Welcome to another week and posting in the Word Emporium! Thank you for being here and giving me some of your precious reading time. I am heartily grateful to you all!
This week I have been thinking about a really bad habit I have developed over the years when it comes to reading stories or watching movies and even listening to radio plays and discussions. Namely that if I feel that something bad or terrible or deceptive is about to happen (to a character) it is almost as if I can predict the plot lines and I stop reading, watching, listening!
Don't like bad stuff…
I don't want to see or be a vicarious spectator even to the deception or anger or revenge, pain and suffering that is seemingly unfolding. Be that on a stage or screen or even In the pages of a book.
I am affected deeply sometimes by what I see performed. I do not think this is particularly unusual for most of us human beings. Yet it is a potentially powerful tool for others to possess and use. They can affect my state of being, my thoughts, my beliefs perhaps, even if it is in affect just temporary. Perhaps more worryingly they could attempt to do this on a more permanent basis.
So at times I get off the merry go round. Yet I am also aware at the same time that I am as equally worried by this attitude of mine in refusing to engage!
Seeking the balance should be my aim as ever.
Aristotle in his book Poetics, has a lot to say about artistic endeavours. Regarding tragedy in particular. For if it is constructed well in verse, the viewer can be brought to view their own fears through the spoken verses and performances. Such a well constructed play can have the effect of purging our fears as we see them in the lives of others on stage. Our lives are improved morally.
I however, second guess what has been constructed as I say above! It is as if I postpone the Aristotelian moment of catharsis in preference to remaining ignorant of the outcome!
I cock a snook at Aristotle and get off the bus! I delay or postpone indefinitely the purging of my emotions that some great art can accomplish. Instead of confronting fears and pains and sufferings and thus becoming their master as Aristotle says great poetry can do: I side step the uncomfortable process all together.
(P.O.I. for non British readers: see here for cock a snook meaning which probably will prove of no help at all! ( https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/cock-a-snook.html )
It is because perhaps that to much art in all its various forms that I consume at various stages throughout a week or month has also an ideological bent to it at the moment. It is either just too confrontational or just aiming to shock. Or not based in any reality. I have become jaded perhaps? Thus the art form fails to engender engagement let alone any cathartic outcome and I judge it very quickly. Yet were are the waters left for me to swim in?
Don't like good stuff…
I contrast this with my youth: when I used to watch television on occasion. In those days of the 1980s and 1990s there were those saccharin sweet US programmes full of family values and apple pie. I would often turn them off before the ending: which invariably was some kind of homily. So predictable!
So I clearly also then have a problem with those inevitable happy endings as well! Those that present a Mom and Pop side by side looking out over the veranda with a slightly swaying swing and a setting Sun disappearing over the horizon as their children lay contented, loved, corrected in the life lesson of the day in their upstairs bedrooms.
Or as is more likely nowadays with the more adult stories that invariably have pain, separation, recreational drugs use and abuse, senseless sex and human frailties and immoralities of every kind displayed without a qualm. No, I'm not just talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop. These themes like undercooked slabs of meat served on metaphorical and cultural platters as if delicious, dainty and nutritious. Yet are disgusting. They give me in reality terminable mind indigestion.
Wagner and the Ring Cycle
Thus this week I looked once again at my Apple library and saw four related volumes. Three of which I absolutely adored. They are the four parts of Richard Wagners Ring Cycle. I like Opera a lot. Hardly get to see them live myself. My Medici subscription however keeps that desire satiated.
Until late 2021 and early 2022 I had never, however, ventured into the world scape of Wagner. I had stayed safe with Mozart and Puccini. I had sailed into the bays of Benjamin Britten. Wagner however, I had avoided.
I always thought to myself: its big women with huge Chests and Horned helmets screaming in for Gods sake, German. I confess dear readers my past prejudices to you, in the hopes they are now gone. Purged, if you get my drift.
So, I went onto iTunes and bought the first Opera in this Cycle of Four Operas at that time. My intention was this: to at least see. If I did not like it…..no need to purchase the next one. So I got ‘Das Rheingold’ the first Opera and set an evening aside to watch and listen to this performance that was filmed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
You know, I think, what happened. It blew me away! It was fantastic! I was left stunned at just how beautiful and stunning this opera was. So I immediately bought ‘Die Walkure’ the second Opera and the next week set and evening aside! Repeat! I was so happy and even lamenting wasting 50 odd years without this in my life! So I bought the third Opera in the series: ‘Siegfried’. Once again the combination of music, drama, myth and story and acting was awesome.
Here comes the rub of todays posting. I knew that the fourth Opera, ‘Gotterdammerung’ has all those themes that I struggle with once I'm engaged in listening and watching. It will toy with my emotions. I will see my worst failings and my inner fears. It will blur the lines. It may well be for me, cathartic.
So I have never watched it. It is there in my library weeping for lack of employment.Until this week. It is time for me to finish the Ring Cycle.
To make this last step and who knows……..
Have a good week everyone whether or not it is the Twilight of the Gods!
Syre Byrd