My former therapist, the late Ralph Colp, Jr., was an extraordinary man.
Posted here (above) is one of his many book reviews. It shows how well Dr. Colp could write, with great acumen and sensitivity.
We had many discussions about writing and writers. He told me that, like most young writers, he used to obsess at the beginning over style. But he said he soon overcame this and was able to not worry too much about it. His writing is notable for its clarity and straightforwardness.
Note that in this review of Geoffrey Keynes’s autobiography, Dr. Colp reminisces about a visit he had with Keynes. Geoffrey Keynes (brother of John Maynard Keynes), like Dr. Colp, was a physician-scholar. Keynes is well known as a scholar (and lover) of William Blake. Dr. Colp told me about having met Keynes. I had told him about my interest in Blake.
I knew of Keynes before becoming a patient of Dr. Colp and have several beautiful Blake books edited by the former.
In the “Divinity School Address” [given at Harvard Divinity School in 1838, Ralph Waldo] Emerson at times made it sound as though his understanding of Christ had transformed that figure into a type of the artist, a man who … had seen “further” than others with more limited vision–An example is Emerson’s statement of how Christ recognized “that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World.” … in his later essay “The Poet,” … [Emerson] lambasted contemporary theologians for thinking it “a pretty air-castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a city or a contract.” Such men prefer, he noted sardonically, “to come again to the solid ground of historical evidence,” not realizing “the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple or centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact.” If his friends were to be faulted for any religious shortcomings, then, it was because they … did not perceive the literal presence of the miraculous in nature’s commonplace facts.
One of Emerson’s most revealing paragraphs in this essay deals specifically with his sense of the poet as a universal Christ-figure. … In “The Poet” Emerson thought it important to suggest how much his contemporaries needed another redeemer, one whose grasp of language and symbol, as well as of divine truth, was comparable to Christ’s, or at least to others among the world’s great prophets. …
Throughout the essay Emerson elaborates the intended equation between Christ and the poet. Like Christ, who stood as ransom before his Father for the entire human race, so, too, the poet is “representative” and “stands among partial men for the complete man.” Further, like the Christ who freed mankind again to the possibility of entering heaven, so the poet is a liberator who “unlocks our chains and admits us to a new thought.” When men are exposed to the truths the poet expresses, they recognize how “the use of his symbols has a certain power of emancipation for all men.” And like the Savior who called all unto him as children, when the poet speaks men “seem to be touched by a wand which makes [them] dance and run about happily, like children.” “Poets,” Emerson brazenly declares, “are thus liberating gods.”
Indeed, throughout the essay Emerson intends to make his readers aware that he means no deception when he equates the work of the Sayer with a process of salvation, for the poet provides a feeling akin to what those of an earlier generation (and, indeed, what some evangelicals of Emerson’s own day) would have called a conversion experience. As he continues in this vein, Emerson sounds as though he were making a narration of the influence of saving grace upon his soul. “With what joy,” he exclaims, “I begin to read a poem which I confide in as an inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these clouds and opaque airs in which I live . . . and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my relations.” The “new birth” is complete, for at such moments, Emerson announces confidently, he becomes “reconcile[d]” to live, while all nature becomes “renovate[d].” “Life will no more be a noise” to him who has experienced the effects of the poet’s vision; and, as self-righteously as any of his seventeenth-century New England ancestors, Emerson claims that then is he able to “see men and women and know the signs by which they may be discerned fools and satans.” The rebirth of his soul is complete, for “this day [when the poet’s message is heard] shall be better than my birthday: then I became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the real.”
This remarkable reworking of the morphology of conversion into an aesthetic experience takes on more significance when the reader is aware of how closely the older forms of religious vocabulary have been melded with terms from the idealistic philosophy to which Emerson had been exposed: He details this dream-vision of transcendence with reference to an explicitly Coleridgean term. “This insight,” Emerson declares, “expresses itself by what is called Imagination” and is best understood not by reference to any religious terminology but as “a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees . . . by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms … ” In the presence of the poet wielding his liberating symbols, man stands, Emerson mystically suggests, “before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety.”
But it is imperative that the poet also become the “Sayer or Namer” and openly declare what has been hidden from his contemporaries because of their imperfect nature and limited vision. “The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it.” The secret of the universe, to paraphrase Robert Frost, literally sits in the middle of men, and the poet must do all in his power to make the secret apparent.
For through that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that … within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the form which expresses that life, and so his speech flows with the flowings of nature.
For the poet the world becomes “a temple whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures and commandments of the Deity,” and it becomes his job to convey the meaning behind those emblems as evocatively as he can. … Emerson indeed believed that “Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in tum arise and walk before him [the poet] as an exponent of his meaning.” Thus, the lessons from men like [the American Swedenborgian Sampson] Reed and {Guillaume] Oegger were assimilated, but along with the important corollary that man must not, like the self-centered mystic, “nail a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false.” The poet is he who knows that “all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” When man reads the true poet’s works, Emerson believes, he finds himself on a version of Jacob’s ladder, the rungs of which are assembled from the world’s natural facts and by which he is to climb to view the world of spirit.
— Philip F. Gura, The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the American Renaissance
I have been reading a fascinating and enlightening monograph: The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the American Renaissance by Philip F. Gura (Wesleyan University Press, 1981), from which the above passages are quoted.
Who is the poet whom Emerson foresaw and spoke of? Walt Whitman, as has often been noted.
Posted here is the Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47, by Dmitri Shostakovich — in two different recordings.
The first performance posted here is by Bernard Haitink, an outstanding Shostakovich interpreter. The second is by the Czecho-Slovak Radio Orchestra. You tell me which one is best. I couldn’t decide.
The Symphony No. 5 was composed between April and July 1937. Its first performance was on November 21, 1937, in Leningrad by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky.
The symphony has four movements:
1. Moderato—Allegro non troppo
2. Allegretto
3. Largo
4. Allegro non troppo
The work is scored for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets and E-flat clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three B♭ trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, glockenspiel, xylophone, two harps (one part), piano, celesta and strings. Regarding the typical ingenuity of Shostakovich in this respect, note, for example, the brief piano passage (in which the piano’s percussive qualities resonate) in the first movement and a passage for a celesta at the end of the first movement.
I became acquainted with this symphony during my teenage years, when I was first getting into classical music. I had not had much exposure to modern classical music then.
I consider it not only an outstanding work among Shostakovich’s ample and varied (astonishingly so) oeuvre, but one of the truly great symphonies of all time. I would be inclined to go out on a limb and say that it is exceeded by few symphonies since Beethoven’s Fifth, perhaps only by Schubert’s ninth and Brahms’s first and fourth symphonies.
The Fifth Symphony quotes Shostakovich’s song “Vozrozhdenije” (Op. 46 No. 1, composed in 1936–37), most notably in the last movement, which uses a poem by Alexander Pushkin that deals with the matter of rebirth. This song is by some considered to be a vital clue to the interpretation and understanding of the whole symphony. In addition, commentators have noted that Shostakovich incorporated a motif from the “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen into the first movement, a reference to Shostakovich’s earlier infatuation with a woman who refused his offer of marriage; she subsequently moved to Spain and married a man named Roman Carmen.
With the Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich gained an unprecedented triumph, with the music appealing equally—and remarkably—to both the public and official critics, though the overwhelming public response to the work initially aroused suspicions among certain officials. The then-head of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Mikhail Chulaki, recalls that certain authorities bristled at Mravinsky’s gesture of lifting the score above his head to the cheering audience, and a subsequent performance was attended by two plainly hostile officials, V.N. Surin and Boris M. Yarustovsky, who tried to claim in the face of the vociferous ovation given the symphony that the audience was made up of “hand-picked” Shostakovich supporters. Yet the authorities in due course claimed that they found everything they had demanded of Shostakovich restored in the symphony. Meanwhile, the public heard it as an expression of the suffering to which it had been subjected by Stalin. The same work was essentially received two different ways.
An article reportedly written by the composer appeared in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva a few days before the premiere of the Fifth Symphony. There, he reportedly states that the work “is a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism.” Whether Shostakovich or someone more closely connected with the Party actually wrote the article is open to question, but the phrase “justified criticism”—a reference to the denunciation of the composer in 1936—is especially telling.
Official critics treated the work as a turnaround in its composer’s career, a personal perestroika, or “restructuring,” by the composer, with the Party engineering Shostakovich’s rehabilitation as carefully as it had his fall a couple of years earlier. Like the Pravda attack at that time on the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the political basis for extolling the Fifth Symphony was to show how the Party could make artists bow to its demands. It had to show that it could reward as easily and fully as it could punish.
The official tone toward the Fifth Symphony was further set by a review by Alexei Tolstoy, who likened the symphony to the literary model of the Soviet Bildungsroman describing “the formation of a personality”—in other words, of a Soviet personality. In the first movement, the composer-hero suffers a psychological crisis giving rise to a burst of energy. The second movement provides respite. In the third movement, the personality begins to form: “Here the personality submerges itself in the great epoch that surrounds it, and begins to resonate with the epoch.” With the finale, Tolstoy wrote, came victory, “an enormous optimistic lift.” As for the ecstatic reaction of the audience to the work, Tolstoy claimed it showed Shostakovich’s perestroika to be sincere. “Our audience is organically incapable of accepting decadent, gloomy, pessimistic art. Our audience responds enthusiastically to all that is bright, clear, joyous, optimistic, life-affirming.”
Not everyone agreed with Tolstoy, even after another article reportedly by the composer echoed Tolstoy’s views. Asafiev, for one, wrote, “This unsettled, sensitive, evocative music which inspires such gigantic conflict comes across as a true account of the problems facing modern man-—not one individual or several, but mankind.” The composer himself seemed to second this view long after the fact, in a conversation with author Chinghiz Aitmatov in the late 1960s. “There are far more openings for new Shakespeares in today’s world,” he said, “for never before in its development has mankind achieved such unanimity of spirit: so when another such artist appears, he will be able to express the whole world in himself, like a musician.”
During the first performance of the symphony, people were reported to have wept during the Largo movement. The music, steeped in an atmosphere of mourning, contained echoes of the panikhida, the Russian Orthodox requiem. It also recalled a genre of Russian symphonic works written in memory of the dead, including pieces by Glazunov, Steinberg, Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky. Typical of these works is the use of the tremolo in the strings as a reference to the hallowed ambience of the requiem.
After the symphony had been performed in Moscow, Heinrich Neuhaus called the work “deep, meaningful, gripping music, classical in the integrity of its conception, perfect in form and the mastery of orchestral writing-—music striking for its novelty and originality, but at the same time somehow hauntingly familiar, so truly and sincerely does it recount human feelings.”
Shostakovich returned to the traditional four-movement form and a normal-sized orchestra. More tellingly, he organized each movement along clear lines, having concluded that a symphony cannot be a viable work without firm architecture. The harmonic idiom in the Fifth is less astringent, more tonal than previously, and the thematic material is more accessible. Nevertheless, every bar bears its composer’s personal imprint. It has been said that, in the Fifth Symphony, the best qualities of Shostakovich’s music, such as meditation, humor and grandeur, blend in perfect balance and self-fulfillment
The final movement, often being criticized for sounding shrill, is declared in Testimony * to be a parody of shrillness, representing “forced rejoicing.” In the words attributed to the composer in Testimony (a work, although attributed to Shostakovich himself, that has been shown to have serious flaws in its credibility):
The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.”
This is symbolized by the repeated A’s at the end of the final movement in the string and upper woodwind sections. It includes a quotation from the composer’s song “Rebirth,” accompanying the words “A barbarian painter” who “blackens the genius’s painting.” In the song, the barbarian’s paint falls away and the original painting is reborn. It has been suggested that the barbarian and the genius are Stalin and Shostakovich respectively. The work is largely sombre despite the composer’s official claim that he wished to write a positive work.
* Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, As Related to and edited by Solomon Volkov (1979), was supposedly based on interviews Volkov had with the composer. I have read the book in part and always doubted its accuracy.
I attended a performance of Shostakovich’s fifth at Carnegie Hall on July 24, 2018. The conductor was Carlos Miguel Prieto. He was outstanding.
I jotted down the following notes on my way home that evening.
To say Shostakovich’s Fifth is his best symphony, which I think it is, is saying something, because he wrote (among a total of fifteen) so many outstanding symphonies.
I have never heard Shostakovich’s fifth live before…. to hear it live is a revelation.
There is a sort of mishmash or “mushy” affect with almost all recorded music — you don’t hear the individual instruments clearly enough. It’s sort of like a Jackson Pollack effect (I never had a taste for his works) of various colors oozing together.
In the Fifth Symphony, the instruments each “hold their own” and maintain their separate identities, yet they talk with the other instruments … there is a beautiful interplay among them. Yet, the overall architecture of the piece is never “lost in the shuffle.” Shostakovich, like Beethoven, is admirably clear. There is such clarity and such a sense of being propelled forward by an irresistible musical logic which recalls Beethoven’s Fifth.
To be able to visually see which instrument(s) are playing. The piano in the middle of the first movement (Moderato). Shostakovich uses instruments, orchestral color, brilliantly, but with restraint. The celesta at the very end of the same. At the end of the fourth movement (Allegro non troppo), I heard — could it be? — yes indeed, two harps playing, not one — interacting, so to speak, and sharing a melody — listening to a recording, one does not get this. To see how important to the overall piece the flute and other woodwind passages are. To see and hear the cymbals and timpani drums in the rousing finale. To see and hear how important the brass instruments are to the piece …. the trumpets held aloft blaring.
“Shostakovich’s Fifth–the Russian composer’s most popular symphony–was written during the darkest period of Stalinist oppression, and has set off an endless controversy about his ideological intentions and musical codes. The music is powerful, emotionally varied, and exceptionally lyrical. Like many Shostakovich symphonies, it is indebted to Mahler, especially in its juxtaposition of the sublime with the banal, its fondness for marches, the garish folk tunes in the scherzo, and the hymn-like lyricism in the slow movement.”
— program notes
Shostakovich’s fifth can stand on its own without extra-musical discussions or associations, and I think it’s better heard this way.
Posted here (above) is a recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Opus 103 (subtitled The Year 1905), conducted by Leopold Stokowski.
It is a marvelous symphony. Extremely moving. Program music that works and is entirely compelling from beginning to end. A powerful work. Like practically all — if not all — of Shostakovich’s works, it is very “Russian.” Meaning, could it have been composed anywhere else? Belong to any other musical tradition? In this respect, Shostakovich reminds me (as I have remarked elsewhere) of Aaron Copland.
I first heard the work when I was in college. My uncle Roger Handy gave me an LP of the world premiere recording (by Andre Clutyens) as a Christmas gift.
Symphony No. 11 in G minor (Opus 103; subtitled The Year 1905) by Dmitri Shostakovich was written in 1957 and premiered, by the USSR Symphony Orchestra under Natan Rakhlin, on 30 October 1957. The subtitle of the symphony refers to the events of the Russian Revolution of 1905. The first performance given outside the Soviet Union took place in London’s Royal Festival Hall on 22 January 1958 when Sir Malcolm Sargent conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The US Premiere was given by Leopold Stokowski and the Houston Symphony Orchestra on 7 April 1958.
The symphony was conceived as a popular piece and proved an instant success in Russia — his greatest, in fact, since the Leningrad Symphony fifteen years earlier. The work’s popular success, as well as its earning him a Lenin Prize in April 1958, marked the composer’s formal rehabilitation from the Zhdanov Doctrine of 1948.
A month after the composer had received the Lenin Prize, a Central Committee resolution “correcting the errors” of the 1948 decree restored all those affected by it to official favor, blaming their treatment on “J. V. Stalin’s subjective attitude to certain works of art and the very adverse influence exercised on Stalin by Molotov, Malenkov and Beria.”
The symphony is scored for 3 flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling cor anglais), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling bass clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, snare drum, cymbals, orchestral bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, tubular bells, 2 harps (preferably doubled), celesta and strings. [Typical of Shoskakovich’s supreme gift for orchestral color.]
The symphony has four movements played without break, and lasts approximately one hour.
1. Adagio (The Palace Square)
The first movement is cold, quiet, and somewhat menacing, with transparent strings and distant though ominous timpani motifs. This is underscored with brass calls, also as though from a great distance.
2. Allegro (The 9th of January)
The second movement, referring to the events of the Bloody Sunday, consists of two major sections. The first section probably depicts the petitioners of 22 January 1905 [O.S. 9 January], in the city of Saint Petersburg, in which crowds descended on the Winter Palace to complain about the government’s increased inefficiency, corruption, and harsh ways. This first section is busy and constantly moves forward. It builds to two steep climaxes, then recedes into a deep, frozen calm in the prolonged piccolo and flute melodies, underscored again with distant brass.
Another full orchestra build-up launches into a pounding march, in a burst from the snare drum like gunfire and fugal strings, as the troops descend on the crowd. This breaks out into an intense section of relentless strings, and trombone and tuba glissandos procure a nauseating sound underneath the panic and the troops’ advance on the crowd. Then comes a section of mechanical, heavily repetitive snare drum, bass drum, timpani, and tam-tam solo before the entire percussion sections breaks off at once. Numbness sets in with a section reminiscent of the first movement.
3. Adagio (Eternal Memory)
The third movement is a lament on the violence, based on the revolutionary funeral march “You Fell as Victims”. Toward the end, there is one more outbreak, where material from the second movement is represented.
4. Allegro non troppo (Tocsin)
The finale begins with a march, (again repeating material from the climax of the second movement), which reaches a violent climax, followed by a return to the quietness of the opening of the symphony, introducing a haunting cor anglais melody. After the extended solo, the bass clarinet returns to the earlier violence, and the orchestra launches into a march once again. The march builds to a climax with snare drum and chimes in which the tocsin (alarm bell or warning bell) rings out in a resilient G minor, while the orchestra insists a G major. In the end, neither party wins, as the last full orchestra measure is a sustained G natural, anticipating the future events of 1917.
“I think … that the insistence on neatness and correctness [in writing] is one of the signs of a modern nervousness and irritability. When has clumsiness in composition been felt as so annoying, so enraging? The “good” writing of the New Yorker is such that one experiences a furious anxiety, in reading it, about errors and lapses from taste; finally, what emerges is a terrible hunger for conformity and uniformity. The smoothness of the surface and its high polish must not be marred. One has a similar anxiety in reading a novelist like Hemingway and comes to feel in the end that Hemingway wants to be praised for the offenses he does not commit. He is dependable; he never names certain emotions or ideas, and he takes pride in that—it is a form of honor. In it, really, there is submissiveness, acceptance of restriction.”
— Saul Bellow, “Dreiser and the Triumph of Art,” Commentary, May 1951
I agree with Bellow. I admire good writing, never cease trying to study and learn from it, deplore lapses including those caused by ignorance of style and grammar points. And, yet, a writer must dare to write and be guided by the subject and fidelity to the truth of experience. I have always felt that The New Yorker was overrated, for precisely the reasons Bellow states. Writers writing well, often about not much of anything, with an archness that leaves the reader feeling unfulfilled.
The house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,
The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,
The hoist-up of beams, the push of them in their places, laying them regular,
Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises according as they were prepared,
The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the men, their curv’d limbs,
Bending, standing, astride the beams, driving in pins, holding on by posts and braces,
The hook’d arm over the plate, the other arm wielding the axe,
The floor-men forcing the planks close to be nail’d,
Their postures bringing their weapons downward on the bearers,
The echoes resounding through the vacant building;
The huge storehouse carried up in the city well under way,
The six framing-men, two in the middle and two at each end,
carefully bearing on their shoulders a heavy stick for a
cross-beam,
The crowded line of masons with trowels in their right hands
rapidly laying the long side-wall, two hundred feet from front to rear,
The flexible rise and fall of backs, the continual click of the trowels striking the bricks,
The bricks one after another each laid so workmanlike in its place, and set with a knock of the trowel-handle,
The piles of materials, the mortar on the mortar-boards, and the steady replenishing by the hod-men;
As I told my students when I was teaching at St. John’s University, Walt Whitman the poet used the simplest words, images, and tropes he could find. He built his poems out of all-original materials that were, so to speak, close at hand (sort of like a bird using twigs on the ground to build a nest) — nothing was “literary” or derived.
Here we see minute observation.
The particular made universal. The concrete, the here and now, timeless.
Wonderful.
Whitman had a genius for using so called deverbal nouns, as is explained by James Perrin Warren in a fascinating book I have been reading: Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990).
Walt Whitman’s father, Walter Whitman, was a carpenter and house builder. Whitman was living in Brooklyn when Leaves of Grass was first published. His father was making a living then as a house builder. It was there that Ralph Waldo Emerson called in the year 1855 upon the poet, who in the frontispiece to the first edition of Leaves of Grass was pictured as a common working man, a Christlike carpenter-poet.
Posted here (above) is what seems to me to be one of the best renditions of “Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras” (For all flesh, it is as grass), the second movement of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), performed by the Berlin Philharmonic.
This extraordinarily powerful, lyrical movement never fails to move me. I had long thought that the lyrics must mean something like: Let’s face it, everyone is going to die; death and decay are inevitable. But the words from scripture are actually consoling.
“From the beginning Brahms had intended the work to be more of a consolation for the living than a memorial for the dead. …” — Program Notes, 1998 Summer Concert of the San Francisco Lyric Chorus
Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras
und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen
wie des Grases Blumen.
Das Gras ist verdorret
und die Blume abgefallen.
So seid nun geduldig, lieben Brüder,
bis auf die Zukunft des Herrn.
Siehe, ein Ackermann wartet
auf die köstliche Frucht der Erde
und ist geduldig darüber,
bis er empfahe den Morgenregen und Abendregen. So seid geduldig.
Aber des Herrn Wort bleibet in Ewigkeit.
Die Erlöseten des Herrn werden wieder kommen und gen Zion kommen mit Jauchzen;
Freude, ewige Freude,
wird über ihrem Haupte sein;
Freude und Wonne werden sie ergreifen,
und Schmerz und Seufzen wird weg müssen.
Behold, all flesh is as the grass,
and all the goodliness of man
is as the flower of grass.
For lo, the Grass with’reth,
and the flower thereof decayeth.
Now, therefore, be patient, O my brethren, unto the coming of Christ.
See how the husbandman waiteth
for the precious fruit of the earth,
and hath long patience for it,
until he receive the early and latter rain.
So be ye patient.
Albeit the Lord’s word endureth for evermore. The redeemed of the Lord shall return again and come rejoicing unto Zion;
gladness, joy everlasting,
joy upon their heads shall be;
joy and gladness, these shall be their portion, and sighing shall flee from them.
“The grass that grows by absorbing the life-giving energy of the sun becomes [in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass] a metaphor of ‘the ceaseless springing forth of life from death.’” — David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pg. 240
My longtime friend Bill Dalzell, who for many years lived in New York City, introduced me to so many things when I first came to New York in the late 1960’s.
Among other things, Bill introduced me to cinema and art. We made several trips together to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bill, a New York transplant from a suburb of Pittsburgh, where he grew up, was — like many having adopted New York City as their home, including myself — an enthusiast of all New York had to offer. He knew all the inexpensive, interesting things to see and do in the City.
Bill used to say: “Would you care to hear me sing the praises of New York?” He used to marvel at the fact that so many people of all races and nationalities lived cheek by jowl in harmony. At the richness of culture. At the convenience of things such as getting around. At how much the City had to offer at what were then modest prices.
Admission to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was free. The main branch of the New York Public Library was open 365 days a year. The subway and bus fares were 20 cents. So was the Staten Island ferry, one of the fun, vivifying, and inexpensive things he enjoyed doing. (We would get off on the Staten Island side, walk around a bit, have a cup of coffee, and take the ferry back to Manhattan.) A meal of wholesome, plain food at the Automat (where Bill used to love to sit and drink coffee while lost in thought) could be had for less than a dollar. A glass of beer in a bar was 20 cents, and usually every third beer was on the house. Films cost less than two dollars. Rents were cheap. Bill paid twenty-nine dollars a month for a one-bedroom apartment on East 5th Street.
Bill introduced me to the paintings of Edward Hopper, one of his favorite painters. (Hopper’s paintings are, for the most part, exhibited in New York museums.) Bill and I, at his suggestion, made a one-day excursion to Nyack, NY to view Hopper’s birthplace.
During our museum trips, he pointed out how Hopper made use of light.
“The light is different in America,” Bill would say. (He had traveled practically everywhere in the world on a limited budget.) By “different,” Bill meant brighter. More brilliant. Yes. Brilliant light. An observation which I do believe to be true. I have observed and thought about this often.
I have come over the years to be myself fascinated by light. Early morning light, daylight, late afternoon light. The light hitting the grass. Different shades of light and degrees of brightness. Summer light. Autumn light. Winter light.
While I would and could never aspire to be an artist — I have no innate talent and only a limited appreciation of the visual arts — I have been taking photographs in the City in parks, on the shorelines, and of houses and streets on my walks, I have posted below some photographs of mine in which an appreciation of sunlight as viewed from ground level is expressed in the photo. I am fascinated by the quality of sunlight in different seasons and at different times of the day.
Most of Hopper’s figure paintings focus on the subtle interaction of human beings with their environment-–carried out with solo figures, couples, or groups. His primary emotional themes are solitude, loneliness, regret, boredom, and resignation. He expresses the emotions in various environments, including the office, in public places, in apartments, on the road, or on vacation. … In many Hopper paintings, the interaction is minimal.
The effective use of light and shadow to create mood is central to Hopper’s methods. Bright sunlight (as an emblem of insight or revelation), and the shadows it casts, also play symbolically powerful roles in Hopper paintings such as “Early Sunday Morning” (1930), “Summertime” (1943), “Seven A.M.” (1948), and “Sun in an Empty Room” (1963).
Hopper always said that his favorite thing was “painting sunlight on the side of a house.”
Although critics and viewers interpret meaning and mood in his cityscapes, Hopper insisted “I was more interested in the sunlight on the buildings and on the figures than any symbolism.” As if to prove the point, his late painting “Sun in an Empty Room” (1963) is a pure study of sunlight.
countryside near Helsinki, Finland; photograph by Elisabeth van der Meer
East Green, Central Park, New York; photograph by Roger W. Smith
Inwood Hill Park, New York City; photograph by Roger W. Smith
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it
is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe
of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps,
And here you are the mother’s laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward. . . . and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.
