Essentially the Only One

A tea-bag bush!

I hadn't really thought about it until now, but the two weeks I spent with my father in South Africa over the past Christmas and New Year were probably the longest time I had spent with him for decades. At the very least since 2002, and even that period was broken up into relatively small chunks. Or so I remember it.

Even before 2002, my visits were fairly infrequent to England. The total time spent with him since I've made my home in the U.S. can only be a few months at most.

So in many ways the trip to Cape Town was with someone quite unfamiliar, with only the memories of my childhood and teenage years of any lengthy substance. Those memories are faint now.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the visit as far as I was concerned was how different our outlooks, ways of doing things and interests have become, yet certain behavioural traits - for example, a certain dreaminess and indifference to what's going on around us - are very similar. I looked around my father's very neat house, complete with many Lladro figurines that he has collected over many years, lovely matching furniture and landscape paintings galore on the walls and contrasted it with our very untidy house, with no figurines at all, beaten-up furniture of ancient and varied (but distinctly non-antique provenance) and walls covered with my photographs, paintings by my son from his early years and the occasional extraneous artwork slipped in between. Well, at least in terms of density of walled framed objects, the two homes were similar. But the feel could not be more different. Right now, our house is relatively tidy as we hosted the neighborhood association meeting on Sunday but it will return swiftly to its mosaic of scattered papers, shoes, clothes and other sundry items that represents its usual state. A condition that we are perfectly used to and satisfied with and feel only compelled to change when either the chaos confounds us or guests are expected.

Just as our homes differ, so do our interests. My father loves sports, I find them almost wholly uninteresting. My father loves to garden; I do not - although we do share a love of a plant or flower. His are cultivated - I look mostly for those in the wild. My father writes poetry, I do not - preferring, as you see here, a reflective prose for my thoughts. But, again, we do share an interest in language and writing - but with differing emphasis. Photography we both love although again perhaps we look at it in a different way.

Diverging paths from a common root. Perhaps that is the best way to look at what has happened to us. I have deliberately chosen a low-key low-stress career, one that satisfies on all levels but not one you might describe as exceptionally high achieving whereas many of my extended family are highly competitive. Not for me, that way. Satisfying days, well lived with a mellow warmth - that's my goal. Mostly, I find it and for that I am extremely grateful.

So here I am, sitting on the couch with our soft black cat beside me, jotting down these thoughts and feeling pleased my life has followed the route that it has. Perhaps the trip to Africa, in a strange way, was most valuable as a pointer to roads not taken, directions that I am sure would not have given me such a rewarding life. Reeling in the years and then casting out the line; I am very glad my personal hook and sinker fell into waters far removed from what might have been.

The road - R329 - that crosses the Great Karoo from east to west. Although much of the road is paved, parts are less so. In this case, a single track only pavement was laid slap in the middle of the gravel road.

Given the rarity of traffic in this great plain bounded by mountain ranges, an area strongly reminiscent of Montana, this is not usually a problem.

However, once in a while a car will appear ahead of you heading directly for you. This makes for a rather interesting game of chicken.

I came across and first read Tolkein's "The Lord Of The Rings" when I was about 14 or 15. I read those weighty books dozens of times, became familiar with every character and every twist of the convoluted plot to the point of obsessiveness. The recent and very well-made movie trilogy merely reawoke my enthusiasm for the story, characters and the epic struggle between good and evil.

Contrast this massive overfamiliarity then with a another trilogy of fantasy novels of approximately the same mid-20th century vintage that remained unknown and unread to and by me until now. Decades after Tolkien moved into my imagination, I found, initially through a series of radio plays, and now through the novels, the world of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast only this year.

Whereas "The Lord Of The Rings" is an expansive epic taking in whole worlds, peoples and overarching manifestations of good and evil, the Gormanghast novels are relentlessly compressed, revolving around the activities of a few individuals, some acting a tragedy, others a comedy. The world of Gormanghast and the lands beyond it are just as fabulously extended as any creation of Tolkein. Peake differs in offering a far more nuanced consideration of character, even as he presents individuals as memorable as those of Middle Earth. There is magic and wonder in Gormenghast, but just what it means and just how much is the product of the inner world of the subconscious verses an outer world of fantastic properties remains ambiguous, even as the text itself strives to create a division between the two. While mimicing Tolkein's interest in good and evil and presenting villians and heroes to match, all of the characters possess a three dimensional complexity, sometime explicity laid out, sometimes inferred, that pushes these entrancing creations beyond the world of simple fairy tale (if there really is truly simple fairly tale).

The story diffuses into a barely linked series of vignettes by the time of "Titus Alone" (concurrent with Peake's own decline into neurological disorder), but the sense of wonder is not similarly dispersed. If anything, the skeletal construction stimulates greater efforts of imagination, the only disappointment being the evaporation of Peake's entrancing word play and descriptive seduction. The radio plays, already playing with the distilled story, embrace this with great success and weave a very beautiful dramatic whole that takes in material from Peake's wife Maeve Gilmore's "Titus Awakes" to conclude the story most movingly.

One of the introductory essays in the volume "The Gormenghast Novels" (Overlook Press) by G. Peter Winnington makes mention of the Tolkein comparison, pointing out a common critical consencus that admirers of one may not appreciate the other and it's easy to see why that view might prevail. They are very different books, but there is no doubt to my, now aged, mind that Peake's language and imagination exceed Tolkein's. There is a humanity and roundedness to Peake's characters, even the oddest ones, that is missing from even the most deeply developed protaganists engaging the power of the Ring - in fact, the Ring itself is in many ways the most fully formed entity, clear in purpose but subtle in effect on those who fall under its sway. The equivalent force in the Gormenghast novels in Gormenghast itself, but not just the vast crumbling castle but also the ritual and history that has been placed upon it by generations of people, lords and commoners, who have been wedded to those stones. Titus, the hero, as the heir to this tradition fights to free himself and in doing so discovers how deeply the tradition has formed him and continues to influence his fate.

I found myself indentifying deeply with Titus Groan in his struggles with both the familiar and the alien and this alone is enough for me to judge these books as some of the best I have read, but this is by no means the only component that bewitches me.

I feel very grateful to have finally discovered Titus.

The following is quoted from my current correspondence to my friend Mary about these works. It's significant because it is leading me to reconsider the philosphy of art - or, perhaps I should say, to consider the philosophy of art with some seriousness for the first time.

The variety of expressive sounds certainly impresses. As does the brevity, extreme even by Webern's standards. Webern composed only two further pieces in this style, the Op. 10 Orchestral Pieces and the Op. 11 Three Little Pieces for piano and cello. I think he sensed at this point that he could go no further with such a condensed instrumental form and all his subsequent instrumental works were serial compositions of somewhat greater length (although still extremely brief by the standards of most other composers). It was the latter serial pieces that had such a profound influence on the music of the 1950s and 1960s. These were extensively analyzed and discussed. The Bagatelles, in contrast, have undergone very little musical analysis. They provide so little material onto which an analytical theory can be hung, I suspect.

This is what Webern himself wrote about them (in a letter to Alban Berg):

"While working on them I had the feeling that once the 12 notes had run out, the piece was finished. Much later I realized this was all part of the necessary evolution. I wrote down the chromatic scale in my sketchbook and struck out single tones from it. Why? Because I had convinced myself that the tone was already there. It sounds grotesque, incomprehensible, and it was immensely difficult. The ear decided absolutely correctly that the man the man who wrote down the chromatic scale and struck out the notes was not a fool."

An extraordinary statement from a composer - whose stuff, after all, is those very tones. The step from this statement to the silence of John Cage's 4' 33" is not a long one even though Cage's work opened up a whole new aesthetic of sound and music and the relation between the two. Webern's work might be considered the pivot between worlds.

I found a fascinating book - "Is There Truth In Art?" by Herman Rapaport that has this to say about Webern's music - specifically in relation to Webern's own comments quoted above about his Bagatelles.

"What is music, according to Webern, but an art threatened by its own temporality, duration, persistence, or continuence? What is music but something other than the work that we hear, the work as timely utterence? Clearly, Webern's remark about twelve notes being enough suggests that what continues is not really music, but something else that we call the work of art, that something else which is destined to meet its hearer in the concert hall. Yet, Webern knew quite well that without continuance, and a coming-to-the-fore of what is at rest, music does not come into being at all. Indeed, if the truth of the musical work is destined to be conveyed to an auditor by means of someone who performs or brings the work into being in time, the appearance of the work must be defined in Heidegger's terms as a 'gather[ing of] the rising of the coming-to-the-fore' that nevertheless holds fast to the "ever possible absenting into concealedness". To put this another way, Webern asks us to consider that music is not simply a time-based art in the sense of that which needs duration in order to come to the fullness of its being as art. Rather Webern's work suggests that the temporality of music may be the very condition under which there is an ever-possible absenting of art into concealedness. What remains in time, therefore, is the otherwise than authentic being of the work - a being that is inhuman. What remains is the trace of silence, the disappearance of the work which comes to the fore as a work that barely survives performer and listener, but that nevertheless proffers itself as something human, audible, transmittable, temporal, understandable, and truthful - that is to say, as the otherwise-than-silence, the otherwise-than-time. It is here, of course, that Webern approaches a Heideggerian conception of aletheia as the presencing of an essence by means of the coming to pass of a counter-essence.

(Rapaport, pp. 65-66. He is referencing Heidegger's "What Is Called Thinking?")

I quote this not so much to endorse the argument, but more as an example of how Webern's music can stimulate the listener to consider the truth, reality and meaning of music in ways that other composers might not, at least not so distinctly or directly.