Bluebeard's Castle

So the pathetic fallacy has to do with feeling nature is acting or responding in a way directed at you, or something similar to that going on in a narrative structure. I think. Anyway, what is it called when you feel cultural (as opposed to natural) creations may be directed at you? Is it simply vanity or narcissism or self-centeredness? I guess I’m not far enough gone to actually feel like this, but often I come across some piece of film, music, or art that seems to hit me so precisely it seems something must have intervened to bring me to it.

I’m thinking about this because on Thursday night I saw a performance of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It was incredible. The story is of Duke Bluebeard and his 4th wife, Judith. It’s set completely in Bluebeard’s castle (although in many performances there is a spoken introduction explaining that the theater or stage might as well be the theater of our minds [this was not part of the performance at the CSO]). All the action concerns Judith trying and succeeding in getting the keys to 7 doors in the castle. They each open to rooms that contain different things that can be interpreted as both literal records of Bluebeard's life as well as metaphoric representations of someone’s mind, personality or soul. Upon reaching and opening the 7th door, still against Bluebeard’s wishes, it becomes clear that Judith and Bluebeard’s love can no longer be experienced and he will now only be able to experience her abstractly (literally she is locked in the room, but, again, metaphorically in his mind). Peter Bartók, the composer’s son, puts it quite eloquently:

No woman, then, can give Bluebeard joy and happiness on her own terms, as Judith had wanted to. The women are forever enshrined, as figures of undying beauty, in the secret recesses of the castle of gloom, which in its turn symbolized man's soul. Bluebeard's women make his flowers bloom and his treasures grow; in other words, they are the source of the creative man's inspiration. But as living women, they cannot share his life. They exist only as idealized memories. Without being a wife-killer in the material sense, Bluebeard does kill his women on the “inner” stage. Tragic man can find no fulfillment in woman.

The music matches the emotional intensity and I was nearly brought to tears a couple of times. The story is told simply in one act with just two characters and succinctly (I can’t imaging it was longer than 30 minutes) but it is incredibly profound and complex.

There was also a performance of the the 2006 Flute Concerto concerto by Marc-André Dalbavie. It was one of the most exciting pieces of music I have heard in years.

All That

One of the last things I read in the naughties was “All That” by the late David Foster Wallace. I am not a David Foster Wallace nut, or anything even close, but I do love his writing a lot, and this essay, published in the New Yorker in early/mid December helped remind me of why. The last thing I had read by him was Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. It’s a math book. And it becomes too dense for me half way through. And it’s incredible. Oscillating from complex equations, peculiar philosophies and real world applications it shows Foster Wallace at his most idiosyncratic and helps solidify him as a spokesman for an era, if not a generation, that is equally comfortable with the banal, the ironic and the transcendent.

The beauty of “All That” is it has similar investigations into justifying concrete ideas with spiritual and abstract ones while still being a damn good read (and, surprisingly, a holiday themed one at that). It traces his spiritual beliefs back to a gift he received as a child (a toy cement mixer that his mother convinced him was magic) that led to a belief (or furthered a belief) that “magic not only permeated the everyday world but did so in a way that was thoroughly benign and altruistic.” He describes his feeling towards magic as “reverence,” which he defines as the “natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena.” This is distinct from the feelings of “respect” and “obedience” which he claims should “describe the attitude one takes toward observable and physical phenomena, such a gravity or money.” One is unanswered and leaves us ungrounded, while the others literally (in the case of gravity) or metaphorically (in the case of money) ground us. But each is significant and should be equally considered.

Oh, there is also some totally incredible descriptions of feelings of ecstasy and how voices in our heads are kind of real. Or something. Anyway, here's a link to the whole essay: All That.

Thankful for One Less Zero

So yesterday, as we all know, was the end of what I guess is now commonly referred to as the noughties (I preferred the oughts, but I guess that seemed too twentieth century or something, or maybe just not negative enough, which addresses my next point). From what I can tell almost everybody hated the noughties. I understand the sentiment. A lot of really terrible shit happened from 2000 to 2009 (I feel no need to go into specifics). The problem I have with embracing that negative feeling is that on a personal level the noughties were the best decade of my life. Almost every year was better than the one before it. From the people I met, to the things I did, places I visited, art I saw, music I heard, and books I read, I was constantly amazed at how incredible life and the world was. And while many things were going to hell around me, it seemed there were equally many things that were evidencing how great things could be. So it’s hard for to say good riddance to the noughties, but it is easy for me to welcome the one less zero of the rest of the century.