4 THE THIRD & FOURTH STEPS: Music & the General Culture
Just as in philosophy and art, there is a doorway into the line of despair in music as well. Debussy (1862-1918) is the doorway into the field of modern music. It is not as easy to trace the steps in music as it is in visual art; yet the parallels are there. It is not as easy because, inevitably, music has a more subjective element in it. Nevertheless, the general trend from Debussy until now is clear enough.
An exhaustive study, which we cannot undertake here, would involve considering jazz as well as classical music. Such a consideration would involve discussing the shift in form and content in the twenties and thirties when jazz was introduced into the white man’s culture, and how the jazz of the forties was the doorway to the despair of a section of modern jazz.
But we will turn our attention to music more in line with the classical tradition. A few illustrations must suffice for the whole. There could be much discussion of detail in this, and yet the total direction of movement is clear. In a later chapter I will deal with the music of John Cage. Here I want to look at musique concrète.
MUSIQUE CONCRÈTE
Musique concrète was developed by Pierre Schaeffer (1910- ) in Paris. Musique concrète is not electronic music—that is, music made electronically and therefore consisting of sounds one does not normally hear. Musique concrète is real sound, but seriously distorted. In the beginning it was created by jumping grooves on a phonographic record. Later Pierre Schaeffer invented a machine by which the distortions can be carefully controlled. With his machine he can lift out the source of the sound, split it up, reverse it, slow it down or speed it up—in fact, do just about anything to alter it. To hear the result is to begin to distrust your ears, just as in Op Art you begin to distrust your eyes. The effect is overwhelming. The message which comes across from the distortion is the same as in modern painting. All is relative, nothing is sure, nothing is fixed, all is in flux. Musique concrète is just one more way of presenting the uniform message of modern man.
UNESCO has put out a record, entitled Premiere panorama de musique concrète. In it is a clear example of what these men are doing, including a selection by one of Schaeffer’s friends, Pierre Henry.
He used the human voice speaking Greek. Greek, of course, is exactly the right language to speak in such a setting, for it is the language representative of our Western culture. The voice is first built up out of chance sounds, reflecting modern man’s view that man who verbalizes arose by chance in a chance universe with only a future of chance ahead of him. Henry portrays this remorselessly in sound. Suddenly something else begins to happen; the voice begins to degenerate and to fall apart. It is as though one is watching a beautiful woman die and totally decompose before one’s eyes. But in this case it is not just the physical body, but the whole person who rots away. It begins to shiver, to shake, to be corrupted. It begins with chance sounds, goes on to the Greek, and ends in chaos. There can be no other terminus when antithesis dies, when relativism is born and when the possibility of finding any universal which would make sense of the particulars is denied. This is the consensus of the cultural environment, and this is that world-spirit which we must reject and into which we must speak.
HENRY MILLER
With this American novelist (1891-1980), we begin our consideration of the fourth step in the line of despair, which I have named general culture. This could be divided into a number of steps, but I have placed these subjects together under this heading for convenience.
Young people often said that the writing of Henry Miller was not just pornographic but was a philosophical statement. Parents of these young people ask me whether I agree. I reply, “Yes, your child is right. They are certainly dirty books and because of this will soil you. However, they were not intended to be mere pornography. Miller was an antilaw writer. He smashed everything to pieces so that there is nothing left. Even sex is smashed. This is especially devastating because it is often in the sexual area of life that men hope to find some kind of meaning when they have abandoned the search elsewhere.”
Not only with Miller but also with other modern writers, we can appreciate the result of this as we notice how they use women in their books. The playmate becomes the plaything, and we are right back with the Marquis de Sade. (I want to talk about the later changed Henry Miller a little farther on.)
PHILOSOPHIC HOMOSEXUALITY
Some forms of homosexuality today are of a similar nature, in that they are not just homosexuality but a philosophic expression. One must have understanding for the real homophile’s problem. But much modern homosexuality is an expression of the current denial of antithesis. It has led in this case to an obliteration of the distinction between man and woman. So the male and the female as complementary partners are finished. This is a form of homosexuality which is a part of the movement below the line of despair. In much of modern thinking all antithesis and all the order of God’s creation is to be fought against—including the male-female distinctions. The pressure toward unisex is largely rooted here. But this is not an isolated problem; it is a part of the world-spirit of the generation which surrounds us. It is imperative that Christians realize the conclusions which are being drawn as a result of the death of absolutes.
JOHN OSBORNE
In the area of drama, another aspect of general culture, it is important to consider John Osborne (1929-1980), one of the Angry Young Men. In many ways he is a great playwright, but he has been accurately described as an idealist who has not been able to find an ideal. This is a magnificent description. Osborne is a man of temperament, courage and sensitivity; a man to ride on a charger with his lance at the ready into the great battles of life. He is an idealist by choice, but without an ideal: a man who cares and yet has found nothing worth caring about. His whole approach is summed up with magnificent clarity in his play Martin Luther. As history it has weaknesses, but in general it portrays the early part of Luther’s life with considerable accuracy. But the moment of truth comes with great force at the very end. Luther is standing with one of his babies in his arms. The elderly head of Luther’s old monastery comes to visit him. They face each other. The old man says, “Martin, do you know you are right?” And against all history Osborne makes him reply, “Let’s hope so.” The lights come on, the curtain is down, and the play is finished. The drama critic of the London Times understood. He said, “Isn’t it interesting that he had to put in that last line to make it a twentieth-century play!”
DYLAN THOMAS
When we review modern poetry as part of our own general culture, we find the same tendency to despair. Near the time of his death, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) wrote a poem called “Elegy.” He did not actually put it together himself, so we cannot be too sure of the exact order of the stanzas. But the way it is given below is probably the right order. This poem is by a fellow human being of our generation. He is not an insect on the head of a pin, but shares the same flesh and blood as we do, a man in real despair:
Too proud to die, broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride
On the darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow
Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother’s breast.
Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found.
I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Moon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead
Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind),
I am not too proud to cry that He and he
will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain.
Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.
The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.
Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the light of the lording sky
An old blind man is with me where I go
Walking in the meadow of his son’s eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres
Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.
O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. Oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.
Until I die he will not leave my side.
In the Festival Hall in London, in one of the higher galleries in the rear corridor, there is a bronze of Dylan Thomas. Anyone who can look at it without compassion is dead. There he faces you with a cigarette at the side of his mouth, the very cigarette hung in despair. It is not good enough to take a man like this or any of the others and smash them as though we have no responsibility for them. This is sensitivity crying out in darkness. But it is not mere emotion; the problem is not on this level at all. These men were not producing art for art’s sake, or emotion for emotion’s sake. These things are a strong message coming out of their own worldview.
There are many means for killing men, as men, today. They all operate in the same direction: no truth, no morality. You do not have to go to art galleries or listen to the more sophisticated music to be influenced by their message. The common media of cinema and television will do it effectively for you.
MODERN CINEMA, THE MASS MEDIA AND THE BEATLES
We usually divide cinema and television programs into two classes—good and bad. The term good as used here means “technically good” and does not refer to morals. The “good” pictures are the serious ones, the artistic ones, the ones with good shots. The “bad” are simply escapist, romantic, only for entertainment. But if we examine them with care, we notice that the “good” pictures are actually the worst pictures. The escapist film may be horrible in its own way, but the so-called “good” pictures have almost all been developed by men holding the modern philosophy of no certain truth and no certain distinction between right and wrong. This does not imply they have ceased to be men of integrity, but it does mean that the films they produce are tools for teaching their beliefs. Three outstanding modern film producers are Fellini and Antonioni of Italy, and Bergman of Sweden. Of these three producers, Bergman has given the clearest expression perhaps of the contemporary despair. He has said that he deliberately developed the flow of his pictures—that is, the whole body of his movies rather than just individual films—in order to teach existentialism.
His existentialist films led up to but do not include the film The Silence. This film was a statement of utter nihilism. Man, in this picture, did not even have the hope of authenticating himself by an act of the will. The Silence was a series of snapshots with immoral and pornographic themes. The camera just took them without any comment. “Click, click, click, cut!” That is all there is. Life is like that: unrelated, having no meaning as well as no morals.
In passing, it should be noted that Bergman’s presentation in The Silence was related to the American “Black Writers” (nihilistic writers), the antistatement novel which was best shown perhaps in Capote’s In Cold Blood. These, too, were just a series of snapshots without any comment as to meaning or morals.
Such writers and directors have had a large impact upon the mass media, and so the force of the monolithic worldview of our age presses in on every side.
The 1960s was the time of many powerful, philosophic films. The posters advertising Antonioni’s Blow-Up in the London Underground were inescapable as they told the message of that film: “Murder without guilt; love without meaning.” The mass of people may not enter an art museum, may never read a serious book. If you were to explain the drift of modern thought to them, they might not be able to understand it; but this does not mean that they are not influenced by the things they see and hear—including the cinema and what is considered “good,” nonescapist television.
No greater illustration could be found of the way these concepts were carried to the masses than “pop” music and especially the work of the Beatles. The Beatles moved through several stages, including the concept of the drug and psychedelic approach. The psychedelic began with their records Revolver, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” This was developed with great expertness in their record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in which psychedelic music, with open statements concerning drug-taking, was knowingly presented as a religious answer. The religious form was the same vague pantheism which predominates much of the new mystical thought today. One indeed does not have to understand in a clear way the modern monolithic thought in order to be infiltrated by it. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was an ideal example of the manipulating power of the new forms of “total art.” This concept of total art increases the infiltrating power of the message by carefully conforming the technical form used to the message involved. This is used in the theater of the absurd, the Marshall McLuhan type of television program, the new cinema and the new dance with someone like Merce Cunningham. The Beatles used this in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by making the whole record one unit so the whole is to be listened to as a unit and makes one thrust, rather than the songs being only something individually. In this record the words, the syntax, the music and the unity of the way the individual songs were arranged form a unity of infiltration.
Those were the days of the ferment of the 1960s. Two things must be said about their results in the 1980s. First, we do not understand the 1980s if we do not understand that our culture went through these conscious wrestlings and expressions of the 1960s. Second, most people do not understandably think of all this now, but the results are very much still at work in our culture.
Our culture is largely marked by relativism and ultimate meaninglessness, and when many in the 1980s “join the system” they do so because they have nothing worth fighting for. For most, that was ended by the 1970s. It is significant that when Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was made a Broadway play (1974, Beacon Theater) it no longer had the ferment; it was “camp” and nostalgia—a museum piece of a bygone time.