Borrowed Pathos & Other Hallucinations

 Why the surprise at the “hallucinations” of our dear & dreaded (1) Chat GPT? It has not been trained as a fact & source checking tool - it has been trained to build plausible sentences drawing upon all the texts from the web it could ingest – so of course it hallucinates. Indeed, humanity’s collective texts & images so often do. Across the ages we have used language and images to share lies, legends, fantasies – as much as true facts and knowledge or expressions of authentic feelings.  

These bots that have become so good at generating texts and images – would they ever be able to also emulate those grander human hallucinations,  which have brought such reassuring structure, beauty  and consolation to so many humans (2)? 

Such as : the religious hallucinations, purporting to offer us all the metaphysics and ethics we need to get along and be happy  in this world, if only we have the faith (and are willing to ignore the lack of demonstrable, scientific truths).  Or the artistic hallucinations, bringing an illusion of transcendent beauty and meaning, answering our longing for harmony and sense, our need for consolation & redemption - exploiting our willingness to temporarily suspend our disbelief (for the time of our blissful listening to the composition (3), of our looking at the painting, of our reading the poem).

It's tempting to speculate on  the new era for art that may be ushered in by Chat GPT. 

Humanity has known eras of transcendent art  -  be it as a pursuit of reproducing the harmony of the spheres or at the service of religion. Eras of high art meeting the demands of wealthy and cultivated patrons (aggrandizing those patrons’  deeds or indulging their emotional tribulations or just offering quality entertainment & decorations). Eras of art which managed to be both sublime (mathematically or even divinely) and movingly human.

We have had an era of mass culture driven by commercial success and mass reproducibility. We have had algorithms spying upon us all and selecting an offer which so perfectly matches our needs that  we get hooked and sell our attention for free to the advertising industry.

In the era of the generative pre-trained bots, shall we now all become like the wealthy patrons of yore – able to order new works of art (a composition, a poem, an image) which are made to fit our specifications of subject, style, mood etc. All we need to do is to compose a  “prompt” – and an artificial intelligence can spit out new personalised creations, in endless variations on what we humans have produced before.

Why does that sound depressing? Because it is a farce if art is not made by an artist sharing our human condition, an artist with empathy who thoughtfully accompanies us  in our quest for expression, beauty, meaning and consolation.  The era of the bot- generated art would be yet another stage in our fall from grace  - a humanity hooked to an automaton which without emotion or involvement produces mindless variations (4) based on statistics and borrowed human pathos.

 

  Reflective Notes  & Quotes

(1)   ‘Dear’ – a fascinating black box we all love to play with, wondering which unfathomable progress may lie ahead ; ‘Dreaded’ – as a parody of our touted unique language skills  - a mindless ransacking of our collective memory

    (2)  Readers can eaaily complete the principal adverse impacts of these grand hallucinations  

(3)   On the subject of blissful listening and redemption, let’s quote an old Bach-lover ( André Tubeuf  in « Bach, ou le meilleur des monde », p172) :  « Notre péché (originel) et notre salut (racheté) : tout le Bach des Cantates se joue en cela. Et dans le timbre d’alto […] de tous le plus pleinement humain. Stigmates compris »

(4)   « les variantes hallucinées […] [des] grandes oeuvres méditatives laissent percer un sentiment d’universel dérision. » . How apt, Yves Bonnefoy’s insightful assessment of Picasso’s works without human presence or dignity (“et c’est évidemment pour cela qu’iI a fasciné son siècle”) :  from 20th century abstract art to our 21st century fascination for art generated by artificial intelligence

humans & books - or the pathos of perishable things

 

Excitement & Pathos

Any regular visitor of second hand books is familiar with that particular mix of excitement and pathos. The excitement of stumbling upon a book which matches one’s interests and affinities  -  a book of whose existence one may or may not have been aware.  Such finds can seem like heaven-sent gifts,  in their serendipity so unlike the outcome of an efficient search process on the web. But there is also the pathos, associated with the journey of the book and of its previous owner(s). 

Take for instance that freshly arrived batch of art books in the “Pêle Mêle” 2^nd hand bookshop in Waterloo : each book I took off the shelf was miraculously appealing to a particular recent affinity of mine  (there was Paul Veyne’s “Mon Musée Imaginaire”, there were the high quality art books on Tiepolo – one of them still including scraps of a magazine article referring to Alpers’ & Baxandall’s 1996 ravishing study “Tiepolo et l’intelligence picturale”). 

Who was this previous owner – with his or her exquisite collection of art books? Why did the books arrive here? Did he or she die recently – was he or she a representative of perhaps the last generation for whom art history was part and parcel of their self-education, their “bildung” as a person? 

Or take that other book, found a few years ago in the “Pêle Mêle” at Ixelles, “Les Grands Pianistes du XXe siècle”, with that poignant anniversary inscription of a woman to her husband (“à mon mari qui est tellement jeune à 63 ans que j’eu oublié notre âge” dated November 2014 … So what happened, one anxiously wonders, what explains that this lovingly given book (bought in Paris, so suggests the  bookmark from a Paris fine arts bookshop) so soon already ended up in a Brussels second hand book shop ?

"The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living"

This mix of feelings, the “pattern of dead and living” (TS Eliot) gets more complicated and more emotional still when one is browsing old objects and books in one’s own parents’ house (and former childhood home).

The house, so empty and meaningless now without its lifelong  occupants, is on this particular day yet full of voices. The hushed and conscientious voices of the direct descendants  taking in charge with some stress the sorting out of the estate, the brisk voices of  the grandchildren lovingly remembering (not without a touch of melancholy) their childhood visits and stay-overs, the excited cries of the very young great-grand children running through  the rooms.  

There are not that many books, actually, mostly technical and computer books, and lots of dated technical and IT equipment, testifying both to my father’s life-long passion for IT and to the very short life of technical and IT equipment (yesterday innovative state of the art ; discarded and incompatible today). In vain I look for the classical music LP’s I know my mother used to listen to with great abandon, or the old travel guides and educational language books she used to prepare the annual family trip. 

But in a room on the first floor, I’m intrigued by an old wooden cupboard, with book covers shimmering through a cloudy glass pane. A collection of old art books, evidently belonging to my mother’s father  (who apart from a railway engineering job, was interested in art, engravings & etchings mostly). The books look like having been untouched for decades. Most book spines show no sign of any use at all.  Books from the 50s and 60s; mostly Belgian art but also a few  reference works on undisputed old masters.

"The melancholy of things themselves" 

There’s one book, though, which betrays intense handling. It’s the catalogue of the Albert Baertsoen (1866-1922) Ghent retrospective of 1972. My grandfather has carefully inscribed with a fountain pen his name on the frontispiece , with the date “November 1972”.  In his meticulous hand writing he has also carefully added titles to a list of reproductions.  

And with a fine pencil line he has marked some of the accompanying texts.  “Baertsoen schildert den weemoed van de dingen zelf” 

He couldn’t have known that 50 years later there would be another Retrospective of Albert Baertsoen, one which was to make such an impression on his grand-child.

Baertsoen is often considered  as an artist of a vanishing world, with a style that would soon be outmoded and replaced by the successive avant- gardes of the 20th Century. And yet, the way he captures an atmosphere, the way he renders the reality and pathos of cityscapes, harbours and industries, appealed to a conscientious railway engineer in 1972, just as it still moves a melancholy economist now.  

Cherishing the poignant hazards of old books

Humans and their aspirations & feelings, Books, Paintings, Styles of art, .... - they all come and go. We’re extremely perishable, and one day, as the 2^nd hand book shop owner dryly remarked upon refusing to buy a no longer wanted book, “on finit tous au container”.

And yet -  some traces of it all may continue their perilous way throughout the ages.

The leading conservator of the Ghent old books library explained how their venerable old books were now all being sent to Google for digitalization.  I’m all for ensuring they can live on the worldwide web. Just as I’m all for the pathetic posting & tweeting by the billions of humans alive. Perhaps some sympathetic bot will read it all one day, spitting it out again, transformed,  at a curious prompt of a human living, say, 500 years on.

Meanwhile, I cherish the poignant hazards of finding old books. 

Lasting Longings for Harmony

 

It’s quite a paradox, especially for ponderous art lovers: in existential stress situations one apparently does not turn to those art works with the heaviest philosophical credentials or the highest emotional pitch.  One rather seeks refuge in pure aesthetic attention:  following a beautiful bold brush stroke (1) ,  listening intently to a subtly modulating melody (2), savouring the changing luminosities of the sky.

So, for instance, on that early morning end of January, after a sleepless night worrying about the diagnosis I’d just received (3), I could not eat, I could not read, nor could I find solace in Bellini’s heart-felt Gethsemane or in any other pathos-filled paintings.  But leafing distractedly through my art books,  my trembling finally did recede,  my anxiety did get quelled by the soothing sight of an elegant annunciation angel (4).

One can observe the same phenomenon, when, with age, a certain tiredness (5)  and the inescapable experience of the frailty of life (6)  seem to engender an increasing need for sheer beauty & harmony. A craving for disinterested aesthetics as a source of relief from the perils of the world, from one’s own anxieties (7), offering moments of reprieve from chaos and discord (8).

In previous eras, a sense for metaphysics and a belief in transcendence would have given legitimation to this longing for aesthetic bliss – it would have been seen as serious proof of the immanent congruence between cosmic harmony and the human soul (9).

By contrast, in our (post) modern times aesthetics and harmony have often been discredited as being amoral, apolitical. And since the romantic era, pure absolute musical harmonies have become suspect for their alleged lack of individual emotional expressiveness.  In our age, we rather prone political action and technological solutions to put things right, we rather recommend the sharing and expressing of raw emotions without overly formal complexities.

But ah, it is something (10)  to be able to focus only on perceiving, on making sense, on discerning harmonies and significations (11).  And it is something  to believe that this intense aesthetic attention can bring us closer to timeless sublime principles of beauty and signification, surpassing our own frail petty lives, adumbrating a possible human dignity shared across the ages.

 

 

Douze Petites Notes … (12)

(1)   Eg Tiepolo rather than Rembrandt,

(2)   Eg Mozart rather than Beethoven

(3)   A scary medical diagnosis, with uncertain outcome at the time. But effectively treated now, so I can look back with relief to the whole episode (and blog-readers need not to worry)

(4)   Giovanni Bellini,  St Vincent Ferrer Polyptych  - Detail of an annunciation angel

(5)   a growing realisation of how the world is, how life is – and our (or at least, my) utter inadequacy & powerlessness

(6)   as most of us must experience one day: the death of a parent, and prior to that - so shocking, so painful - their decay. 

(7)   A Nietzsche-quote, stumbled upon in an old notebook of mine, well worth to be reproduced again here digitally: « Ma mélancolie peut se reposer dans les cachettes et dans les abîmes de la perfection, c’est pour cela que j’ai besoin de musique »

(8)   This flight into the safe Haven of Harmony, goes back a long way:  “The Pythagoreans […]  cleansed their minds of the noises and perturbations to which they had been exposed during the day by certain odes and hymns, which produced tranquil sleep and few, but good dreams.” (p32 Jamie James: “The Music of the Spheres” see below)

(9)   As elaborated in this wonderful book by Jamie James: “The Music of the Spheres – Music, Science and the natural Order of the Universe” .

(10) “something”? something fervently to look forward to, each and every day: dwelling in beauty in the early still hours of the day, coming home to music after all the sound & fury of a worldly day

(11) Some key elements in the exercise of our aesthetic-cognitive faculties; as noted by Alpers & Baxandall in their study on Tiepolo (“Tiepolo et l’intelligence picturale”) : «  […] Produire du sens, […] Chercher de la lumière […] Le travail de déchiffrement présente un pur plaisir »

(12) Also the  title of the first section of Andre Manoukian’s effortlessly swinging & learned book on music (“Sur les routes de la musique”).  And so we make it to twelve silent notes – hurled  into the world wide web, perhaps to be read only by some voraciously learning chatbot.

“the mobility of lighting”, or : Musings on wandering luminosity

 

“Il sole di Tiepolo”

“We love Tiepolo” - so Alpers and Baxandall state, almost apologetically, almost as a disclaimer, in the first chapter of their wonderful study on “Tiepolo and the Pictorial intelligence”(1) .  Because of course, one might disparage Tiepolo as a frivolous painter of pompous showy scenes at the service of rich local potentates.  But then, one cannot help but falling in love with Tiepolo, at the very first sight, and one keeps coming back to his paintings & frescoes, looking at them with delight.  It’s a pure aesthetic pleasure to try and make sense of his intricate jumbles of forms and figures; it’s pure bliss to savour his intense colours; to plunge into his delightful complexities of luminosity. 

Tiepolo clearly caters to our quest for light, our feeling for luminous patterns. His intense luminosities, often contrasted with dull colors, have rightly inspired rapturous comments : “il sole di Tiepolo”. 

Even mere reproductions still work wonders - when I wake on these dark late autumn  days, I rush to get up, to open the Tiepolo book and bask in its luminosity. Just like during lunch break, in my quest for light, I brave the chilly grey drizzle for a walk to the nearby square, where the garden paths are strewn with intensely gleaming,  yellow leaves.

 

“Negotiations with site lighting“

While the former paragraph evokes the internal lighting linked to the hues and tones of the painting itself (or, mutatis mutandis, linked to the yellowness of the autumnal leaves themselves)  - there is of course also always the question of the ambient light  (direct, reflected and refracted)  and of the changes in lighting according the position of the spectator.  

Alpers & Baxandall brilliantly analyse how a fresco painter, such as Tiepolo,  who paints in situ,  uses all his pictorial intelligence to make his frescoes engage with the ambient light on multiple levels.

 For works in situ, the artist can  to a certain extent control or at least negotiate with the effects of external lighting . To a certain extent only – because it is impossible for the artist to anticipate all possible light scenarios, let alone the idiosyncratic wanderings and viewpoints of the spectators. 

 

Curators’ lighting

As to paintings on panel or canvas,  on their journey in the world they will mostly meet lighting conditions unknown to the painter (unless he or she is also curator of the exhibition).  There’s an element of accidentalness there, which is quite moving, and which for any art lover is an integral part of the unique ephemeral experience of looking at a painting at a certain point in time & in space. 

Thus, in a museum with lots of natural light, one can stand in rapture in front of a painting, watching how the colours light up, glow and then fade away again, as clouds drift by.  

In galleries and museums with mostly artificial light and guided or tempered natural light, the curator may intentionally use lighting to create a sense of drama in the room, or to draw attention to specific paintings or elements of paintings.

In the newly re-opened museum of fine arts in Antwerp (2) , I suspect the lighting is used very intentionally indeed. Heavy purple curtains block the sideways natural light while a steady tempered light comes from above  and each room has its own atmosphere of light, including ample use of dramatic potential of spot lights.

It can turn a walk through museum rooms into an aesthetic experience in its own right, one can appreciate the atmosphere of each room, with the lighting contributing to the “mise-en-scène” of a story which features and contrasts different individual works.

The curators/”stage designers” of the renovated Antwerp museum have built a wonderful experience indeed (and it’s quite uplifting to see how many visitors now re-discover the museum). 

 

Wandering light

But please bear with me, if I still cherish the memory of another visit to the Antwerp museum, a very long time ago. The museum back then was old & stately, but ever so quietly decaying, with creaky floors and dusty corners.  Natural light fell in from above (through grimy glass)  and sideways.  The order of the rooms followed the age-old recipe of historical styles and national schools.

 In the Italian room hung forlornly an early Titian, so quietly glowing with Venetian luminosity, its importance signalled only by an old threadbare carpet in front of it. 

 In an ill-lit  room hung the early Ensor paintings of staid bourgeois interiors – so the spectator’s eye would focus hungrily on each subtly rendered gleam and fraying ray of light, on each refracted luminosity in the painting. 

But  what a magnificent moment indeed, when the variable ambient light in the museum room would suddenly intensify and bring to life the painting’s bourgeois interior, before the light dimmed again and one would feel the full shady oppressiveness of a dusty, cluttered interior.  (3)

the immobility of notes

(1)   Tiepolo et l’intelligence picturale (Gallimard 1996, Translation from "Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence", 1994 Yale University Press . Svetlana Alpers & Michael Baxandall)

(2)   What to see at the finally re-opened  Antwerp museum of fine arts : galleries restored  “to their former glory” and with seducing light effects & stories, great works of art brought back to the public; & much more  - see https://kmska.be/nl 

(3)    Now all the Ensors (the colourful ones in any case – where have the more sombre ones gone? ) hang in a brilliantly white room with glaring light everywhere, bringing out the full anarchy of glaring lights and gaudy colours.  

where to hide in the age of 'surveillance capitalism'

They all prey upon us, poor sitting ducks

Grim-faced under a hoodie (1), tapping nervously on the keyboard while watching intently what’s happening on the screen, I might resemble a hacker. But I ‘m merely a hapless computer user who is on high alert while setting up a new device (2).

One might naively assume that having acquired and duly paid for a new piece of hardware with accompanying software, one can insouciantly click through the standard set-up procedure.

But no, commercial harassment (3) is now hard coded into every device right from the start.  If you don’t pay attention the provider can share your data with X, Y and Z to sell you better services and products and blablabla.  And your device’s default browser comes of course pre-equipped with unwanted gaudy news-sites and commercial links.  Etc Etc

One might also naively assume that buying a premium anti-virus license, means you have a security provider who is henceforth on your side, defending your interests in the digital jungle. But no, also this paid-for anti-virus software does not miss an occasion to send various alarming messages only to persuade you to buy yet another multi-year subscription to yet another module you don’t really need. 

And when we go on-line, then of course we all know that really anything goes and no holds are barred.  From commercial tech firms to digital criminals, they all prey upon us, poor sitting ducks, from the moment we switch on our tech device and connect to the web. (4)  Let’s be clear, it’s not the technology as such which is stressful, it’s the whole commercially exploitative environment around it that is so disheartening.

Looking for safer spaces ... 

 By contrast …. ah, by contrast… Have you ever realised what a precious, disinterested realm you enter when reading a good book? For instance a lovingly researched art history book.  You can sit quietly with this book – leafing through it, reading, looking at pictures, thinking, … Nobody is preying on you! Nobody is tracking or trapping you! Within the covers of the book, nobody is trying to sell anything. The book is yours forever, on your own terms of engagement.  

And the book’s content, ah … the content … It has not been selected or engineered by an algorithm maximising and exploiting your attention for some product placement (5).  No, usually there has been an earnest writer at work, eg an art historian, who has done long and patient research, and then in turn tries to explain her insights to the reader. A writer who may actually love his subject, who may try to convey a genuine passion.  What a blessing indeed, to spend time, slow time, your own time, with a book that is only there to share knowledge and beauty.

Who knows, we may still witness a revival of the paper book, when too many people will have become exhausted and disgusted by the rowdy, always-on, always-being-tracked commercial hell which the digital world alas has become.

 

tracking notes instead of cookies

1.  hoodies are so handy to keep warm in times of energy wars, while sitting still in front of the computer 
2.  Not a new device because the old one failed (it’s running nicely with plenty of memory and remaining hard disk space) but because the near-monopolist Operating System provider keeps pushing menacing messages warning about the end of times (ie end of service cycle with security updates), insisting on the need to buy a new computer with the latest operating system.
3.  a commercial harassment to which one has alas become so accustomed when surfing the web, using social media, consulting on-line information. We all know today’s web services’ business model is one of free services in exchange for our data and for our attention to commercial messages.  But even providers of paid-for goods and services are now joining the race to aggressively squeeze as much as possible economic return from their unlucky captive customers.  “post-purchase monetisation” it is called.   Shoshana Zuboff wrote about it in great detail in “The age of surveillance capitalism”
4.  This is not a techno-phobe complaint  - the technology is impressive, its possibilities are exhilarating. But it’s the business model, or even the entire mind set,   of the on-line world, which reduces us to a bunch of sitting ducks.  Who doesn’t think back with longing to the good old early days of the internet, when disinterested communities and websites sprang up, when you could connect with people, find high quality information and educational resources, … ach.  II’s of course also our own collective fault – there is no such thing as a free lunch, and collectively we have ensured the failure of the earlier business models based on premium subscriptions, donations etc.  But maybe the non-mainstream digital world can still recover this better version of the digital world?
5. Just chronicling the latest harassment: Instagram aping TikTok, so you now have to wade through a heap of unsolicited silly video stuff and you can no longer just follow people you find interesting.  What ìs this obsession of our age with video? Is it a question of a collective horror of stillness, a variant of horror vacui?
6. But thank you Alphabet-Google, for your gracious free offer of Blogger! I wonder which data of mine were suited for monetisation?   

Autumn Greyness & City Colours

 

November has at last turned chilly & grey (for a few days at least). So instead of lounging at sidewalk cafés, reluctantly basking in unseasonably warm sunrays (1),  a flâneur can now again take to the streets for long brisk walks. 

For lack of golden sunlight and in the absence of autumnal luminosities, I point the camera to whatever artificial colour that strikes the eye : red street marks echoed in red graffiti, two intensely blue flaps of a sagging shop awning.

Or the flashy colourful letters on a ground floor window (not of a shop, rather a room possibly used for creative purposes) - speaking directly to the soul of a keenly observing, city-gold-digging  flâneur.

1.         How many years, before we’ll stop calling 25°C  end of October “unseasonably warm” -  how long before the veterans of harsh autumns past have become a minority?   

Autumn Luminosities

 

Always a car driving in or out the frame.  Always the autumnal slanting sunrays, reflecting as always on wet asphalt.  And always the leaves, the yellow autumn leaves. 

While Relishing Random Gifts

 

There are many good reasons to no longer write lengthy blogposts.

For one, they are not 15secs videos, so where’s the fun for the scrolling audience? Two, there’s  a war going on in Europe. Three, there are famines threatening in the world.  Four, this planet needs to be saved from climate change. Five, I’ve more pressing private issues to deal with. 

But then again, there’s no harm either in blogging & meandering melancholy musings.

And, right now, instead of dissecting the many perils of the human condition, I feel the strange need to count my blessings – and to evoke some unexpected gifts of harmony.   

 1) The un-solicited emergence of lovely little purple flowers 

“la vie ne fait pas de cadeaux “ : very true indeed!  And yet, these lovely purple flowers just popped up like that, one morning, spreading  their joyous colour & smell all over the small and not particularly well tended front-garden of our building. 

 2)  Finding essential books one didn’t even know that existed

“Rien sans peine” : definitely!  But I was just absentmindedly browsing the shelves in the music section of my beloved second hand bookshop Pêle-Mêle, when, without any merit,  I stumbled upon two  books – each in their way perfect to deepen the insights of a devout albeit unschooled classical music lover.   A small pocket book in perfect condition by Aaron Copland (indeed, the composer!) :  “What to Listen for in Music”. And a beautifully edited art book about “Flemish Polyphony” by Ignace Bossuyt.      

3 

 

3)  An impromptu cello-concerto in the museum garden – by a future winner of the Queen Elisabeth competition

"There’s no such thing as a free lunch” :  undoubtedly! And yet. It was a sultry Sunday summer afternoon in June last year and we had gone for a stroll in the rose gardens of the Museum van Buuren. A woman asked whether we wanted to attend a cello-recital, for free? It was given by a young German-Korean cellist, who was exploring some of the historical surroundings of this music- loving queen who gave her name to an eminent musical competition.  Hayoung Choi’s playing was dazzling.  And on a Sunday morning one year later, scrolling through the news on my phone, I could nod with smug satisfaction: the rose-garden cellist won the 1^st prize of the Queen Elisabeth competition.      

4.      4)  “Incident at Saint Guidon” and an unforeseen city walk

The plan was to efficiently insert a medical examination in the midst of the day, with a well-timed metro trip up and down to the hospital, all without causing so much as a ripple in my work performance.  Well, that didn’t go according to plan – on the way back, after only 10 minutes, the metro halted and all travellers were kindly requested to leave the train: because of an incident at the St Guidon station all metro- traffic was stopped.  

Above the ground people scurried around in all directions, trying to board overflowing buses or hailing already occupied taxis.  Right.  But, that’s when a Flâneur gets going.   Sunny, sweltering hot streets, a walk of about 1.5hours to get back to work.  It’s an unexpected gift to  just walk and walk, along the busy Chaussée de Mons, alongside an unexpectedly peaceful park with children playing, crossing a pittoresque square with a church, slaloming though groups of boys hanging around in Kureghem, traversing the canal, walking past illegal workers gathering behind the Southstation, dodging frantic shoppers at the Place Louise, overtaking strolling dandy’s with nifty dogs along the Toison d’or, speeding up a little, and yes there’s the office building.      

 

5.      5)  Youthful energy in the metro at 7.10AM

“metro-boulot-dodo” – not an uplifting prospect, now that for 3 weeks I have to join the daily commuters to get my treatment in a hospital at the edge of Brussels.   Most people in the metro are rather subdued at this early hour. Looking around I see rows of people uniformly bent over their smartphones. Others are dozing off, like that young slender man, carefully dressed (with red  shoes, red belt and red shirt) snuggling up ever tighter in his corner.  The school-going youth though, bristles with energy. When a girl spots a friend in the next car, she grins & phones :  “look around you!!” , laughing out loud when the friends turns around , surprised. The friend comes over, and until the final metro-stop they sit side by side, grinning & chatting & beaming & oh so happy about their unexpected encounter. 

6.      6)  Greeted by a friendly face at the Erasmus-metro exit

When Ieaving the metro at the ‘Erasmus’ station, apprehensive about the first of 15 radiotherapy –sessions, there is a familiar face that greets me amidst the crowd of commuters. On a bill-board there is Vivian Maier, intently gazing  in her lens, happily capturing her reflection in a mirroring surface, hair unruly, behind her a non-descript building and dappled summer light through tree-leaves -  a joyous reflected self-portrait.  As un-connected & isolated as she may have been – here she is, so many years later, on another continent – on  bill-boards announcing an exhibition of her photos.   

Reflections on human influence

 

I was intending to write a blogpost about "paideia" or “humanitas” – in the sense of seeking individual ‘salvation’ not in material riches, but in an ideal of self-education, in order to participate (however modestly) to the best that human culture has produced.  I was going to reach back 2000 years to bolster my confidence in the relative permanence of this humanistic ideal.  

But I was distracted from my nostalgic musings by the red alert of the IPCC : “Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least  the last 2000 years.”

“Human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s. This includes increases in the frequency of concurrent heatwaves and droughts on the global scale (high confidence); fire weather in some regions of all inhabited continents (medium confidence); and compound flooding in some locations (medium confidence).” (IPCC August 2021_ AR6 WGI – p41))

 

 May human ingenuity (technological, behavioral) now help us to mitigate our influence, and to adapt to its consequences, lest we turn into pillars of salt, gazing, transfixed, at the unfolding disaster.  

Reflections on a Permanent Book

 

“with numerous music examples” - introduction

It was just an unassuming paperback I’d picked up some time ago for a mere €2 in the second hand bookshop : “Monteverdi – His Life and Work” (1)

The frontispiece carried the promise “with numerous music examples”, a bit like an art history book touting the number of colour illustrations. 

One of the joys of reading an art history book, is of course to have eye and mind happily consorting, creating meaning while making the joyful connection between descriptive text and visual image. (2) 

 It’s quite different for music – literary descriptions are either very general glorifications of music or else very subjective outpourings. And objective musicological descriptions, including score extracts with keys & notes, often scare off the un-initiated with their technical terms. (3)  

 

a small digression on learning music as an adult - 2021

As to myself, having never had a musical education, the connection between musical score and actual sounds used to elude me. So my listening (however intense, attentive and profoundly impacting) remained mostly intuitive, and in CD-booklets I routinely skipped paragraphs with technical music terms. 

Luckily, however, my book-buying has always been more ambitious, overreaching my actual abilities, and so not shying away from books including staves and notes  -  implicitly assuming that one day I could still teach myself how to read sheet music. 

Which has proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy :  now at last, with the help of a limpid educational book (5) (which in 70 pages patiently explains the basic musical elements) and following many many hours of repetition, I’m now at a point that I can decipher (ever so slowly, ever so laboriously) what is happening on the lines of a musical score.  Ah, the joy of recognising a b flat! The pride  of identifying an augmented fifth! (4)  I’m like a former illiterate, painstakingly deciphering a sentence word by word, letter by letter.  

 

a modest meditation on the passing of time and the soul of a sentence - 1926

With my recently acquired humble musical knowledge I can now slowly read “Monteverdi – His Life and Work” and, for instance,  ponder the timeless meaning of  “ the frequent use of augmented fifths produce effects of voluptuousness and melancholy”.

But a rather casual, non-technical sentence sets off my melancholy musings, making me wonder about the passing of time and styles. The book’s author, musicologist Prunières, pays a tribute to Romain Rolland (his former music teacher)(6)  as follows: “With an intuition bordering upon genius, he has entered into Monteverdi’s very soul and defined synthetically the essential characteristics of his art.”

Who, these days, would still write a sentence like that? Where (apart from in self-help tutorials) does one still find words such as “intuition, genius, soul” used in one breath?  An entire world of   high art, of cultural reverence, of exquisite sensibilities, is evoked.  While reading  the historical/biographical notes or the musicological commentaries, I didn’t wonder about the date of writing of the book , but this one reflective sentence made me pause and realise that the book was written in another era, almost 100 years ago.      

 

permanent by design - 1972  

As mentioned in the opening paragraph – this book I’m blogging about really is just an unassuming paperback, published back in 1972 by Dover books (7).  But it ages particularly well, withstanding the vagaries of human use and of  the elements (8) for close to 50 years.

On the back cover I read that this longevity was indeed aimed at by the publisher, who devotes a full paragraph to their efforts to “make the best book possible”, from choice of paper to method of sewing and binding, firmly concluding with “This is a permanent book”. 

They were quite right to add a proud exclamation mark to the heading ”A Dover edition designed for years of use!” : their bold claim of permanence has held true so far. 

They were truly  ‘circular by design’ avant la lettre. Quite an achievement, because, just think of it, which TV-set produced in 1972 would still be used today? Which smartphone bought today will still be in use in 2071?      

 

 

Free Notes without a Stave

(1)    by Henri Prunières, Translated by Marie D. Mackie – 1972 republication of the original 1926 English language edition.

(2)    Ekphrasis,  “Greek for the written description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical exercise, often used in the adjectival form ekphrastic. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined” (Wikipedia)

(3)    “Parrot may not learn to sing, but at least he’ll know what singing is” (J. Winterson)

(4)    When asking Google about “literary descriptions of music”  it  brings me to this very relevant blogpost : http://nachumschoffmanthoughts.com/?page=DESCRIPTIONSOFMUSICINLITERATURE

(5)    Ignace Bossuyt : ”Van noten en tonen – Wegwijs in muzikale begrippen”

(6)    When asking Google about ‘Romain Rolland et la musique’ :  https://association-romainrolland.org/image_articles13/Jeanneret13.pdf   « Le nom de Rolland, qui suffisait entre les deux guerres à évoquer un modèle littéraire et social est tombé dans l’oubli », « figure effacée de l’Europe  »   « le modèle d’écrivain-musicien »

(7)    Dover books still exists, but in a ‘restructured’ and slimmed down form, apperently focusing now on colouring books for adults. And I’m not the only one paying tribute to their former sustainable publishing ethos : https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/02/23/this-is-a-permanent-book/        

(8)    “the natural  elements” – we’d almost forgotten about them in our advanced societies. To our horror we now discover our fragility, our helplessness, for instance,  in the face of floodings. The human death toll, the destroyed houses and infrastructure of course command our first concern, but how pitiful, too, those muddy heaps of books and paper files spoiled by the water.

(9)    photo-disclaimer & additional book : this is a photo of two books, the Dover book (as mentioned) and another lovely book on Monteverdi by Actes Sud– published back in 2004, and bought second hand, still in great condition, 17 years later.  My PC from that the early 2000s is long in the scrap yard, and the ZIP drives on which I prudently  saved my back ups are inaccessible now.