Blake's (and Parry's) Jerusalem

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry

The performance of Blake's 'Jerusalem' at the memorial service for Gough Whitlam gave me a momentary pause, it being so strongly identified with England, and Whitlam being such a staunch 'Australianist.' After all, the Barmy Army of visiting cricket supporters sing it before the day's play during Ashes series. But then of course it was the campaign song for Clement Attlee's Labour Party in the famous 1945 landslide ousting Winston Churchill from No.10.  And, having had a not dissimilar educational upbringing from Gough - posh Protestant school - I too find the music invariably stirring; in fact, at the 30 year reunion a short service was held where this was the hymn sung heartily by a bunch of 'old boys' nearing 50.

But then I pondered the lyrics again ... lines such as

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem ...

Parry, who composed the marvellous music, was asked to set the poem to provide a song for the ultra-patriotic Fight for Right movement. Parry had misgivings but did not want to disappoint those who had asked him, and he was pleased - musically - with his resulting work. Yet his misgivings about the political agenda of the Fight for Right grew, and he publicly withdrew all support for the movement.

In this time when seemingly incomprehensible brutality and violence is once again erupting in parts of the world and in our news feeds, it is perhaps worthwhile to ask ourselves what it is that is so moving or inspiring in this hymn, this Call to Arms. Is not the line "Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand" terrifyingly brutal in the way it gives agency to the inanimate weapon. And how would we hear the lines quoted above if instead of the word 'Jerusalem' we substitute 'the Caliphate'?

One's own rhythm

Cesare Pavese

"Il genio non è scoprire un motivo esterno e trattarlo bene, ma giungere finalmente a possedere la propria esperienza, il proprio corpo, i propri ricordi, il proprio ritmo – ed esprimere, esprimere questo ritmo, fuori dalla limitatezza degli argomenti, della materia, nella perenne fecondità di un pensiero che per definizione non ha fondo." Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere: 1938, 6 dicembre.

"Genius is not a matter of discovering some external theme and treating it skillfully, but of finally achieving complete possession of one's own experience, own body, own memories - one's own rhythm, and expressing this rhythm, above and beyond the limitations of plot or subject matter." - Cesare Pavese 6 December 1938

Before the strangeness of things ... the taste of dreams

'Emerald Blue' is one of my favourite Gerald Murnane stories, and the whole collection of which it is the title story, is my favourite Murnane book. In 'Emerald Blue' the narrator describes receiving a collection of foreigh postage stamps at the age of seven. "One stamp was from Helvetia. ... He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country of that name. ... More than forty years afterwards, he still remembered that he had seen in his mind from time to time for several years images of a place he supposed to be Helvetia. ... As soon as he was able to use an atlas, he searched for Helvetia. When he could find no part of the world with the same name as the country in his mind, he felt for a few moments as awed and delighted as he would ever afterwards feel before the strangeness of things."

This seems to me a masterfully precise description of the inner life and the workings of the imagination. Of course, Helvetia is itself a wonderfully literal metaphor for imaginary landscapes. Murnane is one of those writers whose paragraphs lead you off into your own speculative world; I often find myself often reading a paragraph or two then drifting off into my own thoughts. The great figure in this vein of writing is of course Marcel Proust. Early in Du côté de chez Swann he writes how on waking from a dream of a woman he has known he would set about finding her, "comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s'imaginent qu'on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe" ... which Lydia Davis translates as "like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charms of a dream" (this somewhat sacrifices the strong overtones of goûter which has "to taste" and there's that subtlety of "une réalité")

Back to Murnane: "Later, he had come to understand that the landscape of Helvetia was not the only such landscape he had seen. Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the front gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion."

Too much going on at once

Frédéric Chopin

In a recent post about alliterative effects in poetry I mentioned a sort of effect which "gets under your skin, or beneath your analytic defences; it sneaks into the brain directly like perfume, or music with too many things going on at once." This type of too-much-going-on-at-once is beautifully described by Douglas Hofstadter in a piece he wrote about Chopin:

"In that same year, Chopin wrote what some admirers consider to be his greatest work: the fourth Ballade in F minor. This piece is filled with noteworthy passages, but one in particular had a profound effect on me. One day, long after I knew the piece intimately from recordings, a friend told me that he had been practising it and wanted to show me "a bit of tricky polyrhythm" that was particularly interesting. I was actually not that interested in hearing about polyrhythm at the moment, and so didn't pay much attention when he sat down at the keyboard. Then he started to play. He played just two measures, but by the time they were over, I felt that someone had reached into the very center of my skull and caused something to explode deep down inside. This "bit of tricky polyrhythm" had undone me completely."

He goes on to describe that at one scale there is a rhythmic pattern of 2-against-3, but that by accenting every fourth triplet this creates a simultaneous pattern of 3-against-8 at a larger scale. This seems to me to be an excellent example of a general principle about the role of technique in the arts. And the principle is this: the conscious mind under normal circumstances intermediates reality, constructing what is perceived and including its own interpolations and interpretations as part and parcel of our experience of the world.  Thus the role of the conscious analytical computing mind serves to slightly distance us from what we experience: experience is not direct in normal circumstances. When experience is direct we are swept off our feet by the force of it; in this category of experience we might well find certain religious experiences, love at first sight, various psychotic episodes, moments of inspiration or insight, sudden epiphanies, and so forth. Technique is art can so overwhelm the analytical, keeping-track, I-know-what-I-am-experiencing brain that the consructing/interpolating/interpreting processes become overloaded and simply give up and the perceptual experience bypasses all the filters and hits us directly. This is what Hofstadter describes when he says "I felt that someone had reached into the very center of my skull and caused something to explode deep down inside."

The double message

Frank Auerbach Self Portrait
sold for £423,700 in 2008

In a letter to The Times in 1971 Frank Auerbach wrote: "Your correspondents tend to write of paintings as objects of financial value or passive beauty. For painters they are source material; they teach and they set standards." And this is much the same thing as T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote - in the September 1919 issue of The Egoist - that the poet "must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past"

Jacob Bronowski, as always, gives the wide-angle view: "The characteristic feature of all human cultures is that they make artifacts and this is really what we mean when we sat that the human mind is creative. The artifacts begin as simple stone tools, some of which are at the least several hundred thousand years old. What characterizes these and later artifacts is the double message that we read in them all., from the first chipped piece of stone: that tells us what they are for and also, at the same time, how they were made. So the artifact is an invention which carries its own blueprint with it - as we look at it, we see forward into its use and backward into its manufacture, and it extends our culture in both senses." - The Visionary Eye, p.65

From the 50s to the 70s Auerbach kept up a weekly habit of visiting The National Gallery and making drawings from paintings. This simple discipline of work, work, work reminds me of Rilke's comments about Rodin; in a letter (10 August 1903) he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé:

"wird es mir offenbar, daß ich ihm, Rodin, folgen muß: nicht in einem bildhauerischen Umgestalten meines Schaffens, aber in der inneren Anordnung des künstlerischen Prozesses; nicht bilden muß ich lernen von ihm, aber tiefes Gesammelstein um des Bildens willen. Arbeiten muß ich lernen, arbeiten, Lou, das fehlt mir so! Il faut toujours travailler - toujours - sagte er mir einmal, als ich ihm von den bangen Abgründen sprach, die zwischen meinen guten Tagen aufgetan sind; er konnte es kaum mehr verstehen, er, der ganz Arbeit geworden ist (so sehr, daß alle seine Gebärden schlichte Bewegungen sind, aus dem Handwerk, genommen!)."

"It is becoming apparent that I must follow him, Rodin: not in a sculptural reshaping of my creative work, but in the inner disposition of the artistic process; I must learn from him not how to fashion but deep composure for the sake of fashioning. I must learn to work, to work, Lou, I am so lacking in that! Il faut toujours travailler - toujours - he said to me once, when I spoke to him of the frightening abysses that open up between my good days, he could hardly understand it any longer he, who has become all work (so much so that his gestures are homely movements taken from manual work!)"

An immediate sense of the general

Ever since I watched The Ascent of Man as a child, and read several of his books while I was (briefly) at university, Jacob Bronowski has been a significant —and, as is often the way, a sometimes unconscious — influence.

In a recent interview I did for Tincture Journal, I responded to a question about the relation between my work with designing computer systems and my poetry-writing by trying to talk about the similarities: "Seeing that two distinct things are in some respect the same is the vital insight of abstraction, which allows you to make metaphors, write reusable software components, devise mathematical theorems, and make scientific breakthroughs. “My love is like a red, red rose” is the same sort of equation as Newton’s realisation that the force that pulls a falling apple is the same force that guides the orbiting moon (that is, the discovery of gravity united the hitherto separate domains of terrestrial and celestial mechanics). Seeing that two distinct things are in some important way the same is the key ability of the human brain, and—in very basic terms—must be what allows us to learn from experience. As no two moments are alike in all details—as Heraclitus said, “No person ever steps in the same river twice”—we need that crucial power of abstraction to be able to see that the current situation is in some way the same as previous remembered experience. We need a fast, reliable memory, and dreams to train the pattern-matching neural networks, to support this essential metaphor-making ability. Mathematics and poetry are the highest expressions of that same basic evolutionarily-determined skill."

Browsing through old books, I realised that Bronowski had put the matter more succinctly, clearly, and deeply in 'The Nature of Art' from his book The Visionary Eye: "There is a common pattern to all knowledge: what we meet is always particular, yet what we learn is always general. In science we reason from particular instances to the general laws that we suppose to lie behind them, and though we do not know how we guess at these laws, we know very well how to test them. But in a poem the specific story and the detailed imagery that carries it create in us an immediate sense of the general. The experience is made large and significant precisely by the small and insignificant touches. Here the particular seems to become general of itself: the detail is its own universal."

Taking a mechanical turn

Bernard Stiegler in a 2010 article ('The Age of De-proletarianisation') refers to Bartók's 1937 lecture on mechanical music: "At the beginning of the 20th century, perception took a mechanical turn – making it possible, for example, to repeatedly listen to music without knowing how to make music. Bartók drew attention to this in relation to the radio, when he recommended only listening to music while following along visually with the musical score."

Stephen Hough has released a wonderful iPad app where you can do just that: the score is presented as well as three different camera angles filming the performance, and all of these play in sync and of course you can move freely around in the piece with the swipe if a finger. There is also an intriguing piano roll view which shows the notes of the left hand and right hand as little scrolling streaks in different colours.

Bartók was concerned with the body's role in the production of music, and to some extent echoed an aritcle in a special issue of Musikblätter des Anbruch on Music and Machines (October/November 1926) contributed by Hans Heinsheimer, who worked as a music publisher for Universal Edition (where he supported Kurt Weill, Leoš Janáček, and Alban Berg).

Stiegler asserts that "the socialisation of digital technologies, as with every new technology, is initially perceived as a kind of poison (as Plato said about writing, even though it was the basis of law and rational thought)." Perhaps we are too far steeped in the consumerist disenfranchisement from our lives to feel the poison at work: as Stiegler writes elsewhere in the same article ..."a good consumer is both utterly passive and irresponsible" He concludes with an injunction to grasp the digital nettle: "Like writing, and according to Plato’s word, the digital is a pharmakon, that is, at once a poison, a remedy and a scapegoat. Only the digital itself, insofar as it can be a remedy, enables an effective struggle against the poison which it also is"