail Same, The Legislative Belly, another detail; + V closer detail With Daumier, as everywhere in the 19th century, the attack is no longer religious but social. And where the abuse had seemed exceptional, what is caricatured here is the monthly assembly of ruling property, as Daumier titles it, "The Legislative Belly." So Lesconte de Lisle, "To the Moderns": (Neff) Murderers of Gods! the time is near When, sprawled on a great heap of hoarded gold, Having gnawed down to bare rock the nourishing soil, Not knowing what to do with the days and the nights, Drowned in the nothingness of utter boredom. You will die stupidly, cramming your pockets. This is the ubiquitous "Money-Bags" of Marx's Labour Process, who tries to justify his existence: "Have I myself not worked... not performed the labour of superintendence?" — While "His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles." [p.215, Modern Library Giant] 72) English Gothic Revival (Barry and Pugin), 1840-52, Houses of Parliament, London; + V details June 1996 19th Century 40 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The hard-fought sin of Usury has become the baptized fabric of Christian society — Marx: The sphere within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labor goes on, is in fact the very Eden of the innate rights of man. [p. 195] The English Houses of Parliament, built after the fire Turner painted, are a windowed shell before the operations of imperial banking, manufacture and trade. Ironic inversion — "the religious world is but the reflex of the real world" — that such a shell should take the ancient sacred form of Perpendicular Gothic. But Marx's irony yielded to such a rage — The Pharisee of a capitalist denounces this brutality which he himself creates, perpetuates, and exploits — [p. 432] that he perhaps undervalued the reform Christianity of those "fish-blooded" bourgeoisie. 73) 73a) 73b) 73c) 73d) Photograph, 1870, Steam Hammer of 1861 in the Krupp Works, Germany; + V detail John F. Weir, 1886, The Gun Foundry, from sketches made near West Point, Civil War, Putnam County Historical Society, NY (here the video returns to 73, the Krupp steam hammer) U.S. Industry c. 1880, Rails in a Steel Works, National Archives, Washington, D.C. T. Anschutz, 1880's, Steelworks, left detail, Kennedy Galleries, Inc. Great Witley (ruined mansion), c. 1860, near Stourport Works, Worcester (CGB '66) Not so their Faustian power. That capitalist drone, who did not seem to labor or even superintend, becomes the driving force of a process as staggering as the Krupp steam hammer of 1861, apparent model in Chaplin's Modern Times: In Industry [Marx writes] man succeeded for the first time in making the product of his past labour work on a large scale gratuitously, like the forces of nature. [p.424] June 1996 19th Century 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Now "the work of directing, superintending, and adjusting" [p. 363], required by "all combined labour on a large scale," "becomes one of the functions of Capital". The result is an industrialization labor could never have achieved on its own: a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast and furious whirl of his countless working organs. [p.416] Here the Capitalist steps forth in giant boots — such a Faust of accumulations as dwarfs Dickens' Hard Times Bounderby: he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce... those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual is the ruling principle. [p. 649] Self-indulgent Money-bags is almost lost in this devotee. Yet "Two souls, alas, dwell in his breast" — A Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoyment. [p. 651] 74) 74a) Blake, 1789-94 (1826 copy), The Chimney Sweeper, Songs of Innocence and Experience, Rosenwald, Library of Congress; + V details Blake, 1794, Europe: A Prophecy, title page, detail, with Serpent of Materialism, Privately owned (Dover) The predictable fall of that Faust-ambivalence distinguishes dialectic materialism from the poetic cry against the same abuses: Blake's "Chimney Sweeper" — A little black thing among the snow, Crying "weep! weep!" in notes of woe! "Where are thy father and mother, say?" "They are both gone up to the Church to pray." Compare Marx: Previously the workman sold his own labour power... Now he sells his wife and child. He has become a slave dealer... In spite of legislation the number of boys sold in Great Britain by their parents to act as live chimney sweeping machines... exceeds 2000... [p. 432-3] June 1996 19th Century 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But to forge that outrage, on the model of Newton's causality (which Darwin also stretched by metaphor), to an equational science of value — Marx, in the face of an organic unfolding of power-riches self-created, reverting to the old a priori "nothing can come of nothing" a75) b75) 75) Blake, 1793-94 (copy 1799 ff), America: A Prophecy, detail of Plate 5: Flame erupts unde the snake-spiral of materialism Again, Blake, 1794, Europe, detail of Plate 2: Social and racial oppression H. Daumier, c. 1850(?), Third Class Carriage, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; + V details (the last video detail overflows into the a76 section) and so deriving from the quantified ground of labor all productive machinery and accumulations; where the organizing capitalist supplies nothing, nature costs nothing, cooperation nothing, past labor, congealed in machines, works gratuitiously, and that "live monster that is fruitful and multiplies" must be distrained from the only postulated source: The ownership of past unpaid labour is therefore the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale (p.638) — to hammer outrage into the axiomatic net of Das Kapital, Blake might have thought a Urizenic task. Though the rhetoric glows like Luvah — like the dark oils of Daumier's Third Class Carriage: all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process...turn his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. [p. 708] a76) 76) van Gogh, 1885, The Potato Eaters, whole, V.V.G. Foundation, Amsterdam (video places the whole after the 76 details) Same, The Potato Eaters, detail; + V closer detail, then the whole June 1996 19th Century 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But all methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. [p. 708-9] (So Van Gogh's Potato Eaters have sunk from Daumier's Third Class to The Lowest Depths.) Marx: Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more the more labour it can suck. [p. 257] In Van Gogh, who had preached in the mining region of Mons, evangelical Christianity, socialist sympathy, and Symbolist art all meet in an Expressionist break and "transvaluation of value". 77) 77a) 77b) Russian Traditional, 1714, Domes, Church of the Transfiguration, Lake Onega (or V77 horizontal variant) F. Alexeyev, 1794, St. Petersburg, view of the Palace Embankment from Peter and Paul Fortress, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Russian (Renaissance-Byzantine), 1555-60, Cathedral of St. Basil, Moscow Russia, battleground of Christian, Symbolist, and Socialist extremes, was a land so bedded in the past that folk building of the 18th century combines the domes of Byzantine and Tartar with the timbering of the Viking north — a land which now at the style-surface telescopes French Rococo, English Liberalism and German Romantic, surging toward the 1900's like Gogol's troika in Dead Souls: And Russia, art thou not too flying onward like a spirited troika that nothing can overtake... What terrifying onrush... What mysterious force... never seen before. Ah, horses — what horses! Is the wind hidden under your manes?... Russia, whither?... She gives no answer. The ringing of the bells melts into music... everything on earth is flying by, and the other states and nations, with looks askance, make way and draw aside. a78) A. Ivanov, c. 1850, Boys Basking in the Sun, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow June 1996 19th Century 44 �C.G. Bell 78) Symbolic History A. Ivanov, c. 1850, Head of St. John the Baptist, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (video returns to a detail of Boys Basking in the Sun and thereafter to a detail of John the Baptist The troika is our clue to Gogol's plan, that Dead Souls, study of Russia in social decay, should be the first of a regenerative trilogy. He is said to have written the second, a Purgatory of Transition, but burned it dissatisfied, and again, after painful rewriting, by mistake. The third, the Paradiso, was not attempted. This painter Ivanov spent the same thirty years working toward a religious masterpiece, The Appearance of Christ before the Multitudes, of which yearning sketches remain the best fruit. Dostoievsky too, who shifted Crime and Punishment from suicide-course to salvation, intended a trilogy, of which the present Brothers, centered in Ivan, would be the Inferno of a Pan-Slavic ascent of Russia tried and saved. As Father Paissy says: The Church is not to be transformed into the State. That is Rome and its dream... On the contrary, the State is transformed into the Church, will ascend and become a Church over the whole world — which is the opposite of... Rome... and is only the glorious destiny ordained for the Orthodox Church. This star will arise in the east! 79) 79a) I.E. Repin, 1901, Portrait of Tolstoy, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; + V details Serov, 1937, Lenin's arrival in Petrograd in 1917, USSR (video adds, from 79, a detail of Tolstoy's head) That destiny was spiritual, but it has come to pass by material–ism, anathema to the great men of the '40's — this Tolstoi, painted in age by Repin — a hint at the reversals of the organizing play. Thus Le Maistre, Tolstoi's Napoleonic source, Catholic and Royalist counterpole to the Liberal ferment, had become a feature of the court of the Czars. In absorbing that skeptic absolutism, Tolstoi turns it to an intuitive surrender to the divinity of the peasant mass, the prompting of Russian soul. So his Platon Karataev ("The Plato who cannot speak well") mediates Pierre's life-acceptance — with the barefoot search in which Tolstoi would close his life. But for Kutuzov's enactment of the Slavic will, already wrenched from Le Maistre's Machiavellian power-politics, to incorporate itself by a further antinomy, the proletarian iconoclasm of Marx, for an actualization the converse of Father Paissy's dream — is a dialectic the aristocrats of Russian soul could hardly have anticipated. June 1996 19th Century 45 �C.G. Bell 80) Symbolic History M. Vrubel, 1890., Sitting Demon, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; + V details Music: Scriabin, 1903, Etude, 0pus 42, No. 5, close, (Horowitz) Columbia M 31620 Vrubel's 1890 brooding Demon or Genie, its Symbolist forms breaking into the abstract, closes the century. Let it stand with Scriabin, who made his life a medley of visions extolling three things, the new Art, the new Gospel, the new Left: "There must be no more money and no more poor." All his music was in preparation for a great tone poem Mystery, for which he had invented a language of cries and ejaculations; it was to be performed in a hemispherical temple in a lake in India (the reflection completing the perfect sphere), and at its climax Nietzsche's leap to the Superman would occur, and revolution be fulfilled in an ecstasy of Spirit. Though he had bought a cork helmet to explore the site, the World War (as with Thomas Mann, Hesse, and so many) intervened, turning The Poem of Fire to a baptism grosser than those post-Romantics had conceived. (end Scriabin) June 1996 19th Century 46 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 46 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 19th Century : The Loaded Dream, Symbolic History, Part 31 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 31 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_31_19th_Century--The_Loaded_Dream Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/62add3132f30ef4b71f99f920ce83f3a.pdf 522906e59bd36f495cc1b98fd06d3351 PDF Text Text C.G. Bell Symbolic History SYMBOLIC HISTORY Through Sight and Sound 30. O Western Star (Whitman's America) a1) Double: Engravings of [A] Thoreau and [B] Whitman (from 1855 Leaves) Vb1) Again engraving of Whitman, whole 1) Brady(?), called 1849-50, Photograph of Whitman (Black coat and holding hat); first, video detail Music: Beethoven, 1812, from 7th Symphony, lst Movement, opening, (Toscanini) V.LM - 6901 (9) "Eastward I go by force," said Thoreau, "but Westward I go free." What deepening eddies mark the westering stream. (music) From Beethoven's Third to his Ninth (here the Seventh) the wave of I AM sucks up more and more of earth-silt and man's negation. (fade 7th) Advancing through the mass of Schubert's great C Major. Music: Schubert fin. 1828, Symphony No.9, 4th Mov. close Col. ML 5619 So in the immediacy of Brady's 1850 photograph, "Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son," enfleshes Schleiermacher's 1799 creed: In the midst of the finite to grow to the infinite, to be eternal at every moment, that is the immortality religion offers. (Schubert continues) a2) American, c. 1855, Photograph of Emerson, Antiquarian Society, Concord, Massachusetts 2) Mathew Brady, c. 1862, Photograph of Whitman (white shirt, open collar) 2a) Mathew Brady, 1862, Whitman with hat (age 43), New York Public Library V2b) Mathew Brady, 1867, Whitman with arms crossed, National Archive "I was simmering and simmering," said Whitman; "it was Emerson brought me to boil." Emerson, dropping from "the great Stoic motto" its Pythian "Nothing in excess," turned that warning "Know thyself!" about-face: currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God... June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 1 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (close of Schubert) While from Schubert to Bruckner the yea-saying downs huge draughts of raw matter, Wagner's passion, Whitman's concrete — Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude — crushing "a simple separate person" with the Demos godhead of space and time: "I moisten the roots of all that has grown." Music: Bruckner, 1881-3, Symphony No. 7., close of last mov., Nonesuch H-1139 I celebrate myself... I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass... I know I am deathless, I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass, I know I shall not pass like a child's carlaque cut with a burnt stick at night... Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from, The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer. This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds ... (close of Bruckner) a3) b3) c3) 3) 3a) 3b) 3c) Thomas Cole, 1833, Schroon Mountain, Cleveland Museum of Art Peter Birmann, c. 1800(?), View of the Rhine near Basel, Kunstmuseum, Basel Thomas Cole, 1846, The Oxbow, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Thomas Cole, 1833-36, The Savage State, New York Historical Society, New York City Thomas Cole, 1846-47, Prometheus Bound, Philadelphia Museum of Art Thomas Cole, 1833-36, Fall of Empire, New York Historical Society, New York City Again 3, Savage State, detail June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 2 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over... my elbows rest in sea-gaps, I skirt sierras, my palms cover continents... Music: Beethoven, 1804, Waldstein Sonata, Op.53, opening, (Schnabel) Angel, COLH 59 Waldstein. The Faust-search of that Germany set seed in America: to hold Emersonian good through "all terrible balks and ebullitions." If music and even art trail the god-grapplings of the word, those landscapes that fan out from the Hudson River to the Mississippi, Rockies, Andes, have not neglected Whitman's "Spirit that form'd this scene." In Cole's 1833 "Savage State," the first of five depictions of the same scene through the rise and fall of empire, the mountain reared over the harbor from wild through culture to moonlight and ruins speaks the titan identification for which Cole, in a later picture, stretched a nude Prometheus on a snowier crag. "Be it life or death," said Thoreau, "we seek only reality." But which would it be? Emerson's "In the presence of nature a wild delight runs through man"; or Melville's "as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon." Why not, as in Cole and Beethoven, both in one? (fade Waldstein) 4) Robert Feke, 1745, Reverend Thomas Hiscox, The Breakers, Newport, R.I.; + V details June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 3 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History How Feke's Reverend Hiscox, of 1745, would have frowned on either arrogation. If West is the open and exploratory, future and transcendental Now, the forest of intuitive morality and dissolving shorelessness, its quest is in a space somehow round, as Emerson, for all his optimism, saw in "Uriel": In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless and ice will burn... Wherefore, as with other titans, A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell On the beauty of Uriel. The ultimate Westward sail — "All bound as is befitting each, all surely going somewhere" — must veer again East to authority, limit, past, the moral prison of the Scarlet Letter. In the time of this preacher Hiscox, Jonathan Edwards reverted from Berkeleian speculation: "Bodies have no existence of their own... all is mental," to an absolute Calvinism: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." 5) English, c. 1670, Portrait of John Clark (Fortune, July '42, p. 85) And from a century earlier, the free humanity portrayed in John Clarke, tolerant Puritan, and voiced by Hooker or Roger Williams: The Soveraigne origin and foundation of civill power lies in the People... (who) may elect and establish what forme of Government seemes to them most meete for their civill condition — that Anne Hutchinson covenant of Grace 2nd 4 and for 2nd 5) English, c. 1640, John Winthrop, American Antiquarian Soc.; first, V detail was always eddying to reaction — Winthrop: June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 4 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History We see not that any should have authority to set up any other exercise beside what authority hath already set up... To whom Emerson: ...not for all his faith can see Would I that cowléd churchman be. And Whitman, fierce as Blake: Allons! from all formules! From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests. 6) 6a) John Greenwood, c. 1757-58, Yankee Captains Carouse in Surinam; Art Museum, St. Louis; + two V details Thomas Nast, 1879, A Dead Failure, lithograph On one side vision stiffens to rigor; on the other, slides toward that May-pole Merrymount Bradford called "beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians". Within a hundred years, the sea-captain descendents of stern Bradford and the rest were painted at carouse in Surinam, swilling punch, one spilling it onto a sleeper's head, while another pukes in his pocket. So Rembrandt's burghers decline to the Rake's Progress of Hogarth, and after another century to the aged Hollow Men of Hawthorne's Custom House: They spent a good deal of time, also, asleep in their accustomed corners, with their chairs tilted back against the wall; awaking, however, once or twice in a forenoon, to bore one another with the several thousandth repetition of old sea-stories, and mouldy jokes, that had grown to be passwords and countersigns among them. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 5 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History So the zeal of Revolution would wane to Whitman's Gilded Age: the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil-like lethargy, 7) Colonial, c. 1770-90(?), State House, Annapolis, Maryland (CGB '60) the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets, thunder-storms, deaths, births, new projections and invigorations of ideas and men... And wherever the great buildings of civic virtue arose, in Boston, Philadelphia, this Annapolis State House, where Washington surrendered his command (the dome erected soon after), one had always to inquire how far the persons investing those noble shells 8) 8a) John Copley, 1764, Nathanial Sparhawk, Fine Arts Museum, Boston John Copley, 1775, Mr. and Mrs. Izard, Fine Arts Museum, Boston might be defecting to outward form: Copley's Sparhawk, like Franklin, a shrewd Yankee Whig in the mantling robes of Europe. Franklin brought it off; but Tom Brainless in Trumbull's Progress of Dulness. is refined at college from a farm boor to a city fop. And would not Whitman, a century later, "look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease"? Are there, indeed, men here worthy the name? Are there athletes? Are there perfect women, to match the generous material luxuriance?… Are there crops of fine youths and majestic old persons?... These cities, crowded with petty grotesques... playing meaningless antics. 9) Copley, 1765-70, Paul Revere, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; + V detail Music: Wm. Billings, c. 1776, Chester, Col. MS 7277 (from 2nd stanza on) On the tide that rose toward Revolution — this Billings marching tune — Copley's Paul Revere puts off lace and columns, unfallen man claiming freedom for good laws and a good life. So Crèvecoeur, French aristocrat. who came to the colonies in 1754, saw the Frontier as a land of spirit, shaping the new American: June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 6 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History An European... no sooner breathes our air than he... begins to feel the effects of a sort of resurrection... he begins to forget his former servitude... his heart involuntarily swells and glows; this first swell inspires him with those new thoughts which constitute an American. (end Billings) 10) J.S. Copley, 1785, Youngest Daughters of George III, Royal Collection But neither Crèvecoeur nor Copley could sustain the war of values, the crassness and menace of patriot mobs. Copley fled to England, painted the royal children; Crèvecoeur, in France, damned the outcome of the liberating dream: worship the demon of the times, trample on every law, break every duty, neglect every bond... become a clamorous American, a modern Whig, and offer every night incense to the God Arimanes. It was the reversal Lenau would experience a generation later: For 2nd 9) John Copley, 1770, Eleazer Tyng, National Gallery, Washington D.C. On the 8th of October I first put foot on American soil... Bruder, diese Amerikaner sind himmelanstinkende Krämerseelen — Brother. these Americans stink to heaven. They are shopkeepers, nothing but shopkeepers. No souls. Dead to the life of the spirit. Dog-dead... 2nd 10) Again, Copley, King's daughters, detail it seems of the deepest significance that America has no nightingale. It is a poetic curse... Va11) 11) Claude Lorrain, 1636, Seaport; Uffizi, Florence Same, Lorrain's Seaport, detail Music: John Jenkins, c. 1640(?), close of a Fancy for 5 parts and organ, in C Minor, Argo RG 73, Side A, No.3 Drab terminus of the utopian call of sea and setting sun, Claude's 1638 Harbor, with a Jenkins fantasy, and Marvell's Pilgrim settlers, "Safe from storms and prelate's rage": (c.1654?) June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 7 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Where the remote Bermudas ride, In the ocean's bosom unespied, From a small boat. that rowed along, The listening winds received this song: "What should we do but sing His praise, That led us through the watery maze, Unto an isle so long unknown, And yet far kinder than our own?..." Thus sung they, in the English boat, An holy and a cheerful note; And all the way, to guide their chime, With falling oars they kept the time. (close of Jenkins) 12) 12a) William Hodges, 1775, Tahiti Revisited; National Museum, Greenwich, England Same, Tahiti, detail; + another V detail (cf. V12b) We have skipped Marvell's description of the bounteous isle, where God has provided "all foison": He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like Golden lamps in a green night, And does in the pomegranates close Jewels more rich than Ormus shows... Music: Mozart, 1791, "Ein Vogelfänger" from The Magic Flute, Deutsche Gram. 2709 017 A sea-girt paradise, to revive again and again, this Hodges "Tahiti Revisited" of 1775 (time of Mozart) from which Melville, if he had not experienced the actuality, might almost have taken the valley-pool of Typee: All around its banks waved luxuriant masses of tropical foliage, soaring high above which were to be seen, here and there, the symmetrical shafts of the coconut trees... so many waving ostrich plumes... The maidens of the valley... darted through the water, revealing glimpses of their forms... some of the young men... brought... a canoe from the sea... Fayaway... with a wild exclamation of delight disengaged from her person the ample robe of tappa... shielding her June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 8 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History from the sun, and spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe. (fade Mozart) In Moby Dick that verdant land is set in appalling ocean: Music: Beethoven, c. 1803, Sonata 17, D Min., 0pus 31, No. 2, "Tempest" (Brendel), opening, Murray Hill S-34564 So in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, a13) 13) 13a) Turner, c. 1840(?), Waves Breaking Against the Wind; Tate Gallery, London Copley, 1778, Watson and the Shark; Fine Arts Museum, Boston [There is another version in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.] Double: [A] Goya 1799, The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters; Prado, Madrid; and [B] Blake, 1805-10, Book of Job: Behold now Behemoth; Morgan Library, New York City but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! But what choice has the heroic soul? as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as god — so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety… 0 Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean perishing — straight up, leaps thy apotheosis! (fade Tempest) Copley's dramatization of Watson and the Shark is a quarter of a century before Beethoven's Tempest, and three quarters before Melville. But one who had felt the New World harden around him was on the titan track where Lenau, sailing west in 1832, would chant: Fly with the white clouds through the wide sky, white ship... Foam behind me all the gray abyss That holds the heart from freedom, its desire; June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 9 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History and returning, from cities and a frontier "dog-dead to the spirit", would see a youth swept overboard and drowned: And the murderous old ocean smiled At the sky, oblivious of wrong. Had not Copley's contemporaries, Goya and Blake, glimpsed Melville's "gliding great demon of the seas of life"? Va14) Middle Rhine, c. 1410, Paradise Garden; Staedelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt Same, Paradise Garden, detail left 14) Music: Oswald von Wolkenstein, c. 1410-20(?) Sag an Herzlieb, close, Archiv 3033 The paradise of the Middle Ages had been the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs, "my Love is a Garden enclosed." In that walled grace, where the resolving chords are still the earthless fifths and octaves, pure as the art colors — ruby, gold, cerulean — there is no moody filling in of romantic wish and pain. (end v. Wolkenstein) 15) Thomas Birch, c. 1830(?), The Delaware near Philadelphia, Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C.; + V detail, ships, right (V15a) Music: Beethoven, 1816, from An die Ferne Geliebte, "Ewiglich" etc., LHMV-1046 But when conscious paradise has touched the shores of old world and new, so that Thomas Birch fills an outing on the Delaware with the time-fruit of Beethoven and Schelling — The birth of Spirit is the realm of history, as the birth of light is the realm of nature —, then soul is vulnerable. Wordsworth suffers in the sea-drowning of his brother not only grief but the shock of moral betrayal: I could have fancied that the mighty Deep Was even the gentlest of all gentle things. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 10 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Now "a power is gone, which nothing can restore." (fade "klagt ihr Vöglein") 16) C. D. Friedrich, 1821, The Wreck of the Hope, Kunsthalle, Hamburg He sees: That hulk, which labors in the deadly swell, This rueful sky, this pageantry of fear! Even Caspar David Friedrich, celebrant of earth-soul, painted in 1821 "The Wreck of the Hope," in the stark geometry of "ice, mast-high, came floating by,/ As green as emerald." Goethe had lived with the demonic; but the anguish of 1830 bodies forth the lost illusion. Leopardi fears "the hideous power" of nature, "Mother in birth, stepmother in desire" ("Madre in parto ed in voler matrigna"); De Vigny asked never to be left alone with that goddess he knew too well not to fear ("Car je la connais trop, pour n'en pas avoir peur.") For 2nd 15) Thomas Cole, 1839, Notch of the White Mountains; National Gallery, Washington D.C. And still Emerson would go on writing (1836): Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man... a virtuous man is in unison with all her works... For 2nd 16) John Martin, 1852, The Great Day of His Wrath; Tate Gallery, London Until the bitter wave breaks in Melville with his white symbol of "the demonism of the world": all deified nature absolutely paints like the harlot. whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within... The palsied universe lies before us like a leper. 17) T. Gericault, 1818, Raft of the Medusa; Louvre, Paris; first, video detail; then, upper right (sail), from the Louvre oil sketch; while video, after '96, June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 11 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History shows a clearer sail (V17a) from the Louvre oil, then V17b, the whole Louvre sketch Music: Chopin 1842, Ballade #4, Op.52, close, Rubinstein, Vic. LSC-2370 Emerson's euphoria ("sins and the like are the soul's mumps and measles") turned the battle of affirmation against dire fact to a time-drama in America ("he must make his optimism good somehow against the eternal hell itself," said Melville). But in art and music (here Chopin's 4th Ballade), the outcry punctuates the century. Gericault's 1818 Raft of the Medusa, from real disaster and shipwrecked France, verges, with Byron's castaways, on metaphysical pain: Pierre: "Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot." Yet a sail is on the horizon; the derelicts are saved. (close Ballade) As from the Brontès to Dostoievsky, torment sounds the chords of regeneration. How else could that arrogation of torment be borne? 18) Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1440, Creation and Expulsion; Lehmann, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Expulsion was the creed account — Giovanni di Paolo's 15th-century depiction, where God's creation of the circling universe caps a banishment which (like Moonshine in the lanthorn) belongs in that wheel. All validities of nature and man hang in a bright inconsequence of jewelled details stretching symbolic space. 19) 19a) Thomas Cole, 1828, Expulsion from Eden, Fine Arts Museum, Boston; + V detail, right Same, Cole Expulsion, detail left; + V return to the whole But for Cole in 1828, symbols have assumed the body of the dimensional world. The landscape of exile frames the contrast American writers would debate through the century. Emerson faces the sunlit valley of Eden: Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space all mean egotism vanishes... The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms. It is what Lenau thought to find at the headwaters of the Ohio. But what he describes, this Adam and Eve enter outside the rock-gate: The red light of evening filters dimly June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 12 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Into the terrible reaches of the forest, Where life and death have fought hushed together A thousand years their ultimate grim wager... In vain life stirs, in vain seeks some cranny, Through stems of rot and mould, death's choking fingers. Over four centuries, the attempt to realize God's kingdom in the mastered here and now, had raised recurrent doubt how satanically flawed the achievement must be. 20) Jean Fouquet, c. 1453-55, St. Margaret, Hours of Etienne Chevalier; Louvre, Paris In Fouquet, the pastoral and human blend in Gothic acceptance, so calm an earthpossession, one might not guess that the meeting of the haloed Shepherdess, St. Margaret, with the Roman prefect, initiates her martyrdom. If Renaissance so suspends reason's claim, 21) El Greco, c. 1610, Laocoon, detail, National Gallery, Washington D.C. (CGB '60) those fierce breaks back (or forward) to apocalyptic dread, when "very force entangles/ Itself with strength" and the outward "rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct/ As water is in water" (the Shakespeare Melville would take up so overwhelmingly: Now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief... Toward thee I roll, thou all destroying but unconquering whale... Thus I give up the spear!) those Judgment breaks, as in El Greco, 1610, attend the culminant throes 22) 22a) 22b) Jan Both, c. 1645, Italian Landscape; Wallace Collection, London Inness, 1865, Peace and Plenty, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Cuyp, c. 1660(?), A Road near a River, Dulwich Picture Gallery of the temporal formulation itself — the 17th century conscious grasp (as in this Both, inspirer of Cuyp) of a now light-ordered and light-transfigured phenomenal realm — a rallying point for later America, as when Inness irradiates the close of the Civil War in "Peace and Plenty". In such spirit Emerson and Thoreau quote Herbert: June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 13 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Man is all symmetry Full of proportions, one limb to another And all to all the world besides… Music and light attend our head… Traherne's 1670 Christian mysticism is pre-Transcendental: That all the earth is one continued globe, And that all men therein are living treasures. That fields and meadows are a glorious robe Adorning it with smooth and heavenly pleasures. That all we see is ours... each one most blest… 23) Magnasco, c. 1720-30, Storm with Fleeing Monks, detail, Brera, Milan; + V detail Yet the turn to the next, and Swiftian, century can wrench "all that's kind to our mortalities," as in reason's shipwreck, to the Magnasco storm and night-lighted barefoot friars groping for the refuge of the old religious cave — like Faust's pious couple with their chapel bell's "eternal bim-bam-bimmel." Is it some "love of rags and cult of the wound" that sends Hester back to the penance of the Scarlet Letter, or Hilda searching crypts and Dark Age towers in The Marble Faun? 24) Constable, 1828 version of 1802 sketch (in Victoria and Albert Museum), The Vale of Dedham; National Gallery, Edinburgh; + V detail But Enlightenment pressed on with our title to the fruitful earth. Even the Romantic unrest is quietly domesticated in Old Crome, this Constable, Cotman, early Turner — builds a free-brush doctrine of Lake-School good: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils... Experience garnered for later pensive moods: They flash upon that inward eye June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 14 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. 25) Durand, 1849, Kindred Spirits, Public Library, NYC (video uses V25) The American affinity is more with the Germans — or, in Wordsworth, with the pantheism of 1798: One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. In Durand's "Kindred Spirits" these affirmers of the ideal forest are Cole and Bryant ("To him who in the love of Nature holds/ Communion with her visible forms...," TinternAbbey blank verse; "Whither, midst falling dew," Lyrical-Ballad); but they might almost be Emerson and Thoreau: The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit… And if Emerson should squeeze in a word or two: I yield myself to the perfect whole… it would be Thoreau again, speaking of the beautiful bug which hatched out of the dry leaf of an old table, "to enjoy its perfect summer life at last." a26) 26) V26a) Washington Allston, 1818, Elijah in the Desert fed by the Ravens, Fine Arts Museum, Boston Allston, before 1837, Ship in a Squall; Fogg, Cambridge Allston, 1804, Rising of a Thunderstorm at Sea, Fine Arts Museum, Boston But from before 1820, Washington Allston, steeped in the alienation of baroque Rome, had taken the other tack — like Gothic Poe: Mountains toppling evermore Into seas without a shore; Seas that restlessly aspire, Surging unto skies of fire... June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 15 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History or the Poe Whitman dreamed, on "a vessel... torn sails and broken spars," through such a storm as the "gallant ship" Melville saw painted in Father Mapple's church, "beating... off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers" — or the storm where Ahab candles the sky's fire. Toqueville called realism the American mode. But in the antinomy of the century, which is always realism against transcendental and romantic, it is the Americans who (as Thackery would say) espouse dream, the English, beef and ale. Though dreams have to seem real. As Stuart joked, "Nobody could beat Mr. Allston in making water." But what Allston mostly made was symbol: "I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee." a27) 27) 27a) John Quidor, 1829, Rip van Winkle, National Gallery, Washington D.C. John Quidor, 1832, The Money Diggers, Brooklyn Museum, New York City; first, video detail, Vb27 Mathew Brady, 1845, Andrew Jackson, Brady-Handy Collection Music: Gottschalk, 1859, from Marche des Gibaros, Mus. Her. Soc. 3135 In music, Creole Gottschalk would exploit that vein — such chiaroscuro as Quidor had drawn from Irving's Headless Horseman, Rip van Winkle, or the story illustrated here, when a buccaneer's ghost (top right) scares night thieves from pirate gold. Though the master scene of fire- and moonlit weird is Poe's of digging by lantern at a point extrapolated from where the Goldbug fell through the eye of a tree-nailed skull — the kind of grotesquery Tom Sawyer would delight in. While for Hawthorne those devils Goethe thought the New World could be spared are real. The Witches' Sabbath seen by Goodman Brown taints Faith and virtue everywhere. Thus, under the surface de Toqueville staked out for the democratic arts, a ghostly battle is waged, of Transcendental hope and demonic possession: "I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil." (fade Gottschalk) 28) 28a) 28b) George Bingham, 1851, Daniel Boone leads Pioneers through the Cumberland Gap, City Museum, Saint Louis, MO American, 1846, The Murder of Jane McCrea, Historical Association of Cooperstown, New York City Again, 28, Boone and Pioneers, detail June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 16 �C.G. Bell 28c) Symbolic History American, c. 1858, The Railsplitter (Abe Lincoln), Historical Society, Chicago; first, V detail Emersonian promise goes West, as auspiciously as Dan Boone, in the painting by Bingham of Missouri, leads settlers to the "Dark and Bloody Ground." But all those earth-grabs have been claimed for Satan in "Young Goodman Brown": I helped your grandfather the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman... I brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village... Thus Boone was lawyered out of his holdings, and ended his life an embittered semisquatter. Toqueville: Nothing can offer a more miserable aspect than these isolated dwellings... An ark of civilization amid an ocean of foliage… How depressing to the poet Lenau, as he wrote from Ohio: You see no courageous dogs here, no fiery horses, no men of real passion... It is sad to observe these burnt-out creatures in their burntout woods. Yet Lincoln was growing up among them; in a few years Thoreau would build such a shack by Walden Pond. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 17 �C.G. Bell a29) 29) Symbolic History C.G. Bingham, c. 1855(?), A Verdict of the People, detail, City Art Museum, St. Louis Bingham, c. 1851, The Country Election, also City Art Museum, St. Louis (video shows 29 first, then a29, returning to a detail of 29) That epic of Dan Boone sowed the Mississippi valley with the Jacksonian towns Mark Twain would romanticize, and Toqueville study "to learn what we have to fear or hope" from a revolution "which possesses all the characteristics of a Divine decree." But what he found was not unrelated to Lenau's experience in a Baltimore boarding house: They clang a great glutton's bell, and a hundred Americans throw themselves into the room… each falls into a seat, bolts down his food, springs up throwing back the chair, and rushes out to make dollars — eilt davon, dollars zu verdienen… This Bingham County Election ties the representational confidence of The Federalist Papers ("reserved to the people of this country to decide... whether societies of men are really capable"), 30) Hogarth, c. 1754, Election Series, Chairing the Member, Soane Museum, London (video shows details only) to the event Pap describes for Huck: "I was just about to go and vote myself, if I warn't too drunk to get there." If one falls back on Whitman's election poem of 1884: The heart of it not in the chosen — the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing — it is remembering that, in the century before, Hogarth had illustrated the electoral process in four brawling pictures (this Chairing the Member, the last), about the time Sam Johnson was writing: Our supple tribes repress their patriot throats And ask no question but the price of votes; With weekly libels and septennial ale, Their wish is full to riot and to rail. 31) George Catlin, 1832, Pigeon's Egg Head, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 18 �C.G. Bell 31a) 31b) Symbolic History Edward Hicks, c. 1845(?), Tolerant William Penn, detail, Philadelphia Museum? Jacob Miller, 1837, Fort Laramie, University of Oklahoma Press Catlin's depiction of the Yellowstone son of a chief before and after the corruption for which he was killed by his tribe, hints at the vastest abuse of all, which most Americans cloaked under "manifest destiny" — until the "Wounded Knee" soulsearchings of our time. De Toqueville: The Lenapes. who received William Penn... have disappeared; and I myself met with the last of the Iroquois, who were begging alms... At the end of the year 1831. while I was on the left bank of the Mississippi at a place named... Memphis, there arrived a numerous band of Choctaws... I saw them embark to pass the mighty river... All were silent. Their calamities were of ancient date and they knew them to be irremediable... The ejectment of the Indians... takes place... in a regular, and, as it were a legal manner... It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws... 32) H.F. Darby, 1845, Reverend John Atwood and Family, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; + V detail, and return to the whole The family of the Reverend Atwood, Baptist, by the boy-painter Darby, seems to exhibit, in Hawthorne's gloomy words: "the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle." It must have been for this preacher image (every member, as in Blake's Family of Job, with the open Book of Law) that Emerson left his church, saying: "Books are for the scholar's idle June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 19 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History times..." "How can he remember well his ignorance," says Thoreau, "which his growth requires…?" It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Of which Whitman concentrates the essence: death under the breast-bones, hell under the skullbones... polite and bland in the parlors. a33) 33) 33a) Thomas Cole, 1840, The Architect's Dream, upper detail; Museum of Art, Toledo, Canada Same, Architect's Dream, whole Same, Architect's Dream, lower detail Music: Schumann, 1836, Fantasy, C Major, Op. 17, close of last mov., Richter, Angel 35679 Though de Toqueville did not find his way to Emerson's door, much less get on the track of Thoreau's lost hound, horse, and turtle-dove, he felt something astir, a "wild enthusiasm... for what is infinite": I should be surprised if mysticism did not soon make some advance among a people solely engaged in promoting its own worldly welfare. True, there were camp-meeting revivals; but the real break was the irradiation of the worldly itself: Thoreau's Now as immanent Coming: God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages... Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 20 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History This is a hybrid, a romantic mysticism, call to temporal possibility, as rooted in earth and history as Hegel, this Schumann, as Cole's Architect, commanding all styles from Pyramid to Gothic ("The passive master lent his hand/ To the vast soul that o'er him planned"). From such a column of the East and past, Emerson exhorts Westward: 34) W.S. Mount, 1838, The Painter's Triumph, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; first, video detail (cf. Va34) We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe… We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men. (fade Schumann at close) In "A Painter's Triumph" Mount assumes the surface of the Dutch small masters — democratic realism reaffirming 17th-century space. But his magic light is his own. "A living dog," says Thoreau, "is better than a dead lion." And Whitman: I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name... Others will punctually come for ever and ever. 35) 35a) G. C. Bingham, c. 1845, Fur Traders descending the Missouri, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Same, Fur Traders, detail; + another V detail Perhaps Bingham's "Fur Traders descending the Missouri" is the most luminous American picture: Thoreau: "Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere." Water is at the heart of it — Emerson's "Two Rivers" through which a deeper flows, "and ages drop in it like rain" — the symbol, above all, that drew Thoreau to Walden Pond: the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself... earth is not continent but insular... Time is the stream I go a-fishing in... I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars... I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapours I judge; and here I will begin to mine. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 21 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Bingham found the richest vein in the trading stream Mark Twain too would treat with religious awe. a36) b36) Allston, 1819, Moonlit Landscape, Fine Arts Museum, Boston A.P. Ryder, 1890, Cove in the Moonlight, Phillips Gallery, Washington D.C. T. Eakins, 1872-76, The Pair-Oared Shell, detail, Philadelphia Museum of Art T. Eakins, 1873, The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake, left detail; Cleveland Art Museum T. Eakins, 1871, Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Vc36) Vd36) 36) So Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter: Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water… "I have a strange fancy... that this brook is the boundary between two worlds." In Moby Dick the soul leans like Narcissus over the watery mirror, "the tormenting mild image... we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." Where but in literature is such an unfolding of soul-search, from the effusive benign of Emerson, heightened to mystery in Thoreau, through Hawthorne's knot of wrong and Melville's war of spirit — from which Whitman, grappling with bare hands and almost desperate hopes against the Grendel-Leviathan of the deep, welcomes every pustulence of flesh, all catalogued negation, into the immanence of a dark divinity called Light? In the art of the century, from Allston to Ryder, from Bingham to this transreal Eakins, the darks and lights of that drama seem variously shuffled. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 22 �C.G. Bell 37) Symbolic History Altdorfer, 1510, Forest with St. George and the Dragon, Alte Pinakothek, Munich: + V detail Yet from Renaissance to Romantic there is the change Auden has traced in The Enchafed Flood. Consider the forest, Dante's Selva Oscura, Spenser's Wandering Wood: in Altdorfer's enshrouding Other, it is just the path to the civilized and open, which the great frog-mother dragon blocks for the battling St. George. 38) A. B. Durand, 1855, In the Woods, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; video divides to upper and lower details For Durand the ancient wood of error is the place sought, the soul's home. Thoreau: At the same time... we require... that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. Hawthorne brings The Scarlet Letter to its climax by moving from the Puritan town to the intuitive forest: "What hast thou to do with all these iron men?... There is happiness to be enjoyed..." She undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and... threw it to a distance among the withered leaves… she took off the formal cap that confined her hair: and down it fell upon her shoulders... forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest... The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood's heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy. 39) A.J. Miller, 1859-60 (sketched 1837), Indian girl Swinging; Walters, Baltimore Such was the sympathy of Nature — that wild heathen nature of the forest... with the bliss of these two spirits! But Hawthorne had left Brook Farm with the cry that they did not know there was such a thing as sin in the world. What the Baltimore painter Miller caught in this sketch of an Indian girl, Hawthorne makes one pole of an inseparable pair: a region June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 23 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History unredeemed, unchristianized... never subjugated by human law, nor illuminated by higher truth... 40) William Page, 1843, Cupid and Psyche, J.D. Rockefeller III, New York 40a) Same, Cupid and Psyche, detail — an ambivalence as dark as burning. Music: Verdi, 1853, from Il Trovatore, close of Leonora solo, Act IV, i, ff., RCA-V-LM-6008 (side 3 near end) (No wonder the operatic cries of love and death in sensuous soaring sweep the age — Once more La Traviata sighs/ Another sadder song: Once more Il Trovatore cries/ A tale of deeper wrong.) So Page's Cupid and Psyche with its passionate oil-glazes, breaks on the nudes of classic ideality as suddenly as Hester floods the pagan forest with a "smile... gushing from the very heart of womanhood." (Trovatore, side 4, "Ah, che la morte") No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. And then that prophetess of a new truth speaks the inner imperative: "What we did had a consecration of its own... We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?" "Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No; I have not forgotten!" 41) Double: Julia M. Cameron, c. 1865-70, [A] Ellen Terry; and [B] the photographer herself; + video singles A and B (Trovatore cont., Miserere) But the hope of love withers to the Puritan scaffold: "Is not this better," murmured he, "than what we dreamed of in the forest?" "I know not! ... Yea; so we may both die, and little Pearl die with us." (Trovatore cont. "Riposa o madre") June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 24 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History As in the deepest record of Victorian personality, Julia Margaret Cameron's high-souled Madonnas, Echoes, Beatrices, complement the somber photographer herself; so the flood of sun and Pearl's redemption ("A spell was broken... her tears... were the pledge") ("Ai nostri monti") light Hester's return to the dark cottage of the Scarlet Letter, the symbol that closes the fable, engraved on her tomb: one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow: "On a field, sable, the letter A, gules." (fade "dormirò") 42) Frederick Church, 1860, Twilight in the Wilderness, Museum of Art, Cleveland; + V detail (cf. V42, CGB '81) (Trovatore, cont. "T'arrendi — fuggi" & "Ha quest' infame") As Thoreau observed in the agitations of Walden Pond, "the thrills of joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable" — the thawing clay forms of his Spring: These foliacious heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within... So in Church's 1860 Wilderness, the winter twilight flames with affirmation. The devil in Hawthorne's inkstand, to be exorcised by penfuls, was the inseparability of opposites, the wild rose at the prison door. And when the black plummet of Hawthorne sounded the mind of Herman Melville, Emerson's: "The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world," turned to hideous and intolerable allegory: (fade "0 fuggi, fuggi") Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. Va43) 43) Horatio Greenough, c. 1840(?), Washington, front view, waist-up; Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. Same, Greenough's Washington, 3/4 view, detail; + V close detail The bare-chested Zeus-Washington Greenough carved in 1840, after absorbing in Rome the heroics of Canova and Thorvaldsen, oversteps the original in more than nudity — tells June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 25 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous slavish shore. The resolve to found New Jerusalem on man's earth, with all concomitant cults of nature, innate worth, freedom, progress and the eternal now, soars from Revolutionary Tom Paine: All the great laws of society are laws of nature... When precedents fail... we must think as if we were the first men that thought... through Emerson: That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen; or from Jefferson: "That government is best which governs the least," through Thoreau: "Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe — That government is best which governs not at all" — toward the titan overreach of Melville's mid-century: a44) 44) Samuel Morse, 1812, Dying Hercules; Yale University Gallery, New Haven William Rimmer, c. 1869, The Fall of Day; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; + V detail Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm? To which Starbuck has already answered: God help thee, old man; thy thoughts have created a creature in thee: and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates. (Trovatore, cont. "Prima che d'altri", 2nd time) Did Rimmer, Boston sculptor-painter-doctor, whose work, shown in Paris, stirred Rodin, know of William Blake? Or did Michelangelo beget likes? From Morse's Dying Hercules, through Cole's Prometheus, to this Fall of Day, about 1867, the chord that resonates is of archangelic overthrow — Ahab-Lucifer: (when) the step-mother world, so long cruel... did seem to joyously sob over him... Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 26 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History ("Io moro" and fade) 45) 45a) Emanuel Leutze, 1851, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Same, detail In 1851. as Melville was wrestling with his whale fable (like Delacroix's Jacob with the angel), Leutze, for German revolutionaries, painted Washington Crossing the Delaware. It too, over those 75 years, has become a god-wrestling — as when Ahab's ship is sinking and Tashtego is nailing the flag to the subsiding spar, and the sky-hawk intercepts his wing between the hammer and the wood, while the Indian freezes in death's etherial thrill: (Trovatore finale, from "Sia tratto al ceppo!") so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it... For between Melville's Moby Dick and Rilling's Fall of Day, our history too had taken a tragic turn, and the celebrated war of freedom ("Egli era tuo fratello!") a46) b46) 46) 46a) Mathew Brady, 1863, Confederate Caisson, Brady-Handy Collection Alexander Gardner, 1864, Photograph of Walt Whitman, Feinberg Collection, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Winslow Homer, 1866, Prisoners from the Front, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Same, Prisoners, detail had worn down to the bitter war of brothers. (close of Il Trovatore) Melville, in neglect after Mobv Dick, turned ironic verse: Your arts advance in Faith's decay; You are but drilling the new Hun... June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 27 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Whitman — that child who "went forth every day,/ And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became": I... see myself in prison shaped like another man... I am the hounded slave... I wince at the bite of the dogs — Whitman nursed the wounded; and against Emerson's "I grieve that grief can teach me nothing," he taught himself (and the painter Homer) to take up the whole crippling wrong as if love could right it: A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim, As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless, As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent, Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying, Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket, Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all. Curious I halt and silent stand, Then with light fingers I, from the face of the nearest, the first, just lift the blanket; Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes? Who are you my dear comrade? Then to the second I step — and who are you my child and darling? Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming? Then to the third — a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory: Young man I think I know you — I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies. 47) D. G. Blythe, 1863, Libby Prison; Fine Arts Museum, Boston; + V detail Now the painter Blythe, in poverty and drink, took on the anguish of Libby Prison. Melville hammers it too, like "a stake through the black heart of Andrew Jackson": But all through the Seven Days' Fight, And deep in the Wilderness grim, And in the field-hospital tent, And Petersburg crater, and dim June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 28 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Lean brooding in Libby, there came — Ah heaven! — what truth to him. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 29 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But Whitman — tens and twenties of thousands of American young men... all sorts of wounds... diarrhoea languishing, dying with fever... body's tragedies bursting the petty bonds of art... Whitman sees the new man "cool and unquestioned master above all pains and bloody mutilations." a48) 48) Photo of Sojourner Truth, c. 1860-65 Alexander Gardner, April 9, 1865, Photograph of Lincoln, Meserve Collection The categorical right, which from Thoreau — The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behaviour — through Hawthorne: "The world's law was no law for her mind"; and Melville: "unless God does that beating... and not I" — would seize with fear and trembling on Huck Finn, when he has come clean and written the letter to give up Jim: I studied... I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide forever betwixt two things... "all right, then, I'll go to hell" — and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said — that crisis has graved its care on Lincoln's face ("like a Hoosier Michael Angelo," Whitman said — here in the last photograph, the day of the surrender at Appomattox, five days before he was shot) — this face the only artwork with the humanity of Whitman's war poems: "Reconciliation": Word over all, beautiful as the sky, Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world; For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin — I draw near, Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 30 �C.G. Bell 49) 49a) Symbolic History Greek Doric, late 5th cent. B.C.(?), Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounion, Attica (CGB '77) Jefferson, completed 1824, University of Virginia, Lawn and Rotunda, Charlottesville (CGB '83) All over Europe, as Revolution rose and turned to Romantic, the columned image of Greece summoned to the free future from an ideal past. Hölderlin's "forests of pillars in the plain of the desert" loom like Promethean towers. In America, meeting houses, Andalusia, Mount Vernon, Jefferson's University, Music: Songs of the Civil War, "All Quiet along the Potomac," from refrain, New World Records 202 the temples of Natchez and Louisiana, claim the mantle of Greece. (fade) Most of all with slave-holding apologists as the Civil War neared: Music: Same, from "We are Coming Father Abraham," refrain Fitzhugh, decrying the wage-bondage of the North: a50) 50) V50a) (fade) Ante Bellum Natchez, c. 1850(?), Dunleith (CGB '80) Ante Bellum, 1861, ruins of "Windsor" near Port Gibson, Miss. (CGB '80) Same, "Windsor," another view (CGB '80) We need never have white slaves in the South, because we have black ones. Our citizens, like those of Rome and Athens are a privileged class... Slavery protects the infants, the aged, and the sick... Music: June 1996 Same, from "We are Coming from the Cotton Fields" O Western Star Whitman's America 31 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History The Southerner is the Negro's friend, his only friend. Let no meddling abolitionist... dissolve the friendship. (close) Inviting the ruins under which the writers of the South have been reared — Music: Same, from "Tenting tonight" (fade) though Windsor, near Port Gibson, Mississippi, like Faulkner's Sutpen's Hundred, was burned after the war. 51) E. Johnson, 1859, Old Kentucky Home, New York Historical Society, New York City; + V detail (V51a) Music: Stephen Foster, 1854, Old Kentucky Home (flute), Col. M 32577 Fitzhugh's South smiles in this painting by Eastman Johnson, of New England — as in the songs of Southern sentiment Stephen Foster wrote before he travelled there. Though it took war and Reconstruction to draw the truth of Uncle Remus from Joel Chandler Harris's otherwise feeble reporting: (fade "Old Kentucky Home") "Howdy, Sis Cow," sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. "W'y, howdy, Brer Rabbit," sez Miss Cow, sez she. "How you fine yo'se'f deze days, Sis Cow?" sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. "I'm sorter toler'ble, Brer Rabbit; how you come on?" sez Miss Cow, sez she. "O, I'm des toler'ble myse'f, Sis Cow; sorter linger'n twix' a bauk en a break-down," sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. "How yo fokes, Brer Rabbit?" sez she. "Dey er des middlin', Sis Cow; how Brer Bull gittin' on?" sez Brer Rabbit, sezee. Music: Songs of the Civil War, from "Dixie," a phrase, chorus "Sorter so-so," sez Miss Cow, sez she … 52) Winslow Homer, 1877, The Carnival, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City: + V detail (V52a) (fade Dixie) June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 32 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Leadbelly, rec.1939, "The Boll Weevil," Fantasy 24715 In the sketches from Winslow Homer's 1875 stay in Petersburg, Virginia, the old plantation sentiment has drained out and left the sharpness and color of Black rags and indomitable jazz and blues, that would take the world by storm — the under-life Faulkner would grope to in Dilsey's church or Nancy's cabin by the ditch in "That Evening Sun." Though the outward poverty might almost vindicate Fitzhugh's scorn of emancipation. (fade Leadbelly) 53) 53a) 53b) 53c) Currier & Ives, 1868, "Westward the course of Empire …"; Roy King Collection, New York Erastus Field, 1875, Monument to the American Republic; Fine Arts Museum, Springfield, MA Currier & Ives, 1862, The Hunters' Stratagem Again 53, Westward..., detail to the right Music: Charles Ives, 1896-8, lst Symphony, close, Col. D3S 783 (side 2) But the Civil War was over: in the expansion which by 1900 would break in Charles Ives, "Walt Whitman of American music" — the booming nation left the broken South to nurse the first American experience of ruin. (close Ives) Currier and Ives titled the 1868 print which pursues the railroad from the East over plains to the Rockies: "Westward the course of Empire takes its way." Would the Concord rallying be reenacted — Thoreau: "Old deeds for old people and new deeds for new" — but forgetting Thoreau's "If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the 'Mill dam' go to?" Emerson had sounded the call: Our log-rolling… and politics... fisheries, Negroes and Indians... are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes... and it will not wait long for metres. No wonder he hailed Whitman's Leaves: the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed... I give you joy of your free and brave thought... June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 33 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Did not its ubiquitous self range the continent, "Prospecting, gold digging, girdling the trees of a new purchase"? Later chants lead westward: I see... the Pacific railroad surmounting every barrier... I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world. 54) American, 1870's, Reckless Driving (provenance unknown) In that homesteading rush, regional authors spring up everywhere, and their postwar life is humor — Mark Twain. Startling, against Melville, to trace the evolution of a comic genius: to see an author who starts in the easy journalist vein of this "Reckless Driving in Frontier America," with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" — 55) Frank B. Mayer, 1858, Independence (Squire Jack Porter); Smithsonian, Washington D.C. — an author who absorbs (like Frank Mayer of Annapolis, in this 1858 portrait called Independence) the innate benign of Emerson, We interfere with the optimism of nature: Wordsworth's "That we can feed this mind of ours/ In a wise passiveness," descending through Thoreau's I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie... I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and Whitman's "Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat," to Huck Finn's "drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars" — June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 34 �C.G. Bell Va56) Symbolic History Winslow Homer, c. 1872, The Nooning, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut Same, Nooning, detail 56) — that an author who could bring the Intimations of Wordsworthian childhood and Thoreau's "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born" to bear on a boyhood fresh as in Winslow Homer's 1870 studies of country schools — turning Tom Paine's scorn of tradition governing beyond the grave: "It is the living who are to be accommodated," to Huck's defiant pragmatism: After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him: but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people. 57) Again from Bingham, c. 1845, Fur Traders, central detail; first, a video detail from slide 35 — that an author, apt to intuitive nature, Paine's "Government like dress is the badge of lost innocence," and Thoreau's I did not want to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary — to keep soul in this earth-body, not shrink philosophy into a Stoic vault or Christian tomb — rather, as Huck, skeptical of prayer, "set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think about it" — to follow Thoreau at Walden pond past "an invisible boundary," to "live with the license of a higher order of beings," abandoning the pretense of church (those Kentucky feuders at the sermon with their guns), taking to the storm river, the sky "ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine"; to float with the riffling water: "You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft" — 58) 58a) William Blake, c. 1806-09, Great Red Dragon and Woman; Museum, Brooklyn, New York Blake, 1795, Nebuchadnezzar; Tate Gallery, London how strange, in the mode of laughter which well-being June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 35 �C.G. Bell Music: Symbolic History Verdi, 1893, Falstaff, laughter, close of Act I, Col. M3S 750 (side 2) shares with scorn, Music: Verdi, 1886, Otello, Iago's laugh, Act 2, London OS.25701 that Mark Twain, heir to such Rousseaunian goods — Emerson's pervasion of frontier and market place — would be seized, like Blake, with the specter of the winged Dragon harrying the woman clothed with the sun — Melville's "visible objects... are but as pasteboard masks." Is it a comic revelation that the maker of the Jumping Frog and Tom Sawyer should have closed his life in the solipsistic tortures of The Mysterious Stranger: 'It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream — a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought — a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!' He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true. 59) Goya, 1791, The Little Giants, Tapestry Cartoon, Prado, Madrid Goya had run such a comic course almost a hundred years before — his opening jollity the court-play of the ancien regime: though among his tapestry designs, those of children remind us how far the loves of Tom and Becky in the Missouri school rested on Enlightenment, Emile, Goldsmith's village green, before the ideal village was deserted. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 36 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History From that delight Goya weathered (also through war) Va60) 60) Goya, 1820-23, Pilgrims of San Isidro, detail; Prado, Madrid Same, Pilgrims, closer detail to the 1820 gall and heartburn of the Black Paintings on the walls of his own Quinta del Sordo near Madrid. If all comedy blends the bacchanal of good and the barbed castigation of wrong, no wonder if its masters slip to the lacerative side (Swift before, Chaplin in our time). Twain's comic peak in Huck Finn is inseparable from the tarred Duke and King, Buck shot down in the feud, Colonel Sherburn's diatribe on man: I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward... Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. Though Huck can still go to the circus, steal under the tent and revel in those "sureenough queens" — "a real bully circus." 61) 61a) 61b) Goya, 1824-28, "Aun aprendo," black chalk drawing, Prado, Madrid Double: [A] photograph of Mark Twain, 1899; and [B] Eaton, painting of Melville (age c. 50) [video singles only] Again 61, Aun aprendo, detail Was it the Baroque heritage or his own resilience that brought Goya in his last years through the black pit to the laughing myth of "Aun aprendo", "I'm still learning"? And was it the vulnerability of Mark Twain himself or of romantic optimism that let him sink always deeper into the cruelty of God and man, whether in exploited Congo or in microscopic nightmare? Though his wit flashed to the end: "I came in with Halley's comet. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet." And he did — 1835 to 1910. Whereas Melville, on tragic course, had already battled the worst, and in Billy Budd come through to a sacramental calm. As Auden wrote: Toward the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness... Thus the hero is executed under the Blakean fatherhood of Starry Vere: June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 37 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History the vapoury fleece hanging low in the East, was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision; and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and ascending took the full rose of the dawn. But if we are contrasting comic and tragic trajectories, what of Goya's "Aun Aprendo"? 62) 62a) 62b) Winslow Homer, 1864, Croquet Scene; Art Institute, Chicago Winslow Homer, 1870, The Bathers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC Homer, again Croquet Scene, center detail In America it is as if the specter of death under spangled robes had to be encountered again and again, each time with a New World surge of delight and shock of confrontation. How luminously Winslow Homer's (red, white, and blue) Croquet Game of 1864 affirms. Against Emerson's soul, Whitman claimed to celebrate the common and tangible. And early James, turning from those Hawthorne visions he loved, would try to refine as observational a fiction as Howells could. No doubt symbols lurk at the core: it is the corrupt misreading of Daisy Miller's fresh light which makes Europeanized Winterbourne say after her death: I was booked to make a mistake. I've lived too long in foreign parts. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 38 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History But the sunlit scene is actual — in The Portrait of A Lady. the ravishing Miss Archer's arrival on the Touchett's Tudor lawn. 63) 63a) Winslow Homer, 1899, The Gulf Stream; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC Same, Gulf Stream, detail Music: Verdi, 1886, Otello, Act I, opening, London OS.25701 By 1899, Homer's realist surface buckles (as in Verdi's Otello) with the symbolic crisis Melville had faced fifty years before — that demonic ubiquity which brought Henry James to the close of "The Beast in the Jungle" — he saw it... rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened — it was close; and instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb. — So too the "huge and monstrous" alter ego of "The Jolly Corner." It was for such seizure of "villain touch... windpipe squeezed in the fakes of death," that Whitman haunted the opera (that 1863 letter from New York, of Medori pouring out song "like a raging river" in a scene of love and poison): Comrades... this is in singing and music... on a big scale... sometimes the whole band and chorus all putting on the steam together... such singing and strong rich music always gives me the greatest pleasure — and so the opera is the only amusement I have gone to, for my own satisfaction for the last ten years. (fade Otello) a64) 64) V64a) J.M.W. Turner, 1805-10, On the Thames, National Gallery, London J.M.W. Turner, I840, Slave Ship, Fine Arts Museum, Boston Same, detail, corpses in the sea [added to video in '96] And Turner, who had begun before 1800 with the Thames, or Cromack Water, agleam, night or day, sun or shower, with transcended Claude, by 1840 (Melville returning from the South Seas, about to sail at once, like Bulkington, on the whaler Acushnet) — Turner's Slave Ship loads the carnivorous sea with such a charnel-house as would ravage again the wits of Black Pip, gone overboard: June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 39 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Pip saw the multitudinous, God omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs... For 2nd 63) Winslow Homer, 1899, After the Hurricane — Bahamas; Art lnstitute, Chicago If Shakespearean tragedy arose on the climb from Medieval contempt of the world to the formulated command called Leibnizian reason, there is an inverse tragic motion down, as optimism transferred to romantic heart swirls once more in cosmic valuedrowning: Russell: That man is the product of forces which had no prevision of the end they were achieving... that all... are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system... Iago's nihilist creed: "I believe in a cruel God": Music: Verdi, 1886, Otello, "Credo in un Dio crudel," London OS 25701 2nd 64) Turner, Slave Ship, detail (video takes detail from 1st 64) 65) J.M.W. Turner, 1836-7, Avalanche, Valley of Aosta, Art Institute of Chicago The destructive immersion had begun with the romantic itself — Turner's 1836 Avalanche in the Vale of Aosta — to peak by mid-century in Melville: I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb... 66) 66a) A.P. Ryder, 1890, Jonah, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.; + V detail Anonymous, 1879, Photograph of Walt Whitman (age 60), NY Public Library And in American art about 1890 in the sea-allegories of Ryder, where habitable space reverts to devouring whirls. Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides: then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. (fade Otello) But Whitman, also by 1871, had to rest the "soul's habitation" almost on Russell's "unyielding despair": June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 40 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Democracy grows rankly up the thickest, noxious, deadliest plants and fruits of all… We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross- and under-currents, vortices — all so dark, untried — and whither shall we turn? 67) 67a) Winslow Homer, 1896, The Lookout — All's well, Fine Arts Museum, Boston Anon., 1882, Photograph of Walt Whitman (age 63), NY Public Library But as Homer's late works grip night and treacherous ocean in the near-abstract endurance of a Lookout's "All's Well," Melville framed Billy Budd's sacrifice in Hegelian history: The opening proposition... rectification of the Old World's hereditary wrongs... Straightway the Revolution itself became a wrongdoer... the outcome of all... a political advance... for Europeans. While Whitman bridled the leviathan of his Democratic Vistas: Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear?... you must pay... with a proportionate price. In an Otello stripped of Shakespeare's vindicating universals, the murdering suicide's last gasp is harmony: Music: Verdi, 1886, close of Otello, London OS.25701 68) 68a) (fade) J.M. Whistler, 1864, Symphony in White No. 2, Tate Gallery, London; + V detail Same, Symphony in White, closer detail Under the behemoth current West, it is curious to trace the eddies of eastward refinement — during the Civil War, but in Paris and England, Whistler's pre-Jamesian Portrait of a Lady, with its Hawthorne-sad reflection: while in Transcendental America, behind the hedge and brick of an Amherst house, such a mirrored brooder spoke in Emily Dickinson: There's a certain slant of light, Winter afternoons, That oppresses, like the heft June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 41 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Of cathedral tunes. Heavenly hurt it gives us; We can find no scar, But internal difference Where the meanings are. None may teach it any: 'Tis the seal, despair, — An imperial affliction Sent us of the air. When it comes, the landscape listens, Shadows hold their breath; When it goes 'tis like the distance On the look of death. 69) 69a) 69b) V69b) V69c) 69d) 69e) June 1996 Raphael Peale, 1823, After the Bath, Nelson-Atkins Gallery, Kansas City, MO A.U. Wertmüller, 1787, Danae and the Shower of Gold, National Museum, Stockholm Double: what the video separates as V69b and V69c, below J.S. Sargent, 1884, Madame X, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Rembrandt, 1646, The French Bed (etching), Amsterdam Rodin, 1884, Eternal Springtime (bronze sculpture), Rodin Mus., Paris Again 69, Peale's Bath, detail O Western Star Whitman's America 42 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Emily offended against verse form; Walt also against the content of Peale's 1823 Girl Drying her Hair: Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs! There had been Wertmüller's coital Danae modelled in Paris by court ladies and exhibited after 1806 in Philadelphia at 25 cents a head. There would be Sargent's Madame X with as much to cover as Chad's wonderful Comtesse in The Ambassadors. But these are Dwight's "foul harlot Europe" against "fair Columbia." If Bradford had confessed of Plymouth Colony: not only incontinencie between persons unmaried... but some maried persons also; but that which is worse, even Sodomie and Bugerie (things fearful to name) have break forth in this land, oftener than once — Whitman was the first to celebrate Breast that presses against other breasts... Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me... How Emerson overlooked that in the Leaves is not clear; but the "Children of Adam" brought it home: Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice. So the man who had written "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," backed off, until in 1865 he was quoted: there is also Walt Whitman, but he belongs yet to the fire clubs, and has not got into the parlors. As if the cry, "Undrape! you are not guilty to me," had torn the sheet off Peale's still-life nude. 70) 70a) G. Courbet, 1866, Laziness and Sensuality, Petit Palais, Paris G. Courbet, 1866, Les deux amies ou La Reveil, private collection, Paris June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 43 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Exposing the lusts of France, Courbet's Lesbians. Was the Whitman shock in part of "things fearful to name" — his union of body and soul, a mystical oral tree: I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me. And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach'd till you felt my beard. and reach'd till you held my feet. Though it was the "dear love of comrades" in Calamus that stirred British Symonds to the question, from which Whitman reeled, claiming mistresses and bastards. Whitman's loading of self, earth, and all with the lushness of either sex may remain mysterious; but what–ever he worshipped, "firm masculine colter" or "brown melons of breasts," it was not prurience: everywhere an abnormal libidinousness... bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners (considering the advantages enjoy'd), probably the meanest to be seen in the world... 71) 71a) 71b) Thomas Eakins, 1883, Swimming Hole, Art Center, Fort Worth, Texas Thomas Eakins, 1880, Female Nude (drawing), Phila. Mus. of Art Again 71, Swimming Hole, detail Eakins held with Whitman to the "sanity of birth, Nature, and humanity": Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly, Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 44 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window. Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah, the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather. The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies swell to the sun... they do not ask who seizes fast to them. They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch. They do not think whom they souse with spray. a72) Thomas Eakins, 1877, W. Rush Carving his Schuylkill River Allegorical Figure, Philadelphia Museum of Art 72) Thomas Eakins, 1908, William Rush and his Model, Acad. of Arts, Honolulu 72a) Thomas Eakins, 1877, Walt Whitman, Phila. Academy of Fine Arts When Eakins, at 66, took up the celebration which had cost him an academy post 30 years before, he resumed the subject of John Rush, Philadelphia sculptor of about 1800, who had carved a statue of the Schuylkill. But Rush here becomes the old Eakins, and the model, whom his touching chivalry aids from the pedestal (wonderfully plain and sexual, as far from classic marble as Whitman's prostitute: "Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you") is the nude Pygmalion carved and Aphrodite turned to flesh. Whitman too had sacrificed to that flesh. As he wrote in 1872: in the United states [neither]... the chief Literary persons or organs... admit Leaves of Grass as having any value, or recognize the author as a poet at all... he has indeed been ignominiously dismissed from a moderate government employment... for the sole and avowed reason that he was the writer of the book... no American publisher will publish it... many of the bookstores refuse to keep it for sale... and the position of the author both as to literary rank and worldly prosperity, in his own country, has been, and remains today, under a heavy and depressing cloud. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 45 �C.G. Bell a73) 73) Symbolic History Double: [A] Monet, 1875, Woman with Parasol, Nat. Gal., Wash. D.C.; and [B] Cezanne, 1900-5, Bathing Women, det., Phila. Mus. of Art J.F. Millet, 1850, The Sower, Fine Arts Museum, Boston; + V detail Is America behind Europe, strangely neck and neck, or, as Whitman dreamed, searching somewhere in the van? Melville, Whitman, Homer, Eakins, Ryder, span the French modern from Monet through Cezanne. But their style affinities are back, as to the revolutionary commitment of mid-century — this Millet Sower, which Whitman would admire in Boston 30 years after: a sublime murkiness and original pent fury... Will America ever have such an artist out of her own gestation, body, soul? Whitman's "Years of the Modern" is as far from Impressionism as The Communist Manifesto: I see men marching and countermarching by swift millions... Are all nations communing? is there going to be but one heart to the globe?... The perform'd America and Europe grow dim, retiring in shadow behind me, The unperform'd, more gigantic than ever, advance. advance upon me. 74) 74a) 74b) I. Repin, 1885, Ivan the Terrible and his Son, Tretyakov Gal., Moscow Double: Photographs of [A] Whitman and [B] Tolstoy Again 74, Ivan and Son, detail Music: Mussorgsky, 1868-72, Boris Godounov (end of Act II), "I am suffocating", beginning and ending (Chaliapin). Angel COLH 100 There are at present [wrote De Toqueville] two great nations in the world, which seem to tend toward the same end, although they started from different points: I allude to the Russians and the Americans... the principal instrument of the Anglo-Americans is freedom; of the Russians servitude... yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe. And Whitman: (without music) You Russians and we Americans!... so unlike at first glance... yet... so resembling each other... the idea, perennial through the ages, that they both have their historic and divine mission... June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 46 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History (Mussorgsky, voice) Like the Americans, Repin in his 1885 Ivan the Terrible, clings to realism, though with a violence which in Mussorgsky's Boris begins to disrupt the canons of the past, stripping (as no doubt Whitman's "barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world" did) toward something elemental. But Whitman against Boris seems light against dark. (close Boris aria) 75) Edouard Manet, 1877, The Suicide, Emil Buehrle Collection, Zürich The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen. Whitman saw the worst as clearly as Manet. He had shared a bed in the frame house in Brooklyn with a congenital idiot brother (the bed Thoreau found unmade on his visit and the chamber pot unemptied); there was the drunkard brother, married to a street-walker; and a third, "the venerealee," who died of softening of the brain. But against Manet's clever reporting (as Salvian said of the late Romans, "saturated with sardonic herbs"), a76) 76) 76a) Cezanne, c. 1887, detail of Mt. Ste. Victoire; Courtland Collection, London [while video uses Va76, Van Gogh, 1888, The Sower, Kröller-Müller, Otterlo] Van Gogh, The Sower, detail of the sun Again, Van Gogh, The Sower, whole (video: wider detail) Whitman's also factual revolt — "What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me," and "the truest and greatest Poetry… can never again, in the English language, be expressed in arbitrary and rhyming metre" — holds to its "wing'd purposes": "the moth and the fish-eggs are in their place." "Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling" — that from 1865; and from The Song of Myself: We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun, We found our own O my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 47 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History It seems another style world, even from this of the prophetically seized Van Gogh — however Van Gogh's color-splash and Whitman's incantation ("Walt, you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?") press the God-rape on the immediate: "I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps" and "I effuse my flesh in eddies, I drift it in lacy jags." Van Gogh's advance is of the ruptured French Salon: technique, Rimbaud, Symbolist art. Whitman is oceans west — and east — of there: And love and faith, like scented roses blooming. 77) 77a) Chinese, Ma Yuan, c. 1190-1230, Walking on a Mountain Path in Spring, Ink and light colors on silk, Palace Museum Collection, Taichung; + V detail Frank Pearsall, 1869, Photograph of Walt Whitman, NY Public Library Music: Chinese classical from "Water and Clouds over the Rivers Hsiao and Hsian" (Ch'in), Everest 2427 From Emerson's "Brahma," "Find me and turn thy back on Heaven," through Thoreau's Kourou artist timelessly carving a perfect staff, to Whitman's merging self and all — as if, on thought's round globe, "facing West from California's shores" — in that America, the affinity with Eastern wisdom was clear. Yet we have only to admire a Sung landscape of such contemplation, this Ma Yuan, "Walking a Mountain Path in Spring," to sense how far, in leisured refinement of poet-sage and Ch'in-bearing attendant, its millenial evocation of distilled earth and body is from Walt's vulnerability of postCh'in romantic universe and person: (fade setting) I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be... My embryo has never been torpid... For it the nebula cohered to an orb... Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care... 78) 78a) 78b) F.E. Church, c. 1860(?), Morning in the Tropics, National Gallery, Washington D.C.; first video detail (Va78) Same, Tropics, detail left; video, closer detail Same, Tropics, detail center June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 48 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Music: Wagner, 1870-4, Götterdämmerung, from Siegfried's Rhine Journey, Seraphim 60003 Whitman's "O my soul" finds its own in cosmic God-space: To behold the day-break! The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows — a mystery Church learned from Transcendental Cole and painted in smooth-brushed verisimilitude from the sunset Adirondacks to this Tropic Morning. If outwardness begins to dissolve, it is into the shimmering vapours of Wagner's Rhine: Press close bare-bosom'd night... Night of south winds — night of the large few stars — the landscape of mist in which Whitman's most moving lyrics swim, or drown — "SeaDrift": Out of the Ninth-month midnight... Down from the shower'd halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive… Music: Wagner, 1859, close of Tristan, instrumental coda; RCA-V-LM-1829 (or 6700) Death. death, death. death, death, death... The word of the sweetest song and of all songs... The sea whisper'd me. 79) 79a) Blakelock, c. 1885, Moonlight, Brooklyn Museum, NY Same, Moonlight, detail It is Tristan's tragic, infinite landscape (which Blakelock also moved toward, earth floating in water and moon) that the Memories of Lincoln require: When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring... Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 49 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim. (close of Tristan) The affirmation of life, like everything transcendental, from Bach's songs of death-love to Mahler's Lied von der Erde, Music: Mahler, 1908. Das Lied von der Erde, close: "Ewig," Seraphim 60191 is Nietzsche's joy, in love with eternity: Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit, Will tiefe, tiefe, Ewigkeit. 80) 80a) 80b) Cox, c. 1887, Photo of Walt Whitman, "The Laughing Philosopher," Rutgers Univ, detail; + V whole (V80) Thomas Eakins, 1891, Photo of Walt Whitman (age 72), Philadelphia Museum of Art Photograph of Walt Whitman (age 35) c. 1854, Trent Collection, Duke University Library; + V detail As Thoreau answered on his deathbed, when asked "Have you made your peace with God?", "I never quarrelled with him" — so Melville, in the fever of Moby Dick, knew: We were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion... Even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself... still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. It was the seamark to which Whitman sailed, from the 1868 Passage to more than India!... O darling joy! but safe! are not all the seas of God? through Whispers of Heavenly Death, Tenderly — be not impatient, (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, Strong is your hold O love.) to "Goodbye my Fancy" from his last years: June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America (close of Mahler) 50 �C.G. Bell Symbolic History Good-bye my Fancy! Farewell dear mate, dear love!... The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me, Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping. …Good-bye my Fancy. Yet let me not be too hasty... May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who knows?) May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning — so now finally, Good-bye — and hail! my Fancy. Where else had he been all along? And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed... I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love. If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you. June 1996 O Western Star Whitman's America 51 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History: Through Sight and Sound Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Description An account of the resource Scripts of Mr. Charles G. Bell's Symbolic History series. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 51 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource O Western Star (Whitman's America), Symbolic History, Part 30 Description An account of the resource Script of Part 30 of the Symbolic History series by Charles G. Bell. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Bell, Charles G. (Charles Greenleaf), 1916-2010 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1988-1990] Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_BellC_Symbolic_History_Script_30_O_Western_Star_Whitman's_America Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.