Monthly Archives: February 2018

Darkness

22 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Darkness, Daylight Saving Time, Seasons, Sunlight

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This morning I stepped out to run after a sleepless night. A pingy frozen mist fell on streets two degrees too warm for it to freeze there. It hit my face as soon as I stepped out, and my feet slipped a bit on the wet pavement. Can’t run in this, I immediately decided. Then I took a breath and the cold air filled my lungs; I took a few steps and my muscles responded; something like a thrill ran through all of me, and I began to walk. By the time I got to the running path I was ready to burst out into long strides, it all felt so good. All of which is especially strange, because it was still dark.

I am still running in darkness. We wait and wait through the darkness of winter for the sun to return, to give us days that are light when we wake up and stay light as long as we care to be outside while the evening draws to a close, and then, sooner than expected, the days begin to shorten.

It has been a weird winter—that’s the word people tend to use most to describe it. Weirdly freezing during December, then jumping back and forth from very cold days to record-breaking warm days throughout January and February. But we accept the unreliability of heat or cold in the seasonal cycle. Some summers sear you with weeks of excessive heat and humidity; some winters keep you in the deep freeze for far too long. Then again, either season can be mild and pleasant.

But the cycle of darkness and light never changes. I suppose meteorologists have tables that can tell us the exact moment of sunrise a hundred years from now. I enjoy running when the sun is up, when drivers heedlessly speeding to their destinations can see me. Like most runners I have had many near collisions with inattentive motorists, though a truck has only hit me once.

The problem is that we do not change our schedules according to the seasons–and that means according to darkness or light. In the old days, maybe Farmer Jones got up at the crack of dawn to start his chores. Well, the crack of dawn is not a time on a clock, say 5 a.m. or 6 a.m., it gradually moves through the year. As the year progressed, someone who awoke at the crack of dawn gradually moved with it.

Once we started doing everything according to clocks, at set hours, that all changed. Now Farmer Jones awakes at 5 a.m., whether it’s dark or light then. When we realized what an artificial overlay timekeeping was to the natural order, we put in force our clumsiest time tracking device of all: Daylight Saving Time. At that point, Farmer Jones likely wanted to hang himself from the hayloft. I can think of nothing that happens in the yearly round of days and nights that more effectively disorients and confuses people.

My thoughts are different when I run in the dark. More about how hard I’m running, how hard it is to run, how my ragged breath claws at my chest, my legs ache ascending a hill. It’s not that bad, but it seems like it in the dark.

Daylight is the good time, darkness is the bad time. Darkness, when philosophers and sneak thieves prowl the night, when dastardly deeds are done, when the lonely stalk their rooms in desperation. We fight the oncoming dark. Jack O’ Lanterns, bonfires, candles, Christmas lights and more illumine our wintry evenings, at least for a while, until we give up, throw in the towel, and let January and February chill our souls. But by then the corner has been turned, the solstice passed, Sol Invictus, Apollo, the Son of God, or whatever ancient spirit appeals to you has returned. To me, prosaically enough, it’s just the sun.

I ran a good distance, though not as far as I was running before I got the flu in January. When I got home I was barely winded and felt very good, and sat down to write this. Finishing up, I look out, and a pale light, struggling through dense clouds, is brightening the window. It’s too cloudy to see much, but the bit of future I can read in the brightness tells me that soon, I’ll be running in the sunlight.

 

 

Four Last Songs

19 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in die Vier Letzte Lieder, Program Music, Richard Strauss, Seasons

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(This was written a while ago, as should be clear by the wrong seasonal setting; but I am once again working on these musical ideas.)

It was humid and still this morning, until sunrise brought a stiff breeze that cooled the air with a promise of rain showers. I sat on the porch in that kind of paralysis one feels at the change of summer into autumn, thinking about the Last Four Songs of Richard Strauss. They were playing on the radio yesterday as I was driving home, and when the announcer announced them, he offered the names of each one. It’s funny, this set of songs has long been a favorite of mine, but I never stopped to think about the titles of the individual songs or to consider their lyrics.

The lyrics to three of the songs, Spring, September, and Going to Sleep, come from poems by Hermann Hesse, and the fourth, At Sunset, from a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff. At first blush it would seem there is a progression to the set, something moving through the seasons; but it’s really only one song about spring followed by three songs dealing more or less with impending death. Kinda gloomy, I’d say.

On closer study, though, maybe there is more to it than that. Hesse’s poem Spring is about the transition from winter into spring, and by transference, about the human state of distance from nature into a full immersion in nature, which was a High Romantic ideal. It begins with the lines ‘In shadowy crypts/I dreamt long,’ which are pretty somber words for a paean to spring. But no fear, spring does come, to be passionately embraced by the poet.

If with this song we enter the seasons of greening and fruition, in September we move away from them. A lyric laced with melancholy, September is explicitly seen as the month when summer dies.

Summer smiles, astonished and feeble

at his dying dream of a garden

Again, it is the transition we are dealing with, the movement from one season to the next. A point I come across often in researching the seasons is that most people, when they speak of the seasons–especially when they speak of favorite or beloved seasons–usually cite the transition from the previous season into their favorite. It is the time of change that carries something special, whether it is hope, or optimism, or simply fascination with nature’s endless cycles.

In the world of art there are many representations of the seasons. Musicians, painters and poets can’t get enough of guiding us through the four seasons. But the sad fact is, much of this work is mediocre, if not bad. The programmatic impulse in art, the need to make a piece of music tell a specific story or to delineate something as obvious as the four seasons in a painting, usually bespeaks a limited imagination: think Norman Rockwell or Currier & Ives. Of course there are exceptions, such as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or Haydn’s The Seasons, but mostly, the world of art would suffer very little if all the works dedicated to the seasons were removed. This does not mean that programmatic art is not popular–people very much like art that is so easy to understand, and which appeals to something so intrinsic in their lives.

The fact is, Strauss did not write his Vier Letzte Lieder as a set: they just happen to be the last four songs he composed prior to his death, at 85, in 1949. His publisher put them together in the form that has become well known to generations of music lovers. This combination may have been a marketing ploy by the publisher, hoping the songs, seen as a whole, would appeal to the popular imagination. As a matter of fact, there was a fifth song, Strauss’s actual last song, called ‘Malven,’ which he dedicated to a woman other than his wife Pauline, dispatching the manuscript to her. She kept it secret for a long time, for what may be obvious reasons. The song, never orchestrated by the composer, is rarely included in performances or recordings of the Vier Letzte Lieder. It has been described as ‘very ordinary,’ especially compared to the wonderful late flowering of the other last songs.

They had been a fortuitous grouping, making a great concert piece of these songs which, while thematically linked and carrying the feel of moving through the life of a human spirit, are not diminished by a too obvious program. Strauss died a year after completing these songs. He was in his eighties, weary and depressed, living in Switzerland while his German homeland was being purged of Nazi vestiges. Perhaps the secret to creating great art around seasonal motifs is in not walking the audience through a rote recitation of all four seasons, but in expounding on the beauties of the season in which your soul resides at the time.

 

St. Valentine’s Day

15 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Seasons, Spring, Valentine's Day

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St. Valentine’s Day, or the Feast Day of St. Valentine, is traditionally a spring celebration. According to folk wisdom, it is the day on which birds select their mates for the upcoming mating season, and it’s time for humans to pick mates as well. It rarely seems springlike on February 14th in North America, but these traditions were set in place in Western Europe, which is generally warmer than here, with climatic seasons that begin as much as a month earlier.

Many saints’ feast days are placed on days which were previously pagan celebrations. It made it easier to convince folks to accept the new order, besides the fact that there are so many saints from the old days. Not so many these days, because back then, when there was no news coverage and people were generally more superstitious, it was much easier to ‘prove’ miracles. There are two basic stories about martyred priests named Valentine, but most scholars agree that they are just differing accounts of the same personage, especially since elements of the stories—including the miraculous healing of a child—are similar.

I dislike Valentine’s Day. I am not a curmudgeon, nor am I often accused of lacking romance in my soul. Call it the old hippie in me, but I don’t respond well to a designated day for romance, especially when it’s so commercial. The same little bouquet of flowers that cost $6 a week ago is priced at $16.99 on the holiday. I have seen the price of a dozen roses quadruple in the week days leading up to Valentine’s Day. Going to dinner anywhere nice is a trial of waiting and fighting to get served. It’s also a day of deep depression for some people who feel the absence of significant others, with suicides spiking. One time someone left a note in the women’s bathroom of the library where I work, stating, ‘I will leave a bomb in the library on Valentine’s Day.’ We had the local police patrol us all day that day, and nothing really happened, but somehow I understand the sentiment.

It is springlike here this morning, the day after Valentine’s Day. Temperatures were in the 50s (F) when I got up to run, or actually to walk, with short bursts of running here and there. I am finally getting over a nearly month-long bout of influenza, and trying to get back to regular exercise. It was a quiet, windless morning, with the lingering scent of yesterday’s rain showers. Weather apps say it will rain more today, which would be welcome, but I find that weather predictions are increasingly inaccurate. Looking out the window is advised.

I am sitting here now in the still morning, with Ravel on the radio and the windows open. I want only to gather my true love unto me, go for a stroll in the park, and picnic in the grass. This afternoon’s temperatures are expected to climb into the 70s. But I have to leave for work soon, so there will be neither gathering, strolling, nor picnicking. I’d say it will all have to wait until Saturday, but I see that a drop in temperature is predicted by then, down to the 30s, with a good chance of snow. So much for the emergence of spring.

Most of our holidays are seasonal holidays imported from Europe, even the nominally religious ones, like Christmas in winter and Easter in spring. Valentine’s Day is a less successful import, because it too is meant to be a spring holiday, but occurs too early in North America. It may have some interesting precursors in European history, springtime, romance, all of that. Here in America, it’s just an over-hyped, overpriced day of artificial romance in the midst of the lingering winter. Many old European traditions made a successful crossing to North America. I think this is one that did not.

 

 

 

I’d Love to Change the World

03 Saturday Feb 2018

Posted by in Fatalism, News, Politics, Seasons, Ten Years After

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When we were kids, one of my best friends was a huge fan of the band Ten Years After. Led by the singer/songwriter and guitarist extraordinaire Alvin Lee, the band put out several albums during the late 1960s and 1970s, and had one of the best performances at Woodstock—their classic ‘I’m Going Home.’ But for all of his guitar virtuosity, Alvin Lee was not the greatest songwriter. ‘I’m Going Home’ was a cover, as were a number of the band’s best songs.

And, for all of his hard-rocking, Alvin Lee is probably best known for his 1971 song ‘I’d Love to Change the World,’ which was a slow ballad mostly on acoustic guitar. The song is lovely, but it also points out that Lee was not the world’s best lyricist, including verses like:

Life is funny, skies are sunny,

bees make honey, who needs money . . .

 

Still, it featured a chorus which was either deeply cynical and fatalistic, or just used an easy rhyme. I’d like to believe that he saw the fatalism, but there’s nothing in his lyrical oeuvre to indicate that sort of thought when he sang:

 

I’d love to change the world

But I don’t know what to do

So I’ll leave it up to you.

 

That pretty much sums up the human condition, doesn’t it?

I have not listened to a news report, either on TV or the radio, since November 2016. Can’t take it. I am online a lot, both for research and for my job, so of course I see headlines. People say, ‘Did you hear about the prostitute and the hush money?’ or ‘Did you hear about the memo?’—and I say, ‘Well, I saw the headline, do I really need to read the story?’ I read an insightful commentary the other day about why it is possible that people who get most of their news from late night comedians and other satirists may well be better informed than people who watch a lot of news.

If someone tells an obvious, bald-faced lie, say something like, ‘I was wiretapped by a former president,’ all the news shows talk about it. They know it’s a lie, there’s absolutely zero evidence of it having happened, and yet they will spend weeks holding panel discussions and calling in experts to talk about the implications and ramifications of this wiretapping, if it had happened. Of course, it’s a lie, everyone knows it’s a lie, and yet people who consume a lot of news hear a lot about it just the same.

This is all due to a problem that has grown up in journalism dominated by our two-party political system. This is the myth that there are two sides to every story. It is the job of journalism to tell both sides. But the simple fact is, there are not two sides to every story. In many stories, there is simply the truth. It was the contention of this piece I was reading that years ago, journalists understood that their job was simply to tell the truth.

In today’s ‘news’ environment, someone can tell a lie, and then send out surrogates to all the news shows to defend that lie. The news shows all interview that surrogate, because they are dutifully ‘telling both sides of the story,’ even though they know the person has been sent to defend a lie. Why do they do this? Because they have bought into the false mantra that their job is to tell both sides of the story. It’s not. Their job it to tell the truth.

Comedians and satirists have the luxury of calling bullshit bullshit. They do a two-minute segment on the latest lie emanating from on high, get a few laughs, and move on. No panel discussions about the lie, no interviews with other liars. And thus, their audiences may have a clearer picture of what’s going on than people who assiduously tune in to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, or whatever.

I think this is important, and I think other people should understand it. But people never will, either people who listen to way too much ‘news,’ or people who are disposed, by reason of party loyalty, to either believe the lie, or—more likely—to believe that turning a blind eye to the latest lie is being supportive of the office from which the lie originated. To put it into simple words, I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do.

I never listen to news. I am exposed to some of it. But I have little reason to believe I am less informed than people who awake with NPR, Morning Joe, or Fox and Friends, and spend the rest of the day with newspapers, radio, and TV news. I sometimes feel that I should be more involved, but I don’t know what that involvement would be. I will vote, of course. I sign several petitions each week, and send letters to my representatives all the time. Does this make a difference? Of course not. One of my senators believes everything I believe, while the other believes nothing I believe, so my letters are just so much smoke in the wind.

I’d love to change the world, but I don’t know what to do, so I’ll leave it up to you.

Sorry.