Manolis Anagnostakis, "Old Roads"

Margarita Zorbala, "Old Roads" (1975) • poem: Manolis Anagnostakis (translation) • music: Mikis Theodorakis

Δρόμοι Παληοί Μουσική: Μίκης Θεοδωράκης Ποίηση: Μανώλης Αναγνωστάκης Ερμηνεία: Μαργαρίτα Ζορμπαλά Δρόμοι παλιοί που αγάπησα και μίσησα ατέλειωτα κάτω απ' τους ίσκιους των σπιτιών να περπατώ νύχτες των γυρισμών αναπότρεπτες κι η πόλη νεκρή.   Την ασήμαντη παρουσία μου βρίσκω σε κάθε γωνιά κάμε να σ' ανταμώσω κάποτε φάσμα χαμένο του πόθου μου κι εγώ.   Ξεχασμένος κι ατίθασος να περπατώ κρατώντας μια σπίθα τρεμόσβηστη στις υγρές μου παλάμες.   Και προχωρούσα μέσα στη νύχτα χωρίς να γνωρίζω κανένα κι ούτε κανένας κι ούτε κανένας με γνώριζε με γνώριζε.

Old Roads Music: Mikis Theodorakis Poem: Manolis Anagnostakis Interpretation: Margarita Zorbala Old roads – roads that I loved and hated endlessly, let me walk under the shadows of the houses, the nights of coming back, unavoidable, and the city, dead.   My insignificant presence I discover in every corner. Let me meet you someday, lost spectre of my Desire, me too   Walking, forgotten and rebellious holding a trembling spark in my damp palms.   And I kept on walking in the night without recognizing anyone And no one, either, and no one, either, recognizing me, recognizing me.

 

Isaac Bashevis Singer: "Literature... an Intellectual Sport"

Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Who Needs Literature?" Los Angeles Review of Books, November 11, 2019 [Original Yiddish text, first published in Forverts on October 20, 1963; tr. David Stromberg]:

• The crisis of literature: I sometimes fear that all of humankind may sooner or later come to my conclusion: that reading fiction is a waste of time. But why should I be afraid? Just because I would personally be one of the victims?
  No, it’s not just that. Even though we can now land on Mount Everest in a helicopter, it would be a pity if we no longer attempted climbing to the top. The value of literary fiction is not only its capacity to both entertain readers and teach them something, but also as a sport — an intellectual challenge. Even if we could invent a machine that would report to us precisely all of the experiences of a Raskolnikov, a Madame Bovary, or an Anna Karenina, it would still be interesting to know if this could be done with pen and paper. [...]
  Put this way, literature would still seem to survive as an intellectual sport. But it would be a sport in which only people playing the sport, as well as a few amateurs, would be interested. A man who walked on foot to California might summon our admiration, but his walking would not be taken seriously as a medium of communication. For this reason, I fear the day when literary fiction becomes a sport. It often seems to me that we are already at this point. It has actually already happened with poetry, including in our own Yiddish language. The poetic word is now read almost exclusively by poets. In such a great and wealthy land as the United States, works of poetry are often published in 500 copies and a good part of these is distributed by authors among their friends. Drama has not yet reached the sad state of poetry, but it’s going in that the same direction.
  As for literary prose, we often feel like it’s doing well. Books of prose are still bought in hundreds of thousands of copies. But when we look a little deeper into the matter, we see that what we nowadays call “literary fiction” is often far from literary fiction. Works are often sold under the label “novel” that are in fact three-fourths or a 100 percent journalism.
• The forgotten rules of the game: It often seems to me that modern critics suffer from amnesia. They’ve forgotten the elementary rules of the game called literature. It’s no feat to score grand victories in a chess game if, right from the start, one player gets more pieces than another, or if the rules of the game change with each round [...] Instead of admitting that there’s a crisis in literature and that journalism must step in on behalf of literature, literary critics, publishers, and often writers themselves have, consciously and more often unconsciously, changed the concept, they’ve ostensibly expanded it, but in reality simply confused and forgotten it. It’s as if people playing a sport had suddenly decided that a participant in a footrace can ride a bicycle. It’s a revolution that, instead of enriching the field, impoverishes and liquidates it.
• Artistic purity–the way out: For those genuinely interested in literature and its achievements, such works are a sign of a tragic downturn, a sickness that people try to cover up with bragging, false cures, harmful injections, and drugs. We have so expanded the definitions and so deformed the rules that everyone can play and everyone can win. Anyone who understands how rarely a true talent is born and how extremely difficult it is to be original — to discover something of one’s own in the art of writing — can clearly see that we are not dealing with progress but regress, a sort of literary anarchy that’s good only for the big publishers and their printing presses, for television and Hollywood. [...] Precisely because people today are surrounded by a sea of information related to all kinds of fields, genuine modern artists have to deliver more and more artistic purity, more substance, a greater focus on the portrayal of character and individuality. But for this one has to have exceptional gifts. It is, simply put, harder than ever to be original and creative in new ways. 

"O mio babbino caro"

Giacomo Puccini, Gianni Schicchi: "O mio babbino caro", Lauretta: Maria Callas (soprano)

O mio babbino caro, mi piace, è bello, bello, Vo'andare in Porta Rossa a comperar l'anello! Sì, sì, ci voglio andare! E se l'amassi indarno, andrei sul Ponte Vecchio, ma per buttarmi in Arno! Mi struggo e mi tormento! O Dio, vorrei morir! Babbo, pietà, pietà! Babbo, pietà, pietà!

Oh my dear papa, I love him, he is handsome, handsome, I want to go to Porta Rossa To buy a ring! Yes, yes, I want to go there! And if I loved him in vain, I would go to the Ponte Vecchio, And throw myself in the Arno! I am anguished and tormented! Oh God, I'd want to die! Papa, have pity, have pity! Papa, have pity, have pity!

Oh my beloved father, I love him, I love him, I’ll go to Porta Rossa, To buy our wedding ring! Oh yes, I really love him! And if you still say no, I’ll go to Ponte Vecchio, And throw myself below! My love for which I suffer, At last, I want to die! Father, I beg, I beg! Father, I beg, I beg!

Offenbach's Barcarolle ("Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour")

Jacques Offenbach, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Act 2: "Barcarolle (Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour)," Giulietta: Anna Netrebko (soprano) • Nicklausse: Elina Garanca (mezzo-soprano):

NICKLAUSSE Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour, Souris à nos ivresses, Nuit plus douce que le jour, O belle nuit d'amour! GIULIETTA, NICKLAUSSE Le temps fuit et sans retour Emporte nos tendresses! Loin de cet heureux séjour, Le temps fuit sans retour Zéphyrs embrasés, Versez-nous vos caresses; Zéphyrs embrasés Donnez-nous vos baisers. Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour, Souris à nos ivresses, Nuit plus douce que le jour, O belle nuit d'amour!

NICKLAUSSE Beautiful night, oh night of love, Smile upon our drunkenness, Night softer than the day, O beautiful night of love!   GIULIETTA, NICKLAUSSE  Time flies and irretrievably Takes away our tenderness! Far from this happy place, Time flies irretrievably Burning Zephyrs, Bathe us in your caresses; Burning Zephyrs Gift us your kisses. Beautiful night, oh night of love,  Smile upon our drunkenness, Night softer than the day, O beautiful night of love!

J. S. Bach the Rebel

Ted Gioia, "J.S. Bach the Rebel," Lapham's Quarterly, October 16, 2019 [excerpted from Music: A Subversive History by the same author]:

I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t aware of the time he was imprisoned for a month. They never learned about Bach pulling a knife on a fellow musician during a street fight. They never heard about his drinking exploits—on one two-week trip he billed the church eighteen groschen for beer, enough to purchase eight gallons of it at retail prices—or that his contract with the Duke of Saxony included a provision for tax-free beer from the castle brewery; or that he was accused of consorting with an unknown, unmarried woman in the organ loft; or had a reputation for ignoring assigned duties without explanation or apology. They don’t know about Bach’s sex life: at best a matter of speculation, but what should we conclude from his twenty known children, more than any significant composer in history (a procreative career that has led some to joke with a knowing wink that “Bach’s organ had no stops”), or his second marriage to twenty-year-old singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke, when he was in his late thirties? They don’t know about the constant disciplinary problems Bach caused, or his insolence to students, or the many other ways he found to flout authority. This is the Bach branded as “incorrigible” by the councilors in Leipzig, who grimly documented offense after offense committed by their stubborn and irascible employee.

Sgt. J.D. Salinger

Nicolaus Mills, "Son of Sam Cop Pays Tribute to Army Buddy Sgt. J.D. Salinger," Daily Beast, November 11, 2019:

“He was brave under fire and a loyal and dependable partner,” Keenan [John, NYPD Chief of Detectives, in a sympathy letter written to Matt Salinger after his father’s death] observes. “On many occasions in the course of an assignment, although pinned down by artillery, machine gun or small arms fire, he did what had to be done.” But for Keenan, what was most telling about Salinger was his refusal to let the brutality of the war harden him. “Did he tell you,” Keenan asks Matt Salinger midway into his letter, “how he saved a group of wounded German soldiers from being executed by understandably fired-up GI’s?”

[...]

Salinger had insight into what a Nazi victory would mean as a result of living in Austria less than a year before Germany annexed it, and during the war he got a firsthand view of Nazi death camps that never left him. In her memoir, Dream Catcher, Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, remembers him once telling her, “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.”
Salinger’s horror at what he and the Fourth Infantry Division had seen was enough for him to briefly check himself into an Army hospital in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945. “I’ve been in an almost constant state of despondency and I thought it would be good to talk to somebody sane,” Salinger wrote Ernest Hemingway, with whom he had become friends earlier in the war when Hemingway was a correspondent for Collier’s.

Elizabeth Bishop, Lonely and Dedicated

Scott Bradfield,"It’s Always a Good Time to Revisit the Brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop" (A Review of Thomas Travisano, Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop), The Washington Post, November 8, 2019:

• Her loneliness: “When you write my epitaph,” she once told her lifelong friend, Robert Lowell, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
• Her talent: James Merrill once claimed she “had more talent for life — and for poetry — than anyone else I’ve ever known.”
• Her secrecy: It is hard to think of a major American poet who revealed so little about herself while revealing so much about the human world we inhabit. Through about 100 poems published during her lifetime, Elizabeth Bishop — in her compact, reticent, nearly invisible way — contained multitudes. [...] “You know what I want?” she once asked her friend, Richard Howard. “I want closets, closets, and more closets.” There was something secret about every poem she composed, like a private space that you only slowly found your way into. And one that never made you eager to leave.
• Her literary method: Most of all, Bishop never lacked the luxury of time, working for years and even decades on individual poems until she got them just right. There was a dogged pertinacity to the way she composed poems, relentlessly hunting down every perfect word and nuance, often assembling her lines on a large bulletin board over her desk, like one of those serial killer-hunting detectives in a television series.

Christian Dietrich Grabbe

Ladislaus Lob, "Christian Dietrich Grabbe," Encyclopedia of German Literature [Konzett, Matthias, ed.], Routledge (2015), p. 362-3:

In German cultural history, Christian Dietrich Grabbe's work coincides with the Biedermeier period, the transitional phase between the end of classicism and Romanticism on the one hand and the rise of realism on the other. In the context of German political history, it falls into the "Restauration" or Vormärz" era, which began with the defeat of Napoléon in 1815 and closed with the revolutions of March 1848. Sigmund Freud described Grabbe as "an original and rather peculiar poet," Heinrich Heine called him "a drunken Shakespeare," and Karl Immermann saw him as having both "a wild, ruined nature" and "an outstanding talent." Although his image as a flawed genius lingers, he is now also hailed as one of Germany's major experimental dramatists, and the irregularities of his plays are regarded as an integral part of their originality.
The only child of the local jailer, Grabbe felt oppressed and alienated in his provincial hometown of Detmold where, as he wrote to Ludwig Tieck, "an educated person is looked upon as an inferior kind of fattened ox." Physically frail and psychologically unstable, he seemed the archetype of the dissolute bohemian artist, oscillating between sullen shyness and aggressive self-assertion, imperiously demanding recognition but refusing to please or to conform, performing erratically in his duties as army legal officer, staying in a destructive marriage, and precipitating his fatal decline by excessive drinking. While it is uncertain to what extent his "bizarreness" was natural and to what extent it was cultivated to shock his middle-class contemporaries, the "Grabbe myth" soon become confused with, and has often overshadowed, his work.
After his death, Grabbe was condemned to oblivion by classically oriented criticism, until both the nationalists and naturalists of the late 19th century rediscovered him as a kindred soul. In the 20th century, the Expressionists celebrated him as a fellow outcast of bourgeois society, the Dadaists and surrealists welcomed him as another rebel against rationality, the Nazis exalted him as a prophet of "blood and soil," Brecht placed him alongside Georg Büchner in the "non-Aristotelian" tradiiton leading from the Elizabethans to his own Marxist "Epic Theater," and more recent commentators have stressed his affinities with postmodernism.

[...]

By consesus Grabbe's supreme achievement consists of his innovations in historical drama. Unlike the historical plays of Schiller and his followers, which were classical in style and idealistic in character, Grabbe's historical plays are prosaic in language, episodic in structure, and realistic in outlook. Above all, they present history as determined not by abstract ideas or outstanding personalities but by mass movements and the contingencies of time, place, circumstance and chance. [...] Speaking of Napoleon, he rightly claimed to have accomplished "a dramatic epic-revolution," although he might well have included his other historical plays in that remark.
Grabbe's "revolution" in historical drama was accompanied by a revolutionary approach to drama in general. Once dismissed as signs of incompetence, capriciousness, or a sick psyche, his methods now seem eminently modern. Full of incongruities and distortions, deliberately avoiding any appearance of harmony or beauty, his disjointed actions, ambiguous characters, dissonant dialogue, and tragicomic moods not only reflect the social, intellectual, and aesthetic tensions of his own age but also anticipate the "open" form and "absurd" content favoured by many dramatists in ours. Long before the cinema was invented, he also foreshadowed many of its techniques.

    
Christian Dietrich Grabbe (1801-1836), lithograph by W. Severin after a drawing by Joseph Wilhelm Pero (1808-1862)

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NB: Christian Dietrich Grabbe's life was dramatized by Hanns Johst in Der Einsame [The Loner] in 1917. Brecht wrote Baal in response the following year.

Fassbinder Is Baal Is Fassbinder

Dennis Lim, "Baal: The Nature of the Beast," Criterion, March 20, 2018:

From today’s vantage, this nearly lost film opens a window into a formative phase of the New German Cinema. Schlöndorff could not have known its documentary value at the time, but among other things, Baal stands as a remarkable record of the young Fassbinder. The Fassbinder persona as we have come to know it is fully present in his incarnation of Baal: the heedless pleasure-seeking, the improbable magnetism, the sly awareness and skilled exploitation of power dynamics. Brecht moved from the relatively free-form provocations of Baal to the Marxist principles of epic theater. But for Fassbinder—who died at age thirty-seven, leaving behind more than forty films—this scabrous vision of doomed and destructive genius would acquire an air of uncanny prophecy.

"I Hope the World Lasts for You..."

Postmodernist Pirate Jokes

From: Alex Baia, "Postmodernist Pirate Jokes," The New Yorker, November 9, 2019:

How come nobody played cards with the pirate?
Because he was standing on the deck! The other pirates had no universal moral perspective from which to criticize him, so they stared at the ocean and contemplated God’s absence.

What did the pirate say when his wooden leg got stuck in the freezer?
“Shiver me timbers! Me entire life is this sentence, composed by some writer for a cheap laugh.”

How do you piss off a pirate?
Take away the ‘P’!

What did one pirate say to the other?
“I SEA you!” But it was just a joke, for no pirate is ever truly seen.

The Church, Intensive Kinship, and Global Psychological Variation

David Noonan, "Western Individualism Arose from Incest Taboo," Scientific American, November 7, 2019 (review of Jonathan F. Schulz et al. "The Church, Intensive Kinship, and Global Psychological Variation")

In what may come as a surprise to freethinkers and nonconformists happily defying social conventions these days in New York City, Paris, Sydney and other centers of Western culture, a new study traces the origins of contemporary individualism to the powerful influence of the Catholic Church in Europe more than 1,000 years ago, during the Middle Ages.

According to the researchers, strict church policies on marriage and family structure completely upended existing social norms and led to what they call “global psychological variation,” major changes in behavior and thinking that transformed the very nature of the European populations.

[...]

The engine of that evolution, the authors propose, was the church’s obsession with incest and its determination to wipe out the marriages between cousins that those societies were built on. The result, the paper says, was the rise of “small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility,” along with less conformity, more individuality, and, ultimately, a set of values and a psychological outlook that characterize the Western world. The impact of this change was clear: the longer a society’s exposure to the church, the greater the effect.

Thucydides on Appearance vs. Reality

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War i.10, tr. Benjamin Jowett (1881):

When it is said that Mycenae was but a small place, or that any other city which existed in those days is inconsiderable in our own, this argument will hardly prove that the expedition was not as great as the poets relate and as is commonly imagined. Suppose the city of Sparta to be deserted, and nothing left but the temples and the ground-plan, distant ages would be very unwilling to believe that the power of the Lacedaemonians was at all equal to their fame. And yet they own two-fifths of the Peloponnesus, and are acknowledged leaders of the whole, as well as of numerous allies in the rest of Hellas. But their city is not built continuously, and has no splendid temples or other edifices; it rather resembles a group of villages like the ancient towns of Hellas, and would therefore make a poor show. Whereas, if the same fate befell the Athenians, the ruins of Athens would strike the eye, and we should infer their power to have been twice as great as it really is. We ought not then to be unduly sceptical. The greatness of cities should be estimated by their real power and not by appearances. And we may fairly suppose the Trojan expedition to have been greater than any which preceded it, although according to Homer, if we may once more appeal to his testimony, not equal to those of our own day. He was a poet, and may therefore be expected to exaggerate; yet, even upon his showing, the expedition was comparatively small. For it numbered, as he tells us, twelve hundred ships, those of the Boeotians carrying one hundred and twenty men each, those of Philoctetes fifty; and by these numbers he may be presumed to indicate the largest and the smallest ships; else why in the catalogue is nothing said about the size of any others? That the crews were all fighting men as well as rowers he clearly implies when speaking of the ships of Philoctetes; for he tells us that all the oarsmen were likewise archers. And it is not to be supposed that many who were not sailors would accompany the expedition, except the kings and principal officers; for the troops had to cross the sea, bringing with them the materials of war, in vessels without decks, built after the old piratical fashion. Now if we take a mean between the crews, the invading forces will appear not to have been very numerous when we remember that they were drawn from the whole of Hellas.

Umberto Eco on Aesthetic Mythopoeia (4): Casablanca

from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:

According to the traditional aesthetic canons, Casablanca is not or ought not to be a work of art, if the films of Dreyer, Eisenstein, and Antonioni are works of art. From the standpoint of formal coherence Casablanca is a very modest aesthetic product. It is a hodgepodge of sensational scenes put together in a rather implausible way, the characters are psychologically improbable, and the actors’ performance looks slapdash. That notwithstanding, it is a great example of filmic discourse, and has become a cult movie.

[...]

When we do not know how to deal with a story, we resort to stereotypical situations since, at least, they have already worked elsewhere. Let’s take a marginal but significant example. Every time Laszlo orders a drink (and this happens four times), his choice is always different: (1) Cointreau, (2) a cocktail, (3) cognac, (4) whisky—once, he drinks champagne but without having ordered it. Why does a man of ascetic character demonstrate such inconsistency in his alcoholic preferences? There is no psychological justification for this. To my mind, every time this kind of thing happens, Curtiz is unconsciously quoting similar situations in other films, in an attempt to provide a reasonably complete range.

[...]

Obliged to invent the plot as they went along, the scriptwriters threw everything into the mix, drawing on the tried and tested repertoire. When the choice of tried and tested is limited, the result is merely kitsch. But when you put in all the tried and tested elements, the result is architecture like Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia: the same dizzying brilliance.
Casablanca is a cult movie because it contains all the archetypes, because every actor reproduces a part played on other occasions, and because human beings do not live a “real” life but a life portrayed stereotypically in previous films. [...] Casablanca stages the powers of narrativity in the natural state, without art stepping in to tame them.

[...]

When all the archetypes shamelessly burst in, we plumb Homeric depths. Two clichés are laughable. A hundred clichés are affecting—because we become obscurely aware that the clichés are talking to one another and holding a get-together. As the height of suffering meets sensuality, and the height of depravity verges on mystical energy, the height of banality lets us glimpse a hint of the sublime.

Umberto Eco on Aesthetic Mythopoeia (3): Cult vs. Artistic Movies

from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:

In order to transform a work into a cult object, you must be able to take it to pieces, disassemble it, and unhinge it in such a way that only parts of it are remembered, regardless of their original relationship with the whole. In the case of a book, it is possible to disassemble it, so to speak, physically, reducing it to a series of excerpts. And so it happens that a book can give life to a cult phenomenon even if it is a masterpiece, especially if it is a complex masterpiece. Consider the Divine Comedy, which has given rise to many trivia games, or Dante cryptography, where what matters for the faithful is to recall certain memorable lines, without posing themselves the problem of the poem as a whole. This means that even a masterpiece, when it comes to haunt the collective memory, can be made ramshackle. But in other cases it becomes a cult object because it is fundamentally, radically ramshackle. This happens more easily with a film than a book. To give rise to a cult, a film must already be inherently ramshackle, shaky and disconnected in itself. A perfect film, given that we cannot reread it as we please, from the point we prefer, as with a book, remains imprinted in our memory as a whole, in the form of an idea or a principal emotion; but only a ramshackle film survives in a disjointed series of images and visual high points. It should show not one central idea, but many. It should not reveal a coherent “philosophy of composition,” but it should live on, and by virtue of, its magnificent instability. And in fact the bombastic Rio Bravo is apparently a cult movie, while the perfect Stagecoach is not.

Umberto Eco on Aesthetic Mythopoeia (2): Hamlet (and Shakespeare)

from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:

According to Eliot, Hamlet is the result of an unsuccessful fusion of several previous versions, so the bewildering ambiguity of the main character is due to the difficulty the author had in putting together several topoi. Hamlet is certainly a disturbing work in which the psychology of the character strikes us as impossible to grasp. Eliot tells us that the mystery of Hamlet is clarified if, instead of considering the entire action of the drama as being due to Shakespeare’s design, we see the tragedy as a sort of poorly made patchwork of previous tragic material.

[...]

In several ways the play is puzzling, disquieting as none of the others is. Shakespeare left in unnecessary and incongruent scenes that ought to have been spotted on even the hastiest revision. Then there are unexplained scenes that would seem to derive from a reworking of Kyd’s original play perhaps by Chapman. In conclusion, Hamlet is a stratification of motifs that have not merged, and represents the efforts of different authors, where each one put his hand to the work of his predecessors. So, far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is an artistic failure.

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NB: In fact, what T.S. Eliot says about Hamlet in "Hamlet and His Problems" can be said virtually about any other Shakespeare play, as Hamlet is neither "more disquieting" nor less "ramshackled" and "unhinged" than almost any other of the Bard's plays, specifically his "great tragedies" (not excluding even the fairly brief and compact—possibly even severly cut—Macbeth).

Umberto Eco on Aesthetic Mythopoeia (1): The Count of Monte Cristo

from: Umberto Eco, "The Cult of the Imperfect," The Paris Review, October 28, 2019:

The Count of Monte Cristo is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature. The book is full of holes. [...] This novel is highly reprehensible from the standpoint of literary style and, if you will, from that of aesthetics. But The Count of Monte Cristo is not intended to be art. Its intentions are mythopoeic. Its aim is to create a myth.

Oedipus and Medea were terrifying mythical characters before Sophocles and Euripides transformed them into art, and Freud would have been able to talk about the Oedipus complex even if Sophocles had never written one word, provided the myth had come to him from another source, perhaps recounted by Dumas or somebody worse than him. Mythopoeia creates a cult and veneration precisely because it allows of what aesthetics would deem to be imperfections.

In fact, many of the works we call cults are such precisely because they are basically ramshackle, or “unhinged,” so to speak.

John Ruskin on the Nature of Possession and Who Has What

John Ruskin, Unto This Last (via The Victorian Web):

What is the meaning of 'having,' or the nature of Possession. Then what is the meaning of 'useful,' or the nature of Utility.

And first of possession. At the crossing of the transepts of Milan Cathedral has lain, for three hundred years, the embalmed body of St Carlo Borromeo. It holds a golden crosier, and has a cross of emeralds on its breast. Admitting the crosier and emeralds to be useful articles, is the body to be considered as 'having' them? Do they, in the politico-economical sense of property, belong to it? If not, and if we may, therefore, conclude generally that a dead body cannot possess property, what degree and period of animation in the body will render possession possible?

As thus: lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking — had he the gold? or had the gold him? — "Ad Valorem"

 

Distant Music: "O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim..."

"The Lass of Aughrim." Lunchtime recitals by John Feeley and Fran O'Rourke with Joyce's recently restored guitar. Newman House, 86 St Stephen's Green:

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from James Joyce, "The Dead," from Dubliners (1917)

Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing.
He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.


[...]

She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on:
"Then the night before I left, I was in my grandmother's house in Nuns' Island, packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn't see, so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering."
"And did you not tell him to go back?" asked Gabriel.
"I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where there was a tree."
"And did he go home?" asked Gabriel.
"Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in Oughterard, where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!"
She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.
She was fast asleep.

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from John Huston's final film, The Dead (1987):

 

John Burnside on Difficult Poetry (and How It Is Taught at Schools)

from Rowan Williams, "Why Poetry Matters" (A Review of  John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century), New Statesman, October 23, 2019:

Burnside is a consistent champion of difficulty in poetry, the quality that liberates the reader (and writer) from a “prefabricated world” in which nothing is ever new and disorienting. On this basis he has some pretty sharp things to say about how poetry is often taught in schools – as illustrative of subject matter rather than as something that has to be wrestled with first and foremost as speech. Pupils, he says, are likely to go away thinking more about this subject matter than about what has been happening in the words they hear or read. Pushing students into prematurely writing their own poems on the subject further shrinks the challenge of staying with the difficulty and valuing it in its own terms. Yet he also has astringent things to say about “lazy” difficulty. Verbose, self-indulgent poetry, drawing attention to its own ingenuity, labours for surface effect rather than transparency to what the poem directs us to – which is not themes or ideas but the “music” of the givenness of a moment, or a juxtaposition of words, or a collision of sensations.

[...]

Burnside mischievously suggests that our passion to “understand” poetry may derive from “a middle-school confusion of literature and theology”, rooted in the abiding problem of making sense of an opaque scriptural text. But if there is a proper overlap between the two it is surely here, in the way poetry affirms the material, finite world but is always conscious of an unimaginable backdrop, never trying to occupy or contain that elusive perspective.

Euripides, Suppliants 195-245

Tr. E. P. Coleridge:

Theseus:

Full often have I argued out this subject with others. For there are those who say, there is more bad than good in human nature; but I hold a contrary view, that good over bad predominates in man, for if it were not so, we should not exist. He has my praise, whichever god brought us to live by rule from chaos and from brutishness, first by implanting reason, and next by giving us a tongue to declare our thoughts, so as to know the meaning of what is said, and bestowing fruitful crops, and drops of rain from heaven to make them grow, with which to nourish earth's fruits and to water her lap; and more than this, protection from the wintry storm, and means to ward from us the sun-god's scorching heat; the art of sailing over the sea, so that we might exchange with one another whatever our countries lack. And where sight fails us and our knowledge is not sure, the seer foretells by gazing on the flame, by reading signs in folds of entrails, or by divination from the flight of birds. Are we not then too proud, when heaven has made such preparation for our life, not to be content with it? But our presumption seeks to lord it over heaven, and in the pride of our hearts we think we are wiser than the gods.

[...]

There are three ranks of citizens; the rich, a useless set, that ever crave for more; the poor and destitute, fearful folk, that cherish envy more than is right, and shoot out grievous stings against the men who have anything, beguiled as they are by the eloquence of vicious leaders; while the class that is midmost of the three preserves cities, observing such order as the state ordains.

Euripides, Hecuba 864-867

Tr. E. P. Coleridge:

Hecuba
Ah! there is not in the world a single man free; for he is a slave either to money or to fortune, or else the people in their thousands or the fear of public prosecution prevents him from following the dictates of his heart.

Euripides, Hecuba 426-427

Tr. E. P. Coleridge:

Polyxena
Farewell, my mother! farewell, Cassandra!

Hecuba
“Fare well!” others do, but not your mother, no!

---

Πολυξένη
χαῖρ᾽, ὦ τεκοῦσα, χαῖρε Κασάνδρα τ᾽ ἐμοί,

Ἑκάβη
χαίρουσιν ἄλλοι, μητρὶ δ᾽ οὐκ ἔστιν τόδε. 

Euripides, Hecuba, 369-378 & 547-552

Tr. E. P. Coleridge:

Polyxena:

Here I close my eyes upon the light, free as yet, and dedicate myself to Hades. Lead me away, Odysseus, and do your worst, for I see nothing within my reach to make me hope or expect with any confidence that I am ever again to be happy. Mother, do not seek to hinder me by word or deed, but join in my wish for death before I meet with shameful treatment undeserved. For whoever is not used to taste of sorrows, though he bears it, yet it galls him when he puts his neck within the yoke; far happier would he be dead than alive, for life bereft of honor is toil and trouble.

Talthybius (recounting Polyxena's last words):

O Argives, who have sacked my city! of my free will I die; let no one lay hand on me; for bravely will I yield my neck. By the gods, leave me free; so slay me, that death may find me free; for to be called a slave among the dead fills my royal heart with shame.

Euripides, Hecuba 239-250

Tr. E. P. Coleridge:

Hecuba
Do you know when you came to spy on Ilium, disguised in rags and tatters, while down your cheek ran drops of blood?

Odysseus
I do; for it was no slight impression it made upon my heart.

Hecuba
Did Helen recognize you and tell me only?

Odysseus
I well remember the great risk I ran.

Hecuba
Did you embrace my knees in all humility?

Odysseus
Yes, so that my hand grew dead and cold upon your robe.

Hecuba
Was it I that saved and sent you forth again?

Odysseus
You did, and so I still behold the light of day.

Hecuba
What did you say then, when in my power?

Odysseus
Doubtless I found plenty to say, to save my life.

William Blake, A Letter

[To] George Cumberland, 12 April 1827, via The William Blake Archive / transcript; in bold, one of Harold Bloom's favourite passages (cf. the "Prologue" to The Visionary Company, p. 1)

Dear Cumberland,

I have been very near the gates of death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in the Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger& stronger as this Foolish Body decays. I thank you for the Pains you have taken with Poor Job. I know too well that a great majority of Englishmen are fond of The Indefinite which they Measure by Newtons Doctrine of the Fluxions of an Atom. A Thing that does not Exist. These are Politicians & think that Republican Art is Inimical to their Atom. For a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s] Strait or Crooked It is Itself & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else Such is Job but since the French Revolution Englishmen are all Intermeasurable One by Another Certainly a happy state of Agreement to which I for One do not Agree. God keep me from the Divinity of Yes & No too The Yea Nay Creeping Jesus from supposing Up& Down to be the same Thing as all Experimentalists must suppose.

[...]

Flaxman is Gone & we must All soon follow every one to his Own Eternal House Leaving the Delusive Goddess Nature & her Laws to get into Freedom from all Law of the Members into The Mind in which every one is King& Priest in his own House God Send it so on Earth as it is in Heaven


I am Dear Sir Yours Affectionately
WILLIAM BLAKE

Robert Frost, "Acquainted with the Night"

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Leonard Bernstein, Candide (BBC, 1988)

Candide at LeonardBernstein.com | "A Guide to Leonard Bernstein's Candide" at SondheimGuide.com | librettos: 1956 (Lillian Hellman & Richard Wilbur) • 1973 (Richard Wilbur & Hugh Wheeler) | venue: Theater Royal, Glasgow (1988) | cast: Voltaire/Pangloss/Martin/Cacambo: Nickolas Grace • Candide: Mark Beudert • Cunegonde: Marilyn Hill-Smith • Old Lady: Ann Howard • Governor/Captain/Gambler: Bonaventura Bottone • Maximilian: Mark Tinkler • Paquette: Gaynor Miles

Act 1
• 8:30: "Life is Happiness Indeed"
• 13:30: "The Best of All Possible Worlds" (1989, London)
• 19:09: "Oh, Happy We" (Candide & Cunegonde)
• 22:22: "It Must Be So" (Candide)
• 44:58: "Auto-da-Fé"
• 56:46: "Glitter and Be Gay" (Cunegonde) (2005, New York)
• 1:14:48: "I Am Easily Assimilated" (The Old Lady)

Act 2
• 1:35:45: "My Love" (The Governer)
• 1:53:57: "The Ballad of Eldorado" (Candide)
• 1:59:45: "Words, Words, Words" (Martin)
• 2:08:33: "The Kings' Barcarolle" (The Five Kings)
• 2:16:00: "We Are Women" (The Old Lady & Cunegonde) (2005, New York)
• 2:28:00: "Nothing More Than This" (Candide)
• 2:34:40: "Make Our Garden Grow"

"Meine Freundin ist schön..."

Puhdys - "Wenn ein Mensch lebt" • from: Heiner Carrow, Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1974) 

 

Wenn ein Mensch kurze Zeit lebt, sagt die Welt, dass er zu früh geht. Wenn ein Mensch lange Zeit lebt, sagt die Welt es ist Zeit. Meine Freundin ist schön, als ich aufstand ist sie gegangen. Weckt sie nicht, bis sie sich regt, ich habe mich in ihren Schatten gelegt. Jegliches hat seine Zeit, Steine sammeln, Steine zerstreun, Bäume pflanzen, Bäume abhaun, leben und sterben und Streit. Wenn ein Mensch kurze Zeit lebt, sagt die Welt, dass er zu früh geht. Wenn ein Mensch lange Zeit lebt, sagt die Welt es ist Zeit, dass er geht. Jegliches hat seine Zeit, Steine sammeln, Steine zerstreun, Bäume pflanzen, Bäume abhau'n, leben und sterben und Frieden und Streit. Weckt sie nicht, bis sie sich regt, ich habe mich in ihren Schatten gelegt. Wenn ein Mensch kurze Zeit lebt, sagt die Welt, dass er zu früh geht. Wenn ein Mensch lange Zeit lebt, sagt die Welt es ist Zeit, dass er geht. Meine Freundin ist schön, als ich aufstand ist sie gegangen. Weckt sie nicht, bis sie sich regt, ich habe mich in ihren Schatten gelegt.

When a person lives a short time the world says he went too early. When a person lives a long time the world says it is time. My girlfriend is beautiful when I get up, she is gone Don't wake her, until she stirs I have lain in her shadow To every thing there is a season: to collect stones, to scatter stones to plant trees, to harvest trees to live and to die and to wage wars. When a person lives a short time the world says he went too early. When a person lives a long time the world says it is time for him to live. To every thing there is a season: to collect stones, to scatter stones to plant trees, to harvest trees to live and to die, for peace and for war. Don't wake her, until she rouses herself I have lain in her shadow When a person lives a short time the world says he went too early. When a person lives a long time the world says it is time for him to live. My girlfriend is beautiful when I get up, she is gone Don't wake her, until she stirs I have lain in her shadow.