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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