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P
R A E S I D I U M
A Journal of Literate and Literary
Analysis
7.4 (Fall 2007)
A quarterly
publication of The Center for Literate Values
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Board of
Directors:
John R. Harris, Ph.D.
Executive
Director
Thomas F.
Bertonneau, Ph.D.
Secretary
Helen R.
Andretta, Ph.D.
York College-CUNY
Ralph S. Carlson,
Ph.D.
Azusa Pacific University
Kelly Ann Hampton
Michael H.
Lythgoe
Lt. Col. USAF
(Retd.)
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The
previous issue of Praesidium ( Summer
2007)
may be viewed by clicking
here.
ISSN
1553-5436
© All contents of this
journal (including poems, articles, fictional works, and short pieces by
staff) are copyrighted by The Center for Literate
Values of Tyler, Texas (200 6),
and may not be cited at length or reproduced without The Center's express
permission.
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CONTENTS
A
Few Words from the Editor
Much
of this issue is devoted to examining our strange hopes--often that we may
be shocked, ravished, or otherwise amused--for the future, and to the
suspicion that such hopes are not an encouraging commentary upon the
present.
A
Taxonomy of North American Society’s Narratives
of Catastrophe and Dissolution
John
R. Harris
The past four decades have abounded in catastrophic
scenarios, with the emphasis shifting every few years yet a panicking
prognosis always strident. What
are we really afraid of—and what ought we really to fear?
Space Exploration, Technology, and
the Possible Futures of Humanity
Mark
Wegierski
The author is less concerned with likely advances
in miraculous gadgetry than with how a transformed, high-tech society is
likely to respond to delicate political questions and perennial needs of
culture such as religion.
The High Hills: Frederick Delius and
the Secular Sublime
Thomas
F. Bertonneau
Delius
was a complex, often difficult human being.
This essay traces his ultimately self-defeating struggle to meld
the sublimity of music and Nature into a Nietzschean assertion of
autonomy—a failure which implies a triumph beyond the composer’s
understanding.
Invitation to Opposing Voyages
J.
S. Moseby
To make a donation, address your check or money order to The
Center for Literate Values or to John
Harris (NOT to Praesidium) and
post to:
Praesidium
c/o John Harris, Editor
2707 Patriot Drive
Tyler
TX,
75701
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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.
back to Contents
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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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”,
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?
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.
Notes
Cf.,
“Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100?”
a symposium held at
Stanford
University
on
April 1, 2000
. Conference
notes appear at http://www.ceptualinstitute.com
/nuc/robo-souls-more.htm.
Reporter Jane Corbin narrated a
documentary for PBS Frontline
titled “Chasing Saddam’s Weapons” which first aired on
January 22, 2004
.
The following are Corbin’s own words in summary of her
findings: “So far, the strongest indication that
Iraq
may have continued a clandestine program is the ISG’s discovery of 97
samples [of bacteriological matter]—reference strains. A
scientist had kept them hidden in his refrigerator at home for the
past 10 years. One of
the test tubes, or vials, contained an organism called botulinum;”
and later this: “Dr. Rihab Taha, the woman U.N. inspectors called
‘Dr. Germ’, had used her skills in Iraq’s past bio-weapons
program. She admitted
that in the 1980s, she’d played a key role in developing anthrax
and botulinum—for
Iraq
’s self-defense, she claimed.”
Corbin retained a coolly skeptical tone throughout the
presentation, yet the claim of a captured technician working on
methods of mass murder surely deserves at least as much skepticism
as that of intelligence officers concerning the probable end of such
“experiments”. As
for the dismissively tendered presence of deadly bacteria in
homespun storage, it can only raise suspicions about what vials were
deemed important enough not
to sit languishing in an old refrigerator.
Ultimately, however, the Bush Administration preferred to
shrug off the paucity of pieces for nuclear missiles lying about
rather than pursue the many biochemical leads, and neither the
Fourth Estate nor the public has demanded answers.
The first contaminated mail was
discovered on
September 18, 2001
, exactly one week after 9/11; the
offices of two
U. S.
senators were eventually among the
known targets. Though
the case has never been solved, the very absence of useful leads
flowing from organized terrorist cells suggests that a single
disgruntled functionary may have been “freelancing”.
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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”.
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***************************
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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:
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.
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.”
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,”
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
From the booklet to Richard Hickox’s
performance on the Chandos label (2002).
Booklet for the Chandos recording, 33.
back to Contents
***************************
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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