Cultural Frustration and Heinrich Hesse

I feel underserved by nearly all the contemporary cultural production I come across. It all seems to fall into one of three categories:

A. Escapist: typically on the “they killed him but he ran away” model. This is often entertaining, sometimes very well done, and certainly has its place in the lives of many people. But it usually fails to keep my interest for long. (I really couldn't care less who done it, and remember nothing whatever of Star Wars).

B. Engaged art: this sets out to publicize the plight of various disadvantaged. (Most Scandinavian film and drama falls in this category). It is often worthy and sometimes also well done but if one is not so disadvantaged himself, the whole business fails to speak to him personally. (Take The Elephantman, for instance: how tragic to suffer from elephantiasis! -- but what does it have to do with me?)

C. Dummy Realism: This “tells it like it is”, but it takes as its topic the very ordinary – lower-middle-brain, to employ sociological terminology -- criminals, bakers, undertakers, working girls, frustrated suburban housewives, advertising canvassers walking aimlessly about Dublin while talking to themselves, etc. The reason for this is perhaps that writers are not, by and large, a brilliant lot (what possible incentive can there be for writing this stuff for hours and hours each day?); and it is impossible to write convincingly about people more intelligent than oneself. So writers, wisely, write "down". (As in "girls marry up, boys marry down"). And that's alright, but why do I have to read down?

This is why I enjoy reading Hesse: his heroes -- like Knecht of The Glass Bead Game -- are upper-middle brain and neither disadvantaged nor politically engaged; they are thus free to direct all of their considerable brain power to the pure task of cultivation of that brain power; which is a life-style anyone with a brain and the freedom to pursue it well might. It is, in other words, a life we all could live if we only could live it; perhaps even the life we will all live one day, all our disadvantages have been removed and all our brains powered-up by way of a special chip. The project is not without its problems -- but they are not explored in art; and that is too bad because, certainly, to me at least, such art would be a lot more interesting than A-C above.

But while I praise highly Hesse's gumption to go after a good topic, I praise his execution less enthusiastically. His description of the sculptor's creative process in Goldmund and Narcissus is a pious fabrication; his description of meditation in Glasperlenspiel, also. Perhaps Hesse, too, was too busy writing books to find out properly about the things he was writing about.

The old dictum regarding pornography comes to mind: the reason why it is so bad is because those doing it have no time to write it, and those writing it have never done it. Good literature has the odds stacked up against it.

Thoughts on visiting a portuguese palace

Here are some thoughts on visiting a Portuguese palace.

First, its owners were busy military and royal administration men; perhaps this explains why the interior decoration and the garden statuary is so damn ugly. Perhaps they were too busy to appreciate art, and therefore did not know anything about it. Perhaps stucco was just stucco to them; and statues -- statues. ("Hey, it's Jupiter, alright? Or is that not good enough for ya?")

(Or, since the palace was redecorated following the 1755 earthquake, perhaps they didn't have the money to spend on the best artists available; or perhaps the best artists have died in the earthquake and were simply not available).

Second, generally speaking, the quality of statuary in Portugal is pretty lousy. (As it is, for the most part, in Venice -- just google the Lombardos). Perhaps Don Joao V imported Italian artists not to monkey Rome, or to please the Pope, but because he could see the problem. The truth is that there is no ugly statuary in Rome. (And hardly any in Florence).

Third, an EP observation: anyone used to looking at naturalistic statuary can tell at an instant whether a particular statue represents accurately an ugly person (like Michelangelo's famous Medici bust, above); or whether the ugliness is an ungainly representation of a possible person (such as Michelangelo's Night in the Medici chapel). It is almost as if our brains carried in them some algorythm to know whether a particular deformity is possible -- "natural" -- or not (whether joints of particular shape or limbs of particular proportions will "work"). We almost certainly use this mechanism to recognise charicatures -- what we see does not "check out".

And neither do bad statues.

Most of the statues in the park did not check out. But there was a statue of a lady in the buff; her bum looked bad, but one knew instantly that it was a natural bad bum: such person could indeed have existed and the artist merely manage to capture it in all its glory. (Bad bums canbe glorious).

How to make friends and influence people

A new series on TV5 covers famous hôtels (now that they have done with the chataux). This week's was the so called hôtel Potoquì in Paris, now the seat of the Chambre du Commerce et Industrie de Paris (at 1, Avenue Friedland, 75008 Paris). (Google map it to see the size of its garden).

It was bought by the colorful count Mieczysław Potoquì, son of Szczęsny (of Targowica fame) whose main adventure (and cause of long internal exile in Siberia and eventually out of Russia and to France) was that he was repeatedly rude two successive tsars, his masters (not being home when they called, forgetting to remove the hat when they entered, etc.) He left the house to his son, Mikołaj, whose main claim to fame was his wife, one Emanuela Emanuella Donna Pignatelli de Cerchiara, of Naples, a socialite, salon keeper, friend of Proust and Maupassant. The two have completely gutted and refurbished the house in a style now considered remarkable.

The house can now be visited and was by someone who left us some of these wonderful photos above. Alas, these photos do not include either the tapestries or the beautiful (and somewhat racy) frescoes for which the indomitable Emanuele posed ("not seductive," said someone about her, "but seduction itself"), but which were featured in the tv5 program and which occasioned all this search by yours truly. (Shall I henceforth tape everything I watch on TV?)

All I was able to find of the seductive Emanuelle was this garden statue at the hotel, for which she also posed:



A pretty girl, and not too shy.

Apparently, the monsieur le comte was a little tired by all this running about the house in the buff. "Darling, he would say to her reportedly, please pose naked for whatever and whomever you wish, who am I to place unreasonable limits on your wonderfully creative personality, but do me the favor and do not seduce the artists: they are hired help, you know. Have some respect for the feudal tradition."

It's thanks to fine liberal people like the comte that Paris is one of the few places in the world where it is a social positive to claim Polish ancestry. All it takes is, apparently, is a little money and a little sex appeal.

Some thoughts on The Pictures

Hartmann, Viktor; sketch of costumes for the ballet Trilby; possibly the basis of Number 5 "Балет невылупившихся птенцов" (Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks)

Modest Mussorgsky composed his Pictures at an exhibition as a piano solo work after seeing a picture show. (1)

The composition's structure is a kind of braid of two interwoven strands: one is a formal theme-and-variations on the theme of “Promenade”; it serves a kind of straight vertical pole around which there climbs the other strand of the piece, an unruly creeper. This creeper is a kind of quodlibet, that is, a succession of structurally unrelated tone sketches – or mini-sketches; or better yet – miniatures – each representing a different picture at the show. So we have a neat succession of tableaux: the theme followed by a miniature followed by variation I followed by another miniature followed by variation II followed by another miniature; and so forth. (Structure is good, simple structure is best). (2)

Think of this structure as architectural: that of a typical museum, with long straight airy main hall off which various doors lead left and right to a succession of small rooms where the art is displayed; something along the lines of the Italian Renaissance Gallery at the Louvre or the Long Wing at the Venetian Accademia. The theme-and-variations is the long main hall; the miniatures are the paintings in the side-rooms. Seeing the whole exhibition involves much weaving left and right and numerous returns to the main hall – the theme and its variations.

The main hall is the best known melody of the piece, the Promenade. Its first appearance – the opening of the exhibition – is exuberant, celebratory, and not a little triumphant. The impression is quite unmistakable: a beautiful airy high-ceilinged hall, well lit by daylight falling through tall windows on a sunny day; simply milling with a huge crowd of immaculately dressed, coiffed, and perfumed beautiful people, strutting and checking each other out. The invitations were hell to get, the tickets prohibitive; the exhibition is an exercise in gate-keeping, it separates the wheat from the chaff, the elite from the plebs; it is no mean feat just being there, included. A spot of self-congratulation is definitely permitted.

(The atmosphere is not a little snobbish: among the paintings a fair number are French-themed; the garden of Tuilleries; a festival at Limoges; innocent enough, except that there is a strong whiff of display about any Russian painter painting landscapes in France (cost, passports, visas). But it is also escapist: sitting in a Parisian café drinking coffee has long been the preferred vision of paradise among all children of political and economic oppression).

The Promenade is the best known fragment of the whole work, incessantly anthologized; unsurprisingly: triumphalism sells not only in Russia; it is a universally popular emotion (perhaps more so with grocers and builders than princes and kings). But each return to the promenade is different; one’s mood is affected by the paintings one has just seen; the triumphalism disappears, replaced by sadness, or meditative reflection, or light-hearted delight. It is as if each time returning to the promenade, one saw it in a different light, the weather having, Russian-like, changed. Any picture gallery-goer will recognize this phenomenon instantly: going from picture to picture in an art gallery is like that: a kaleidoscopic sampling of moods.

The Pictures can be broadly categorized as being western (Tuilleries, Limoges) and eastern (Baba Yaga’s hut, Samuel Goldberg and Schmuyle). I am not enough of a musicologist to say for sure, but my impression is that the western tableaux sound western: it is good, solid – and rather ordinary – French music; a Franck or a Berlioz or a Respighi could have written it. It is the eastern pieces which are really interesting: they have steep melodies which sound to us as unstable and wild; strange moods of malicious child-play; and ornamentation recognizably un-western (e.g. two-note arpeggio entering). In time, Mussorgsky’s successors, Shostakovich and Prokofiev will build a whole new classical edifice on these ideas and their western critics, wishing to invent a collective name for these strange phenomena, will call them ironic, or sarcastic, or jeering. Until this day they retain a flavor of strangeness. How would these elements have sounded in a Viennese or Parisian salon of the early nineteenth century? Frightening? Barbarous? It is quite likely that they would not have been permitted. Mussorgsky cracked the lid of that box but the disasters which followed have not been without their pleasures.

These elements are of course Musorgski’s native music; no wonder he does it well; but he brings it up here, in this “western” picture gallery, not only because he can: it has the effect of garishly and expensively dressed young people speaking loudly in Russian in the lobby of George V. (Or Mickiewicz praising the clouds and rain of Polish sky while sitting under the divine azure of Naples which he deprecates as boring). The original picture exhibition was a deliberate juxtaposition of east and west; Mussorgsky could not have escape it if he had wanted to; which he didn’t: a Russian’s raison d’etre, it seems, is to be thus divided, internally juxtaposed; to love the west, but then dismiss it as trivial; to despise the east as barbarous yet to be mystified by (and proud of) the presumed (probably pretended) mysteries of its darkness. Sometimes one gets the impression that any Russian who joins either one side or the other ceases to be Russian in the word’s proper sense.

The Pictures were composed within a 10 period in 1874; but were not published until twelve years later (and seven years after their composer’s death); and their great career has not really begun until 1890’s when various composers began transcribing them for various kinds of ensembles (Wikipedia lists more than 70 transcriptions); the most famous being the 1922 by Ravel.

Personally, I feel best in the piano solo version; being less well known, it is, like Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies, a place to hide from the vulgar plebs in my elitist self: thanks to its existence, I am free to confess to the liking a popular work; I like it, but, as it were, differently. Richter played it wonderfully well in Sofia in 1958.

PS. And Kissin plays it badly.

(1) The show was an 1874 exhibition held at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg in honor of Russian architect, graphic and stage designer Viktor Hartmann. Various efforts have been made to identify the pictures shown at the exhibition, but mostly without success. Most appear to have been lost. Here are a few. (The association with Bydło, a Japanese idea, seems to me rather -- ahem -- exotic).

(2) My analysis is intentionally unlearned. The Wikipedia article points out, probably correctly that “for all the variety individual movements display in musical invention, each springs from a kernel in the opening melody. The Promenade theme provides distinctive "cells" of two and three notes that generate themes and accompaniment figures throughout the piece”. If so, then two strands of the braid aren't really separate.

Eerie eels

Oh eerie, eerie eels!

Neither fish, nor snakes, they have puzzled and frightened men for millenia -- since Aristotle at the very least. (He thought they self-generated in the miasma of mud). We still had no clue at the end of the 19th century when Sigmund Freud cut up thousands in order to find their gonads and failed. (Failed and moved on to other areas of science, where, no doubt, progress was easier to manufacture. And we have ever since wished he had not).

Eels live in fresh water; but then the time strikes to go and breed and they up and go to sea. They get there any way they can; over eel ladders, if they must; or burrowing through wet sand; or -- it makes my skin crawl when I think of it -- slithering on wet grass at night.

Yes. You heard it right: slithering on wet grass at night.

("Holy canole! What is that noise, Chuck?!" "Oh, it's nothin', baby. It's just them eels slithering past our tent on their way to the sea. Nothin' to worry about.")

Then they reach the sea and begin to swim; and swim and swim and swim. It takes them several hundred days to do so. And as they swim they transform: they lose their honey golden glow and turn metallic gray; they grow gaunt and trim and their eyes grow large to adapt to the limited light at the bottom of the sea. Their gut rots away -- they'll never eat a thing from now on.

And all the while they swim and swim and swim. When they reach the end of the continental shelf, they dive down along the precipice, thousands of meters down, into the murky depths; and, upon reaching its muddy bottom, they turn west again and go on; go on restlessly, ever westwards; home.

.

And then they reach the Sargasso sea; lay billions and billions of eggs in a frantic orgy of reproduction and -- die.

.

Though the European eel breed in the east of the Sargasso and the American eels in the west, it surely must happen sometime that a European eel and an American one run into each other. And when they do, what must they feel?

They look wholly identical, members of the same world-encompassing race of eel, you might think. But they aren't: they have different numbers of ribs; and -- more importantly -- chromosomes: they could never cross-breed. And nature has a way of telling us, by way of a supernatural shudder, when we meet something perverse, something unnatural. It looks like us yet - it stinks; it isn't like us. It mystifies and scares us.

Do they sense their fundamental incompatibility? Do they realize, with that very shudder, that they have just run into something unnatural, impossible, foreign, a denial of their own selves, their very opposites, their antimatter, their alter ego, their doppleganger, their death?

.

Reading English and the Japanese wikipedias on eels is most instructive: the English talks about the eel's anatomy, life-cycle, reproduction, risks of extinction, exploitation and costs; but the Japanese -- about the place of eel in the Japanese culture. It quotes poems from the Man'yōshu -- 1300 years old -- and discusses the beast's place in Heian culture (Sei Shonagon ate them); explains customs related to the eating of eels; some typical Japanese eel dishes; and festivals held in quaint little towns to celebrate the annual eel catch.

The Man'yōshu reference, by the way, is waka 3854. It reads:

痩々母 生有者将在乎 波多也波多 武奈伎乎漁取跡 河尓流勿

Which is

やすやすも,いけらばあらむを,はたやはた,むなぎをとると,かはにながるな

which is

yasu yasu ikeraba aramu wo hatayahata
munagi wo toru to kawani nagaru na

which is

If you're really thin, sit still;
don't imagine you can go catching eel in the river!

Last summer in Marienbad

The camera glides slowly, soundlessly through the hall, towards the chandelier and then underneath it. In the film's black and white photography it looks like glowing gigantic thousand-armed squid in some terrifying darkness-deep of the ocean. But it also looks like a Persian calligraphic inscription carved in molten light against a filigree background. As the eye dives beneath the chandelier, the shimmering outline of another appears down the hall.

Les Brodeuses

Pretend for a moment that a film is nothing but an aesthetic object.

Then the aesthetic core of Les Brodeuses is the 120-second sequence around minute 36:Sequins do not usually want anything that micro-focused. It is OK for any project they sponsor to feature Monteverdi arias or sequined embroidery – they are not Visigoths; but they also need the mainstream plot, drama, especially love drama, best if fulfilled in the end. (And it is). But perhaps that conventional content (and it is very conventional: an older single woman dealing with her only son’s tragic death; a younger single woman trying to decide whether to keep her baby) also serves as a setting for the central scene, the way a ring might set a stone, the face the eye, the body the face, the altar its statue; the way swathes of dull Miltonese set the far-in-between moments of utter and disarming beauty. The aesthetic rule number one is that a beautiful object’s setting must be duller than it itself, or else it will exhaust the eye and steal the show. Not that the film is dull – it is all visually very beautiful; and the story is touching and well and intelligently told. But aesthetically speaking, everything in the film is duller than this sequence. As well it must: its beauty is difficult to match.

2/8/09: Good bye, South, Good bye has the same sort of aesthetic core: the four minute motorcycle ride through the hills around Chia-yi, the director's ultimate nostalgia trip; and mine, too)