THE GNOSTIC GLOW
Jerry Harkins
For five hundred years, Westerners have sought to exclude all but the most operational truths from the pale of intellectual discourse. From this we have gained enormous technological prowess but at a terrible price. Only art has kept alive what was once our most ennobling trait, the search for truth beyond what is obvious. The renewal of that search may turn out to be the twentieth century's most important legacy.
Gnosticism is an ancient theology that evolved to explain the paradox of evil in a world supposedly created by an all-loving god. [1] It is mythically complex, and is regarded by most Christian, Jewish and Moslem sects as esoteric, heterodox or worse. That, of course, is a case of the victors writing history. In the 200 years following the destruction of the Second Temple, a Gnostic version of Judaeo-Christianity flourished in Egypt. It was defeated with great difficulty by the Pauline Church but only after it had come close to establishing itself as the orthodox expression of the new faith. Even in defeat, however, it survived to influence several of the major heresies of the first millennium and to play a role in the Great Schism of 1054. [2] It is still the wellspring of almost all Western mysticism and, from time to time, it has emerged as an intellectual force in more mainstream movements including the Reformation, 18th Century Freemasonry, 19th Century romanticism, and 20th Century psychoanalysis. Contemporary interest — among scholars and New Age enthusiasts — followed the discovery of a large collection of Gnostic manuscripts at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. Some of these speak to us in a persuasively canonical voice.[3]
Gnosis, the phenomenon from which the theology takes its name, is an epistemological construct simplistically thought of as secret or hidden knowledge. Although its precise nature varies from writer to writer, it is generally described as a spark of the divine flame — a spiritual principle present in the midst of degenerate material creation. Most Gnostics held that a good God could not create evil which nonetheless was manifestly present in all material creation. The gnosis was said to be a remnant of the spiritual creation of an all good God who became lost to us because we find ourselves bound literally in the materiality created by an evil god or demiurge. Separated from the godhead, like us, it is lost in a hostile sea of evil and ignorance and yearns to be reunited with its source. Meanwhile it is available to us and, when cultivated, gives us glimpses of "truths beyond truth." In some ways it is analogous to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the middle of Eden, a kind of key to god-like understanding.
With its potential for revealing hidden truth, gnosis defuses the dilemma of Plato's cave and goes a long way toward easing the pain of Saint Paul's famous observation, "For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away...For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known" (I Corinthians, 13:9-12). Paul, the great dogmatist, probably would not have welcomed the relief however closely it resonated with some of his own musings. [4] Gnosticism threatened the divine monopoly of the Pauline Church which, therefore, responded fiercely although not at first with violence. At length, however, the church instituted a crusade which led to the slaughter of Gnostic Cathars in Thirteenth Century Languedoc. Still, the basic ideas of the Gnostics were never fully extinguished. In part this was because it was more than a religious doctrine. It addressed one of our most fundamental and universal paradoxes, the common subject of Plato and Paul, the fearful chasms between good and evil and the known and the unknown.
These pairs are two of a long list of dualities that attract our attention — among them are self and other, individual and community, the long term and the short term and, in some senses, male and female. The members of these pairs contrast with each other but are usually not complete opposites. By themselves though they are devoid of almost all significance. It is not that males have no meaning as such, it is rather that the significance of maleness is diminished greatly without the context of femaleness. And vice versa. Where and when the members of a pair intersect, there is the prospect of either discord and conflict or innovation and creativity. For those influenced by Gnosticism, duality replaces unity as the intersection of good and evil and is therefore the focal point of metaphysics and ethics.
The known and the unknown is the least distinct and most threatening of these dualities. In the abyss, will be found everything we think we know but isn't so, and things we believe but can't prove. “Abyss” is not the right word. The space between the known and the unknown is particularly fearsome not because it is a real gap but because it is a slough of ambiguity where things constantly change. Still, like the other pairs, the known is central to a proper understanding of the unknown. Where they interact, they create irreconcilable tensions which turn out to be sources for much of the world's creativity and a fair share of its tragedy. In some senses, it is useful to think of the known as good and the unknown as evil but that is a subject for a different day.
Of more immediate relevance to the subject of this essay is the pairing of good and evil. Orthodox Christians and Jews believe that evil entered history through the fall of Adam. Gnostics believe that it resulted from an imperfection in the act of creation. All true Gnostics are dualists who believe that the Creator known to history is an evil principle and that the good god of our prayers is knowable only through gnosis, a spark of the good adrift in the material world. Some Gnostics, however, take a more sophisticated position: good and evil are not opposites, nor is one the absence of the other. They are complementary principles which are often but not always opposed in the moral dimension but not necessarily elsewhere. Thus, for example, the knowledge of nuclear weapons may be morally repugnant but the imperative to acquire such knowledge is admirable in the biological or psychological realm. The more interesting problem arises from the fact that the drive to knowledge will always be incomplete, will always frustrate us.
Even as children, the universe whispers to us that there is something just beyond our ken, not God but of God, not in the hereafter but in the here and now, within our reach if not always our grasp. It is a something that promises to tear away the veil of uncertainty and alleviate our existential anxiety, the fear captured by J.B.S. Haldane "...that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Our sense that truth consists largely of "dark matter" is very strong. [5] We go through life feeling dissatisfied, as though we never really understand things because we ourselves are somehow diminished. We gaze at the stars yearning for more meaning, more purpose, more delight. We seem adrift in a cosmos that is often opaque, sometimes capricious. Truth, beyond what is trivial, is elusive, and the things that we care most about – love, laughter, wisdom – lie outside the limits of language and logic. Gnosis is a key to releasing or at least easing these tensions; it lets us suppose we can suppose.
Few of us cultivate our Gnostic gift. Rather, challenged by chance, change and or mere complexity, most people allow themselves to be seduced, like the denizens of George Orwell's Animal Farm, by ideology and formula. Others, though, persist, trying to tease out of themselves their dreamlike visions or memories of transcendent truth. This "teasing" is, I believe, a Gnostic process that might take any metaphorical form. In traditional cultures, the teaser might be a seer, a shaman, a poet or an historian. Often such persons were masked or depicted as blind which I take as a reference to their ability to transcend the obvious world of the senses. William Irwin Thompson [6] offers a compelling metaphor for the role they played:
The seer is a person who sees that most people are like fish caught in pools at low tide. They swim in their puddles and forget that every 5,124 years or so, a new tide comes in and the puddle is reconnected to the immensity of the sea....The task of the seer is to bear witness to the truths of the sea, to keep up the cultural memory, through myth and legend, of the greatness of the ocean.
But the seers became professional priests and went to war with the scientists thinking that science truth and seer truth were somehow competitive. Sadly, the seers were not well equipped for any such contest and they retired from the field. In recent times, therefore, the most common form of Gnostic expression has been art.
It may be that artists have always been dualists but, as long as art served functions outside itself, the relationship was easily camouflaged. Gradually, however, it was liberated from church and state, and artists developed new media — less literal, less disciplined and less referential than previously and so more suited to exploring interior truths. Nineteenth Century Romanticism represents the revolutionary view that beauty is the object of the soul and art is the language it speaks. Here, for example, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge explaining himself in terms that would have been unthinkable a hundred years earlier: "...I seem rather to be seeking...a symbolic language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new."[7] The something is the truth that proceeds from the poet's imagination and intuition. That truth is eternal, not mortal, and universal, not particular. It is, in short, indistinguishable from the truths beyond truth open to us through gnosis.
The Gnostic journey however — whether the pilgrim be a seer or a poet — takes great courage because it is so unlikely an enterprise. Unlike the social insects, our experience of the world is almost entirely self-referential. The only dichotomies that are obvious to us are I and You, Mine and Yours, Of Me and Not of Me. Many people spend their lives coping with these without noticing the less obvious and much more nuanced dualities. Consider, for example, the dilemma of the great English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Watch with him, shivering in his black cassock, his life acutely focused by religious vows, as he confronts the casual freedom of the Christ-figure falcon (king / dom) soaring on the morning wind, mocking the poet's prideful subordination of self and thereby releasing within him truth previously hidden. Share the poet's ecstasy in "...the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!" and feel the erotic—homoerotic—energy that heightens the moment with self-awareness — "O my chevalier." Now stand over his shoulder as, recollecting the experience in tranquillity, he tries to express all this with words, in T.S. Eliot's phase, forcing language into its meaning. "I caught this morning morning's minion..." I caught? Hopkins does not say I saw and does not mean anything quite so positive. He "caught" the idea not as one catches a ball but more as one catches a cold. It is a little bit passive, implying some distance between the artist and a revelation that is not entirely welcome.
Subjecting such a nuanced truth to the disciplines of vocabulary, grammar and logic is the act of a frightened but exhilarated poet tickling the tail of the dragon. It recalls the passion and pleasure of the moment but now without the terrible imminence, now cloaked in protective symbols. In the process of being tamed by both the inherent limitations of words and the poet's ability to shape them, any truth is inevitably diminished. Still The Windhover, one of the great sonnets in English, comes so agonizingly close to expressing truths beyond truth that I think the reader should blush. It comes to grips with three great dualities: the human and the divine, freedom and constraint, and pride and submission.
Poets are in the business of bending language to express truths that are resistant to prose. Poetry is a compromise between logic and image; it never fully abandons the semantic bonds — connotative as well as denotative — between words and their referents. Thus, a priest who sees Christ as his chevalier can not entirely evade the image of the knight in shining armor (cavalier), astride his mighty horse (cheval) come to save the fair damsel (the essential service of chivalry). At its best, poetry stretches such bonds until the tension becomes tangible at which point hidden meanings are forced free. We need not speculate as to what happens next to the damsel who, remember, is Hopkins himself in a black cassock. It is enough to realize that The Windhover exalts and despairs in the liberty gained by submission which, in various guises, is one of the great literary themes. Writers are attracted to it, I think, in part because it mirrors their own struggle to liberate truth by subjecting it to the rough discipline of language.
For musicians, on the other hand, the challenge is quite different. In music there are no obvious bonds between the sounds and anything outside. It is true that the perceptions of an octave and of consonance, dissonance and resolution arise from fairly precise mathematical relationships but these have nothing to do with musical meaning.
The musical equivalent of a word is a rhythmic sequence of notes or chords making up a "phrase." Some such sequences — the bugle call "Taps" [8] is an example — have acquired symbolic associations as strong as any word and may, in fact, be onomatopoetic. Others are less explicit but still unmistakable. To anyone brought up in the culture of Western tonality, Bach's chorale "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" from the Saint Matthew Passion consists of four phrases which mean unspeakable grief.[9] Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun means sexual awakening. If nothing meaningful ever happened in music, it would be, by definition, boring. (Indeed it is, I think, precisely because nothing "happens" in serial music that it bores almost everyone. The perfect answer to Milton Babbitt's question "Who Cares If You Listen?" [10] is, "I'm sorry, were you talking to me?")
What is endlessly fascinating about music is the realization that, for all its ambiguity, the emotional responses it evokes are remarkably consistent from listener to listener. Something collective does happen at a concert, whether of Beethoven or The Grateful Dead, because music is "about" something — and the something is absolutely of the essence of the universe.
The Celts believe the universe is made of music and both are made of rhythm.[11] The stars and the seasons turn in their time; the moon waxes and wanes; the katydid's tattoo measures the progress of summer just as surely as the rising of the mountain marks the movement of continents; and the recession of the meadow records the comings and goings of the glacier. To all these eternal rhythms, our own hearts beat a poignant, ephemeral accompaniment.
From our first breath, we sing to the rhythms within and outside ourselves. The baby cries — sings — to tell the world "I am hungry," or uncomfortable, or afraid or tired. There is no music in the world more compelling. Cries express vital needs but on a pre-verbal, pre-conceptual level. They reveal knowledge that is not "known" in any logical way but is felt. The baby "knows" the first stirrings of hunger in an utterly fundamental way. A few weeks after our first cry we are babbling. Listen to an infant. Babbling is the purest song, consisting of continuous vocalizations in which the pitch and timber of the underlying tones are rhythmically varied. It is extraordinarily rich in the range of sounds it gives voice to — happy, playful, experimental sounds that convey the qualities of burbling, gurgling and hithering and thithering.[12]
The power of music to bring us into contact with the fundamental stays with us all our lives. Today this view is not fashionable and musicologists work hard to belittle any suggestion that music has extra-musical meaning.[13] This leads to some rather bizarre explanations of what does take place in a concert hall. Here, for example, is the sum and substance of a recent "analysis" of the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto in G Major, Opus 58:
The concerto begins in the "strange" key of B major, then flirts with A minor, an "odd choice." It pays a call on the "less remote" key of B minor but moves quickly to an "amazing surprise," a "dream episode" in the "completely strange" key of B-flat. There follows a second dream episode in the "most unexpected key" of C-sharp minor, and then a third in "yet another strange key," E-flat. The cadenza begins with a violent excursion in a "blatantly wrong" but unspecified key and then offers a peace-making gesture in the "completely irrelevant key" of A major.[14]
Much musical writing follows the same structuralist line. But The Fourth Piano Concerto, one of the most popular works in the classical repertory, simply cannot be appropriately described as strange or odd or unexpected or irrelevant or wrong in any way, including its architecture. Its structure explains almost nothing, and dressing it up in provocative adjectives is merely an attempt to disguise the writer's failure. A musicologist might want to make the case that this concerto presages the movement away from strict tonality, and might want to speculate that certain key changes must have sounded "strange" to contemporary ears. But no one except a musicologist would ever sit through the piece to admire the key shifts. As Jacques Barzun has written, "Bach is not a great composer because he was adept at counterpoint, but because he had a purpose in using it."[15] We should be far more interested in Bach's purposes or in the content of Beethoven's "dream sequences" than in the craft of their creation.
This, of course, is a challenge of a different magnitude, perhaps an impossible one. It may be that any attempt to verbalize the inner meaning of any complex musical work is doomed to futility. As Rainer Maria Rilke observed, “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.” [16] But the problem of translation does not consign music to meaninglessness. I believe we all sense meaning in music, if only through Paul's glass darkly, and that artists are more sensitive to it than the rest of us. When Picasso looked at primitive ritual masks, he saw their truth more clearly than the anthropologists and he communicated it more forcefully. [17] In a similar way, George Balanchine saw something in Bizet's Symphony in C and left us what amounts to an explication de texte in the form of a ballet.
Composed in 1855 when Bizet was 17, this romantic, exuberant work is rich in familiar, song-like themes. There is nothing "heavy" about it, nothing requiring deep thought or careful preparation. It is easy to listen to, moving along at a good pace and leaving an audience happy. Why? What does it mean?
Balanchine points toward the answers in his own Symphony in C. A large corps of ballerinas in white tutus supported by eight male dancers in black tights take us through four technically demanding movements of classical dance sequences against an unchanging blue backdrop. There is almost nothing for the conscious mind to anchor itself to. No program. No story. No scenery. Just dancers in various combinations, the dance, and Bizet's music. Does it mean anything?
Absolutely. As a ballet, Symphony in C invites us to immerse ourselves in a relationship it postulates between the romantic and the modern sensibilities. The audience cannot help but respond to the semiotics of attractive young women in revealing white costumes, communicating through a language of idealized movement. Their feminine lyricism is interspersed with passages that include athletic young men dressed to emphasize their maleness. On the surface, it is all courtly entertainment, placid, abstract, "hot" in the McLuhanesque sense that it does not require a great deal of audience engagement. Just beneath the surface, however, there is a cooler layer, a more disturbing melange of interwoven visual and musical images. Fragility, innocence, gaiety and youth are set in contrast to elegance, discipline, uniformity and urgency — the childish and irrational face to face with the adult and the highly evolved. Balanchine loved both sensibilities; he was perfectly capable of creating sumptuous treatments of classics like The Nutcracker and Don Quixote while, in the next breath, giving us the most quirky modernism imaginable in such works as Agon.
The juxtaposition of romanticism and modernism has long been a thematic preoccupation of choreographers. It is the subject of several of the Nineteenth Century "fairy tale" ballets including even Swan Lake.
Swan Lake came into being at the end of the romantic era when Ibsen and others were reconsidering traditional societal attitudes toward women.[18] Like many fairy tales, it is a deceptively simple story of star-crossed lovers until one realizes that Odette and Odile are not two different women but two aspects of the same person. Specifically, the Odette/Odile character is a dialectic of good and evil, wisdom and folly, virgin and whore, mother and mistress. Ultimately, she is that most terrifying metaphor of world literature: The nightmare, Life-in-Death was she, / Who thicks man's blood with cold. [19] She is a revelation to Siegfried on the cusp of manhood given by Rothbart, the evil magician/wisdom figure. The denouement flows from Siegfried's inability to cope with her dualities. The duality depicted by Odette/Odile is, I think, a subset of the more encompassing duality of good and evil which, of course, is the point of departure for gnosticism. Symphony in C narrows the focus even more but stays within the same archetype.
How do I know all this? I don't, of course. I'm imagining it on the basis of my experience of the piece. Worse, part of my "evidence" is a sense that Balanchine felt he hadn't got it quite right in Symphony in C, that it — the dance and probably more so the music — overstated the romantic and overwhelmed the modern. Audiences were and are entertained but not, I think, deeply affected. I suspect Balanchine realized this and therefore recast the idea twenty years later as Jewels which is choreographically very similar but set to music that is more complex and displays greater contrasts.[20] Jewels also adds definition to Symphony in C through what Lincoln Kerstein called the lapidary metaphor for perfection: "...emeralds, rubies, diamonds are the residual matter of aeons, consummately shaped and faceted as an incarnate mathematical paradigm of price, preciousness, luxury; hence of luck or fortune."[21] The connection between fortune as wealth and fortune as luck is not instantly obvious.[22] On the one hand, the jewels represent the hard-edged characteristics of modernism — think of science, engineering, technology and precision in general. But then the metaphor is turned on its head and shown to refer simultaneously to change and chance, the frivolous and the decorative, all intuitive enemies of order and precision. This particular variation on the ancient duality is close to the core of the modernist credo.[23]
Balanchine did not work out a formal prospectus for either of these works. He never would have written the preceding paragraph which cannot hope to do justice to his creative impulse. I do not think that any of these ideas occur or should occur explicitly to people enjoying Symphony in C or Jewels or Swan Lake. However, when you watch people leaving the theater after seeing especially the latter two, they seem to be awakening from a familiar, disturbing and hard-to-describe dream. Something has happened. Communication has occurred on a very basic level. A truth has been exposed, not precisely perhaps but powerfully, unforgettably. Perhaps this is the way the people who built the great medieval cathedrals looked as they left the mass on Sunday.
Some Native American societies use delicate, highly elaborated nets to "catch" dreams and other truths that elude ordinary conscious processes. We too are aware, at least dimly, that the pathways of truth are richly varied. We seem though to fear the roads less taken even as we are irresistibly attracted to them. I propose that art has come, in Western culture, to play the roll of our dream catcher.
We know the universe is dense with meaning and metaphor, only a small fraction of which can be brought under the yoke of language and logic. We understand truth seems to fold back on itself and play tricks with us. Parallel lines merge. Time changes tempo. The tortoise outruns the hare. And even Bertrand Russell does not know who shaves the barber.
We experience truth as endlessly suggestive, even playful, urging us to make connections, associations and predictions and then laughing at our pretensions. As the King of Siam observes:
Some things nearly so
Some things nearly not,
There are times I almost think
I am not sure of what I absolutely know.[24]
Truth is seductive, tempting us to peel away one layer after another to teach us the real meaning of the myths of Tantalus and Sisyphus: the simple certainty that the universe knows us better than we know it.
From the perspective of incompletely evolved beings looking out from the third planet of a remote star, we hope desperately to be noticed. The glow we give off is not that of our anemic technological achievements. It is rather that of our courage in looking out in wonderment not despair, and of our sustained faith that we can touch the truth and know the divine. This is our Gnostic glow.
Notes
1. As used here, “Gnosticism” refers primarily to the system developed by the Cathars or Albigensians of late medieval Europe who were the spiritual heirs of the Manichaeans of Third Century Persia. Both were fully developed Gnostic churches and can be called “heretics” only in the sense that they deviated doctrinally from the orthodox church and its secular allies who put them to the sword. The Cathars were a late flowering on a major branch of an ancient tree.
Among the world’s formal religious systems, only those of the Abrahamic tradition assume that God, seen as the Uncaused First Cause, must incorporate perfect virtue. Thus, the palpable presence of evil in the world is a serious problem for Jews, Christians and Muslims and the story of the fall is one of the most important sources in their literature. Still, they have been unable to offer a satisfying explanation of how an all loving God can be the font of evil. It is, therefore, not surprising that some of them have historically pounced on Gnosticism which at least offers a theory that is internally consistent. (There are interesting exceptions within the Abrahamic tradition. Christian Science, for example, denies the existence of evil.)
The best definition of Gnosticism I have ever seen was written by the French scholar Henri-Charles Puech in an article on Manichaeism. He says, "Like every form of Gnosticism, Manichaeism arose out of the anguish inherent in the human condition. The situation into which man is thrown proves to him to be alien, unbearable, and radically evil. He feels enslaved to his body, to time, and to the world; he feels entangled in evil, constantly threatened and defiled by it; and he desires to be delivered from it. But if he is capable of experiencing this need for deliverance, it is because he is essentially superior to his present condition and a foreigner to the experience of his body, of time, and of the world. His present condition seems to be some kind of fall. Moreover, as he gets to know himself as essentially a stranger in the world, he learns that God himself can also only be a stranger in it. God who is nothing other than goodness and truth can not have willed this suffering and deceit. Thus, it is necessary to attribute this responsibility to a principle that is evil and opposed to God." (Encyclopedia Britannica, Fifteenth Edition, Vol. 11, P 442 ff.) In general, Gnostics believe that the creative agent of Genesis, more or less identified with Yahweh, was an essentially evil divinity and that the ultimate God is real but unknowable to us.
2. The causes of the Great Schism were many and varied but the most important ones derived from different attitudes toward truth. In general, Eastern Orthodox theology accepts the magisterium or teaching authority of the bishops and councils as indicative but not decisive as to truth. Before doctrine can finally be accepted as true, it must be received by the body of the church in a free and personal manner made possible by the sacramental fellowship of the church. Serbian Orthodoxy is somewhat more hierarchical, insisting on the doctrine of sabornost which forbids individual interpretation of scriptures and any relationship with the divine not mediated by the clergy. But even this exception is not as rigid as the position of the Roman Church which is more jealous of its teaching authority. It accepts the idea of free will grudgingly, and subordinates it with conditions until it becomes the freedom of a correctly formed conscience to do good. What is interesting in the present context is that both positions represent attempts to certify truth by appeal to the ineffable — in the one case, an almost Jungian sigh of collective acceptance and, in the other, an almost Freudian wrestling with one's private demons.
3. The best example is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 wisdom sayings of Jesus that had been "lost" for more than a thousand years before 1945. Like Paul's epistles (see below, Note 4), Thomas contains no explicit Gnostic theology but can be read as generally consistent with Gnostic epistemology. Some scholars, notably those of the controversial Jesus Seminar, now treat Thomas as though it should be regarded as canonical (see: Funk, Robert W. and Roy W. Hoover, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, Macmillan, 1993).
4. I may be wrong about this because it is hard for my modern ear to get past Paul's glibness and his fondness for the imperative mood. My theory is consistent with the still-prevailing scholarly view which sees the wonderful prose of I Corinthians as directed against certain proto-gnostic tendencies in the church of Corinth. Many interpreters think the final sentences of 1 Timothy (6:20-21) are another admonition to resist the same kind of tendencies. There is also, however, modern scholarship connecting Jesus and Paul to the Essenes and there are clear parallels between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts. When Paul refers to God's "secret wisdom...revealed to us by his Spirit" (I Corinthians, 2:6-16) he certainly sounds like a Gnostic. And the early Gnostics were attracted to Paul. The highly successful Marcionite church of the 2nd Century CE was not strictly Gnostic but it relied heavily on the teachings of the great Gnostic Cerdo. Marcion, who created the first Christian biblical canon, included most of Paul's epistles. He even took as his motto Paul's remarkable claim in Galatians 3:13 that "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law..." This same sentence serves as the foundation of another family of long-lived heresies, that of antinomianism, and is one of the pillars of Luther's doctrine of justification by faith. That's quite a burden for one sentence, and you can almost hear Paul protest that he is being misunderstood and misquoted.
5. Recent data confirm what cosmologists have long concluded that the universe is made up largely of dark matter and dark energy. Preliminary results from the Microwave Anisotrophy Probe suggest that the composition of the universe by weight is 23% dark matter, 73% dark energy and 4% atoms and their constituents. Scientists do not know exactly what the dark stuff is although they think it is left over from the big bang. The leading theory is that it is Einstein’s “cosmological constant,” a repulsive force he postulated as necessary to keep the universe from imploding on itself. Einstein later abandoned the idea but it has been revived because of evidence that the boundaries of the universe are receding at an increasing rate. If visible matter were everything, gravity would have already begun to overcome the force of the big bang and the universe would be collapsing.
6. "The Mythic Past and the Present Moment" in Robert O'Driscoll (ed.), The Celtic Consciousness, Braziller, 1982, p. 597 ff.
7. Anima Poetae, Chapter 4, 1805. Coleridge often said that poetry is opposed to science in that it seeks pleasure, not truth, the beautiful rather than the good. This is, of course, high romanticism, sharply at odds with the dominant Aristotelian strain in Western philosophy. Later, Keats would make a related point in complaining about the Grecian urn whose message that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" was offensive to his romantic sensibility.
8. "Taps," also called "Lights Out," was composed during the Civil War to replace the drum tattoo "Lights Out" and is still used to end each day at U.S. military posts. Soldiers noted its appropriateness as a salute to their fallen comrades and so these 21 notes have lived a double life. It is, of course, sad, but the ascending major chords speak also of pride. Joyce Kilmer picked up on its stately, assertive, prideful cadences in the two refrains he wrote for his poem Rouge Bouquet.
9. I have the sense that I’m getting pretty far out on a very fragile limb here, but my focus is on Bach’s music, not Picander’s bathetic words. The tune, which Bach borrowed from Hans Leo Hassler, occurs five times in the St. Matthew as Nos. 21, 23, 53, 63 and 72 in the Peters Edition. These are, respectively, the chorales “Please know me my protector” in E Major, “I want to abide with you” in E Flat Major, “Set your course…in his trusty care” in D Major, “Oh bloodied, wounded head” in F Major, and “When one day I die” in A Minor. In other words, Picander wrote hymns of yearning for Christ more than of grief. But the music is different. It is a dirge. Each version ends on the tonic chord in its second inversion so that the soprano line is left adrift like a tear on a mourner’s cheek.
10. There is no need to burden Mr. Babbitt with any more responsibility for the state of modern music than is rightfully his. Thus, it should be noted that the infamous title of his 1958 essay was not his idea but that of his editor at High Fidelity. It was reprinted 20 years later with Babbitt's own title, "The Composer as Specialist" (Esthetics Contemporary, Richard Kostelanetz, Editor, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1978). Having thus discharged his responsibilities to evenhandedness, the author wishes to make clear that he nevertheless continues to hold Babbitt and his academic confreres largely responsible for the decline of art music in the West.
11. This description of Celtic cosmology is a conceit of William Irwin Thompson (see Note 9), the founder of modern Lindisfarne, an itinerant center for individuals of various esoteric persuasions. He named it after the Holy Island off the coast of Northumbria where the Celtic Christianity of Saint Aidan rubbed against the Pauline Christianity of Saint Augustine in the Seventh Century. King Oswy loved the Irish (who had, after all, given him and his brother asylum after King Edwin had assassinated their father Ethelfrith in 616) but preferred for practical reasons the hierarchical, dogmatic Roman to the libertarian spirituality of the Celt. (In this, he was merely the first in a long line of English royal hypocrites and ingrates.) So he convened the Synod of Whitby in 664 with himself as judge and jury. The issues were the dating of Easter and the proper hair style for monks. As to the latter, the Irish were accused of wearing their hair in the style of the Gnostic heresiarch Simon Magus. In the end, the Irish were sent back to Ireland and, as a direct consequence, the English became Protestants less than a thousand years later.
12. Respectively, the sounds of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, Sir William Gilbert's squirming pig in The Mikado and James Joyce's waters of the night. When I was a student, the great authority on the subject of infant vocalization was Harris Winitz, then at the University of Kansas. His definitive book,
Articulatory Acquisition and Behavior was published in 1969 by Appleton-Century-Crofts. Having recently re-read the relevant chapters, I am not at all certain that Winitz would agree with my description of babbling although he does not take issue with anecdotal evidence that babies babble because babbling gives them pleasure (Page 43). We know this because deaf babies stop babbling very soon after they start — a sudden cessation of babbling is often the first evidence that a child does not hear. Hearing babies not only continue to babble but their repertories increase, suggesting that the babbling reinforces itself or, in other words, is pleasurable.
13. The view that music is an inexpressive art — a self-contained and self-referential system that "means" nothing outside itself — is an axiom of modernist criticism. There has, however, been a dialectical backlash, the most important manifesto of which was the book The Language of Music by Deryck Cooke (Oxford University Press, 1959). Cooke felt that the modernist approach impoverished culture by divorcing it from "the most articulate language of the unconscious," music. He set out to define the elements of that language so as to "...make it ultimately possible to understand and assess a composer's work as a report on human experience, just as we do that of a literary artist" (p. xii).
14. Abstracted from Michael Steinberg's program notes for a concert of the New York Philharmonic, March 26, 1996, published in Playbill, March 1996. Fortunately, Mr. Steinberg's distinguished career does not rise or fall on this program note. Indeed it is something of an aberration on the part of a writer who is typically eloquent in helping his readers get to the meaning of the music. The concerto does not begin in the “strange” key of B Major; it begins with a lovely 5-measure tune for solo piano in, of course, G Major. The strings follow this, playing the same theme in the perfectly logical mediant key of B Major. The "blatantly wrong" but unspecified key with which he says Beethoven began the cadenza is probably A-flat major. But the first movement ends where you would expect it to, solidly on the tonic chord, G major. The cadenza begins with the same chord in the same key signature and then trips down a two and a half octave run flatting the B's, E's, A's and D's as it goes thus winding up in A-flat major. The first E-flat certainly calls attention to itself but, in the couple of seconds it takes to complete the run, your ear is fully adjusted to A-flat major. You didn't have time to think "wrong."
15. "Music into Words," in Words on Music, Jack Sullivan, ed., Ohio University Press, 1990, p.14ff.
16. Letters to a Young Poet, translated by M.D. Herter, Norton, 1959, p.29. The sentence is from Letter No. 3 dated April 23, 1903.
17. This is not to say there is nothing to be learned from a museum exhibit such as the recent "Chiefly Feasts" which displayed ritual masks of the Native Americans of the Northwest. But, useful as they are, the words and numbers of the scientists cannot begin to get close to sensibilities of the mask makers and wearers.
18. The swan maiden myth is an ancient archetype which may have originated in various Siberian cultures but has been found throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands. It arose, no doubt, because the swan is itself a confusing duality: beauty and regal serenity coupled with a foul temper and a penchant for violence. The original scenario for the ballet was published in 1877 by Vladimir Begichev and Vasily Geltser following a German folk version called Schwanensee. The original choreography by Wenzel Reisinger was unsuccessful and the 1895 version by Marius Ivanovich Petipa is the basis of all subsequent versions. It is interesting how minor changes can drastically affect the meaning of the story. Some versions have Odette and Odile clearly separate even when both are danced by the same ballerina. Such a treatment, of course, plays havoc with the analysis presented here.
19. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Lines 193-194. I am not sure whether the creators of Swan Lake meant this or were simply pointing to it as an ancient and harmful stereotype.
20. The composers are: Faure (Emeralds), Music from two Suites; Stravinsky (Rubies), Carpriccio for Piano and Orchestra; and Tchaikovsky (Diamonds), Symphony No. 3.
21. Kirstein, Lincoln, Thirty Years: The New York City Ballet, 2nd Ed., Knopf, 1978, p. 193. If I am right that Jewels is Symphony in C reconsidered, then it is reasonable to think that Balanchine went through several stages in dealing with the same idea. When first performed at the Paris Opéra in 1947, the work was titled Le Palais de Cristal and each movement was danced in differently colored tutus. The following year in New York, it assumed its present more abstract title and its black and white costumes. Presumably, Balanchine decided that the combination of glass and the colors confused the metaphor. By 1967, however, he seems to have decided that his initial impulse had been correct and his 1948 amendments had gone in the wrong direction.
22. For some reason, the Romans associated the goddess Fortuna with good luck and the three Fates, Nona, Decuma and Morta, with misery and suffering. Of course, the Romans were not blessed with the wisdom of Uncle Remus who observed, “Watch out when you’re gettin’ all you want. Fattenin’ hogs ain’t in luck.”
23. Twentieth Century physics is largely the story of the coming and gradual acceptance of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the notion that it is impossible to know the position and momentum of a particle at a given moment in time. Initially, artists responded to Uncertainty as a cold, ominous doctrine that separated people from history and ethics and brought death to the soul by mocking our intellectual attainments. Gradually, however, unlike Einstein who went to his grave hating the thought of an ultimately uncertain universe, they came to see it as liberating, finding in Probability Theory a new source of delight. That delight is the subject of the second essay in this series, "The Gentle Joys of Maybe."
24.Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The King and I, Random House, 1951, Act I, Scene 3.
