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Passau, where I'm now working, is exceptionally picturesque. Tom was visiting for the first time today, and so I gestured poetically from an ivory stone bridge, praising the clear, blue, beautiful Danube.
T pointed out I was actually looking at the River Inn, famous for its murky waters, in comparison to the Danube which is the other side of the town. What-eva.
Incredibly, the English-speaking world has never paid much attention to the twentieth-century Polish poet Krystok Kamil Baczyński. Bill Johnston has now brought out a book of new translations, White Magic and Other Poems.
Baczyński, at 18 already acknowledged a major poet, was killed in action in the Warsaw Uprising at the age of 23. He is particularly known for his love poems to Barbara Drapczyńska, who he married in 1942, and who was also killed.
Baczyński's searing, relentless, cliché-free imagery explode even the purest expressions of faith - the Hail Mary now "Madonna of mine, full of sin" - and everything collapses, nightmarishly: "Sucking and imbibing, / the colossal maw of the abyss...like a child that is dying, / and like a father who must live on."
Alongside unimaginable horror, Baczyński still knows what is beautiful, particularly in the erotics ("I'll open for you the golden sky/Where the white thread of silence is..."). Perhaps that is because he was so young. Young men should not be dead, but instead should be in love, with their wives, with the world around, with music and dancing. They should be full of joy, and faith: that is the natural way of being young. Youth was the only unspoiled thing. w tej grozie jedna była czysta.
I've been reminded by a kind email that when I was working on Birtwistle's Crowd, I posted some WH Auden I had much in mind. As artists and as human beings, both Auden and Birtwistle know what it is to want order and wholeness, and equally how the chaos of the universe stands in our way.
It strikes me that perhaps, the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to need and delight in order (good minds naturally sort and interpret), but also to feel how difficult things are. The more you know, the more you know how little you know. Hence Auden's disillusioned, weeping "child with the tremendous brain", and Birtwistle's patterns disordered by chance elements. Crowd's penultimate page is particularly harrowing, where soaring fragments are trapped by sharply cut-off notes, like a door is slamming on all your aspirations.
And so perhaps also extremely intelligent people have a clear, knowing sadness, that is their own - lonely, too. Such is Hamlet's problem: he is much brighter than everyone else, horrified by events the others think OK. Tchja. My father wrote once in a poem: "God must be terribly lonely."
Britten always has this sadness: the fanfare in the War Requiem's 'Sanctus' is so grand, brilliant, soaring, and yet whenever I hear it, despite the huge orchestras, choirs, organ, I always feel there such profound loneliness.
I am listening to the Tavener/Yeats 'To A Child Dancing in the Wind':
The biggest downside to relocation is Jeff and Janet are now with foster parents in Surrey. But Janet looks like this and Jeff ("not fat, big-boned") has even lost weight.
Not only can I not handle ordinary work-a-day bureaucracy, I am a crap mother.
I'm downshifting to a yucca plant (although: the basil plant I had at college got down to one leaf, and had to be hospitalised at my mum's. After six months of her pouring Gro-More on it, it grew a second leaf. I can't understand it. Tom and I had at that time his 'n' hers herbs. His lived on whatever he was drinking at the time of watering - Sprite, beer and Nesquik - and was thick and luxuriant).
How was I supposed to know I have to apply for a tax card in order to get paid by my orchestra?*
After all, I've never had a job in my life.
Somehow I have managed to buy a flat, get a job, naturalize my car and survive negotiations with Deutsche Telekom, but I think I shall advertise for a German husband or father or someone to steady my tottering progress through the bureaucratic wilderness.
*UPDATE: turns out, the orchestral management sent me a nice helpful letter explaining all this, but I only read the bits about the fee, how much time I could take off, and the jolly ending welcoming me to the orchestra. Tsk.
"In music there are certain moments which somehow evade rational calculations or planning. After all this is the secret of art: it somehow escapes from a complete intellectual control. Of course, it affects the mind and is created by it, but this is a different matter. [...] In 20th century music the aesthetics of beauty ceased to function and while the category of beauty could be applied to certain particular sounds, in general the aesthetics of beauty belongs in the past. It is in the Renaissance or the Baroque periods that the primary task of an artist was to create beauty or truth. Now, the purpose of art is not to provide beauty nor truth, but rather evoke certain emotions which are intellectual more often than artistic."
Krzysztof Baculewski in an unpublished interview by Trochimczyk, 1986
I was playing the Mozart flute and harp concerto today: not one of Mozart's deepest or darkest works, but because so much of the harp repertoire is crap by neglected composers, Mozart's concerto buckles, among harpists, under disproportionate intellectual tonnage. Which ornaments to use? What cadenza?
I'm not going to the library for this concerto. It's infinitely more than pretty (I think flowery renditions of it are cheap), but its beauty is here, right now. There is wonderful drama but, whichever feeling the music portrays at any one moment is directly here, distilled, uncomplicated. That's why Romantic interpretations don't work, because Romantic feeling is at best always slightly tortured. The Andantino, soaring forth: is it so difficult just to play it? To let it go? To let go?
One general paradox of adult human existence is that we have to learn how to be simple. The Alexander Technique trains us back to the natural postures of children; the greatest artists are clear. It is difficult to let the Andantino go, because we superimpose our habits; false rallentandos, Romantic exaggeration, or sapping the music of its drama and energy by failing to sustain a crescendo or a forte.
But I think we study simplicity not just because of whatever personal detritus we've collected along life's way, but because there is nonetheless a knowingness to be gleaned beyond gut feeling, or a baby's chaotic instinct. The perfect balance of Mozart's music, there for the taking if you take infinite pains. Use whichever ornaments you like. Just let them be right.
The word enlightenment: bringing light. Growing lighter. Learning. Soaring.
Se ha llenado de luces |
My heart of silk Federico Garcia Lorca (George Crumb, Ancient Voices of Children) |
