A Few Words from the Editor

     I would scarcely be believed if I asserted that neither Mark Wegierski nor I had any prior knowledge of what the other intended to compose for this issue of Praesidium.  The happy coincidence of themes is really natural enough, however.  Mark’s interests have typically run toward the future, while my tendency is to scrutinize the past for some clue about how we have reached our present position.  It was indeed perhaps inevitable that one day I should decide to bend my investigations slightly forward as Mr. Wegierski assembled yet another prognostication from his superior awareness of movies, websites, board games, science fiction, and other pop-cultural outlets of expressions addressing tomorrow.

     I should have to say, too, that we have both run true to form.  The Wegierski essay appearing in this issue indexes notions of space travel or extraterrestrial challenge to reigning political ideologies.  The future, I believe Mark would say (and I would utterly agree), will never transform us in the sense of lifting us out of preexisting cultural categories, but can only open up new vistas whose landscape those categories will soon determine—for better or for worse.  For my part, I discovered that I could not transcend the insight (repeated perhaps too often in my piece) that moral choice will influence our tomorrows infinitely more than super-conductors or time-machines.  To be sure, these two preoccupations—the cultural and the moral—are narrowly related: both share the conviction, for example, that technological wonders of themselves really offer no durable escape from our major problems unless accompanied by a new cultural or personal outlook.  I suppose I would emphasize that culture cannot change unless its individual representatives insist upon alterations; while perhaps Mr. Wegierski would say that individuals are built by their culture.  The chicken or the egg….

     Into this mix falls an extraordinary work of fiction—not a short story, but an unbridled vision of how two contrasting cities of the future might look—shadowed by a few reflections on how the transformed physical environment may transform its creators, in return.  I admit that I encouraged Mr. Moseby to offer me this work once he reviewed some possible themes with me: I instantly recognized a likely resonance with the two essays I have mentioned.  Sure enough, the flight of fantasy probably declares even more powerfully than the essays that our technology, no matter how miraculous, will always return the ball to our court—will always be more mirror before what we are than window upon what we might be.  The fact is that we will never really be anything very different from what we are—that is, unless our technology “advances” so far that it usurps the power of decision-making from us, leaving us emasculated and lobotomized.  But then, you know, we humans have always entertained a tendency to self-destruction… so that, too, would be nothing new under the sun.

     The Moseby story does not squint at this unpleasant possibility (discussed in both essays).  It is haunted, however, by a constant awareness that a certain density of people-per-area or a certain predominant height of ceiling or color of housing can have immense consequences upon the community’s perception of life.  To me, that is the story’s “message”—or, to be less Philistine in my choice of critical terms, that is its signifié, its enduring echo.  Whatever we build tomorrow—and we may well be able to build just about anything—is what we shall have to occupy and dwell in for years to come.  The unlimited freedom of conception will be, and always is, severely circumscribed by the physical fact of creation.

     There remains Dr. Bertonneau’s essay, which is not the second half of a two-part discourse on misunderstood composers but simply a second tribute to the most neglected art, quite possibly, of our time.  I asked the author for a brief summary of the essay for use on the “contents” page, and received instead rather more detail than I could fit thereon.  Here, however, it fits perfectly: “Frederick Delius was a self-consciously Nietzschean composer who sought to represent in music the underlying beauty of the purely natural order, but in spite of himself, he seems to have testified that intrinsic to all beauty is a spark of the divine—a kind of atheist's faux pas.  This ironic reversal of intention might explain why modern and postmodern musicologists have disdained Delius’s works.  Delius is, at the very least, a supreme musical artist whose music all culturally literate people should know.  Delius stands at an important crossroads of music and literature.”

     So what has Mount Parnassus to do with Mount Palomar ?  Nothing much, I’m afraid—not unless we forge a connection.  In this issue’s context, I suggest that Dr. Bertonneau’s piece may remind us a) that we are losing our taste for “the finer things” as we eagerly plan space stations, and b) that an heroic individualism which undertakes to reconstruct the universe without God, rejecting its own finitude and corruption, can only re-enact the tragedies of what it considers a quaint, unusable past. 

 ~J. H.

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A Taxonomy of North American Society’s Narratives of Catastrophe and Dissolution

John R. Harris

 

     Like many of this journal’s devoted readers, I have come to appreciate Mark Wegierski’s clinical assessments of civilization’s chances to survive another century, or to survive in a certain form—and even his mere presentation of likely post-civilized alternatives without further comment.  This is an Aristotelian endeavor, open to charges of being dry or (the cardinal sin these days) without passion.  Yet the passion for passion is itself highly toxic, and may be regarded (I certainly regard it so) as a symptom of cultural collapse.  When I was little more than a boy, Sir Kenneth Clark was assembling his magnificent BBC series Civilisation, an epic documentary which integrated visual art and architecture seamlessly with the music and literature of shifting times and customs.  (The series has grown more valuable than ever today since, all unwittingly, Sir Kenneth committed to film several of Europe’s most historically rich metropolitan areas just before they would dissolve in the sludge of traffic and contemptuous alien populations.)  I distinctly recall the scene—it has been haunting me for years—where the grand old man crunched through the riverbed gravel beneath a Roman aqueduct in southern France and delivered the following lines: “There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city.  Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed—it would have been better than nothing.”[1]

     How well I know that sentiment from observations of my fellow Westerners during my own lifetime!  I recall also, a mere twenty years ago now, an excursion to the ancient Irish site of Emain Macha which I took in the company of several young scholars, all of us enrolled in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies’ summer program.  The talk in the bus at one point became snagged upon the image of our being stopped by an IRA roadblock (for Emain Macha lies a few miles within the Ulster border).  There would be bearded men with machine guns (my compatriots fantasized with shivering delight)—and if we made a break for it, the machine guns would shoot out our tires.  I drew only dark stares when I laughed that a bus moving at 40 miles per hour would not only shatter any extempore obstruction, but would advance so far along our twisting rural road that, by the time the blackguards could extract themselves from “the furzy hedge” (as John Millington Synge has dubbed it), their hiccoughing automatics could never hit any target so small as a tire.  I quickly realized that these thin-shouldered, well-washed Ph.D. candidates wanted to be detained by road agents.  Perhaps the women wanted to be kidnapped and ravished, and the men to be recruited under duress.  Such was their boredom.  The learning which had been heaped upon them seemed, if anything, to have multiplied their impatience and disgust with the resources of Western culture for bestowing coherence and value upon life.  They wanted to be profoundly shaken up: they wanted to become passion’s next prey.

     Anyone who has ever endured immense emotional strain knows that the calm voice of an analytical Aristotle, far from being tedious and deathly, is a lifeline back to sanity.  You cannot not cultivate a cool head and still survive in circumstances where people behave like ravening animals.  Actually to court the excesses of taraxia, the opprobrious turbulence of emotions universally condemned in ancient philosophy, is to grow infatuated with lunacy.  Yet it is an inescapable truth that many of our best educated and most influential citizens long to be somewhat “out of their heads”.  Why is that, and what prognosis does it suggest for our sickly ruin of a culture?  I should like to make my own best effort at taxonomizing the possibilities, as surgically as I can.  Though my attempt is doomed to be more Theophrastian than Aristotelian as I inventory my experience of people, I solemnly vow to purge irony of bile.

I.  Natural Calamity

     To begin with, allow me to dispose of roughly half a dozen lurid scenarios much publicized in popular fiction, made-for-TV movies, and even—lately—the political forum, all forecasting the collapse of our civilization due to a natural calamity which mankind will either provoke or failed to neutralize.  I have global warming very much in mind, to be sure; but it is only the early twenty-first century’s most compelling projection of our species’ suicide, for reasons to be discussed shortly.  As well as I can recall, it was preceded by 1) a high alert that the Western United States, in particular, would run out of water; 2) an alarm that acid rain would massively destroy crops, voiding several vital links in the food chain; 3) a fear of the impending earthquakes that are sure to devastate major population centers along the West Coast; 4) apprehension over a large meteor’s colliding with the Earth and plunging the planet into a “clean” nuclear winter; and, just before the recent heat-up of Global Warming Anxiety, 5) a nerve-racking rumor that a tsunami like that which scourged Southeast Asia on Christmas of 2004 could well wash over the East Coast’s population centers with unspeakable slaughter.

     Now, all such doomsday scenarios have several elements in common.  Each enjoys a certain amount of scientific plausibility.  In fact, of major earthquakes out West and perhaps even the asteroidal menace, one might say that the risk is 100%: “not if, but when”.  Most of these scenarios also involve at least a small degree of human complicity with the forces of doom.  Water is being depleted because we choose to waste it, rain is acidifying because we choose to pollute the air, and even the catastrophe wreaked by earthquakes depends somewhat upon our choice of where and how to build our cities.  I should stress the obvious in the matter of human choice, as well: none of the calamities has been projected as the grim consequence of deficient personal morality rather than of social and economic policy.  That is, when “we choose” to pollute or abuse or ignore, we are not really choosing individually at all: those in charge of our lives, rather, are failing us.  Dour prophets warn that large factories are permitted to foul the air, that Las Vegas is permitted to sap the Rocky Mountain water table, that pork-barrel politics has robbed the public of adequate tsunami or asteroid detection outposts.  The suggestion is never floated that the typical American citizen has turned his back on frugality to embrace frivolity—disdaining close-to-home jobs for better-paying ones, gambling and partying too often, hitting the beach in a kind of gluttony for sun-bathing.  The natural threat is invariably related, sooner or later, to our technology, whose liabilities are in turn related to greedy, wicked people in positions of power.

     Finally, and not without connection to the previous point, I observe that most scenarios insist upon truly catastrophic die-offs in spectacular events of flame, tumult, and collapse.  Only the water-shortage and acid-rain options lack this aspect.  Both of them—surely not by chance—were roiling the public mind before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when nuclear holocaust still seemed an imminent possibility.  In other words, with the disappearance of the nuclear threat as a likely “extermination event” for the human race, natural disasters have proceeded to buy up the available shares of terror (as it were) which flooded the market for mass hysteria.

     I do not wish to imply that I view all of these gloomy forecasts as the alarmist exaggerations of a public incapable of enjoying the quiet life.  They mostly highlight real dangers, in some cases imminent dangers.  I honestly do not know the status of the mid-continental water table or of the predations of acid rain.  The threat of earthquake to southern California, however, is immense—a major event during rush hour could easily kill thousands, as quakes have recently done in China and India.  In the case of collision-course asteroids and tsunamis, we appear to enjoy a rather more advanced system of detection and early warning.  (Since tsunamis are an effect of mid-oceanic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, they offer us a kind of built-in recovery time even when the earth’s crust takes our seismographs by surprise.)  In either case, we could probably avert catastrophe.  Even a metropolitan center could be largely evacuated in a day.  That New Orleans was given almost a week to clear its streets before Hurricane Katrina made landfall and still bungled the job deserves a closer look momentarily.  Local evacuation would make little difference in the final tally of casualties inflicted by a meteorite of, say, a mile’s diameter, for the vast majority of deaths would ensue months after impact, as crops failed globally thanks to a thick haze of debris high in the atmosphere.  Yet we possess the technology at this instant to intercept such an apocalyptic missile with a nuclear weapon whose detonation would fragment it.  The most heavenly of the menaces is probably the least of our worries.

     I wrote just above that I am ignorant of what inroads have been made against the problems of depleted water resources and acid rain.  I am not a scientist or a specialist in any field relevant to such issues.  In a way, this is precisely the point I wish to draw from the foregoing discussion—for I was no more a specialist when water and rain were front-page news than I am now.  The front page thrust them into my face.2  These matters, that is, though they deserve to be taken seriously, consistently have not been so over the past half-century, during which span “impending natural calamity” has been a favorite means of soliciting readership and viewership.  They have been handled exactly like “stories”—like primetime serial melodramas whose denouement is referenced to a ticking clock.  Bored people enjoy them: bored people enjoy being scared.  Will the bullet be dodged at the last possible instant, or will Mr. Jones, CPA, be one of his species’ hundred surviving members?  Which scenario would Mr. Jones prefer to see?  (Mrs. Jones is a bit long in the tooth; as forlorn castaways, the last beautiful women could not well afford to be too choosey about which of the last men they allowed into their bed to regenerate the race.)  Ms. Smith, teacher’s aid, a single parent with few prospects for advancement, generally feels that the world has ganged up on her.  The notion of cosmic forces ganging up on the world is not unpleasant—but there is also the child to think of, and Ms. Smith has a quasi-religious faith in the ability of avuncular authorities to defuse ticking time-bombs (which may say much about how she has allowed men to reduce her personal life to a ruin).  All in all, the “catastrophe” theme is good for sales and ratings.  It appeals to a great many latent fears and longings in a society with a great many frustrations.  If Catastrophe did not exist, Man would have to invent it.

     I repeat that I am not dismissing such high-risk behaviors as our high-tech culture routinely adopts in its straining or violating of natural law as the text of a wry joke.  It is because these risks are substantial—sometimes very substantial—that our melodramatizing of them is itself risky.  We cry wolf.  Eventually, those among us who are bored with this antidote to boredom will mock our cries by wearing wolf’s ears.  There is a kind of person who installs a back-yard swimming pool and buys a gas-guzzling Humvee to putter around town in just because he has tired of what he regards as “alarmist whining”.  The whiners are far more apt to inhabit the political Left, and the polluters-and-proud-of-it the political Right.  One can well imagine that any exchange between two such adversaries is unlikely to reach a truly responsible conclusion, no matter which finally amasses more muscle on its side of the rope.  For both are responding to passion: the Leftist is “passionate” about protecting the environment, while the Rightest is “passionate” about protecting consumerist free enterprise.  The one truly relevant datum here to mapping our most likely path of descent, then, is the omnipresence of passion as a tolerable motive for major decisions.  The Leftist wears green baseball caps, drinks green tea, sorts glass and plastic from his garbage, rides his bike to work, lets his lawn’s grass grow unshorn, eats vegetarian, and buys only recycled paper products.  His lifestyle is a role, a mission: it offers lines to utter for every situation and gestures to mime in every crisis.  Some of his tactics may actually benefit the environment (e.g., bike-riding), some are mere tokens of tribal loyalty (e.g., clothing and diet), and a few could even prove destructive of the cause to which he claims abject dedication (e.g., the messy lawn: ticks, mosquitoes, and other vermin complicate, aggravate, and sometimes abbreviate the existence of higher life forms).  He may also cancel out all the virtuous petrol-abstinence so arduously practiced on a bicycle’s seat by jetting to a couple of conferences or “wilderness” vacations per year.  Passion rules good sense: acting the part trumps promoting the desired end.

     The Rightest, meanwhile, manicures his lawn to golf-course perfection, prowls the city needlessly every evening in search of “take-out” food and amusement, plunges for the latest electronic gismos, spends Sunday afternoons sprawled before a wide-screen projection of the football game, and packs his children off to soccer practice and Tai Kwan Do after school.  The traditional virtues of thrift, temperance, industry, modesty, humility, and gravity are little in evidence (though pressuring clients to buy more insurance or computer upgrades or motor vehicles may qualify as a certain kind of industry), or else patently contradicted (grass trimmed beyond a certain point and kids forcibly enrolled in costly extra-curricular tutelage are among our time’s pre-eminent forms of bourgeois ostentation).  But how could he live otherwise?  For he, too, has fallen prey to passion: his inclinations weave a chain around his neck.  His acts and utterances have all been choreographed and scripted to flatter basic appetites.  The space beyond his part’s well-worn limits is needless hardship.

     In short, I contend that the least resistible influence upon the West’s collapse is not “the big one” due any time now along the San Andreas Fault, but the incapacity of its citizens to live as individual moral agents, rationally accepting or rejecting options on the basis of their relation to objective goodness.  For instance, the automobile is a necessary evil: no other portrayal of it makes any sense at all.  It is dirty, dangerous, and socially disruptive, and our common moral ambition should be to eliminate it.  To the extent that we need it to cover the vast distances between home and workplace and marketplace which we have allowed to open up (largely in accommodation of the car’s technical parameters), our problem is one of reconstructing the spaces where we sleep, eat, shop, and work.  Yet neither side—neither Left nor Right—has any such plan on the drawing board.  The Left periodically proposes higher emission standards which would force hundreds of American businesses to shut down or higher gas taxes which would force millions of our poorest citizens into destitution.  The Right racks its collective brain for ways to continue the existing dilemma—thereby offering the single defensible explanation for its curious commandeering of the word “conservative”.  The privileged bureaucratic class, in other words, cannot understand why commoners are not eating cake when the price of bread goes up, while the private-sector middle class cannot understand what’s so wrong about wanting the latest model of car with a TV and DVD -player on board.  Neither side understands—there is a crisis of moral understanding.  The “way of life” to which both sides are inseparably wedded can make no more convincing claim upon an impartial bystander than that its adherents have laced their emotions through and through it.

     The natural calamity, I believe, is much more than another diversion to these people in full flight from responsible self-examination.  Now is not the time to psychoanalyze the two political polarities and discuss in detail just what appeal either of them finds in tales of a contemporary Deluge or Vesuvius.  Obviously, the crowd on the Right could be expected to take rather more pleasure in the scenario’s fireworks and special effects.  Not only does the Right appear to enjoy spectacle more (as opposed to the catharsis of mass hysteria, where the Left’s affections incline): anything on the order of The Last Days of Pompeii offers ample scope for individual action and unhampered freedom during the critical hours when survivors struggle against chaos.  On the Left, consumers of so nightmarish a narrative are more likely to perceive it as an allegory of corrupt leadership—or even of an outraged Mother Earth punishing the entire race for condoning the hybris of a few.  To the Left-leaning audience, that is, the scenario is less entertaining than sacral—i.e., enabling of proper worship.  For I should say nothing new in remarking that environmental causes are the Left’s religion: the sequence of garden, custodianship, violated command, and severe punishment is clearly visible just beneath the surface of any Left-wing crusade in this direction.

     A Right-tending filmmaker, we might summarize, might choose to threaten the Earth with a rogue asteroid, while a Left-leaning one would prefer the rupturing of the government’s hush-hush nuclear waste dumps in an earthquake… but, as I say, such is not my theme here.  I would stress, instead, the remaining member of the Doomsday Scenario’s recurrent characteristics: the refusal to admit any genuine personal culpability.  For if the Left postpones guilt until it clings to the highest levels of leadership, the Right tends to evade the issue entirely: again, one hears no homilist on either side exhorting us simply to shut down Las Vegas, simply to resuscitate farming as a livelihood, or simply to stop dividing our residences from the rest of our lives.  Indeed, my perception is that the alleged phenomenon of global warming has considerable traction in both camps, and that both are comfortable indicting mysterious forces atop the political-economic hierarchy for it.  A Rightest is infinitely less apt to reproach certain senators for not supporting the Kyoto Accord’s limits on emissions, and infinitely more to mention China’s ruthless charge into the future, asphyxiate who may.  What we do not hear from him is an entirely different program for living in the tradition of New England Puritanism or Ohio Valley Quakerism or Southern agrarianism.  The residue of the “hippy” fringe is perhaps closer to making an “alternative lifestyle” proposal… but then again, maybe not.  Just as electric amplifiers were essential to that fringe in its original form, so its present morphos relies heavily upon digital amusements.  At some relatively superficial level, responsibility for the planetary crisis always shifts to the Establishment.  One’s personal conveniences and fantasies must not be jeopardized.

     Global warming, as a socio-political phenomenon (where it is incontestably real), is the crystallization of our collective finger-pointing and role-playing.  Companies market products by touting their absurdly minuscule reduction of some minor pollutant.  Schools announce the planting of a few trees about the campus with much fanfare, though their buses continue to belch soot all about the city twice a day.  We all rush to embrace the “do your little bit” approach, since it is the reverse side of heaping a guilty onus upon a select few: a personal conscience cleansed with a dime.  Traffic is indeed cited as the primary contributor to greenhouse gases in all the summations of the theory that I have seen, yet citizens of almost every political persuasion cannot seem to stake out a coherent position on any series of issues related to transportation.  Municipal governments persist in constructing loops around their city limits to ease rush-hour “slow goes”, despite ample evidence that more roads draw more traffic as a magnet draws metal shavings.3  Car manufacturers boast of cleaner-running engines, yet the miles-per-gallon averaged by their products have increased over the past decade in response to the public’s clear preference for heavier, higher-suspended vehicles.  The most zealous environmentalists—people who, perhaps, ride bicycles to work—are among the most enthusiastic supporters of open international borders (about which, more anon).  Yet a vast infusion of day-laborers, constantly driving to new temporary work sites in vehicles neither properly inspected (if not legally registered) nor state-of-the-art, has immensely exacerbated air pollution in southwestern cities.

     We are a shallow people, and the major threat to our civilization’s sustained survival is, precisely, our shallowness.  The thick lather of indignation over the flawed evacuation of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina made landfall is surely the most stunning monument to our absurd ineptitude.  Hundreds of people perished needlessly, some of them having freely chosen to take their chances, some of them allegedly having lacked the resources to depart.  Yet the resources necessary were minimal, since a high alert was publicized five days in advance; and, in any case, one must suppose that local government and volunteer help from private organizations like churches would or could have taken up the slack.  Of course, subsequent indignation centered upon the failure of state and (especially) federal agencies to provide timely relief after the catastrophe.  The decision fatally embraced by the victims to stay put—and other decisions not to dissuade them vigorously which their neighbors must have reached in many cases—never fall under scrutiny.  The personal tragedies which ensued are packaged as nothing less than a plot hatched in the White House.

II.  Plague 

     At first glance, the plague appears to be an entirely natural phenomenon—and so it is, if one considers it strictly as phenomenon (i.e., as a fact whose reality begins as soon as it becomes visible).  Massive die-offs due to infection are common throughout all tiers of biological existence, in both plants and animals.  Indeed, our own time’s tendency is again to belittle or ignore the element of choice in human epidemics, as if we were so many microbes in a Petrie dish.  Nothing could be more absurd—or more patently illustrative of why human plagues are often not natural calamities—than the selling of the AIDS epidemic over the past two decades as a guilt-free thunderclap: essentially, a stroke of bad luck.  In North America, where most of the HIV-infected were not born so, this is plainly inaccurate.  Homosexual activity is definitively unnatural if one simply builds statistics upon mammalian behavior, the specific high-risk behavior here has always been the opting for promiscuous activity, and intravenous drug use is also a deliberately chosen series of acts.  Yet AIDS has been aggressively represented to the public as a fatal version of the common cold.  Apparently, it was not unheard-of in the early days of this scourge for certain men infected with the HIV virus to spread their contagion to unsuspecting women with careful premeditation so as to “upgrade” the disease’s moral status to a pure misfortune.  As we have already seen, the American masses were well primed to adopt the desired view, for Americans tend to see any sort of catastrophe—public or private, medical or natural or financial—as engineered by wicked authorities rather than admitted by personal decision.  Furthermore, a few homosexuals in recent years have publicized their active attempts to become infected, a suicidal behavior which once more reminds us that catastrophe is an antidote to boredom.

     But what about the common cold—or a common case of winter influenza?  Our society has lately been harrowed with rumors that a major outbreak—a pandemic—of “bird flu” (borne by migratory wildfowl from Southeast Asia all around the world, then spread among domesticated fowl and thence to other animals and to humans) is poised to cut our numbers in half, perhaps.  Might some particle of “lifestyle choice” affect the dreadful progress of such a scourge?  At a certain level, yes: certainly more so than in the case of an Earth-asteroid collision or a volcanic eruption.  One of the major factors in the spread of any plague is frequent long travel.  European merchants didn’t understand this in the days of Marco Polo, nor European explorers in the days of Columbus.  We understand it very well now, however—yet never have so many people traveled so far so frequently.  We travel for amusement as well as for profit: we travel simply to “get away”.  The best-educated travel expensively to conferences several times a year, even though staying at home and reading dozens or hundreds of position-papers has never been easier.  The wealthy travel in order to spend their wealth; the retired travel in order to convince themselves that the shackles of routine have truly been struck off.

     Besides compounding problems involving traffic and pollution, and besides wearing the traveler’s physical resistance down due to decreased exercise and irregular diet, these habits jeopardize everybody back home who is likely to come in contact with the returned globe-trotter, now a breeding ground for opportunistic infections.  Yet I must repeat (at the risk of belaboring the point) that nobody during the bird-flu scare’s opening volley of advice and reproaches ever hinted that our North American lifestyle is really rather frivolous, and that we would have to worry far less about this sort of misery if we would make our local communities more habitable, learn how to read for pleasure, and take up gardening.  To this day, such a strand of argument has not worked its way into the public debate.  Because of our continued resistance to changes in our basic habits, and now because the first bird-flu alarm has proved a false one (the “cry wolf” syndrome again), we are probably more vulnerable to decimation by plague than we have been since the discovery of penicillin.

     For the fact remains that wandering people, not migrating geese, are responsible for all of the few reported cases of Avian Influenza in this hemisphere; yet the unsanitary conditions which nurtured the flu in Southeast Asia are being replicated—with an official determination to court disaster and an official indifference to the risks—even as I write these words.  Diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy have grown exotic in our part of the world, the scourges of distant times and places (like the Black Plague itself).  Now, however, with the throwing open of its southern border to millions of destitute immigrants unschooled in basic hygiene, the U. S. is transforming its cities into incubators for such all-but-extinct contagions.  In Dallas public schools, diagnosed cases of tuberculosis have skyrocketed.  Most disturbing is that new strains of the bacillus are proving untreatable with existing antibiotics: as we saturate our national pharmacopia in thousands and thousands of cases bred not only in dense populations, but also newly and constantly mixed populations, we are writing the perfect recipe for the invincible infection.  The phrase “melting pot” is acquiring a new, morbid meaning.

     Of course, penurious refugees from the wastes of Chihuahua can be supposed to understand the mechanism of bacteriological infection no better than (if even as well as) Boccaccio’s Florentines.  The typical American citizen, however, is fully aware that sneezing in somebody’s face, drinking from somebody else’s glass, or eating a morsel that has occupied an unclean place can cause illness.  Yet many very well-educated Americans, apparently—occupying positions of private ownership and public leadership—are not alarmed at the probable consequences of unleashing Third World health habits upon the high-tech metropolis, where people of all walks of life can cover vastly more miles and mingle with vastly more sub-populations during the average day than they would in Mexico.  When a treatment-resistant strain of TB finally sweeps across the nation (and, as with the 8.5 earthquake in southern California, it’s only a matter of time), the response will be the same as it was to the first tiny outbreaks of bird flu—and, for that matter, to Hurricane Katrina and to the “Christmas tsunami”: “Where were the reinforcements?  Why were our rulers not fully prepared to intercept this threat, or at least neutralize its aftermath?  What plot is being hatched against us good, ordinary people at the very highest levels?”

III .  Technological Short-Circuit

     Most of us have known the frustration of being stuck in a power outage after a violent electrical storm or, perhaps, a wintry blizzard.  Practically every amenity in our environment, all of our tools at work, all of our amusements at play—our garage doors, our lights, our heating and air conditioning, our ovens and microwaves, our clocks, our hair-dryers, our computers, our televisions, our stereos—our whole world is electronic.  Suddenly deprived of this magical current, we are apt to reflect (if we are at all thoughtful) upon what utter havoc a protracted breakdown would wreak.  Water would not be treated at municipal plants; essential transactions could not be made at bank windows; traffic lights would not work.  In the Robert Wise sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, the benign but stern Martian visitor impresses upon the world’s recalcitrant population the gravity of his mission by shutting down everything electrical for one hour.  His point is soon taken.

     Computers have probably heightened our awareness of vulnerability.  In the early days of the word-processor, many of us were introduced to the exquisite frustration of losing every trace of an important document because we had not saved it properly.  Such lapses were almost routine.  In the case of yesteryear’s typed or printed document assembled from handwritten notes, an entire building would have to burn down to wipe out one’s hard labor so completely.  Important e-mails continue regularly to go astray in ways that the layman cannot begin to understand, and cell phone reception is notoriously unreliable.

     The notion of our slave Technology’s rising up like Spartacus and throwing our empire into chaos, therefore, is not at all far-fetched to us.  It is an experience which we have known on a small scale, and which hence need only be magnified to produce a disaster narrative.  In contrast, most people cannot begin to formulate an image of what assault by tsunami or asteroid would be like.  This particular pest, because we have already been dosed with its toxin in tiny amounts, seems less exotic all the time.  The 2001 in which Stanley Kubrick projected his Space Odyssey has now come and gone; the Mutiny of the Computer, having become part of our cultural drill in a small way, has lost its teeth.  The boy has cried “wolf” too often.

     The truth is that we are probably less prepared for this kind of calamity, more exposed to its real occurrence in some devastating form, and more inept at reading its early rumbles than in the case of any disaster so far discussed.  Earlier in this essay, I have accused North Americans of not understanding, of being shallow, and of not recognizing the significance of personal choice in their affairs.  These charges are fundamentally the same charge, and it has repeatedly surfaced when technology was under consideration.  Technology is what we do not understand adequately; technology is rendering us shallow; technology obscures to our eyes the importance of our own choices—and even the existence of those choices.  We are uniquely exposed to technological abuses or miscues, in my opinion, because we seldom have any notion of just what’s at stake in a high-tech crisis of the simplest kind.

     I admitted that I myself have only the weakest intellectual grasp of what issues currently surround our water supply or the acidification of rain.  I am clearly not alone in being puzzled about the degree to which global warming is fact rather than theory (I am indeed joined, it seems, by a great many climatologists); and this, like the various concerns about ground- and rain-water, is at last a matter of how the modern production of energy and material affects the environment (for no one would be very exercised about rising temperatures or falling water tables if the trend turned out to represent a natural cycle).  We are outraged when “science” doesn’t warn us of a coming earthquake or tsunami, or when it fails to predict a hurricane’s path reliably enough that no boy at the National Weather Service can be suspected of crying wolf.  We tend to view the persistence of heart disease and cancer as a national disgrace, just as a fairly common opinion holds that AIDS could be cured next year if the medical community would really apply itself.

     These views, I would emphasize, come from people who are shocked at the damage done by a motor vehicle “barely moving” at 30 miles per hour, who will chatter away on a cell phone while watching an electrical storm, who believe that an old keyboard tossed in the trash will disintegrate at the landfill like apple cores and leftover spaghetti, and who expect to cheat sleep year after year with caffeine while suffering no long-term ill effects.  North Americans are ignoramuses about every kind of science, from physics to meteorology to anatomy.  So is virtually everyone else in the world, for that matter.  The scientist’s calling is that of a specialist—and few people can specialize, by definition.  (Even the nuclear physicist usually knows nothing about engineering, and the cardiologist nothing about nutrition.)  But the great danger is that we are immersed in applied science as no other culture on earth, although many are overtaking us rapidly.  They, too, will soon share our dilemma.  Their lives will be awash in gadgetry which makes no more sense to them than a wristwatch to a caveman.  They will grow very familiar only with what these marvels are supposed to do when the right buttons are pressed in the right succession (and making such sequences simple is known as being “user-friendly”—a euphemism for burying every last trace of the mystery and enhancing the false sense of security).  Were a vast network of such things to malfunction in unison, whether by accident or design, not one in ten thousand of us could take effective action.

     The most homespun and “scaled down” example of this risk is the minor catastrophe of a fatal car wreck.  Drivers have grown quite anesthetized to the risks they incur when traveling at 60 or 70 miles per hour—to the point, indeed, that they suppose themselves freed up to handle phones or food or radio dials.  We feel ourselves to be entirely in command.  What we do not feel is the extremely fine edge of that command: one instant of inattention or one over-correction, and we could end several lives on the highway around us as well as our own.  Imagine now that a mechanical failure were to occur at high speed.  Even the most conscientious driver, ignorant of the warning signs and of the malfunction’s immediate effects, would be diving off Niagara Falls in a barrel, just as if he were one more drunk behind the wheel.  The tally of traffic fatalities per annum is already approaching that of the entire Vietnam War.  It is symptomatic of our dense insulation from such realities that we do not even style the figure—more than double that of China’s Tangshan earthquake in 1976—as a calamity.

     Yet the most relevant class of cases involving misidentified or ignored technological menace may be found in the file devoted to terrorist attacks.  From the evening of September 11, 2001 , until this very instant, the techniques of Al Qaeda have been praised or damned as “sophisticated”.  They are nothing of the sort.  They are astute, but not sophisticated.  They involve the mere exploitation of loosely stitched seams in our high-tech lifestyle’s fabric.  We happen to have many such seams.  One of these is the number of conveyances moving at anywhere from three to 15 times a racehorse’s fastest gallop with a high volume and density of travelers on board—at least dozens, often hundreds.  One stumble, and the contemporary iron horse spills all his riders like grape shot fired out of a cannon… so the trick is to figure out how to catch a hoof.  In the case of a bullet-train or a jetliner, this turns out to be remarkably easy.  No one remembers now, but shortly before 9/11, a favorite scenario for disaster was widespread “metal fatigue” in commercial jets (a theme at least as old as the classic James Stewart film, No Highway in the Sky).  To our terrorist-obsessed mentality, every new plane crash or train derailment is immediately assumed to conceal another dastardly plot; yet the plain truth is that such disasters were already occurring frequently of their own accord before twisted young men armed themselves with box-cutters.4  Our techniques of mass transportation are quite terrifying in and of themselves.

    Another seam ever ready to split in contemporary habits of living is the skyscraper.  Terrorist masterminds were at first somewhat overmatched by the task of destroying a high-rise’s inhabitants in North America, where building codes are more stringent than in other parts of the world.  Yet the edifice need not be toppled: if simply set on fire, its occupants will be trapped like rats on the proverbial sinking ship.  Civilian targets in tall structures could also be struck by a massive curb-side explosion—the equivalent of an IRA “supermarket bomb” ignited in a locality where the supermarket is a multi-tiered complex.  Timothy McVeigh did not induce the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City to collapse—he simply took off one of its faces at a time when most of the chambers were occupied, and this with no more than a rented truck and some fertilizer.  Timing, of course, is of the essence.  A commercial tower leveled in the dead of night would not only possess little photogeneity: it would claim relatively few victims.

     We remarked that time would be a major factor, too, in determining the devastation inflicted by a Los Angeles earthquake.  Our masses move to the clock’s tempo: many of our machines require some sort of chronological coordination—perhaps internal, perhaps with other machines—in order to reach their peak performance.  Yet many also do not.  Indeed, I can think of no apparent reason why office space would not be maximally utilized if workers came and went around the clock.  Traffic would certainly be diminished, fuel consumption would be reduced, opportunities for ancillary businesses (e.g., all-night coffee shops or gyms next to office buildings) would be multiplied, and general stress would be relieved (assuming that the round-the-clock regimen translated into greater flexibility of schedules).  In this case, I believe we may divine one of the machine’s greatest menaces: that its habits are infectious to neighboring humans.  Instead of acquiring greater freedom thanks to the machine’s having liberated us from the sun and the seasons, we spring to life far more rigidly at the alarm’s claxon than any farmer ever did at cockcrow.  We steadily create new technology that allows us to “cheat” a little—drugged drinks to wake us up faster or new conveyances or routes to get us to the job on time.  We do not, however, seem to spend much thought on creating jobs that begin or resume when we’re ready—at dawn, at sundown, at 2 a.m.  The truth is that there were many more such jobs in the past than there are now: the carpenter’s, the seamstress’s, the baker’s, the writer’s.

     So technical catastrophe is not invited only by the physical structuring of contemporary North American life, with its emphasis on breakneck speed and precariously juggled population densities; the short-circuit may also occur in our own nervous systems, one individual at a time yet with plague-like abundance.  It is difficult to compare the nature and extent of nervous disorders from one generation to another, and certainly from one century to another: many ailments were not even identified as such in the past, many today are obscured or mitigated by advanced treatments, circumstantial factors such as diet and exercise have changed radically, and so forth.  Nevertheless, the deterioration of manners in recent generations has achieved an acceptance so near to the universal that it has grown to be a cliché. People certainly seem to be more tense.  Anecdotal evidence abounds—some of us can even remark an increased aggression in our own deportment as the electron has sped up everything we do.  To argue that North Americans already suffer from a plague of machine-inspired neuralgia, then, does not seem at all far-fetched.

     Of course, the most popular scenarios for cultural dissolution involve something more explicit and dramatic: a take-over by robots, for instance (the projection, one might say, of 2001: A Space Odyssey into the terrestrial and the bourgeois).  Several reputed scientists and technicians have lately created a stir by suggesting that robots will, in fact, supplant the human species eventually.5  This narrative seems to have enjoyed a considerable magnetism upon our audiences for generations already, if one may view the highly mechanized aliens in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds as robotic (or, to adjoin the ridiculous to the sublime, take those devils-on-coasters, the Daleks, from the campy Dr. Who series).  What most interests me about the scenario here—perhaps the only one in this group which truly and persistently captures the popular imagination—is that it once again minimizes the citizen’s willful collaboration in the process of decline.  We drive cars, we hop aboard elevators, we log on to computers… but we have no apparent hand in “artificial intelligence”.  Some Frankenstein-like figure in a white coat invented it, perhaps an evil genius, perhaps simply a naïve introvert who failed to foresee his plaything’s ruinous consequences.  In any case, the fault is not ours.  We may admit it as a collective guilt, for such guilt costs us nothing personally (and may, indeed, ennoble us personally for “admitting” to a sin on behalf of others).  Nothing we do in our quotidian routine, however, seems to bear the remotest relation to this reified menace of circuitry.  By agreeing to fear our technology in this form, we have yet again succeeded in missing the point.

IV.  Weapons of Mass Destruction

     No discussion of doomsday scenarios would be complete without The Bomb.  The Baby-Boomer generation was raised in the shadow of a mushroom cloud: some North Americans can recall actually drilling for nuclear attack in school the way youngsters do today for tornados.  (The tornado sirens used in early warning systems around the U. S. were actually developed back in the fifties as alarms for incoming Russian missiles.)  Nuclear weapons have the “advantage” over other forms of catastrophe, from the standpoint of “doomsday credibility”, that they have indeed been used and that their effects were indeed immensely more widespread in time and space than anyone had predicted (another example, by the way—the preeminent one—of technology’s tendency to exceed even the understanding of its specialist creators).  A-Bombs and H-Bombs well support the thesis that a general exchange of them would end life on Earth.  They constitute a special class of technology which we need not—probably should not—attempt to squeeze under the foregoing rubric; for, while as distant from most of our daily lives as robots, they have none of the robot’s potential for farming ocean bottoms and mining planetary surfaces.  They are invincibly extraordinary: their purpose is to obliterate the ordinary and plunge reality back into primal chaos.

     This malodorous reputation clings to nuclear power even when attempts are made to harness it as domestic energy.  In the popular mind, it will remain a “bomb”, first and foremost.  The identification may not be ill-advised, especially with the proliferation of terrorism around the world and the painful revelation that none of our security systems is fully secure.  For all that, I suspect that the most popular narrative is once again among the least likely: not the least serious, but among the easiest to avert.  A missile or a bomb must be delivered, and airborne weapons can be detected and destroyed in flight.  Something like the defensive net of satellites proposed by President Reagan, and which was at once derided with the tag “Star Wars”, will probably soon be in place over North America.  An infinitely more disturbing WMD , given the relative ease of introducing it into the target society, is the bacteriological weapon.  A vial poured into a major city’s water supply or a highly infectious bacterium like anthrax dusted over a few large crowds could leave millions dead, and its lingering effects could be just as difficult to purge from the environment as radioactive fallout.  The evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing such weapons included the blunt fact that he had already gassed dozens of Kurdish villages (leaving tens of thousands of non-combatants dead in their tracks) and that his own scientists confessed to having developed such a hellish arsenal.6  Yet both the popular mind and the Bush Administration fixed upon the image of a mushroom cloud.  The question of where, exactly, Saddam’s vials and dishes of “Satan Bug” ended up has been left not only unanswered, but unasked.

     If the nuclear bomb overlaps with the renegade robot as a portrait in high-tech evil, then the bacteriological weapon overlaps with the naturally occurring plague.  To infuse a population with smallpox would be to “jump-start” Mother Nature down one of her most destructive paths.  The factors which make of the pandemic a harrowing possibility today—enormous concentrations of people moving over unprecedented distances with unprecedented speed and frequency—also elevate the planted contagion to the status of a “dirty bomb”.  The suitcase-bomb with fissionable material would at least give a quick death to immediate bystanders, and its long-term effects could be circumscribed and anticipated within a fairly specific area.  The infused bug would have neither redeeming quality.  Let us not suppose, either, that only governments, or government-sponsored paramilitary groups, would have access to it.  A deranged lab technician could conceivably slip a vial into his pocket and head for the mall.  The scare created one week after 9/11 over certain items of mail dusted with anthrax points to just such an individual or minute group.7  The coverage of that story exposed that such living time-bombs as anthrax and smallpox can be rather easily obtained from their “secure storage” for purposes of “research”.

V.  The Most Likely Scenario

     I am a great consumer these days neither of science-fiction novels nor of “disaster genre” movies.  I have tried to create an inventory of what appear to me the most widely circulated narratives into which our national anxiety about the decline of the West has been compressed in recent years; and I have tried to leaven this mass of material, furthermore, with what I perceive to be less publicized and less naive versions of the story.  That is, I have sought to knead the whole from inventory to taxonomy—to impose certain priorities, at least by implication.  The metaphor of raw dough is not entirely inapt, for the substance with which I have worked does not lend itself to clear separation.  We have seen that commonly styled natural calamities tend to overlap with the effects of our technology on the environment, that plagues are also part natural and part consequence of “lifestyle” choices, that technology itself is widely perceived by the masses as a “given” of nature and its malfunction hence as “bad luck” or “an act of God”,8 and that weapons of mass destruction substantially intersect both the region of high-tech and that of nature (in the form of plagues).  The ultimate end of such an exercise, of course, cannot be simply to produce a curious arrangement of diverse objects.  A responsible investigator must look over the whole and attempt to reach a reasonable conclusion about which scenarios are the more likely ones—for we are not, all metaphor aside, merely surveying beads on a string or a recipe for making bread: we are contemplating the possible collapse of North American society, as precipitated by a catastrophic event that will prove too much for its waning or overstretched energies.  Anyone who can raise a warning should do so.

      I will immediately observe in response to this challenge that a major catastrophe may surely occur without jeopardizing society’s survival.  Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tidal waves will happen, and some of them will claim thousands of lives despite our best efforts at prevention and preparation.  I find that one of this topic’s most fascinating lessons, therefore, lies in the popular mind’s tendency to associate such events with societal collapse.  The earthquake, the tsunami, and especially global warming have all been presented in fiction and on film lately as likely to disrupt the North American way of life irreparably.  A foregone conclusion of personal vulnerability and general ineptitude seems to rest at the bedrock level beneath every narrative.  These scenarios, at least as much as anticipations of natural cycle, are symptoms of an advanced moral anemia.  Americans do not feel in control of their lives, and they readily flinch when the shadow of some major event requiring accommodation or change falls over their shoulder.

     I remarked time and again throughout my survey—I could not restrain myself from a commentary so patently justified—that all varieties of disaster show a tendency to thrust whatever measure of human responsibility may exist onto the “higher-ups”.  The proliferation of a dreadful disease has no more to do with one’s personal decisions than whether rain will fall tomorrow; the failure of traffic to move smoothly indicts poor planning on the part of corrupt or stupid politicians, and the pollution dumped by so many cars into the atmosphere clearly proves that manufacturers have bribed Congress to settle for low emission standards.  The jet which struck the first World Trade Tower was (though nobody now recalls this) immediately assumed to have veered off course through pilot error, and we were told that such accidents had in fact been fearfully anticipated when the towers were constructed; yet the emphasis at once and permanently shifted when the terrorist plot surfaced (except for some talk of suing the construction company because the sprinkler system malfunctioned).  The presumptuous height of the Towers ceased being an issue: they had done it—the others, the bad guys!

     Several pieces of the puzzle’s most likely picture, then, must be drawn from a condition which precedes all specific disasters: the persistent and characteristic evasion of personal responsibility notable in Americans’ responses to calamity.  Why have we surrendered to this sad ebb of morale?  The chief culprit in my view would be our technology: we are so accustomed to having vast amounts of labor done for us by systems which we don’t begin to understand that shut-downs, break-downs, and melt-downs may always credibly be laid at the door of “them”.  How can we be responsible for something which we personally didn’t build, can’t repair, and can’t explain?  A house was constructed, and we bought it: what did we know about mud-slides?  A desirable apartment in a high-rise came available, and we rented it: were we not entitled to assume that someone was protecting us from stray aircraft?

     I believe that the average American’s profound ignorance of how his technology works is a major national problem, and growing day by day.  We are asked to approve a bond for a new loop around town in order to reduce traffic, having no knowledge whatever of the rigid connection between such projects and increased traffic.  We are asked to oppose the construction of a nuclear power plant on a ballot initiative, abysmally ignorant of what environmental costs a conventional coal plant will exact or of whether the nuclear option can in fact function safely.  The personal computer has been part of my life for about twenty years: has there been a single study of entering college freshmen, from the cradle to the present, who grew up before the PC?  Parents were once warned not to let their children sit within five feet of a television: what unwholesome effects are observable in a generation which has spent its collective life within two feet of these new screens—or held them in its lap?  Is such a study being designed even now?  Do we know the long-term effects of wearing an earpiece all day long which pipes in loud music?  The public bristled a few years ago over rumors that cell phones produce brain tumors, and a few years before that over rumors that power lines over one’s residence produce all kinds of cancers.  Both rumors were eventually shot down derisively… but how many more plausible worries will never reach the status of a rumor because the boy has already cried “wolf” twice?9

     At a subliminal level, if not consciously, most of us must surely be somewhat nervous.  And there are more practical, even political reasons to fidget.  When all of your financial transactions are at last done online, how vulnerable will you be to the kind of savvy depredation which plunders life-savings from a terminal?  How will you guard your identity and private information?  What if the whole system “crashes” in a massive and protracted power outage, caused either by accident or malicious design?  What if the public is allowed to vote by computer—how difficult will election fraud be then, when online surveys are already notoriously hard to police for “stuffing the box”?  How much personal information will intelligence agencies extract about us, with or without legal permission?  How much truth are we likely to be told by our leaders when rhetorical “spin” can be vetted before a focus group in an hour, then finessed and fed to the general public according to cues from electronic polling?  How easy will we be to lead about by the nose—how hard will we find it to dig in our heels and not be led?

     The kinds of situation I have just sketched out are already first-tier disasters for our society.  Natural disasters will occur on their own time and without our provocation—but our moral disaster will compound them.  People unwilling to leave their homes as a hurricane descends, or all too willing to build homes on a fault line, because “it’s out of their hands” and, in any case, “they will be taken care of”…  people unwilling to change their travel plans just because the flu season has turned virulent, or all too willing to engage in exotic sexual activity, because “you can die slipping in the bath tub” and, in any case, “modern medicine can handle it”….  Such crises will certainly be exacerbated by the misplaced fatalism and obtuse trust in higher powers typical of contemporary North America.  Technological malfunction will abound, for the same reason.  Seismometers will not prove quite accurate enough, antibiotics not quite potent enough, because this population will have allowed itself to pressure existing resources to the breaking point.  Traffic will grind to a halt, and computer systems will black out—but the public outcry will demand only more highways and more fiber-optic cable.  Malevolent souls will exploit the universal stress of every network for their wicked ends, tossing in a wrench, loosening a rail, crossing a couple of wires.  Public outrage will demand more police, better-welded joints,  and “hack-proof” software.  Though an excessive reliance on technology has created the problem, the only solution recognized by our citizens’ passive mentality is yet another technological appendage; for, since they did not understand the original miracle before it malfunctioned, they cannot understand why a supplemental miracle should not correct the malfunction.

     In such a scenario, an elite coterie high in the central government could conceivably transform the political landscape.  Elections might well be engineered, or voters otherwise manipulated.  A deceased hero might even be resurrected digitally and appear on screens everywhere to solicit votes or support.  The potential for propaganda would free itself from all practical limitation—entire nations could be invented and then obliterated, invasions by interplanetary pirates mounted and repelled, without the viewing public’s being any the wiser.  Contagions could be selectively released and “steered” like a raging forest fire so as to eliminate certain undesirable demographic elements.  All sorts of comic-book caliber narratives could suddenly find accommodation in the twenty-first century’s now highly plastic reality.

     I return to the affirmation, though, that these exotic nightmares are no more than the endgame of a society whose primary catastrophe was to lose its will power.  If I put it thus Delphicly in closing, I hope I will now make sense: our best defense against an asteroid on a collision-course with us may be to stop buying every new gadget.  We should begin striving to understand as well as we can whatever technology we allow into our lives; what we do not well understand, we should allow to affect as small a part of our lives as possible.  Being surrounded by incomprehensible switches, levers, and buttons is diminishing—not enhancing—our technical skill.  What good would an asteroid-shooting laser-gun do us—a device understood by all of half a dozen people on earth—if not even these happy few could calculate how the original rock’s fragments would behave?  How will we know whether the elite six would misuse the gun?  How would they know whether its side-effects might poison the atmosphere?  How will we know that the asteroid or the gun exists, either one, and that we are not being manipulated by a propagandistic fabrication?  Free people cannot live like this.  If we are to inhabit so complex a world, then our society can only preserve its freedom by placing an immensely greater value on seeing things clearly and weighing things soberly.

 

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Space Exploration, Technology, and the Possible Futures of Humanity

Mark Wegierski

 

     Space exploration is often criticized as a waste of money that could better be spent on Earth-bound concerns.  However, space exploration may also be seen as a very long-term strategy for human survival.

     In the more immediate present, there is undoubtedly a need for some kind of “space shield/asteroid watch”.  It is possible that the proposed U.S. National Missile Defense initiative would also be capable of intercepting any especially large incoming asteroids; indeed, that would be a superb argument for its quick implementation.

     In the more remote future, it would be helpful if there were a human presence established on other planets and asteroids of the Solar System.

     Astronomers know that in about a billion years or so, the Sun is likely to “go nova” (i.e., explode and expand to consume most of the Inner Solar System)—which would probably destroy whatever human (or post-human) life existed on Earth at that time.  The Sun would then collapse into a burnt-out cinder.

     So human beings should, at the very least, try eventually to establish a significant presence in the Outer Solar System that could survive the death of the Sun—or, for that matter, have some kind of presence on the Moon or Mars that could offer the chance of human survival beyond some kind of massive catastrophe on Earth, which could, of course, occur much, much earlier.

     In many science fiction works, there has been some discussion of whether “the stars are not for man”—whether, given the unbelievably huge distances between different star systems, interstellar travel will ever be possible.  The portrayals of such travel in most science fiction films and television shows today are clearly unscientific “fantasy”.

     The achievement of interstellar travel is also linked to the question of ultimate human survival, in reference to the so-called heat-death of the physical universe which is postulated by most mainstream physics theories to occur in several billion years.  Some science fiction writers have postulated that those hyper-technologically advanced species (or perhaps machine intelligences) existing at that time will ensure their survival through the creation of a “pocket universe” of several galaxies, avoiding the destruction of the old universe by “popping into” the newly emerging universe.

     The question of what form humans or descendants of humans will survive in has also been asked.  It has been suggested that the future of humanity will consist, in the main, of the transfer of individual human consciousness into electronic and cybernetic form.  One idea is that a human being, after living out his or her natural life, would have his or her consciousness transferred into some kind of discrete electro-cybernetic construct.  An electro-cybernetic construct would presumably retain interactivity with the physical world, whereas the insertion of an individual human consciousness into some kind of virtual reality realm would obviously minimize links to the physical world.  A virtual reality realm would, nevertheless, presumably require maintenance and upkeep by physical humans, and hence problems could perhaps arise if certain aberrant personalities within the realm should try to impose their will.

     Some science fiction authors have suggested that humans could achieve very long and flourishing lifespans in human biological form, by various forms of genetic manipulation and improved medicine.  In regard to various biological manipulations, the question has been raised of whethere there could be bizarre new human “genders” or subspecies created—which would tend to make the conception of “human nature” (already comparatively tenuous and under constant attack today) even more problematic.

     One issue concerns what will happen to language in the future.  There have been large numbers of dystopias built around issues of language, most notably George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.  One of Tolkien’s main points in his creative endeavor was to contrast the profound beauty of the Elven or Elvish languages he created (out of his study of Latin, Classical Greek, Old Anglo-Saxon, Finnish, and various Celtic and Norse languages) in contrast to the nasty speech of the Orcs and other underlings of Sauron.  Today, even as it has become the dominant language of world business and computers, English has to a large extent declined into various impenetrable jargons and often vulgar varieties of slang.  Linguistic scholars in many of the Continental European countries have noticed almost unbelievable levels of vulgarity, as well as an accelerating intrusion of anglicisms (especially linguistically pointless ones where perfectly fine native words are being rapidly replaced) in their native languages.  In a few decades or centuries, it is possible that very many smaller languages on Earth may almost entirely disappear, and that many people will not have anything beyond various English-derived reductive jargons and varieties of vulgar slang in which to express themselves.  One may think today of the typical vacuous teenagers or ‘tweens (or whatever one is supposed to call them) chattering endlessly about essentially nothing on their ubiquitous cell phones.  It could be seen as our consumerist society’s semi-comic version of Orwell’s nightmare in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the human voice would be emerging from the larynx without any engagement of the brain.

     The future of religion in human societies is lso often seen as problematic.  While there were a number of science fiction writers and extrapolative scholars who seriously explored the future of traditional human religions, there were others who have been quite happy to consign them (especially the Christian churches) to oblivion—or to portray them in grossly caricatured form.  We are approaching the situation today—so uncannily prophesied in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World—where any robust expression of traditional Christianity in the public arena is seen as virtually “obscene”, whereas gross “porn” and horror, as well as vicious derision of Christianity (as in many stand-up comedy routines), is virtually de rigueur.  Another obvious point is that, in America and Canada today, the major career prospects of any new, deeply tradition-minded Catholic or fundamentalist Protestant film director, screenwriter, playwright, popular musician, visual artist, screen or theatre actor, fiction writer (especially in so-called “high literature” and such subgenres as science fiction), or serious opinion journalist are virtually zero.  The extent of France’s decline today (a country which once, it may be remembered, virtually defined itself by its fervent Roman Catholicism) is attested by its arid Enlightenment dogma of trying to ban all religious symbols from its public schools—presumably because it cannot bring itself to ban head-to-toe female Muslim attire without simultaneously immiserating Christians and Jews.  It is possible, however, that Christianity may find in itself an unusual resilience (as indeed it has many times before) and that it will be able to flourish in and make a contribution to major civilizational advance in the planet’s “South”, even as it largely disappears from many parts of Europe, Canada, and the United States.  The large presence of Christianity in the “South”—viz., a humane, saintly African Pope—may indeed be the only thing that will prevent the mass-euthanasia of geriatric Western populations when the West reaches the nadir of its cultural exhaustion.

     Another issue would be whether some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) would ever arise that might be inimical to humans.  A further danger would be the emergence of nanotechnology which might create a nanotech “virus” or “plague” capable, theoretically, of extinguishing the entire Earth—the so-called “gray goo” scenario.  The idea is that the self-replicating “nanites” would spread over the Earth with immense rapidity, destroying everything in their path.

     However, the question of nanotechnology may be a little remote in regard to other possible serious problems facing humanity, such as biotechnological and genetic manipulation dangers, disastrous climactic change, or general environmental degradation.

     It is clear that humanity today is facing a number of major crises and unresolved dilemmas, some of which are indeed related to its divisions into various religious, cultural, and ethnic groupings.  Certainly, the variety of human religions, cultures, and ethnicities is to be cherished rather than abolished in some “mad scientist” type, universalist Enlightenment project.  However, one of the major aspects of the planet today is a dialectic which may indeed be baneful for the future of humanity.  It is the unfortunate sense of massive, ongoing resentment against white, Western, Christian civilization.  No one can doubt that—for better and for worse—Western civilization has pushed human technological development the farthest.  At the same time, its enthusiastic embrace of technology has had the eventual result of corroding its own traditional identities.

     It is an open question whether (for example) China, India, and Japan can now lead humanity on the path of technological advancement, or whether the continuing presence of a more robust Western civilization will remain necessary for this to happen.

            Perhaps the West today is indeed in a process of terminal, social, political, and cultural decline.  Ironically, it is today the opponents of the West that are suffused with the supreme, unshakeable confidence and sense of righteous moral authority that once characterized such groups as the Spanish Conquistadors and British Imperialists.  As for the U.S. imperialism of Bush, it is could be considered as that of a multiculturalist empire, whose main domestic policy appears to be “to invite the world” and main foreign policy “to invade the world”  (as the controversial paleo-conservative columnist Sam Francis acerbically put it).  Insofar as he so blatantly neglects his heartland base, Bush might well be setting up the Republican Party for eventual disaster.

     It is possible that some form of “eternal recurrence” is the destiny of humanity.  That is to say, the West will invariably collapse, civilization virtually everywhere around the planet may collapse, and there will be a regression to barbarism (a scenario often enough suggested in sci-fi movies like Mad Max and The Road Warrior).  During the 1980s, there was much talk of the dangers attending a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union which would push humanity to the brink of extinction (the so-called “nuclear winter” theory).  A particularly gruesome example of a post-nuclear-holocaust world was shown in Harlan Ellison’s highly transgressive story, “A Boy and His Dog”.  The use of nuclear weapons (or other horrific weapons) clearly remains a constant danger in the human future.  There are many ideas for how the use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction can be prevented in humanity’s future.  They range from ideas of a “hegemonic” power stomping on all smaller, upstart, unstable rivals (while tolerating nuclear arsenals among the stable, so-called Great or Middle Powers) to the notion that if almost every country had nuclear weapons, the likelihood of their use would diminish.

     It appears that, for the first time in history, human societies have achieved comparatively high levels of technology, reaching some degree of freedom from being at the mercy of the natural elements.  Although it should also be remembered that Nature sometimes has a way of “biting back”—such as the increased resistance of insects to pesticides—at those who take her too much for granted.  Certainly ecology is a hugely important discourse.  Insofar as we become increasingly estranged from “the natural”, the texture of our lives may indeed become “inhuman”.  It would be utterly hideous to live in world where Nature had been annihilated—even if, theoretically speaking, human life could continue in some form.

     While the excesses of the animal-rights enthusiasts should be resisted, there is certainly something to be said for the notion of “stewardship” of Nature.  Wilderness areas and magnificent wild animals roaming free certainly possess some intrinsic value.  We do NOT have the right to destroy Nature in order to advance today’s monstrous, advertising- and consumption-addled society.  The rises in the GNP that advanced economies are so insistent on may not in fact be producing any positive social or cultural results; indeed, it could be argued that, in terms of many truly meaningful social, cultural, and psychological indicators, life in American society has become considerably worse in last three decades.  And the ecological consequences of a compounding rise in the GNP—whose increase is more or less coterminous with increasing resource-use and consumption patterns—are simply frightening.  It is also a reductio ad absurdum to argue that ecology is calling for a return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle (it may also be incidentally noted that this lifestyle was sustained by the eating of prodigious quantities of animal meat).  There is certainly something “natural” and “positive” in the life of the countryside and its villages, a life which (it could be argued) has changed comparatively little over thousands of years.

     Then there are the nice small towns of the typical countryside in Europe.  The notion that there can in fact be truly meaningful cultural diversity between different villages and regions of a virtually mono-ethnic and unreligious society, or for that matter at a major university whose staff and student body consists almost entirely of one nationality, ethnicity, and religion, is alien to today’s dominant sensibilities.  Indeed, a given society’s or university’s pleasant and subtle diversity within comparative unity is largely devoured by the introduction of radical “multiculturalist” diversity (which also usually operates within a tight, quasi-totalitarian framework of “political correctness” where there is no diversity of thought permitted—except perhaps in regard to rather dubious (and sometimes truly hideous) aboriginal and Third World customs and attitudes, whose all-out defense is seen as a “politically correct” badge of honor).

     And it may be noted that the life and the architecture in most cities until the most recent period certainly has had an “organic” quality to it.  Many European cities were extremely diverse and unbelievably rich in cultural for centuries or millennia while registering only the most minute presence of “exotic” peoples from outside the usual European historical experience.  It is a profound mistake to confuse the concept behind magnificent, traditionally multi-ethnic European cities such as Vienna with the ideas driving today’s radically disintegrated, multicultural urban agglomerations, with their often maximally ugly, “late-modern” pop-culture, art, mores, and architecture.  Tolkien’s creativity indeed celebrated rootedness in the village (typified by the hobbit’s Shire), in the noble, ancient city (typified by Minas Tirith), and in the nation (Gondor and Rohan).

     One can see today, as well (among some persons), a profound understanding of unfolding historical and social dynamics.  It is possible that there exists enough historical and social knowledge today to allow serious, perceptive critics to at least suggest the lineaments of what aspects of social, political, and cultural existence may be salvific for the future evolution of humanity, and what elements should probably be reduced in influence or discarded.  Certainly, the nightmares of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union should have taught us critical lessons.  Let us consider the possibility, however, that a new nightmare, which could be called the managerial-therapeutic regime—the union of big business and big government, a social environment of total administration and near-total media immersion, has now arisen.  As Tolkien put it most clearly, “evil always takes on another shape, and grows again…”

     Perhaps it should be the current human societies, after embracing certain healing directions, that transcend various historical and natural cycles, and move straight along an upward path of technological advance that might eventually take us to the stars.  There may not be any necessary contradiction between the embrace of ecology on Earth and the eventual hope of outposts in the Solar System, and possibly interstellar travel—and even the possible survival of humanity’s descendants beyond the projected death of the current physical universe.  Perhaps we may indeed become the only species that can follow that long road.  Perhaps, as Carl Sagan suggested in the 1980s, virtually every intelligent species reaches an evolutionary impasse, and destroys itself through an event akin to a nuclear war.  This is clearly something which, at least for now, has been happily avoided—although Reagan’s aggressive strategy in regard to the Soviet Union was pretty well the opposite of what Sagan had been advising at the time.  Ultimately, it may indeed be a question of societies that will establish a proper balance between ecological and real technological considerations when allocating and conserving resources.  It may be noted, for example, that today’s consumerist/consumptionist society is indeed devouring vast planetary resources toward the production, enhancement, and support of what amounts to little more than massive, idiotic, stultifying, social and cultural garbage.

     The central question concerning technology may be whether a given society’s enthusiastic embrace of technology is not ultimately corrosive of its culture, politics, religious traditions, art, architecture, and mores.  Every society must face the issue of to what extent it can integrate technology within its pre-existent national and cultural traditions.  Certainly, some of the attempted “syntheses”—for example, Nazi Germany, or Stalin’s Soviet Union—have been absolutely horrific.   Today’s America, as well, is close in many ways to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—especially in regard to its ever more outré outlooks on sexuality and forms of entertainment.  It must be said that China, India, and Japan, have all retained a greater measure of traditional outlook, while—without question—becoming extremely proficient in technology.  A possible issue which arises is whether social and cultural decadence can ever lead to technological decadence—a decline in technological advance.  So far, America seems to have avoided the latter outcome.

     It would be reassuring to believe that the various nations one cares about and identifies with will be able to carry on with a more or less similar ethnic and cultural composition almost literally ad infinitum, eventually settling some of their population on remote outposts of the Solar System or the habitable planets of distant stars.  However, this appears to be becoming less and less likely for many of the Western and European nations.

     The scenario painted in David Wingrove’s monumental, eight-volume science fiction series, Chung-kuo—which portrayed a worldwide, highly technologically-advanced Oriental empire (albeit with some European presence)—may indeed not be the worst of the outcomes facing humanity today (although the author himself clearly intended it as a dystopia).  Authors such as Samuel P. Huntington have speculated that another possible “culture sphere” is a (sub-Saharan) Christian Africa.  Indeed, the conflict between Christianity and Islam in Africa may become one of the most important in human history.

     In a world of massive technological flux, those nations and peoples that retain a tough and unshakeable sense of their own ethnic and cultural identity, combined with a sense of critical intelligence about the world, the natural environment, and human social relations, as well as a highly necessary degree of generosity and tactical flexibility in regard to others, are likely to dominate “the deep future”.

The High Hills: Frederick Delius and the Secular Sublime

Thomas F. Bertonneau

 

Of the higher realms of spiritual exploration music has said very little, of the highest realm, next to nothing at all.  This is strange, yet not strange.  Strange, because music is of all the arts the one and only art that can give expression to the mystery of heavenly things, the one language in which the inexpressible is expressible, and not strange in that the creation of the kind of music that I am trying to define, and in which Delius would have excelled, would demand rare qualities of mind and disposition in the soul of the creator.                  Eric Fenby, Delius as I Knew Him

I

     Others might have known the Bradford-born, Dutch- or German-descended composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934) longer than did Eric Fenby, the old man’s amanuensis for the late flowering of his music in the last six years of his life, but none save his wife Jelka (née Rosen) knew him so plainly, or, as an artist, so intimately, not even old friends like Balfour Gardiner or Sir Thomas Beecham.  Fenby lived through most of the period 1928-34 in the Delius household at Grez, a village on the river Loing, some forty miles north of Paris.  While working out the daunting problem of how to take full-score musical dictation from a creative artist blind and paraplegic, he saw daily his idol in the idol’s unscreened candor.  Transparent to Fenby, who in his saintliness of dedication overlooked the rudeness habitual to the self-proclaimed disciple of Friedrich Nietzsche, Delius remained largely opaque to himself, a supreme egotist, and now and again an insufferable bigot in the prejudice and tenacity of his views.  To read Fenby’s beautiful, tactful first-person account of his residency chez Delius, written and published soon after the master’s death, is to confront in particularly high relief the paradox that a great artist need not be a great man.  When one speaks of greatness in a man, one usually means magnanimity or largeness of soul.  Fenby has magnanimity—a capaciousness of spirit that opens itself to other spirits—but Delius rarely if ever reveals this quality, as a person.  He occasionally reveals it, as an artist, but his receptivity to others remains confined, even in his art, to a narrow range of types close to his own.  Indeed, Delius appears detached from other human beings generally, rather like an Ibsen protagonist or the central figure of a Knut Hamsun novel.  Consider the man’s relation to his wife.

     Jelka, a granddaughter of the Romantic-era piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, had made for herself no little reputation as a painter and sculptress before meeting Delius.  She obviously devoted herself to the man, loving him in a more or less uxorial way, and sacrificing a big measure of her own artistic ambition in doing so.  In the composer’s final years, Jelka nursed her husband unselfishly.  Yet Delius could tell Fenby, who was young, shy, Catholic, morally orthodox, and susceptible of being shocked: “You must never marry…  No artist should ever marry…  If you ever do have to marry, marry a girl who is more in love with your art than with you.”  It would be better, as Delius advised, to “amuse yourself with as many women as you like” because in such affaires libres “the physical attraction soon plays itself out” (Fenby 185).  Delius’s conviction corresponds to the human detachment of rigorous Epicureanism or Stoicism.  More a Romantic or a Decadent than a classicist—he belongs to the chapter of music history known as Late Romanticism wherein one finds also not only Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler but Arnold Schoenberg as well—Delius found poetic and philosophical justification for his ideal of the passade in two of his favorite writers, the aforementioned Nietzsche and Walt Whitman.  With Fenby’s invaluable help, Delius had set Whitman’s lines in the vocal-orchestral Idyll (1932), where the anonymous male voice tells, “Once I passed through a populous city, / Imprinting my brain with all its shows. / Of that city I remember only /A woman I casually met, / Who detained me for love of me” (Fenby 119).  Women “casually met” and soon discarded populate Delius’s biography, from a probable black girl during his time in Solano Grove, Florida, to his Parisian years, when, a frequenter of brothels, he contracted the syphilitic infection that blinded and paralyzed him when he was still in his fifties.

     Another item in the late flowering of Delius’s art, as Fenby midwifed it, is a vocal-orchestral setting of Ernest Dowson’s “Cynara”.  The usual interpretation of Dowson’s poem is that it commemorates the poet’s infatuation with an underage girl, but with its conflation of sickness and passion, it could just as well be about syphilitic madness as the legacy of a sexual rencontre:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

     In Whitman’s dialogue and in Dowson’s lyric alike, a palpable weariness weighs heavily in the words.  Attachment exhausts the spirit as pleasure loses its flavor in the saccharine ennui of familiarity; not just eroticism but rather society in itself, as the world of other people, becomes a disease of life inimical to the sovereignty of the subject.  Delius told Fenby, “There is little difference as far as I can see between animals and the great mass of humanity,” a sentiment derived, as Fenby remarks, “from the rhapsodic utterances of Nietzsche” (Fenby 182).  In Zarathustra, indeed, Nietzsche’s prophet and protagonist says in the section of Book II called “The Rabble”: “Life is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned” (63).  In both Idyll and Cynara, the music suits the poetic diction perfectly.  The tempi of Idyll, as again of Cynara, correspond mostly to adagio; at the same time, the chromatic saturation of the chords hobbles the listener’s sense of harmonic change so that he gains the impression of onerous labor, as in a dream, against an affliction of immobility.  Yet the music, constantly trying to free itself of paralysis, has its melancholy, laboriously striving beauty—of this one cannot doubt.  With or without Fenby’s amanuensis, Delius knew how to enact a spell by suspending profane time in favor of esthetic time.  This ability magically to alter the auditor’s perspective and to transport him beyond the everyday world appears already in quite early works, such as the Ibsen-inspired tone poem, På Vidderne (1888), and the somewhat later folklore-inspired fantasy overture, Over the Hills and Far Away (1897).  The woodwind arabesques that relieve the sense of motionlessness in Idyll or Cynara also decorate the textures of På Vidderne (“On the Heights”), although with less deftness and surety than would later be evident; the Grieg-like, Norwegian-accented horn-calls of Over the Hills and Far Away return, wonderfully remote and sublimated, in the dark background of the later works.

     In his Delius (1978), the late Christopher Palmer argues that an essential identifiable experience lies at the heart of Delius’s esthetic, which he traces back to the composer’s Floridian sojourn: the shock of being suddenly gripped—the event reserves itself for a nocturnal setting—during an access of undefined longing and Weltschmerz by “voices, distant, wordless and unseen” (6), sounding from across the landscape and achieving its highest poignancy when mixed with the acoustics of intervening water.  Palmer finds echoes of this powerful “moment of illumination” (6) in the final scene of A Village Romeo and Juliet (1902), in the second dance song of the Nietzsche oratorio A Mass of Life (1899), and in the climacteric choral vocalise of The Song of the High Hills (1912), among other scores.  In the precincts of his orange grove on the St. Johns River, living alone in his cottage, Delius often heard the songs of the black laborers at night, serenading themselves after their meal.  The close harmony and plastic rhythms combining with the subtropical ambiance transfixed him.  An erotic component soon wove its way into the texture.  In a television documentary about Delius, violinist Tasmin Little propagated a story about the composer that stems from remarks in a letter by Percy Grainger.  According to the story, to which Palmer alludes obliquely, Delius left behind at Solano Grove a love child by a woman of color.  In the sole convincing demonstration of remorse in Delius’s biography (supposing the story’s truth), he returned to Florida in 1897 hoping to acknowledge his offspring; the mother and former lover misinterpreted the return, however, and thinking that Delius meant to take the boy away from her fled with him.  When Delius married Jelka in 1903, he was forty-three and she was thirty-five; so whether it was by mutual agreement, Delius’s own stubborn resolve, or biology, the marriage remained childless.

     Accelerated in the trend by his discovery of Nietzsche, Delius would from now on seek the response to and affirmation of the ego’s existence not in other egos, not in any promiscuity with the human-all-too-human, and certainly not in fatherhood and family life, but rather in the palpability of the earth and the rarity of high places; indeed, he would exert himself to dissolve and sublimate the ego in such natural, non-human aspects of the world.  “The Superman,” says Nietzsche through his mouthpiece Zarathustra, “shall be the meaning of the earth…  I conjure you, my brethren, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes!” (3).  On the other hand, the “higher man” who has broken the trammels of human involvement corresponds in his vivacity to “whatever is at home on a high place” (109).  Rejecting human ties because they hobble creativity, locating significance in the mute, brute fact of matter or “the earth”, and aspiring—never mind the contradiction—to the noontide and light of “high places”: the works that Delius wrote beginning in the mid-1890s would reflect these formative biographical influences and produce a template for the full flowering of Delius’s art in the two decades after the turn of the century.  An early opera, Koanga (1897), based on the novel The Grandissimes by George Washington Cable, incorporates Creole melodies and dance rhythms associated with Southern Louisiana and the Francophone regions of the Caribbean.  A large-scale set of variations “on an old slave tune”, Appalachia (1897), scored for orchestra, soloists, and (mostly) wordless chorus, refines the sentiments of personal loss and redemptive absorption in nature further.  Appalachia is a stronger and more affecting work than critics have admitted.  Peter J. Pirie, for example, writes of its “barely digested influences”, including “the ‘Negro theme’ itself, which is none other than the Quartet from [Verdi’s] Rigoletto” (Hughes and Strading 45-46).  Nevertheless, even Pirie admits the work’s “combination of sadness and beauty, which made Delius uniquely his own” (46).  Beecham, hearing it in performance in 1907, felt overwhelmed and began his own lifelong advocacy of Delius in the concert hall.  The score that commentators take for epochal in the Delius oeuvre, however, his Paris (Nocturne): Song of a Great City, came two years after Appalachia, in 1899.

     Where the score of Appalachia calls on baritone solo and chorus to explicate its meaning (“Oh, honey—I am going down the river in the morning,” as the solo mournfully sings at the climax), Paris dispenses with texts and voices in order to convey its composer’s discoveries in purely instrumental terms.  Where Appalachia derives from the sensual impressions of the Mississippi River, the bayous of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, and the catastrophe of the slave’s separation from his beloved, Paris by contrast mines an urbane lode, the most cosmopolitan one imaginable, but purged of any too-close human presence; Delius drives forth from the Parisian experience, with which residency in the 1890s made him intimately familiar, that Nietzschean anathema the rabble and distills what hackneyed language calls “the City of Light” into the darkest of liquors.  Paris does share with Appalachia a nocturnal atmospherics and it looks forward to the next large-scale item of Delius’s catalogue, The Mass of Life, which itself incorporates nocturnal elements at key expressive points in its scheme.  Paris also reflects to some extent Delius’s touchy awareness of Richard Strauss (1864-1949), at the time the paramount German composer, whose opulence and grandeur stem seemed the latest word in audacious modernism.  Fenby’s account points up Delius’s prickly dislike of music other than his own, even of music by composers who praised his efforts and acknowledged a compositional debt to him.

     About Paris, the ever-astute Wilfrid Mellers writes: “Despite its superficial resemblance to Strauss, [Delius’s score] is much further from the classical tradition…  The continuity of flow which Delius achieves between the sections has more affinity with Wagner; and his relationship to Wagner’s last works is… not so much conscious imitation as intuitive discipleship” (120).  According to Mellers, in Paris Delius makes of the “impetuous joy” of his youthful sojourn in the French metropolis—of his “gay abandon” and Bohemian insouciance of those days—a study in distancing and in the “chromatic intensity” of nostalgic “regret” (120).  Palmer describes Paris as “a gigantic… night-piece” that “represents a turning point in Delius’s career” and he certifies the tone poem as “the first score… to see poetry in the city, to draw on the metropolis as a living source of inspiration” (127).  For Palmer, Paris “closely parallels the work of certain mid and late-nineteenth century French poets and painters” (128).  He mentions, of course, Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine among the poets and Paul Gauguin and Edgar Dégas among the painters.  Delius was friendly with Gauguin, as he was with Edvard Munch, then resident in the French capital.  Of the eight or ten recordings of Paris that have appeared over the decades, Beecham’s two, from 1934 and 1955, best convey what Mellers calls the “Dionysiac genius” (120) of the music and what Palmer calls a “night-world reflected in the stridency and glare of [the] brass” (130).  Beecham’s affinity for the music comes as no surprise.  As Colin Wilson has observed, in his fascinating Brandy of the Damned, “Beecham and Delius were alike in one respect: both were curiously immature split-personalities” (128).  Egocentrics, both men also suffered from deeply seated insecurity, for which the harsh, Nietzschean view served as a cover.  Says Wilson: “To conduct Paris or A Song of the High Hills was [for Beecham] like declaring in public that the world is basically a tiresome and unpleasant place, and that the spirit has its own values” (128).  Most sensitive people would agree with the theory, although few would endorse it in such far-reaching terms; most people find ways of reconciling themselves to the world.  Beecham’s absolute commitment to Delius’s palette of subtle effects, and to his message of redemptive renunciation of the social world, is nevertheless abundantly evident from the first few seconds of his recorded traversal, whether it is the 1934 recording or his 1955 remake.

     How to put in words the musical gestures of this score?  How to describe the ineffability of the “Delian” gesture?  How indeed assay the podium art of Sir Thomas Beecham?  Paris, which when apprehended conscientiously ought truly to disturb the attentive listener, opens with low grumblings in the celli and double basses, colored by the dark woodwind hues of the bass clarinet.  The subterranean character of these gestures, a character of as yet formless movement under shadowy concealment, suggests that Delius sees himself as conjuring, not so much the populous city of the arrondissements, but rather the Nietzschean “earth” beneath the city: something other than human, something pre-human or superhuman, against which the contingencies of the merely civic life play themselves out.  Writing in the late 1970s, Palmer could report that no Parisian orchestra had ever performed Paris; but this comes as no surprise, given that Delius’s technique has little relation to French music of the time.  Perhaps the closest musical analogy to these opening bars is the slow, watery E-major prelude to Wagner’s Rheingold, which likewise describe elemental processes that drive life.  Against the opaque background (“night” raised to a metaphysical principle), Delius brings to the fore two important elements.  One is a rhythmic figure given to the tambourine on the pattern of two linked phrases organized as (a) two short, one long, and three short; and (b) two short and one long.  The other, a melodic fragment taken up in turn by the reeds, will grow, over the work’s sections, into the main theme, to achieve final apotheosis in a blaze of brass.  The rhythmic formula provides the basis for a recurring “gypsy dance”, which takes various guises in the animated, fast sections of the score.

     Listening to Beecham’s 1934 traversal, the first of these episodes comes along around nine minutes into the recording.  It is possible to hear Paris as a rondo, in which case it begins to anticipate the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony (1906), which bears the subtitle “Song of the Night” and has links to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.  Mahler finds his urban nightlife in a phantasmagorical Vienna and manages to bring matters to a brilliant close.  In Delius, so studiously attuned to the flux and evanescence of passing life, things tend to fade back into the preconscious wellsprings from which the artist has temporarily drawn them forth.

     Palmer, in accounting for the spirit of Paris, writes of its “almost overwhelming sense of big-city loneliness… an infinite weariness” (121).  For the implied subject of Delius’s score, the empirical city has a purely phenomenal status although the mass of citoyens perceives the mere appearance as a final and inalterable reality; the visionary seer, however, grasps that the surface—blithe and colorful—floats on the depth like so much transient foam, waiting to be whisked away by the wind.  To define happiness by the canons of the civic illusion would be the same as accepting a false currency, for the real reality lies (exists or is) beyond the appearances; the appearances give only a crude and blandly mediated notion of that unseen will or force that impels strife and aspiration and separates the seer from the mob—hence the “loneliness” and “weariness” of Palmer’s commentary.  Fenby has a passage on Delius’s approach to form that explains something of the alchemy of Paris.  “One can’t define form in so many words,” Delius said, “but if I was asked I should say that it was nothing more than imparting spiritual unity to one’s thought” (Fenby 200).  In Paris, as Beecham understands so well from his conductor’s perspective, Delius reduces the empirical metropolis to its essence and then infuses that essence into the several episodes of the work.  By this method he achieves his “unity”.  The essence dwells always in the distance, spatially and temporally; one recalls it in a mood of intense nostalgia, as if from exile.  This is the meaning of the languid horn calls and the passing highlights of triangle and harp sounding within the dense polyphony of strings and woodwind.

     Having obliterated the illusory “real Paris”, the artist communicates in a fashion not amenable to verbal expression with the intelligible entity in whose aura of being the illusory “real Paris” has its false existence.  In the end that entity proves to be the same, in essence, as the self of the artist-creator.  In sublimating himself in the object, he returns to the wordless but powerful substrate of his own Dionysiac potency.

II

     In casual criticism, writers often categorize Delius as a “nature-composer” or, in a related observation, as belonging to that loosely grouped school of English composers—Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams are two of its stellar lights—that mined the vein of Lincolnshire, Kentshire, and Essex folksong in the early decades of the Twentieth Century.  If Holst had an opinion about Delius, it went unrecorded.  Vaughan Williams, in his study of National Music, writes rather dismissively of Delius, consigning him, on the basis of his chord structures, to the musical blandness of British music in the 1880s.  Colin Wilson ironically finds much of Vaughan Williams’ music—he mentions A Pastoral Symphony (1923)—as sounding like “an over-long Delius tone-poem” (146).  While Wilson offers valid insights about Delius and ends his chapter on the composer by praising him gently, he does not accord him exalted stature; on the contrary, he sees Delius as almost a light-music composer.  Delius, writes Wilson, wrote “tired music, soothing music for exhausted nerves, a dreamy, introverted music that asks very little of the listener except that he should relax” (132).  Fenby, Beecham, Mellers, and Palmer correctly argue greater significance for the creator of Paris, while making qualifications of Delius similar to those posited by Wilson: that the music operates within a narrow range of expression, for example, or that the composer uses certain stock formulas habitually, particularly the Paris-formula of slow emergence of thematic material from a nebulous background and its eventual re-submergence back into the same.  Fenby’s version of Wilson’s remark about Delius being stuck too often in an esthetic furrow consists in his confession that during his period of amanuensis, when he heard little music other than Delius, “it would have been refreshing if, after a hard day’s work, one could have listened for a while to music that was just a little less chromatic in character” (53).  About the best he could do was sneak off to his room at night where he would play the opening bars of Sibelius’ Second Symphony on his upright piano.

     Delius’s chromatic harmony derives from Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, as Mellers remarks.  It can indeed irritate patience in large doses, although it is not quite so relentless as Fenby’s words suggest.  For that matter Wagner’s chromatic harmony can also outstay its welcome, which is why recorded music brought such a great boon to the currency of his five-hour-long operas.  Through recordings one can take the medicine in measures of one’s own choosing; one can, as it were, switch to Sibelius.  Chromatic harmony produces, among many other effects, the sense of time slowed down, of eternity in a hiatus of temporality, which listeners have come to associate, say, with the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, where Wagner perfected his new tonal vocabulary.  In the Liebestod, the lovers elect death over life, for life has forbidden their love, and they can find fulfillment only in a deliberate break with existence; yet paradoxically, their bliss, although momentary from the external or normative perspective, becomes as it were internally endless and imperishable.  Intensity of affect and acuity of sensation trump anything so trivial as this-worldly duration: the subject, no longer a limited ego, sublimates his discrete psyche into the elements—or indeed into the veiled Will that causes the elements to be in the first place.  Society and the marketplace, those sources of bland illusion, stand between the strong soul and its access to the hidden sublime of eternal non-personal natural processes.

     When Fenby quotes those passages of Zarathustra—from Part I, Chapter XII–that Delius liked to quote to him, they prove to be those that promise liberation by vatic exercise from paltry norms:

Flee, my friend, into thy solitude!  I see thee deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones.

     Admirably do forest and rock know how to be silent with thee.  Resemble again the tree, which thou lovest, the broad-branched one—silently and attentively it overhangeth the sea.

     Where solitude endeth, there beginneth the market place; and where the market place beginneth, there beginneth also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.  (Nietzsche 31)

     Placing himself beyond the spiritual deadness of the “sentimental dissemblers”, the Nietzschean self-redeemer stands ready to participate in “immaculate perception” (83).  One of the “Sublime Ones”—a seer, who has attained this heightened power of phenomenological acuity—tells Zarathustra that “precisely to the hero is beauty the hardest thing of all” (79).  To perceive immaculately is to bestow value, the essential creative act, by naming things in plain, especially the rarest things, the moments of metaphorical noontide; to see clairvoyantly in this way is to attune oneself to existence at large and thereby to transcend the restrictions of the civic ego.  A Mass of Life, a work on the largest scale, most explicitly among Delius’s works sets forth this Gospel of the secular sublime; but a later score by a decade, An Arabesque, makes clear Delius’s artistic goal on a smaller and therefore more accessible scale than the Nietzsche-setting and can serve as a portal to the larger composition.  Composed for baritone solo, chorus, and orchestra, and requiring somewhere between twelve and fifteen minutes for performance, An Arabesque, composed between 1911 and 1915, takes its impetus from a literary source equal to Nietzsche in Delius’s pantheon.

     Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885), translator of Darwin, brought Naturalism to Danish prose and the trappings of Symbolism to Danish poetry; like Dowson, he died young from the effects of tuberculosis, poverty, and overwork.  The critic Georg Brandes dubbed him an apostle of modernity and ranked him high in Danish, indeed in European, letters.  One of his two full-length novels, Niels Lyhne (1880), would provide the basis for Delius’s last opera, Fennimore and Gerda (1910); his lyric cycle Sånger af Gurre (1868) would inspire Arnold Schoenberg to create the culminating score of his post-Wagnerian period, the gigantic Gurrelieder (1902).  En Arabesk, written in 1868, first appeared in print in the same small volume of posthumously published verse (1886) as Sånger af Gurre.  Delius initially set Jacobsen’s original, being fluent in Danish and Norwegian; most performances, however, have used Philip Heseltine’s creative rendering into Dowson-like English, which actually has Jelka’s German version as its basis:

Hast thou in gloomy forests wandered?

Knowest thou Pan?

I too have known him.

Not in gloomy forests,

When all the silence spoke;

No, no, him never have I known,

Only the Pan of Love have I endured,

Then hushed all that speaketh.

 

Har du  faret vild I dunkle Skove?

Kjender du Pan?

Jeg har følt ham,

Ikke I den dunkle Skove,

Medens alt tiende talte,

Nej, den Pan har jeg aldrig kjendt,

Men Kjærlighedens Pan har jeg følt,

Da tav alt Talende.

     A vignette of disaster, An Arabesque tells how its speaking subject has exiled himself from Redemption-in-Nature by entangling himself in the pernicious human traffic called Love.  Jacobsen’s lines hint at sinister events betokened by “a lonely thorn bush” from which “blood reddened berries” fall “one by one” into “the white, cold snow”.  In Idyll, Delius’s Whitman-setting, the male speaker has managed to extract himself from the spiritual demotion of an imbroglio.  Jacobsen’s lines record their ego’s catastrophic failure to avoid just this downfall, after which, remembering that from which he has excommunicated himself, he goes vagrant along paths whose beauty he has unfitted himself to feel.  The Danish verb at føle, which Heseltine translates as “to know”, would be better set into English as “to feel”.  Fenby writes that Delius preferred music “simple and intimate… direct and immediate in its appeal from soul to soul” (197), and sought to create such music.  “That song shows fine feeling” or “what beautiful feeling” were Delius’s highest words of praise (Fenby 201).  In his vehement moods, Delius scorned Christianity for equating feeling, inherently healthy, with sin, and Christian music—specifically, on one occasion, Palestrina—for being so much bloodless “mathematics”.  For music to redeem itself, said Delius to Fenby, it must “get rid of the Jesus element” (181).

     In An Arabesque, which deals with the atheistic version of sin, Delius’s music heightens the calamity of the words by recreating for the listener that communion with natural beauty to which the vignette’s self-damned protagonist has forfeited access.  Palmer points out that the years when Delius made his setting of Jacobsen’s poem were those during which his dormant syphilis began to manifest itself in debilitating symptoms.  In this way, the plight that the poem describes applies allegorically to Delius’s own deteriorating physical condition at the time—yet another layer of ironic meaning.  Even in the limited fidelity of the air check recording of Beecham’s 1934 Leeds Festival performance, the sonorities of An Arabesque’s opening bars suggest the subterranean root-life of the visible forest: the winding polyphonic lines of the celli and basses burrow and intertwine while the violins with woodwinds perform intricate figures in delicate tracery.  The baritone (in Beecham’s performance it is the incomparable Roy Henderson) soon poses his forlorn question, “Knowest thou Pan?”  He does not, but in the dark movement of instruments in their lowest register, in the coruscations of the flutes and clarinets, and in what Palmer calls “the frosty glitter of the harp” (73), we do.

     Later recordings in better sound bring out this effect even more poignantly, especially Fenby’s, with the Royal Philharmonic, from 1987, which takes nearly fifteen minutes compared with Beecham’s twelve.  Fenby’s slow tempo seems right for this score, which so much concerns psychic paralysis.  Whether for Beecham or Fenby, when the chorus first enters after the baritone’s invocation of “the fleeting moment”, the listener instinctively grasps that its wordless sighing “Ah!” expresses the sting of bitter regret, of utter hopelessness.  Yet a fatal ennui must befall the one who wittingly trades the Pan of the Forest, an emanation of the Nietzschean “earth”, for the “Pan of Love”.  “Love,” after all, is a suspiciously Christian word.  The foolish gambler has made thus a bargain, deadly for him soon enough, which he cannot exchange.  The plangent choral sigh later donates its melodic shape to the enunciation of the words, “Now all is past!”  In Danish, a bit more pithily, Jacobsen says, “Alt er forbi!”  Dowson put it similarly: “Gone with the wind.”  Jacobsen’s strange poem indeed has much in common with Dowson’s “Cynara”.  Delius had set aside his Cynara incomplete shortly before beginning to work on An Arabesque.  The two compositions are nearly contemporary, Cynara being revived and completed with Fenby’s help in 1929; it was the first of their collaborative efforts to reach full score.  An Arabesque, as Palmer so aptly puts it, depicts “a ravaged landscape” inexorably transformed into a “featureless void” (78).  While the subjects both of Jacobsen’s lyric and Delius’s musical gloss have, as Palmer argues, glimpsed “the real world of spirit beyond the imagined world of matter” (78), he has chosen lethally to relinquish that supernal vision for what turns out to be a lesser, indeed a blighting, delectation.  In An Arabesque, Delius has created his version of the negative sublime; the positive sublime, where Delius achieves it musically, becomes all the more poignant by contrast.

     Delius’s most ambitious work in any genre, A Mass of Life, belongs, like Paris and Appalachia, to the fin-de-siècle.  Beecham and Palmer give its dates of composition as 1904 to 1907, with the first complete performance under Beecham coming in 1909; Peter Pirie, however, in The English Musical Renaissance (1976), says that portions of Part II of the work were in score as early as 1899.  A number of Delius’s compositions, as we have seen, underwent long periods of gestation.  In some ways an uncharacteristic work, A Mass begins with a great choral outburst, which qualifies as the most positive and forthright statement that the composer ever made.  It is Delius’s equivalent of the C-Major fanfare that opens Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Titanic theme for horns that opens Mahler’s Third Symphony, like A Mass inspired by Nietzsche’s faux prophecies.  Over an urgent ostinato in the strings and swooping figures in the horns, the chorus urges forth these words: “O thou my Will!  Dispeller thou of care!  Thou mine essential in life!  Preserve me from all petty conquests.”1  Delius imparts a particularly buoyant quality to the brass interjections—trumpets and trombones soon join the horns—by syncopating their rhythms.  In one of the few true allegros that Delius wrote, the paean continues with: “Preserve me for one final destiny, that I may stand prepared and ripe in the full noon-tide.”2  These words resonate with many of the exordia that Delius launched at Fenby during the young man’s residency at Grez.  “Eric,” he once pronounced: “I’ve been thinking.  The sooner you get rid of all this Christian humbug the better.  The whole traditional conception of life is false” (Fenby 179).  To espouse the “traditional” is tantamount to submitting to “petty conquests”.  On the same occasion, Delius said, “Throw those great Christian blinkers away, and look around you and stand on your own feet and be a man” (179).

     The annotator of the Delius Festival (presumably it is Philip Heseltine), which Beecham organized in the London Autumn of 1929, remarks, no doubt with A Mass in mind, that “the first thing to be realized about Delius’s music is that it is the outcome of a profoundly religious nature, and is therefore completely at variance with what is glibly called the modern spirit in music.”3  By the time these words were written, the phrase “the modern spirit in music” would have referred to Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, Igor Stravinsky and Le sacre du printemps, and the percussive keyboard compositions of Bela Bartók, with their basis in the brash folk music of the Balkans.  A Mass, which struck early audiences as daring, would in 1929 by comparison with such avant-garde benchmarks have seemed lush and reactionary—real beauty of the old-fashioned type as opposed to contemporary intellectualism and technique.  Aware of this, the annotator writes: “It is considered a paradox to describe as a religious composer one who, instead of writing anthems and services, turns to Nature (and even to Nietzsche) for his inspiration; and yet most irreligion is mere reaction against a pretence of religion that would destroy religion, a misconception of the very nature of religion, a confusion of ideas which is of the same order as the credulity of the senses with regard to the sun’s apparent motion around the earth.”4  With references to Donne and Traherne, the writer finds in Delius, and particularly in A Mass, a recognition that “Man is not merely part of Nature, but… all external things are only aspects of himself made manifest to his senses.”5

     One might justly suspect the epistemology, with its overtones of Fichte and Feuerbach, but the notion convinces even so that what Delius seeks in all his music, not only when he sets philosophical pronouncements, is a rediscovery of the real, which it is the sin of the modern mentality to forget.  In one of his books, the anthropologist Mircea Eliade reminds his readers that for antique and primitive people, such things as day and night, storm and sweet weather, earth and sky are entities, palpable, undeniable, the raw experience of which, overwhelming the subject, gives rise to ideas of godhead and the supernatural.  With the aid of Nietzsche’s words, A Mass tries to restore this base-line reality to the modern intellect, which has become uprooted from its foundations in nature.  This motivation lies behind the plan of Paris, which Delius called a “Nocturne”.  A Mass includes two “nocturnes.”  In Part I of the score, this takes the form of the “First Dance Song”.  Nietzsche’s prose, as organized for Delius by Fritz Cassirer, represents a parliament among the tenor, soprano, and contralto with descriptive commentary and verbal scene painting by the chorus; it culminates in the basses singing the verse-lines from Zarathustra, Part IV: “O Mensch gib Acht! / Wie spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?”  Mahler sets the same lines in his Third Symphony.  Delius draws from the words a slow, quiet music that nevertheless moves in dance rhythms, even at one point about midway through the movement becoming a fugal dance in syncopated rhythm on the vocalization La-la-la in the chorus.  In form, the “First Dance Song” reprises the form of Paris.  Against a dark background, glittering highlights emerge briefly only to disappear into the shadows—a glittering golden boat that sinks away into jet-black waters, the moon shining on the waves, the silhouette of a paradisiacal island glimpsed on the far horizon.  Delius here builds on earlier sallies in the use of the chorus as an instrumental adjunct of the orchestra that he had undertaken in Appalachia.  Bartók, who heard a Vienna performance of A Mass under Carl Schuricht, wrote to Delius to say how powerfully the “First Dance Song” impressed and intrigued him.  Indeed, wordless voices augment the orchestra in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók’s only opera.  The admiration went in only one direction, however.  Fenby records how Delius loathed the Hungarian’s Fourth String Quartet when he heard it in a broadcast concert: “Harsh, brutal, uncouth noises” (61).

     At the beginning of Part Two of A Mass comes the atmospherically rare orchestral prelude called “On the Mountains”.  As Palmer writes, Delius conceived this prelude stereophonically.  While Beecham’s pioneering 1952 recording of A Mass retains pride of place as the best performance of the score committed to disc, Sir Charles Groves’s 1970 two-channel reading treats the spatial aspect of the score with greater adequacy.  Against a background of quiet strings, horns call to one another antiphonally, creating a sense of Alpine elevation to fit the episode of Zarathustra’s retreat back to his mountain fastness.  Delius has here provided his score with its most transparent textures; the feeling of a great free aerial space is immediate and wonderful.  Several musical kinships come into play in connection with “On the Mountains”: Franz Liszt’s Bergsymphonie (1848; revised 1851 and 57), the first of that composer’s “Symphonic Poems”; Joachim Raff’s Seventh Symphony, “In den Alpen” (1876); and Richard Strauss’s Alpensinfonie (1916), another work taking its cue from Also Sprach Zarathustra.  When the climbers reach the summit in Strauss’s score, they too encounter the exaltation of the height.  For Strauss, however, the prophetic moment requires a conspicuously churchy organ interpolation.  Delius comes closer to Nietzsche’s determination to remake mystic communion with no vestiges of the Christian ethos whatsoever.

     The last two movements of A Mass as a whole together furnish the second of its two nocturnes.  Textually these two movements take up the Mitternacht motif of the “First Dance Song”.  “Night” serves the seer’s goal of working up to the act of immaculate perception because in it the chief sense, vision, forfeits its efficaciousness; imagination and creativity must supply what the paltry optical faculty cannot—and the auditory and tactile faculties come into their own.  “Night” signifies the soul.  The soul is deep and frightening, a foreign place that only the audacious man can recover as his own proper domain.  Musically this two-paneled  “Night Song”, concluding with a repetition of the verses “O Mensch gib Acht”, is less complicated but a good deal more intense than the “First Dance Song”.  The tenor sings of his yearning, from the depths of night, for the new dawn of his psychic transformation, but the end comes not in a blaze—rather in a quiet fading-away, so typical of Delius.  Beecham, writing in the 1950s, noted that, thirty years before, Heseltine had asked rhetorically why A Mass of Life should not be ranked equally with Bach’s B-Minor Mass.  In ambition and intention, one can hardly deny a degree of equivalence, but Fenby’s thesis that Delius might have achieved a superior degree of expression had he not shut himself off from anything that smacked of the conventionally divine comes immediately to mind.  Of magnanimity and caritas—two qualities that Bach’s Mass infuses with new surcharged meaning—A Mass of Life has nothing, its tenor-protagonist being no Evangelist-narrator but more narrowly the Dionysiac celebrant of his own ego.  As Delius conceived it, or perhaps as he felt it, the sublime always refers back to the ego because the plenitude of worldly beauty springs in the first place from the hidden ego-creator of all phenomena.

III

     In his penchant for vocal and choral composition, Delius remained rooted in the Nineteenth Century tradition.  A Mass of Life stands in a line with Felix Mendelssohn’s Biblical oratorios Elijah and Saint Paul, with Max Bruch’s Moses and Ulysses, and with works by late-Victorian composers such as John Stainer, Hubert Parry, and even Edward Elgar.  In another case of one-way admiration, Elgar, a Catholic, generously expressed his appreciation of A Mass of Life while Delius spared not the contumely in pronouncing a judgment on The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar’s Newman setting and one of the glories of the English choral heritage.  To its credit, Delius’s music in these choral canvasses has held its own (more or less) in the active repertory, as Stainer’s music and Parry’s have not.  A Mass surpasses in beauty and therefore in interest later essays in secular piety such as Hans Pfitzner’s cantata Von Deutscher Seele (1923), with texts from the poetry of Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff.  Pfitzner owes something to Delius without rising anywhere near to the level of Delius’s achievement.  The much current Carmina Burana (1938) by Carl Orff, as popular on records as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, also sets out to be a litany of secular sentiment, but Orff is to Delius as a “boom box” is to a string quartet.  Palmer wonders why the Nazis never seized on Delius’s Nietzsche-oratorio for propaganda purposes, but Delius would have been too gentle and refined for them.  The dying cadence was not in the Nazis’ songbook; they needed Pfitzner’s sub-Schumann type of nationalism or Orff’s tub-thumping oompah-choruses.  The Austro-German conductor most associated with Delius in the middle of the Twentieth Century, Carl Schuricht, fled Das Reich during the war to reside in Switzerland.

     Whenever one feels the urge to skimp Delius, one tends to recall how refined a manner he cultivated and how much genuine beauty he offered to his audience.  For all his railing against technique, he paid attention to detail, fine detail, and his care counts in the result.  The secular sublime in music might well be limited, but it is by no means nugatory; the world would be poorer without it.

     The case could be argued that Delius created with the greatest inspiration when he avoided encumbering himself with words.  Fenby understood this: “Of his settings in German and Norwegian I am not competent to judge, but, with English, the words are almost like an unnecessary commentary on the mood which the composer has drawn up from their meaning” (202).  When they were working together as composer and amanuensis on the complicated choral-orchestral score of Songs of Farewell, a Whitman setting, Delius said to Fenby: “It doesn’t matter so much about my hearing the singers.  The Orchester—the Orchester is the chief thing I want to hear” (Fenby 203).  As a composer for orchestra, aficionados identify Delius with a group of miniatures—On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1911) and Summer Night on the River (1912); A Song Before Sunrise (1918) and The Song of Summer (1929); the Prelude to the early opera Irmelin (1892), “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” from the middle-period opera A Village Romeo and Juliet (1902), and the Intermezzo from the final opera Fennimore and Gerda (1909).  The notion, quite false, remains in circulation that Delius, like his teacher at the Leipzig Conservatory Edvard Grieg, exercised his talent in the art of the miniature.  Wilson takes more or less this position in Brandy of the Damned.  Casual criticism also categorizes Delius as an English composer.  Yet On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring uses a Norwegian folksong and the river of Summer Night on the River is the Loing, which ran through Delius’s backyard in Grez.  A Village Romeo and Juliet adapts a novella, Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorf, by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, while Fennimore and Gerda adapts the Dane Jacobsen’s novel of youth and despair Niels Lyhne.  Palmer organizes his study by geographical region—Florida, France, Scandinavia, England—and declares his subject a true cosmopolitan.

     The score of Brigg Fair—An English Rhapsody (1907) seemingly confronts the listener with several contradictions, for it takes the form of a set of variations on a Lincolnshire folksong, as English as one can get, that Percy Grainger collected “from the singing of Mr. Joseph Taylor, of Saxby-All-Saints”, in 1905:6

The tune is related to the one loosely adapted sixty years later by the pop-artists Simon and Garfunkel for their acoustic hit, “Scarborough Fair”, used in the movie The Graduate.  Arthur Hutchings describes it as being “in the Dorian mode”, and so decisively neither in a major nor a minor key; but Delius gives it the kind of treatment, Hutchings says, “exactly as he would have given to a diatonic tune” (84).  True to its folksong-origin, Delius’s appropriated melody sticks in memory after a single hearing and is easily sung; its tessitura is not so wide as to prevent anyone with an untrained voice from giving it a good approximation.  The tune’s phrase structure lends itself to plastic modification and the grace-note fillips make an opportunity for modest ornamentation.

     The lyric exists in many versions.  Grainger transcribed these stanzas, as sung by Joe Taylor:

It was on the fifth of August,

The weather fine and fair,

Unto Brigg Fair I did repair,

For love I was inclined.

 

I rose up with the lark in the morning

With my heart so full of glee,

Of thinking, there, to meet my dear

Long time I wished to see.7

Grainger culled additional stanzas from other sources.  One of these must have exerted considerable appeal on Delius, with its aperçu that while “meeting is a pleasure, / Parting is a grief.”8  It is the same nuclear meaning as in Jacobsen’s “Arabesk” or Dowson’s “Cynara”; we encounter it also in the lyric of separation in the climax of Appalachia.  The emotions of “Brigg Fair” grow out of centuries of country life; they absorb a contour from the hills and coppices of the English countryside, quite as Hutchings remarks.

     One cannot then escape Brigg Fair’s earthy Englishness.  The cosmopolitan has returned to his native roots: his score is in its way more English than, say, A Somerset Rhapsody (1906) by Holst or In the Fen Country (1904) or the Norfolk Rhapsody (1906) by Vaughan Williams.  “How magically,” Fenby writes, “do the first few pages of Brigg Fair evoke the atmosphere of an early summer morning in the English countryside, with its suggestion of a faint mist veiling the horizon, and the fragrant scent of the dawn in the air” (208).  A Chaucerian yeoman would be at home in the musical environment; so too would one of A. E. Houseman’s farmhands.  Hutchings remarks that even the form, freely evolving “rhapsodic” variations, has an English pedigree, traceable to the elaborate part-song fantasias of the Elizabethan composers, who also often appropriated what later musicology would call folksong.  Brigg Fair, commencing in the spare textures of two flutes, two clarinets, and harp, whose gestures resemble birdsong, thus differs in character from other famous free-standing sets of orchestral variations—the Variations on a Theme by Haydn by Johannes Brahms and the Symphonic Variations by Antonin Dvorak, not to mention the Enigma Variations by Elgar.  One section follows another (there are twenty-two in all) seamlessly; when the tune first appears on the oboe, it seems to emerge from the serene texture of the winds-and-harp introduction.

     Although Delius indicates no strict program, the listener may suppose along with Hutchings a relation between the development of the tune and the journey of the hopeful wayfarer to the titular fair; if he gets his heart broken, he seems reconciled to disappointment.  On the other hand, as in Paris, Delius emphasizes the natural over the human.  If Brigg Fair had a model, it would probably be Vaclav Smetana’s Moldau, which essays to depict in instrumental terms the growth of a river from its mountain sources to its slow-moving broadened-out grandeur in the lowlands; musicology can analyze Die Moldau as a set of variations, after all.  A kind of fluvial downhill motion propels the transformations of the basic material in Brigg Fair too until in the penultimate section the full brass complement, backed up by tubular bells, intones the melody in augmentation.  This climactic section—the score’s moment of ego-absorbing sublimity—blazes forth like the Nietzschean “Noontide” invoked by the chorus in A Mass of Life.  Afterwards, in the epilogue, the calm music of the introduction asserts itself again, closing the circle, as it were, of this rurally inflected passacaglia for orchestra.  In only a handful of other works did Delius create such perfect balance between form and content—so much so that one easily forgets that Brigg Fair operates on a rather large scale, requiring from sixteen to eighteen minutes in a typical performance.

     In Brigg Fair, listeners confront another small but significant paradox of Delius’s music already briefly remarked: that the Master of Grez, although in reaction against the industrial blighting of the landscape and the mechanization of life, embraced the mechanical reproduction of musical performance as a medium for disseminating his work.  Beecham played a central role, founding a Delius Society in 1934 to make and sell records by subscription through the offices of Columbia United Kingdom.  But as early as the mid-1920s, Beecham had recorded some of the shorter works, while sessions for the first recording of Brigg Fair took place in London in the bold days of December 1928 and July 1929.  The long hiatus between rehearsal dates involved the resolution of technical problems in capturing the subtleties of the score and the review of the initial masters by Delius.  Beecham would re-record Brigg Fair in 1946 and again in 1956, the latter in stereo.  The 1928 discs retain the magic of the occasion.  Particularly fetching are the introduction, the dance-like variation with triangle, and the variation featuring solo horn.  The 1946 and 1956 remakes bring all the details into greater clarity, yet they fail to surpass the first effort musically.  Listening to Delius’s score through the crackling surface noise of the eighty-year-old master platters is rather like contemplating faded sepia-tint photographs of one’s grandparents on their wedding day: it is the vestige of a gentler world now gone—gone with the wind.  Beecham already had this sense of Delius’s art at the time, grasping it as the source of anomalous illumination in “the vast cloud of mental obfuscation hovering over the present musical scene” (222).

     In 1928, Beecham also committed to grooves the vocal-choral-orchestral work that some nominate as Delius’s finest achievement, the Whitman setting Sea Drift (1903-1904); Beecham would re-record Sea Drift in 1936, the 1928 takes having remained unpublished, and once more in 1952.  The waking of consciousness through confrontation with loss and death, the location of dawning sentiment in the thoughts of a self-sufficient and keenly perceiving subject, and the removal of that subject’s awareness from rabble-ridden vulgarity by his participation in events of a powerful natural order—these elements animate and structure the verses from Leaves of Grass to which Delius responded in conceiving this poignant essay in seascape, solitude, and mortality.  Fenby wonders about Delius’s belletristic judgment, saying that, on inspection, he “had no feeling whatever for the music of words” (201).  Fenby goes farther with the comment, “The root of his insensibility… was, I think, a certain lack of literary taste” (205).  Hutchings, however, in respect of Sea Drift, urges that “Delius never bent a text to his musical purposes in so masterly a way” (104).  Sea Drift is certainly a more compact work than A Mass of Life or even than the Songs of Sunset (1907), an elaborate choral-orchestral suite on poems by Dowson.  Hutchings reminds readers that Whitman fascinated British composers in the decade on either side of the year 1900, inspiring settings by Holst and Vaughan Williams—The Mystic Trumpeter (1904) and A Sea Symphony (1903-1909) respectively.  Sea Drift differs in spirit from both in like degree as either differs from the other.

     That Whitman’s words convey a story, however minimal, contributes to Sea Drift’s musical cohesion.  This cannot be said of the Dowson poems in Songs of Sunset.  Delius excerpts his text from Whitman’s longer poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”; this is the first entry in the suite of eleven sea-themed poems in Leaves of Grass that bears the name, which Delius has borrowed—Sea Drift.  In the poem, Whitman’s memoirist recalls how when a boy he one summer came to know by close observation a pair of seagulls, “two feathered guests from Alabama”, who nested on the Long Island shore.  The words betoken that Romantic Fusion-with-Nature that lies at the heart of the Delius esthetic: “And every day, I, a curious boy, never too close, / never disturbing them, / Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.”  Swiftly enough, catastrophe falls:

Till of a sudden,

Maybe killed unknown to her mate,

One forenoon the she-bird crouched not on the nest,

Nor returned that afternoon, nor the next,

Nor ever appeared again.

And thence forward all summer in the sound of the sea,

And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,

Over the hoarse surging of the sea,

Of flitting from brier to brier by day,

I saw, I heard at intervals, the remaining one, the he-bird,

The solitary guest from Alabama.

     “Peering, absorbing, translating”: these words of intentness and communion aptly designate what Delius accomplishes musically in reacting to Whitman’s verbal sea-sounds and tableau of sadness.  The opening bars, purely orchestral, juxtapose rising figures in the bass line with descending figures in the upper registers—with flutes and clarinets furnishing the atmospheric color.  This music recurs at important moments of the score, but Delius’s form corresponds entirely to his intuitive appreciation of Whitman’s words.  The baritone sings the lines attributable directly to the lyric persona of the poem while the chorus sings descriptive passages or lines that seem to represent unspoken and even half-thought notions of the same persona.  The solo vocal line corresponds to extended recitative, always melodic, but bursting into genuine arioso melody only near to the end, at the words, “O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!”  The final bars rehearse the sea-music of the opening bars, with the chorus fading away on the poem’s cadential “together no more”.

     The moment of sublimity in Sea Drift involves the boy’s apocalyptic and total identification with the bereft he-bird, whose lonely gull-cries become his own: “High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves, / Surely you must know who is here, is here, / You must know who I am, my love.”  At the same instant the boy seems to fuse also with the seascape against which the blight of separation has occurred.  Yet musically the flight into soaring melody comes only as the poem’s subject recalls that vanishing—and now vanished—oneness.  Is that oneness also love?  The word love or its participle, loved, registers fourteen times in the lines that Delius selects; but one notes that this love is animal affection, the bonding in nature of mate with mate, and not complicating human affection even though the poet necessarily speaks of it in anthropomorphic figures.  The disaster of Sea Drift thus differs from the disaster of I, where the subject has damned himself by choosing the Pan of Love over the Pan of the Forest.  The exile of Sea Drift is constructive where that of An Arabesque is destructive.  Delius always remains true to his peculiar type of non-gregarious asceticism.

     Palmer, who so succinctly sums up the central Delian experience, has strangely little to say about Sea Drift; indeed, neither does Brigg Fair interest him beyond passing remarks.  It is a question worth pondering why Palmer slights these scores in his otherwise comprehensive and detailed study.  For Pirie, Sea Drift “is a blend of several subtle and seemingly not very compatible elements fused at white heat into a new synthesis—not a bad description of the creative act itself” (Hughes and Strading 53).  Pirie praises the harmonic modulation at “O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!” for being “so magical that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it is the most emotionally profound and technically apt since Schubert” (53).  As for Hutchings, he consecrates six enthusiastic pages to the score, which he finds to be full of paradoxes.  “The sea is always there, but the work is not a seascape,” he writes; and Delius’s “primary concern is to express the emotions” implicit in Whitman’s poetic usages (105).  Hutchings admires the cyclic character of Delius’s musical working-out of the argument: “The orchestral opening to the work immediately brings us to ‘the surgy murmurs of the lonely sea,’ and we are left with the same lonely sea when the last ‘No more, no more’ recedes” (105).  Sea Drift has been lucky in its discography; while the classic representations belong to Beecham, whose three sallies have remained in the catalogue, interested parties should also seek out more modern recordings like those of Sir Charles Groves and Richard Hickox.  These reveal technical aspects of the score that older recording practices never could capture.  None will surpass, however, the first of Beecham’s three, featuring the impeccable diction of baritone John Brownlee, whose clarity of enunciation makes Whitman’s every word fully apprehensible.

IV

     Novelist and thinker Colin Wilson grudges a bit in according status to Delius, as we have seen; but his chapter on Delius in Brandy of the Damned often cuts to the heart of the matter.  Addressing the probable motive behind Delius’s vehement espousal of Nietzsche, Wilson proposes: “Like Yeats, Delius created a mask, an anti-self, as a defense against the world.  The hatred of religion might at first seem strange; after all, Dowson became a Catholic, and wrote movingly of Extreme Unction.  Then one realizes that Delius would have been incapable of the surrender of personality demanded by religion, even the romantic, masochistic religion of Parsifal; the rejection was again a form of self-defense” (129).  Apposite to Wilson’s diagnosis is the record of Delius’s everyday life, as documented by Lionel Carley in Delius: A Life in Letters (1862-1908).  Readers of Carley’s volume will search in vain for an artistic credo, a passionate outburst, or the report of a life-altering visionary experience.  While Delius could and did write effective accounts of the tropical climate in Florida and his treks through the Norwegian mountains, the bulk of his correspondence (Carley frequently reproduces both sides of an exchange) consists of negotiations with music publishers, answering pleas from second-tier conductors that he might intercede to supply them with scores on discount, and notices to Jelka on trivial particulars of various tours he made to promote his music.  The exceptions are an occasional word of praise for a play, poem, or novel that Delius has read, as when he briefly extols Jacobsen’s Marie Grubbe (1876) in a missive to Jelka.

     The letters show no obvious resentment, but taken in concert with private remarks in later life as detailed by Fenby and with the music itself, one can hardly not conclude that Delius, as Wilson argues, spent much of his life in passionate revolt against the enmeshing banalities of modern existence—even while acquiring adeptness in handling them.  He came from a family of successful, wealthy cloth merchants, after all, and had worked in the family business in various capacities.  He struggled to escape the family business, however, as much as he could: “wholesale draper” was not how he saw his career.  When Delius père objected to the son’s determination to live for art, Delius availed himself of a generous and playboy-like uncle then living in Paris, where he experimented with Bohemianism and became conversant casually with the antinomian theories of the day.  In the two decades up to his death, Delius’s house in Grez, originally Jelka’s, belonged by deed to his friend and benefactor Balfour Gardiner, who charged no rent.  It is characteristic of Delius that he could rail against Christian charity, as he often did to Fenby, while existing on the benevolent largesse of one of his relatives or friends.  Fenby’s dedication also came without a price.  It too was charity.  Despite Fenby’s filial devotion to the old man, this contradiction never ceased to impress him, and he thought that it had implications for Delius’s art.

     In A Life in Letters, Carley reproduces passages from a novel by C. F. Keary, The Journalist (1898), where Delius appears as “Sophus Jonsen”.  Keary, who also wrote the libretto for Delius’s opera Koanga (1896), describes Jonsen as  “an Anglo-Danish playwright in his mid-thirties” who “dabbles in Alchemy and is a disciple of Nietzsche.”[i]  In a conversation, Jonsen expatiates on the Übermensch: “I tell you, my dear fellow, that’s the most important thing of all that we’ve got to get rid of, that idea that you must always be afraid of hurting somebody.  You’ve got to hurt a lot of people—you’ve got to hurt all the damned bourgeoisie as much as you can—if this world is to step a bit forward” (416).  Delius recognized himself without objection in Keary’s portrait, which provides a clue both to his personal psychology and his esthetics.  What Delius did, apart from writing music, was promote it, and why not?  He also inveterately promoted himself, and again why not?  What Delius felt was irritation at the rabble or “bourgeoisie” and at the market where such philistines go about their small lives and reign sclerotically, like his father, over their families.  Something of this anti-bourgeois bellicosity filters into Delius’s version of the secular sublime; but it is there already in Nietzsche’s version of the same, which serves Delius for his chief model.  The attainment of “immaculate perception” functions as a rite de passage whose secondary purpose, once it has admitted the seer to a new order of perception and understanding, is to exclude the unwashed from its rigorous grace.

     Yet now, while roundly criticizing Delius for his lack of common gratitude and moral stinginess, it is nevertheless required to say that these unattractive characteristics never cancel the possibility that, in certain of his attitudes, the man was right and that as an artist and seer he delivered truths to those willing to receive them.  Like Blake, who could also be self-serving, Delius saw that industrialism and mercantilism—whatever the affluence they had produced and however much their apologists might justly defend them—had made ugly incursions into the landscape and had established a mentality that placed too much merit in the crass ideas of business for its own sake and so-called success.  To this extent, the modern world had subtracted something from the medieval world that it had replaced.  While the cities grew, the villages shrank, and land became another “resource” for exploitation.  While human habitation encroached on and despoiled the wilderness, money, rather than some actual bond, became the mediator between individuals.  Wilfrid Mellers appropriately includes Delius in his study, Singing in the Wilderness: Music and Ecology (2001), where he devotes a chapter to A Village Romeo and Juliet (1902).  Coincidentally, Delius commissioned Keary as the original librettist for this “Lyric Drama in Six Scenes” before he and Jelka decided to assemble the book on their own.  Mellers compares Delius with Wagner.  A Village Romeo and Juliet, he writes, is a kind of “sequel to Tristan und Isolde, with which it shares both poetic theme and technical means to its end” (13).  Succinctly, according to Mellers, “both operas address the impossibility of achieving identity between flesh and spirit in the temporal world” (13).

     The story is simple: two farmer-widowers fight over a wedge of land, “the Wild Land”, between their fields, extending the feud to their children, Sali, the boy, and Vreli, the girl; they are playmates childishly in love now forbidden to associate by parental fiat.  The disputants go to law and ruin themselves.  The children, grown to adolescence in poverty, ignore the now ineffective ban; but seeing no prospect in life, finding the world hostile to their passion, they at last drown themselves in a river.  A contest over unspoiled land, which the contestants greedily see as potential property, poisons the happiness of two innocents.  One complication in the plot is the back-story of the contested pristine patch, said to be morally the inheritance of a vagabond called the Dark Fiddler who, however, being a bastard, cannot legally hold title.  While Sali and Vreli are the opera’s titular protagonists, the Dark Fiddler dominates the drama as the truly central and the most fully realized character.  Delius played the violin and, while not illegitimate, nevertheless relished his bastard-like épater-les-bourgoises role as the brothel-crawling black sheep of his family.

     Delius, although in marriage childless, probably fathered a mulatto male child during his Floridian excursion.  Incorporating these autobiographical traits, the Dark Fiddler (the German-language libretto calls him der Schwarze Geiger!) functions in A Village Romeo and Juliet as the composer’s self-projection.  A sophisticate as well as an outsider, the Dark Fiddler possesses sublime and tragic knowledge inaccessible to the naïve adolescents, for whom he nevertheless acts, up to a point, as a guide.  The opera’s two feuding farmers and its uptight villagers who snub the simple lovers are wretched people; despite standing in opposition to civic life, however, the Dark Fiddler’s antinomianism redeems him not.  On the contrary, Sali and Vreli at last reject him, but only after his cynicism has contributed to their despair.  In presenting this attractive—to him—character so ambiguously, Delius comes as close in A Village Romeo and Juliet as he ever came to self-criticism.

     Musically, A Village Romeo and Juliet moderately tests the definition of opera, while producing consistently gorgeous quasi-polyphonic textures, as a Delius score always does.  About forty of the opera’s one hundred and twenty minutes of playing time leave out the voices entirely; elsewhere, the orchestra contributes at least as much as the singers.  As Mellers remarks, the scenes in their sequence follow a rule of enharmonic “declension”, foreshadowed in the descending intervals of the first bars of the Prologue, suggestive of “a Fall”, as in the Fall of Genesis (14, 16).  The opera’s best-known excerpt, the orchestral intermezzo called “The Walk to Paradise Garden”, offers melodic material based contrastingly on ascending motifs, but these cannot finally counteract the downward pressure of the dominant material.  “Paradise” remains a myth; reality consists of declension, alienation, and heartbreak.  The excellent film of the opera (2002) by Czech cinéaste Petr Weigl, with baritone Thomas Hampson superbly representing the Dark Fiddler, brings out the moral ambiguities of the narrative, as well as providing, in its expansive location shots, imagistic justification of Delius’s musical evocation of nature.  Weigl interprets cinematically what Mellers detects through musical analysis: “Although [the Dark Fiddler] communes with the wild woods and untamed winds, his main tune emulates, in its dotted 6/8 rhythm, his limp—itself a kind of Fall in that he, like Lucifer, had been ousted from Eden” (15).

     A really gorgeous moment comes in the orchestral link between the second and third scenes, where Weigl follows Sali as he wanders out to what remains of “the Wild Land” to meet Vreli.  Especially in the score’s deployment of the horns, these bars resemble the Prelude to Part Two of A Mass of Life.  Weigl’s scenery is mountainous, lush with grasses and trees, and the sky, starkly blue against the peaks: the ensemble of effects provides the conditions in which sublimity might reveal itself to a well attuned consciousness.  The interweaving Alpine polyphony of the horns tells us this—and no montage could be truer to Delius.  Neither Sali nor Vreli qualifies as such a consciousness, however, because neither can stand back from the scene; they both remain immersed in their own simple emotions.  The Dark Fiddler could perhaps see and undergo transformation through the power of beauty, but bitterness at his exclusion has corrupted his poetic capacity.  Coming on the sweethearts, he gloats over the “havoc” that desire for his untitled landholdings has unleashed on the two stricken families.  A moment later, Sali has struck down Vreli’s father, who appears in anger to drag her off.  All the property sold off to creditors, the fathers reduced to madness and confinement, the lovers become homeless wanderers.  In a long sequence they dream about their marriage in terms that Delius makes deliberately insipid, but Weigl judiciously mitigates the insipidity, thereby vindicating their idea of love precisely because of its naivety.

     Weigl depicts the “Paradise Garden”, the disused and dilapidated inn where the Dark Fiddler and his gypsy cohort take their temporary lodgings, in images of alcohol and drug use, nudity and voyeurism, and implied promiscuity of all forms.  This too we may take as autobiographical, verging on the self-critical; it is a bit of Dowson-like decadence inserted into Keller’s stolid prose.  Repelled by the Bohemians’ dissolute character, Sali and Vreli choose their version of the Liebestod rather than join themselves to dissoluteness.  Weigl has not departed entirely from Delius’s intentions, but he has subtly tweaked them, heightening the self-critical subtext of the work.  To make A Village Romeo and Juliet more dramatic than it might otherwise seem, Weigl makes it more normatively moral, and in so doing necessarily contends with Delius’s tendency to excuse and justify his own antisocial character.  Weigl’s scene forces us to recall the affiliation between the end of A Village Romeo and Juliet and the tragic choral climax of Appalachia.  Sali and Vreli also “go down the river”, as does the slave in Appalachia, but with suicidal finality in their case.  If slave separation provokes moral outrage, so then ought the misery of two simple souls, given that others are the prime authors of that misery.  So much for the Übermenschlich pleasure of outraging Christian sentiment!  The effect of Weigl’s treatment is to free the music into its absolute, nature-celebrating glory.

     Delius completed six operas, A Village Romeo and Juliet being the fifth, and Fennimore and Gerda (1910), after Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne (1880), being the last.  Hutchings nominates A Village Romeo and Juliet and Koanga as the two most convincing of Delius’s essays in the genre, but the close thematic relation between the former and Fennimore and Gerda inclines one to vote for the Jacobsen-inspired score rather than the Cable-inspired one.  (Delius based Koanga, as we recall, on The Grandissimes, Cable’s créole novel, with Keary as librettist.)  Where A Village Romeo and Juliet concerns two people, Sali and Vreli, who never exceed their rustic, childlike, and naïve limitations, Fennimore and Gerda concerns the city-dwelling upper classes and those who have acquired an education, however mis-educated they prove in their fumbling through life.  Readers familiar with Niels Lyhne will easily grasp why this Bildungsroman exercised so strong an attraction over Delius.  Jacobsen, as his poetry attests, exulted in natural description, befitting for a trained naturalist who had translated Darwin for the Danes. Then again, Jacobsen embraced a rigorous atheism, holding out for the stoic ethos of Denmark’s medieval ballads over the delusions, as he saw them, of Christian sentimentality.  One may read Niels Lyhne, as Delius undoubtedly read it, as a sustained novelistic case for atheism incidentally denunciatory of the middle classes and voting yes for free love.

     Consider the scene in which the young Lyhne, having just had his heart broken by a woman he knows to be his intellectual inferior, takes his Christmas dinner in a restaurant, where a chance guest, Dr. Hjerrild, joins him.  Hjerrild, as convinced a materialist as Lyhne, nevertheless cautions him that “Christianity has power” (Jacobsen 103).  Lyhne, prone to rhetoric, launches into a speech: “But don’t you see… that the day humanity can cry freely, there is no God, on that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic.  Only then will heaven become free, infinite space instead of a threatening, watchful eye.  Only then will the earth belong to us and we to the earth” (106).  In Jacobsen’s scheme, events chastise Lyhne’s youthful Rousseauvian conceit—without, however, overturning his (and the novel’s) basic conviction.  But another element of the Jacobsen’s story must have enthralled Delius equally at least: its remarkable evocation of the Danish landscape, especially the coastal regions.  In one of Niels Lyhne’s Fennimore chapters, set at Consul Berendt Claudi’s estate at Fjordby, the guests have spent the afternoon visiting their host’s coastal steamer; at evenfall, by plan, they leave the ship in lighters to cross back by moonlight to shore.

The first boat was supposed to row on ahead and make a swing away from land, while the other one would make straight for shore; the reason for this arrangement was that they wanted to hear how [Fennimore’s] song would sound across the water on a still evening like this….  Gently the boat glided forward, and the dull, smooth surface was rippled into receding lines and circles by a faint white light that barely illuminated the path it took, and only where it was strongest did it send a fine, dim glow, like a cloud of light, out over its surroundings….  [Fennimore and Erik Refstrup] sang a couple of Italian romances together, to the accompaniment of the mandolin.  (Jacobsen 121-122)

     Delius sets this scene—where Fennimore, loved without declaration by Niels, accepts Refstrup’s offer of marriage, tipping the protagonist once again into third-party dejection—as the second of the opera’s “Eleven Pictures”.  We recognize Palmer’s Delian “Ur-scena” in the concatenation of elements.  Delius has in fact altered Jacobsen to bring the configuration of motifs closer to his own esthetic.  The “Italian romances”, no doubt belonging to middle-class Kitsch, vanish; their replacement is a wordless tenor-register vocalise overheard by the parties in both boats.  Palmer calls it “one of [Delius’s] loveliest vocalises” (69).  Fennimore says, as she and Erik tie off their boat at Claudi’s landing, “How beautiful it sounds on the water,”9 indicating that she has some keenness of perception; yet she immediately succumbs to Refstrup’s hackneyed blandishments.  Niels sees them embracing shortly after he ties off the second boat.  Both Delius and Jacobsen make Lyhne’s sudden awareness of his exclusion constitutive of what is stoical and admirable in him.  Fennimore and Erik’s love, since it cannot claim the naivety of Sali and a Vreli’s, descends into insipidity.  Lyhne’s conviction that he must now withdraw his own suit ought to elevate him, but his subsequent decision to become an unmarried hanger-on in the Refstrup household shows a basic weakness.  The touchstone of truth remains the voix sans paroles, unidentifiable and a bit inhuman, that resounds like a spirit on the dark fjord; it is not the voice of love and domestic relations, but of Nature and Nature’s trans-human and transfiguring beauty.

     Delius makes other alterations to Jacobsen, even more drastic, as Palmer and Hutchings point out.  In Jacobsen’s novel, after the death of his young wife Gerda and a failure of creativity, Lyhne wavers in his atheism, at one point mimicking a prayer to God; he joins the army to fight against the Prussians in the war over Schleswig-Holstein, and during a battle falls fatally wounded.  Lyhne reaffirms his atheism to Dr. Hjerrild, who attends him in the hospital where he dies “the difficult death”, obviously meant by Jacobsen to symbolize the heroic nihilism of the true materialist.  This ending should have appealed to Delius as a Nietzschean, but perhaps he was musically incapable of the required starkness.  Instead, Delius chooses to end with two “Pictures”, the Tenth and Eleventh, of Lyhne meeting and falling in love, and then enjoying married life, with the teenaged, girlish Gerda.  After the verismo emotionalism of the “Ninth Picture”, where Erik’s drunken companions bring him home on a cart and Fennimore all but curses Niels for having brought back thoughts of her love for him, the “Gerda” epilogue is bound to strike the committed Delian as relinquishing sublimity for something perilously close to inanity.  It is a fair question why Delius saw fit to let the lovers die in A Village Romeo and Juliet but then betrayed the spirit of Niels Lyhne by cutting its final death-scene from his operatic version.

     Palmer never tries an explanation.  Hutchings contents himself with observing that Delius felt that this was how his opera should end even though there are “no reasons, musical or dramatic,” for it.[ii]  Hutchings does rightly judge that “the best music in Fennimore and Gerda is that which either enhances the scenery—the winter forests, the sea and fjord, the summer sunset, etc.—or else bespeaks the surging love of passion” (129).  Even the dénouement furnishes such gorgeous moments as in the Prelude to the “Tenth Picture”, which oddly but unmistakably echoes the slave-theme Appalachia (“across the mighty river”) and offers up choral vocalise reminiscent of the “Dance Songs” in A Mass of Life.  What might reconcile the dénouement of Fennimore and Gerda with what has gone before, a repudiation of antinomian ways as in A Village Romeo and Juliet, never occurs—only the abrupt transition to Lyhne with his Dowson-type child-bride.  Such repudiation would have required a more forthright recasting of Niels Lyhne than Delius would ever willingly have made.

V

     In his always provocative book on music, Brandy of the Damned, Colin Wilson sets aside an entire chapter for Delius, but Delius turns up elsewhere in Wilson’s oeuvre.  In the opening chapter of Wilson’s crime-novel The Killer (1970), about a psychiatrist’s discovery that one of his cases, a seemingly harmless schizophrenic, is actually a sociopath and a sex-killer, the first-person narrator is motoring around Yorkshire to interview various relatives of the patient in small towns.  The novel’s decade of the 1960s saw the nadir of the postwar British economy under the Laborites and related social deformation: bad times have shut down and rusted out the mills, and great scars of abandoned works mar the landscape.  Blocks of welfare housing (council flats) disfigure the civic centers.  “I am not fond,” says the narrator, “of the industrial towns of Yorkshire; so I drove across the Pennines to Burnley, then south to Manchester.  It had rained in the night, and the July morning was fresh and full of the smells of summer.  As I drove through the golden and green countryside, I listened to a concert of Elgar and Delius on the car radio, and the beauty of the day made me understand the nostalgia in their music” (44).

     Wilson is himself something of a modern visionary, the advocate in scores of books of his “New Existentialism” based on access to vatic wellsprings of consciousness akin to what the American psychiatrist Abraham Maslow called “the Peak Experience”.  The Delius allusion (in fairness, a Delius and Elgar allusion) comes and goes in The Killer, but it is telling in the novelistic context and telling again in connection with the remarks about Delius that the present essay has liberally quoted.  Brigg Fair or A Song of Summer and Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro, as readers might imagine, suddenly furnish the narrator with a much-needed reference opposite to the slum-benumbed lethargy and soot-dirtied despair that so bothers him in the ugly environment.  The Delian or the Elgarian “nostalgia” partakes in the dissolution of an older order that the two insightful men already saw breathing its last at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

     What differentiated that older order from the one that dissolved and succeeded it was an underlying rhythm: the rhythm of the seasonal cycle, of the sacred calendar, and of maturation and death rather than that of office routine, of airline timetables, and of the taxman’s schedule.  Wilson speaks in many of his books about “the robot”, as he calls it.  “The robot” is the human being denatured by the imposition of externally mandated behaviors so that he loses his ability to act spontaneously on intuition and instinct.  “The robot” usefully enables people to do all sorts of things by a kind of second nature, but “the robot” also endangers people by being too efficient in taking over their habits.  As a program for the cool, smooth execution of all errands, “the robot” even threatens to colonize love, sex, and the erotic response to beauty, as Platonically conceived.  One might say figuratively that a man with a six-figure income, an attractive wife, and the full array of material chattels nevertheless lives a slum-benumbed life to the extent that his routines have replaced him and robbed him of autonomy, happiness, and judgment; or that his material chattels belong to Kitsch, serve him for mindless diversion, and signify his cultural and spiritual inanity.  Relevant to the discussion is a claim, already cited, by Mircea Eliade, who says that ancient and primitive people invest phenomena with a greater sense of reality than do their modern, civilized counterparts.  They have a greater sense of reality altogether, where modern people are alienated from life and anhedonic in their disposition.  In this regard, Hutchings makes two interesting remarks about Delius: first, that Delius probably lived most happily during his Bohemian years in Paris when he also lived most frugally; and second, that Delius, in his maturity, “had the temperament of a mystic, one who uses symbols” and for whom “phenomena are symbols” (Hutchings 179).

     Identifying Delius as a mystic enables Hutchings to disarm the rhetorical sharp edges of the composer’s bellicose espousal of Nietzschean doctrine.  Delius found in Nietzsche visionary formulas and a guide to a type of bachelor asceticism that he might as easily have located in the metaphysical poets or in Wordsworth—who, Hutchings points out, was also a Yorkshireman and a poet of distant redemptory prospects.  When Wordsworth wrote, in the early Nineteenth Century, the old order, while under threat, still existed.  When Delius wrote, in the first third of the Twentieth Century, the new order had all but triumphed.  Its triumph entailed, however, an elision of natural reality and all too often the abuse of nature demoted to mere “resource”.  Such a process could only be recursive on those who enacted it, deforming human nature quite as it deformed the landscape.  Delius, like his almost exact contemporary H. G. Wells, refused to adhere to a trade.  It was indeed the same trade, although Wells saw his doom in the lowest retail end of it and Delius his in a capitalist’s role.  In saying “No!” to absorption in what Wordsworth called, with a brothel-connotation, “getting and spending”, both Wells and Delius (two divergent temperaments if ever there were) also said “No!” to the flattening out of life into a universal and spiritually anemic middle-class existence.  From the flatland of bourgeois dejection, both men prophesied an urgent need to put toil aside—temporarily at least—to climb the mountain, regain a broad perspective, and breathe the rare air of the heights.  As Hutchings says in so many words, if this prescription were a secular way of saying that people ought to come “Nearer, my God, to Thee” before calamity overtakes them, then why would one cavil over its secularity?  The Christian mystic and the Atheist mystic meet one another precisely in the Far Away or the Up Above to which they so hungrily aspire.  Homo modernus lacks badly for a vivifying “Peak Experience”, so he needs whatever signpost of it he can come by in his wanderings down below.

     Delius’s supremely cogent expression of this, his basic urgency as artist-seer, takes flight in the most ambitious purely orchestral score that he ever penned—A Song of the High Hills (1911).  In Hutchings’s description of A Song of the High Hills, “the whole work has the shape of a peak” (111).  The shape is: Ascent—Exultation and Transfiguration—Descent.  The classification “orchestral score” needs some qualification because A Song of the High Hills requires both solo and choral voices although it sets no text, using the singers wordlessly to extend the instrumental palette.  The inspiration comes from the Norwegian Alps, where Delius often sojourned in his youth, once undertaking an extensive trek through the highlands of the Valdres region with two Norwegians, the violinist Halfdan Jebe and novelist Knut Hamsun.  Ostensibly, they undertook the itinerary as a concert-tour, with Delius supplying piano accompaniment to Jebe’s fiddle.  “What part Knut Hamsun played I could never learn,” writes Beecham with amusement (84).  Norway serving for an occasion, A Song of the High Hills clearly stems once more from Delius’s response to the craggy prose of Zarathustra.  Fenby records that Delius encountered Nietzsche for the first time when a Norwegian friend lent him Zarathustra for reading matter during one of those summer adventures.  Beecham says that what spoke most directly to Delius in Nietzsche was the notion “that there were dangerous fallacies in the bulk of democratic doctrine” (219).  This affinity might be in play in A Song of the High Hills, one of whose sections carries the description, “The Wide Far Distance—the Great Solitude”.

     A Song of the High Hills begins with a sequence of descending “sighs” in the strings.  One might relate these “sighs” to the descending chromatic motif in An Arabesque, which in that context certainly represents despair.  In this sense, A Song f the High Hills commences symbolically in the despair of the lowland, where the contaminating influence of “the herd” subverts rigor of perception and the capacity to experience mystic—or Dionysian—communion with Nature.  Woodwinds introduce contrastingly songlike figurations leading up to a brass outburst that reveals the beckoning heights.  A flute ostinato appears, which will recur throughout at key moments, sometimes in other instruments, particularly (and significantly) the horn.  Delius develops these motifs in his depiction of the ascent towards the transcendent heights implied by the title.  Delius marks this first section “Tranquillo”.  The next section, “The Wide Far Distance—the Great Solitude”, announces itself in two ways: in the deployment of a characteristically folksong-like melody and in the use of the wordless chorus, which echoes that melody after the clarinets introduce it.  An icily beautiful passage for strings, harp, and celesta follows, which Hutchings interprets as revealing “the snow-capped summits before our eyes” (110).  Palmer invokes “shafts of sunlight glinting at intervals through a mist” in summing up the impression of the same bars of the score (53).

     A third section continues the mood, giving variants of the folksong to two solo voices, soprano and tenor:

In the longish fourth and final section (“Very Quietly”), Delius gives substantial paragraphs to the voices alone.  Like the voice heard across the waters in Fennimore and Gerda, these vocal contributions represent powers non-human and transcendent.  Some commentaries refer to them as “satyrs”, the Nietzschean implication which is apposite to A Song’s musical poetics.  In Palmer’s words, “A thousand voices sound from afar deploying the mystic melody in an elaborate chromatic context—the Delian Experience, and one of the great moments in music” (53).  After what Palmer calls “a climax of overpowering hymnic splendor,” then as he writes, “the vision fades [and] all the themes from the earlier sections are passed in review” (53).  Pirie calls attention to the “coda for orchestra alone, ending in a magical passage in which the timpani play chords” (Hughes and Strading 80).

     Wilfrid Mellers penetrates, as usual, deeply into the meaning of the notes.  “The essence of the music,” he writes, “may be the flux of sensation—the sighing of the Wagnerian appoggiaturas with which the work opens, the fluctuating chromatic woof of the choral texture…

Nonetheless, all the component lines [that] make up the harmony sing….  The rhapsodic solo melody tends to be pentatonic, like folk-song or medieval monody, as though it were seeking oneness beyond the sensory flux….  The celebration of life in and for itself leads to the desire to lose the self in the contemplation of Nature… [whereas] the desire for Nirvana as the only resolution of passion is common to Wagner and Delius; the pantheistic ecstasy is peculiar to Delius.  (123)

No one sympathized with these traits of the Delian outlook as closely as Beecham, whose 1946 recording of A Song of the High Hills, with the Royal Philharmonic, remains the touchstone against which others should be measured.  Beecham made the recording in connection with the second Delius Festival of that year, where he played the work for the first time.  The flute and horn ostinati become quite intense—the sharp focus of vatic ego-transfiguration as the subject of events gazes into the mystic distance; and listeners are reminded that these oscillating patterns, or something very like them, appear also in Sea Drift.  Beecham’s account points up another “intertextual” allusion, given in the low-register dance-like motifs (basses and cellos) of the third section, this time to Delius’s other Norwegian-highlands score, Eventyr (1915), inspired by Asbjørnsen and Moe’s folktale collection, with its trolls and gjengångare.  Now where Beecham emphasizes the score’s intensity, Fenby emphasizes its high-altitude rarity, in a performance (1983) that, in extending to half an hour, adds five and a half minutes to Sir Thomas’s account.  Sir Charles Groves recorded A Song of the High Hills convincingly in the late 1960s.  More recently (2002) the Danish conductor Bo Holten made The High Hills the centerpiece in a program devoted exclusively to Delius’s “Norwegian” music, a refined and yet vigorous representation of the score.

     Wilson notes in Brandy of the Damned, published more than forty years ago, that “the centenary of Delius’s birth [just then celebrated] seems to have proved what many of us have suspected for a long time: that since the death of Sir Thomas Beecham interest in Delius has dwindled almost to the vanishing-point” (125).  In Wilson’s diagnosis, “the reason for this lack of interest is unpleasantly obvious: it is the same cultural snobbery, the curious narrowness of sympathy, that led the editor of the Pelican Modern European Music to omit all reference to Sibelius, and that leads many music critic to talk as if Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Webern are the only interesting composers of the twentieth century” (125).  Even through the bleakest years of this “cultural snobbery”, however, Delius retained his audience.  What kind of audience?  Wilson is right: it was not an audience of elites.  Hutchings says that Delius’s music conveys these essential experiences of life and world: “Dawn, sunset, the hills, the sea, with humanity as the sapient and feeling crown of nature, the longing of men and women to be always their ‘higher’, more mystical, more Dionysian, more clairvoyant selves, their yearning to fulfill their love passions and their craving for beauty, for identity with the strength and glory of creation, together with their mastery of its pain and evil” (175).  Hutchings then affirms that “it is ordinary folk, not professional musicians, who have decided that Delius is a great composer” (176).

     Hutchings does not mean everybody, of course.  These “ordinary folk” are, like all culturally responsible people, few rather than many in their number—but the important thing is their freedom from the snobbism of which Wilson writes.  Palmer wrote bravely indeed when he foresaw the publication of his Delius in the late 1970s, when critical intolerance against musical beauty reached its irate zenith: the inverse and negation of the Nietzschean-Delian “Noontide” that art reveals to its audience.  Anton Webern might well have discovered a new and peculiar esthetic canon by his application of Schoenberg’s methodic atonality in his pointillist miniatures, like the Concerto for Nine Instruments (1934) or Das Augenlicht (1935).  Let us not gainsay the possibility.  But by setting up Webernian mathematical rigor as the only and as the institutionally approved manner of composition—because most composers and especially those who cleave readily to a system are mediocre—the bureaucrats of the music colleges unleashed against well tempered ears a dreary wave of what Delius called “atonal ugliness” (Fenby 210).  Such ugliness sprang, Delius said, from “lack of imagination [and] lack of emotion” and from “our hasty mode of life” (210).  Delius averred on the same occasion that “no set of principles or theories… can give birth to beautiful music” (210).  Stubborn music-lovers who, during the 1960s and 70s, insisted on buying records of Rachmaninov, Ravel, and Frederick Delius, stood the ground against the destruction of melody and harmony in the name of a false progress.  Palmer, seconding Hutchings, writes: “The value of [Delius’s] legacy lies not merely in its great glory as art per se, but in its ability to stir its recipient to some hazy awareness of their own latent imaginative powers and to an eventual realization that, the longer and the better they live in Delius and all other fine music, the more their awareness of the wonder of the world will be increased, the more grateful they will be for the privilege of being alive” (193).

     Palmer’s words are daring ones.  One can easily imagine the supercilious scoffing that would automatically greet them if they constituted an offering at a contemporary scholarly conference.  Just what do you mean by “value”?  Just what do you mean by “beauty”?  Just what do you mean by “live better”?  The graduate humanities students would have a good laugh all around, committed as they are to a contradictory absolute relativism in all domains of ethical and esthetic endeavor.

     Palmer’s words anticipate, in their particular context, what the philosopher Roger Scruton has recently said about the parlous state of education in the Western societies.  So universal is an outworn but tenacious utilitarian understanding of culture that modern Westerners tend to be oblivious to the real function of art, which is not to divert, not to please simply because people “need pleasure” the way they need food and housing, but rather “to teach us ‘what to feel’,” in given common situations, “through the exercise of sympathy” (54).  A dearth of such basic instruction explains the hypothetical but entirely predictable reaction to Palmer supposed in the second sentence of the present paragraph, and it explains how composition could be denigrated in academies to the methodic, soulless making of music according to a mathematical formula.  Scruton writes: “Although music is not a representational art, it shares an important feature with human life, and that is organized movement.  We move with the music that we listen to, and this too is a sympathetic response, a way of shaping our inner life to fit the perceived life of another” (61).

     In this light, while we might lament with Fenby over those insights that Delius in pride failed to achieve, we must—must—be grateful for all those that he did achieve and which he generously, whatever his fault, bequeaths to those who agree to follow him in the ascent.  It is good to “move” with the Delius of Briggs Fair and A Song of the High Hills, to move with and to be moved by them.  A world that makes room for Delius is without doubt better than one that shuns him.

 

Works Cited

Carley, Lionel.  Delius: A Life in Letters (1862-1908).  Ashgate, 1983.

Fenby, Eric.  Delius As I Knew Him.  London: Bell, 1936.

Hutchings, Arthur.  Delius.   Greenwood, 1970.

Jacobsen, Jens Peter.  Niels Lyhne.  Trans. Tina Nunnally

Mellers,  Wilfrid.  Singing in the Wilderness: Music and Ecology in the Twentieth Century.  U of Illinois Press, 2001.

Nietzsche, Friedrich.  Thus Spake Zarathustra.  Trans. Thomas Nietzsche Common.  Boni and Liveright, 1920.

Palmer, Christopher.  Delius.  Duckworth, 1976.

Pirie, Peter.  The English Musical Renaissance.  St. Martin’s, 1976.

Scruton, Roger.  Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged.  Encounter Books, 2007.

Wilson, Colin.  Brandy of the Damned.  Pan, 1964.  

---.  The Killer.  Panther, 1970.  

 Notes

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Invitation to Opposing Voyages

J. S. Moseby

 

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,

Luxe, calme et volupté.

 

     Two cities of radically different design.  Two radically different ways of addressing the super-populated urban environment—of navigating the future.  Either city is indeed rather like a great ship on an indefinite voyage across an unknown sea.  Its all but innumerable human cargo cradled within a creative, synthetic structure of ribs and joists, it bravely noses through each coming month’s billow, confident of making landfall eventually in the next century.  There, in that faraway land which will be the same land in a later time (and what coast was ever more exotic?), its cargo unloaded, its mission accomplished, it will perhaps consent to being dismantled.  Perhaps a new century will require a new vessel—for the future, to be honest in metaphor, is always sea and never land: human culture is always afloat, sometimes wittingly adrift and sometimes pressing on in a grand illusion of looming arrival.  Different ships for different seas… but for now, for a century whose currents perhaps growl at the far end of this writing’s “now”, two contrasting designs have slipped from dry dock.  To walk their contrasting decks, climb their contrasting masts, shine a light in their contrasting holds… collect impressions, make notes, tally capacities… this would be worthwhile, perhaps.

*

     Pyramidopolis.  A Victorian’s fantasy of Seleucid Egypt… and yet, no Egyptian astrologer ever had such geometrical inspirations under the stars, no Victorian romantic such generous visions in an opium den.  Every structure in Pyramidopolis is pyramidal—and there are hundreds, thousands of such structures.  The tallest surpass the doomed World Trade Towers, and do so self-consciously, almost vaingloriously, as if laughing lightly (a woman’s laugh, perhaps Cleopatra’s—perhaps Hatshepsut’s) at the future’s assembled airborne armadas.  To topple one of these pyramids, or even to do it great structural damage, with such a blow would be patently impossible.  And safety will surely have been among the major reasons argued for building Pyramidopolis: it is uniquely secure from air assault.  The precincts of this labyrinthine checkerboard, twenty miles by twenty miles on a plain of engineered, perfect flatness (for natural slopes are anathema here)—four hundred square miles of pyramids, from horizon to horizon to horizon to horizon—are the safest metropolitan real estate the world has ever known.  Even earthquakes cannot budge the great masses.  Even a cloud of contagion, whether expelled by an adjoining swamp or malignly man-generated—would readily blow away from its streets.

     For besides being indestructible, these pyramids are also friendly to open space—to sunlight, to the winds, to sunsets and stargazing.  It is their primary liability, from the city designer’s perspective of having to house millions within limited territory; yet the hygienic  and logistical benefits of so much space are compensation for a disappointing rate in bodies per cubic foot (since the designer is charged, as well, with keeping the bodies alive and functional).  That the sacrifice to the Goddess of Space may not be extravagantly lavish, all pyramids are right-angled to all others: an aerial view of the city, as from a satellite zooming in, reveals not a single triangle—not one “slice of pie”—anywhere within the urban grid.  Larger pyramids have been carefully aligned so as to leave just enough space for smaller pyramids (usually the square of “two” or “three” in number).  City streets, as a result, are narrow but numerous and, in every case, readily oriented to every other street.  Traffic flows freely through these abundant arteries at hours of high volume, and rescue crews can gain quick access to scenes of incidental catastrophe.  The dozens or hundreds of services involved in sustaining such a vast settlement’s populace, though often taken for granted and sometimes unmentionable before delicate ears, rank among Pyramidopolis’s most efficient triumphs.

     Less visible triumphs—a delight to the heart of the social engineer—flow from this material efficiency in a logic as irresistible as it is (initially) curious and furtive.  For the uniformity of residential structures has largely done away with social snobbery, if not altogether with economic classes.  Living at or near a pyramid’s apex is not of itself less or more prestigious than living at or near street level.  There are no colonnaded mansions, no exclusive penthouses, no moldering slums, no pestilential shanty towns.  Perhaps some apartments are bigger than others or better furnished than others, or perhaps here and there a wealthy family rents an entire floor of apartments.  Nothing in the conception of Pyramidopolis need be viewed as precluding such muted ostentation—nothing in human history has ever hinted at the possibility that ostentation can be anything more than muted at a distance of twenty paces.  Yet high and low in this settlement of the next century do not physically dwell high or low.  All are pyramid-denizens, citizens of the thousand-peaked checkerboard plain.  An enforced programming of the environment, perhaps, infuses that sense of fraternity which the past’s best efforts at teaching moral precepts have never been able to spread far and wide.  The Pyramidopolitan may not like his neighbors: he may particularly dislike some of them.  Let us not grow naïve in our projections… no, but he is nevertheless of them and they of him in a manner, and with an intensity, seldom paralleled by co-residents of previous human settlements.  For all of them, the horizon is littered with forty-five degree mineral slopes as a great shipyard is littered with masts; and a trip to any location, be it ever so humble or exalted, must negotiate a series of right-angled turns.  Different vistas are not on sale to the highest bidder, and different transits not available to those with chauffeurs.

     In imagining the life of the “typical” Pyramidopolitan, then, we cannot be far from imagining the actual life of any specific member of the community.  Think of life in a pyramid.  A central elevator would be feasible only for the smallest specimens.  In the largest, it would require occupants to travel unconscionable distances to their offices or domiciles.  Though the walk itself might prove salutary, the wasted space taxes the responsible mind (for we have already agreed that space will be at a premium).  At least four elevators, rather, will run the height of each great structure, their shafts paralleling the four great outer corners of forty-five degrees.  Like all the outer walls and many of the inner ones observable in any given room, the elevator’s compartment will slant through the half of a right angle, though floor and ceiling will parallel the distant ground.  (Seats can be laid along the compartment’s steep slope to maximize occupancy, allowing the short-statured or the weary to sit toward the outside.)  Should a cable ever snap, the compartment’s formerly fatal plunge will now be easily arrested by applying a manual brake, its downward acceleration having been much reduced from that of free fall.

     How will actual rooms appear?  Within superficial sameness, rich diversity.  Greatly increased exposure to an outer wall.  The four great outer walls are now, each one, the hypotenuse of the line created by that antiquated vertical wall of yesteryear.  More light, more sun.  The outer walls could indeed be constructed of a semi-transparent Space Age plastic permitting penetration of light one way, yet hard as a rock—their entire surface a great window.  Or perhaps windows would be liberally built into each apartment’s outer wall at a space of about two feet above the floor… for a lucid panorama of the universe pouring in at toe-level might induce vertigo.  Or perhaps this would not be so at all, in the case of a window slanting forty-five degrees.  Were one able to crawl to the edge (where a vacuum cleaner might scarcely reach) and peek over, one would see no dizzying abyss, but the reassuring side of the pyramid, flat, polished, scintillant.

     A bar running down the pyramid’s side along each tier of rooms.  (The rooms could not be perfectly aligned—not with one on top and fifty at the base.  The system of bars would create the impression of a deep arc, a kind of necklace-effect, around each face of the apex when viewed from the streets, for fewer bars would continue to the top as each story carried fewer rooms.)  Emergency bars.  In the event of fire or other internal dangers, occupants would exit through their windows and clip a belt onto the convenient bar.  Chairs equipped to “crawl” down the bar would be available for the elderly or disabled.  Some tenants might choose to climb to the top and back routinely by way of exercise.  Or perhaps not… windows would infallibly prohibit criminal entry, but indiscriminate recreational “barring” might have other negative consequences.  The situation needs a closer look.

     It must be said here that building codes would not require each pyramid to have flat surfaces.  External walls could be “waved” to create yet more surface area, though at great expense.  The implementation of safety bars would at least be made much easier this way, and access to them far less daunting to the frail-hearted.  The “valleys” between each ridge would also lend themselves to the construction of balconies where desired.  But then, balconies would be entirely feasible in the flat design, as well.  Windows would be brought down vertically, the remnant floor space projecting into the outer wall now a ready-made balcony once the window is fitted with a sliding door.

     Yet the increased surface area of the outer walls cannot obviate the inner darkness of the lowest floors.  The largest pyramids’ bases will be massive, the distance from their center to an outer window formidable.  To be considered carefully: what human activities best prosper with least light, or with artificial light?  The pyramid’s core may contain essential storage space, pipes, and power cables.  (These last may be minimal if the outer surfaces can be designed both to admit light and to collect solar energy.)  Maintenance services, the Laundromat, the barber shop… transactions demanding uninterrupted thought, endeavors demanding insulation from incidental noise.  Certain businesses dependent upon discreet exchanges would be officed here.  Musical practices or performances could be arranged in sound-proofed chambers.  Perhaps a modicum of private residences: the insomniac may prefer to court sleep in a space where the sun never shines.

     Nothing, of course, would forbid the merging of public and private life within a given pyramid.  Everything, rather, would argue for it.  Not only could the citizen live within the same structure which houses his office: his office might be his home (the writer, the data analyst, the programmer, the accountant).  The design of private residences might be critical to the success and happiness of such a people.  The poet may wish to compose in bed while staring out his window into space… but the marketing strategist may wish to leave his labors under lock and key after hours, out of sight and out of mind.  Would life in the pyramids necessarily be altogether too synthetic, forcing denizens to embrace a single identity constantly?  Would even an array of windows lifted like a telescope’s lens upon the stars suffice to inspire them?  Would efficiency be their ruin?  Do human bees living in human hives require tawdry out-of-bound gutters and nooks forgotten by the designer to cultivate mystery and retain sanity?

     Fortunately, the individual apartment is built of corners.  If the satellite looking down upon Pyramidopolis observes no slice of pie, the “guts” of each structure consist of little but such slices.  All rooms must fan out.  Extremely narrow foyers, perhaps no more than shoulder-span… then an expanding vista.  How to divide it?  Half a slice for work, half a slice for play?  Leisure rooms along the windowed outer wall, business space sealed into the interior?  Vice versa?  A sleeping cubicle in the slice’s very middle, with no wall adjoining a potentially disruptive neighbor’s living space?  Or a cot on the balcony?  Would such decisions have to be made in advance?  Could the occupant, indeed, not alter the room’s design from month to month as readily as changing a furniture arrangement?  If internal walls, bearing no structural weight, could be designed to move… an occupant who possessed two contiguous apartments could even wall up the door of one and use only the other for entry.  The resulting triangular closet could be either delicious or disgusting to the impartial observer.  No doubt, it would be the former to its author.

     To live in such places week after week, month after month… what must Pyramidopolitans dream?  Do they court and have babies?  What crimes infest their artificial cliff-dwellings?  A certain shyness—a tendency, even, to the anti-social, the morbidly withdrawn—must be an abiding concern.  For whatever cleverness should be displayed in romanticizing or mystifying private quarters, no trick can hide the reality of aloofness in this land of leaning walls.  A richness of private fantasies may indeed make individuals less willing than ever to reach far, far out to others.  Imagine: in all the vast settlement, not a single high-rise presents an easy view of neighbors across the way.  To a young man or an old woman staring out the window, no richly varied panorama of human activity within full view or ready hearing.  All facades slope away from all other facades: the very windows are themselves pointed into the sky at forty-five degrees.  What psychological price to be paid for this heavenly tilt?  The curvaceous girl on the sixth floor can only be appreciated through binoculars as her silhouette slips out of bathrobe into shower.  Binoculars and telescopes introduce intent, and guilt: the sighting is no longer a lucky accident.  The Peeping Tom cannot mistake the contours of his inner disease in the magnified mirror of his outward gaze.  Even the retired general who feeds pigeons from his window sill has become, to the casual eye, himself a bird-like flutter of white on a far cliff.  Who is he—what is he?  Casual sight does not suffice to give a sense of the normal, the workaday—sights have been rendered too problematic by their remoteness.  The young couple on Floor Nine can no more be overheard arguing or making up.  Sounds no longer ricochet along narrow walls.  Noises filter aloft from the street, perhaps—mostly mechanical noises.  Human shouts, laughs, and screams are a memory from the hours beyond one’s room, one’s cell.  One is alone here, alone in a city of millions, as soon as one locks one’s door for the evening.  Voices and images may be imported by pressing a button or turning a dial, but the sight of a living body requires a squint.  Even passers-by on the street below appear only with a vast expanse of slanted, synthetic wall between them and the viewer—a kind of yardstick whose calibrations (in the form of other windows) remind the restless eye of distance, constant distance.

     To consider: would residential structures not be better designed for communal habitation if they were “waved”, as speculated earlier—routinely crimped in right-angled vertical ridges and valleys up and down their facades?  Every resident would thus have frontage on the lives of at least two other residents (more if he could peer above and below, perhaps with the aid of a balcony).  Or would such arrangements invite trouble?  Would Pyramidal Man, already dangerously inclined to introversion, get to know too few people too well—might he not become obsessed with those few, a potential stalker?  Would it be more advisable to seal all his neighbors equally in the anonymity of the smooth, slanting façade?

     Residents of Pyramidopolis would almost certainly have a strong attraction to the metaphysical.  So much sky, so much light, so much space… so much enforced distance from other eyes like theirs gazing into the blue day or the constellated night… this would surely be a reverent people.  To consider carefully, as well, how such reverence might affect social health and efficiency.  Would citizens tend to view their daily routine as trivial or futile?  Would they lose their energy, their creativity, their will to live?  Listless, morose, depressed… a need, an urgent need, to channel their spirituality into participatory worship.  Perhaps the city’s angular grid would be pock-marked, after all, with great amphitheaters—kivas where, for once, all eyes are turned down and into a common focus.  A primary concern: a topic of preeminent importance to further studies.

     Perhaps social and psychological pressures will be somewhat relieved by outdoor diversions as well as collective worship.  Make a virtue of necessity: so much open air and sunlight should be conducive to sidewalk cafés and streetcorner vendors.  The recreational park, however… with square footage already so precious, one can picture few city blocks as being designated for cycling and sun bathing.  Such amusements must be ingeniously integrated into pyramidal life.  The pyramids themselves could feature terraces—some of them—with flower and vegetable gardens.  Balconies would be ideal for an individual green thumb.  Hikes up the slopes, along the bars already mentioned… mountaineering clubs and societies, as it were.  Celebrations at apices, where more cafés or public lookout posts might nest… cycling up and down the checkerboarded streets, or perhaps certain designated ones of them.  The easy, ample collection of rainwater run-off from the sloping walls, not only to feed the vegetated terraces, but also to form “city streams” here and there instead of streets—straight-running streams criss-crossed by short bridges, stocked with trout and carp, overhung by fruit trees.  Boaters punting along, perhaps for pleasure, perhaps on their leisurely way to work or making deliveries.  Almost indefinite possibilities for much-needed social outlets…

     But Pyramidopolis remains first and last a city of the plain, a city of the skies.  If the criss-crossing streets may hum with all varieties of traffic, then why not thin air with one or two varieties?  Broad possibilities here, too.  So many geometric tip-tops saluting the zenith, a post or pole or tower on all the tallest, no doubt (if only to blink at night in a constant alert to incoming air traffic)… why should these not be recreational destinations, too?  A lightweight single-seater craft—fiberglass, even canvas—launched from a lofty pyramid’s peak could practically glide the next mile or two.  Minimal power needed: perhaps as system scarcely more complex than a wound-up rubber band on a child’s toy.  Such a tiny craft could coast and soar from one apex to another.  Having arrived, it would extend a hook or loop and catch the peak’s crowning pole, concurrently cutting its elemental engine… and the craft would gently circle the pole in a mild descent (its hook on a line to avoid initial dizziness, the line’s length reeled in as the craft loses speed).  At the pole’s base, covering the apex like a umbrella, a huge convex circle of light metal.  The craft would roll to an easy halt here.  The same technique could be used in reverse to slingshot aircraft on new expeditions.  The umbrella “runway” a collector of solar energy, perhaps—doubly beneficial to the city’s energy needs, since it would gather new power and also cool the upper pyramid with its shade when the sun beats down most cruelly.  The Egyptian city of royal tombs would wear the slope-brimmed hats of farmers along the Yangtze.

     How difficult would such joy-flying be?  Would it require close licensing and monitoring—would incompetents, ingénues, and revelers shred each other at five hundred feet the way automobilists trade mayhem today?  Or would the third dimension suffice to reduce risk drastically?  All to be decided, negotiated, as mounting experience should dictate.  But the sheer exhilaration of such a ride has been the perennial dream of mankind.  To be Daedalus, the Bird Man… to slip in relative silence and at a peaceful gait between the sun’s beams, only one’s hands and feet as passengers… to see the works of men at such a remove, once a part of them, now alone, soon again to be a part… an hour per week or month of such reflection would not be an unconvincing claim to superior civilization.

     In case of malfunction, parachutes on both pilot and craft.  No risk to those below.  The parachutist would most likely slither easily down the forty-five degree slope of some structure to its adjoining street (where passers-by would ridicule his ineptitude in good nature), then seek out his craft like a lost kite.  Or perhaps, the craft itself also equipped with a quick-filling chute, he would have stayed on board and slid to the sidewalk tail-first, a blind Nantucket sleigh ride.  As you buttoned your shirt in Pyramidopolis and gazed beyond your window, how often would the sudden interruption of your view by a miscalculating aviator send a shock down your spine?  Or would you hear the rumble coming from three or four stories up?  

*

     Tholopolis.  From the Greek word for a dome.  Ancient Mycenaean tombs were said to be shaped like beehives, and were called tholoi.  The extension of this image to the second great city of the future is, however, an unsteady arch.  Giant hives do not cover this plain as pyramids cover the site of Pyramidopolis.  More accurate to say that Tholopolis is the other city’s photographic negative.  It is the space between the pyramids now transformed into living and working quarters: what was once pyramids (or let us imagine them hives—vaulted pyramids) is now empty space.  Tholopolis is a vast, densely inhabited block riding on thousands and thousands of massive archways. 

     Its virtues?  Security, as with Pyramidopolis.  The arches (each standing a uniform fifty feet high from street level to keystone) distribute their weight so companionably that no two or three or even ten would leave the overhead structure jeopardized if they were suddenly to crumple.  Experts estimate that at least sixteen immediately adjacent arches would have to be subverted before the ten stories of living space above them would come crackling and smoking to earth in a great landslide.  Even then, the surrounding structure would remain intact, brooding over its internal wound yet uninfected by fissures and fractures.  Two proofs for this assertion: 1) Though sealed in a common shell, the city is constructed in thousands of independent sections, each resting on sixteen supports, which transmit no major internal wall to any other section; 2)  So vastly abundant is the array of vaults within Tholopolis’s sixteen square miles (a mere particle of Pyramidopolis’s area to contain precisely the same population) that no analogy of falling cards or dominoes works here.  Hundreds more columns would form a perimeter around any disaster scene to take additional stress upon their shoulders.

     As if such multiplicity would not suffice, a solid-state skeleton of metal alloy would remain in place after any assaulted section melted away.  Double, triple, and quadruple reinforcement everywhere the panicked eye turns.  Experts calculate that no missile and no earthquake could possibly bring the whole mass to its knees (a judgment surely confined within certain probable parameters).  For good measure—for extravagantly unnecessary reassurance—massive flying buttresses equipped with springs wider than Atlas’s armspan line the four outer edges of the perfectly squared metropolis, anchored in concrete cast twenty feet into solid bedrock.

     All animals intuitively burrow when frightened.  Question: why raise Tholopolis above ground rather than—at least partially—underground?  Security.  Not only is the greater exposure of surface settlements to earthquake and missile strike an illusion: underground structures are far more vulnerable to certain kinds of attack or malfunction.  A ruptured pipe, leaking contaminants… massive asphyxiation.  A single wall collapsed upon a single section of underground track… hundreds of casualties.  For another of the city’s special virtues is that its means of mass transport circulate at ground level—in the open air, that is, and entirely apart from residential and business quarters. These latter rest in The Block which sits titanically, sublimely, atop the thousands of bending piers.  A transit from one end of the city to the other is accomplished by riding an elevator down one of the columnar supports (every eighth of which has a hollow shaft at its core) and boarding a shuttle or a single-occupant vehicle.  The lofty arches allow ready passage to even the most burdened conveyances.  Generous clearance permits free circulation of breezes which chase away noxious vapors (though use of fossil fuel will have been minimized).  Of course, the settlement is quite immune to floods.  Streets may be awash, but not homes and offices.  Flooding would be a constant scourge in underground cities.

     Where Pyramidopolis was a gargantuan checkerboard of efficient fragments, Tholopolis is one immensely efficient asteroid.  Heating and cooling of the entire population is centrally controlled.  Maximal conservation of hot or cool air… minimal surface exposure… the four unearthly rectangles measuring ten stories by four miles on its sides, then the bottom and the top—only these are touched by weather.  A million people share millions of walls within.  In summer, the arches can be ventilated to flush warm air from The Block’s elevated base.  In winter,  screens drop down from the outer archways to trap warm air beneath the city.  A hive, after all… but a hexagonal one, its depths incredibly extensive, often miles away from windows.

     Hence the lighting problem, almost unknown in Pyramidopolis.  Illumination must somehow be piped in for most citizens, throughout an unending night.  Yet a note to the advocates of subterranean dwelling: the four square miles or so of windowed outer walls, for all their distance from the interior, represent a huge head-start over an underground city.  These surfaces could be mostly or all window (who could possibly see you climbing out of the shower stall?), and their transparent panes might absorb energy from light as well as admitting it (as in the city of the pyramids).  The Olympian box’s top would be another matter, possibly very similar to a sunken city’s surface tier: of that, more later.  But the bottom should not be ignored in this regard, either.  Though pierced by little direct sunlight—none except for the outer edges—bottom portholes would at least provide a view of something not The Block.  Down-looking tenants or diners or bureaucrats would see the headlamps of passing traffic in the steady buzz of streetlights.  Such portholes are to be encouraged.  Consider that the supporting arches, though impregnable collectively, will always remain the favored target of ill-wishers, revolutionaries, and psychopaths.  Police cannot be everywhere.  With thousands of eyes turned downward, however, no loiterer could plant a load of explosives at any arch’s base without being reported by twenty different witnesses.

     Yet the lanes among the arches (Tholopolitans will call this bottom space The Basement or The Garage, among other things) undoubtedly pose a major social challenge to the city.  Even with ubiquitous streetlights raining down pale clarity from keystones, the place will be a magnet to misfits.  Pair every light above with a camera and an instant-alarm system… and still—perhaps more than ever—you draw the fringe of the maladjusted who plan to escape detection or apprehension.  To consider: will privately owned, single-occupant vehicles serve a function in this community more consequential than the risks they pose?  For the pickpocket, thug, or prostitute on foot will simply shift to wheels if systematically chased from the arch’s dark side.  If he or she cannot lurk where the elevator opens, then threats or proposals can be made from an open window at a stoplight.  Larger vehicles may even be chauffeured around The Basement’s always-midnight mid-section as guilty parties transact business or make good on their menaces in a concealed back seat.  The elimination of all private means of transport may come to be vigorously promoted.  So, too, the exit of all elevators upon crowded, well-lit platforms offering the traveler immediate boarding of public conveyances.  Otherwise, The Basement may well become The Gutter, a collection of all the Twentieth Century’s worst urban horrors into an unwanted memory chest.

     But the key to The Basement will be The Block.  If mainstream citizens are generally well-adjusted, the detritus cast upon the settlement’s outer shores (or down its Cloaca Maxima) will be negligible; and if Tholopolitans, on the other hand, labor under constant pressures imposed by their astounding concentration in one great unit, then no amount of policing will keep them from trickling through the cracks by the dozen and the hundred to loiter, wander, and plunder.  This is the city’s most dangerous liability as well as its most obvious asset: population density.  So many people in such tightly enclosed quarters.  How will they handle it?  Or maybe the problem goes back to air, light, and space, as it did in Pyramidopolis: too much of them there, too little here.  There, the citizen risked alienation from his society: here, he risks saturation in it.  The trouble could be defined either positively—too many bodies competing for limited space—or negatively—too little air, light, and space defining one’s distance from other bodies.  Or is this equivalence of issues really valid?  Is the native human need for light distinct from the need for privacy?  Could you cram dozens or hundreds of people in a small room and keep them relatively content if a glass ceiling admitted lovely blue skies?  Will the Tholopolitan feel bitterly his lack of direct sunlight two miles in from the nearest window even if he has a vast, well-lit apartment all to himself?  (Though, of course, that hypothetical case exaggerates the optimal scenario: residents cannot have vast apartments, or else the density of population for whose maintenance the city was designed will be impracticable.)

     Vexed issues.  Very complex… more research needed.  Experts will have to make pronouncements.  But not at all likely is the simplistic model patterned after routine twentieth-century design: residence, workplace, marketplace, recreational space.  Constant shuttling between the four.  Too constrictive.  Most citizens would be left fulfilling all vital functions under artificial light in The Block’s enormous, windowless nucleus.  A high risk of claustrophobia, the panic of submariners and prison inmates.  Yet a daily migration from nucleus to outward spaces—say, from densely walled business offices to generously wide-paned residential rows—would also prove impracticable.  The energy involved in such a commute… the crush of moving masses at peak hours… highly inefficient.  Tholopolis, as has been stressed, faces an energy crisis even on the drawing board.  Vast, frequent shifts of people are to be avoided at all costs.

     Possible solution: a “musical chairs” approach.  Denizens will work and play in The Block’s artificially lit nucleus for a period of time—four days, a week.  Then they will “rotate out” with a similar mass occupying spaces along and near the windowed outer walls.  Perhaps every two weeks, perhaps once a month, they will ascend to the rectangle’s sixteen-square-mile top—The Deck—and spend two or three days and nights “camping out” in the open air.  The exchange of personal quarters might create a sense of invaded privacy.  Make a virtue of necessity: limit “rotations” to a size small enough that all members know all others, yet large enough to provide a degree of choice in “roommates”.  A Rotation consists of two residence-exchanging groups: roommates belong to one of the Rotation’s two “pods” (fifty people, say) and do not, of course, room together at the same time.  One vacates on cue as the other moves in.  Furnishings may be left behind: some personal items will be transported.  Families matched with families, childless couples with childless couples, singles with singles.  An important social glue—for the citizen will thereby intimately know someone or some small group quite outside of his pod and quartered a mile or two away.  A corrective to parochialism, so that small units within The Block do not over-identify member with member and neglect ties to the broader community.  Once in a while, pods will be reshuffled.  Occasions to stage inter-pod picnics and banquets, perhaps once every three months.  Perhaps on The Deck, weather permitting.

     So will life within The Nucleus for the four days or the week of one’s shift be a kind of brief jail term, required of everyone?  Absolutely vital to resist this impression.  How to make a term in The Nucleus appealing?  Within any given area of Tholopolis—but especially The Nucleus—vertical mobility highly encouraged.  Denizens will not move horizontally among myriad partitions like rats in a maze as they pass from residence to school to work to restaurant to haberdashery.  Much of this movement, rather, will flow up-and-down.  A city of stairways.  Frequent climbing contributes to the physical health of Tholopolitans, yet it also—perhaps more importantly—fights claustrophobia by imparting a sense of distances traveled.  Minimal space is wasted in this regime.  Since vertical shifts are not mass migrations but rather incidental excursions in the individual’s daily routine, arteries of passage do not clog up.  The distances covered, in any case, are negligible compared to the expanse separating The Nucleus from Windowspace.  A note: ladders and staircases constructed of rungs and steps which partially absorb and conserve the climbing or descending foot’s impact.  The energy thus generated suffices to fuel minor local appliances.  The traveler is also required to expend a little more effort, which enhances the exercise value of his travels.

     Many small businesses opening off of staircases, whether at their landings or mid-ascent.  Nook-and-cranny cafés and hairdressers, sometimes simple perches furnished with public benches where friends may sip coffee.  Here and there, “dormiteria” arranged rather like yesteryear’s safety deposit boxes—you pay at the desk and receive a sound-proofed chamber (with choice of background noises) for an hour or two, or half a day.  As the nook-and-cranny approach implies, Tholopolis (especially The Nucleus) is locally diverse in appearance.  Some offices feature green walls with ample indoor plants, some gleam with chrome… some are oval or circular, and some combine two stories in one room (not by sacrificing space, but by setting desks on ascending platforms or flooring the intersection with thin bars or transparent matter).  Such enterprises as counseling services and legal consultation, of course, have an affinity for muted colors and secure individual chambers—virtual cubby-holes.  Restaurants are particularly eclectic: a magenta room here, a canary one there, a space just beyond with an azure ceiling to mimic the summer sky’s… some orchids, a cactus, comfortably caged songbirds, a discreetly gurgling fountain or frail cataract… patrons may sip their drinks for hours, trading one space for another as their conversations navigate different moods.

     Yet the most important concession to fighting claustrophobia and skotophobia (fear of shadows—a term well known to Tholopolitan engineers) is the array of “phaiotholoi”, or “splendid hives”, zigzagging through The Nucleus’s core.  Empty shafts about twenty feet in diameter brought down from skylights in The Deck, these great lifelines to direct sunlight descend most of the way to the bottom.  Cylindrical, they are greeted by circular atria at every story (which are barred along the rim to prevent fatal accidents).  Families often congregate around a phaiotholos: children may stare at the gilded chasm for hours.  Many cafés abut the area’s shimmer as close as codes will allow.  Sometimes acrobats stage performances here.  The more reflective inhabitants claim that they lounge against the bars at least as hungry for sounds as for sights, since at no other point in Tholopolis does one acquire such a keen awareness of the hive’s humming.  Occasionally, you see such a philosopher confronting the abyss with his eyes closed.

     For all that, space and energy—the city’s two related obsessions—begrudge the phaiotholos a full ten stories.  The deepest stop at eight.  Structurally, too, a firm bottom layer is mandatory.  This plain necessity does not deprive the first story, however, of a certain lurid mystique.  “Bottom-dwellers,” Tholopolitans call those of their fellow citizens who persistently ladder all the way down to the first story without interest in the elevators, The Basement, and the ensuing chain of public transit.  To be sure, The Bottom Rung houses legitimate business concerns (often wholesaling and warehousing services which do not rely upon a steady stream of clients).  Yet residences are rare, and residential permits hard to obtain.  The windows opening downward upon The Basement beguile, and even corrupt.  Unless very near to the city’s perimeter, they admit no hint of sunlight, but only the eternal haze of streetlights insinuating an eternal night.  Security personnel claim that problems sometimes evolve with residents who put on displays for the travelers fifty feet below.  More commonly, restaurants and “night clubs” will succeed in drawing the general public to this far remove.  Diners and revelers seem to be mesmerized by the sight of busy traffic zipping beneath their feet like trout through a mountain stream.  Their reflections are perhaps predominantly “blue” or “offbeat”, epithets which also well suit the music played at such watering holes.  The “fringe” aspect of “bottom-dwelling” is not socially destructive, in a strict sense: it may even be therapeutic for most.  Yet the police plant an agent in every club—for The Basement, after all, is the next step down.  Also disturbing is the apparent fact that diners and clubbers gazing down through the portholes seldom seem to report antisocial behavior in the silent, twilit streets.

     Curiously, true criminals have a way of sinking downward.  The city’s vulnerability to certain kinds of crime is fairly obvious.  Had it been truly regimented like a hive’s colony, interior life would facilitate detection and apprehension—yet the psychological strain of rigid structure would also create more aberrant behavior, probably insurrection at last.  In the absence of twice-a-day roll-calls and lateral marches to and from factories, shops, and schools, a single person can peel off from a pod and be lost in the great wide ocean.  Sixteen square miles, about six and a half cubic miles, with fluid vertical circulation.  A petty thief or a cautious rapist—even a disciplined serial killer—could practice his predations from end to end of the settlement for months or years, especially if he avoided The Basement (always well and easily monitored) to work his way patiently side to side using various exits of businesses, the concourses around phaiotholoi, and so forth.  Amazing, how elimination of vast public spaces complicates the work of law enforcement.  Happily, such types will eventually frequent The Bottom Rung, if not The Basement.  As Tholopolitan detectives say, “Sludge settles.”

     Of course, there is that other Tholopolitan saying, as well—often muttered in Bottom Rung night clubs on the subject of the city’s politicians: “Slag rises.”  The Deck is the settlement’s most mysterious, least explored precinct.  Wandering about under the open sky on its sixteen-square-mile plain is not permitted, though “camp-outs” for Rotations (as has been said) are constantly scheduled in certain reserved areas.  Few citizens—very few—know precisely what goes on up here.  Vast plates for gathering solar energy are visible from every point, as is greenery of some sort.  (The city raises some of its own vegetables, though certainly not all: in a catastrophe, complete short-term self-sufficiency would be possible.)  Aircraft may be heard descending and taking off on occasion.  Energy-harvesting and agriculture, with a smattering of communications technology and extra-urban transport… this seems a logical allocation of The Deck’s resources to most Tholopolitans—quite enough to consume sixteen square miles, which is little enough in support of a million people.

     Yet it may be supposed that certain “higher-ups” nestle on The Deck more or less permanently.  Their existence is indeed a crowning irony.  Such planning, such design, such technical sophistication for miles about them, for hundreds of feet beneath them… and they, offered a choice of all possible residences, live on an artificial surface resembling a pioneer farmer’s few flat acres.  Could it be that humanity’s “progress” is really more vertical than horizontal?

*

     If we human beings do not exterminate each other or reduce ourselves to troglodytes in an instant of ill humor or a century’s accumulation of poisons, we will certainly come to live in cities like those I have envisioned.  For we cannot continue on our present course of stirring together bits of styles from the past: what conserves energy and provides security for the coast-dweller or the plains-dweller plunges the cliff-dweller into misery, and a city set in glaciers lurches from crisis to crisis if built and operated like a city among volcanoes.  These indiscriminate tides which hurl our civilizations topsy-turvy upon each other must at last recede.  New islands of us must emerge, some white sands and palm trees, others sheer rock and shoal waters.  Not so delightful to the imagination, perhaps, will be a life-sentence to a single island, for such cultures will not interbreed.  A Pyramidopolitan would pine away in The Great Hive, and a Tholopolitan would prove subversive in the Land of Retreating Walls.  Efficiency demands that a place must be itself and not elsewhere, that an order of worship must exact kneeling now and not later.  Life in the future will not be a rubble of interchangeable pieces.  At a given moment, one may fear the void or fear tight places, fear isolation or fear mass-absorption… but to fear all at once is self-contradictory, the non-existence of utter insanity.

     Limits, then, must arise.  Certain crimes will multiply as they quietly stalk the fringes, and certain crimes will wither away and blow from memory under the sweeping broom of regeneration.  If the poet survives, however, he will be a traveler, a wanderer: a transport vessel’s captain passing from shore to shore, a discreet ambassador posted from capital to capital.  To see first-hand the laws, rites, routines, holidays, games, festivals, and executions of Pyramidopolis for a year, then to move along to those of Tholopolis… and then further along in another year.  A civilization per year.  Every year, a new universe.  Amid such constant variety, one might forget to die.

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