BACH AS THE MIND BEHIND THE WILL

Schopenhauer’s philosophical interpretation of music as direct objectification of the will, developed further in his discussion of the meaningfulness of the bass notes, up to the highest notes,--- brings to mind, of all the composers who ever lived, the music of Bach, which becomes the subject of this entry. There is a colossal power in Bach’s music, at first suggesting that there is indeed a giant Schopenhauerian Wille at work here. But then it becomes exceedingly obvious that there is a giant mind behind that Wille, and it is that mind that controls Bach’s music, even at the heights of his expressions of feeling, such as in several emotionally-rich parts of his St. Matthew’s Passion, and in numerous similar examples of exquisite complex emotions, which are like beautiful horses harnessed to carry forth a Divine carriage, guided by Bach’s masterful, mathematical mind.

Indeed, his harmonies are mathematically perfect, his musical logic is unshakable, his polyphonies belong to the eerily esoteric, yet glaringly tangible world of geometrical Pythagorean mysteries. And of course, the world of Bach is all as profoundly original as his patently unprecedented Wohltemperierte Klavier… Only Wagner, after him, could create a world as wholesome, as original, and as unprecedented as Bach’s…

To make it perfectly clear still further, there is a Divine science revealing itself in Bach’s music; but Bach is not a scientist in the ordinary human sense, which I have hopefully conveyed throughout the section on The Genius And The Scholar. Bach is a colossal thinker, a philosopher of musical expression, and his system of thought parallels in music those of the world’s greatest philosophers, be it Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. But his unquestionable advantage over all the philosophers is that he can never be perceived as intruding into the sphere where others dwell and work. Whereas we can argue with any philosophical system on the grounds that there is always something that we disagree with there, there is no disagreement inside Bach’s domain, where he rules supreme as its inspired creator, mighty commander, and wise legislator.

SEMIOTICS OF MUSIC

This is a brief account of my erstwhile effort, at Moscow University, to develop a thesis on the Semiotics of Music, under the official academic supervision of a very interested Professor Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan.

Here is the bottom line. This project seemed indeed very interesting, but I am glad that, having no time for this larger-than-life undertaking (with, perhaps, another prospective job and a PhD offer from some excited professorial quarters?), due to my marital distractions of the year 1971/1972, I switched to Permyakov and to his structural paroemiology. Otherwise, I would have remained committed to a project, suitable for a music scientist, rather than for a music artist, and I would surely have ended up deeply disappointed in my awfully ambitious endeavor to “dissect music like a corpse,” (which is of course a semi-quote from Pushkin’s Mozart and Saglieri, naturally, put in the mouth of Saglieri, Pushkin’s epitome of mediocrity).

My lucid understanding of this rather unhappy connotation of my Semiotics of Music should be credited to my rereading of Pushkin (rereading in my mind, not in a book: I still keep much of Pushkin’s poetry vividly etched in my memory, reciting it from time to time to myself), in light of Schopenhauer’s analysis of music as a direct copy of Der Wille, not as a science of any kind, nor, mind you, as some tortuous copy of a copy, which precludes me from all consideration of music through the second-hand prism of musicology, even if the latter is hiding under the fancy name of structural musicology.

Having said that, I must repeat my acknowledgment of the fact that forty years ago the idea of writing this intriguing thesis was indeed very much on my mind, greatly bolstered by my special pride in the brilliantly short and effective title Semiotics of Music. To my credit, I never intended to reduce all music to a formal semiotic system. My interest was in creating a fancy formal system which could be applied to music with a number of noteworthy conclusions to be made.

I am not particularly anxious to dig up the corpse, after allowing it to stay buried for forty years, but a few fleeting reminiscences, which come to mind, can get themselves committed to paper (figuratively speaking), if only as a faraway memory.

In a broad-brush sketch, I regarded music as a system very similar to the system of natural languages, with a classification closely following the latter. Each notable composer of music represented a separate language of his own, these languages grouped into families and branches.

Individual notes constituted phonemes, while their vertical clusters corresponded to morphemes. Musical sequences were treated on several levels of complexity, corresponding to words, phrases, idioms (clichés) and such. The differences in timbre, such as involving the use of different instruments, etc., corresponded to metalinguistic phenomena, such as intonation in speech, for instance.

My Semiotics of Music employed in large measure the elements of Theory of Music and Musical Harmony (I was rather proud of my uncommon accomplishments in this abstruse field, and desired to show them off), but these were seen as the syntax of music only. My work went beyond syntax, of course, treating music as a well-developed communication system with signs and symbols denoting and connoting within groups of “lexicological” units. I went well beyond the musicologists’ preoccupation with various musical elements, to their usage by the composers within their endeavor to develop a personal communication system, which made them recognizable and comprehensible to the recipients of their aural message.

I do not know how this barely-started grandiose project might have worked out. It might have taken me so far away from my core interest in human interaction through politics, bargaining and in other extralingual modes of such interaction, that I would have become ashamed of dragging my pure virgin, music, into the lower world of filth and dissimulation, where it clearly does not belong. But I would never have given up my interest in politics, as doing so, and concentrating on the purely aesthetic enjoyment, would have been an unimaginable surrender, for no aesthetic shield can protect the innocent soul from being manipulated, and eventually corrupted, by the influence of the “lower” world, and without such proper understanding of this corrupting influence, and without exposing it for what it is, there can never be such a thing as a purely aesthetic enjoyment in a blissful out-of-this-worldly vacuum…

THE ABOMINABLE CONMAN. PART II.

…The critics of charlatanism and ignorance in philosophy and political science routinely accuse their quarry of lacking common sense. Common sense is of course a necessary, but by no means a sufficient condition of scientific probity. Which means that common sense alone cannot carry us to wisdom. On the contrary, the blessed country bumpkin, common sense and all, can easily fall prey to clever manipulators, whenever he is fed phony basic “facts” as his input upon which he is expected to form that “commonsense” judgment. Beware of the common sense, when it comes in the same package with glaring ignorance!

General education is indispensable as the basis in forming political judgments. Alas, decent education is in such short supply in this country (I mean, in the United States), that it is here more than anywhere else, that the greatest political stupidity can be expected to originate and to prosper…

The tragedy of historical education for one is that there is a quagmire of fact drowning in fiction right in the very place where the actual information bank ought to have been. Whether we may like it or not, the whole history of the twentieth century is mostly fake.

Stalin was cynically right when he called history “a class concept,” written by the ruling classes to defend their power against the surge of wannabes, who, in turn, want to come up with a “history” of their own. It is not about what actually happened but about what your leaders want you to think and to “know.” That’s why I insist that freedom of thought is such a rare and precious commodity (much greater, I say, than freedom of speech, which is creative and resilient enough to emerge on top in the survival of the fittest), and even more rare and precious than one might suspect, because thought control is permeating the political atmosphere of society to a similar extent as hydrocarbon emissions affect its physical counterpart.

Freedom of speech is worthless when the speech itself is from ignorance. It is imperative for us therefore to exercise our freedom of thought properly. We need to realize that our position vis-à-vis the social sciences of today is not that much different from Dèscartes’, and we need to diligently read the opening paragraph of his Method again and again, until we fully realize its awesome relevance to our own modern experience:

“From my childhood, I have been familiar with letters; and as I was given to believe that by their help a clear and certain knowledge of all which is useful in life might be acquired, I ardently desired instruction. But as soon as I had finished the full course of study, at the close of which it is customary to be admitted into the order of the learned, I completely changed my opinion. For, I found myself involved in so many doubts and errors, that I was convinced I had advanced no farther in all my attempts at learning, than the discovery at every turn of my own ignorance. Yet, I was studying in one of the most celebrated Schools in Europe, where I thought there must be learned men, if such were anywhere to be found. I had been taught all that others learned there; and not content with the sciences actually taught us, I had in addition read all the books that had fallen into my hands… I was thus led to take the liberty… of concluding that there was no science in existence that was of such a nature as I had previously been given to believe.”

In a sense, political science can be compared to chess. There is a saying among professional chess players that chess is not just a sport, a science, or an art, but all of the above. Science alone cannot make politics work. We know that all exact sciences are based on more or less arbitrary assumptions, and, therefore, their conclusions are tied to practical applications, and cannot be trusted as general principles. So, politics must possess a well-developed sense of intuition and a creative talent of its own, to help overcome the otherwise forbidding limitations of its respective components.

But the bottom line of our resistance to all charlatans and ignoramuses, a.k.a. experts, who come to deceive and mislead us into the selfish schemes of their own, is a will to truth, rather than to convenience, without which the truth, when it eventually comes out on its own, will never be coming to our rescue from the lie, but as a vengeful Erinys, bent on punishing us for our short-sighted hypocrisy.

THE ABOMINABLE CONMAN. PART I.

Talking about the vanity of the haves and the ignorance of the have-nots, and the charlatan experts taking advantage of both, Nietzsche, as always, is up to the challenge, putting his finger on the principle cause of this bothersome state of affairs:

“Most people are nothing, and are considered nothing, until they have dressed themselves up in general convictions and public opinions, in accordance with the tailor philosophy: clothes make people.” (Mixed Opinions and Maxims, #325)

He is not the only one to say it, of course. Hobbes and many others have said almost the same thing, but in different words, and, so far, the great philologist and poet Nietzsche says it much better! What I find even more appealing here is that he fits right into the tailor metaphor of the Andersen tale, which we have been discussing so far in this miniseries on the Emperors without clothes.

How do these reprehensible scoundrels, the abominable conmen, find the fertile ground for deceit, making sure that they can get away with their schemes, or, at least, that they have enough time to play their crooked games, and bail out before they are caught?

The state of unfreedom in repressive societies, as I have already had several occasions to remark, is hardly the best climate for the conmen to prosper, as the oppressed, paradoxically, compensate for their handicap by developing a keen and contrariant mind that works as a repellant to such schemers. On the other hand, in the free nations, people’s discomfort from their sense of… personal freedom (remember the dual nature of man, which has given rise to the Commonwealth in the Hobbesian sense) finds its own compensation in an urge for law and order, leading to a disproportionate, but completely subconscious (just try telling some fiercely freedom-loving Evangelical Christian that he is somebody’s fool, and you may end up with a broken nose, before he goes back to his church on Sunday to be duped by his crooked pastor; and on Monday, he goes to a political gathering, where he will be duped again, this time, by a Republican Party apparatchik) obedience to authority, and allowing the scoundrels to prosper, as long as they are smart enough to worm themselves into the good graces of a weak-minded authority, and start using it as their cover against everybody else.

But the state of political science, to which I am now descending, is, perhaps, the worst case of all con jobs, where even the brightest minds among the general public are so deeply sucked into the propaganda games, played by the powerful of all nations, that, just as they proudly congratulate themselves on eluding a clever trap of some sort, they are oblivious of the fact that at that same instant they had fallen fast into another.

These days, political science everywhere is a sorry spectacle. At its best, it boils down to mildly insinuating propaganda, and at its worst, it represents bold-faced deceit.

…And I am not talking about America only, where the level of political thinking seems to have reached the rock bottom. But what other nation, I may ask, has produced its own knight in shining armor to come to the rescue of our poor civilization-in-distress? What other nation today, rather than whining about the American hubris and gloating over her always self-inflicted wounds (no one can harm America as much as she harms herself, per President Ike Eisenhower!), would take to heart the profound lesson of Jonah and, maybe, start caring about our civilization’s common salvation?

But, perhaps, there is a shortage of prophets there, too? Perhaps, their own professors are charlatans, just as callous as ours? Otherwise, wouldn’t their voices have been heard loud and clear, now that they are needed so much?

Well, maybe not, if all conflicting and competing nations, their differences notwithstanding, are united in a mutually agreeable conspiracy to perpetuate a lie, satisfying them all. In that case, there may be no remedy whatsoever against such a concerted effort of the powerful of the earth.

But then, again, remember Hobbes centuries ago, in his Leviathan, ranting and raving about the “Darkness from Vain Philosophy” of the “Schools”? Come to think of it, so did every great philosopher from the Pre-Socratics to Nietzsche, so, maybe, this is not just the bane of our modern times. It may well be that political science is always a sham, when it pretends to transcend the boundaries of common sense, and passes itself off as something special, a thing-in-itself, claiming for itself some kind of extra privilege, and distinction, elevating it among all other social sciences, exactly like it was the case with sociology, before it got burnt, and exactly like it has always been the case with theosophy in religion…

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)

EMPERORS WITHOUT CLOTHES

Hans Christian Andersen is indisputably a genius, on a par with the greatest. His profound tale Emperor’s New Clothes alone would have assured his immortality in the pantheon of the magnificent shadows. There is an eerie resemblance of the story’s Emperor to the recent American President George W. Bush, with his Administration and the United States Congress paralleling the Emperor’s court of stupid and incompetent lackeys, who are afraid that revealing the truth would make them all look stupid and incompetent, and thus make them lose their precious jobs. As for the tale’s two scoundrels, we have the neocon clique so closely impersonated by those two, that the precious fairytale, written well over a hundred years ago, reads as if it has been tailor-made for the New American Century.

But the philosophical message of the Emperor’s New Clothes is certainly larger than just one incidence of time and place. The idea of Emperors without clothes can be put into a variety of larger contexts. One can say anything about anything, and the most stupid things at that, but as long as his words are endowed with the authority of a high office, there will always be hosts of others, rushing to dig up some imaginary pearls of wisdom, from that outhouse of stinking nonsense, and they are sure to always find such pearls there, as long as they are motivated enough to find them.

The ball starts rolling with the vanity of power. The Emperor always has a weakness, and the first task of our scoundrels is to identify it and start playing on it.

…Word of the Emperor’s refined habits spread over his kingdom, and beyond. Two scoundrels, who had heard of the Emperor’s vanity, decided to take advantage of it. They introduced themselves at the gates of the palace with a scheme in mind.

“We are two very good tailors and after many years of research we have invented an extraordinary method to weave a cloth so light and fine that it looks invisible. As a matter of fact, it is invisible to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its beauty.”

It is important to realize that at issue here is not just the gullibility of the Emperor, who will never want to buy anything, even the best of products at the best possible price, unless it is exactly what he wants, and in this case, the quality of the product as such becomes unessential, as long as the presentation is in harmony with his preconceived idea. Now, what about those allegedly sober heads around him? At least one of them must surely see through the scheme, and speak out?

The prime minister was known as a man with common sense. “I cannot see anything,” he thought. “If I see nothing, that means I am stupid! Or even worse, incompetent!” If he admitted that he did not see anything, he would be discharged from his office… “What a marvelous fabric!” he said then.

And so, there is not one among the lackeys to stop him from committing his folly, and our naked Emperor marches on. His folly now becomes public, for everybody to see, but the world of adults allows him to keep getting away with his folly, some, out of personal ignorance and veneration of authority, others, out of fear to be proved unpatriotic, should they confront their Emperor with the truth, still others, and, perhaps, every foreigner among them, out of spite and glee, the latter, in addition, harboring an expectation of a potential profit from the stupid Emperor’s folly.

…A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage. “The Emperor is naked,” he said.

“Fool!” his father reprimanded, running after him. “Don’t talk nonsense!” He grabbed the child and took him away.
But the boy’s remark, which had been heard by the bystanders, was repeated over and over again, until everyone cried: “The boy is right! The Emperor is naked! It is true!”
The Emperor realized that the people were right, but he could not admit to that. He thought it better to continue the procession under the illusion that anyone who could not see his clothes was either stupid or incompetent. And he stood stiffly on his carriage, while behind him a page held his imaginary mantle.

Alas, such is the case with all those emperors without clothes. “A man in my position cannot allow himself to look ridiculous,” as Jack Woltz says, in The Godfather. And, incredibly, they are all convinced that, far from looking ridiculous already, the only thing which could expose their ridiculousness would be their own admission of their folly. And so, they will march on, and on, until stopped by circumstances beyond their control.

…So far, we have been talking mostly about the Emperor, his court, and the public. It is time now, in our next entry, to talk about the scoundrels… among other things.

THE UGLY DUCKLING

(This is the beginning of my Hans Christian Andersen triptych, where the Danish fairytale genius serves as an introduction to an essentially political discussion. Written years ago, during the sway of the George W. Bush Administration, even the political part of it cannot be called dated, to say nothing of the timelessness of the man who furnishes us with the metaphor.)

In this Sonnets section, I have written about the genius of Aesop, also remembering the other two fabulists of genius, La Fontaine and Krylov, and also about the genius of my friend Grigori Permyakov, who applied the structuralist approach to the broad field of folkloristics. How, then, can I fail to pay tribute to the superlative creative master of generative folklore, whose genius is second to none, the great Hans Christian Andersen?! His sublime creations have become indistinguishable from the best of world folklore, which is, of course, the mother’s milk of all human civilizations. In this sense he can also be compared to Homer and to the Bible in their nourishing impact on the human mind and on the human soul.

The title of this entry carries in it a complex allegory. Among my Apte Dictums there is one that talks about Andersen. It goes like this: “There are at least two creative geniuses, whose genius is best described by the titles of their works. Hans Christian Andersen is the Ugly Duckling, and Mozart is the Magic Flute.” What is the meaning of the Ugly Duckling allegory then? It is commonly known from his extant photographs that Andersen was an outwardly unattractive man, although his indwelling genius must surely have furnished his features with a divine glow. But, in a sense, he was indeed an ugly duckling, and here comes the allegory. A rather unattractive man in the physical adolescence of his immortality, he developed into a thing of stunning beauty in his historical maturity, for all time…

FERNELIUS DIXIT

(This is one of my entries entirely inspired by my wife Galina, who is an avid student of homoeopathy and who introduced me to Fernel’s superb Latin one-liner below, as quoted by the greatest English homoeopath John Henry Clarke, MD [1853-1931], in his magnum opus A Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica.)

Like father, like son... Or, as Jean Fernel puts it, “Parentibus liberi succedunt, non minus morborum quam possessionum haeredes.”

(Jean Fernel [1497-1558] was a great French physician who introduced the term “physiology” to describe the study of body’s functions and was the first to describe the spinal canal. He also suggested that taste buds are sensitive to fat, which hypothesis was only recently proven as correct.)

BACK IN THE USSR

(…This entry was first jotted down ten years ago this day, right after Paul McCartney’s May 24, 2003, concert in Moscow’s Red Square, billed as the Back in the USSR tour. The singer was enthusiastically received by the Russian public, and personally by President Putin, who, in turn, gave him a private tour of the Kremlin, and fêted him in grand style. Publishing it today is a tribute to the tenth anniversary of that momentous event. But, of course, this entry is far larger than the specific event, except that the particular serves well, in this case as a symbol of the general.)

The fact that Russia may not want the old USSR back, at least not in its outmoded form, does not prevent the Russians from a nostalgic yearning for the return of the Soviet Union. It has become a symbol of those better old days, when lives and jobs were secure, when everything was cheap, and what was not cheap was free of charge altogether. Yes, there were a lot of blemishes and had they been granted their sincere wish to have the USSR back, all of them would have restarted grumbling about this thing and that thing, and about how much better life had to be elsewhere.

It is so much easier to idealize a symbol than to accept an always imperfect reality. But in Russia’s case her post-Soviet reality had, indeed, been horrific, and, in the old-regime French of my Grandmother Nadezhda, “insupportable, mauvais!”

Therefore, here comes the supreme irony of the unforgettable Paul McCartney’s Back in the USSR concert on Red Square. Should I ever want to write a special entry Russia and the Beatles assessing the exorbitant extent of the British group’s influence on the Soviet cultural scene, I shall not fail to mention their godlike status even among the most profound and aesthetically elitist Russian classical music lovers, and how that incredible and inexhaustible adulation of the Beatles was brought to Red Square, got even more fired up at the sight of Paul in his red shirt, to feed and magnify to the umpth degree their nostalgia for their red flag of old, for the oh-so-badly underappreciated delights of their old life, for those good things so carelessly taken for granted before they were gone, for the enormous pride and glory of their superpower nationhood, and, generally speaking, for their sparkling past, when they were so much younger and better. And the dazzling sparkles were lavishly provided to them by their Paul, both in the stage lighting effects and in the newsreels of erstwhile Soviet propaganda on a giant screen just as powerful on that day as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens must have felt for another nation at a different time and in a different place…

SAPER VEDERE

Saper Vedere, Knowing How to See, is Leonardo da Vinci’s concise description of the dominant skill of his own genius. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is one of the greatest geniuses of Western Civilization, and as such, he definitely merits a large entry of his own among these other entries. Moreover, aside from being a titan in his own straightforward right, there is a web of intrigue and innuendo spun around his figure, which includes various wild conspiracy theories and the so-called Da Vinci Code of the most recent fame.

Not that I should bow to the authority of gossip, be that even the mega-gossip of the kind spread out about him, but leaving Leonardo without an entry seems like a shameful omission by any measure. And yet, if my reader believes that this will be an entry about da Vinci, he may be disappointed. Perhaps, I must write an entry like that, indeed, in the future, but at any rate and at the present moment this isn’t it.

I might have titled this entry Saper Vedere, Or A Tractatus About Senses. Having looked at this possibility, I, however, decided that it will be enough to mention it as such a possibility, but that the short but profound Saper Vedere should amply suffice. This entry is about our senses, five or six of them, to be ‘exact.’ And let it be formally registered now, in what seems like a needless repetition, that the spark for this discussion has been provided by Leonardo da Vinci’s complex phrase Saper Vedere.

There are, of course, five traditional senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and whatever is omitted by these five is referred to as the sixth sense. What it really is has been a subject of disagreement. There is a good case being made by parapsychology that the sixth sense is ESP, for the details of which discussion we ought to consult the parapsychologists, as I have no intention to get into this here or probably anywhere.

Had I been hard-pressed to come up with my own sixth-sense alternative, I would have gone for the sense of association and metaphorization, which is developed to the highest degree in poets, as well as the sense of imagination and intuition and I even might not have stopped at that but gone on and on, except that all these exceptional qualities ought to be considered each by itself and within itself, but, if taken in conjunction with our familiar five senses, this may both dilute our normal understanding of sense as a physical phenomenon, and preclude us from referring to the legitimate parapsychological ESP as our sixth physical sense, which, in varying degrees of intensity, is immanent in human nature.

The last mention of the “degrees of intensity” brings us back to the traditional five senses, and Leonardo’s phrase. What’s wrong with the five that we have to look for the sixth, before we have exhausted our search of the “terra cognita,” which, for all higher intents and purposes, remains very much “incognita”?

In other words, why don’t we go after the five traditional physical senses of our nature, but “kicking it up a notch,” that is, at a much higher level of intensity than what the average man has been accustomed to.

Hence, Leonardo’s use of the qualifier saper, indicating the ability to function at the higher, or the highest levels of intensity in the exercise of our traditionally outlined sensory perception.

Ironically there are serious disagreements in principle, concerning the superiority of certain senses over the rest. Leonardo’s saper vedere specifies the sense of sight as superior, at least, within his own list of talents. Furthermore, he puts his aesthetic preferences very explicitly in this note from his Notebooks:

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things. (Reminding the reader again that seeing, apparently, ranks far above hearing, with Leonardo.)

A different set of priorities comes out of Schopenhauer’s Third Book of The World as Will and Idea, ##42-52. Putting architecture at the bottom of his pyramid of aesthetic impressions, he ascends it via plastic and pictorial arts, with poetry nearly at the top, surpassed only by music, his highest aesthetic impression. We may wonder, however, whether he would agree with Leonardo da Vinci’s qualifier saper, transposing it to knowing how to hear. Most likely, music to Schopenhauer is not an art of hearing sounds first and making them later, but a kind of primeval scream, an aural self-expression, testing the knowledge of the listener’s ear, rather than that of the creator of the musical sound.

So far we have been dealing with only two of the senses: visual and aural. It can be argued, though, that a third sense, of touch, is involved in the plastic arts, and in some other creative expressions. The senses of smell and taste play key roles in the art of cooking, and we may rightfully ascribe the laurels of genius to a particularly great chef, but generally, they appear not to play a role in artistic production of all other kinds, although it is said that a refined sense of smell may be a telltale sign of superior intellectual development and discernment.

Our next point of interest is to contemplate the comparative value, with regard to artistic communication, of one single sense versus a complex combination of senses. If the involvement of several senses should be deemed superior to the involvement of a single sense, then we must agree with Richard Wagner in that his concept of a musical drama with a specially designed theater and visual stage effects is superior to straight music, and also with his claim that Beethoven was trying to find Wagner’s path before Wagner, but could not find it. There may be different opinions on this account, I assume, but this is where I wish to leave the argument: in the realm of opinions and personal preferences.

As far as I am concerned, I do not see any particular advantage in a combination of participating senses as opposed to just one. It is well known in the world of classical music, for instance, that Alexander Scriabin, the eminent Russian composer, had a highly peculiar innate sense of mental association between sight and sound (different colors corresponding to different tonal chords). He represented his complex “aural vision” in a number of compositions that combined lights and sounds. I like Scriabin’s music as such, but I never found his complex compositions superior in any way even to those of his own works which did not involve sensual experimentation.

The question of art and aesthetic expression raises yet another intriguing question. Does the artist need to think in order to express? In a previous entry, I was quoting Leo Tolstoy, who defined art as an expression of the artist’s feelings, rather than thoughts. Without any disrespect to feelings and emotions, I must argue that the definition of art ought to be expanded, in this case, to include the expression of thought as well. To express thoughts artfully (like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche do it in philosophy, and like great writers do it in creating great works of literature) is just as much an art as any other visual, or aural, or tactile, and, yes, even olfactory and gustatorial arts are.

In that case, the qualifier saper should not only be applied to the five senses, but to the art of thinking, just as much, and so we come up with a most useful expanding variation on Leonardo da Vinci’s saper vedere, which is saper cogitare, knowing how to think.

THE GREATEST ITALIAN… NATIONALIST

Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe are generally acclaimed as the three greatest literary geniuses of Western Civilization, and, rather than engaging myself in a useless argument as to who else should join them at the peak, I might just take this as an attestation to their sublime achievement, and cheerfully move on to more important things about Dante, who is the subject of this entry. Its title The Greatest Italian Nationalist is a tribute to the fact that Dante’s La Divina Commedia was written in Italian, and not in Latin, thus snubbing the Catholic (in the literal sense of this word!) internationalism, in favor of the Renaissance nationalism, envisaging the nationalist Reformation.

This little note would have been shamefully inadequate, of course, had this been the only entry devoted to the genius of Dante. Fortunately, he is duly included among my magnificent shadows, but in the section of Significant Others, for the purely technical reason that there is one single entry (so far) for him there. The title of that entry is Nessun Maggior Dolore, taken from one of his most profound practical observations that “nessun maggior dolore, che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.”

As for the above-mentioned Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe trio, I am amused to find them all reunited in this one sentence from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (Zarathustra, 6):

“That a Goethe, a Shakespeare, would be unable to breathe even for a moment in this tremendous passion and height, that Dante is, compared to Zarathustra, merely a believer, and not one who first creates truth, a world-governing spirit, a destiny… that is the least thing and gives no idea of the distance, of the azure solitude, in which this work lives.”

THE THREE WHALES OF TRAGEDY

The three whales of Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, are frequently lumped together, as if the three of them were inseparable triplets. I confess that in my first acquaintance with these three, I lumped them together too, and there was a good superficial reason for that. Let us read Bertrand Russell’s momentous History of Western Philosophy to understand this reason, capsulated in the following passage: “There was at this time, in Athens (the Golden Age of Pericles), an extraordinarily large number of men of genius. The three great dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all belong to the fifth century…” And, in a different place, “Aeschylus was quickly followed by Sophocles, and Sophocles by Euripides…”

No wonder, therefore, that from the far distance of two and a half millennia, distance becomes the primary identifying factor, unlike, say, the later times, when people living at the same time and in the same country are judged by more relevant criteria, like their creative credo and style, and, therefore, distinguished more competently than in the case of the ancients.

To be sure, Russell does make a distinction between the first two and the third in the following manner:

“Aeschylus fought at Marathon and saw the battle of Salamis. Sophocles was still religiously orthodox. But Euripides was influenced by Protagoras and by the free-thinking spirit of the time, and so his treatment of the myths is skeptical and subversive…”

Not only that, we may add. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles seem to be completely divorced from the reality of everyday life, while Euripides exudes it in his plays. The only reason why we may not see the difference between them so easily is once again the great distance between us and them, which makes their everyday life barely distinguishable from the lives of the gods and the heroes of Greek mythology.

Incidentally, there is an anecdote about Sophocles in Plato’s Politeia, which emphasizes Sophocles’s depth of alienation from his contemporary reality. One may look upon it as a joke about his old age, but clearly, it is much more than that, being a statement about the detached quality of his creative talent as such:

“Someone asked Sophocles, ‘How do you feel now about sex? Are you still able to have a woman?’ And he replied, ‘Hush, man! Most gladly am I rid of it all, as though I’d escaped from a mad and savage master.’”

Having made all the points I wanted to make I am furthermore directing my reader to Nietzsche’s masterful discussion of these three great whales of Greek tragedy in his Die Geburt der Tragödie, which can be found in toto either in print, or on the Internet (e. g. on Nietzschesource.org), and also in selective excerpts in my specific Nietzsche entries, still to come.

NOT A LAUGHING MATTER?

(Talking about fables…)

Human stupidity is a very sad thing, but if we do not make fun of it, what else will make us laugh?

TWO FROGS

(This entry is placed right after Genius In Fabulis to observe the continuity of the fable theme.

This entertaining entry centers around a remarkable literary short story that reads like an authentic classical fable, and even has the same title as a fable by Aesop, albeit completely differs in content. This one belongs to the Russian/Soviet writer L. Panteleev (pen name of Alexei Ivanovich Yeremeyev, 1908-1987), and this is how it goes, offered to the reader in my true to the Russian original English translation. I have deliberately avoided taking artistic liberties with the text, in order to convey the authentic author’s style rather than to impress the reader with the translator’s aesthetic embellishments:

Two Frogs.

“Once upon a time there lived two frogs. They were friends, and lived in the same ditch. Only one of them was brave, strong, and cheerful, while the other was neither this nor that: she was pusillanimous, lazy, and a sleepyhead.

And yet they lived together, these frogs.

Then one night they went out for a walk.

Now, they are walking along a forest path, and suddenly they see a house there, and by the house there is a cellar. And the smell is so delicious from it: it smells of mold, dampness, moss, mushrooms: everything that frogs like.

So they got themselves into the cellar and started playing and hopping around there. They hopped and they hopped and accidentally fell into a pot with sour cream.

And they started drowning.

But of course they don’t want to drown.

Then they began to scramble, and they began to swim. But this clay pot had very tall slippery walls. There was no way for the frogs to get out of there.

The lazy frog swam a little, scrambled a little, and she thinks:

“There is no way out from here, anyway. Why should I scramble in vain? That’s only suffering for nothing. I’d better drown right away.”

That’s what she thought, stopped scrambling--- and drowned.

But the other frog-- she was different. She thinks:

“No, friends, it’s never too late to drown. I can do it any time. Let me scramble and swim some more. Who knows, maybe something will come out of it.”

Only-- no, nothing comes out of it. Swim as much as you like, you cannot swim too far. The pot is small, its walls are slippery-- no way can our frog get out of the sour cream.

Still, she doesn’t give up, doesn’t lose heart.

“It’s all right,-- she thinks,-- as long as I have the strength, I shall scramble. I’m still alive, it means I must stay alive. And then--- whatever happens then!”

Now, with her last strength fights our brave frog with her frog’s death. Here now she is losing her memory. Here now she is drowning. Here now she is being pulled down to the bottom. Still she is not giving up. Just works and works with her feet. Moves her feet and thinks:

“No! I am not giving up! You are kidding me, frog’s death…”

And then, suddenly, what’s this? Our frog feels something firm under her feet, this is no longer sour cream, but something solid, reliable, like the ground. Surprised, the frog looked down and saw that there was no sour cream in the pot anymore; she was now standing on a lump of butter.

“What’s this?-- thinks the frog.-- Where did this butter come from?”

Surprised was she, but then she figured it out: that’s how she herself churned solid butter out of liquid sour cream, by beating it with her feet.

“Well,-- she thinks,-- this means that I did a good thing not to drown right away.”

She thought about it, jumped out of the pot, rested, and hopped back home into the forest.

And the other frog was left in the pot.

And never would she, poor thing, see the world, or jump, or croak.

Well! To tell you the truth, you, frog, have only yourself to blame. Do not lose heart! Do not die before you are dead!”

Well, here it is. Perhaps it is a bit too long. Aesop would surely have cut it to a small fraction of its present length. Only he did not write it, nor did La Fontaine, nor did Krylov, for that matter. Yet, its message, both formally, meeting the strict definition of fable, and morally-- Don’t you ever give up!-- is truly “fabulous.” No wonder then, that I have chosen to introduce it to my reader for his or her cultural and moral edification, if for nothing else…

(No matter how much I tried, I’ve been unable to trace the origin of this fable earlier than Panteleev’s little gem. I am therefore tempted to conclude that this wonderful piece indeed belongs to his creative fancy.)

GENIUS IN FABULIS

(This Aesop entry’s title is a play on the Latin saying Lupus in fabula, earliest found in Terence. It continues the theme of the previous entry Quandoque Bonus Dormitat Homerus, denying legitimacy to the “personal” investigations of critical historians into the proper identities, or non-identities, of the holiest cultural icons of our Western Civilization.)

The genre of fable was not created by Aesop. Hesiod, who lived more than a century before him, is known to have used fables in his poems, such as the fable of hawk and nightingale, in Works and Days. Here it is, slightly shortened, in order to make an important comparison:

A hawk carrying a nightingale in his talons high up in the clouds, as she was crying pitifully, thus spoke to her with disdain: “Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you. If it pleases me, I will make my meal of you, or I will let you go. Only the fool tries to withstand the stronger, for he cannot get the upper hand, but suffers pain besides shame.”

Here, for comparison, is a fable of Aesop, needless to say, one of many:

A fly was sitting on the axle of the fast-moving chariot. “What a dust do I raise!” it exclaimed.

No disrespect to Hesiod, the genius of Theogony and Works and Days, he is not a genius of fable. Aesop is. Plato, Aristotle, and Aristophanes, to name just these three, speak of him as a genius, and are quite familiar with his works. We are told that the only genre of poetry that Socrates really appreciated was the Aesopian fable. (Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.)

And yet none of Aesop’s fables are extant as originals, but only in retellings. Judging by one of his fables, retold above, they were incredibly easy to memorize and retell.

Aesop, the reputed author of Aesop’s Fables, is believed to have lived about 620-560 BC. He is also said to have been ugly and deformed, and to have been born a slave. Like many other ancients, perhaps, to an even greater extent than Homer and Pythagoras, Aesop is considered by many scholars to be a purely legendary figure. The few “facts” of his life are mutually contradictory, and there is a theory that his name was a pure invention, to give authorship to a collection of folk tales which used beasts as their allegorical characters to convey straightforward morality messages attached to them.

Here is another very ugly example of critical (nitpicking) history deflowering the lady of her monumental charms, to the point that our poor lady is no longer a lady, but a damsel in extreme distress. Had there been only that first kind in existence, I would never have developed a love for history. Not surprisingly, my earliest books of history (before the age of seven) were fairytales and mythology.

Thus, it has no significance for me whether a real Aesop had ever walked the earth (or whether Shakespeare was Shakespeare for that matter), as all history at its very best, is pure mythology, to me, anyway, of which the Lives of Plutarch are among the most convincing and endearing examples. Aesop is thus a genius fable-teller, a symbol incarnate, if you like, but he is no less real for that than anybody else who had lived and died in historical actuality.

My attitude should not come as a surprise to anyone. I believe in historical symbolism, and fully share Stalin’s genuine conviction that “Stalin” (like “Homer,” “Aesop,” “Pythagoras,” “Shakespeare,” etc.) are not merely names of real or imagined men, but exceptional cultural and national symbols. By the same token, many well-known names have become exactly such symbols, not just of national significance, but embodying the glory of the whole Western civilization. For this worthy reason, Aesop, like all other glorious symbols of world culture, has remained a man, rather than some meaningless, phony ghost, which is what must perforce happen to all disembodied symbols…