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GG: Solitude, Exile and Ecstasy
Hi folks,
As promised, here's the script of the other radio program by Bruce Charlton.
Once again, if you have any comments about it please, send a Cc of your
message to Bruce at <bruce.g.charlton@newcastle.ac.uk>.
Enjoy it!
Silvio
MESSAGE FOLLOWS **********************************************************
Solitude, Exile and Ecstasy
Theme and Variations in Words and Music
Devised by
Bruce Charlton
Copyright 1987
Directed by Philip Martin
Broadcast BBC Radio 3 31 March 1991
(repeated 20 December 1991)
Words Henry David Thoreau - Ed Bishop
Hugh MacDiarmid - Ian Cuthbertson
Glenn Gould - Peter Marinker
Music J.S. Bach - 'Goldberg Variations' BWV 988
recorded 1981 - Glenn Gould CBS D37779
-- <> --
[GOLDBERG VARIATIONS (GV); ARIA]
THOREAU When I wrote the following words I lived alone, in the
woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had
[woodland built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord,
sounds Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labour of my
throughout] hands only. I lived there two years and two months.
Near the end of March 1845, I borrowed an ax and went
down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I
intended to build my house, and began to cut down some
tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for
timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but
perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit
your fellow men to have an interest in your enterprise.
I built thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten
feet, wide by fifteen long, and eight feet posts, with a
garret and a closet, a large window on either side, two
trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace
opposite. The exact cost of my house was twenty eight
dollars, twelve and a half cents!
[GV; VARIATION 1]
MACDIARMID I came to Whalsay, this little north Isle of the
Shetland Group, in 1933. I was absolutely down-and-out
[seashore at the time - with no money behind me at all, broken
sounds down in health, unable to secure remunerative employment
throughout] of any kind, and wholly concentrated on projects in
poetry and other literary fields which could bring me no
momentary return whatever, involved continuous intense
effort ridiculously out of proportion to my strength,
and called for facilities, in the way of books, papers,
and even intercourse - the friction of mind upon mind,
since isolation and a too complete self-centredness were
definitely dangerous, not only to the qualities of the
work to be produced but to my own mental stability or,
if scarcely that - for if I had been capable of
developing any form of insanity, I would certainly have
carried myself irrevocably over the border line long ago
- at least to the generation and maintenance of the
necessary, or at any rate the most helpful, moods.
We - that is to say, my wife, our son (now going on
five, and so a baby then of little more than eighteen
months), and I - have been 'marooned' in Whalsay ever
since, and are likely to remain so.
[GV; VARIATION 7]
GOULD The north has fascinated me since childhood. In my
school days, I used to pore over whichever maps of that
[Low mumble region I could get my hands on, though I found it
of city exceedingly difficult to remember whether Great Bear or
traffic Great Slave was farther north. The idea of the country
throughout] intrigued me, but my notion of what it looked like was
pretty much restricted to the romanticized,
art-nouveau-tinged, Group of Seven paintings which, in
my day, adorned virtually every second schoolroom, and
which probably served as a pictorial introduction to the
north for a great many people of my generation.
A bit later on, I made a few tentative forays into the
north and began to make use of it, metaphorically, in my
writing. When I went to the north, I had no intention
of writing about it, or of referring to it, even
parenthetically, in anything that I wrote. And yet,
almost despite myself, I began to draw all sorts of
metaphorical allusions based on what was really a very
limited knowledge of the country and a very casual
exposure to it. I found myself writing musical
critiques, for instance, in which the north - the idea
of the north - began to serve as a foil for other ideas
and values that seemed to me depressingly
urban-oriented and spiritually limited thereby.
Now of course, such metaphorical manipulation of the
north is a bit. suspect, not to say romantic, because
there are very few places today which are out of reach
by, and out of touch with, the style and pace-setting
attitudes and techniques of Madison Avenue. Time,
Newsweek, Life, Look and The Saturday Review, can be
airlifted into Frobisher Bay or Inuvik, just about as
easily as a local contractor can deliver them to the
neighborhood news-stand, and there are probably people
living in the heart of Manhattan who can manage every
bit as independent and hermit-like an existence as a
prospector tramping the sort of lichen-covered tundra
that A.Y. Jackson was so fond of painting north of Great
Bear Lake.
Admittedly, it's a question of attitude, and I'm not at
all sure that my own quasi-allegorical attitude toward
the north is the proper way to make use of it or even an
accurate way in which to define it. Nevertheless, I'm
by no means alone in this reaction to the North; there
are very few people who make contact with it and emerge
entirely unscathed. Something really does happen to
most people who go into the north - they became at least
aware of the creative opportunity which the physical
fact of the country represents and, quite often I think,
come to measure their own work and life against that
rather staggering creative possibility - they become, in
effect, philosophers.
MACDIARMID To mention Karel Capek. I found that we had a great
deal in common. Our talk was mainly of matters which
were the themes of his last book - Travels in the North
- a few years later. When Karel Capek was a little boy
he dreamed of discovering a marvellous island above the
Arctic Circle, where mangoes would be growing on the
slopes of a volcano, amid the eternal ice. Later there
was his mind's lifelong journey to the North, on the
wings of the great literature of Scandinavia. And
always he cherished the thought of an actual pilgrimage
to 'just the North'; the North of birch trees and
forests, and sparkling water, and dewy mists and
silver coolness,' and altogether a beauty that is more
tender and severe than any other'. So at last he made
his Northern journey; across the neat fairy-tale
landscapes of Denmark, among the lakes and islands and
granite boulders and red plank farmhouses of Sweden, up
through Norway and the great Northern forests, and
beyond the Arctic Circle into that unreal world where
one may see 'midnight rainbows hanging from one shore to
the other, a mild and golden sunset mirrored in the sea
before a frosty morning dawn'; so to the 'end of
Europe' at the North Cape.
[GV; VARIATION 13]
THOREAU Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long
rainstorms in the spring or fall, which confined me to
the house for the afternoon as well as the forenoon,
soothed by their ceaseless roar and pelting; when an
early twilight ushered in a long evening in which many
thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves.
There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our
horizon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is
not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is
always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated
and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. For
what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some
square miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy,
abandoned to me by men? My nearest neighbor is a mile
distant, and no house is visible from any place but the
hill-tops within half a mile of my own. I have my
horizon bounded by woods all to myself; a distant view,
of the railroad where it touches the pond on the one
hand, and of the fence which skirts the woodland road on
the other. But for the most part it is as solitary
where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or
Africa as New Eng1and.
I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a
little world all to myself. At night there was never a
traveller passed by house, or knocked at my door, more
than if I were the first or last man; unless it were in
the spring, when at long intervals some came from the
village to fish for pouts - they plainly fished much
more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited
their hooks with darkness - but they soon retreated,
usually with light baskets and left "the world to
darkness and to me", and the black kernel of the night
was never profaned by any human neighborhood. I believe
that men are generally still a little afraid of the
dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity
and candles have been introduced.
GOULD Solitude is the pre-requisite for ecstatic experience,
especially the experience most valued by the
post-Wagnerian artist - the condition of heroism. One
can't feel oneself heroic without having first been
cast-off by the world, or perhaps by having done the
casting off oneself.
[GV; VARIATION 16]
GOULD I don't know what the effective ratio would be, but I've
always had some sort of intuition that for every hour
you spend in the company of other human beings, you need
"x" number of hours alone. Now, what "x" represents I
don't really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or
seven and two-eighths, but it is a substantial ratio.
THOREAU I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the
time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon
wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never
found the companion that was so companionable as
solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we
go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.
A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be
where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of
space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The
really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of
Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the
desert.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short
intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value
for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and
give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese
that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of
rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this
frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to
open war.
THOREAU We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and
about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in
each other's way, and stumble over one another, and I
think that we thus lose some respect for one another.
Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important
and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a
factory - never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would
be better if there were but one inhabitant to a square
mile, as where I live.
MACDIARMID As the years of my exile on this little Shetland island
stretch out, it becomes increasingly strange to have my
rare interludes back in Edinburgh or Glasgow or
Manchester among civilised people. They are to me like
sparkling water in a thirsty land, these comings into
relationship again with minds keen, alert, attuned to
beauty. I realize that I had almost forgotten that
there were people who had thoughts and could clothe them
in words not only worthy of rational beings, but even
make such words interesting, eloquent. (I do not want
to be unfair to Shetland in the least. If there are no
such people in Shetland, there are exceedingly few in
Scotland or England either - nor more than one per
100,000.)
MACDIARMID Except for these brief visits in Scotland and England,
and the rare occasions in the summertime when I have
friends - authors, artists, and students - to stay with
me in Shetland, I see nobody who has read widely enough
to possess grounds on which to base, if not opinions, at
least reasonable speculations. I hear nothing but the
inane phrases of women. 'It's all in the Bible, you
know.... Moore, you know, Old Moore. He knew, and they
do say that the Queen had a dream... And you remember
what Churchill said...?' And the men are as ignorant
and incoherent as the women, even the young men, sailors
who have been all over the world and soldiers in the
present War and the previous war, with their easy laughs
and childish pronouncements upon the development of the
awful dramas in which they have taken part. They have
read nothing - never open a newspaper, even. What in
Heavens name have I to do with such people? Why, how,
have I made such an association possible?
[GV; VARIATION 20]
MACDIARMID This is not a restful place in which to write. The
cottage is rattling like a 'tin lizzie' in a
90-miles-per-hour wind, and every now and again there is
a terrific rattling of hail. We have had well nigh
continuous gales, with heavy snow-storms and great
downpours of rain, for the last two months - the worst
winter the Shetlands have had within living memory.
I could not have lived anywhere else that is known to me
these last four years without recourse to the poorhouse.
We were not only penniless when we arrived in Whalsay -
I was in and exceedingly bad state, psychologically and
physically. I am always least able to 'put my best foot
forward' and do anything that brings in money when I am
hardest up. I do my best work when I have most irons in
the fire, and the fact that here I had all my time to
myself and had 'nothing to do but write' for a long time
made it almost impossible for me to do anything at all
and is, recurrently, a drawback still. Besides, I was
'out of touch with things' - I had not the advantage of
being 'on the spot' where 'anything might be going' -
and worst of all I had no books.
[GV; VARIATION 21]
GOULD I don't think that one can benefit from isolation in
whatever form, whether it's in an arctic outpost, or in
a Newfoundland village with no road to the outside
world, or in a religious community - which are the main
metaphors I have used - I don't think one could benefit
from that without first coming to terms with the
Zeitgeist, without deciding that its tremendously
tyrannical force has to be overthrown in one's own life
before one can really learn from such an experience.
THOREAU The greater part of what my neighbours call good I
believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of
anything, it is very likely to be my good behaviour.
What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You
may say the wisest thing you can, old man - you who have
lived seventy years, nor without honour of a kind - I
hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from
all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of
another like stranded vessels.
A mans life should be a stately march to a sweet but
unheard music, and when to his fellows it shall seem
irregular and inharmonious, he will only be stepping to
a livelier measure!
[GV; VARIATION 28]
GOULD Most people I have met who actually did immerse
themselves in the north seemed to end up, in whatever
disorganised fashion, being philosophers. Whatever the
motive in moving north may have been, each individual
seemed to go through a particular process which greatly
altered his life.
At first, most of these people resisted the change. But
after a while they usually reached a point when they
said to themselves: "No, that's not what I came up here
to do."
In general, I found that the characters who had stuck
out long enough and removed themselves from the sense of
curiosity about what their colleagues were thinking, or
how the world reacted to what they had done, developed
in an extraordinary way and underwent an extreme
metamorphosis.
MACDIARMID These are the thoughts running in my mind as I sit by my
Shetland window completing the writing of my
autobiography. Somehow or another - in the face of all
likelihood - we have flourished, although never
sufficiently, of course, to be secure at any time for
more than a week ahead. Tonight as I sit writing, the
cottage is amply and comfortably furnished, though I
have never succeeded in securing again many of the books
which were the background of my earlier books and which
were and remain so vital to my creative processes that,
in their absence, I have subtly to reorientate my
writing in other directions then, if I could recover my
old collections again, I would be likely to take -
nevertheless many hundreds of books have accumulated
about me again. All my principal intellectual interests
are well represented and catered for - geology,
biochemistry, plant ecology, physiology, psychology and
philosophy - and I have a fine array of the works of my
favourite writers: Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Doughty,
Stefan George and Paul Valery in poetry; Leo Chestov in
philosophy; Pavlov's lectures on conditioned reflexes;
and Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels, Adoratsky and many
other dialectical materialist writers!
[GV; VARIATION 29]
THOREAU If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend
my life in years past, it would probably surprise those
people who are somewhat acquainted with its actual
history; it would certainly astonish those who know
nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the
enterprises which I have cherished.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have
been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it,
on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two
eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the
present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some
obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than
in most men's, yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable
from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I
know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my
gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove,
and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I
have spoken to concerning them, describing their tracks
and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two
who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and
even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they
seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost
them themselves.
MACDIARMID (SITTING ON A RAISED BEACH, ABOVE THE SEA.
BACKGROUND SOUND EFFECTS OF SURF ON PEBBLES
AND SEA BIRDS. THE FOLLOWING IS A POEM)
We must be humble. We are so easily baffled by
appearance
And do not realise that these stones are at one with the
stars.
It makes no difference to them whether they are high or
low,
Mountain peak or ocean floor, palace, or pigsty.
There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no
ruined stones.
No visitor comes from the stars
But is the same as they are.
-Nay, it is easy to find a spontaneity here,
An adjustment to life, an ability
To ride it easily, akin to 'the buoyant
Prelapserian naturalness of a country girl
Laughing in the sun, not passion rent,
But sensing in the bound of her breasts vigours to come
Powered to make her one with the stream of earth life
round her',
But not yet as my Muse is, with this ampler scope,
This more divine rhythm, wholly at one
With the earth, riding with it, as the stones do
And all soon must.
I am enamoured of the desert at last,
The abode of supreme serenity is necessarily a desert,
My disposition is towards spiritual issues
Made inhumanly clear; I will have nothing interposed
Between my sensitiveness and the barren but beautiful
reality;
The deadly clarity of this 'seeing of a hungry man'
Only traces of a fever passing over my vision
Will vary, troubling it indeed, but troubling it only
In such a way that it becomes for a moment
Superhumanly, menacingly clear - the reflection
Of a brightness through a burning crystal.
A culture demands leisure and leisure presupposes
A self-determined rhythm of life; the capacity for
solitude
Is its test; by that the desert knows us.
It is not a question of escaping from life
But the reverse - a question of acquiring the power
To exercise the loneliness, the independence, of stones.
I remember how Thoreau wrote:
'I have a commonplace book for facts
And another for poetry,
But I find it difficult always
To preserve the vague distinctions
I had in mind - for the most interesting and beautiful
facts
Are so much the more poetry,
And that is their success.
- I see that if my facts
Were sufficiently vital and significant,
Perhaps transmuted more
Into the substance of the human mind,
I should need but one book of poetry
To contain them all!!
[GV; ARIA DA CAPO]
THE END