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Tag Archives: Bach

Darkness Visible

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Psychology

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Aeschylus, Albert Camus, Albrecht Durer, Bach, Beethoven, Dante, Darkness Visible, depression, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hamlet, Job, John Donne, Joseph Conrad, Mahler, melancholia, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Schumann, Sophocles, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, William Styron

William Styron

“Since antiquity — in the tortured lament of Job, in the choruses of Sophocles and Aeschylus — chroniclers of the human spirit have been wrestling with a vocabulary that might give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia. Through the course of literature and art the theme of depression has run like a durable thread of woe — from Hamlet’s soliloquy to the verses of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, from John Donne to Hawthorne and Dostoevsky and Poe, Camus and Conrad and Virginia Woolf. In many of Albrecht Durer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.

One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.

For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as ‘the shining world.’ There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.”

William Styron

__________

From the closing pages of Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron’s register of his descent into depression.

Thanks D. for recommending this one to me.

William Styron was born today in 1925. Darkness Visible, his most intensely revealing and personal book, is an utterly haunting chronicle of madness and melancholy — one which drags you, as Virgil does through the inferno, down Styron’s steep and rocky path into the depths of psychological suffering. The book opens with Styron, an acclaimed author of fiction, arriving at a lavish Paris hotel to accept a coveted literary award. This rainy Parisian night, however, is the moment wherein his own “brain storm” emerges over the horizon, bringing with it an enervating disease of the mind which he comes to call melancholia. The remainder of the short text is an utterly brutal yet lucid look at just what this afflication is and is not.

The passage above is the book’s ending, and it finishes Styron’s story, as Dante’s, in the clarity and serenity of a long desired return to sunlight and air. It also illustrates handsomely Styron’s unmatched technical skill as a writer.

From a Spring 1954 interview with Styron in the Paris Review:

Does your emotional state have any bearing on your work?

I guess like everybody I’m emotionally fouled up most of the time, but I find I do better when I’m relatively placid. It’s hard to say, though. If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing done. Actually— though I don’t take advantage of the fact as much as I should —I find that I’m simply the happiest, the placidest, when I’m writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. When I’m writing I find it’s the only time that I feel completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well. It’s fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time—for jittery people. Besides, I’ve discovered that when I’m not writing I’m prone to developing certain nervous tics, and hypochondria. Writing alleviates those quite a bit.

I think I resist change more than most people. I dislike traveling, like to stay settled. When I first came to Paris all I could think about was going home, home to the old James River. One of these days I expect to inherit a peanut farm. Go back home and farm them old peanuts and be real old Southern whisky gentry.

Styron

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Is There a Universal Human Nature?

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy, Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Axel Schiøtz, Bach, Charlie Chaplin, cognition, evolution, free time, human nature, Noam Chomsky, Pablo Casals, psychology, Work

Noam ChomskyYou have argued that any stance one takes on political, economic, social or even personal issues is ultimately based on some conception of human nature. Why is this?

Any stance we take is based on some conception of what is good for people. This conception will tacitly presuppose a certain belief as to the constitution of human nature — human needs and human potential. You might as well bring them out as clearly as possible so that they can be discussed.

According to your view of human nature, all human beings possess certain biological functions endowing them with common mental capacities. How do you defend this position against postmodernist critics who argue that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all attempts to define it are guilty of reading other cultures in the light of Western perceptions and values?

Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate — this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any effect of human nature on our mental make-up — our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also makes no sense.

The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribes people she would have developed a completely different way of thinking. This is true. But we must then ask how a child could develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organizational component to the mind that is internal. We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in the area of morality.

For example, not long ago I talked to people in Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these values that we were able to interact — talking about real problems such as being forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.

Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?

In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone — Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates — creates stories of themselves where they interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings. Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications — even that they were acting in ‘self-defense’. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by saying ‘I’m doing this to maximize my own benefit and I don’t care what happens to anybody else’. That would be pathological.

But I think you would agree that not all cultures are equally viable from the standpoint of promoting human fulfillment and well-being? Are you wanting to argue that your understanding of human nature can give us a kind of objective understanding of the conditions of human flourishing?

Now we’re taking an essentialist position which the relativist would contradict. I’m not willing to go that far. We can develop a stronger conception of human nature through drawing on Enlightenment thinking on the issue.

This has support from some of the sciences, but is mainly founded on a philosophical investigation into our hopes, intuition and experience, and an examination of history and cultural variety. There are needs for conditions which allow the flourishing of human capacities. Insights from the Enlightenment show us that people need to exist in free association with others — not in isolation, and not in relations of domination. There is a need to replace social fetters with social bonds. Therefore any social structure that involves relations of domination — whether it’s the family, a transnational corporation, gender relations — has a very heavy burden of proof to bear. It must demonstrate that the benefits it provides outweigh the restrictions it imposes on human capacities. If it can’t demonstrate its legitimacy, it should be dismantled.

Do you think that different social and economic circumstances either block or reinforce certain dispositions — that, for example, whatever there might be in the way of a natural tendency towards selfish and aggressive behavior is reinforced by the capitalist market society?

There’s no doubt about it. Let’s take Germany, for example. In the early 20th century Germany was the most advanced area of Western culture — in music, the arts, science. In the passage of a few years, it entered the absolute depths of human history. Small changes in German society allowed people like Joseph Mengele to flourish rather than people like Einstein and Freud.

Granted the truth of what you say about our distinctively human capacities for freedom and co-operative action, how come we are so open to that kind of manipulation and deceit? How come we remain both globally and locally so caught up in oppression?

It’s a serious question. Why are we born free and end up enslaved?

Is there a case here for viewing social factors as more determinant than biological factors?

You can’t say which factor is more decisive. They interact. Take the example of puberty: small changes in nutrition can modify the onset of puberty by a factor of two, or even terminate it altogether. Or the visual system: in a kitten you can destroy the neural basis for vision simply by not presenting pattern stimulation in the first couple of weeks of its life. However, does this mean that the environment is the decisive force? No. Puberty is a process which human beings undergo at a particular stage of maturation because that’s the way they’ve been designed. You don’t undergo puberty because of peer pressure. Likewise, human limbs will not develop into wings rather than arms or legs. The genetic component determines strict limits within which variation is possible. I believe the same is true of our social and mental development.

How do you see the relationship between work and free time in a more liberated society?

Polls in the US, Germany and elsewhere have shown that people value free time over material goods. Therefore, there are major propaganda efforts to reverse this. One reason over a trillion dollars a year is spent on marketing in the USA is to try to undermine our natural tendency to want free, liberated time.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve just finished a few important books. One is Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, a penetrating and expert study showing how and why standard doctrines concerning economic development are dramatically refuted by the historical record and have caused severe harm when applied. Another is Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood. The “flood” is Lavalas, the popular movement in Haiti that won the first democratic election in this tragic country, a victim of French and US torture, and the savagery of a small elite, since it became the first free country of free men in the hemisphere. Hallward’s deeply informed account of what he sees as “neo-imperial sabotage” by the traditional torturers explores the background of the coup of 2004 and the persistence of “the flood” in a country that is a microcosm of imperial savagery and heroic resistance, however one interprets recent events.

What are you currently watching?

My wife and I used to be movie addicts, but I’m now pretty much reduced to what the grandchildren want to see. All-time favorite? The one movie I sat through twice was Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, so maybe that qualifies.

What are you currently listening to?

If some ancient equipment could be rehabilitated, I’d take out some wonderful old records of Axel Schiøtz singing Schubert Lieder and Pablo Casals playing Bach solo cello suites, reviving memories of more light-hearted days when my wife and I backpacked through Europe to the Prades festival, 60 years ago.

__________

From two interviews with Noam Chomsky — one from his website, the other from the Christian Science Monitor.

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Julian Barnes on Belief and Doubt in Religious Art

11 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bach, Brancusi, churches, Donatello, Edith Wharton, Giotto, Julian Barnes, Modigliani, Mozart, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Picasso, Poulenc, religion, religious art, Rembrandt, Shakespeare

Caravaggio -- Saint Jerome

I went to a concert in London with my friend J. The sacred choral work we heard has gone from my memory, but not his question afterwards: “How many times in the course of that did you think of our Risen Lord?” “None,” I replied. I wondered if J. had himself been thinking of our Risen Lord; after all, he is the son of a clergyman, and has the habit—unique among people I know—of saying “God bless” as a farewell. Might this be indicative of the extent of his belief? Or is It just a linguistic remnant, like saying “Grüss Gott” in parts of Germany?

Missing God is focused for me by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art. It is one of the haunting hypotheticals for the nonbeliever: what would it be like “if it were true” . . . Imagine hearing the Mozart Requiem in a great cathedral—or, for that matter, Poulenc’s fishermen’s mass in a clifftop chapel damp from salt spray—and taking the text as gospel; imagine reading Giotto’s holy strip-cartoon in the chapel at Padua as nonfiction; imagine looking on a Donatello as the actual face of the suffering Christ or the weeping Magdalene. It would—to put it mildly—add a bit of extra oomph, wouldn’t it?

This may seem an irrelevant and vulgar wish—for more gas in the tank, more alcohol in the wine; for a better (or somehow bigger) aesthetic experience. But it’s more than that. Edith Wharton understood the feeling—and the disadvantage—of admiring churches and cathedrals when you no longer believe in what those buildings represent; and she described the process of trying to imagine yourself back through the centuries in order to understand it and feel it. Yet even the best imaginer-back cannot end up with exactly what a Christian would have felt gazing up at the newly installed stained glass of Bourges Cathedral, or listening to a Bach cantata in St. Thomas’s, Leipzig, or rereading a long-told biblical story in a Rembrandt etching. That Christian would, presumably, have been concerned more with truth than aesthetics; or at least, their estimation of an artist’s greatness would have been guided by the effectiveness and originality (or, for that matter, familiarity) with which the tenets of religion were expounded.

Does it matter if we take the religion out of religious art, if we aestheticize it into mere colours, structures, sounds, their essential meaning as distant as a childhood memory? Or is that a pointless question, as we don’t have the choice? Pretending to beliefs we don’t have during Mozart’s Requiem is like pretending to find Shakespeare’s horn jokes funny (though some theatre goers still relentlessly laugh). A few years ago I was at the Birmingham City Art Gallery. In one glassed-in corner, there is a small, intense painting by Petrus Christus of Christ displaying his wounds: with outstretched forefinger and thumb he indicates where the spear went in—even invites us to measure the gash. His crown of thorns has sprouted into a gilt, spun-sugar halo of glory. Two saints, one with a lily and the other with a sword, attend him, drawing back the green velvet drapes of a strangely domestic proscenium. As I was stepping away from my inspection, I became aware of a track-suited father and small son travelling towards me at a lively art-hating clip. The father, equipped with better trainers and more stamina, held a yard or two’s advantage as they turned this corner. The boy glanced into the exhibition case and asked, in a strong Brummy accent, “Why’s that man holding his chest, Dad?” The father, without breaking stride, managed a quick look back and an instant answer: “Dunno.”

However much pleasure and truth we draw from the nonreligious art created especially for us, however fully it engages our aesthetic selves, it would be a pity if our reaction to what has preceded it was finally diminished to a Dunno. But of course this is happening. Wall captions in galleries increasingly explain such events as the Annuncication, or the Assumption of the Virgin – though rarely the identity of all those squadrons of symbol-bearing saints. I would have needed my own iconographical dictionary if someone had asked me to name the two attendants in the Petrus Christus.

What will it be like when Christians forget the immense symbolic and iconographical heritage which has been two millennia in the making? It will be like this.

Recently, I was in Athens, and found myself looking for the first time at Cycladic marble figurines. These were made around 3000-2000 BC, are predominantly female, and come in two main types: semi-abstract violin shapes, and more naturalistic representations of a stylistically elongated body. The latter typically propose: a long nose on a shield-like head devoid of other features; a stretched neck; arms folded across the stomach, left arm invariably above the right; a sketched pubic triangle; a chiselled division between the legs; feet in a tiptoe position.

They are images of singular purity, gravity and beauty, which come at you like a quiet, sustained note heard across a hushed concert hall. From the moment you see one of these forms, most no higher than a handspan, rising before you, you seem to understand them aesthetically; and they appear to collude in this, urging you to bypass any historico-archaeological wall information. This is partly because they evoke so clearly their modernist descendants: Picasso, Modigliani, Brancusi. Both evoke, and surpass: it is good to see those admirable tyrants of modernism being made to look less original by a community of unknown Cycladic carvers; good also to be reminded that the history of art is circular as well as linear. When this brief moment of vaguely pugilistic self-congratulation has passed, you settle into, and open yourself up to, the tranquility and symbolic withholdingness of the figures. Now, different comparisons come to mind: Piero or Vermeer. You are in the presence of a stately simplicity, and a transcendent calm which seems to contain all the depths of the Aegean, and offer a rebuke to our frantic modern world. A world which has increasingly admired these items, and so desired more of them than can possibly exist. Forgery, like hypocrisy, is the homage vice pays to virtue, and in this case much homage has been paid.

But what exactly have you, or rather I – yes, I’d better take the blame of this one – been looking at? And were my reactions, however pantingly authentic, relevant to the objects in front of me? (Or do aesthetic objects, over time, become, or dwindle into, our reactions to them?) That all-over pale creaminess which lends such an air of serenity would not originally have existed: the heads, at least, would have been vibrantly painted. The minimalist – and proto-modernist – incising is at least in part a practical consequence of the marble being extremely hard to crave. The vertical presence – the way these small images rise to meet us on tiptoe, and thereby seem to calmly dominate us – is a curatorial invention, since most were intended to be lain down horizontally. As for the rebuking tranquility they emanate, it is rather the stillness and rigidity of the tomb. We may look at Cycladic figurines aesthetically – we cannot do otherwise – but their function was as grave goods. We value them by displaying them in musems under carefully arranged light; their creators would have valued them by burying them in the ground, invisible to all except the spirits of the dead. And what exactly—or even roughly—did they believe, the people who produced such objects?

Dunno.

Julian Barnes

__________

From Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes.

The painting is Caravaggio’s depiction of — you knew this didn’t you? — Saint Jerome.

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