in search of truth | Richibi's Weblog

un-still lifes‏

“Fairy tale. Garden of Eden“ (1904)

Martiros Saryan

__________

animals are also poems, just by even standing

there

dolphins

penguins

bears

well, mammals, I meant, and, of course, birds

Richard

psst: sometimes I think that the Fall from the Garden

of Eden is not behind us but before us, we are

the cancer, we are the terror, we have eaten

irresponsibly from the Tree of Knowledge, not

for better but for, too often it would appear,

unfortunately, worse

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XXVll. My own Belovèd, who hast lifted me – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XXVll. My own Belovèd, who hast lifted me

My own Belovèd, who hast lifted me
From this drear flat of earth where I was thrown,
And, in betwixt the languid ringlets, blown
A life-breath, till the forehead hopefully
Shines out again, as all the angels see,
Before thy saving kiss! My own, my own,
Who camest to me when the world was gone,
And I who looked for only God, found thee!
I find thee; I am safe, and strong, and glad.
As one who stands in dewless asphodel
Looks backward on the tedious time he had
In the upper life,–so I, with bosom-swell,
Make witness, here, between the good and bad,
That Love, as strong as Death, retrieves as well.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

_______________________

the Asphodel Meadows were a mythological
nether field where souls wandered aimless
after death, bereft of their earthly memories,
washed away by the river Lethe they’d had
to cross to enter the Underworld, can you
dig it

very few have returned from There, notably
Eurydice, who, profoundly grieved by
Orpheus, her swain, is granted leave to
come back by the god of the Underworld,
Hades, as a grace for Orpheus’ uncanny,
uneartlhy, musical ability, though with one
dire condition, that he, Orpheus, Lot-like,
not look back, but that’s an entire other story

love however is what has resurrected her here,
according to Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
afforded her another, transformed, life, she
states

for transcendental apparently love, not only
ineluctable death, according to her earlier
staunch expectations, had proved able to
stir her from her earlier in-, or “asphodel”,
as she calls it, existence

as love does

Richard

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November 2, 2012

“The Carnival of the Animals” – Saint-Saëns/Nash/Disney

in the same spirit of “music as literature” as in

Liszt’s “Années de pèlerinage“, or Mussorgsky‘s

“Pictures at an Exhibition“ especially, Camille

Saint-Saëns, composed his “Le carnaval des

animaux“, “The Carnival of the Animals“, a romp

through an anthropomorphised menagerie

where the description is impressionistic rather

than narrative, which is to say more painterly

he composes in patches of musical textures

instead of melodic and linear paragraphs,

incompatible with the original association

of music as melody, or song, one’s response

would become thereby more intellectual

than emotional, one does not swoon, or

even sway, in other words, as marvel at the

synesthetic imagination, which lets you see

sounds and hear pictures

you’ll hear here, or “hear, hear”, the turtles

doing their determined interpretation of the

can-can, at an improbable crawl, in playful

reference to Offenbach‘s “Galop infernal”,

mad gallop, from his “Orpheus in the

“Underworld“, other such instances of

compositional salutations follow, not at

all an unusual practice among composers,

great and small

you’ll be enchanted by the shimmering

ethereality of the aquarium, by the grace

and majesty of the now mythic swan,

among other zoological bedazzlements,

in 14 movements, in therefore essentially

a symphony, a piece for orchestra with

several movements

here they are

I. Introduction et marche royale du Lion

(Introduction and Royal March of the Lion)

II. Poules et Coqs

(Hens and Cocks)

III. Hémiones (animaux véloces)

(Wild Asses)

IV. Tortues

(Tortoises)

V. L’Éléphant

(The Elephant)

VI. Kangourous

(Kangaroos)

VII. Aquarium

VIII. Personnages à longues oreilles

(Personages with Long Ears)

IX. Le coucou au fond des bois

(The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods)

X. Volière

(Aviary)

XI. Pianistes

(Pianists)

XII. Fossiles

(Fossils)

XIII. Le Cygne

(The Swan)

XIV. Finale

you’ll want to read the poems that Ogden

Nash later wrote about them, his very own

“Carnival of the Animals“, that now often

accompany the piece, a mistake, I find, for

exposing two entirely idiosyncratic and

incompatible sensibilities opposite each

other, thereby taking away from each

but Walt Disney has, and you will too have,

a great deal of fun nevertheless with both

of them, though they’re somewhat in his

version abridged, no swan

Richard

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October 31, 2012

happy hallowe’en

just in time a brew to invigorate the season,
courtesy of Shakespeare

Richard

_________________

(from “Macbeth”, act IV, scene 1)

Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights hast thirty one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

           Double, double toil and trouble;
           Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
                                                                                                                                               Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble

William Shakespeare

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October 28, 2012

“Song of the South”‏ – Walt Disney

it’s been over fifty years since I’ve seen this movie,

never thought I’d see it again but now for the magic

of the Internet, the boundless trove of irreducible

treasures, like those in Ali-Baba’s caves, or the

attics of our ancestors, stowed away, open again

to our poetic or otherwise imaginations, at our

very fingertips

I remembered this movie to be wonderful, moving,

but not much else, except for the “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-

Dah” theme, which is unforgettable, and a single

plot twist it would be unchivalrous to divulge

it has apparently been controversial, and is

presently banned, it would appear, in cinemas,

but it would be to my mind as racially insensitive

as “Huckleberry Finn”, “Tom Sawyer’, or even

“Gone with the Wind” have been, when they

were patently giving voice rather to a shocking

human cultural, and political, abomination,

however awkwardly, that is still powerfully,

shamefully, even manifestly, resonant

this is not a universal, note, condition, every

season for any culture has its bugbears, its

demons and monsters, and woe to the

unfortunate and inadvertent victim

in perhaps his most wonderful movie, and there

were quite a few, “Song of the South“, Walt Disney

lets us know that we’re all in this together, and

that kindness meets kindness in everyone, when

you open your heart

and that the reverse is horrible

Walt Disney is of course one of the great cultural

influences of the 20th Century, dismissed among

the titans as merely for kids

Walt Disney will be for an entire generation the

place where we learned our moral ABCs, much

more than in the dire Bible

as such he’s no less significant an artist, not at

all less significant, than Monet, Picasso, for

instance, Beethoven, Shakespeare, in shaping

our present moral and aesthetic world

you’ll need some Kleenex

you can also sing along

Richard

psst: filmed, I’m sure, right here in beautiful Stanley

Park behind my place in Vancouver, even the

animated portions

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October 26, 2012

“The Trojan Women” – Euripides

the purpose of any art essentially is to either

inform or entertain, preferably both together,

therefore comedy would be associated with

entertaining whereas tragedy with informing

and, as such, this last would be perhaps more

intellectually demanding, so be it

the strength nevertheless of great tragedy is in

its level of delivering immediacy and fascination,

which is to say entertainment, of great comedy

its obverse, insight

“The Trojan Women” was written in 415 BC by

Euripides, a tragedian at the very summit still,

2400 years later, count them, of remarkable

historical achievement

the war with Troy had taken place a full 800

hundred years earlier, Homer had written the

alternate Bible to our Western civilization,

“The Iliad“, still with Proust to my mind the

very summit of our Occidental accomplishment,

resonating across the ages as powerfully as

even the pyramids, extraordinary to read,

from about, again count them, astounding

millennia, nearly unimaginable centuries,

850 BC

Helen had been abducted from Sparta, according

to that side of the story, by Paris, the son of King

Priam of Troy, she had been whisked away not

unwillingly according to that prince of that city,

from where she became known to us as Helen of

Troy, rather than of her original Sparta

the Trojan War ensued

the Trojans were creamed by the Achaeans, the

Greeks, the Spartans, interchangeable terms,

under Menelaus, king of Sparta, and his brother,

Agamemnon, older brother, and king of Mycenae,

the greater incorporating kingdom

the Trojan women remain to pay the price of

war, after so many centuries still their horror is

vivid, nor do we need to look far for equivalent

modern instances, they were all slaughtered or

enslaved, ‘nough, or maybe not ‘nough, said

here we get perhaps the best interpretation

we’ll ever see, with a cast we’ll probably not

in a long while again put together – Katharine

Hepburn in perhaps her greatest role – “Once

I was queen in Troy”, she says, and you will

profoundly believe her – Vanessa Redgrave

doesn’t get ever much better as she reaches

chthonically, which is to say from the very

entrails of her earth, her soul, for a cry of

anguish you are not likely to ever forget –

Geneviève Bujold, a mad Cassandra, and

Irene Papas, the very incarnation of the

most beautiful woman in the world

all tear up the screen in their moments,

leaving you breathless and helpless before

their art and evocative power, only Helen,

because of her beauty, insidiously manages

in the story to reasonably comfortably

survive, making mincemeat meanwhile

out of her big bad, he would have it,

Menelaus

Helen had been the gift to Paris, who’d had

to choose among the goddesses, Hera, Athena,

Aphrodite, which of these was the most

beautiful, but only when Aphrodite had bribed

him with the gift of the most beautiful woman

in the world instead of from either other deity

power and glory, had he chosen Helen

the other two of course reponded with the

devastation at Troy, Olympians were not prone

to be easy, Christian mercy would find in that

pagan unequivalency propitious ground

wonderful rendering of the traditional Greek

chorus – the Greek version of back-up girls,

“doo-wop, doo-wop” or “she loves him, she

loves him” – commenting on the tempestuous

story

one of my favourite ever films

Richard

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October 14, 2012

“Années de pèlerinage” – Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886)

Années de pèlerinage

Première année: Suisse (published in 1855)

                1 Chapelle de Guillaume Tell
                2 Au lac de Wallenstadt
                3 Pastorale
                4 Au bord d’une source
               5 Orage
               6 Vallée d’Obermann
              7 Églogue
               8 Le mal du pays
                9 Les cloches de Genève

Alfred Brendel, pianoforte

          Deuxième année – Italie (published in 1858)

                  1 Sposalizio
                   2 Il Pensieroso
                   3 Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa
                  4 Sonetto 47 del Petrarca
                  5 Sonetto 104 del Petrarca
                  6 Sonetto 123 del Petrarca
                  7 Après une lecture du Dante. Fantasia quasi una Sonata

Lazar Berman, piano

         Troisième année  (published in 1883)

                1 Angélus! Prière aux anges gardiens
                2 Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este I
                3 Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este II
                4 Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este
               5 Sunt lacrymae rerum
               6 Marche funèbre
              7 Sursum corda

Lazar Berman, piano

___________________________

music as literature

Richard

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October 12, 2012

XXVl. I lived with visions for my company – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XXVl. I lived with visions for my company

I lived with visions for my company
Instead of men and women, years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.
But soon their trailing purple was not free
Of this world’s dust, their lutes did silent grow,
And I myself grew faint and blind below
Their vanishing eyes. Then THOU didst come–to be,
Belovèd, what they seemed. Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendours (better, yet the same,
As river-water hallowed into fonts),
Met in thee, and from out thee overcame
My soul with satisfaction of all wants
Because God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

_____________________

compare Joyce Kilmer‘s

“Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.”

from Kilmer‘s “Trees“, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning
in her poem has of course a much more Romantic view
of things nearly a century earlier, and where the source
of her telling light is rather the much more human
Robert Browning

a fair match, I first wondered, Browning or a tree

then thought, what do I now mean, a good one
and two respective centuries later, by God, the
genesis of all this inscrutable incontrovertible
horn of bounteous and wondrous plenty

I am of course still wondering, despite even the
Sisyphean exponentiality of those wonders

in the end I believe a tree is no less the equal
of a Robert Browning, as proof of the divine

about the divine itself however I’ll reserve
judgment, though my own personal experience
of miracles has made me believe in at least the
ineffably miraculous, the immanence ever of a
mystical, multidimensional order – “There are
more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, /
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” –
maybe therefore of the divine

but this could easily be just ultimately empty
semantics

so presently I cede

interesting that the question was even popping
up however, finally, after centuries of obligatory
Christian, and obfuscating, dogma, a personal
quest, rather than adherence by ecclesiastical
ordinance, for a proof of God

Richard

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October 10, 2012

the importance of believing in your dreams‏

                                                                                                                                                 today on the Internet I was looking for something
completely different when I inadvertently fell upon
this, for a movie I’ve never been able to abide
Shirley MacLaine won her only Oscar, having missed
out on her other way more wonderful performances,
“Irma la Douce“, “The Apartment“, her unforgettable
“Some Came Running“, where she makes easy
mincemeat out of both already established celebrities
Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, for instance

here in her acceptance speech she reminds us how integral our reality can be to our dreams

Richard

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October 5, 2012

XXV. A heavy heart, Belovèd, have I borne – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XXV. A heavy heart, Belovèd, have I borne

A heavy heart, Belovèd, have I borne
From year to year until I saw thy face,
And sorrow after sorrow took the place
Of all those natural joys as lightly worn
As the stringed pearls, each lifted in its turn
By a beating heart at dance-time. Hopes apace
Were changed to long despairs, till God’s own grace
Could scarcely lift above the world forlorn
My heavy heart. Then thou didst bid me bring
And let it drop adown thy calmly great
Deep being! Fast it sinketh, as a thing
Which its own nature doth precipitate,
While thine doth close above it, mediating
Betwixt the stars and the unaccomplished fate.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

__________________

despite a rigorous rhyme scheme and a mostly
strict iambic pentameter here, which is to say
each verse is given five, or penta, metres, or
beats, where iambic means that the accent is
on the second syllable of each of those five
individual metres, ta-da, ta-da, ta-da times
five, should your Greek be understandably
amiss, Elizabeth still manages to skew the
pace of the piece again in this instance,
turning her poetry, as always, into a more
direct and purposeful prose

just try to follow the sentence metrically as
in a more traditional poem, or song, you’ll
block her headlong and unfettered propulsion

alteration of the beat is not much different
from what composers were doing then with
music, the early eighteen-hundreds, not much
different indeed at all, and which they did for
the very same particular reason, greater
authenticity, the truth part of the iconic
imperatives of beauty and truth

incidentally, where Elizabeth was trying to
invigorate poetry by giving it the apparent
immediacy of prose you might’ve noted
that in my own flurry of literary tidbits,
however ever so humble, I’ve been quite
consciously peppering prose rather with
the elements of poetry, for better or for
worse, but in my mind to reflect a less,
dare I say, prosaic, more inherently
enchanting, vision of the world

Richard

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Richibi’s Weblog

Category: in search of truth

November 11, 2012

un-still lifes‏

November 5, 2012

XXVll. My own Belovèd, who hast lifted me – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏

November 2, 2012

“The Carnival of the Animals” – Saint-Saëns/Nash/Disney

October 31, 2012

happy hallowe’en

October 28, 2012

“Song of the South”‏ – Walt Disney

October 26, 2012

“The Trojan Women” – Euripides

October 14, 2012

“Années de pèlerinage” – Franz Liszt

October 12, 2012

XXVl. I lived with visions for my company – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

October 10, 2012

the importance of believing in your dreams‏

October 5, 2012

XXV. A heavy heart, Belovèd, have I borne – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏