The Shadow of Berlin

Since youtube is still down i can't post any music but Shostakovich's Waltz, Jazz suite no.1, hints at something quite delightful, elusive, like a half-hidden truth, a fox in the city....

I love my love like a broken word, split in your mouth, or like a foreign one stammering on her lips. She/It/I as true as a timeless summer's day, as uneven as a backyard fence that riddles the light with shadows. Like the cold stare of empty glass, the wholeness of a whale's song, the fire in the clay, a quarter of the moon, the dream of a stone, the gold thread that finally shows, when dangling loose...

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Listening to Private Passions, which has its charms despite a slight pretentiousness, and heard someone talk about the Waltz  and how it reminded her of mime or a black&white world, or maybe there was a hint of Berlin looming in the background. How does music conjure up such images and are they always individualized? In previous times was their an ancient rhythm around the old fires, the first circles, that led to a form of collective delusion? It's a frightening thought: the idea that music can tap into something tribal, some kind of collective subconscious, uniting us all under an 'oceanic feeling'. The wisdom of 'one'...as opposed to the fox, who knows many things. What is G. Steiner on about when he says there is (perhaps) something fundamental about G-minor to western sensibilities?

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'If the lives of most people take place within the warm circles of practice, the academic world is found to be flying off at a tangent-a situation it shares with art and lunacy.'

'The tangent would be merely a line without the circle.'

---Kenneth Minogue, The concept of the University.

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Yeats said, “Too much sorrow can make a stone of the heart.”

I have a feeling that there is a dying, if not a death, of great literature. Some blame the television for it. Perhaps. There is hardly any distinction between a writer and a journalist—indeed, most writers are journalists. Nothing wrong with journalism any more than with dentistry, but they are worlds apart! Whenever I read the English Sunday papers I notice that the standard of literacy is high—all very clever and hollow—but no dues to literature. They care about their own egos. They synopsize the book, tell the plot. Well, fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth, and the perfection and care with which it has been rendered. After all, you don’t say of a ballet dancer, “He jumped in the air, then he twirled around, et cetera . . .” You are just carried away by his dancing. The nicest readers are—and I know by the letters I receive—youngish people who are still eager and uncontaminated, who approach a book without hostility...Also, great literature is dying because young people, although they don’t talk about it much, feel and fear a holocaust.

---Edna O'Brien.