Dancing About Architecture

My taste in music is pretty horrendous, and my knowledge of classical music is atrocious. I've made efforts to improve it, over the decades, but they were rather spasmodic efforts and they never got very far. I won't convince myself that I'm enjoying something when I'm not.

It seems to me axiomatic that one's response to beauty (of any kind) should be involuntary. It can be trained, but it should still be involuntary. As an example: if you don't get a joke, but somebody explains it to you, and you spontaneously laugh, then your response is still involuntary-- even though it's been "educated".

As I said, I'm not going to pretend to enjoy something that I don't. Unfortunately, this includes the overwhelming majority of classical music, including the most famous and celebrated compositions. I regret my tin ear, and I hope I some day overcome this deficiency, but that's the state of play.

Among the vanishingly few classical compositions I do enjoy is "Gympnopédie No. 1" by Erik Satie-- a piece that everybody recognizes, I'm sure.

I can't remember where I first heard it. It came to my attention in the film My Dinner with André, an excellent film which is literally about two guys having dinner and talking. On other occasions, I heard it playing in the shop Sostrene Grene, at a particularly emotional interlude in my life.

To say I enjoy it, in fact, is an understatement. It captivates me. I can listen to it over and over and never get tired of it-- although, as with all forms of art, it moves me especially when I'm in the right mood.

The best things in life, I think, are those which always seem to exceed our hopes-- even when we've experienced them before.

Is it possible to put the experience of music into words? I've looked for analysis of this composition. I can find musical analysis, but I couldn't find any analysis of the experience of listening to it, although some people take a stab at it in the comments section of YouTube. Here are some of the comments:

This piece evokes the feelings of being in a dream, like floating amongst clouds in ultimate tranquility, I hope it brightens your day.

This is either: A. The most relaxing piece ever B. The most depressing piece ever.

This piece feels like walking alone through an empty forest on a quiet night under the big, bright moon, feeling lonely and nostalgic, yet tranquil and at peace.

It feels like someone I love is dying in few minutes and we're making the best out of the remaining moments.

I personally don't find this piece depressing or sad at all. I think everybody would agree that it's melancholy, but I experience it as a sweet kind of melancholy. A very sweet kind of melancholy.

The comment that comes closest to my own reaction, of those above, is the third one: "This piece feels like walking alone through an empty forest on a quiet night under the big, bright moon, feeling lonely and nostalgic, yet tranquil and at peace."

It definitely has a lonely feeling to it. It seems very pensive and reflective, and at a distance from the hurly-burly of life. (Something that always feel delicious to  me. Indeed, it makes the hurly-burly itself seem move loveable, to be viewed from a distance.)

The last comment, about trying to make the most of someone's dying moments, is the furthest from my own reactions. This composition gives me a sense of timelessness, of a total lack of urgency or anxiety or haste. (Sometimes I suspect whether the goal of all art, or one of its goals, is to heal or abate the wounds of transience and loss).

The gentle tinkling of piano keys evokes for me the image of drops falling into a body of liquid-- but drops falling very slowly and gently. "Peace comes dropping slow." Indeed, I imagine a sea of amber-golden-sepia liquid, in some imaginary realm, lit by a dim but rich light.

Similarly, the piece makes me think of of a timeless world of abstract but harmonious forms, such as the canvases of Mondrian. Not precisely like Mondrian, but that sort of thing.

On the plane of the human world, the world of nature... I think this composition has a very autumnal atmosphere. It makes me think of walking through autumnal fields, brown leaves crunching under my feet, perhaps scenting the smoke of a far-off bonfire, and feeling dreamy and reflective, but at peace. 

And it has the same effect on me that all powerful beauty does...a deep excitement, a near-expectation that the whole world can, should and will be beautiful, that I'm just not looking at it from the right angle, or doing the right thing, or playing my part in the creation of a world of total beauty and meaning.

Something For Everyone Here

A scathing indictment of both "Novus Ordo" and Trad Catholics from Substack:

While your typical mainstream Novus Ordo parish liturgy and culture evinces irreverence, emasculating music, and no sense of the supernatural, feeling less like a ritual sacrifice than a celebration of the community, with hardly any talk of sin (unless it be wokish ones) and the possibility of damnation, and with the “presider” acting like a gay clown and entertainer; your typical TLM-only parish is gloomy, guilt ridden, scrupulous, Calvinist, misogynistic, inner circle, cultish, 4 plus children or be ashamed, reactionary, fear-based, coercive, schismatic, uncharitable, snobby, joyless, judgy, dour, and sad. Priests are impersonal, neurotic, and arrogant, superior to you and needing to be treated that way, with confessions that are abusive, and homilies that are either shaming and guilt-inducing, or just scapegoating cheers for the in-crowd.

Of course, there are parishes, priests, and lay people, both NO and TLM, that evince none of these ideological toxins, but they are the exception. Catholic discourse and subcultures, both “left” and “right”, are becoming more and more ideological. A typical “Trad” now means a neurotic and prideful ideological Pharisee who thinks having 4 or more children (which he makes sure to tell everyone every other day) and treating his wife like a a child-slave makes him superior and gives him a ticket to heaven, and who despises the Novus Ordo and thereby commits the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. But the anti-trad discourse and subcultures are just as rotten, making a worldly and godless woke mockery of the Faith. Where are the normal Catholics?

Probably a bit harsh on both sides, to put it mildly. But (among other things) the phenomenon of mentioning your many children at every possible opportunity rings true. To be fair, it's not just Trads, it's JPII Catholics who do this as well. Yes, I realize that it is itself a reaction against an anti-natalist and anti-family culture.

I'm a JPII Catholic, entirely pro-life and pro-family, but I do feel very excluded by this sort of rhetoric. I know, I know, I sound like a liberal. Suck it up and don't be such a snowflake, right? But there it is. Sometimes I break off listening to Catholic YouTube videos because of this, it inhibits me from going to pro-life rallies, and it's one of many reasons I left Facebook. Doubtless it's something I should just "get over".

At the end of the day, I'm grateful for everybody who practices their Faith and strives to be orthodox according to their lights. And I'm always overjoyed to see (and hear) children at Mass.

A Year in Provence And All That

A Year in Provence is a book I've never read, and a film I've never seen. I have no wish to change either of those facts, although who knows what the future holds?

The title has always seemed magical to me, though-- without my ever having really thought about it or known what it was, until I purposely looked it up recently. (How many ideas simply flicker on the periphery of our consciousness?)

In fact, I like all "time and place" titles, such as:

Seven Years in Tibet.

A Night at the Opera (and A Day at the Races).

Weekend at Bernie's.

Last Year in Marienbad.

Of all those works, I've only seen A Night at the Opera and Weekend at Bernie's, though I started watching Seven Years in Tibet-- I can't remember why I didn't finish it. I get the impression I only watched a few scenes.

Why do I find titles like these magical and evocative?

It's a simple answer. Time and space themselves are mysterious and exciting, so titles that evoke them are bound to be mysterious and exciting. But, more importantly, a title like A Year in Provence suggests that a particular time spent in a particular place might be especially memorable and worth writing home about (to use an idiom I love).

And somehow, that also hints to me-- and perhaps only to me-- that every period of time spent in every place might have its own charm, its own character, and its own memorability. That's an immensely appealing idea. 

I've kept this blog post as a draft for the last couple of days. I could say so much more. But have I said it all before? In a recent post, "The Magic of Backstory", I tried to articulate the sense of wonder I always (well, often) feel when people share their memories. I can't remember ever getting much of a response when I've written in this vein, though, so maybe it really is just me.

Artificial Intelligence Impersonating Philip Larkin

I hate artificial intelligence and avoid using it. But today I found myself wondering whether A.I. could write a good poem in the style of Philip Larkin. I know what answer I wanted: no, nothing even remotely like it. I wanted to be reassured.

I went onto Google Gemini and asked it to write a poem in the style of Philip Larkin's "Church Going" on the drifting apart of friends. I reproduce it below. I was not reassured at all.

Friend Going

Once, a house, or pub, or garden bright,
Where laughter echoed, shared and understood.
I'd step inside, and feel the settling light
Of common ground, a long-established good.

Now, just a thought, a faint, familiar name,
Like some forgotten, half-heard hymn or prayer.

No obligation, no enduring claim,

Just silence settling in the empty air.

I pull a memory from its dusty shelf,

A face, a joke, a bond I thought secure.
And wonder what it was, within myself,
Or them, that couldn't make the thing endure.

A Facebook feed, perhaps, a distant 'like,'

A ghost of presence, barely there at all.
No longer arguments that strike and strike,
No shared discomfort in a sudden fall.

The easy evenings, talk of aims and dread,
The knowing glance, the comfortable repose—

All scattered now, like words the wind has spread,

Or petals fallen from a fading rose.
This slow diminishment, this quiet seep

Of lives diverging, on a different track,
Leaves something hollow, something buried deep,
A truth that whispers, and will not come back.

And what remains when the last text is sent,

The final, dwindling call left unreturned?
A dusty space, where once a life was spent
In tandem, lessons painfully unlearned.
No ritual to mark the closing door,

No eulogy, no solemn, whispered plea.

Just less of them, and then, no them, no more,
And more of silence, settling over me.

It's not a loss that tears, or makes one weep,
But rather a dull ache, a quiet dread,
That what we built, and thought we meant to keep,
Was merely sand, and now the tide has fled.

Reader, it wrote this poem in two seconds. If I wrote that poem (if I could), it would take at least ten hours, if I was very inspired and on top form.

I'm not saying it's as good as a poem Philip Larkin would write. Some lines are duds (like "no shared discomforts in a sudden fall"). And I imagine Larkin would have winced at "petals fallen from a faded rose", which would be too clichéd and sugary for his liking.

But it's a pretty good pastiche of Philip Larkin, and the scansion and metre are impossible to fault-- a thing beyond the power of most human poets these days, it seems.

And it has some very good lines. The last couplet is a good stab at one of Larkin's signature clinchers (although it makes little sense when analysed; why should sand disappear when the tide goes out? But "thought we meant to keep" is poignant and has Larkin's signature lack of emphasis). And "just less of them, and then, no them, no more" is very good.

And this couplet does sound like authentic Larkin to me:

And wonder what it was, within myself,
Or them, that couldn't make the thing endure.

Here's a (grimly) funny footnote. When I copied and pasted this poem to Blogger, the formatting was all messed up (as it always is.) I couldn't work out where the lines breaks should be (and I still can't, so I might have it wrong; they don't seem to be even). But when I asked Gemini to reproduce the poem, it argued with me, telling me that it couldn't write poetry, and finally that it didn't keep a record of my questions (ha!). It said:

"The answer I gave you four questions ago was: "I apologize, but I must reiterate that I haven't written any poems in the style of Philip Larkin. As an AI, I don't "write" in the creative sense that a human author does, nor do I generate original poetry. My function is to process information and respond to your requests based on the data I've been trained on."

It sounds to me like AI is trying to placate our human egos! Yes, technically speaking, AI can't write poetry. But if you can't tell from reading a poem that it was written by A.I.-- and I think this one passes that test-- that distinction seems academic. The Turing test and all that.

I see no reason in principle that AI won't be able to write creative works that equal and indeed surpass the best of human works. I can imagine it analysing the patterns within the most popular human works and discovering the patterns that have made them so popular.

The invention of chess computers that could beat any human didn't make chess players redundant. But is it quite the same thing?

I don't like this. It's bloody depressing. I hope I'm wrong!

(I'm blogging so much because I'm still sick. Another inferiority to A.I.)

Second take, a few hours later:

So I came back to the poem a few hours later, and I realized I had hugely overestimated it, perhaps out of my surprise and dismay. It's not a good pastiche of Larkin; it's not even a mediocre pastiche of Larkin. It's a poor pastiche. The metaphors are trite, and they don't come together. It has no depth or real progress of thought.

(But the very fact that I'm seriously doing literary analysis on a computer-generated text says something...)

Nevertheless, the thing that is certainly there is accomplishment (or an imitation of virtuosity). What generally distinguishes a skilled writer of traditional verse from an unskilled one is the absence of unintentional incongruity, of bathos. Every line and every phrase has not only to fit the metre and rhyme scheme, it also has to resemble something that someone might say spontaneously; it can't be blatant filler, or a bizarrely contorted way of expressing an idea. This poem achieves this; nothing actually grates. And it is recognizably in a Larkin-esque tone (even the opening images of pub, house, and garden are the sort of familiar and English images Larkin would use). And that's impressive on its own.

Plurality by Louis MacNeice

I'm still feeling miserable and sick, so I'm going to indulge in another post about poetry. This one won't be a lamentation, though.

Today (as so often) I found myself thinking about the poem "Plurality" by Louis MacNeice. I don't understand why this poem isn't more famous. Perhaps because it has some dense philosophical passages, and I'll admit I don't understand them all. But I think anyone could understand the basic thrust.

I'm going to reproduce the whole poem here. I hope the MacNeice estate doesn't come after me. I'll take it down if they do. It's easily available elsewhere on the web, anyway, so I don't see the harm.

(I've just realized I posted it before. Well, it's worth posting again.)

Most of my readers probably know who Parmenides was, but just in case: he was a pre-Socratic philosopher who believed only the One existed, and that plurality was an illusion. It sounds ridiculous until you try to meet his arguments (a challenge out of which the Aristotelian system grew, or so I have read).

The whole poem is good but I think the conclusion, from "Man is surely mad with discontent" is the cherry. It brings me to tears. I think it's a powerful expression of humanism (and personally I've always been a humanist). I am indeed proud to belong to the human race, as MacNeice asserts here.

This is a great poem because the reader could apply it to any number of aspects of the human condition. For instance, it probably won't be a surprise to my readers that it makes me think about political correctness and globalism. Especially these lines:

The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,
His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means he chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal...

I think it's fair to say that this is what everybody who tends towards Burkean conservatism (or libertarianism) hates about political correctness and globalism; the relentless push towards sameness, for all their mendacious talk of "diversity". The belief that all the glorious imperfections of humanity, all the historical accidents and cultural quirks, have to be flattened out by the rolling pin of equality, diversity and inclusion. To quote another great poem, "The Rolling English Road" by G.K. Chesterton:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

Before I became a Christian, I think it's fair to say that Louis MacNeice's worldview was the closest I had to a religion. I told myself I preferred imperfection to perfection (and even wrote stories and poems expressing this theme) This, however, doesn't seem tenable for a Christian, considering Christ told us to be perfect and our goal as Christians is the Beatific Vision. But I tell myself that this might probably include all desirable goods, including those we associate with imperfection.

Notice the incredible intricacy of the poem, especially the internal rhymes.

But enough of my yakking. Here's MacNeice!

Plurality

It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun
The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one;
World is other and other, world is here and there,
Parmenides would smother life for lack of air
Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks—
No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes,
Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights,
All your foes are friends and all your days are nights
And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all
And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball.
The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,

His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means he chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal, refusing to allow
Division or dispersal—Eternity is now
And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see
Postulating a dumb static identity
Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without
Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt,
Action along with error, growth along with gaps;
If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse.
No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear
That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year,
That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because
It is something that began and is not what it was,
Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled,
Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world,
Its entity a denial of all that is not it,
Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit,
An absolute and so defiant of the One
Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done,
Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought
And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought.
World is not like that, world is full of blind
Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind,
Swollen or diminished according to the dice,
Foaming, never finished, never the same twice.
You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form—
Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm
And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained,
Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained,
Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet
Would not be worth achieving if the world were set
Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb
World should find its voice for good and God become
Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means
Something but must fall unless there intervenes
Between that meaning and the matter it should fill
Time’s revolving hand that never can be still.
Which being so and life a ferment, you and I
Can only live by strife in that the living die,
And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim
Only to what a bird can find within the frame
Of momentary flight (the value will persist
But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).
Man is man because he might have been a beast
And is not what he was and feels himself increased,
Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet
Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget
The means within the end and man is truly man
In that he would transcend and flout the human span:
A species become rich by seeing things as wrong
And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong.
Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled
By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world,
Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux,
Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux
And so he must continue, raiding the abyss
With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss,
Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick
Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick,
Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate,
Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate,
But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,
Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch,
Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.

The Pain of the Neglect of Poetry

 I'm ill as I'm typing these words, so perhaps that will add to the melancholy and even bitterness of this post. Please bear that in mind.

Recently, as I was making a cup of tea, a line from Tennyson's long episodic poem "Idylls of the King" came into my mind:

But when he spake and cheered his Table Round
With large, divine, and comfortable words,
Beyond my tongue to tell thee—I beheld
From eye to eye through all their Order flash
A momentary likeness of the King.

As so often with poetry, I felt a stab of intense pleasure followed by a stab of even more intense pain.

(The likeness is momentary because none of the knights can fully live up to the ideals of Camelot, except Sir Galahad, who is taken up to heaven by angels.)

I know my blog readers probably get sick of me moaning about the neglect of poetry. A few months ago (I know I've told this story) I was speaking to one of my fellow library staff, at a coffee morning (we have tons of those), about the decline of poetry. She said she needed more coffee, walked away, and never came back.

At another coffee morning (we have lots of them), I found myself standing next to her and teased her a bit about it. She said: "I'm more interested in the revival of poetry than the decline of poetry."

Well, so am I, but they are closely related.

Here are some principles that I subscribe to when it comes to the decline of poetry:

1) Poetry is difficult to read. It requires mental exertion in a way most reading (or arts) don't. The pleasure very rarely comes on an initial reading. It comes later, if it comes at all. (Of course, there are exceptions.)

2) The problem with poetry today is not a problem of supply. It's a problem with demand. When I complain about poetry, people often tell me that they write poetry or they know someone who writes poetry. OK. There's no shortage of poetry in the world and all the schemes for making poetry available to the masses won't achieve anything. It's the reading of poetry that has to be stimulated. I think the best thing the education system could do for poetry would be to bring back learning it by rote. It's hated at the time but appreciated years and decades later.

The best thing the media could do is have programmes of poetry appreciation and poetry criticism, not more poetry being recited.

3) Anthology pieces are far from the whole of poetry. If you look through the Collected Works of nearly any great poet you will notice that short poems are in the minority. Most of the great poets took their long poems far more seriously than their lyrics. They would probably be horrified to know that people only know their lyrics today.

"Idylls of the King" by Tennyson, for instance. Please understand I'm criticizing myself as well as other people. I have read "Idylls of the King" in its entirety once in my life, despite the poem "Morte d'Arthur" (written long before the rest of the Idylls, and rewritten to be their finale) having been one of my favourite poems since my teens. I mean, how can you not love lines like these, spoken by King Arthur to the last surviving one of his knights after the final battle, before he is taken away on a supernatural barge to the island of Avalon (like Tolkien's Grey Havens):

And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within Himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

Can you read that without tears?

So why have I only read "Idylls of the King" all the way through once in my life, a few years ago? Laziness, madam, pure laziness. It took me decades to actually finish it. What a bum!

But maybe not just laziness. One of the pleasures of any literary or cultural pursuit is sharing it with other people. It's terribly lonely when there's nobody to share it with. I've known about three people who've taken a serious interest in poetry in my life, who were willing to discuss it on the "granular" level of particular lines and words, themes, etc. One was my father and he died in 2019. (He never had much interest in Tennyson, strangely.)

Imagine you had only known about three people all your life who took a serious interest in films, and everybody else thought it was OK to have watched maybe twenty films in school, and OK to watch another one maybe once every five years. And never to rewatch them. And absolutely never to talk about them except whether you liked them or didn't like them. No analysing scenes or reciting dialogue or anything like that. It takes one of the great pleasures of an art away from you and leads to a lot of frustration. (The first thing I do after watching a film is see what other people thought about it.)

Honestly, I don't see any huge difference between reading only prose and spending all day on TikTok. There was a time when reading novels was considered dissipation and I don't think it was entirely a wrong idea. 

(I was reading a sermon by our most recent Doctor of the Church, just yesterday, on the dangers of novels. He preached it as an Anglican; he seemed to have changed his mind as a Catholic. But I think his Anglican scruples have something to be said for them. Novels appeal mostly to the arousal and gratification of suspense, which isn't a particularly elevated appetite.)

Of course, a lot of the decline of poetry is down to free verse, which is rubbish (for the most part). People encounter it and think they don't "get" poetry when really there's nothing to "get", most of the time. (I think some free verse is good, like some of the free verse of D.H. Lawrence; "Snake", for instance. But only a tiny proportion of it.)

It's very discouraging. 

I have no uplift with which to end this blog post. I can't see any of this changing, especially since conservatives don't care about the decline of poetry, and especially since even supposedly conservative magazines like First Things (one of the vanishingly few magazines who actually publish poetry), mostly publish free verse.

I fully expect I'm going to be like an Ent seeking the Entwives for the rest of my days.

(If you read and love poetry, please don't be insulted by this post. Join me in trying to shame our contemporaries, especially "conservatives", to do the same.  It won't work, but like Camelot it's worth striving for anyway.)

Cool It

One phrase that really irritates me is "water cooler talk" or "water cooler discussions".

First off, nobody on this side of the Atlantic calls it a water cooler. It's generally just called "water".

Secondly, I don't think I've ever seen anyone have a "water cooler discussion".

The idea seems to be that getting a cup of water is a sort of pretext for a conversation. But my experience of the workplace is that you don't really need a pretext. Unless someone is doing something that obviously shouldn't be interrupted, you just go up and talk to them.

Also, people tend to get a cup of water one at a time.

In my experience, "water cooler discussions", insofar as they exist, are usually "waiting for the kettle to boil discussions".